Maxwell School News and Commentary

“It almost doesn’t matter what kind of grandparent you are, as long as you and the parents agree. The trick is for the parents and the grandparents to agree on the roles and the rules,” says University Professor Madonna Harrington Meyer. Once that happens, “then there could be a really harmonious relationship.”

The “idea that irreconcilable differences justify secession ignores the violent history of such efforts, including the Civil War, and overlooks the reality that Americans are deeply intermixed—politically, geographically and ideologically,” says Ryan Griffiths, professor of political science. 

“When we don’t measure things, it makes it much harder to claim that there is a problem and that the government has some kind of responsibility to help alleviate it,” says Sarah Pralle, associate professor of political science.

The decorated U.S. Army veteran and former Department of Defense executive brings deep expertise in leadership, workforce transformation and innovation.

In the rush to develop Kashmir, Professor of Anthropology Mona Bhan explains, the government and developers lost sight of the region’s geological stability. In an active seismic zone with increasing investment into what she calls “an infrastructure dump”, the colonization of Kashmir is actually adding geological pressure onto an already volatile region. 

Omar Cheta, assistant professor of history, has written How Commerce Became Legal: Merchants and Market Governance in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2025). The book explores Egypt’s adoption of a new infrastructure of commercial laws and institutions following the country’s opening to private capital in the 1840s. 

Co-authored by Associate Professor of Sociology Selina Gallo-Cruz, the article was published in Local Environment.

“I do think it's the case that this kind of political violence has been rising. ...There's just been a number of shootings and attacks, attempted assassinations in recent years, and it really, to be honest, it reminds me in a way of the 1960s. And I think in each instance there's probably similar forces behind it,” says Grant Reeher, professor of political science.

The article, co-authored by Odlanyer Hernández de Lara, Ph.D. candidate and part-time instructor in anthropology, was published in Post-Medieval Archaeology.

Co-authored by Sebastian Karcher, director of the Center for Qualitative and Multi-Method Inquiry and the Qualitative Data Repository, was published in PLOS One.