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Social Sciences

Ethics of Climate change - warming globe
Winter 2012

The Ethics of Climate Change

In 2012 the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service, in conjunction with the School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs, began a new public symposia series that focuses on the ethical and public policy ramifications of new scientific innovations and knowledge. Each semester the symposia, which are open to the public, bring together WSU faculty with other internationally prominent scholars. The first in the series, “Ethics and Global Climate Change,” was held in April 2012, and brought to WSU’s campus Andrew Light, director of the Center for Global Ethics at George Mason University and a fellow at the Center for American … » More …

Winter 2012

Feasting on the Salish Sea

It must have been quite the feast.

No one remembers the host. Or how many guests there were. Or how long it lasted. Or even when it was exactly, though 650 years ago is a good guess. We do, on the other hand, know what they ate—approximately 10,000 sea urchins.

Archaeologist Colin Grier and I are standing at the back corner of what was once a longhouse on the northern tip of Galiano Island at the southern end of the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia.

In 2010, Grier and his crew, intent on another project, had nearly passed on this ancient longhouse. But … » More …

WSU Nursing Building
Winter 2012

Posts for Winter 2012

William Julius Wilson

We were thrilled to read the article “Race, Class, and William Julius Wilson’s World of Opportunity” in the Fall 2012 issue of Washington State Magazine. Many may not realize that Dr. Wilson got his start at Washington State University and to hear him describe his choice to attend WSU as “the greatest decision he ever made” is an inspiration.

Unfortunately, the article did not mention that the university has named a national award after Dr. Wilson. The William Julius Wilson Award for the Advancement for Social Justice is bestowed upon those who follow in Dr. Wilson’s footsteps by making innovative contributions … » More …

William Julius Wilson
Fall 2012

Race, Class, and William Julius Wilson’s World of Opportunity

In the middle of the last century, a Tennessee preacher-turned-sociologist, Tolbert H. Kennedy, found a relatively untapped pool of doctoral students among the nation’s black college graduates. Between 1944 and 1965, when Washington State University barely had a few dozen black students, he and fellow ex-preacher Wallis Beasley helped produce more black doctors of sociology than all but two schools, the University of Chicago and Ohio State.

Among them was a young man who went from the hardscrabble coal country of western Pennsylvania to graduate first in his class at Wilberforce, the oldest black college in the country, and get a master’s degree at Bowling … » More …

WSU evolutionary anthropologist Luke Premo
Fall 2012

Yet another existential mystery

Although humans greatly outnumber our closest living relatives the great apes, for some reason the genetic diversity of modern humans is much lower, posing a puzzle that only gets more puzzling the further geneticists look into our evolutionary past. Not only is this disparity counterintuitive, it contradicts a basic tenet of population genetics theory, that larger populations should display greater genetic diversity.

Luke Premo, an assistant professor of anthropology, has taken a stab, with coauthor Jean-Jacques Hublin, at exploring the conundrum in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (January 6, 2009).

Premo is an evolutionary anthropologist who studies Pliocene and Pleistocene hominin behavior … » More …

New and Noteworthy
Fall 2012

New & noteworthy

Images That Injure

edited by Susan Dente Ross and Paul Martin Lester

Praeger, 2011

WSU English professor Ross and her colleagues examine pictorial stereotypes in the media.

Seaside Stories

by S.R. Martin, Jr. ’74

Blue Nile Press, 2009

Short stories of life in Seaside, on California’s Monterey Peninsula.

Life Histories of Cascadia Butterflies

by David G. James and David Nunnallee

Oregon State University Press, 2011

A unique chronicle of the life cycles of the butterfly species native to Cascadia. Read the feature article.

Summer 2012

The Manis Mastodon Site: An Adventure In Prehistory

 

The following story is reprinted courtesy of Carl E. Gustafson. Read more about the Manis Mastodon in “Bones of contention,” and how new techniques confirmed that the Manis mastodon bone and its accompanying hand-hewn projectile dates North America’s earliest known inhabitants to 13,800 years ago, 800 years earlier than the Clovis people, long regarded as the New World’s oldest culture.

 

Cover of The Manis Mastodon Site. By Cory and Catska Ench

Cover of the original booklet by Cory and Catska Ench. View a printable, PDF version of the original.

 

… » More …

Cover of Governing Washington
Summer 2012

Governing Washington: Politics and Government in the Evergreen State

Cover of Governing Washington

Cornell W. Clayton and Nicholas P. Lovrich
WSU Press, 2011

Washington state has its own distinct brand of democracy, growing from the early Populist and Progressive movements of the early twentieth century. This series of essays from leading scholars, journalists, and authorities on Washington’s government and politics delves into the unique facets of the state’s leaders, voters, and laws.

Edited by WSU political science emeritus professor Nicholas Lovrich and Cornell Clayton, … » More …