"Just put words in the bucket," and "All good writing comes from bad writing." Sage advice from Professor Susan Felch, Director of the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship, and the driving force behind the Writing Co-op. The aim of the co-op is to provide faculty with a quiet, solitary space in which to advance or complete a writing project. They must apply each year by April 15. Once accepted, they pledge to spend a week in the library writing and revising. This summer 12 faculty were accepted.

One of the chosen faculty is Elisha Marr, Sociology Professor. Her project, which involved analyzing the 100 top-grossing films from 2016, began a couple of years ago during the January interim. Her class of 24 students were assigned about seven films to watch and code for genre, race, age of main characters and gender. They examined the five most prominent characters/people in each film. After the data had been collected, recorded and organized, Elisha and her students looked for patterns. Some findings: men hold more adult roles than women do; women surpass men in child and adolescent roles; Black women can "sell" a movie on a poster in all genres except Westerns and dramas; Asian and Hispanic actors are under-represented as a whole.

This summer, Professor Marr is writing an article based on her research. She completed a literature review and wrote a methods section for the paper.