once believed the focuses of her doctoral and postdoctoral work were completely different.��

She completed her doctorate in Botswana, studying how humans were changing large carnivore behavior. After earning her degree, she researched whale migration at the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But while Abrahms was with NOAA, a historic heat wave off the West Coast was associated with an unprecedented rise in whales getting tangled in fishing gear. The event reminded her of studying in Botswana, when an extreme drought led to predators killing more livestock.��

“It struck me as important that you have two really different systems, yet in both cases an extreme climate event led to a change in human-wildlife interactions,” said Abrahms, an associate professor of biology at the 91̽��.

Those experiences led Abrahms to study how climate change is affecting human-wildlife interactions and increasing conflict around the world — from polar bear attacks on people to elephant destruction of agricultural areas. Her areas of expertise made her the ideal choice for keynote speaker at the held in Botswana in January.

Abrahms offered a global perspective on how climate change is impacting human-wildlife conflict while also providing specific insight on southern Africa, since she has worked in Botswana since 2011. The roundtable was hosted by the National Assembly of Botswana in partnership with through its program.

“It was really gratifying,” Abrahms said. “As a scientist, we’re often putting papers out and not knowing what reach they will have. You never really know where they’re going to go, if they’re going to go anywhere. To be featured so prominently in this intergovernmental parliamentary workshop was a career highlight.”

The roundtable brought together parliamentarians from Botswana, other African nations, the European Union, and beyond, alongside government officials, civil society leaders, local community representatives, conservation experts and international partners. Attendees focused on identifying solutions to human-wildlife conflicts while ensuring that the interests of citizens, local communities, ecotourism operators and wildlife advocates are reflected in policy.

Abrahms’ speech addressed the global impacts of climate change on human-wildlife coexistence.

She discussed increasing news reports of human-animal conflict, like kangaroos mobbing areas in Australia during droughts, and increased alligator attacks due to hurricanes in South Carolina. Previous research from Abrahms and her team revealed that the warming world is increasing human-wildlife conflicts. Another of her studies found that the overlap between humans and animals will increase substantially across much of the planet in less than 50 years due to human population growth and climate change.��

“These issues are definitely getting more attention and when I gave this talk, it resonated,” Abrhams said. “Afterward, there was a panel featuring different parliament members and every single one of them had their own stories of climate increasing conflict in their countries, whether it was from a hurricane or a drought or a heat wave.”

Despite the wide variety of animal species and climate events — floods and hurricanes in Sri Lanka, droughts in Botswana and more — Abrahms was struck by how frequently climate change exacerbated these problems. She was heartened, though, by how many people from around the world came together to share experiences, success stories and challenges.

Some national-level policy recommendations that came out of the roundtable included predictable compensation and insurance mechanisms for when human-wildlife conflicts occur. Experts also suggested land-use planning that recognizes wildlife corridors as well as human needs. Among the other ideas: Investment in community resilience and climate-smart livelihoods, parliamentary oversight and a wildlife coexistence fund.��

Public outreach is also an important piece, Abrahms said.

“That would help people prepare and hopefully prevent some of these conflicts from occurring,” Abrahms said. “Governmental fiscal planning also could help by anticipating that there will be increased strain on a system and extra money could be put into a fund for use during extreme climate events.”

Abrahms left the roundtable impressed with how much the attendees genuinely cared about the environment, as well as their interest in learning from each other and about her work.

“It was a very grounding experience,” Abrahms said, “and it was nice to be part of a policy-oriented audience. There is a huge amount of money and resources and personnel and expertise aimed at alleviating these problems. In that respect, it was uplifting.”

For more information, contact Abrahms at abrahms@uw.edu.

The U.S. and Israel against Iran on Feb. 28 that targeted military and civilian infrastructure, missile launchers, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and triggered hundreds of retaliatory missiles from Iran.

More than 1,200 civilians so far in the conflict, Iran reports, while nearly 10,000 civilian sites have been hit and 3.2 million Iranians have been displaced. An ongoing military investigation also determined the U.S. is responsible for a deadly strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to a .��

President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have offered for the war with Iran — now entering its third week — including the regime’s nuclear ambitions, its ballistic missile capabilities and its support for groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon. Rubio said that the U.S. abandoned negotiations and bombed Iran because Israel had already attacked and Washington expected Iranian retaliation against U.S. bases.��

Before the strikes, in December 2025, massive anti-government protests erupted in Iran. The protests, driven largely by the economic crisis caused by U.S. imposed sanctions and regime corruption, were the largest since the 1979 revolution. The Iranian government thousands of protestors in response.

, a professor of Persian and Iranian studies at the UW, researches modern Iranian and Afghan histories and modern Persian literature and has been widely quoted in the media since the war began. He spoke with 91̽��News about the U.S.-Israeli strikes, the impact on Iranians and more.

What should people know about how Iranians and the Iranian diaspora feel about the conflict?

Aria Fani: The Iranian diaspora is . A segment of Iranians in the West has advocated for war on Iran, while others have against military intervention. Voices from within Iran appear conflicted as well, reflecting the precarity and desperation of the moment. As we have seen in Iraq, Venezuela and Cuba, the U.S. has relied on a security, economic and political apparatus that creates a state of paranoia for the ruling regime and collectively punishes the population, pushing them to the brink of despair. Equally undeniable is the Iranian regime’s brazen corruption, both moral and economic, and its violent repression of protesters.

When weighing in public opinion, as reflected in the media, we should not forget that the U.S. media to be a reliable partner for the military-industrial complex. The way in which pro-war voices are currently being amplified is a testament to this alignment. I immigrated to the United States when President George W. Bush was running for re-election and remember how the media failed to hold his administration to account. In many ways the media landscape is even worse today, as of major outlets. Yet, unlike the early 2000s, we now also have a number of independent platforms that cover war with greater transparency and skepticism.��

On a personal note, as a teenager living under an Iranian regime that made anti-U.S. rhetoric a cornerstone of its revolutionary ideology, I held an abstract yet largely positive view of the U.S. Moving to the U.S. in 2004 — studying its history and traveling through and living in Latin American countries it has ravaged — profoundly shifted my perspective. Two wrongs do not make a right. The mantle of anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle has never been on the minds of this Iranian regime, but it is a mantle we cannot afford to put down for a livable planet.��

Iranian youth, much like their counterparts in places such as Hong Kong, Egypt and the United States, confront a militarized state that shows little regard for collective dignity and insatiable appetite for money and power. History teaches us that effecting durable change takes time. If change begins with a supposition of violence, it will undoubtedly end with more of the same. The spectacle of imperial violence is also designed to demoralize a generation of youth all over this beautiful planet who dare to dream of a different system. To them I say: do not despair and work toward positive change at any level you can.

What misconceptions about Iran do you see in Western media?

AF: The military-industrial complex thrives on generating hysteria and fear of racialized others. A familiar example is the claim that the Iranian regime is an ideological actor hellbent on the total destruction of the West. Yet the same regime entered into a nuclear agreement in 2015 with the United States and other world powers that placed its nuclear program under international scrutiny. Unlike the United States and Israel, both of which possess hundreds of nuclear weapons — the U.S. remains the only country that has used them — Iran is a signatory to the , and its nuclear facilities were regularly monitored before the United States withdrew from the agreement in 2018. Like Iraq, Iran is being attacked not because it has nuclear weapons, but because it does not.��

Every time politicians sell the public a new war, the narrative is predictably the same: baseless claims of an imminent threat paired with promises that military objectives will be easily attainable and the suffering minimal. However, Israel and the United States have a documented history of destroying civilian infrastructure; we have seen this clearly in Gaza and Beirut. That it is happening again breaks my heart. Whether one believes the current war is justified or not — and on what grounds — the abuse of power and through which it is conducted should concern everyone. Equally disturbing is the role of religious fundamentalism as evidenced by references to the .��

Let me be clear again: the Iranian regime’s willingness to engage in diplomacy abroad does nothing to absolve it of state violence, which it directs at . The regime poses a deadly threat to its own people and to Iran’s ecology, as evidenced by the brutal suppression of protesters in recent weeks.

How will this conflict impact Iran and its people in ways that are being overlooked?

AF: There are those in my community who accept any collateral damage if it means the Islamic Republic might ultimately collapse. This mindset is profoundly dangerous. For decades, the Iranian regime has invoked the men it lost during the (1980–1988) to justify cracking down on dissent years after the war ended. In effect, the regime has argued that any sacrifice at home is justified if it preserves the revolutionary state. Yet some of its most ardent opponents now accept the same logic in reverse: that widespread bloodshed and ecological destruction are acceptable if it leads to the regime’s downfall.

Even more troubling is that their idea of who counts as part of the “regime” is dangerously broad. It is not difficult to imagine a similarly vengeful purge to the one carried out by the regime’s own founders in 1979, should the regime fall. My mother recounts how her father — the Friday prayer imam in Shiraz — fled Iran after the Islamic Revolution because he was aligned with the Shah. He was never in the Shah’s regime, a fact that mattered little to those who were doing the purging. We cannot break the cycle of violence by doing one last purge.�� 

Vengeance does not offer a positive agenda for the working class and minoritized Iranians. The greatest victims in war are civilians and the infrastructure on which their lives depend. The more bombs that fall, the further we move from the day when those responsible for atrocities against the Iranian people might be held accountable.

For a big segment of the Iranian diaspora to throw up their hands and say, “bomb them,” is not an act of courage but the greatest abdication of collective responsibility. And to ask the same power that has economically strangled Iran to save it through its bombs is the stuff of Orwellian fiction. Millions of American voters feel deeply disempowered by the ongoing dismantling of democratic institutions here at home. Yet who among them would seriously advocate for their country to be bombarded by a foreign power? 

The world has changed in the wake of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran. One thing seems increasingly clear: the cheerleaders of today’s war will later warn about a “caravan of Muslim refugees” supposedly arriving to invade the nation. This is already happening, as Iranian . While I do not begrudge any of my suffering compatriots celebrating the downfall of a brutal dictator, history suggests that the only actors ultimately left dancing on the global stage will be weapons manufacturers and oil industry executives.��

For more information, contact Lauren Kirschman at lkirsc@uw.edu.

Indigenous people in the United States are at higher risk of fatal police violence in and around American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) reservations, according to the first comprehensive national study on the subject from researchers at the 91̽�� and Drexel University.

The study, recently published in , used data on the 203 AIAN people killed by police from 2013 through 2024. The researchers found that roughly 73%, or three out of four, AIAN people killed by police violence were on or within 10 miles of a reservation. Only about 40% of AIAN people — 50% when including multiracial AIAN people — live on or near reservations. The disproportionate risk held even after accounting for population density and rurality.

“My prior research has documented how policing on and around reservations functions as a form of sovereignty threat — where Indigenous peoples, their movement and their presence on their own lands are treated by law enforcement as problems to be managed,” said , co-author and associate professor of sociology at the UW. “This is the first study to measure what that looks like at the national level.”

The researchers hope the work will inform policy action to better protect Indigenous communities.

“We know that disinvestment in Indigenous communities living on reservations, along with unique policing models and police harassment on tribal lands, coincide with this disproportionate risk of fatal police violence,” said lead author , an assistant professor in Drexel’s Dornsife School of Public Health “Colonial policies designed to confine, displace and dispossess Indigenous peoples are not just history — they continue to shape who is killed by law enforcement today.”

Federal, state and tribal police were responsible for the majority of deaths on reservations, while municipal and county police were primarily responsible for deaths that occurred more than 10 miles away from reservations. The reasons police gave for stops also differed on and off tribal lands, with police giving no reason for stopping one in five people killed on reservations compared with about one in 10 people killed far from a reservation. The pattern reflects the jurisdictional fragmentation that has identified as central to the sovereignty threat.

“Indigenous communities have been documenting and resisting police violence for generations, from the American Indian Movement’s records of killings in the 1960s to youth-led protests happening right now,” Rocha Beardall said. “Researchers are still catching up. What this paper does is put rigorous population-level data behind what Native peoples have long understood about where this violence is concentrated and the risks it creates for their nations and communities.”

A high concentration of Indigenous people live in the borderlands surrounding a reservation, and frequently cross in and out. The researchers hypothesize that this flow — combined with frequent racial profiling of people traveling to and from reservations — could increase the likelihood of police encounters and account for an increase in deaths near reservations.

“Fatal interactions with law enforcement on reservations are structurally instigated — by entrenched poverty, poorly funded schools and chronically neglected health systems,” Schwartz said. “These inequities are vast and the structures holding them in place must be reimagined. That will likely require a lot of things: Indigenous-led prevention, stronger accountability for police and sustained public health investment.”

The researchers note that commonly proposed police reforms lack consistent evidence for reducing these inequities.��

More research is needed to measure specific drivers of the geographic disparity in deaths, the psychological and physical health impacts of fatal police violence for Indigenous communities, and what impact proposed solutions — such as Indigenous-led healing and wellness responses to crime and poverty — would have on fatal police violence rates.

of Drexel University was also a co-author.��

The study was partially supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health.

For more information, contact Rocha Beardall at tyrb@uw.edu.

This story was adapted from a release by .

Recent books from 91̽�� faculty and staff include those from legal studies at 91̽��Tacoma, international studies, political science, history, and Asian languages and literature.��

91̽��Tacoma assistant professor collaboration with Policing in Chicago Research Group

“” was collaboratively authored by , assistant professor of legal studies at 91̽��Tacoma, and the Policing in Chicago Research Group. They developed the book in dialogue with those on the front lines of struggles against racist policing in Black, Latinx and Arab/Muslim communities.

“Imperial Policing” analyzes the connections between three police “wars” — on crime, terror and immigrants — with a focus on the weaponization of data and the coordination between local and national agencies to suppress communities of color and undermine social movements. Topics include: high-tech, data-based tools of policing; racialized archetypes; the manufacturing of criminals and terrorists; the subversion of sanctuary city protections; and abolitionist responses to policing, such as the Erase the Database campaign.

The book contains analysis and ideas for solutions at a critical political moment, and serves as a rare, vital example of scholars working directly with community organizations to map police networks and intervene in policing practices.

“‘Imperial Policing’ is an important offering that decenters normative modes of knowledge production and the academy itself and instead provides a model for collaborative knowledge production and change work that academics ought to take up and consider,” Ravichandran said. “This book deepens abolitionist analyses of U.S. Empire and broadens abolition as a necessary global coalitional framework.”

Modern Taiwan through an agrarian lens

“” is a recent book by , associate professor of international studies at the UW.

The book recounts the history of modern Taiwan through the lens of agrarian development. Starting in the 1950s, Taiwan sent international development missions to over two dozen nations across the Global South. From the 1950s to 1990s, Taiwan’s GDP per capita grew by 800%. While researching this growth, an article caught Lin’s attention: a report of how Taiwan’s efforts surrounding improved varieties of broccoli rabe would solve hunger, famine and malnutrition.

“How could broccoli rabe make the world a better place?” Lin wrote in a blog post about his book. “Over the next decade, I traced the arc of agricultural development in libraries and archives across the world, from Ithaca, New York to Shanhua, Taiwan. The more I delved into this question, the more I unearthed a time when Taiwan’s contributions to the world weren’t in advanced semiconductors, but rather rice and vegetables.”

In “In the Global Vanguard,” Lin examines how Taiwanese technicians and agricultural scientists introduced new crop varieties, extended new agricultural technologies and extolled the virtues of a Taiwanese approach to development across the Global South.��

Lin argues the missions eventually shaped how the Taiwanese conceived their place in the world. At the same time, the Nationalist party-state of Taiwan co-opted agrarian science to position Taiwan as a modern nation, legitimizing the government’s authoritarian rule by martial law.

Ordinary people and the global legal order

“” examines an important, and often underappreciated, actor in international law.��

Written by , professor of political science at the UW, the book is of interdisciplinary interest due to its combination of constitutional and international law theories and a wide range of quantitative and qualitative data.

When considering who counts in the international legal order, most answers focus on governments, leaders, generals, lawyers or other elites. Wallace integrates insights from law and political behavior to advance the idea of “popular international law,” where ordinary people are considered important legal actors.

“Drawing on a blend of experiments, conventional polling, media coverage and historical cases, this book shows the ways in which national publics can have an impact on core functions of international law,” Wallace said. “Insights from the book offer an account of international legal politics from below — taking seriously the place of ordinary people in international affairs.

Co-authored book began with love of 18th century poetry

“” is a new book co-authored by the UW’s , associate professor of history, and , professor of Asian languages and literature. True to its subtitle, the book emerged from friendly conversations they had about early 18th century poetry in Urdu — a language that was called Rekhtah at the time.

Their interdisciplinary conversations led to the growing conviction that the diverse roots of this important vernacular tradition had become obscured through selective attention to a handful of poets associated with rarified imperial courtly environments. Poetic networks had become erased as poems were taken out of their social contexts and isolated in separate tomes by author.�� 

“Vali Dakhani and the Early Rekhtah Networks” presents the evidence to reconstruct these lost literary networks of Urdu’s formative past. The book reframes the history of Urdu within the diverse context from which it emerged: lively social gatherings, bazaars, shrines and multiple courts of 18th-century South Asia, highlighting its engagement with diverse regional cultures and communities in South Asia.��

The cover illustration, an 18th-century canvas by Mughal painter Chitarman II, vividly depicts the many literary references to “Lovers and Beloveds” featured in the poetry of this period, inviting the reader to join the authors in sharing its pleasures.

For more information, contact Lauren Kirschman at lkirsc@uw.edu

Before the 91̽��’s winter quarter even started, told his “Modern Olympic Games” class one of the questions that would be on the final exam: “What is something that happened in the 2026 Winter Olympics that you can understand better because of something you’ve learned in this course?”

“There is not yet an answer to that question,” said Haddad-Fonda, a part-time lecturer of history at the UW, “but there will be by the end of the quarter.”

As Haddad-Fonda’s students watch this month’s Winter Olympics in Italy, they are also learning in the classroom about the history of the Games. The course covers subjects ranging from ideology and national identity to race and the position of women in society.

91̽��News talked with Haddad-Fonda to learn more.

What makes sports such an effective window into history?

Kyle Haddad-Fonda: This is a 100-level course, and the majority of students taking it are first-year students aiming to fulfill a general education requirement. I see the course as a kind of sampler platter of 20th-century history. Students may not know coming in that they would be really interested in Native American history or Nazi Germany or some aspect of women’s history — but they’re going to get exposed to a little bit of everything. What ties it all together is Olympic competition. Sports are inherently about race and gender and politics.

In class, I get to tell stories about some truly wild things that have happened in the Olympics. I’ve talked already this quarter about a dehydrated whose trainer refused him water but gave him strychnine mixed with egg white, a dubbed the prettiest girl at the Olympics who was kicked off the team for having the audacity to drink champagne, and a whose coronation as the world’s greatest athlete was upended when a teammate poisoned his orange juice. But after I tell these stories, the next step is to stop and say, “Okay, why does this matter on a deeper level? What can this one athlete’s experience tell us about the world?”

Where did the idea for this course come from?

KHF: I’ve been mulling it over for years, and now seemed like the right time to do it because the Winter Olympics are happening at the same time.

This is the seventh academic year in a row that I’ve taught the history of the Cold War. After a few years of teaching the same course, the content gets pretty well set. I started to realize that the only changes I was making to the lectures was to add short anecdotes about sports. Students responded really well. Including the occasional bit of sports content became a strategy for illustrating complicated ideas in a relatable way.

Last year, I advised a senior thesis by a history major who had previously taken my Cold War course. I had spent maybe 30 seconds in class talking about how the Catholic Church in Italy as part of its broader campaign against communism around the time of the 1948 Italian election. This student was a soccer fan, and she went and did a lot more reading about the role of soccer in postwar Italy. A year later, she came to me and said that just that one comment had helped her to realize that sports were something she could take seriously as an academic topic. She ended up writing her senior thesis about athletes who defected from communist countries during the very short period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. This student’s enthusiasm for viewing sports as a window into deeper historical phenomena gave me that final push to decide I was ready to create this course.

What is one of your favorite topics that you cover in the class?

KHF: Just last week, we talked about the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, after which about a third of the athletes on the Hungarian team . Those Olympics happened in the immediate aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution and the Soviet crackdown. There was a 16-year-old Hungarian swimmer named Zsuzsa Ördög who had to make a decision all by herself about whether she was going to defect to the U.S. or return home to her family. She ended up moving to Mercer Island because she was by the family of a 16-year-old American swimmer, Nancy Ramey, who had won silver in the butterfly.

One of the reasons I mentioned Ördög was to contrast her story with that of Hal Connolly and Olga Fikotová. Connolly was an American who won a gold medal in the hammer throw in 1956; Fikotová was a Czechoslovakian who won gold in the discus in the same Olympics. While they were competing in Melbourne, . Three months after the Olympics, Connolly went to Prague, where he and Fikotová got married. Then they moved to the U.S. The American media was delighted by a love story that transcended the Iron Curtain. In class, I showed my students a clip of the newlyweds appearing on the game show “.”

Before the next Olympics, Fikotová wrote to the Czechslovakian Olympic Committee saying she was ready to represent Czechoslovakia a second time. She got a letter back saying that the committee no longer considered her to be Czechoslovakian. Fortunately, her U.S. citizenship came through about a week before the U.S. Olympic trials, so she showed up — as the reigning Olympic champion — and made the U.S. team. She went on to represent the U.S. at four Olympics and even carried the flag in 1972.

Fikotová’s experience of moving to the U.S. was markedly different from what happened to the Hungarians who defected at the same Olympics. For starters, by the Olympic rules at the time, athletes couldn’t change national allegiance for political reasons. The only way for somebody who had represented one country to compete for another was if a woman changed her nationality by marriage. So while Fikotová could throw the discus for the U.S., Hungarian athletes had no recourse. Ördög went on to set an American record in the breaststroke, but there was no way she could ever swim in the Olympics again. Quite a few of the Hungarians who defected to much fanfare in 1956 subsequently decided to return quietly to Hungary and resume their former lives. Their stories offer a great illustration of the hard choices that faced ordinary people who got caught up in Cold War rivalries.

Do you anticipate any crossover into the course from more recent Olympics, and even the current Olympics?

KHF: While it’s tricky to talk about the ongoing Olympics from a historical framework, I do plan to bring my course all the way into the 21st century. My students will get to evaluate whether host cities have lived up to the promises they have made about using the Olympics as a catalyst for urban transformation. And we’ll talk about the ways that the Olympics have legitimized authoritarian regimes and examine how activists have articulated calls to boycott the games.

All of these are themes that have been building over the entire quarter. I recently talked about William May Garland’s plans to use the 1932 Summer Olympics to build Los Angeles. You have to start there in order to make sense of London’s efforts to rejuvenate the East End or Paris’s campaign to restore the Seine. By the time we talk about calls to boycott the Olympics in 2014 and 2022, we will have already discussed boycott efforts — successful or unsuccessful — in 1936, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984 and 1988.

All this history matters especially much right now because our own country is gearing up to be the next Olympic host. I know my students are going to watch the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles — in fact, one of them has entered the lottery to buy tickets. When they do, I need them to be empowered to look beyond the headlines. I want them to understand that all the controversies that will inevitably swirl around those games spring from 130 years of contentious, messy historical precedent.

For more information, contact Lauren Kirschman at lkirsc@uw.edu.

Violent traumatic events — such as mass shootings and acts of domestic terrorism — have become increasingly common in the United States. Yet, despite their growing prevalence, little research has examined how these events shape the decisions made within organizations.

A new study from the 91̽��, in the Academy of Management Journal, reveals that traumatic events can significantly dampen organizational risk-taking. The findings challenge the long-standing view that decision-makers — such as CEOs, executives and team leaders — are largely rational, emotionless actors. The research instead shows that emotional experiences in the broader community can spill over into the workplace and reshape strategic choices.

“People bring their whole selves to work,” said , co-author and professor of management in the 91̽��Foster School of Business. “Whatever emotional state that’s being influenced by things happening in their community eventually spills over and bleeds into how organizations conduct themselves.”

The research team found that violent traumatic events in local communities make decision-makers less focused on pursuing lofty objectives. As a result, organizations become less likely to take risky actions to close  performance gaps or achieve ambitious goals.

To reach these conclusions, the researchers combined two complementary methods: an observational field study and two controlled experiments. The field study analyzed nearly 40,000 fourth-down decisions made by NFL teams between 2008 and 2019 and combined that data with information on local mass shootings and other violent events.

that when NFL teams fall behind in games, they tend to take more risks — for example, attempting a fourth-down conversion rather than punting or trying for a field goal. In this study, teams that were underperforming were about three times more likely to attempt a conversion. However, following a traumatic event nearby, those same teams were 10% less likely to take that risk.

“I think it is a sadness effect,” Gupta said. “When people are sad, they can’t focus on pursuing their ambitious goals. They can still continue to avoid negative circumstances, but the pursuit of ambitious goals is driven by a strong positive drive. These traumatic events impair people’s ability to pursue those goals.”

Researchers also found that when the chief decision maker — the coach, in this case — had spent more time embedded in the community, the event’s impact on risk-taking behavior increased. Distance also mattered: The closer to an organization the event occurred, the stronger the impact.

“It was striking that distance still matters,” Gupta said. “You think it wouldn’t matter with the way information spreads now, but even two miles versus 20 miles still really matters. When it’s that close, you can imagine yourself or your kids being the target. Rationally, it shouldn’t matter, but psychologically, it clearly does.”

The two controlled experiments verified the mechanism behind the behavior changes. In each experiment, one group of participants read a Wikipedia article about a mass shooting while the other group read about a more neutral event — either a music festival or an accounting conference.

Participants then competed in a three-round game for bonus pay. In line with the field study, those exposed to the traumatic narrative took fewer risks in later rounds and reported a decreased focus on winning, suggesting that sadness diminished their competitive drive.

By demonstrating that emotionally charged events in the broader social environment can alter organizational risk-taking, the study highlights the deep interconnectivity between societal trauma and economic decision-making. It suggests that collective emotional states — such as sadness, anxiety or fear — may ripple through firms, industries and local economies, quietly seeping into strategic behaviors.

“Emotional states are dynamic, fleeting, and hard to study,” Gupta said. “How they influence important organizational decisions is still an underexplored area. Much of individual-level psychology hasn’t yet made its way into research on strategic decision-making. Our findings, we hope, will spark a broader rethinking of how emotion and environment jointly shape organizational behavior.”

Other co-authors were of Vienna University of Economics and Business and of the University of Vienna.

For more information, contact Gupta at abhinavg@uw.edu.

, artist in residence and head of organ studies at the 91̽��, will be joined by students and colleagues on Friday, Oct. 31, to perform a concert of spooky organ classics and Halloween fun.

The concert will open with “Toccata and Fugue in D minor,” which Price will play on the organ. Most likely written by Johann Sebastian Bach in the Baroque period, the composition is strongly associated with Halloween and spooky films, including the Disney movie “Fantasia.”

“People will recognize that piece and sort of expect it,”  Price said. “We will then have vocal students and instrumentalists from the 91̽��School of Music, which will show how the organ can be an accompanying instrument, outside of just being a solo instrument. Each organist will bring their own character and style to their performances.”

Other concert selections include “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” “Pink Panther,” the Mexican folk song “La Llorona,” , and the American folk tune “The House of the Rising Sun.” 

“Events like this are important because they expose people to organ music that may not ever take the chance to go and hear an organ concert,” Price said. “It is a very popular event, and it’s oriented around popular music and familiar music. That makes it a fun experience.”

After graduating from Western Connecticut State University, Price received a Fulbright Scholarship to Toulouse, France, where he studied historical and modern performances practices of French organ music. He went on to earn a master’s degree and a doctoral degree in music.

“I have a colleague here in Seattle who believes the instrument chooses you, and I think there may be some truth to that,” Price said. “The first time I saw an organist play, I knew instantly that’s what I wanted to do.”

Seattle is well-known as a space industrial hub. In 2024, launched into space were designed or built in the Greater Seattle area. Washington state manufactured more than half of the satellites currently orbiting earth, and more than 75% of the world’s satellites.

, a 91̽�� professor of international studies, believes the city can expand its reach even further by also becoming a hub for space diplomacy. This mission led her to start the annual at the 91̽��in 2023.

The SDS — co-sponsored by the Space Law, Data and Policy Program (SPACE LDP) in the 91̽��School of Law and the Program on Strategy, Policy, and Diplomacy Research in the 91̽��Jackson School of International Studies (SPDR) — aims to center diplomacy in civilian, commercial and military space activities.

“I want the world, not just our nation, to pay attention to what’s going on in Seattle’s industry,” said Pekkanen, who is the founding director of SPACE LDP and SPDR. “Seattle is becoming the leading hub for satellites and , but we’re also trying to become the place for regulatory policy and building diplomatic collaborations. All of this serves the interests not just of educators, but also our community. Seattle can lead the way for what space diplomacy might look like.”

There is no shortage of space technology in the world, Pekkanen said, but it’s dialogue and diplomacy that makes it grow.��

“It’s important to have capabilities, but it’s also important to position those capabilities in a very fiercely competitive international system,” she said. “How can we advance those capabilities in a way that’s good for our community and that’s good for whoever may be interested in buying them?”

This year’s SDS keynote speaker is the James H. Binger senior fellow in global governance at the Council on Foreign Relations. Brimmer will reflect on the role of diplomacy in international space relations while also raising awareness of essential space-related topics. Brimmer directed the Council of Foreign Relation’s report, “,” on which Pekkanen served as a task force member.��

Symposium panelists will include representatives from the Cabinet Office of Japan, the U.S. Space Force, the Space Law Council of Australia and New Zealand, and Harvard Medical School.

Pekkanen had three major motivations for establishing the SDS.

“The first one was, nobody else was doing it,” she said. “So now we are the only ones in the world. The 91̽��has a standing platform.”

Secondly, she said, the symposium gives 91̽��and the Seattle area an opportunity to draw attention to the next generation of regulatory, policy and diplomatic challenges.��

Finally, Pekkanen said, universities have a remarkable, but siloed, ecosystem. The SDS helps bridge the gap by gathering thought leaders from across academic departments.

“We have so many people at the 91̽��with different competencies that are at the cutting edge of where space is going,” Pekkanen said. “We need to come together to begin building the sort of policy and diplomatic foundation for what matters.”

The SDS started as a way to bring together experts and build community. But as the event grows, Pekkanen also views it as a way to bring special topics to the table.

“It’s fiction that space has nothing to do with war, or that it only has to do with prosperity,” she said. “This is a dual-use technology that cuts across both. This year, for the first time, we have more specific themes.”

, a 91̽��assistant teaching professor of international studies and lead of the Jackson School’s Cybersecurity Initiative, will preside over a military space diplomacy panel that will focus on cybersecurity.��

A key topic on the civil space diplomacy side will be megaconstellations —  large groups of satellites that work together to provide a service. , a 91̽��research assistant professor of astronomy and associate director of the 91̽��Institute for Data-intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology (DiRAC) will host the panel.

The commercial diplomacy panel will be moderated by , an associate professor of bioethics and humanities in the 91̽��School of Medicine. One key topic for these experts will be the medical and biological challenges of sustaining humanity in space.

“It’s space!” Pekkanen said. “Who is not interested? It’s a hopeful vision. It gives people hope that we can build something and sustain something good not just for our community, but also nationally and internationally.”

For more information, contact Pekkanen at smp1@uw.edu.

Five years before a 25-foot story pole was installed outside Denny Hall on the 91̽�� campus, (Sugpiaq/Alutiiq) had a vision.

A Native Alaskan, Haakanson understands the importance of recognizing a land’s native peoples. So, when he looked around the UW’s Seattle campus, he found himself wondering: Where is the Coast Salish community? The Burke Museum houses Coast Salish pieces, he said, and there are small works in other buildings. But representation was noticeably missing from the actual grounds.

Al Charles (Lower Elwha Klallam), Tyson Simmons (Muckleshoot) and Keith Stevenson (Muckleshoot) carved the story pole that’s now on the 91̽��campus. Credit: Sven Haakanson

Haakanson, a 91̽��professor of anthropology, wanted to change that. He first started by talking to Al Charles, a carver from the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, and then to Tyson Simmons and Keith Stevenson, of the Muckleshoot Tribe, to get their thoughts on bringing a story pole to the UW. They were all on board, but Haakanson didn’t approach the university until about a year later.

He had just been offered the position to chair the Department of Anthropology. While discussing ways to retain him at the UW, Haakanson asked for a story pole to be commissioned for the 91̽��Seattle campus.

“It was kind of an odd ask for retention,” Haakkanson said. “But this is a wonderful way to promote, lift up and celebrate the Coast Salish peoples, whose land we’re on.”

and indicates the cultural group of Indigenous peoples who speak or spoke these languages. Coast Salish peoples have lived in present-day western Washington and southwestern British Columbia for more than 10,000 years. The 91̽��is located on land that touches the shared waters of the Suquamish, Tulalip and Muckleshoot nations.

The Coast Salish people carve story poles, while totem poles are a broader category of carved wooden monuments from the Pacific Northwest. Story poles were specifically created to share and teach Coast Salish legends, histories and stories.

“Story poles are meant to tell stories,” Haakanson said. “With totem poles, they are talking about their clans and their histories. Story poles are about histories, as well, but the Coast Salish have used story poles to tell a story about an event, a legend or where we are now.

“ We see a lot of totem poles here, but totem poles are from up north. I love what totem poles represent, and I love the symbolism, but we should also be supporting local communities in their form, in their way. This is one way for students and visitors to learn about who the Coast Salish peoples are.”

Charles, Simmons and Stevenson submitted a proposal for the pole, which Haakanson then relayed to the university. The project was approved, and work on the log started a year and a half ago.

“The carvers turned this from a vision into the story pole itself,” Haakanson said. “They put in not just a lot of time and work, but also so much care and thought. To me, it’s not just a phenomenal piece of art but a celebration of the Coast Salish peoples.”

The title of the story pole is skʷatač dxʷʔal x̌ʷəlč, which translates to “From the Mountain to the Coast Salish Sea.” From the top down, images on the pole are Mount Rainier, women’s weavings, the holding two orcas, four salmon that represent four rivers, Coast Salish peoples and the Coast Salish Sea.

Carving of the story pole that’s now installed on the 91̽��campus began a year and a half ago. Credit: Sven Haakanson

The aluminum back features the North Star at the top and water and mountains in in the middle. Underneath are three canoe prows from the Northwest Coast, the Salish Coast and the West Coast.

“What I really loved about the story pole is it celebrates and recognizes the original peoples and symbolizes our responsibility, as the community now, to care for our environment from the mountains to the sea.” Haakanson said. “They have this symbolism embedded in the story pole.”

For more information, please contact Haakanson at svenh@uw.edu.

New research from the 91̽�� shows that the program can improve fruit and vegetable intake and food security among low-income populations by providing financial support for buying healthy food.

The Fresh Bucks program works with local partners to help Seattle residents access healthy food. The program accepts applications from Seattle households with income less than 80% of the area median — $110,950 for a family of four in 2024. Recipients can use the $40 per month benefit to purchase fruits and vegetables at more than 40 retail locations throughout Seattle, including farmers markets, Safeway stores and independently owned grocery stores.

The study, , shows that Fresh Bucks households experience a 31% higher rate of food security and consume at least three daily servings of fruits and vegetables 37% more often than those assigned to a program waitlist.

“I would classify both of those numbers as pretty large,” said , co-author, 91̽��affiliate professor of health systems and population health and of epidemiology and University of California, Irvine professor of health, society and behavior. “We don’t routinely see interventions that work that well. It’s a pretty big impact on diet in terms of what we can do from a policy perspective and expect to make a difference in food insecurity.”

Food insecurity, or the lack of access to nutritionally adequate foods, is linked to lower-income households and is often associated with poor nutrient intake, diabetes and hypertension. Diet quality, including fruit and vegetable intake, impacts the risk for premature disability and death from cardiometabolic disease, cancer and other causes. But fresh fruits and vegetables tend to be less available in lower-income neighborhoods and more expensive than processed foods.

“The UW’s study helps us understand how the City of Seattle’s Fresh Bucks program shows up in the day-to-day decisions of our enrolled households,” said Robyn Kumar, Fresh Bucks program manager at the City of Seattle Office of Sustainability. “Findings show that the healthy food access program makes a tangible difference for customers, significantly increasing food security and fruit and vegetable intake. We know these lifestyle changes have long-lasting benefits, and Fresh Bucks is helping to ensure that our most overburdened community members have equitable access to healthy foods and increased quality of life.”

In October 2021, 6,900 new applicants and existing beneficiaries applied to receive benefits in 2022. The total number of applicants exceeded program funding, so 4,200 households were randomly chosen to receive benefits. The remaining applicants were placed on a waitlist. The City of Seattle then mailed a follow-up survey to all 6,900 applicants in July 2022. The sample for this study consists of the 1,973 households who completed and returned the survey.

Researchers compared new applicants who received the benefit and new applicants assigned to the waitlist. They also considered the impact of losing Fresh Bucks by comparing returning applicants who were placed on the waitlist with those who continued receiving benefits. Losing the benefit reduced food security by 29% and resulted in households being 26% less likely to eat fruits and vegetables at least three times a day.

“The results were quite symmetric,” said , lead author and 91̽��teaching professor of economics. “The people who gained the program saw nearly the same benefit as what was lost by the people who lost the program. So, it seems like there are two things going on: One is that the program is helping people, and the other is these effects don’t magically sustain themselves without funding.”

Because of the health risks associated with poor diet, insurers have recently shown increased interest and investment in “food is medicine,” or FIM, programs, which include produce prescriptions and programs that provide free, healthy food for patients. Before FIM programs, federal grants funded “nutrition incentive programs” to increase healthy food access and food security.

But Fresh Bucks differs from other healthy food benefit programs in several ways, including focused enrollment within households disproportionately impacted by food insecurity and diet-related chronic disease, divesting enrollment from SNAP participation, enabling participants to redeem benefits at a large chain food retailer and smaller local stores and no required match spending — where participants receive additional benefits based on how much of their own money they spend.

“We clearly see that once this program goes away, people can no longer afford to eat these foods, as evidenced by the increase in fruits and vegetables when people are receiving the benefit, but the near symmetric decrease when benefits are lost,” Jones-Smith said. “I think that really drives home the fact that money or material resources are necessary for enacting this kind of dietary change.”

Other co-authors from the 91̽��include , recently graduated doctoral student of health systems and population health; , associate professor of health systems and population health; and , community research coordinator. The study was funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

For more information, contact Knox at knoxm@uw.edu.