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A new article from the Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine discusses the research of Bertha Bermúdez Tapia. Bermúdez Tapia is a PhD student in sociology and a graduate affiliate for the Health and Society Program and the Center for the Governance of Natural Resources at IBS. Her work covers how deportees and asylum seekers living in violent border cities experience damaging impacts from immigration policies, including her hometown of Matamoros, Mexico. As part of her research, Bermúdez Tapia has also made a visual art project to stress the impacts of these hardening border lines. This later resulted in a YouTube video titled “Twin Cities Torn Apart” “which takes viewers to two cities whose proximity is only driven by feelings now” Bermúdez says. To read more about her research, read the full article on the Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine’s website.

Bertha and her colleague Arielle Milkman (Anthro) also recently hosted the Hostile Terrian 94 workshop here at IBS. If you would like more information on the Hostile Terrain 94 workshop, please email Bertha or Arielle. 

A news article from Colorado Public Radio (CPR) discusses the fires that raged through Grand Lake last fall and how residents are on their own when it comes to protecting their homes. The article highlights Hannah Brenkert-Smith from IBS's Environment and Society Program and her work with WiRē.  WiRē is a team of wildfire practitioners and social scientists whose work promotes the use of evidence to improve to help promote community wildfire mitigation efforts. While conducting research the team found that when individuals talk with their neighbors about wildfire risk, they do more risk mitigation than those who haven’t talked to their neighbors. From this research, Brenkert-Smith concludes that financial resources spent on community wide mitigation efforts are worthwhile. 

“We’re spending so much money on suppression, and firefighters are putting their lives at risk when we could be investing instead at the front end of the problem,” Brenkert-Smith said. “And at that front end, actions by human beings are the key to reducing risk.”

For more information about Hannah’s work and wildfire mitigation efforts, read the full article on the CPR website.

Dave Bechhoefer and Angelia Baker from the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence's (CSPV) Youth Violence Prevention Center-Denver (YVPC-D) have been working with community members in the Montbello and Park Hill Neighborhoods of Denver, CO to prevent youth violence.  Their work was recently highlighted in a Fox News article addressing the challenges that studying youth violence has faced during COVID.  “The pandemic has actually made it difficult to pull out any solid findings,” Bechhoefer says. Despite complications from COVID, over the years their research has been able to discover risk factors for youth in Montbello. From this information and funding from the CDC, they were able to create initiatives and support organizations that teach kids life skills. In the future, Bechhoefer is hopeful that more funding can support measures to stop youth violence. For more information on the study, read the full article on Fox News.  Please also check out the great work that CSPV and YVPC-D are doing. Congrats to the team for their hard work!

David Pyrooz and Scott Decker's book Competing for Control: Gangs and the Social Order of Prisons was awarded the Outstanding Book Award by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS). David Pyrooz is an Associate Professor of Sociology at CU Boulder and is part of the Problem Behavior and Positive Youth Development Program at IBS. This award comes from the ACJS which is an international association that promotes criminal justice education, research, and policy analysis within the discipline of criminal justice.  Read the full list of awards at the ACJS website. You can also read or purchase Pyrooz's book on Amazon. 

You can read more on Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine article here.

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Article written by Ciara Coughlan, IBS Student Assistant, PoliSci '21

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, Boulder Country Public Health Executive Director, Jeff Zayach has made his message to the Boulder community very clear: personal responsibility can stop the spread of the virus. "Whether we think it’s an effective message or not, it really does come down to people taking responsibility for those precautions,” Zayach says. Governor Jared Polis has also stressed the same public health policy, however researchers Stefanie Mollborn, Interim Director of IBS, and Lori Peek, Director of the Natural Hazards Center, question the effectiveness of this message. Mollborn states that “Public health measures that have tended to work throughout the years are things that individuals can’t affect." Peek follows up with that by stating "It’s hard because we all have different factors that are influencing our sense of personal responsibility, and what does that really mean in the context of a pandemic?” To read more thoughts on public health policy and personal responsibility read the full article here or on the Daily Camera's website. 

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Article written by Ciara Coughlan, IBS Student Assistant, PoliSci '21

For many years parents have been worried about the amount of time their kids use technology. However, a new study from CU Boulder says that the amount of time technology is used by adolescents only weakly predicts how much time they will spend on electronics as a young adult. Lead researchers on the team Stefanie Mollborn, Interim Director of IBS and Sociology Professor and Joshua Goode, CU sociology doctoral student and stats consultant with Computing and Research Services at IBS found that young adults whose parents had stricter technology guidelines placed on them as adolescents do not spend any less time on technology than those who had less strict technology guidelines. Mollborn further states, "As people’s social context changes, their technology use changes as they go through life. So how much they used technology as a teenager matters a little bit, but it doesn’t matter much at all, relative to other things, some which can be explained, and some can’t.” For more information on the study and the article, visit the Colorado Daily website.

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Article written by Ciara Coughlan, IBS Student Assistant, PoliSci '21

Terry McCabe, director of the Environment and Society Program was elected to be a 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellow. He was elected due to his tremendous contributions to anthropology and his reseaach studying people's ability to adapt to arid rangelands in East Africa. AAAS fellows are elected each year by their peers who serve on the Council of AAAS, the organization's member-run governing body. This title recognizes important contributions to STEM disciplines, including pioneering research, leadership within a given field, teaching and mentoring, fostering collaborations, and advancing public understanding of science. The virtual ceremony will take place on February 13, 2021 and fellows will receive official certificates and rosette pins in gold and blue, colors symbolizing science and engineering. Read the full news article on the AAAS website as well as an article on CU's Arts and Sciences Magazine. 

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Article written by Ciara Coughlan, IBS Student Assistant, PoliSci '21

The Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS) is inviting all University of Colorado faculty and research staff to apply for the 2020-2021 research development awards. Preference will be given to teams that include current IBS Fellows and staff, and that engage with questions represented by one of the five IBS programs. IBS has earmarked dedicated funds for projects that advance equity, diversity, and inclusion themes, so we particularly welcome proposals explicitly addressing these issues in substance, methods, and personnel. We expect to have funds to support 3-5 projects and proposals can request up to $15,000. We encourage collaborative and interdisciplinary research and welcome applications from all investigators, especially those who have not yet obtained external grant support.

Here is the PDF of full details.

On October 15th a new research study came out from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing how unselfish and voluntary leaders are more likely to mobilize support for environmental management within their own communities. Lead author of the study Krister Andersson, Director of the Center for Governance of Natural Resources, and contributing authors Kimberlee Chang and Adriana Molina-Garzón argue that early action taken from unselfish leadership is why local communities are so successful in governing their own resources.  

To further their point, while conducting research for the study, researchers created a game that mimics tragedy of the commons and Andersson comments on their findings, “We saw that when leaders behaved unselfishly as a response to the small, gradual decline in resources—when they make unselfish, harvesting decisions and propose a course of action for the group—then what we see in the next few rounds is much stronger agreement in the group around self-regulation, that many more group members are on board to self-regulate.”

For more information on the study and the article visit the Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine website. 

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Article written by Ciara Coughlan, IBS Student Assistant, PoliSci '21