Geography Professor Asha Best has lived in a handful of cities across the U.S., Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Atlanta among them. Experiencing each place’s unique culture, transportation, and education systems has given Best insight into how different cities are designed and how they function. A curiosity to understand this more drives some of her current research.

Best, an urbanist who studies mobility and urban informality, is researching how planners and developers can build just cities, where everyone lives equitably. One thing she’s noticed throughout her studies is that there is no common definition of what justice looks like, however.

“We often know what injustice looks like in cities, but we don't often know what justice looks like. I think that equality is a good start. Do we have equal access to shared resources, and are vital resources distributed in a way that's consistent and even — and I'm talking about things like water and food and shelter, the basics,” she says.

Best believes just cities are ones in which planners and officials address current problems and work to right historical wrongs.

“I think it's about how cities deliver vital resources, discovering who doesn't have access to them and how to fix that, and creating a space that's livable, where people have dignity,” she says.

Challenge. Change. is produced by Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

In 2008, just as the film adaptation of "Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer was about to hit theaters, Sarah Gallagher was a doctoral student in Boston and saw everyone walking down Commonwealth Avenue with their heads buried in the book with an apple on its cover. Initially, she wasn't interested. But once she inevitably got her hands on the book, she tore through it in one night.

"I can never explain what it felt like to read that book for the first time and to just fall in love with it. I immediately was so obsessed with Edward. There's something in the pages of that book that makes you fall into the world," says Gallagher, now the associate dean of students and operations in Clark's School of Professional Studies.

Vampires don't age, but the series did, and not necessarily gracefully. On this episode of Challenge. Change., Gallagher explains some of Twilight's flaws and why the fandom is still so passionate about Bella and Edward despite the saga's issues. These topics are at the heart of Gallagher's book, "Why We Love (and Hate) Twilight," which is being published in April. Gallagher encourages the fandom to think critically about the kinds of media we love.

"I think if we can start being critical about things that we love, then it will be a lot easier to be critical about terrible things that are happening," she says. "I think it's an exercise in evaluating the things in our life."

Challenge. Change. is produced by Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

Most people aren't thinking about just how many sounds they encounter on an average day. But Professor Matt Malsky, the Tina Sweeney, M.A. '49, Endowed Chair in Music, director of the Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for the Arts and Humanities, and director of the interdisciplinary Media, Culture, and the Arts program, part of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, is immersed in it.

"Our vision is something that we have some control over. We have eyelids, we can close our eyes, and we can stop seeing things," he notes. "But we don't have earlids. Hearing is always on, and there's no way to stop the sensations that come with sounds."

As Malsky teaches his students about soundscapes and acoustic ecology — including walking tours around Worcester to partake in all the noises of nature and traffic — he's also thinking about the intersection of sound and our changing climate.

"Lots of sea creatures depend on sounds to communicate with other creatures and to get feedback about their environment. As the climate changes, as the temperatures rise on the planet and the temperature of the ocean increases, it changes the way that sound is transmitted through water — it speeds it up, it increases the distance that it travels," Malsky says. "Combined with all the ways in which humankind is adding sounds to the ocean with increased traffic of tankers, underwater mining operations, and offshore wind turbines, we're adding an enormous amount of sound to the ocean, and it's changing the way that sea creatures are able to operate — to their deficit."

Challenge. Change. is produced by Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.