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In the wake of the recent terror attacks in Paris, ‘the refugee question’ has received redoubled interest from the international community. However, this global refugee crisis is in no way a new phenomenon, and has its roots far outside of the Middle East. To clarify the current state of duress, Professor of Economics Erol Balkan, Henry Platt Bristol Professor of International Affairs Alan Cafruny and Professor of Africana Studies Heather Merrill held a panel discussion on Nov. 17 for an overflowing Red Pit of students, faculty and community members.

The uneven cadence of fingers on a keyboard is almost background music in residence halls and academic buildings on campus. It could have been yesterday, when Lucas Phillips ’16, editor-in-chief of the campus’ newspaper, The Spectator, checked his email for contributions by his staff; or it may have been more than five decades before, when Henry Allen ’63 sat in his Kirkland Dormitory bedroom completing homework on his typewriter.

“We aren’t all producers, but we’re all eaters,” Danielle Nierenberg pointed out last night. Nierenberg is the president and founder of Food Tank, a nonprofit organization begun in 2013 that is “dedicated to building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.” The event was part of the Levitt Center Speaker Series, and was additionally supported by the Arthur Coleman Tuggle Fund.

For many Americans, radiation exposure is often linked to cancer treatment or atomic fallout. For villagers living in and around Semipalatinsk, however, exposure to radioactivity is a part of everyday life. Semipalatinsk, nicknamed “the Polygon” due to its cartographic shape, is located in east Kazakhstan and is the world’s largest nuclear test site.  Medical Anthropologist Magdalena Stawkowski, the MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, spent 20 months living just outside of the “official” borders of the Polygon. She spoke at Hamilton on Oct. 7 about the lifestyle and health of residents in the Polygon.

Students in “U.S. Foreign Policy,” taught by Assistant Professor of Government Erica De Bruin, were granted a unique experience on Oct. 2 when three distinguished Foreign Service experts visited their class to field questions regarding U.S.-Russia relations and careers in the field.

Although social media activism campaigns are started almost daily, seldom do they accomplish their goal of creating and sustaining national interest that lasts for years. Nevertheless, occasionally these movements successfully promote awareness, draw together communities and create lasting conversations that can affect lives across the country, and even the globe. One such campaign is the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, co-founded by Alicia Garza.

Few people have trouble visually distinguishing a desk chair from a moving car, or the sounds of a crying baby and crashing waves. But could brain activity alone allow researchers to determine what novel stimuli a participant heard or saw? Although the proposition sounds more akin to a science-fiction blockbuster than a scientific possibility, Jack Gallant, of the Gallant Lab at UC Berkeley, has spent decades focused on answering this question.

Although globally humans rely mostly on agriculture as a source of sustenance, farmers around the world are not on equal footing. Eren Shultz ’15 is particularly aware of this disparity “having both grown up in rural Wisconsin and spent significant amounts of time traveling and living abroad in small agrarian villages in Eastern Africa.” Shultz said he was both “fascinated and concerned” with “the differences in mechanization and lifestyles” between those communities.

Since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, health care has remained in the minds of many Americans and news outlets, who wonder and speculate about its future. Yet, the conversation is often centered around legislation and healthcare providers, leaving much important work unnoticed. This summer, four Hamilton graduates, Sam Sherman ’15, Taylor Brandin ’15, Alicia Rost ’15 and Kurt Minges ’15, will be joining Towers Watson, an “American global professional services firm,” as Health and Group benefits analysts.

Although archaeology is often associated with dinosaur fossils and sarcophagi, museums only hold a small portion of the artifacts unearthed over the past few centuries. For Max Lopez ’15, who’s currently working as a teaching assistant at a summer field school in British Columbia, “it’s the day-to-day kind of stuff that really gets [him] going, the smaller stuff that tells a story everyone can relate to.” It is these types of discoveries he hopes to make, leading him to pursue a Masters of Archaeology at Cambridge University beginning in the fall.