MU Honors College hosts the “Honors Unlimited” faculty lecture series on Zoom every other Thursday at noon. The series is part of the college’s outreach program focused on students, alumni and the Columbia community.
J.D. Bowers, director of MU Honors College, was looking to expand campus-based events in teaching and learning while keeping everyone safe. Bowers decided to look inward to MU faculty for the new lecture series.
“One of the things that the pandemic has taken away, in an academic realm, is campus speakers,” Bowers said. “At the same time, we were stifled in some of our other efforts to increase outreach to our alumni and to our community partners. We’re uniting both of those things.”
Mark Milanick, a professor in medical pharmacology and physiology, delivered the inaugural lecture on Feb. 18 on the opioid crisis and how pain is examined in the medical and scientific communities. Bowers said the lectures are a fascinating way for people to learn about a study they’re not familiar with.
“There are a lot of things that I, as a historian [and] political scientist, would never know about pain and how pain is being discussed in the medical communities,” Bowers said. “Certainly, I had no idea about the medical and scientific elements of the addictiveness of opioids.”
The lecture series offers MU faculty the opportunity to share their research with people outside of their department. For the MU community, the lecture series provides an inside look into different areas of study within the Honors College.
“If we can promote faculty work, and people can understand what our faculty are doing and how they’re doing it — I think we’re doing a service to the university as well as to the Honors College and to our community,” Bowers said.
Nicole Campione-Barr, an associate professor in psychological sciences, and Sarah Killoren, an associate professor in human development and family science, will speak at the next lecture on March 4, titled “Love Them and Hate Them: Why Siblings are Important in our Lives.” The lecture will focus on Killoren and Campione-Barr’s research into the balance of positive and negative sibling relationships.
“A particular period where we see a big jump in conflict and negativity between siblings is during adolescence,” Campione-Barr said. “While that’s a really big issue for parents, it’s not necessarily a bad thing because it’s a pretty safe relationship to have conflicts within and can actually help siblings stay engaged with one another.”
Killoren hopes the lecture will provide interesting information on a topic most can relate to. According to the U.S. Census, nearly 80% of North Americans have at least one sibling.
“I think there would be a great deal of interest in our talk because there are so many people who have brothers and sisters,” Killoren said. “Also, I think parents would be interested to learn that it is okay that their children argue with one another. It doesn’t mean they won’t be close to each other later in life.”
Campione-Barr also wants to use the lecture to bring awareness to the opportunities for sibling relationship research at MU. For example, the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Scholars Programs offer a team project on parent-child relationships, friendships and co-parenting.
According to the Honors College website, “researchers study the relationship challenges that are important for positive relationship outcomes and how relationship partners respond, on emotional and physiological levels, to stress and conflict.”
“The sibling research area is very tiny compared to many other areas of psychology or family relationships, so to have two people on the same campus who study it is really rare,” Campione-Barr said. “[The series] seems like a good opportunity to highlight the fact that we have this very specific expertise here at MU.”
The series is meant to start enriching conversations in the MU community, Bowers said.
The spring lecture series spans a range of topics, from The Women in the Odyssey on April 1to Money in Politics on April 29.
“This isn’t a lecture series all on psychology. This isn’t a lecture series all on history,” Bowers said. “We’re really trying to get people across the disciplines to participate.”
For more information on the Honors Unlimited series, visit the MU Honors College website.
Edited by _ Sophie Chappell | [email protected] _
