A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Professor of Communication Sushma Subramanian
Professor of Communication and Digital Studies Sushma Subramanian contributed to “My Pandemic Valentine,” which aired on With Good Reason radio. Two days after Sushma Subramanian got engaged, she moved to Virginia to teach, leaving her fiance behind. She tells us about the app that got them talking — and touching– across the distance. Listen to the show.
Associate Professor Sushma Subramanian
Associate Professor of Journalism Sushma Subramanian published a story, “How breast milk banks could avert the next formula crisis,” in National Geographic. The piece examined how Brazil has become the world’s leader in breast milk banking, inspiring similar programs in other countries. Read more.
Associate Professor of Communication Sushma Subramanian
Associate Professor of Communication and Digital Studies Sushma Subramanian penned an article, She Pioneered the Sale of Breastmilk, Then Lost Everything: What the rise and fall of entrepreneur Elena Medo reveal about how we value women’s labor, which ran on May 13 in the Washington Post Magazine.
About a week before Christmas in 2014, Elena Medo received the opening salvo against her latest breast milk company. She was at her new office in Lake Oswego, a suburb of Portland, Oregon, when she got a cease-and-desist letter. Prolacta Bioscience, the breast milk product company she founded in 1999 and then parted ways with in 2009, was instructing her new company, Medolac, to stop using its trade secrets.
Medo, then 61, was used to dealing with adversity. As the veritable founding mother of the breast milk industry, she had spent her life charting a controversial path to selling breast milk to hospitals. Medo had been accused of exploiting women to make money and of creating inequalities that hurt babies from poor families. But the products that she’d sold have also been credited with improving the outcomes for tens of thousands of premature babies in hospital neonatal intensive care units. Read more.
Associate Professor of Communication Sushma Subramanian
Associate Professor of Communication and Digital Studies Sushma Subramanian has appeared on several podcasts to talk about her book How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch and her article, “Who Gets the Child?,” which ran in The Washington Post.
Assistant Professor of Communication Sushma Subramanian
Assistant Professor of Communication Sushma Subramanian penned an article for Washington Post Magazine entitled, “States are increasingly considering equal shared parenting in custody cases. This young Kentucky couple serve as a test case.”
Judge Brent Hall had some stern words of advice for the young couple seated before him at Hopkins County Family Court in Madisonville, Ky. Jordan Pyles and Ashlyn Harrell had come to make some small adjustments to a temporary custody arrangement for their 4-year-old daughter, but on this March afternoon in 2018 what preoccupied them was their upcoming trial in June. Pyles, a 25-year-old project manager at a steel manufacturing company, and Harrell, a 22-year-old full-time mom, were both hoping to win sole custody.
“I care about your child because I care about kids,” Hall said of the trial, which he would also be presiding over, “but I’m going in blind, and you are going to have a very limited period of time to tell me and try to get something to click in my mind that makes me see things your way. . . . And I’m probably not going to see it your way, either one of your ways.” Read more.
Assistant Professor of Communication Sushma Subramanian
Assistant Professor of Journalism Sushma Subramanian wrote an article for Truly Adventurous entitled, “Queens of Kasekela.” The piece follows the life journey of Gremlin, a chimp Jane Goodall originally observed, as she rises to power in her Gombe National Park community, and is an experiment in nonfiction storytelling using animals as main characters. View on Medium.com.
Assistant Professor of Communication Sushma Subramanian
Assistant Professor of Journalism Sushma Subramanian penned an article in The New York Times entitled, “How Psychologists Can Help Treat Chronic Pain.”
Over the past two decades, as the opioid crisis has shaken the public’s view of painkillers and pharmaceutical companies have come under fire for their marketing practices, many patients are looking for alternatives. One of the leading contenders has become treating pain with talk therapy.
Psychologists, therapists and social workers have quietly become a crucial part of pain treatment programs, proving to be as effective or more so than medication. In 2018, the medical journal The Lancet went so far as to recommend education and psychological treatment as first-line interventions for chronic low back pain, before pharmacological treatment.
A spokesman for the American Psychological Association said they have only recently started tracking pain psychology and in 2021 found that nearly 40 percent of its members report their patients frequently have chronic pain. The organization is currently drafting guidelines for chronic pain treatment, a sign, according to Lynn Bufka, a Maryland psychologist and a senior director at the A.P.A., that it’s an important and growing field with science-based solutions. Read more.