External Posts

Arisa White, assistant professor of creative writing, is a board member of the San Francisco literary magazine Foglifter, which has just won a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize, "a coveted annual award that celebrates emerging literature," reports Datebook, a component of the San Francisco Chronicle. White is also an editor of Foglifter's anthology Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart.

Professor of Economics Michael Donihue, an expert on the lobster economy in Maine, was tapped by Gray Television in Washington for a story on a new federal payout plan called the Seafood Trade Relief Program and its potential impact on Maine lobsterman. Donihue said the federal aid program leaves out those in the lobster business hardest hit. “The dealers got pinched, really badly,” he said, “because they’re the ones who actually have to deliver the product to market, and they’re the ones who get the final price.”   "Helping the harvesters but leaving out the dealers is puzzling to Donihue. 'That’s where a lot of us are scratching our heads,' he said, 'it feels a bit political.'”

A Psychology Today blog post on personality types unfazed during the pandemic includes a quote from Associate Professor of Psychology Christopher Soto. To explain why introverts fair less well during something like a pandemic, Soto said, "Compared with introverts, extroverts tend to experience more frequent and intense positive emotions. This makes it easier for them to maintain a positive mood in everyday life. It also helps them stay optimistic in the face of difficult circumstances, like the current crisis.”

Professor of Government Dan Shea was a guest on the Sept. 14 Maine Public program "Maine Calling" that discussed polling. Shea, an expert on polling, was part of the program that set out to "check in with pollsters and learn what lessons they took from the 2016 election, the science of polling and how it has changed over the years, and what to expect this election season."

Vox tapped Professor of Government Dan Shea for his thoughts on Senator Susan Collins in their article "The ways Democrats could retake the Senate majority, explained." Shea, a pollster and political scientist, said that Collins is "in this really difficult space; this happens for a lot of moderates across the country. The question is, what does she do in that difficult space?”

A paper by Professor of Education Adam Howard was published in the journal Educational Review. The paper, "Globally elite: four domains of becoming globally-oriented within elite schools," draws on a multi-sited global ethnography of elite schools across the world, this article explores how elite schools prepare students for an increasingly interconnected world characterized by difference and competition through global citizenship education. In this exploration, Howard identifies the four domains that give meaning to global citizenship education within elite contexts: cultural, relational, emotional, and material. These domains reveal the ways in which these schools are responding to the challenges of globalization by providing students opportunities to develop awareness and knowledge of differences, to establish and maintain relationships across differences, to gain a sense of obligation toward others, and to accumulate valuable forms of human and cultural capital. Through globally oriented practices, students are being prepared to be flexibly mobile, to imagine themselves as leaders within a globalized world, and to thrive in the hypercompetitive and unpredictable global knowledge economy. These practices play an important part in elite schools’ larger strategy of making and remaking elites.

Caleb Bitting '23 was quoted In a CNBC article focused on students' perspective about how their peers are behaving on campus in light of COVID-19. “At my college, I would say that social distancing and masks are adhered to at least 90% of the time,” Bitting said. He went on to say that "Colby is communicating regularly with students about lower-risk ways to socialize, such as outdoor walks." 

In an article published in the journal Environmental and Sustainability Indicators (available open access here), Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson develops a richness index for baselining climate change adaptations in small island developing states. Using historical data (1997-2014), she finds that Cook Islands (Pacific) and Kiribati (Pacific) are among the most advanced adaptors and that Guinea-Bissau (Atlantic) and Marshall Islands (Pacific) are among the least advanced adaptors. She concludes that greater investments in ongoing capacity-building in islands are required for countries to better plan, implement, and evaluate adaptation actions, and to better advocate for more optimal levels of international financing for helping to underwrite the cost of adaptation.

As the Waterville Planning Board prepares to consider plans for and vote on Colby's proposed performing arts center, the Morning Sentinel ran an extensive story on the center, providing an overview of the building and its programs as well as Colby's other projects in Waterville centered on the arts.

A new study by Gail Carlson, assistant professor of environmental studies and director of the Buck Lab for Climate and Environment, and Skylar Tupper '20 has been published in the journal Chemosphere. The paper, titled "Ski wax use contributes to environmental contamination by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances," looks at these hazardous environmental contaminants at a central Maine recreation center. "We examined the environmental impact of ski wax use at an outdoor recreation area with significant cross-country ski activity by measuring PFAS levels in melted snow, soil, and water following a collegiate ski race. We found extremely high levels of long- and short-chain PFAS (C4–C14) contamination in snow at the race start line (∑[PFAS] 7600–10,700 ng/L), with the longer-chain analytes (C10–C14) predominating," the authors wrote in the paper's abstract. "Our results suggest that ski wax use, from which fluorocarbons abrade at very high levels onto snow during a ski race, are the main source of PFAS contamination at our site. Regulation of ski wax use is warranted to reduce PFAS pollution."