Division of Social Sciences

How local journalists help Brazil’s favelas endure

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:12:09 +0000

How local journalists help Brazil’s favelas endure Rachel Sauer Thu, 04/09/2026 - 14:12

Cody DeBos

��Ƶ sociologist Molly Todd finds that community newspapers were vital for people living in Brazil’s favelas during the COVID-19 pandemic

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Rio de Janeiro in early 2020, residents of the favelas Maré and Rocinha faced a crisis of communication. Public health messages in Brazil were contradictory—including the government’s denial of COVID-19. Like so many under-resourced and overlooked communities, the roughly 210,000 residents of these favelas received information laden with jargon, misinformation and directives that did not align with their daily realities.

Fortunately, inside the favelas, local newspapers like Maré de Notícias and Fala Roça were picking up the slack. They offered readers humor and solidarity while providing their communities with a shared sense of direction that helped them survive the pandemic.

For Molly Todd, an assistant teaching professor in ��Ƶ Department of Sociology, this grassroots journalism stood out.

Molly Todd, a ��Ƶ assistant teaching professor of sociology, and her research colleagues found that community newspapers were an important source of information in Brazil's favela neighborhoods during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We really wanted to understand what it was they were doing in the face of a global pandemic that made them such important pillars of their communities,” she says.

Todd and an interdisciplinary team of co-authors recently published a study in the Journal of Urban Affairs examining how these two community-run newspapers helped guide residents through the pandemic and endure it with dignity. The project, which included scholars from Brazil and the U.S., offers a new lens on crisis response and who gets to tell the ensuing stories.

City within a city

Brazil’s favelas are often misrepresented in the media. They tend to be depicted as chaotic and dangerous places that tourists to sunny Rio de Janeiro should avoid. While favelas do struggle with crime and drug trafficking, they’re also rich with social networks, political activism and neighborhood pride.

Speaking of the teams behind Maré de Notícias and Fala Roça, Todd says, “These are journalists who are rooted in the places they report on. They’re talking about things that are very much on the minds of folks living next door in these communities.”

Residents of Maré and Rocinha, which are densely populated urban areas often excluded from formal infrastructure, have long relied on information from community sources. When COVID-19 arrived, this network became even more critical.

“In many cases, favelas are characterized by both hyper surveillance and neglect. The state is failing to meet the basic needs of its residents while disproportionately policing them—even though they’re Brazilian citizens who should have the full rights that other citizens have,” Todd says.

During the pandemic, state-led responses were lacking. Official communication was slow and often misleading. Moreover, widely shared health advice was rarely tailored to the unique realities of favela life.

That’s where the community newspapers stepped in.

“They were very clear about the fact that they wanted to be sources of credible information, sources of timely information and sources of information that were contextualized for the community,” Todd says.

Stay safe, stay sane

Todd and her team of researchers collaborated to analyze how Maré de Notícias and Fala Roça responded to the pandemic. One team member, Vanessa Guerra, was interested in a central theme early on: resilience.

Fala Roça is one of the community newspapers that served as a vital source of information during the COVID-19 pandemic for people living in Rio De Janeiro's favela neighborhoods. (Photo: Fala Roça)

“We often talk about resilience as if it’s just ‘bouncing back,’ but that misses a lot of the bigger story behind-the-scenes of how people survive,” Todd says. She adds that discussions of resilience need to include a critique of the systemic oppression that produces the need to be resilient in the first place.

Informationally, the favela newspapers filled gaps left by the state. They ran myth-busting columns, answered readers’ questions and provided updates on local infection rates. They provided regular COVID updates and used WhatsApp to circulate infographics, FAQs and emergency contacts.

But information was just the start. The papers also nurtured archives of community culture and memorials for those who didn’t survive. One article collected portraits of neighbors lost to the virus. Another ran a photo series of the newly empty public spaces in Maré paired with poetic reflections from the community.

“They were doing this work of archiving sort of how a community comes through a moment like this together,” Todd says.

Who gets to speak?

Mainstream coverage of Brazil’s favelas often skews toward the negative, focusing on issues like violence and poverty. During the pandemic, that narrative sharpened to portray the neighborhoods as volatile, ungovernable zones where health guidance was ignored.

The favela newspapers told a different story—one of hope, community and organizing for a future. That was something Todd and her fellow researchers wanted to capture and preserve.

Todd has continued to explore questions of representation, voice and power in other projects related to Maré. At ��Ƶ, she organized an interactive visual and textual library exhibit called Maré from the Inside. Hosted in Norlin Library from September 2025 to February 2026, the exhibit was intended to “[c]enter and display the intellectual and artistic production of the mostly Black and indigenous residents of Complexo da Maré. . . . The project leverages art’s pedagogical potential with the hope to contribute to a more nuanced public understanding of favelas.”

“There’s so much history of academics just extracting from communities, writing about them and then leaving. It’s not really been a reciprocal process,” says ��Ƶ scholar Molly Todd, emphasizing the importance of collaborating with local communities on projects that benefit their interests. (Photo: Wolf Schram/Unsplash)

Reflecting on the work her team put in, Todd asks, “How can we produce a memory of a place marked by so many erasures? Can this memory help us imagine a different future? How do we encounter unfamiliar places in ethical ways and relate across our differences?”

Visitors were able to walk through a favela story on their own terms, feeling immersed in the ways neighbors cared for each other and allowed creativity to thrive even in an incredibly dark time. They also took in workshops, panels and tours hosted by artists in residence surrounding the exhibit’s opening.

Artists participating in the exhibit included Henrique Gomes da Silva, Andreza Jorge, Paulo Vitor Lino, Wallace Lino, Dayana Sabany, Francisco Valdean and Antonello Veneri. Exhibit organizers included Nicholas Barnes, Andreza Jorge, Henrique Gomes da Silva, Desirée Poets and Molly Todd.

What we can learn from favela newsrooms

Though Todd’s study and the Maré from the Inside exhibit focus on Brazil, she believes the lessons within apply far beyond the borders of Latin America.

“If we want people to feel safe and informed in a crisis, we need to think about trust,” she says.

Top-down communication often fails to resonate with marginalized communities, breeding distrust and false narratives. Local journalism led by people with lived experience can be the link that builds enduring relationships in their communities.

As for her involvement, Todd reiterates the importance of collaborating with local communities on projects that benefit their interests.

“There’s so much history of academics just extracting from communities, writing about them and then leaving. It’s not really been a reciprocal process,” she says.

“To be fair, our project still wasn’t reciprocal in the sense that we have our names on the article and the journalists don’t. In my eyes, I would like to see even more collective kinds of scholarship in the future.”

Looking ahead, Todd hopes this work starts deeper conversations about collaborative knowledge production and whose voices shape our collective memory. In a world facing climate disasters and political upheaval, she sees an urgent need for models that put local knowledge and lived experiences front and center.

“If we’re going to build more just societies,” she says, “we need to pay attention to … people telling stories about their own communities and find ways to amplify their voices.”

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��Ƶ sociologist Molly Todd finds that community newspapers were vital for people living in Brazil’s favelas during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Top photo courtesy Maré de Notícias

¡Ándale! ¡Ándale! ¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:10:13 +0000

¡Ándale! ¡Ándale! ¡Arriba! ¡Arriba! Rachel Sauer Tue, 04/07/2026 - 10:10

Jared Bahir Browsh

With Speedy Gonzales set to make his triumphant return to the silver screen, the character’s redemption arc appears complete

“¡Ándale! ¡Ándale! ¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!”

Meaning “hurry up, let’s go,” the trademark slogan of Speedy Gonzales was, for generations of children, the first Spanish words they learned.

But by the 1980s, ABC had pulled his cartoons due to concerns that his dress, accent and characters like his cousin, Slowpoke Rodriguez, were insensitive toward Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The Cartoon Network followed suit in 1999.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the ��Ƶ Department of Ethnic Studies.

I’ve studied and written about the history of animation, including how characters have been received around the world. Though rooted in a well-intentioned effort at cultural sensitivity, taking Speedy Gonzales off the air was a step too far for many viewers. He was one of the few cartoon characters rooted in Mexican identity, and he’d become a cultural icon across all of Latin America. The ensuing uproar in the wake of his cancellation prompted the Cartoon Network to reinstate the cartoon mouse in 2002.

With Warner Bros. greenlighting a new Speedy Gonzales movie in January 2026, the character’s redemption arc appears complete.

A speedy rise to stardom

“The fastest mouse in all of Mexico” first appeared in the 1953 animated short “Cat-Tails for Two.”

He was redesigned with his iconic yellow sombrero and red kerchief when he starred in his eponymous 1955 film, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short.

The short film features the general framework for future plots: Speedy helps members of his border community – a place inspired by Ciudad Juarez, just south of El Paso, Texas – evade the conniving Sylvester the Cat.

It opens with a town of starving mice looking longingly at the AJAX cheese factory through a fence establishing an “international border.” They try to determine who will try to outrun Sylvester, the factory’s guard. One of the mice says that his sister is friends with Speedy Gonzales. (Another pipes in that Speedy is friends with everybody’s sister, signaling Speedy as something of a Don Juan.) After they call on Speedy, he uses his speed and smarts to outrun and outwit Sylvester.

The basic premise also appears in a number of cartoons, from Tom and Jerry to Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote: An antagonist is consistently thwarted by a clever protagonist who avoids increasingly complicated traps and attempts at capture.

Speedy Gonzales is unique, though, in that he was the first cartoon star to be from a Latin American country.

In the 1940s, with the European and Asian markets cut off due to World War II, Disney had turned to the Latin American market. The studio produced “Saludos Amigos” in 1942 and “The Three Caballeros” in 1944 to abide by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, which aimed to leverage diplomacy, trade and cultural exchange to improve relations with Latin America.

Speedy ended up appearing in 45 theatrical shorts. In 1969, Warner Bros. shut down its animation studio, but the character lived on in Saturday morning cartoon anthologies like “The Bugs Bunny Show,” which repackaged older cartoons for younger audiences.

Animation’s racial reckoning

The Cartoon Network pulled Speedy Gonzales from the air at a time when networks and studios were starting to reassess animated characters from earlier eras.

Many early cartoon characters, including Mickey Mouse, had been modeled after blackface minstrel characters. Warner Bros.‘ first star, Bosko, was originally patented as “Negro Boy.”

With Warner Bros. greenlighting a new Speedy Gonzales movie in January 2026, the character’s redemption arc appears complete. (Illustration: Warner Bros.)

Since racist tropes were ubiquitous in early-20th-century animation, films and shorts like Disney’s “Dumbo,” “Mickey’s Mellerdrammer” or Warner Bros.’ “All This and Rabbit Stew” were either pulled, edited or updated to feature a content warning.

But after The Cartoon Network pulled Speedy Gonzales from the air in 1999, there was unexpected pushback from the Hispanic American community and the character’s Latin American fans. Groups like League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest Hispanic civil rights organization in the United States, declared Speedy a cultural icon and requested that his cartoons return to the air.

Back when Speedy Gonzales was first introduced to audiences, Hollywood had been filming more movies in Mexico and at the U.S.-Mexico border. However, most of these films depicted Latinos as either incompetent or villains.

In this regard, Speedy represented something different. Though the character’s English speech and accent reflected stereotypes – and he was voiced by a white actor, Mel Blanc – the character was ultimately a clever, quick-witted and good-natured protagonist. And the Spanish dubbing of his cartoons in Latin America had removed the stereotypical accent altogether.

Let the people decide

The trajectory of Speedy Gonzales resembles that of another controversial cartoon character: Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from “The Simpsons.”

An Indian immigrant who earned his Ph.D. in computer science in his home country, Apu becomes the manager of a convenience store in the U.S.

Some critics viewed Apu’s depiction as problematic; voiced by a white actor, Hank Azaria, Apu’s exaggerated Indian-American accent and catchphrase – “Thank you, come again” – was routinely mimicked and mocked by viewers of the show. Others, however, saw Apu as the embodiment of the American Dream: He was intelligent, hardworking and morally grounded.

Cultural theorists like Jacques Derrida and Stuart Hall have written about the complexities of how audiences understand – and either resist or embrace – what they read and watch. They ultimately argue that viewers and readers often interpret media however they see fit, regardless of the creators’ intent. For example, many minority groups who are underrepresented or misrepresented in popular culture will nonetheless find their own meaning and inspiration in characters, even if those characters weren’t supposed to represent those groups in the first place.

This happened with “The Goofy Movie.” Some audiences went on to describe the 1995 film as Disney’s first “Black” animated feature, despite the fact that the characters’ race is never mentioned. There were hints, of course: Black R&B singer Tevin Campbell played the movie’s fictional pop star, Powerline, and the themes of fatherhood and generational tensions eerily echo those in the play “Fences,” written by Black playwright August Wilson.

Of course, in the case of a character like Speedy Gonzales, depictions can become more nuanced as cultural norms and sensitivities change. Jorge R. Gutiérrez is set to direct the animated feature. If his work on films like “The Book of Life” is any indication, he’ll be well-equipped to bring cultural awareness to the animated feature – even if Speedy continues to sport his big, floppy sombrero.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the ��Ƶ Department of Ethnic Studies.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article

With Speedy Gonzales set to make his triumphant return to the silver screen, the character’s redemption arc appears complete.

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Praise the Lord and plan the family

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:20:01 +0000

Praise the Lord and plan the family Rachel Sauer Mon, 04/06/2026 - 11:20

Rachel Sauer

In new book God Bless the Pill, ��Ƶ scholar Samira Mehta delves into the often-forgotten history of how liberal religion helped make birth control broadly available in America

A little more than 100 years ago, the Episcopalian stance on birth control was this: “We utter an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of contraception, together with the grave dangers—physical, moral and religious—thereby incurred, and against the evils with which the extension of such use threatens the race.”

Even acknowledging “abnormal cases” in which birth control might be necessary, Episcopalians were just one of many Protestant denominations that, in the early 20th century, “reacted to contraception on a continuum from skeptical to disapproving,” writes Samira Mehta, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of women and gender studies and director of the Program in Jewish Studies.

This aligns with commonly held ideas about how contraception—specifically the pill, which received FDA approval in May 1960—became broadly available in the United States: that first- and second-wave feminists pushed for accessibility, policy change and social revolution while religious leaders erected roadblocks and preached against it.

��Ƶ scholar Samira Mehta's new book, God Bless the Pill, explores how liberal religion helped make birth control broadly available in America.

Except this doesn’t actually tell the whole story.

In her new book God Bless the Pill, scheduled for publication April 14, Mehta details the often-forgotten history of mid-20th-century Protestant, Jewish and Catholic leaders and believers who embraced birth control as part of God’s plan. In fact, many denominations that were “skeptical to disapproving” in the early 20th century came around to supporting and advocating for birth control and family planning.

“In a society that overtly thought of sex as something inside of marriage and that was inappropriate outside of marriage, the way that birth control becomes something that is covered by insurance and a part of respectable medicine lay in reshaping it from a tool for sexual liberation and turning it into a tool for creating properly structured American families,” Mehta says.

“This didn’t happen because (as a society) we care about women but because children have a better start if their mother doesn’t die in childbirth, if their family doesn’t have more children than the parents can provide for. The goal was to create healthier families—to use birth control to create healthier families—not just a healthy mother. And there’s concern that if you have more children than you can afford, you become dependent on the state. This is the United States, where we don’t want you to need a school lunch program, so you can’t have more kids than you can afford to give lunch to.”

The role of liberal religion

The idea to research what became God Bless the Pill, Mehta says, germinated from a desire not to lessen the significant influence that first- and second-wave feminism had on making birth control broadly available to women, but to understand what, if any, influence liberal religion had on the accessibility of birth control.

Book release and Q&A

What: A reading from God Bless the Pill by author Samira Mehta, followed by a Q&A facilitated by Phoebe Young, chair of the ��Ƶ Department of History

Where: Waldschänke Ciders + Coffee, 4100 Jason St. in Denver

When: 6-8 p.m. Monday, April 13

Who: All are invited to this free event.

Reserve a spot

Mehta was inspired by social historian Elaine Tyler May’s America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, in which May assesses how access to the pill did and didn’t fulfill utopian dreams of liberating women, eradicating global poverty and supporting stable and happy marriages.

Mehta understood that the history of contraception is not simply a feminist history and found herself wondering what “that story would look like if one fully included religion in the narrative? I hoped and assumed that, as in May’s title, the promise and liberation might outweigh the peril. I also saw in May’s narration the assumption that religion was always conservative and opposed to birth control,” she writes in God Bless the Pill.

But what about liberal religious congregations? Where were they in the aftermath of oral contraception becoming broadly available in 1960?

Mehta took that question to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, where she found documentation of her childhood minister, the Rev. Al Ciarcia of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Bridgeport in Connecticut, publicly supporting birth control during the Griswold v. Connecticut debate—a landmark 1965 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the court found that a Connecticut statute forbidding contraceptive use violated the right of marital privacy.

This decision came 25 years after the American Birth Control League, formed by Margaret Sanger in 1921 and renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942, assembled a national clergymen’s committee.

“These clergy talk about the importance of sex in a marriage and how a marriage that is sexually dynamic is less likely to result in divorce,” Mehta says. “The rhetoric around sex and marriage starts changing, and clergy members start talking about the sacred nature of a marriage bond and how sex is part of that bond through which two become one—regardless of literally becoming one in the form of a new person.

"The way that birth control becomes something that is covered by insurance and a part of respectable medicine lay in reshaping it from a tool for sexual liberation and turning it into a tool for creating properly structured American families," says Samira Mehta.

“They also advocate for marriages that are economically stable, and more kids can strain the economics of the household.”

Making the moral choice

Though Mehta begins the narrative in God Bless the Pill during World War II, the story of religion and contraception really gathers steam after the war’s end and the Cold War’s beginning. During this time, the value and sanctity of the American family was touted as one of the best weapons against the communist menace.

“There’s talk about Soviet women who have to go out and work in factories and put their kids in daycare,” Mehta says. “But a family that can control how many kids they have—where the mother can stay home and the father’s income is enough to support the family—can control their discretionary income. They can get a KitchenAid stand mixer, they can replace the dishwasher when a new and better model comes out. Limiting the birth rate becomes a way of increasing capitalist consumption.”

Messages highlighting capitalism as a way to defeat communism often occurred in the same breath as messages of moral behavior: “It’s the idea that if you can’t control something, it’s not moral,” Mehta explains. “Nobody wants to argue you should be celibate in marriage, so liberal religion begins framing birth control as a tool that allows us to make moral choices about how to structure our families.

“These clergy members believe that you can lay out the evidence for a compelling moral choice and then everybody will want to make a compelling moral choice. They were arguing that this is an access problem and an education problem, and they thought people would see that the best choices for their families are these choices (the clergy members) are suggesting.”

Mehta notes that even the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that people would make the moral choice if it was presented to them—arguing that big families may be appropriate for the farm, but they work against African Americans’ self-interest in the city. “He laid out the argument that African Americans have a right to these tools as well to lift themselves out of poverty.”

Ultimately, Mehta adds, there was and continues to be backlash on both the right and the left, with the right not anticipating the feminist potential of contraception and the left questioning whether birth control is a tool of liberation rather than of racial and patriarchal oppression.

“And then the center isn’t necessarily super comfortable with prolific non-marital sex,” Mehta explains. “They may be OK with married-like relationships, but they’re generally not OK with an emotionally unencumbered and mutually satisfying one-night stand. And the center wasn’t on board with men needing to pull their weight at home and women being in the workforce and kids being in daycare. We’re still seeing a course correction from the center.”

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In new book God Bless the Pill, ��Ƶ scholar Samira Mehta delves into the often-forgotten history of how liberal religion helped make birth control broadly available in America.

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TikTok doesn’t change minds—it changes moods

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 23:25:55 +0000

TikTok doesn’t change minds—it changes moods Rachel Sauer Mon, 03/23/2026 - 17:25

Bradley Worrell

New research from ��Ƶ political scientist Michelangelo Landgrave finds that watching political influencers on TikTok does not seem to influence young voters on the issues—but does leave them feeling sadder, angrier and more anxious

If you are over the age of 30, put aside those preconceived ideas that TikTok is just a website where teens and young adults watch 10-second videos of cute cats.

According to the Pew Research Center, about one in five U.S. adults now regularly gets their news from TikTok—and usage is highest among people under age 30. That shift prompted University of Colorado Boulder political scientist Michelangelo Landgrave to ask a simple but important question: What does consuming political content on TikTok actually do to young voters?

In a new study published in Political Studies Review, Landgrave and his co-authors found that while TikTok videos from political influencers don’t appear to change young voters’ positions on the issues, they do have an impact—making those viewers feel more negative emotional states, such as anxiety, anger and sadness.

��Ƶ political scientist Michelangelo Landgrave and his research colleagues found that while TikTok political influencers may not change minds, they do change moods.

Landgrave recently discussed the findings of his research paper with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine. His comments have been edited lightly for clarity and condensed.

Question: How does this latest study fit into your broader area of research?

Landgrave: I study American politics broadly, including institutions and political behavior. This paper is primarily a behavior study. It was inspired by earlier work examining how exposure to traditional news media—like Fox News and CNN—shapes political beliefs.

We started thinking that traditional media isn’t where many young people get their news anymore. Instead, they’re getting it from TikTok or similar short‑form video platforms like YouTube. It’s arguably the only type of media where the number of people getting news is actually increasing. Traditional media still has an audience, but it’s relatively stagnant and it skews older.

That led us to ask: Does this change in media format affect how people process political information?

Question: At the outset, were you surprised to learn how many younger Americans are getting their news from TikTok?

Landgrave: Somewhat. One of our co‑authors, Robert Anstett, was a student at the time, and we brought him onto the project explicitly because neither I nor the other senior co‑author, Abdelaziz Alsharawy (assistant professor at UT Health Houston School of Public Health), really used TikTok. We had a sense this was happening, but we weren’t firsthand users of TikTok.

We had read a Pew Research Center report noting that an increasing number of people get their news from TikTok, and both of us thought, ‘Isn’t that just a 5‑second clip? What can you really get from that?’

That skepticism helped motivate the study.

Question: When and where was this study conducted?

Landgrave: This study was conducted in 2023 at the University of Missouri while I was finishing my work there. Missouri turned out to be ideal because, while it’s a red state at the presidential level, the local student population was about evenly split—roughly 50% Democrat and 50% Republican. The experiment involved political science students who agreed to participate in the experiment.

Question: How did the experiment work?

Landgrave: At the start of the weeklong study, participants were randomly assigned—regardless of their political views—to one of three groups. One group watched Democratic‑leaning political videos, another watched Republican‑leaning videos, and the control group watched nonpolitical content—mostly animal videos.

We didn’t produce the videos ourselves. These were real TikTok videos that had been popular in the week leading up to the study.

"Because the videos are so short, influencers rely heavily on emotion rather than argument. Both Democratic and Republican videos leaned strongly on negative emotions—sadness, fear and anxiety," says ��Ƶ scholar Michelangelo Landgrave.

Question: With political influencer content, did you notice any notable differences in who was producing the content by age, gender or race? What about the frequency of posts?

Landgrave: That surprised us. We expected differences but we didn’t find much. Age, gender and racial diversity were fairly balanced across political sides.

We did observe that Democratic‑leaning influencers produce more videos and tend to have more followers. Both are still dwarfed by nonpolitical content like animal videos, but there is a clear production imbalance. It’s unclear whether that’s due to the algorithm or differences in content creation. We can’t say for sure.

Question: Were there differences in the way Democratic and Republican influencers made their cases to TikTok viewers?

Landgrave: That was one of our most interesting findings. Because the videos are so short, influencers rely heavily on emotion rather than argument. Both Democratic and Republican videos leaned strongly on negative emotions—sadness, fear and anxiety.

Republican‑leaning videos tended to show more negative emotions like contempt and fear. That said, both sides relied heavily on negative emotions. Democratic-leaning videos were more likely to utilize anger. By contrast, traditional news often includes lighter or feel‑good stories, while animal videos found on TitkTok are, of course, just animals being animals.

Question: If the political videos on TikTok are less than a minute, it doesn’t seem like that’s enough time to properly address an issue in a substantive way?

Landgrave: Exactly. Even short television news segments usually provide some nuance and context. There’s a reason it takes 10, 20 or even 60 minutes to follow the news properly. With 5‑ or 10‑second clips, there’s very little room for nuance—you’re really only getting snippets.

Question: After the weeklong experiment, research subjects who watched these influencer videos showed no evidence of changing their opinions on political topics?

Landgrave: That’s correct. We didn’t find evidence that political attitudes changed—even after a full week of exposure. This is important because it wasn’t just one video; the algorithm adapts. Once someone starts watching a type of content, TikTok shows them more of it. So, effectively, we were altering their algorithm for a week—and still didn’t see attitude change.

It’s possible longer exposure—months or years—could matter, but at least over a week, we didn’t see a direct effect on political attitudes.

Question: But you did see emotional effects even at just one week?

Landgrave: Yes. While political attitudes didn’t change, emotional states did. After a week of political TikTok exposure—regardless of whether it was Democratic or Republican—participants reported feeling more sadness, anxiety and anger.

I went into this study fairly ambivalent, assuming concerns were probably overstated. But after seeing the results, I’m genuinely worried about the emotional effects on young people.

��Ƶ scholar Michelangelo Landgrave and his research colleagues found that after a week of political TikTok exposure—regardless of whether it was Democratic or Republican—participants reported feeling more sadness, anxiety and anger. (Photo: Kelly Sikkema/Unsplash)

Question: Do you believe there are possible policy implications here?

Landgrave: Speaking only as a private citizen, and not representing ��Ƶ position, I think there’s reason for concern—particularly regarding children and teenagers. While we didn’t find direct political effects, we did find emotional harm.

That suggests policymakers should consider stronger safeguards, whether that’s time limits, improved parental controls or other measures.

Question: Why do you think emotions changed but political attitudes didn’t?

Landgrave: That surprised me, too. We focused on young adults because their political views are still forming. If there were going to be an effect, we expected to see it there.

One possibility is that emotional effects accumulate faster than ideological change. I also wonder whether younger audiences—middle school or even elementary‑age children—might be more susceptible, though that research would require different expertise.

Question: Were your survey participants already using TikTok?

Landgrave: Almost all of them. Only about five participants had never used TikTok. Most already had accounts and varied only in how much they used it. Our intervention didn’t replace their normal viewing—it nudged the algorithm by requiring them to watch specific videos daily.

Question: How confident are you that TikTok itself caused the negative emotional effects, rather than outside life stress?

Landgrave: Because it was an experimental study with random assignment, we’re confident we controlled for most external factors. That said, I’d love to explore conditional effects—whether the impact is stronger for heavy users, rural populations or people with fewer entertainment alternatives.

Question: Do you believe this is a subject area worthy of more exploration, possibly on what longer-term exposure to TikTok might mean for mental health outlook? And maybe whether political influencers have a greater influence over a longer-term period?

Landgrave: Long‑term experimental studies would be very difficult, but observational work is possible. As a researcher—and as a teacher—I’m increasingly concerned about the mental health effects (of social media) on younger people. I see students who seem almost addicted to these platforms, and I worry about my nieces and nephews too.

I want to be clear: This is speculative, but I can imagine an indirect effect over time. Years of exposure to emotionally negative content could potentially radicalize people or increase tolerance for extreme behavior. Our study can’t prove that, but it raises important questions.

Question: If you do more research on this particular subject, what might that look like?

Landgrave: We want to use eye‑tracking technology—glasses that track where people are actually looking. That would help us understand whether viewers are focused on the speaker, the text or even the video at all. Future studies might also involve controlled lab settings to see whether focused attention changes outcomes.

Question: Have you received feedback from other researchers on your published work regarding TikTok influencers?

Landgrave: Yes. Colleagues have reached out, including researchers studying similar effects internationally. This may not be a uniquely American issue—it could be global.

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When the mountain becomes a mirror

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:42:33 +0000

When the mountain becomes a mirror Rachel Sauer Thu, 03/19/2026 - 11:42

Cody DeBos

��Ƶ alum Jason Kolaczkowski’s new memoir reveals lessons found in the mountains and in life

Jason Kolaczkowski (PolSci ’99) didn’t know if the Himalayas would bring him clarity, but he knew he needed to attempt the first ascent of an unclimbed peak. Diagnosed with leukemia just a year earlier, he boarded a flight to Asia in 2019 with a plan.

The goal wasn’t to make history as a mountaineer. For Kolaczkowski, the trip was about defying the notion that his time was already running out.

“There was a moment when I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to die a lot younger than I thought I was, and so I want to go and do this thing.’ There was no going back from there,” he recalls.

Jason Kolaczkowski (PolSci ’99), shown here at basecamp, attempted the first ascent of a previously unclimbed Himalayan peak after being diagnosed with leukemia. (All photos courtesy Jason Kolaczkowski)

In his forthcoming memoir, Notions of Grace: A Memoir of Climbing, Cancer and Family, Kolaczkowski chronicles the lessons learned leading up to and following that expedition.

“It started as internal processing for me. The process of writing the book was really then an act of compulsion,” he explains. “I wanted to archive a snapshot of my life for my kids, who were too young to understand at the time. Maybe when they’re 14 and maybe again when they’re 24—maybe they’ll care.”

The mountain becomes a mirror

Wrestling with risk, fatherhood, identity and a cancer diagnosis layered with unknowns, Kolaczkowski thought of climbing as a reprieve.

The type of slow-progressing leukemia he had been diagnosed with can remain asymptomatic for years. Treatment wasn’t recommended yet, so he entered a “watch-and-wait” phase that included taking precautions to protect his compromised immune system.

But Kolaczkowski’s internal clock was ticking.

A climber since the late Aughts, he had long dreamed of attempting a previously unclimbed route. He started planning the Himalayan expedition before his diagnosis, but after it came, the trip felt more urgent.

“The first big question was: Well, should I even still go?” he says. “I ultimately reached the conclusion that I still felt healthy enough to do it.”

After finding the right group, the pieces fell into place, but the climb itself would soon be a wakeup call. In Notions of Grace, Kolaczkowski describes the peril of fixing lines in a gully littered with rockfall. The terrain, though not inherently difficult to climb, was deadly in its indifference. The mountain didn't care if Kolaczkowski died.

“What I came away with was a new sense of self-awareness. Just being in that amount of danger for that amount of time shifted my mindset into a much more forward-looking place again,” he says.

The expedition didn’t end in a triumphant summit photo, but Kolaczkowski flew home counting it as a success.

“I was really looking forward to going home and doing things with my kids.”

Writing for who matters most

Kolaczkowski describes his emotional state before the trip as grief for a life transformed by factors beyond his control.

“I guess you could say that telling a private story in public is another form of accepting risk,” says Jason Kolaczkowski of writing his memoir.

“Getting a cancer diagnosis really is a grieving process. You’re giving up a life that you had—an understanding of your goals and your family dynamics that you had—and you have to let it go and shift into the acceptance eventually of what is reality now,” he says.

Writing became his way of documenting this shift. His sons remained the intended audience for a while, but after sharing early drafts with friends over time, Kolaczkowski’s outlook on the project changed.

“People started telling me, ‘I think there are some universal themes here that other people would be interested in.’ So, I started thinking of ways to maybe get this published,” he says.

He kept writing, bringing the meticulous habits learned in planning expeditions and climbing rugged peaks to the page.

“Rather than focusing on getting the book done, my goal was to put in effort consistently. Some efforts will be great; others won’t be,” Kolaczkowski says.

“If you think about not making summits, and when to turn around and all that sort of stuff, having enough self-forgiveness to accept that, it translates well. Maybe today was hard to write and it just isn’t coming out; that’s OK as long as I’ve made the attempt,” he adds.

The calculus of risk

The title of Kolaczkowski’s memoir mirrors its tone. Grace isn’t something he claims to possess in abundance. Rather, he jokes that it’s often a goal he stumbles toward, describing several moments in the book as a “series of misadventures rather than adventures.”

The throughline connecting mountains, medical challenges and fatherhood is a series of lessons on living life with just the right amount of risk.

Just a few months after Kolaczkowski returned from Nepal, there were new obstacles to overcome as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Strict precautions for protecting his health became necessary, leading the Kolaczkowskis to the decision to homeschool their sons.

“We were shrinking down the world in order to keep me safe, but 5-year olds need their world to expand. What are we willing to do from a mitigation perspective when it comes at a cost?” he asks.

At first, the choice felt aligned with his family’s needs. But after watching one of his sons be afraid to touch playground equipment, Kolaczkowski knew it was time to rethink his approach to risk.

“And that’s what the book is about. How little risk is too little risk? How much is too much? Because we had taken too little risk and it was visibly stunting the character development of my kids,” he says.

Fortunately, in his years of climbing, Kolaczkowski had already developed a mental framework for managing uncertainty.

Jason Kolaczkowski approaches a couloir entrance on his Himalayan climb.

“You’re constantly building in these points where you are having the meta-conversation about the thing that you're doing,” he says. “You're talking about how to talk about the climb.”

That same approach became essential to not only navigating the pandemic but rebuilding his family’s relationship with adventure. Because his wife, Kristina, had often accompanied him on climbing trips, she shared some of the same language.

“The ability to sort of coalesce around that sort of meta-conversation—how are we going to talk about how we're going to deal with these new risks—was a big part of our family life,” he says.

Return to adventure

Eventually, Kolaczkowski and his family began venturing out again. Hiking, climbing and reconnecting in the relative safety of the outdoors during the pandemic ultimately led to a 100-mile family hike around Mont Blanc.

“I’ve never seen them quite so happy,” he says, recalling his sons’ experience on the trip.

Today, Kolaczkowski is planning many more adventures, some with his sons and some on his own. He recently joined an expedition in Kyrgyzstan and is looking ahead to more climbs, including a return to Nepal in 2027.

Telling his story publicly, he says, was another kind of healing.

“I guess you could say that telling a private story in public is another form of accepting risk,” he admits.

But as Kolaczkowski sets his eyes on what the future will bring, public opinions aren’t what he worries about.

“That’s one of the nice things about having cancer. It puts other stuff in perspective,” he says with a smile.

Notions of Grace: A Memoir of Climbing, Cancer and Family is available for pre-order now through DAP Books and will be released March 31.

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Top photo: Jason Kolaczkowski at an 18,000-foot camp

Exhibit highlights environmental impacts of war in Ukraine

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:40:01 +0000

Exhibit highlights environmental impacts of war in Ukraine Rachel Sauer Thu, 02/19/2026 - 14:40

“Ecocide in Wartime Ukraine,” a pop-up exhibit at the CU Art Museum Feb. 20, shows through images and interactive displays how the ongoing war has environmentally devastated the country

Feb. 24 will mark the four-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—a devastating anniversary marking the escalation of a longtime conflict into a war that has not abated in devastation or loss.

A sometimes-overlooked aspect of the wartime devastation is the environmental destruction: ruined farmland, poisoned waterways, endless plains of rubble. These losses will be featured in “Ecocide in Wartime Ukraine,” a pop-up interactive exhibit and reception from 4-6 p.m. Friday, Feb. 20, at the CU Art Museum.

The exhibit—sponsored by Svidok.org, Ukrainians of Colorado and the University of Colorado Boulder International Affairs Program—includes largescale photos of the environmental destruction that has happened in Ukraine since the war began along with descriptions and QR codes that participants can scan to learn more.

During Friday’s exhibit, Roman Oleksenko, a community development program manager for Peace Corps Ukraine, will join virtually from Ukraine. Since the full-scale Russian invasion, Oleksenko, who lives in Kyiv with his family, has been volunteering with a non-profit called Ukrainian Action, which delivers humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

U.S. Rep Joe Neguse has said he will attend Friday’s event, as will Boulder businessman and philanthropist Michael Brady, who will talk about his recent trip to Ukraine.

Layers of tragedy

“Ecocide in Wartime Ukraine” was originally proposed by Mark Dillen, a former diplomat with the U.S. State Department who now is director of public affairs for Ukrainians of Colorado. Sarah Sokhey, a ��Ƶ associate professor of political science and Eurasia specialist, met Dillen at an event “and he knew about the availability of these posters through this organization,” she explains.

If you go

What: Ecocide in Wartime Ukraine pop-up exhibit

When: 4-6 p.m. Friday, Feb. 20

Where: CU Art Museum

Other upcoming Ukraine-focused events include:

Speaker Series: Civil Society and Ukraine Resilience at 12:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 20, on Zoom
Solar Chargers for Ukraine: convert solar panels to solar chargers and decorate them, 10-12:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 28, at Fairview High School

In one photo, a red truck traverses a dirt road between two charred fields as smoke billows behind it. “Ukraine’s fertile land, which helps feed much of the world, is being burned and razed to the ground by Russian attacks,” the description notes.

Another photo shows a person hugging a gray cat, and the description is in their words: “On the day the Kakhovka dam was blown up, water began to arrive quickly at 10 pm. People tried to save their property. My grandfather, who had just lost his wife (whose body likely could not find peace due to the flooding and erosion of the cemetery) carried things from his house from 10pm until 4am. Just imagine being forced to swim in cold water all night, in your 70s, with kidney problems and prostatitis.

“My grandfather had chickens, rabbits, and dogs. Our lop- eared Scottish cat, just a huge feline with whom I grew up, simply drowned, and no one helped him. He just drowned in the water. My other cat, also Scottish, but with straight ears, disappeared, and I'm still looking for him. The same thing happened to my sheepdog.”

“There are so many layers of tragedy happening in Ukraine, and I think highlighting any of those is important,” Sokhey says. “Now that we’re four years since the full-scale invasion and still the war is going on, as bad as it’s ever been, it can be hard to know what to emphasize. An aspect of the war that we thought people were missing is the long-term environmental damage—what it means for people living there, what it means for trying to rebuild after war.

“We hope people will come away with a better appreciation of the scale of destruction and the ongoing level of destruction and what that means for people’s quality of life. I don’t know that it’s all reversible, so I think seeing the scale of tragedy and the human impact is really important.”

Sokhey, who asked Oleksenko to join the exhibit, says he readily agreed, but with the caveat that he wants people to know that "'our daily thoughts are not about the environment right now,’” she says. “He’s in Kyiv, which is being attacked regularly, so for him and a lot of people it’s a day-to-day survival issue. While we want people to understand the scale and scope of environmental damage, we also want people to be aware of the human element. A lot of people don’t have the bandwidth to worry about these issues right now when they’re trying to get food and stay warm and stay alive.

“We want to document and note the environmental destruction because a lot of people in Ukraine can’t even think about that right now. They don’t have the luxury of thinking that long-term. That’s how bad it is.”

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“Ecocide in Wartime Ukraine,” a pop-up exhibit at the CU Art Museum Feb. 20, shows through images and interactive displays how the ongoing war has environmentally devastated the country.

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Exploring what it means to take up space

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:26:03 +0000

Exploring what it means to take up space Rachel Sauer Thu, 02/19/2026 - 10:26

Rachel Sauer

Multimedia Takin’ Up Space performance Feb. 21 at Fiske Planetarium will highlight historical, cultural, environmental and social justice narratives as an act of reclaiming Black spaces

There are a lot of ways to take up space. The most basic is simply a function of being born—existing on this planet, possessing mass, moving across its horizontal surfaces.

There’s also taking up space in the cosmological sense: pondering the farthest reaches of the universe, soaring through this spiral galaxy and beyond, transcending gravity as an act of belonging in time and in space.

And then there’s taking up space as an act of taking back. This is a reclamation of spaces previously occupied, of being in them, of filling them as an act of defiance and homecoming.

��Ƶ professors Shawn O'Neal (left) and Kalonji Nzinga (right) envisioned Takin' Up Space, in part, to "revisit our past in order to have a better evaluation of the present and build better futures," O'Neal explains.

Considering these possibilities and more is Takin’ Up Space III: Holding Space, the third iteration of an event envisioned by Shawn Trenell O’Neal, a University of Colorado Boulder assistant teaching professor of ethnic studies and associate faculty director of the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS), and Kalonji Nzinga, an assistant professor in the School of Education.

The free event, which will be from 6 to 9 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 21, at Fiske Planetarium, is a multi-act, multimedia performance produced, arranged and performed by O’Neal and Nzinga, with special performances by Denver singer-songwriter Kayla Marque and wellness guide-somatic artist Soraya Latiff.

The title Takin’ Up Space acts, on one level, to “reintroduce us to spaces we’ve been systematically removed from over decades,” O’Neal explains, adding that themes of space and time are intrinsic to African culture.

“Harriet Tubman, when she was leading folks from enslavement on the Underground Railroad, read the stars and nature. So, another aspect of this is realizing we are one with nature, though we’ve been systematically removed from it for decades. I’ve never thought it was a coincidence that 1964 was the year of the Civil Rights Act and the Wilderness Act. In a way, it was opening the door to Black people’s human rights and closing our access to nature and space.”

If you go

What: Takin' Up Space III: Holding Space, a multi-media performance produced, arranged and performed by Shawn Trenell O'Neal and Kalonji Nzinga, with special guests including Denver singer-songwriter Kayla Marque and wellness guide-somatic artist Soraya Latiff

Where: Fiske Planetarium, 2414 Regent Drive

When: 6-9 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 21

The event is free but tickets are required.

Learn more

Takin’ Up Space will include O’Neal’s all-vinyl live scoring of the 1926 silent film The Flying Ace, whose cast members are all Black, followed by an immersive somatic meditation led by Latiff, during which she will guide reflection on the meaning of “holding space.” Nzinga will perform selections from his hip-hop soul catalog, synced with film visualizations aligned with his storytelling, and then Marque will bring “emotive vocals, electronic textures and cinematic storytelling,” inviting the audience “into a shared cosmic dream,” according to event organizers.

Occupying spaces of Blackness

For O’Neal, performing a live score to an almost-forgotten film represents the confluence of art, history and culture that has long motivated his scholarship and creative life. He first scored a silent film in 1998, when he was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and realized he had a gift for DJing.

“My friend had this idea that, ‘Hey, we should score a silent film,’” he recalls. They took on the challenge of scoring the 1925 The Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin, and each night of the performance was different.

“I realized, ‘Wow, this is a really creative way to mix records and use my record collection in a different way than just dancing,” he says. “It was my way to push against how we collapse all these art forms into very limited, narrow views of what they can be.”

His goal evolved from literal-minded soundtracking to close consideration of subtext, mood and feeling—scoring as an artistic act of composition that embraces what the film shows both on and beneath the surface. So, on a recent Saturday in his home studio in his Denver basement, The Flying Ace is cued on his laptop, and he is a blur between two turntables and a soundboard.

Shawn O'Neal experiments with sound as he composes a score for the silent film The Flying Ace. (Photo: Rachel Sauer)

The scene playing is a joyous moment of flight, when pilot Finley Tucker takes to the air with Ruth Sawtelle, the woman he hopes to marry.

“When the plane is in the air, I want a big, bright blast of sound, probably something Sun Ra-ish,” O’Neal explains, bent over a milk crate of LPs that represent a winnowing from the many hundreds in his collection. “Then from that moment I want a very feminine sound—Mahalia Jackson to Alice Coltrane.”

If the choices are unexpected—leagues from the calliope plinks traditionally associated with silent movies—it’s partly because “something that’s always interested me about public performativity is the opportunity to capture feelings and emotions that are flowing through the audience, maybe even things people didn’t think they were ready to deal with.”

O’Neal says he wants to give people what they’re not expecting, pursuing a goal of introduction and reintroduction: “We’ve allowed Black music and Black art to be sold so short, so as we’re reintroducing ourselves to spaces of Blackness, that includes a musical heritage that is so broad and so deep.”

In fact, the scaffolding of Takin’ Up Space is built from the Africana aesthetics regarding the five pillars of hip hop studies: DJing, MCing, dance, graffiti/visual art and knowledge. O’Neal, Nzinga and their co-organizers also draw deeply from the symbols and stories in African cultures, including Sankofa of the Akan people of Ghana, represented as a bird with its head turned backward and an egg in its mouth, symbolizing the idea of looking back at the past to learn from it and move forward.

“We’re not doing this to say, ‘This is better than anything else,’ but to revisit our past in order to have a better evaluation of the present and build better futures,” O’Neal says. “We intend to take up space.”

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Multimedia Takin’ Up Space performance Feb. 21 at Fiske Planetarium will highlight historical, cultural, environmental and social justice narratives as an act of reclaiming Black spaces.

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Incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans holds lessons now

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:37:00 +0000

Incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans holds lessons now Rachel Sauer Thu, 02/19/2026 - 07:37

Daryl Maeda

The Day of Remembrance, Feb. 19, should focus our attention on how a constitutional republic can shun its first principles

Today is the Day of Remembrance, marking the date that the United States officially marshalled the full force and power of the federal government against Americans whose only offense was being of Japanese descent. This day, which now lives in infamy, holds lessons for us now.

On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to one of the most notable mass violations of civil liberties in U.S. history: the imprisonment of 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent without due process. Each year, the Japanese American community commemorates this Day of Remembrance to reflect on the lessons of that episode and resolve to advocate for justice for all.

Dressed in his U.S. Navy uniform, World War I veteran Hikotaro Yamada enters the Santa Anita assembly center after being forced to leave his Torrance, California, home. (Photo: Clem Albers/U.S. Department of the Interior)

The attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 exacerbated decades of anti-Japanese racism. Japanese immigrants were disparaged from the 1890s onward as an invading “yellow peril” that brought crime and sexual deviance, stole jobs and threatened to impose a foreign culture.

Before 1941, the federal government barred them from becoming naturalized citizens and eventually prevented their migration. Many states prohibited them from marrying white people and buying land, a serious impediment for an ethnic group whose economy relied heavily on agriculture. Despite these barriers, the Japanese American community grew to include Nisei, children born in the United States who possessed natural-born citizenship.

After Dec. 7, government and military officials portrayed Japanese Americans as a monolithic threat to national security, alleging that they could not be differentiated individually and were thus all potential spies or saboteurs.

As the historian Jacobus vanBroek reported, Mississippi Congressman John Rankin told the House of Representatives: “I'm for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps and shipping them back to Asia as soon as possible ... This is a race war, as far as the Pacific side of the conflict is concerned ... The White man's civilization has come into conflict with Japanese barbarism ... One of them must be destroyed ... Damn them! Let's get rid of them now!”

New Deal liberals like Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson declared, “Their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese.”

General John L. DeWitt, military commander of the West Coast, said, “In the war in which we are now engaged, racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted ... It therefore follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies of Japanese extraction are at large today.”

California Attorney General and future Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren called for the mass expulsion and incarceration of Japanese Americans just one decade before issuing the landmark decision barring school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.

Members of the Mochida family, with government-issued identification tags on their clothes, await a bus that will take them from their California home to an internment camp. Mr. Mochida (back row, left) operated a nursery and five greenhouses on a two-acre site in Eden Township, California. (Photo: Dorothea Lange/U.S. Department of the Interior)

Newspapers added cruelty to the message. The San Francisco Examiner opined, “Herd 'em up, pack 'em off and give 'em the inside room in the badlands. Let 'em be pinched, hurt, hungry, and dead up against it... Let us have no patience with the enemy or with anyone whose vein carry his blood…”[1]

EO 9066 authorized the Secretary of War to remove civilians from areas deemed to be militarily sensitive. It named no class of civilians or ethnic groups and defined no geographic boundaries or criteria for designating sensitive areas.

The vaguely defined yet overwhelming power conveyed by the order resulted in Japanese Americans—accused of no crimes as individuals and receiving no due process—being removed from the West Coast and incarcerated in barbed-wire enclosed prison camps hastily constructed in interior states including Colorado. My uncle and aunt were imprisoned at the Amache camp near Granada, Colorado.

Barracks at the Amache internment camp near Granada, Colorado. (Photo: Tom Parker/U.S. Department of the Interior)

Three legal challenges by Gordon Hirabayashi, Min Yasui, and Fred Korematsu to the removal and incarceration made their way to Supreme Court, which ruled repeatedly that EO 9066 and its implementation were constitutional.

In what has come to be a widely admired dissent from the majority opinion in the Korematsu case, Justice Frank Murphy declared, “I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States.”

Here at the University of Colorado Boulder, the U.S. Navy established the Japanese Language School, which recruited some Nisei instructors out of the camps to train military translators and interpreters. President Robert L. Stearns supported the establishment of the school and urged the Boulder community to welcome the instructors and their families.

In response to the Denver Post’s propaganda campaign demonizing Japanese Americans, CU students voiced their outrage, writing in the school’s Silver and Gold newspaper, “Now that the Denver Post has embraced Hitler’s doctrines of race and Aryan superiority, now that the Post has converted this war from a battle of principles or even of nations into a battle of peoples, now that the Post has declared war on the Japanese Americans in our cities and internment camps, it’s about time we college students registered our protests against such fascist techniques in our midst.”

Posterity has condemned the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which offered an official government apology for the “fundamental injustice” done to citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry and providing monetary compensation to those still alive over four decades later.

In signing the bill, Reagan said, “[M]y fellow Americans, we gather here today to right a grave wrong. More than 40 years ago, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living in the United States were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in makeshift internment camps. This action was taken without trial, without jury. It was based solely on race, for these 120,000 were Americans of Japanese descent.”

What lessons can be drawn from this sordid episode that occurred eight decades ago?

Justice is not a partisan issue. After all, the incarceration was perpetrated by the administration of FDR, perhaps the most consequential liberal president of the 20^th century.
Unchecked federal executive power can lead to abuses of fundamental civil and human rights, especially when militarized forces are unleashed on civilians.
Compliant courts and legislatures cannot be relied upon to provide the checks and balances necessary to ensure that constitutional rights are protected.
Mass incarceration camps can be built in the United States and filled with both U.S. citizens and aliens alike without due process. Indeed, they have been.
History will remember the words and deeds of those who support justice and due process.

So today, and indeed every day, we are obliged to remember and to learn.

Daryl J. Maeda, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, has been a faculty member at ��Ƶ since 2005. He holds a PhD in American culture from the University of Michigan, MA in ethnic studies from San Francisco State University and BS in mathematics from Harvey Mudd College.

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The Day of Remembrance, Feb. 19, should focus our attention on how a constitutional republic can shun its first principles.

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Top image: Boys imprisoned at Manzanar Camp in California (Photo: Toyo Miyatake)

Scholar considers language, identity and the fight over shared symbols

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:42:36 +0000

Scholar considers language, identity and the fight over shared symbols Rachel Sauer Mon, 02/16/2026 - 10:42

Cody DeBos

��Ƶ linguistics researcher Kate Arnold-Murray studies what a Facebook fight reveals about identity

In 2019, Washington, D.C.’s Pride celebrations became a flashpoint—but not just for the usual political tensions. Organizers of the annual Dyke March barred participants from carrying the Jewish Pride flag, sparking a wider debate about symbols and the meanings they carry.

Organizers claimed the flag too closely resembled the Israeli flag and could be insensitive to pro-Palestinian participants. Jewish LGBTQ+ activists, many of whom had marched in the event for years, were stunned.

“I was actually living in Washington, D.C., at the time,” says Kate Arnold-Murray, a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “I was out of town at the time, so I was looking at things involving the march on Facebook and saw all these arguments going on. I wanted to get to the root of what people were upset about—what people who presumably should be on the same page were arguing about.”

��Ƶ scholar Kate Arnold-Murray has studied how the six-pointed Star of David became the center of conflict in a space that promotes solidarity.

What began as curiosity while browsing turned into years of research for Arnold-Murray, culminating in her recent publication in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.

Her study looks at how a single symbol—the six-pointed Star of David—became the center of conflict in a space that promotes solidarity.

Bridging language and politics

In her doctoral work at ��Ƶ, Arnold-Murray focuses on how language produces and reflects political identity in America.

“Most of my work involves language and politics on the left in the United States. This piece ties into that work because these are presumably mostly political actors on the left in arguments with each other,” she says.

In her paper, Arnold-Murray examines a trove of public Facebook comments from individuals and organizations reacting to the 2019 Dyke March decision.

“As a member of both the Washington, D.C., queer community and the Washington, D.C., Jewish community, it was like my two sides were fighting, and I wanted to understand why,” she says.

The problem of misrecognition

The controversy centered on the Jewish Pride flag: a rainbow background with a white Star of David in the middle. For some, the star was a proud symbol of Jewish identity that dates back thousands of years. For others, it was too reminiscent of the Israeli flag—and thus a political statement they opposed.

To understand the disagreement, Arnold-Murray turned to the concept of indexicality, or the connection between a sign and its social meaning.

“Indexical misrecognition is accounting for the possibility that we might have misunderstandings based on our lived experiences shaping how we interpret signs like a symbol or word,” she explains.

In other words, what one person sees as an expression of faith or cultural belonging, another may see as a symbol of state violence or exclusion.

“In this instance, each group came with a different notion of what the Star of David means based on their lived experiences—and that’s where we get that misrecognition.”

Arnold-Murray’s paper takes it further. She argues that not only do symbols connect with personal and cultural identities, but they can lead to conflict because their meanings are not fixed. That’s especially true when it comes to symbols like the Star of David, whose associations stretch across religion, nationalism, ethnicity and more.

“If we can find ways to stop arguing about symbols and come together a little more, we can have more political unity. But that has to start with listening to the voices of marginalized individuals and understanding that the signs we use might carry multiple meanings,” says ��Ƶ linguistics scholar Kate Arnold-Murray. (Photo: Tom Morris/Wikimedia Commons)

“Another example is the phrase ‘Are you a friend of Dorothy?’ which has been used within the queer community to indicate that someone is queer. But to someone who is not queer, they might not share that same meaning and they might say, ‘Dorothy who?’” Arnold-Murray says.

One flag, many meanings

Arnold-Murray also uses the term bricolage to describe the Jewish Pride flag. In the art world, bricolage refers to a construction created from layers of different materials.

“Here, we have the Jewish Pride flag as a construction of bricolage, where there are the meaningful horizontal rainbow stripes of the queer pride flag and then the white Star of David, which can indicate Judaism or potentially Israel, depending on one’s reading,” she says.

The ambiguity of meaning in signs consisting of multiple parts is what often leads to misrecognition. Since the Jewish Pride flag combines two strong identity symbols, any interpretation is bound to stir deep emotions, Arnold-Murray explains.

“It’s when we have these signs that are so tied up with our identity and who we are that we get these big conflicts among, presumably, a queer community where a lot of people agree on political issues overall.”

For many Jewish participants in the 2019 Dyke March, banning the flag was more than a debate over a symbol.

“A lot of the commenters who were against the ban of the Jewish pride flag were claiming that the ban was anti-Semitic and against them as Jews and that they felt excluded from the march,” Arnold-Murray says.

For organizers, allowing the flag could have been seen as endorsing a political stance they didn’t share. It was a lose-lose situation made worse by how personal it felt for everyone involved.

What’s at stake

Arnold-Murray is careful to warn that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to symbolic conflict. But she does suggest that understanding how symbols work, and why layered meanings can spark conflict, can lead to more empathetic conversations.

“I think the stakes are huge. When we have these signs that are tied to identity, it can feel like a personal attack to be contesting what they mean,” she says.

“If we can find ways to stop arguing about symbols and come together a little more, we can have more political unity,” she adds. “But that has to start with listening to the voices of marginalized individuals and understanding that the signs we use might carry multiple meanings.”

In a political landscape increasingly fractured by culture wars and identity debates, that goal may feel out of reach. But for Arnold-Murray, it all comes back to understanding.

“Meaning isn’t fixed. When it comes to situations like this, what’s really important is listening, being willing to apologize, and being willing to move forward while being as inclusive as possible,” she says. “Understanding that meanings come from lived experiences is a good starting point.”

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��Ƶ linguistics researcher Kate Arnold-Murray studies what a Facebook fight reveals about identity.

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Top photo: Ted Eytan/Wikimedia Commons

Colorado has the mountains … but not the Olympics

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 17:38:57 +0000

Colorado has the mountains … but not the Olympics Rachel Sauer Wed, 02/04/2026 - 10:38

Jared Bahir Browsh

Fifty years ago, Denver was supposed to host the Winter Olympics, but fiscal and environmental concerns halted plans and highlighted difficult truths about hosting

With its infrastructure, mountains and the presence of the Colorado Springs Olympic and Paralympic Training Center, Colorado seems like the ideal Olympics host—and many wonder why the state has never hosted a Games.

Fifty years ago, Denver was scheduled to host the XII Olympic Winter Games during the state’s 1976 centennial celebration and the United States’ bicentennial. Denver’s bid was accepted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1970, but in November 1972—after a statewide referendum rejected funding for the games—the IOC was left scrambling to find another host city. Although Salt Lake City, Utah, and Lake Placid, New York, offered to host, the IOC, frustrated by the rebuff by Colorado voters, elected to move the games back to Europe in Innsbruck, Austria, just eight years after the city hosted in 1964.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the ��Ƶ Department of Ethnic Studies.

The Denver episode taught both the IOC and event organizers as a whole to secure funding, infrastructure and the support of stakeholders before granting any city or country the rights to host major events—although Olympic host cities continue to navigate imperfect planning, as the 2026 host, Milana-Cortina, Italy, races to complete the hockey arena in time for the Games.

From underdog to host

Denver was seen as a dark horse when the bid process began, competing against Sion, Switzerland; Tampere, Finland; and Vancouver, Canada, for the rights to host the Olympics. Denver won the first round of votes but came in second to Sion in the second round (Vancouver and Tampere were eliminated in the first and second rounds, respectively). Most of the IOC voters for the Finnish town ultimately shifted to support Denver’s bid, which was granted in May 1970.

After significant cost overruns and losses during the previous two Games in Grenoble, France, in 1968 and Sapporo, Japan, in 1972, Denver was promoted as the economical Olympics. The Grenoble Games posed a loss of more than $250 million, so when Denver submitted a budget of $14 million, the IOC voters may have seen Denver ushering in a new strategy for a more affordable Winter Games.

However, as the planning moved forward, it was clear the $14 million budget fell far short of what would be needed. By 1972, some estimates surpassed $100 million with a number of unanswered questions regarding the venues and facilities. The University of Denver was floated as a potential location for the Olympic Village, but university officials were never informed of this plan, which would have occurred during the school year.

The original plans also called for the alpine events to be held at Loveland Basin and Mount Sniktau, which did not receive reliable snowfall and were airbrushed with “snow” to cover bald spots in the promotional materials. Many of the plans for events like cross-country skiing had routes that ran through residential neighborhoods in Jefferson County, and plans for the biathlon—a mix of cross-country skiing and rifle shooting—included ranges near Evergreen High School.

Planning goes off course as the election nears

Because the IOC preferred bids that allowed for the vast majority of events to occur close to the host city, the original Denver Olympics plans promoted Loveland Basin and Mount Sniktau as being only 45 minutes away from the city—which may have been possible if I-70 was shut down. Officials then decided to move the ski events to Aspen and Steamboat Springs, both more than 100 miles from the originally proposed Olympic Village. They floated plans to have multiple villages and even discussed having a helicopter usher athletes between sites.

Along with having cross-country skiing events in Evergreen, planners wanted to have the ski jump there as well, which would have required demolishing a hill, rerouting a residential road and pouring concrete over Bear Creek. Maybe Evergreen residents would have enjoyed watching events out their windows—and through their yards—even if it meant dodging bullets and finding new roads to get to work or school, but it is doubtful.

Then-state legislator—and future governor—Dick Lamm, political organizer Sam Brown and environmentalist Eileen Brown (unrelated to Sam) formed Citizens for Colorado’s Future (CCF), which campaigned against the Games. The group collected signatures and ran an information campaign in the lead-up to the 1972 election that included a ballot initiative for the $5 million promised by the state hoping to convince voters to not approve the funding.

A bumper sticker produced before Colorado residents voted on a 1972 referendum to fund the 1976 Olympic Games, which voters rejected. (Photo: History Colorado)

The CCF looked to secure a meeting with the IOC, and when group leaders were rebuffed, they traveled to the Sapporo Olympics, where the IOC executive committee was meeting. CCF members ultimately crashed the meeting, to the consternation of the committee, and presented their findings regarding the true cost and environmental impact to the IOC. This caused Avery Brundage, who was attending his last Winter Games as IOC president, to threaten to pull the Games from the Denver Organizing Committee, which quickly put together a presentation to reassure the IOC.

The cost overruns at the 1972 Sapporo Winter Games and the summer games in Munich further reinforced the cost concerns in Denver. Munich also faced one of the worst terrorist events in sports history, which cast a cloud over the Olympics just months before the 1972 election. Groups like Protect Our Mountain Environment (POME) also held well-publicized protests in places that would be impacted by the Games, including Evergreen.

On Nov. 7, 1972, these myriad problems led Colorado voters to reject the $5 million Olympics contribution from the state, with 60% of voters choosing to say no to the state spending the money on the Games. The following week, Denver officially withdrew from the Games and then-Governor John Love, who championed the bid, resigned the following year to serve as “Energy Czar” under President Richard Nixon. In 1974, Lamm was elected governor, eventually serving three terms and running on a campaign focused on environmentalism and limited development.

Ultimately, Colorado voters were proven right. The 1976 Innsbruck Games cost an estimated $58 million, even with the use of existing facilities from 1964. The Montreal Summer Games the same year were one of the worst financial disasters in Olympic history, with the city, its province, Quebec, and Canada shouldering a debt of more than $1 billion, which was not paid off until 2006.

The early ‘70s bid was not the last time that Denver tried for the Olympics. Federico Peña, mayor of Denver from 1983-1991, pushed to bid for the Olympics even as the city faced financial difficulties. Denver also bid to be the United States Olympic Committee pick for the 2002 Winter Games, with plans that had the University of Colorado Boulder campus serving as the Olympic Village. Denver was beat out by Salt Lake City for the 2002 Games, which faced a bribery controversy over its winning bid.

Ultimately, the politics of Colorado, which include ballot initiatives and the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), create a difficult path for Denver to host an Olympic Games. The concerns of 1976, including rising costs and environmental concerns, have only gotten stronger as some have questioned the long-term impact of hosting. Also, with the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles and the 2034 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, it may be decades until another Olympics makes it back to the United States—and odds are Colorado voters would not approve of the exponentially higher cost of the Olympics in the future.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the ��Ƶ Department of Ethnic Studies.

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Fifty years ago, Denver was supposed to host the Winter Olympics, but fiscal and environmental concerns halted plans and highlighted difficult truths about hosting.

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