Research & Creative
Navigating the Complex Terrain of Life
Health isn’t solely the purview of hard science. Politics, economics, rhetoric, art, and history all provide essential perspectives on what it means to be healthy. This issue gives a liberal arts perspective on health.
The Health, Strength, and Vitality of a Democracy
Can a democracy be healthy or unhealthy? Political science professors weigh in on how democracies are created and the work required to maintain them.
Understanding the Invisible: Air Quality and Health
A citizen-science project aims to see if the act of measuring air quality influences how we understand and think about the air from a day-to-day standpoint. Journalism professors and students are working with air quality scientists to incorporate the social sciences—or the human element—in to their investigation.
Community Guide Project amplifies housing’s impact on health for Fort Collins residents
How can a city encourage participation in a critical topic such as sustainable, affordable housing? Call on a variety of agencies and the Center for Public Deliberation to solicit people from a wide spectrum and teach them how to engage in productive community conversation. The result is a successful first step toward meeting people’s physical and mental health needs related to housing.
Surviving an Invasion during a Pandemic in the 14th Century
The people of Provence were undergoing multiple crises of war, famine, and plague in 1360. Their stories about a miracle woman, collected during an inquest considering her for sainthood in the Catholic church, helped them understand what was happening, and gave them ideas for how to recover from these devastating issues.
Balancing our bodies: How people in early modern Spain approached health and medicine
Our ideas about what health is and what sickness and disease mean are big questions about what kind of society we want to live in, what it means to have a good life, and what it means to be living as you believe is most appropriate or best. In early modern Spain notions of health and healthcare changed due to religious expulsion or conversion, colonialism, and more.
Mental health, community-building, and the challenges of a global pandemic
In the Department of English at CSU, initiatives that seek to bolster mental health, such as reading, writing, and thinking reflectively, creatively, and critically have long played an important role among students and the broader community: Initiatives that include the Writing Center, the Veterans Writing Workshop, and Speak Out! These opportunities to explore both joyous and difficultexperiences require an emotional labor, a re-tooling during pandemic times, and an awareness that not all mental health healing can come from the mind.