Division of Social Sciences

Life is what's a-changin’

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 13:31:00 +0000

Life is what's a-changin’ Rachel Sauer Wed, 07/16/2025 - 07:31

Monica LaBonte, a CU Boulder alumnus and prominent Colorado musician, visits The Ampersand to discuss ski bumming, teaching, gigging to sometimes-small audiences and always finding joy in the music

Listen to The Ampersand

There are certain people who pick up a guitar or sit at a piano or stand at a microphone and you think, “Yes. That’s right. That’s where they belong.”

That’s Monica LaBonte. Her path has been winding, but the road has always been music—writing it, performing it, hearing it in the rhythms of words and speech and the cadences of life. She is at home behind a microphone in a way that lets you know she doesn't just love to sing, isn't just good at it, but was born to breathe deep and bring audiences to tears.

A 2011 91��Ƭ��AV graduate in speech, language and hearing sciences and a well-known Colorado musician and performer, LaBonte recently joined host Erika Randall, CU Boulder interim dean of undergraduate education and professor of dance, on "The Ampersand,” the College of Arts and Sciences podcast. Randall and guests explore stories about “ANDing” as a “full sensory verb” that describes experience and possibility.

Monica LaBonte, a 2011 CU Boulder graduate in speech, language and hearing sciences, is a well-known Colorado musician and performer.

For the record, no banjo-playing children were harmed during this conversation.

MONICA LABONTE: Before my son was born, I was a full-time working musician. I was still playing five gigs a week, and I think by the time my son came, I was ready for a break. Then the pandemic just changed the industry so much, so I think there was this natural pause in music for me at that time anyway.

It was kind of already happening, or it was about to happen. And then motherhood is just—I mean, it really turns your world upside down. So, I was ready to put my focus and energy into my son, because I discovered quickly that it was just too hard to put all the love and the time and the energy into both. I couldn't do both for some time.

ERIKA RANDALL: What did your schedule look like as a professional musician? What was touring like? What was the gigging like? What was the writing and recording like?

LABONTE: It was just all over the place. I was just a yes person for 10, 15 years, just saying yes to every gig, to every recording. I didn't do a whole lot of touring but I was part of a band for 10 years, and we did multiple recordings, and we played festivals all over the state. We did just a little bit of touring up to Oregon. We went to Wyoming one time.

RANDALL: But there was enough of a scene here in Colorado.

LABONTE: Oh, for sure. And then I've been teaching music along the way, so that's kind of—

RANDALL: Painful.

LABONTE: Kept me afloat.

RANDALL: Is it torture to teach little people how to play the banjo? I mean, that sounds like the worst job ever.

LABONTE: Well, I will say this: I really appreciate people who can teach children and do it for their whole lives. I discovered over many years of different kinds of teaching—and teaching mostly kids, I've worked with kids in lots of different ways—but I've really come to realize that I love teaching adults. And I do not teach banjo.

RANDALL: OK. Because that just isn't going to go well.

LABONTE: Yeah, I do not teach banjo. I mostly teach voice.

RANDALL: And do you ever audition them and then say no? Like if I auditioned, you wouldn't—

LABONTE: No.

RANDALL: But there's no guarantee, right? You wouldn't be like, ‘Yes, Randall, I got you. You're going to come out of here doing all the musical theater or all the gentle, angry folk that you want.’

LABONTE: I really just meet people where they are, and I don't make any promises, because it's not my work, it's their work. So, I can show them the tools, but I can't promise that anything is going to happen.

RANDALL: And we all have the tools in our bodies to do this?

Monica LaBonte (right) performs with former bandmate Bill Huston at a Mixtape event. (Photo: Monica LaBonte)

LABONTE: For sure, yeah. It's just like Ratatouille:. Anyone can cook. Anyone can sing, but it's hard work. And singing is so intertwined with the heart and the soul and past experiences. This choir teacher told me, ‘Everyone got into the choir except for me, always.’ Or, ‘My mother told me I couldn't sing.’ A lot of people have these stories. So, it's interesting because I almost have to feel—I almost have to hold a space of a caretaker or—

RANDALL: Therapist.

LABONTE: A bit of a therapist.

RANDALL: I would cry in a lesson with you.

LABONTE: I've cried so many times. It's very vulnerable. So, I will say, I have, over the years of teaching, the people who come and are willing to at least let go a little bit of their story or those walls—have their walls come down—and let go of excuses and are just willing to try, those are the most successful people.

LABONTE: Yeah. It's cool. It's such fun work. And then I have a background in speech therapy, so I have this knowledge of the actual system.

RANDALL: Is that how your degree from CU serves you, do you think?

LABONTE: Oh, yeah.

RANDALL: The systems learning, the anatomical, the somatic. Tell me about that, because that's something that's so interesting to me. And also because I wrote about a character who was a folk singer who then becomes a speech therapist, so the character of my novel is the opposite of you.

LABONTE: Interesting

RANDALL: And the book is called Music for Leaving, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. I cannot wait to give it to Monica.’

LABONTE: Cool.

RANDALL: Because it's like you, but Benjamin Buttoned. And so often when we get a major, we don't know where it's going to land us. For you, did you think that these worlds were connected, that you always wanted to be a singer and a singer-songwriter, and you were studying this in college? Or how did that work for you? Tell me about that path.

LABONTE: The path was just so messy. I took seven years to graduate college with my bachelor's because I couldn't land on one thing. And I did some world traveling in there, and I was a ski bum one winter up in Beaver Creek, and I met one of my dear friends, her name is Abby.

She brought me to a camp called Camp ASCCA in Alabama, and I became the music and arts and crafts director for this camp. It's for children and adults with disabilities, and from that job I just really fostered a love of taking care of people and being in a therapeutic role.

So, from there—and I had never had an opportunity to work with people with disabilities, so that was my first—that experience just changed my course.

RANDALL: And there were generations at this camp, they were all ages.

LABONTE: Yeah, all ages. I think it's 6 to, I don't know, 70-something. And every week is like a different age group and a different—

RANDALL: That's huge to just walk into—

LABONTE: It was wild.

RANDALL: —without prep.

LABONTE: Yeah. Oh, it was wild. And going from a ski bum to—

RANDALL: Hyper able community to a different community that has different requirements. What was the biggest thing that that job, that position, asked of you that you had to find or tap into that you didn't maybe necessarily resource yourself with before?

LABONTE: I would say it was the first time that I couldn't be selfish. And I was young.

RANDALL: Which is the perfect time to be selfish.

LABONTE: Exactly. So, I had to learn to not be selfish, and it required me to be very humble and just be so present because this population is so vulnerable, but they're so loving and so kind, and so there's a lot of magic. And it really, truly changed the course of my life.

RANDALL: So, from there you went back to school with a new focus?

LABONTE: Yeah. I declared music therapy, actually. I went to CSU, which is where I reconnected with my husband, and music therapy just didn't feel—I was like, I don't know if I want to marry these two worlds in such a direct way.

RANDALL: It's really specific.

LABONTE: It just felt too direct. I love music so much, and I loved working with people with disabilities, but I didn't want to marry the two. It didn't feel like the right fit. So, then I found the speech therapy program at CU.

RANDALL: I love that you had to go further outside. It was too close here when they were nesting organically. You're like, ‘No, no, no. I got to mix it up with my own and put a little tension between the two.’

LABONTE: Yes, add some space. A lot of people ask me, not knowing my past, ‘Why don't you do music therapy? It just seems like the obvious choice.’

RANDALL: You're like, I don't want to do the obvious choice.

LABONTE: Yeah, totally. So, I went to CU for speech therapy, and I loved studying all the things speech. But at the same time, I was also cutting my teeth as a songwriter in Boulder. All that to say, I wasn't maybe the best student, because my passions were so divided at that point. And I was having so much fun playing music.

Click the button below to hear the rest of the conversation.

Listen to The Ampersand

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Monica LaBonte, a CU Boulder alumnus and prominent Colorado musician, visits The Ampersand to discuss ski bumming, teaching, gigging to sometimes-small audiences and always finding joy in the music.

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What’s at risk with public media cuts?

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 14:23:00 +0000

What’s at risk with public media cuts? Rachel Sauer Tue, 07/08/2025 - 08:23

Jared Bahir Browsh

Through its more than 100-year history, U.S. public media has represented diverse audiences and broadcast in areas that commercial media hasn’t

On Nov. 7, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act into law, forming the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) that led to the creation of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1969 and National Public Radio (NPR) in 1970.

However, the history of U.S. public media goes back even further—more than a century—as producers and public media advocates have pushed to use the nation’s airwaves and, more recently, digital outlets to give the American public a broad range of news, cultural entertainment and educational media.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Modern U.S. public media’s roots are in the campuses of colleges and universities. Many broadcast historians recognize KDKA in Pittsburgh, which launched on Nov. 2, 1920, as the first commercial radio station, but several experimental stations, some public, had launched in the preceding decade. Union College launched its experimental station in 1916, although it was shut down in 1917 because of the suspension of all civilian stations during World War I (civilian stations were allowed to broadcast again after the war ended). Unsurprisingly, many early radio stations launched on college campuses to both serve the community and train a generation of early broadcasters.

In 1925, at the Fourth National Radio Conference, the Association of College and University Broadcasting Stations (ACUBS) was formed across 25 universities to encourage cooperation and content sharing. This is the model that PBS and NPR adopted and represents one of the main misunderstandings about how public media functions in the United States: PBS and NPR are not a centralized cabal producing biased content for national distribution; rather, they are networks in which the majority of content is produced by local member stations and distributed by PBS and NPR.

The commercial National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the antecedent to the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the United Independent Broadcasters, were formed just before the Radio Act of 1927 was passed on Feb. 23 of that year. The Act was partly a response to the chaos caused by the lack of regulation, with stations launching on previously occupied frequencies. The Act aimed to better regulate and organize radio broadcasting under the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), and in response to the effort to base radio license distribution on the ability to serve “public interest, convenience, or necessity,” the Act ultimately prioritized commercial radio affiliates with more financial means in their license allocation, causing many smaller, non-commercial stations to either lose their licenses or lower the power of their frequencies.

In 1933, engineer Edwin Armstrong patented high-fidelity frequency modulation (FM) radio broadcasting, offering higher-quality audio broadcasting as compared to amplitude modulation (AM). Experimental FM stations launched in the late 1930s, and the FCC established commercial FM bands on Jan. 1, 1941.

The growth of FM radio, and later television, was delayed by World War II, and soon after the war ended in Europe in 1945, the FCC reassigned the FM band’s range to between 88–106 MHz—under the pressure from the Radio Corp. of America (RCA), which owned NBC at the time. This led to the end of a number of stations that operated outside of the frequencies and made nearly 400,000 receivers obsolete.

This was part of a larger legal battle between RCA and Edwin Armstrong, who owned the original FM patent. RCA claimed its FM system did not infringe on Armstrong’s patent, and the ensuing legal battle delaying the growth of FM radio. One positive outcome from the FCC’s decision is the dedication of the lowest 20 bands (88.1~91.9 MHz) to noncommercial educational stations, which is why many NPR stations broadcast from these frequencies.

The rise of television

After World War II, television expanded rapidly, but to avoid the same chaos that plagued radio before the creation of the FRC, the FCC froze license distribution in 1948, using the time to organize the broadcast television landscape. License distribution was restarted in July 1952, when the FCC's Sixth Report and Order ended the freeze; it also allocated stations for educational television.

"Soul!" debuted in 1968 as a variety show hosted by Ellis Haizlip (right, facing camera) that featured Black artists and figures considered controversial by the white establishment. (Photo: PBS)

In November 1952, the Ford Foundation’s Fund for Adult Education created the Educational Television and Radio Center, which six years later relocated to New York City and renamed as the National Educational Television and Radio Center (NETRC). The organization became National Educational Television (NET) in 1963 and produced its own programs, including “NET Journal” and “Public Broadcast Laboratory.” Both programs were accused of having a liberal bias and were ultimately not carried by a number of affiliates in conservative areas for covering issues like the Civil Rights Movement and poverty.

In 1966, the Carnegie Foundation began conducting a study on the future of educational television at the behest of President Johnson, prompted by concerns about NET’s role as both a television producer and network. The following year, Carnegie’s report recommended that educational television evolve into a more comprehensive “public television” model—inviting a larger variety of programming and transitioning from a centralized production model to one that is rooted in the distribution of programming from independent producers.

The Public Broadcasting Act formalized this plan, with nearly all the CPB’s budget coming from Congressional allocations. Only 5% of this allocation is used for administration costs; the rest is dedicated to content development, community services and other local station and system needs. The budget for CPB in fiscal year 2025 was $535 million, with 70% of that total allocated to grants for local television and radio.

The Act did not invent public media, but it helped organize it, ensuring stations have necessary funds to operate and improve the distribution of programs. During this transitional period between the establishment of the CPB and the launch of PBS in 1970, several programs debuted that would exemplify the eventual impact and reach of public television. “Washington Week” debuted on WETA in 1967, followed by “Black Journal” in 1968; the latter was one of the few public affairs programs focused on issues affecting African Americans. “Soul!” also debuted in 1968, a variety show that featured Black artists and figures considered controversial by the white establishment. This included Muhammad Ali during his exile from boxing after his draft refusal and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. It also featured popular musical acts like Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight & the Pips.

A year before the official launch of PBS, the show that became most synonymous with the network debuted through NET: “Sesame Street.” After three years of research and development, Joan Ganz Cooney spearheaded the creation of the show following discussions with the Carnegie Foundation during its research into educational television.

“Sesame Street” was aimed at lower-income preschool children but ultimately became an influential program for generations of young children, mixing entertainment and education to keep them engaged. The structure also invited older children and parents to co-watch by adding cultural references and more sophisticated humor, as research showed that co-watching led to higher retention of the lessons presented through the presence of the older co-watcher. Cooney became executive director of Children's Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop) and also helped create “The Electric Company” for elementary school students, featuring Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno.

Diverse representation

When the children’s show “Arthur” featured a same-sex wedding in 2019, some public television stations refused to air the episode. (Photo: WGBH/PBS Kids)

“Sesame Street” and “Soul!” also represented the diversity featured on PBS as other broadcasters continued to maintain a television environment that often ignored people of color, those with different abilities, women and, later, those who belonged to the LGBTQ+ community. The mix of informational and cultural content from otherwise-marginalized groups was especially important in a pre-cable television environment dominated by NBC, ABC and CBS. This diversity is still controversial; for example, when the children’s show “Arthur” featured a same-sex wedding in 2019, some stations refused to air the episode.

PBS also imported shows from around the world, a strategy originally utilized by NET to offer a greater variety of programming to member stations while exposing the audience to global television. “Masterpiece Theater,” which debuted in 1971, broadcasts performances, films and series mostly from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In 1974, Dallas PBS station KERA began airing episodes of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” leading many other stations to pick up the irreverent and influential British sketch comedy show. More recently, “Downton Abbey” aired in the United States as a part of Masterpiece, continuing PBS’s commitment to groundbreaking television programming.

NPR launched in April 1971 with coverage of Senate hearings on the Vietnam War. Covering Congressional hearings and debates became a hallmark of NPR, including when it became the first radio network to broadcast from the Senate floor in 1978. Unlike PBS, NPR does have a centralized news division and launched its first national program, “All Things Considered,” in May 1971; “Morning Edition” debuted in 1979. Both rank among the most popular news radio programs. NPR also distributed popular programs produced by member stations like “Car Talk,” which debuted in 1977.

Public media also has been at the forefront of programming that is now commonplace in the United States. PBS aired several European Soccer shows in the 1970s and 1980s, and documentaries, which have seen a dramatic increase in popularity in recent years, have been a staple of PBS programming since NET was launched.

Local community and nonprofit stations joined as members, incorporating local news and programming with the national content distributed by NPR. In 1980, NPR was the first to launch a national satellite system to distribute content. In an agreement with CPB, NPR began broadcasting non-NPR programming in 1983, addressing a budget deficit resulting from rapid expansion and funding cuts. CPB agreed to lend NPR money if it would transition its satellite service into a collaborative effort, the Public Radio Satellite System, giving access to other public radio distributors. This also shifted the distribution structure for NPR, with money from CPB going to local radio stations that pay subscriber fees to NPR to air its programming.

"It is important to note that only 15% of PBS's funding and 1% of NPR's funding comes directly from the federal government, with NPR stations receiving on average about 10% of the operational budget from the CPB," says CU Boulder scholar Jared Bahir Browsh. (Photo: Ted Eytan/Wikimedia Commons)

The 1983 crisis also led to a national fundraising campaign, “Drive to Survive,” to help ease the financial crisis that almost caused NPR’s demise. Pledge drives are typically run by the local affiliates, but on occasion NPR has run national drives to address funding cuts and other crises. PBS also has mounted coordinated national pledge drives; the first, “Festival 75,” was a reaction to federal funding cuts.

Benefits outweigh the costs

As the current administration’s calls to cut public media funding get louder, it is important to note that only 15% of PBS’s funding and 1% of NPR’s funding comes directly from the federal government, with NPR stations receiving on average about 10% of the operational budget from the CPB. Many PBS and NPR shows are partially funded by grants from the CPB and support from organizations like the Ford Foundation, so cuts may not end national PBS or NPR, but are more likely to lead to some programs and stations ceasing operations, since it is the individual stations that more heavily rely on grants from CPB.

Affiliates in major cities are better positioned to absorb the cuts due to a larger donor base and existing in states that provide more funding—though these stations, too, will still have to make up the loss of federal revenue, most likely through cuts to personnel and ancillary content like educational programs. The most significant cost would be to stations in rural areas and in states that provide little to no funding to public media. These stations provide important information in locations that are otherwise deserts for local news and culture.

Even in our expansive digital media landscape, with so many options available through streaming, PBS and NPR have been at the forefront of leveraging the digital environment to make content available to the public, particularly educational and informational content. NPR was one of the first large organizations to embrace podcasting, and PBS continues to develop and distribute content through its Digital Studios and LearningMedia for both educators and the general public. Also, as the radio and audio industry further consolidates under the domination of corporations like iHeartRadio and Audacy, many public radio stations have taken on the role of providing listeners with diverse and independent music.

The defunding of CPB would lead to a dramatic shift in the media landscape of the United States. PBS and NPR would survive, but their ability to provide diverse content and serve American media consumers would be severely curtailed. The return on the federal investment in the CPB proves it is not a burden but a boon.

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

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Through its more than 100-year history, U.S. public media has represented diverse audiences and broadcast in areas that commercial media hasn’t.

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Top image: Sesame Workshop

Supporting survivors of sexual assault through community

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 00:31:29 +0000

Supporting survivors of sexual assault through community Rachel Sauer Wed, 07/02/2025 - 18:31

Cody DeBos

CU PhD graduate Tara Streng-Schroeter's research offers a new way to support survivors of sexual violence

The first time Tara Kay Streng-Schroeter stepped into a sorority house to deliver her sexual assault support training, she hoped it would help students feel more prepared to support one another.

She didn’t anticipate the crowd of women lining up afterward to ask questions and offer thanks.

“At one chapter, many women came up to me and thanked me for being there, told me how important they think this training is,” she recalls. “Some said it was better than any training they’ve received from school or as an RA (resident advisor).”

CU Boulder scholar Tara Streng-Schroeter, who earned a PhD in sociology in May, designed a peer-based intervention program designed to help students respond supportively when someone they care about discloses they have experienced sexual violence.

That moment reaffirmed Streng-Schroeter’s belief in what she’d spent years building: a peer-based intervention program designed to help students respond supportively when someone they care about discloses they have experienced sexual violence.

Her program, called Building Support for Survivors (BSS), offers a promising new approach to how college campuses can support students who experience sexual violence.

“We know the majority of survivors never seek support from the police or formal support from a non-profit or university resources. They instead disclose to a close connection,” Streng-Schroeter says.

Yet most students haven’t been trained to handle such a sensitive moment. Even well-intentioned responses can backfire, leading to shame, self-blame or isolation for survivors.

That’s the gap Streng-Schroeter, who in May earned her PhD in sociology from the 91��Ƭ��AV, hopes to close.

Taking innovative research to the front lines

Streng-Schroeter has spent more than a decade working both professionally and academically in the field of sexual-violence response. She has coordinated sexual-assault response teams, trained volunteer victim advocates and witnessed firsthand the long-term effects of both harm and healing.

After talking with hundreds of survivors, she was acutely aware of the opportunity that existed to help college students support their peers who have experienced sexual violence.

Building Support for Survivors, a 90-minute training intervention that she designed to be implemented with peer groups of college students and has piloted with sorority chapters, combines education about the prevalence of sexual violence with hands-on learning around how to listen, what to say and what not to say.

As part of Building Support for Survivors, Streng-Schroeter also provides customized flyers listing local confidential and non-confidential support options.

“Even though there are so many victims within campus communities, students don’t necessarily know the right thing to say to someone who’s experienced this kind of violence unless they have received training,” she says. “And it’s those individuals that don’t have the training but need it that we’re trying to help.”

Over the course of her study, Streng-Schroeter partnered with sorority chapters at nine universities across the country, delivering her training in person at four of them.

A wake-up call

“We know the majority of survivors never seek support from the police or formal support from a non-profit or university resources. They instead disclose to a close connection,” says CU Boulder researcher Tara Streng-Schroeter.

One of the most striking findings of Streng-Schroeter’s research was just how many students have been affected by sexual violence. More than half of the sorority women who completed her surveys reported experiencing sexual violence in their lives.

That number is significantly higher than national averages had previously suggested.

“It could have happened in the week or the month or the semester leading up to when they took a survey,” Streng-Schroeter says, “but it also could have happened when they were a child, or when they were in high school.”

She notes that sorority members, as well as queer students, are disproportionately affected by sexual violence on college campuses. However, many studies only ask about incidents within a narrow time frame, obscuring the full picture.

“Knowing more about what the actual affected population looks like was very important to me,” Streng-Schroeter says.

The data from her study underscores the urgency of making peer support more effective. Fortunately, there are many promising signs that her intervention works.

Rethinking support for survivors

After completing Streng-Schroeter’s BSS training, students showed meaningfully improved responses in how they thought about and responded to sexual-assault disclosures.

Participants who received the training reported lower levels of rape-myth acceptance—the false or harmful beliefs about what “counts” as sexual violence or who is to blame.

“The program also increased how often participants in chapters that received the training actually provided positive responses to their friends’ disclosure of sexual victimization,” Streng-Schroeter says. “And the data also appears to show that the training reduced negative responses and reduced how often participants anticipate that they will use negative responses when faced with a disclosure of sexual violence in the future.”

Streng-Schroeter believes that her community-first training model is an essential part of why it’s so effective.

Unlike large, anonymous lectures, her program is delivered in already-formed social networks. She theorizes that within peer groups where trust already exists and that experience disproportionately high levels of sexual violence, individuals may be more likely to disclose being the victim of sexual violence to one another.

"Even though there are so many victims within campus communities, students don’t necessarily know the right thing to say to someone who’s experienced this kind of violence unless they have received training."

“The social community aspect is a really important aspect of why we saw promising results with this,” Streng-Schroeter says. “Deploying the exact same training in an orientation for new students … it wouldn’t have the same effect because those friendship networks aren’t there yet.”

In other words, the best way to support survivors may be to start with the people they already lean on by giving them the tools to respond appropriately.

Healing together

With her dissertation completed and defended, Streng-Schroeter now hopes to expand the BSS program. She believes the model could scale to more chapters—and other student communities where close peer-bonds exist—with more funding.

She says, “One goal is to secure funding so I can provide this training across a whole network of a sorority, every chapter. That could impact thousands of people’s lives.”

She’s also eager to adapt the training for queer student organizations, college athletic teams and other student clubs.

Streng-Schroeter knows institutional and cultural reform takes time. But helping students become better friends, listeners and supporters can happen right now.

“People just voluntarily sharing that they felt this training was impactful really meant a lot. It made me think, ‘Okay, something good is happening here,’” Streng-Schroeter says.

As her training and research show, the most important support doesn’t always come from an office or through official channels. Often, healing begins when one person is ready to talk and another is prepared to hear them.

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CU PhD graduate Tara Streng-Schroeter's research offers a new way to support survivors of sexual violence.

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Healing Indigenous communities from the ground up

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 23:46:02 +0000

Healing Indigenous communities from the ground up Rachel Sauer Mon, 06/23/2025 - 17:46

Sarah Kuta

Mushroom mycelium can clean up the soil. Can it also help Indigenous people reconnect to the land? CU Boulder researcher Natalie Avalos aims to find out

Fungi are powerful and versatile organisms. They’re being used in a variety of beneficial ways, from degrading hard-to-recycle plastics and purifying contaminated water to developing new medicines and restoring forests after wildfires.

Now an innovative project from the 91��Ƭ��AV will explore fungi’s ability to remediate urban soil and, in the process, reconnect Indigenous families to the land.

The project is being led by Natalie Avalos, a CU Boulder assistant professor of ethnic studies and core faculty member of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS). She’s working in partnership with Carissa Garcia, a Denver-based writer, educator and combat veteran with Picuris Pueblo heritage.

CU Boulder researcher Natalie Avalos, an assistant professor of ethnic studies, is leading a project to explore fungi’s ability to remediate urban soil and, in the process, reconnect Indigenous families to the land.

With grant funding from CNAIS, the duo plans to use mushroom mycelium to clean up the soil at various locations in Denver and Commerce City. They hope to inoculate small farm plots and garden beds on properties that are owned or rented by Indigenous people.

Soil remediation will allow Indigenous families to grow their own foods and medicines and may even lead to the revitalization of ancient crops. But, beyond that, Avalos and Garcia hope their land-based healing project will help Indigenous people restore and strengthen their sacred relationship with the land.

“We talk about decolonization as land repatriation, or the return of Indigenous lands to Indigenous people,” says Avalos. “But this is a form of rematriation, thinking about land as mother and returning to this relationship where you are tending to the health and well-being of the mother so that she can better attend to your health and well-being in return. Restoring that symbiotic relationship is profoundly impactful for families.”

The power of fungi

Mycelium is the name for the network of dense, fibrous, root-like threads that make up the body of a fungus. It’s typically hidden underground, often out of sight and out of mind until it produces mushrooms, which grow above the soil and help fungi reproduce.

In the wilderness, mycelium acts as nature’s clean-up crew. It plays a vital role in decomposition, breaking down dead plants and returning essential nutrients to the soil.

But researchers have also come to realize that mycelium can be a powerful ally for combating pollution. The process, known as “mycoremediation,” harnesses fungi’s natural abilities to remove or break down harmful contaminants in the soil. Scientists are using fungi to clean up everything from heavy metals and pesticides to petrochemicals and other hazardous substances.

Avalos and Garcia want to use mycelium to create healthy and resilient soil for Indigenous families, including some that live in heavily polluted areas on Colorado’s Front Range. They plan to take detailed measurements before, during and after inoculation, to see how the mycelium affects the soil, as well as the plants that will eventually grow in it. Based on these initial results, they hope to expand their mycoremediation work to other Indigenous farms and gardens—and, possibly, even to tribal lands.

They also want to use the soil remediation project to create hands-on educational opportunities for Indigenous communities, particularly Indigenous youth.

Garcia will spearhead the soil remediation work, which is slated to begin later this year. Then, after the mycelium works its magic, Avalos will investigate how the project is affecting Indigenous people.

“I’ll start collecting some oral histories, some ethnographic testaments about what this means to them,” says Avalos. “How is this confirming their relationship to land? How is it speaking to or shaping their religious life, their sense of identity, their Indigeneity? How is it that having restored soil is supporting their health and wellness and contributing to human flourishing?”

“We talk about decolonization as land repatriation, or the return of Indigenous lands to Indigenous people. But this is a form of rematriation, thinking about land as mother and returning to this relationship where you are tending to the health and well-being of the mother so that she can better attend to your health and well-being in return. Restoring that symbiotic relationship is profoundly impactful for families.”

Sovereignty and self-determination

Avalos is also curious to learn how soil remediation might contribute to sovereignty and self-determination for Indigenous people, especially those living in cities. Today, roughly 70% of American Indians and Alaska Natives live in urban areas—but this population is often overlooked.

“How is it that Native people can act as stewards of land, even though they often have less control over that land?” Avalos says. “They may be renters, they may be living in very polluted areas. But just to have that little bit of agency.”

Denver sits on the ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, the Cheyenne, the Ute and other tribes. But, today, the city is home to Indigenous people with a wide array of tribal backgrounds. This diversity largely stems from a federal program that pushed Native Americans away from reservations and into urban areas in the 1950s and ‘60s, as part of the government’s broader attempts to force Indigenous people to assimilate. Denver was one of nine relocation sites located across the country.

“For folks living in cities that have been impacted by displacement and disconnection, I want to document, how are they reconnecting? How are they re-Indigenizing?” Avalos says.

As the world grapples with pressing environmental issues, many Indigenous people are now looking to their sacred ways of life for answers. Long displaced from their lands and separated from their traditional cultural practices, they’re returning to ancestral medicines, deepening their relationships with all living creatures and opening themselves up to the knowledge that’s embedded in the land.

Avalos and Garcia hope their soil remediation project might play a small role in that broader work.

“We can’t count on the treaties, we can’t count on our federal leadership or even our state leadership to really protect us and protect land,” says Garcia. “My generation is looking at a grim future. We’re at a place where many of us are asking, how do we embody the Indigeneity and our sacred ways of knowing and being, and mesh that with an Indigenous futurism that will heal the planet and our people?”

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Mushroom mycelium can clean up the soil. Can it also help Indigenous people reconnect to the land? CU Boulder researcher Natalie Avalos aims to find out.

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Top image: mycelium growing on a log (Photo: iStock)

Soccer joins the club

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 20:31:24 +0000

Soccer joins the club Rachel Sauer Mon, 06/23/2025 - 14:31

Jared Bahir Browsh

The FIFA Club World Cup, being held through July at venues across the United States, highlights international collaboration and concerns that soccer schedules are too packed

On June 14, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Club World Cup kicked off with Inter Miami CF taking on Al Ahly in Miami, Florida. Although the Club World Cup was established in 2000, interruptions and changes in format led FIFA to completely reimagine the tournament as a format that mimics FIFA’s premier tournament, the World Cup.

The Club World Cup serves as an appetizer for next year’s World Cup, being held in North America, which pits national soccer federations in the largest single sport event in the world.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

There have been a number of club tournaments run by FIFA and continental and inter-continental confederations, several of which were established in the 1960s, including the FIFA Intercontinental Cup and the Champions Cup overseen by the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF). Unlike the World Cup or other tournaments between international federations, these tournaments offer professional clubs from leagues around the world the opportunity to compete against each other.

In 1958, Brazilian Sport Confederation head João Havelange, who later went on to be the longest-tenured president of FIFA (1974-1998), suggested organizing a regular intercontinental cup between top European and South American clubs. There had been a few other attempts to establish international club cups, one of the earliest being Copa Aldao, a tournament between Argentine and Uruguayan clubs that started in 1913.

Copa Aldao was abolished in 1955 after competing national team and club schedules made it difficult to schedule the tournament, an issue that continues to affect national, continental and international club and federation tournaments today. These conflicts have included efforts by the South American Football Confederation (CONMEBOL) to establish a continental club tournament, which resulted in the South American Championship of Champions in 1948 and Copa de Campeones de América, now known as CONMEBOL Copa Libertadores, in 1960.

Five years earlier, in 1955, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) began the European Champion Clubs' Cup (now the Champions League) a year after UEFA was established. The Tournoi de Paris, first hosted by the club Racing Paris in 1957, featured clubs from UEFA and CONMEBOL in a friendly tournament and prompted the creation of the FIFA Intercontinental Cup in 1960 between the champions of CONMEBOL Libertadores and the UEFA Champions League.

These tournaments were part of a larger effort to organize and expand international soccer in the 1950s and 1960s. Before this effort, the only international soccer confederation in existence was CONMEBOL, organized in 1913, with the North American Football Confederation (NAFC) and Confederación Centroamericana y del Caribe de Fútbol (CCCF) in Central America coming only after the first World Cup, in 1930.

Growing confederation

FIFA spent most of the first half of the 20th century trying to organize international soccer. The nations of the British associations boycotted World Cup play as FIFA included the Central Powers as they reorganized in 1919 after World War I. The British associations rejoined the next decade, but left again in 1928 over disputes related to payments to players and the maintenance of traditional ideas of amateurism. The 1942 and 1946 editions of the World Cup were cancelled due to World War II, but as the premier international soccer tournament grew, so did the need to further organize international soccer. They came to an agreement in 1950, helping the World Cup to grow and emerge from the shadow of the Olympic soccer tournament.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), Confederation of African Football (CAF), CONCACAF (a merging of NAFC and CCCF) and Oceania Football Confederation (OFC) joined UEFA and CONMEBOL to establish the current continental confederations. CAF, AFC and CONCACAF all founded their own Champions Leagues in the 1950s and 1960s, which were contested between top professional clubs in each confederation.

Urawa Red Diamonds fans cheer during a June 17, 2025, group stage match at the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup against Club Atletico River Plate at Lumen Field in Seattle, Washington. (Photo: SounderBruce/Wikimedia Commons)

Half of the teams in the Club World Cup qualified automatically through the confederation’s club Champions Leagues or the Copa Libertadores. In the case of Inter Miami, which is the host, the team qualified by winning the Supporters’ Shield, or the MLS regular-season championship, in 2024. This decision was controversial given that the L.A. Galaxy won the MLS Cup in 2024; FIFA President Gianni Infantino admitted that Miami’s soccer culture and the presence of Lionel Messi partially motivated Inter Miami’s inclusion.

The other half of the qualifying teams were selected based on their rankings in their respective confederations. LAFC won a play-in game against Club América after Club León was disqualified due to shared ownership with fellow Liga MX team Pachuca. Out of the 32 teams in the Club World Cup, 20 are from either UEFA or CONMEBOL, with Europeans teams guaranteed 14 spots in the tournament.

Infantino knew that for this tournament to be successful and grow in popularity, he needed to financially incentivize the top teams in the top confederations to play in the Club World Cup. There is a staggered prize money framework for qualification, with top European teams such as Manchester City earning more than $38 million USD for making the tournament based on sporting and commercial criteria, whereas qualifying OFC teams were awarded $3.58 million.

Busy schedules

The confederations oversee both intra-nation club tournaments and contests between national teams within the confederation. However, despite general oversight by FIFA, there are still conflicting schedules and growing complaints about the increasing number of soccer competitions and the struggle to balance club schedules with national team obligations.

The FIFA Club World Cup exemplifies one of the issues with the ever-expanding soccer schedule: direct conflict between club and inter-nation tournaments. The United States is hosting the FIFA Club World Cup and the CONCACAF Gold Cup at the same time. Most of the matches for the Club World Cup will be held east of the Mississippi, and the Gold Cup matches are being played in the Midwest and West Coast, with no shared venues and the Los Angeles area the only location to host matches for both events.

Several teams had to choose between the two competitions, and with the U.S. Men’s National Team automatically qualified for the 2026 World Cup as one of the hosts, and the larger payout of the FIFA Club World Cup, players like Timothy Weah, Weston McKinnie and Giovanni Reyna have decided to compete on behalf of their professional clubs rather than their national team.

The Club World Cup also comes on the heels of the UEFA Nations League Finals June 8. Players like Nuno Mendes, who helped lead Portugal to the Nations League championship, will have to quickly pivot to play with Paris Saint-Germain a week later for the Club World Cup. The international club soccer schedule runs from late summer through early spring, meaning players like Mendes are forced to play multiple tournaments during what is supposed to be their offseason.

Egyptian soccer star Taher Mohamed plays for Al Ahly SC in the 2021 FIFA Club World Cup. (Photo: Fars Media Corporation/Wikimedia Commons)

A number of players have expressed concern over being overworked, with some even calling for a strike for FIFA and for club leagues to reduce the schedule; some players are being pushed to participate in more than a match a week on average.

Several players and managers have said they see the Club World Cup as a money grab by FIFA, expanding the competition schedule to encroach upon the club offseason. The MLS plays a spring-to-fall schedule, so the North American league will be forced to suspend play during the Club World Cup. But the three MLS teams—the Seattle Sounders FC, Inter Miami and LAFC—do see it as a way to compete with top professional clubs and may adjust their schedules before the next Club World Cup to fall in line with the rest of the world.

FIFA scandals

FIFA has long faced a number of scandals and bribery charges, including with partner International Sport and Leisure, which handled marketing and media rights for the soccer organization but folded in 2001 with debts of more than $200 million. This led to the cancellation of the Club World Cup that year. The organization was subsequently investigated by authorities in Switzerland and charged with fraud. Later, as a part of the 2015 FIFA corruption scandal investigation, several sports marketing executives and officials with continental football bodies were found to have bribed FIFA officials including Havelange.

The 2015 scandal was also centered on bribery and collusion related to sports marketing and media rights; the FBI and IRS uncovered impropriety among executives of CONMEBOL and CONCACAF, several marketing firms and even Nike, which was found to have spent $40 million on bribes to become the exclusive apparel company for the Brazil national team. In spite of CONCACAF’s involvement, and a year delay in the bid process due to the scandal, the combined North America bid still won the 2026 World Cup.

Although no impropriety has been alleged around the 2025 Club World Cup, FIFA is still accused of participating in a money grab, with greed overshadowing team concerns and player health. The pace of top-level soccer also has increased over the last quarter century, with more running and pressing being partially blamed for more injuries along with the ever-growing schedule. Sponsors also have been hesitant to become involved over questions related to viewership, attendance and return on investment for the revamped tournament.

To combat concerns and attract top clubs and players, FIFA has offered a $1 billion prize pool, with top-qualifying teams like Manchester City able to earn up to $125 million if they win the tournament. The amount a team like Real Madrid could earn would be on par with the prize money for making the UEFA Champions League quarterfinals, but some of that money is offset by costs including early signings or transfers to boost talent before the tournament.

Each win and draw from the group stage through the final will earn teams money, but there are also questions of where that money will go. Many players in the MLS clubs are currently petitioning the league, which owns all the clubs, for a prize-money share. The Club World Cup is not specifically mentioned in the collective bargaining agreement with the MLS Players Association, and caps on tournament compensation shares could lead to a disproportionate windfall for the league—with players getting what they see as a share below international standards if any of the league’s teams make a run. Seattle Sounders players wore T-shirts with the message “Club World Cup Ca$h Grab” before their June 1 match, and several players have posted criticisms campaigning with the #FairShareNow hashtag.

Another shadow over the Club World Cup is international and domestic tensions related to the Trump administration. Travel bans have created concern among players, while social media posts by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which were later deleted, hinted at the agency showing up at the first match in Miami and possibly using the soccer tournament to target undocumented immigrants. Some have blamed potential ICE presence at games for lower than expected attendance at early matches.

These concerns will fade if the tournament ends up being a success, and some of that will depend on the competition itself, which organizers hope will increase fan interest. Ultimately, seeing this many top clubs will be a fan draw, but the question is whether casual fans will be interested in the tournament in the same way as next year’s World Cup—ideally snowballing toward the 2029 edition and forcing sponsors, and possibly players, to warm up to yet another major tournament in an already crowded soccer schedule.

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

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The FIFA Club World Cup, being held through July at venues across the United States, highlights international collaboration and concerns that soccer schedules are too packed.

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Top image: English soccer club Chelsea celebrate after winning the 2021 FIFA Club World Cup. (Photo: Fars Media Corporation/Wikimedia Commons)

Pitching perfection

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 20:58:56 +0000

Pitching perfection Rachel Sauer Mon, 06/09/2025 - 14:58

Jared Bahir Browsh

145 years after Lee Richmond threw the first perfect game in Major League Baseball, pitchers still pursue one of baseball’s ultimate achievements

Perfect (adj.): flawless, being entirely without fault or defect

The word “perfect” is not typically associated with team sports. In bowling, you can have a perfect game of all strikes, or in gymnastics we have seen perfect scores by legendary gymnasts including Nadia Comăneci and Mary Lou Retton. However, there are so many variables in team sports it is hard to define “perfection.”

One exception is baseball, in which a pitcher can step on the mound and if, after none of 27 batters reach base by a hit, walk or error, he is considered perfect.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

The National League is in the midst of its 150th season, and in those years there have been 24 recognized perfect games, the first thrown 145 years ago by Worcester pitcher Lee Richmond on June 12, 1880. The feat was repeated by John Montgomery Ward of the Providence Grays five days later, which remains the shortest time between perfect games in Major League history. It would be 24 years before a third perfect game occurred in 1904, a year after the World Series was first played between the National League and American League, which had been formed in 1901.

When Richmond and Ward threw their perfect games, baseball looked much different. Pitchers were required to throw underhand 45 feet from the plate and batters could request the height of the pitch, with umpires determining whether the pitch was “unfair” and batters getting up to seven balls before walking, reduced from nine before 1880.

In 1893, pitching moved toward its modern form as the pitchers were required to throw from a slab 60 feet, 6 inches away from home plate, the current distance between pitchers and home plate. Still, it would take another 11 years for the next perfect game to be thrown, as young pitchers had to be trained on the standardized distance and throwing motion.

As the calendar turned to the 20th century, the American League was established as a “major league” in 1901 before Major League Baseball was created through the National Agreement in 1903. In the season following the first World Series in 1903, a pitcher for the defending champion Boston Americans (who changed their name to the Red Sox in 1908) threw the first perfect game in the World Series era against the Philadelphia Athletics. The pitcher, Cy Young, is considered the father of modern pitching, and in 1956 Major League Baseball began awarding the top pitcher in baseball the Cy Young Award before expanding it to the best pitcher in each league in 1967.

Before World War II, there were only three perfect games thrown, and none in the regular season, including Charlie Robertson’s 1922 perfect game for the Chicago White Sox. More than 40 years later, Jim Bunning pitched a perfect game in 1964 for the Philadelphia Phillies. In between, Yankee Don Larsen threw the only perfect game in World Series history in 1956 against the Brooklyn Dodgers, beating a team that included the first Cy Young award winner, Don Newcombe.

Two more perfect games capped off the 1960s: Sandy Koufax for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1965 and Catfish Hunter for the Oakland Athletics in 1968. Hunter’s perfect game occurred in the midst of what became known as the year of the pitcher, one of the most dominant years of pitching in baseball history, when pitchers dominated with a league ERA of 2.98 (4.07 in 2024) and an average of 6.8 total runs scored per game (8.8 in 2024).

As a result of this domination, MLB lowered the pitching mound and tightened the strike zone to make it more difficult on pitchers. A higher mound allows more force as pitchers step down into the pitch, while a tighter strike zone makes it easier for hitters to take balls, induce walks and wait for better pitches. Much like the rule changes in the late 19th century, the leaders of professional baseball were concerned about the lack of hits contributing to reduced interest from fans. Sports are entertainment businesses that often adjust rules to encourage more offense and create more engaging experiences.

Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw (here pitching a July 2015 game against the New York Yankees) saw his 2014 perfect-game bid halted by an error. (Photo: Arturo Pardavila/Wikimedia Commons)

MLB wasn’t the only league to make changes to encourage more scoring: The NBA introduced the 24-second clock in 1954 after several seasons of boring, low-offense—and thus low-scoring—games, including a 19-18 game between the Fort Wayne Pistons and Minneapolis Lakers in 1950. College football legalized the forward pass in 1905 to encourage a faster pace of play and reduce head-on collisions, and the NHL reduced allowable goalie pad size in 2018 to encourage more goal scoring, the same year the NBA shifted rules again to limit the amount of contact defensive players can make and quicken the pace of play.

Rule changes = fewer perfect games

The lowered mound in 1969 is just one example of these rule changes that increase offense and make it harder for pitchers to achieve a perfect game. Similarly, in 1920, MLB made it illegal for pitchers to scuff the ball or use foreign substances that could affect how it moves in the air; the ball was also switched out at the first sign of wear, which allowed batters to see the ball more easily and made it more difficult for pitchers to manipulate its movement. These changes contributed to only one perfect game between 1920 and the 1956 World Series.

After the mound was lowered, there would not be another perfect game until 1981, meaning there were no perfect games in the 1970s. But in this time another rule was introduced that created another obstacle to a perfect game: the designated hitter in the American League in 1973. Historically, pitchers have been below-average hitters and often considered an easy out, so eliminating their presence in the lineup allowed for another skilled hitter to challenge perfection. The National League adopted the designated hitter in 2022.

Along with rule changes, strategy has also shifted significantly on the mound and in the batter’s box. Pitchers are pitching harder and throwing more breaking balls, which wear on the arm and lead to fewer complete games. In 1921 there were 1,827 complete games out of 3,553 total, meaning pitchers completed more than half the games they started. In 1968, out of 3,250 started games, 897 were completed (27.6%), while in 2024, of the 4,828 games started, only 28 were completed by the same pitcher (.58%). The desire to protect topline pitchers, and the increased reliance on talented relievers, has led to shorter outings for starters.

The changes in throwing style have led to a rise in strikeouts, which is a shift from the past when pitchers aimed more for contact and shorter at-bats. In 1988, there were about 5.6 strikeouts per nine innings pitched; in 2024 that number jumped to 8.6 strikeouts per nine innings pitched. This has also led to longer at-bats, raising pitch counts; in 1988, there were 136.2 total pitches per game and 3.59 per at-bat. In 2024, there were 146 pitches per game, or 3.88 pitches per at-bat.

In 1991, MLB formalized the definition of a perfect game to include only those games in which the pitcher throws at least nine innings without a batter reaching base, completes the game and wins the game. After that ruling, several games, including Harvey Haddix’s performance in 1959 when he pitched 12 perfect innings before losing in the 13th, was removed as a perfect game from the record books.

Walk, strikeout or home run

Batters have also contributed to this rise as they take more pitches and embrace the “three true outcomes”: walk, strikeout or home run. For a long time, walks were undervalued until analytics proliferated the game, popularizing a player evaluation strategy utilized by teams like the Oakland A’s and described in Michael Lewis’s 2003 book, Moneyball. The book follows the 2002 A’s as they won 103 games with a $44 million payroll—matching the win total of the Yankees, who had a payroll of more than $125 million. With more batters willing to take pitches—and walks—pitchers are forced to throw more.

Since 2012, the only perfect game was thrown by Domingo Germán (here pitching a 2019 game against the Baltimore Orioles) in 2023. (Photo: Keith Allison/Wikimedia Commons)

Also encouraging this protection of pitchers is the expansion of the playoffs and MLB introducing the five-game league championship series in 1969. This happened after each league added two teams, expanding professional baseball from 20 to 24 teams and with each league split into two divisions. Previously, the team with the best record in each league won the pennant and met in the World Series.

Baseball expanded its playoffs to four teams in each league in 1995, five teams in each league in 2012 and six teams in each league in 2022. This placed less emphasis on the regular season, and managers became more protective of pitchers to ensure their availability for the playoffs, leading to shorter outings. In fact, the only two times pitchers have been pulled from a perfect game have been in the last decade: in 2016 because of a blister and in 2022 when L.A. Dodger Clayton Kershaw was removed after seven innings. Dave Roberts, the manager of the current defending champion Dodgers, was the manager for both of those games.

Although the ebbs and flows of perfect games may be attributable to changes in rules, strategy and season format, there are a number of other variables beyond any pitcher’s control. Weather conditions can dramatically alter the path to perfection. The ball travels farther during warmer months, leading to more home runs. Only five of the 24 total perfect games occurred in July or August. Lower humidity and altitude also affect the ball, as it travels farther when the air density is lower, which is why the Colorado Rockies began to place balls in a humidor to combat the high rates of home runs being hit at Coors field. Rain or wetter conditions can make it harder for a pitcher to grip the ball, and in the summer, sweat can have the same effect.

With all of these factors, there is also a significant amount of luck in achieving a perfect game. There have been 326 no-hit games pitched in Major League history, with Nolan Ryan throwing seven of those, but with no perfect games in his career. Unlike a perfect game in bowling, perfection in baseball relies on other humans, including the pitcher’s defense. Nine perfect games have been made imperfect by errors—notably, a perfect-game attempt by Jonathan Sanchez in 2009 and, most recently, Clayton Kershaw’s bid in 2014. Human error is not reserved to fielders, as umpire Jim Joyce erroneously called the 27th batter safe, ending Armando Gallaraga’s perfect game attempt on June 2, 2010. Gallaraga completed his one-hitter, or “28-out perfect game” on the following at-bat.

This luck is also exemplified when we see a run of perfect games. Sanchez and Gallaraga’s flirtation with perfection occurred between 2009-2012, when there were six perfect games, with three occurring in 2012 alone (Sanchez’s and Gallaraga’s bids occurred fewer than two weeks after another perfect game). The first perfect game of 2012 was thrown by Phillip Humber, who started 51 total games in his career and finished 2012 with an ERA of 6.44, showing how just one good day can lead to baseball immortality.

Since 2012, the only perfect game was thrown by Domingo Germán in 2023. Germán has started seven games since his own perfect day with the Yankees.

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

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145 years after Lee Richmond threw the first perfect game in Major League Baseball, pitchers still pursue one of baseball’s ultimate achievements.

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Top image: Cy Young pitching (Photo: Library of Congress)

Anthropologists awarded major early-career development support

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 30 May 2025 21:44:15 +0000

Anthropologists awarded major early-career development support Rachel Sauer Fri, 05/30/2025 - 15:44

CU Boulder scholars William Taylor and Fernando Villanea have been named 2025 National Science Foundation CAREER award winners

Two 91��Ƭ��AV anthropologists have been named 2025 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award winners by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support their research of animal domestication and genomic variation.

William Taylor, a CU Boulder assistant professor of anthropology and CU Museum of Natural History curator of archaeology, has been awarded a $419,696 grant for his research project “Understanding Animal Domestication and Human-Environmental Relationships.” Fernando Villanea, an assistant professor of anthropology, has been awarded a $579,010 grant to study “Archaic Hominin Genomic Variation in Modern Human Populations.”

William Taylor, a CU Boulder assistant professor of anthropology and CU Museum of Natural History curator of archaeology, has been awarded a $419,696 NSF CAREER grant for his research project “Understanding Animal Domestication and Human-Environmental Relationships.”

The NSF CAREER Program offers the foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty “who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization,” according to the NSF. “Activities pursued by early-career faculty should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.”

“Funding from this grant means my research team’s salaries will be supported for the next five years, including hiring a new post-doctoral scholar, to explore the effects of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry in living people,” Villanea says. “A portion of the grant will also fund functional genetic experiments in collaboration with scientists at the CU Anschutz School of Medicine.”

Taylor notes that this award “is a tremendous honor and a huge step forward in our scientific investigation of the past. Ancient Mongolia was deeply intertwined with so many parts of the story of animal domestication, from dogs to horses, reindeer, and beyond. It’s exciting we will be able to start exploring that with our interdisciplinary team at CU over the years ahead.”

Doing community archaeology

Taylor’s research aims to understand animal domestication and human-environmental relationships on northeast Asian prehistory through archaeology.

His NSF CAREER project will investigate rare, well-preserved archaeological and biological assemblages recovered from archaeological field research in western Mongolia—including new finds from high mountain snow and ice features and excavation of stratified dry caves—spanning the last four millennia and beyond.

The research will be paired with a multifaceted program of museum education and outreach, building on Taylor’s past findings, providing infrastructure for the protection of cultural resources and the cultivation of international scientific cooperation while supporting early-career scientists and expanding public education in Mongolia and the United States.

The NSF CAREER support will aid Taylor and his Mongolian partners, including the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and National Museum of Mongolia, to analyze ancient animal remains, artifacts and ecofacts with cutting-edge techniques from archaeozoology, biomolecular sciences and paleoenvironmental data from the Mongolian Altai. The research team will seek to establish data-driven models for the introduction and dispersal of domestic livestock to northeast Asia; the timing and role of Mongolian cultures in the innovation of large animal transport, including the chariot, the saddle/stirrup and reindeer riding; and the relationship of key social developments to ancient environments in the eastern Steppe.

Fernando Villanea, an assistant professor of anthropology, has been awarded a $579,010 NSF CAREER grant to study “Archaic Hominin Genomic Variation in Modern Human Populations.”

“Leveraging partnerships and expertise from scientists and institutions at home and abroad, this award will produce key scientific research on animal domestication and the human story,” Taylor noted, adding that the CAREER award will help “to build important educational tools and capacity for a future generation of scientists and scholars, along with strong international partnerships and scientific cooperations between Mongolia and the United States.”

Archaic genetics, modern applications

Villanea’s NSF CAREER research begins with the concept that “living people carry archaic genetic material inherited from other hominins such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. This genetic inheritance can affect fitness and health, and its persistence and effects cannot be fully understood unless studies consider each group’s unique population history and the evolutionary processes that shaped them,” he explained.

The goal of Villanea’s study is to assess the presence and evaluate the impact of archaic hominin ancestry in groups with a complex population history by applying sophisticated computational genetic techniques to existing information. Villanea and his research colleagues aim to develop educational tools, provide training opportunities for students at different educational levels and build capacity in a new generation of scientists.

This research advances knowledge of archaic ancestry in groups with complex admixture. To separate the archaic ancestry contributions from those derived from modern groups, this study analyzes the genomes of individuals that predate well-documented historic processes as well as those from modern peoples. To improve admixture models, the study creates computational tools that benefit from artificial intelligence techniques. The study examines the relationship between archaic gene variants and phenotypic traits.

Villanea’s research will focus on the Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry distribution in Indigenous American and descendant Latin American genomes, promoting understanding of the forces of evolution as they acted in Indigenous American and descendant Latin American genomes. A goal is that the knowledge gained will empower underrepresented students to access higher education in medical and STEM fields.

“Computational and statistical competency is a lower cost of entry to STEM and medical sciences than hands-on experience in laboratory techniques, and I believe that this trend is democratizing access to genomics research across all institutions,” Villanea noted. “The trend towards free access to scientific resources is exemplified by the public availability of modern and ancient genomes, and the acceptance of preprint services to remove paywalls to exciting new results and methodologies.

“For this reason, I advocate for the inclusion of computational competency in the curriculum for all students, and see an opportunity for online resources to provide an early form of access to evolutionary theory for pre-college level students that can both grow their interest in biology and improve their chances at academic development by equipping them with high-level theory they can be self-taught supplementing their school curriculum.”

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CU Boulder scholars William Taylor and Fernando Villanea have been named 2025 National Science Foundation CAREER award winners.

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How Wheaties became ‘the breakfast of champions’

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 21 May 2025 20:03:14 +0000

How Wheaties became ‘the breakfast of champions’ Rachel Sauer Wed, 05/21/2025 - 14:03

Jared Bahir Browsh

Recently featured in Marvel blockbuster The Thunderbolts*—and with the Thunderbolts featured on a tie-in box—Wheaties has been the go-to champion breakfast for 100 years and counting

The cereal that would become Wheaties was accidentally invented in 1921 when a clinician for the Washburn Crosby Company spilled wheat bran onto a hot stove. After several dozen attempts to fortify the cereal to withstand shipping, Washburn's Gold Medal Whole Wheat Flakes were released in November 1924. An employee contest led to the name Wheaties—beating out other options like Nutties—and within a few years, promotion of the new cereal was revolutionizing product advertising.

On Christmas Eve 1926, Wheaties was featured in the first prerecorded jingle on Minneapolis radio station WCCO (named for Washburn-Crosby Company). “Have You Tried Wheaties” was sung to the tune of “Jazz Baby.”

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Washburn-Crosby merged with three other mills and was renamed General Mills in 1928. After General Mills debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in November of 1928, the company increased advertising for Wheaties and released the jingle nationwide.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Wheaties established what would become a long association with sports when the cereal was featured on a billboard in the stadium for the Minneapolis Millers and was the main advertiser for the minor league baseball team’s broadcasts on the now General Mills-owned WCCO. Knox Reeves, a Minnesota advertising executive, created a mock-up for a billboard in the Millers’ stadium featuring a box of the cereal with the tagline “The Breakfast of Champions.”

Throughout the 1930s, the cereal continued to expand its reach nationally, sponsoring sporting and cultural events on more than 100 radio stations. Wheaties’ closest association was with baseball, and in 1934 Yankees legend Lou Gehrig became the first athlete featured on a box of Wheaties, a tradition that continues today.

The honor of appearing on a Wheaties box was not exclusive to athletes, or men; aviator Elinor Smith was featured on the box in 1934. The following year, groundbreaking athlete Babe Didrikson, who won three medals at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, appeared on the box. After his record-breaking four gold medal performance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Jesse Owens was the first African American to appear on the box.

In 1937, Wheaties held a contest for the top play-by-play announcer in the country. The winner was a sports broadcaster from Des Moines, Iowa, who recreated Chicago Cubs games through transcribed telegraphs. The broadcaster won a trip to the Cubs Spring Training in California, and while there, it was recommended that he take part in a screen test for Warner Bros. Ronald Reagan began a film career that led to pursuing a career in politics, becoming the governor of California and the 40th President of the United States.

The breakfast of champions in the world of tomorrow

Wheaties continued to set milestones in advertising when NBC featured the Brooklyn Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds in the first televised baseball game on August 29, 1939. The broadcast was a part of the World’s Fair taking place in Queens in 1939 and 1940. Although the FCC did not authorize full commercial television until July 1, 1941, the commission gave special permission for live commercials during the game that was available to the 500 television set owners in New York City. Hall of Fame broadcaster Red Barber poured Wheaties and milk or cream into a bowl, announcing, "Now that's the breakfast of champions."

In 1986, Walter Payton was the first African American featured on the front of a Wheaties box. (Photo: General Mills)

By the 1940s, Wheaties had cemented its association with sports, even earning a mention in the song “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio” produced by Les Brown and his orchestra in the midst of DiMaggio’s record-breaking 56-game hitting streak. As television took off after World War II, advertising costs rose, leading Wheaties to pull back from its focus on sponsorships, instead using testimonials in commercial spots to advertise the cereal—an approach that was less expensive than sponsorship, but also less effective in promoting the brand.

As Wheaties declined in visibility, General Mills turned its attention to children’s programming, a strategy that helped Cheerios become one of the top cereals after General Mills rebranded “Cheerioats” following Quaker Oats claiming ownership of the word “oats.”

This was not Wheaties’ first foray into entertainment programming; it had previously sponsored radio programs like “Jack Armstrong: All-American Boy.” Jack Armstrong was the first character to appear on a Wheaties box, in 1933, preceding Lou Gehrig by a year. He was created by General Mills’ Vice President Samuel Chester Gale to sell Wheaties. Gale went on to create Betty Crocker and lead the Advertising Council from 1950 to 1951.

General Mills even featured a mascot, Champy the Lion, created by puppeteer Bil Baird and voiced by Thurl Ravenscroft, who also voiced another cereal spokes-feline, Tony the Tiger. Its sponsorships of children’s television shows like The Mickey Mouse Club backfired as adults began to avoid cereals associated with children, and children’s increased cereal consumption did not offset the loss of older consumers.

By the late 1950s, General Mills reinitiated Wheaties’ relationship with sports, hiring Olympic pole vaulter Bob Richards as its first spokesperson. Before Richards, athletes appeared on the back of the Wheaties box, but the Olympian was the first to appear on the front of the box in 1958, and athletes have remained on the front ever since.

As a part of his contract, Richards led the Wheaties Sports Federation that promoted physical fitness, Olympic sports and athletic education and published instructional books. They also advertised through sporting events again as one of the first brands to sponsor pregame and postgame shows.

Honored on the orange box

Similar to the cover of the magazine Sports Illustrated or the video game series Madden, an athlete—or, recently, superheroes—being chosen to appear on a Wheaties box represented mainstream stardom. Mary Lou Retton’s iconic 1984 box was the first time a female medal winner appeared on the front, and two years later Walter Payton was the first African American to be featured on the front of the box. By the end of the 1980s, fans could pay to have a Wheaties box made with their picture.

In 1987, the Minnesota Twins were the first team to appear on a Wheaties box in 1987 after the team, from the same city in which Wheaties was created, won the World Series. In 1992, to celebrate the Chicago Bulls’ back-to-back championships, Wheaties produced a red and black box, the first time it broke with the iconic orange color. Bulls legend Michael Jordan was signed as a spokesperson for the cereal in 1988, appearing on the box a record 19 times, followed by Tiger Woods with 14 appearances.

In recent decades, the cereal industry has seen a dramatic decline, and Wheaties has not been immune to this downturn. With many more breakfast options, and the younger generations consuming less milk, cereal now occupies less space in the breakfast pantry. In spite of the public’s turn away from cereal toward healthier options, Wheaties remains an iconic brand, evidenced by its partnership with the blockbuster film set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

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

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Recently featured in Marvel blockbuster The Thunderbolts*—and with the Thunderbolts featured on a tie-in box—Wheaties has been the go-to champion breakfast for 100 years and counting.

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How Asian American became a racial grouping

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 20 May 2025 23:21:45 +0000

How Asian American became a racial grouping Rachel Sauer Tue, 05/20/2025 - 17:21

Jennifer Ho

And why many with Asian roots don’t identify with the term these days

For the first time, in 1990, May was officially designated as a month honoring Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage. Though the current U.S. administration recently withdrew federal recognition, the month continues to be celebrated by a wide array of people from diverse cultural backgrounds.

People from the Pacific Islands have their own distinct histories and issues, delineated in part by a specific geography. Yet when we refer to the even broader category of Asian Americans, a concept with a deep yet often unknown history, who exactly are we referring to?

There are nearly 25 million people of Asian descent who live in the United States, but the term Asian American remains shrouded by cultural misunderstanding and contested as a term among Asians themselves.

Jennifer Ho is a professor of Asian American studies in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies and director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts.

As a professor of Asian American studies, I believe it is important to understand how the label came into being.

A long history of Asian people in America

The arrival of people from Asia to the U.S. long predates the country’s founding in 1776.

After visits to modern-day America that began in the late 16th century, Filipino sailors formed – as early as 1763 – what is believed to be the first Asian settlement in St. Malo, Louisiana.

But it wasn’t until the 1849 California Gold Rush that Asian immigration to the U.S.—from China—began on a mass scale. That was bolstered in the 1860s by Chinese laborers recruited to build the western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad.

Starting toward the end of the 19th century, Japanese immigration steadily picked up, so that by 1910 the U.S. Census records a similar number for both communities – just over 70,000. Likewise, a small number of South Asian immigrants began arriving in the early 1900s.

An exclusionary backlash

Yet after coming to the U.S. in search of economic and political opportunities, Asian laborers in America were met by a surge of white nativist hostility and violence. That reaction was codified in civil society groups and government laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

By 1924, federal law had expanded into a virtual ban on all Asian immigration, and through the first half of the 20th century, a multitude of anti-Asian laws targeted areas including naturalization, marriage and housing, among others.

From the start, people from Asian countries in the U.S. were generally identified broadly with identifiers such as “Oriental,” a common term at the time mostly for those from China, Japan and Korea.

As more Asians came to the U.S, other terms were used to denigrate and demean these new immigrants, whose physical appearance, language and cultural norms were distinctly different from their Euro-American neighbors.

‘Asian American’ and the birth of a movement

Chinese railroad workers (left to right) Wong Fook, Lee Chao and Ging Cui with a parade float in Ogden, Utah, during a 1919 parade celebrating the 50th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. (Photo: San Francisco Public Library)

The desire to claim America was one of the drivers for activists in the 1960s to create the concept of Asian American that we know today.

The movement began in the charged political context of anti-Vietnam War protests and the Civil Rights Movement for Black equality. Students of Asian heritage at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley were organizing for the establishment of ethnic studies classes, specifically those that centered on the histories of Asians in the U.S.

Rejecting the term “oriental” as too limiting and exotic, since oriental literally means “from the East,” the student activists wanted a term of empowerment that would include the Filipino, Chinese, Korean and Japanese students at the heart of this organizing. Graduate students Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka came up with “Asian American” as a way to bring activists under one radical organizing umbrella, forming the Asian American Political Alliance in 1968.

A contested term

Today, the Asian American label has moved beyond its activist roots. The term might literally refer to anyone who traces their lineage from the whole of the Asian continent. This could include people from South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan or Sri Lanka to parts of West Asia like Syria, Lebanon or Iran.

Yet not all people who identify as Asian actually use the words Asian American, since it is a term that flattens ethnic specificity and lumps together people with as disparate of backgrounds as Hmong or Bangladeshi, for example.

A 2023 Pew Research Center survey of self-identified Asian adults living in the U.S. revealed that only 16% of people polled said they identified as “Asian American,” with a majority—52%—preferring ethnic Asian labels, either alone or in tandem with “American.”

Moreover, unlike the student activists who worked together through their shared Asian American identity, the majority of people of Asian descent living in the U.S. came after the 1965 Immigration Act was passed, which ended all prior anti-Asian immigration laws. This, combined with a subsequent wave of Asian immigration from parts of Asia not represented in the past—including Vietnam, Taiwan and Pakistan—means that most Asian Americans alive today are either immigrants or one generation removed from immigrants.

As a largely immigrant and recently Americanized group, many Asians therefore may not relate to the struggles of an earlier history of Asians in the U.S. That may contribute to why many don’t connect with the term “Asian American.” Korean immigrants, for instance, may not see their history connected with third-generation Japanese Americans, particularly when considering their homelands have been in conflict for decades.

For some, Asian American is too broad a term to capture the complexity of Asian-heritage Americans.

Indeed, Asian Americans come from over 30 countries with different languages, diverse cultures, and histories that have often been in conflict with other Asian nations. Within such a broad grouping as “Asian American,” a wide range of political, socioeconomic, religious and other differences emerge that greatly complicate this racial label.

Even though the term remains contested, many Asians still see value in the concept. Much like the activists who first created the label in the 1960s, many believe it signifies a sense of solidarity and community among people who—despite their many differences—have been treated like outsiders to the American experience, regardless of how American their roots are.

Jennifer Ho is a professor of Asian American studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the 91��Ƭ��AV.

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

And why many with Asian roots don’t identify with the term these days.

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Top image: Children performing a traditional Korean dance to celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. (Photo: Viorel Florescu/AP)

What is ‘woke’? Who knows?

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 19 May 2025 13:30:00 +0000

What is ‘woke’? Who knows? Rachel Sauer Mon, 05/19/2025 - 07:30

Bradley Worrell

CU Boulder PhD candidate Benjamin VanDreew’s search for an answer to that question finds that Barbie is, book banning isn’t, and that female Democrats are more likely than male Democrats to be seen as ‘woke’

Is Chick-fil-A “woke”?

Seeing that question posted on Twitter (now X.com) back in 2023 made Benjamin VanDreew ponder: Who decides what qualifies as “woke”?

“I was on Twitter, and for whatever reason, trending that day was the question: Had Chick-fil-A gone woke?” says VanDreew, then an undergraduate at Utah Valley University and now a 91��Ƭ��AV PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science studying American politics. “Seeing that post made me question: Is there a cohesive definition for woke? Or is it just kind of an anything-and-everything term?

CU Boulder PhD candidate Benjamin VanDreew was inspired to research wokeness after seeing a post on X and wondering, "Is there a cohesive definition for woke? Or is it just kind of an anything-and-everything term?"

“I really wanted to put the term to the test, because I think having specific definitions—especially in politics, when people are throwing around buzzwords—is incredibly important,” he adds.

“The term woke seems like it’s taken on a life of its own, so I don’t think anybody has felt the need to elaborate on it or explain it themselves. And if everything can just be tossed onto the pile of what the word means (definitionally), to me it makes the word have less meaning.”

In the absence of any widely recognized definition for woke, VanDreew says he was inspired to investigate how average Americans determine what constitutes “woke.” To do so, he and his coauthors commissioned a polling firm to query a demographic sampling of people nationwide about their own definitions of woke by asking them to choose between a series of two lists, with each list containing one political party, one sexual orientation, one gender group, one religious group, one political figure, one historical event, one profession, one higher education institution, one political movement and one political policy.

Those responses were then coded by whether the respondents self-identified as Republican, Democrat or independent and conservative, moderate or progressive.

The authors detailed their findings in the article “What’s woke? Ordinary Americans’ understandings of wokeness,” recently published in the journal Research and Politics.

Who (and what) made the ‘woke’ list

Politicians who appeared on the selection lists for survey respondents to consider included President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden, Florida Gov. Ron Desantis, former congressman Matt Gaetz, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Specific groups included Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the Ku Klux Klan, Moms for Liberty and the Proud Boys, while specific policies included affirmative action, book bans, pro-life, pro-choice, aid for Ukraine, aid for Israel and admitting fewer immigrants.

“We tried to pick people and things that our survey respondents would be aware of by keeping choices as modern as possible,” VanDreew explains of the survey list selections.

He says forced choices resulted in some interesting decisions when survey respondents had to decide what constituted woke. For example, Ocasio-Cortez and Pelosi were deemed woke by respondents, while Biden and Schumer were not—even though all four are Democrats who share similar politics. That’s likely because Republicans, in particular, tend to associate gender (particularly female) with wokeness, he adds.

Meanwhile, survey respondents placed Trump firmly in the anti-woke camp, but not Desantis—even though he made crusading against woke a part of his failed presidential campaign (famously stating that his home state of Florida is “where woke goes to die.”) VanDreew says while it’s not clear why Desantis did not score higher as anti-woke, it may be that part of his messaging did not resonate with survey respondents.

Left: Protestors at a Jan. 20, 2018, march in Calgary, Canada (Photo: Joslyn MacPherson/Wikimedia Commons); right: President Donald Trump speaks during the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference. (Photo: Hermann Tertsch and Victor Gonzalez/Wikimedia Commons)

When it came to evaluating groups and policies, respondents deemed the Civil Rights movement, Black Lives Matter, lesbians and being pro-choice as being woke, while Republicans, Proud Boys, the KKK, book bans, aid to Israel and admitting fewer immigrants were judged as being anti-woke.

“We were able to see that partisanship does show up across a lot of these things as far as, if something more associated with the Democratic Party, it’s more likely to be viewed as woke, and if it was Republican-associated it would be viewed as less woke. Also, things that are associated with feminism or LGBTQ are more likely to be considered woke, and things that are conservative related to gender and race were seen more as anti-woke,” VanDreew says.

Reviewing the survey results, VanDreew says there was actually a fair amount of agreement between Republicans and Democrats on specific areas of what was deemed woke, as Democrats joined Republicans and independents in identifying certain individuals, groups and causes as woke.

“What was different was the connotation as to whether they viewed woke as a negative or a positive. It’s an interesting thing that they agreed but also completely disagreed on certain subjects,” he says.

Meanwhile, independents as a whole had much less consistent views, tracking more closely with Democrats when it comes to some considerations, while more closely aligning with Republicans on others, he adds. In particular, independents were generally in agreement with Republicans regarding gender issues, which suggests that the political right has been especially successful in reframing gender progressivism as woke, the authors state in their paper.

Other survey responses showed that those polled generally don’t generally consider the religions, careers or products/companies listed in the survey as especially woke or anti-woke—with one major exception: Barbie.

In late 2023, around the same time respondents were surveyed, the movie Barbie debuted and was recognized for addressing gender and stereotyping issues, which may account for the fact that Barbie placed in the woke category, VanDreew says.

Today’s ‘woke’ is different than yesterday’s ‘woke’

"For the sake of voters, we need politicians on both sides to do a better job about transparency when it comes to woke or other buzzwords, and what they’re platforming."

Based upon the survey results, VanDreew says there are some conclusions that can be drawn about woke. First, the term has undergone a radical transformation in recent years.

“Woke is typically attributed to coming about during the Civil Rights movement, as kind of a discrete way for people to show support for the struggle. It may not have been just the word woke by itself, but it could be terms like ‘stay woke,’” he says.

“That’s where it started, and I would say that definition stuck until more modern times, when we’ve seen it take on a completely different context, which is a confusing and not well-organized context.”

Second, research suggests some on the political right have co-opted the term and used it to include anything deemed politically correct, liberal or “anti-American,” VanDreew says. Despite this conceptual stretching, however, the term remains linked to social justice, he adds.

At the same time, research shows that how ordinary Americans view woke as a whole remains unclear. Given that the research paper determined there are implied meanings and associations with woke—but not a clearly spelled-out definition—VanDreew says it reinforces his belief that politicians on either side of the woke issue owe it to their constituents to explain exactly what they mean when they use the word.

“For the sake of voters, we need politicians on both sides to do a better job about transparency when it comes to woke or other buzzwords, and what they’re platforming,” he says. “I think a better understanding of the word (woke) as it’s used by people in power would only help us as a country. That was my only intention here. I didn’t come at this (topic) trying to be polarizing in any direction; I just came at it with a question and the data led to the published results.”

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CU Boulder PhD candidate Benjamin VanDreew’s search for an answer to that question finds that Barbie is, book banning isn’t, and that female Democrats are more likely than male Democrats to be seen as ‘woke.'

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