Please provide a brief overview of your research and/or creative work. You are welcome to focus on your most current work or, if you prefer, any particular work you’d like to highlight.
I have the pleasure of partnering with researchers around the world to conduct research on employee well-being by pulling back the curtain on the many roles we play in our lives. Instead of focusing exclusively on traditional business outcomes such as profit and productivity, I collaborate with colleagues to bring light to employees’ multi-faceted roles and identities and explore the intersections between their work and family lives. Seeing employees as whole people is how we can humanize workplaces and dignify work that occurs outside of offices and in people’s homes.
I am most energized by the research I have been conducting with colleagues on couples. I’m fascinated by how partners come together, the different identities they develop, and how their relationships change over time. I’ve worked with researchers to theorize typologies of couples based on career and care, study couples during pregnancy and reentry into work after parental leaves, and analyze how couples challenged parenting and work norms during the early months of COVID-19. Currently, I am working on a series of studies to investigate how couples collaborate (or not) to set goals, make decisions, and manage their resources at the intersection of their work and family lives.
What inspired you to pursue this area of study or creation?
It is my love of research that initially led me to explore an academic career. After spending more than ten years in marketing research and communications roles in Washington DC and Chicago, I decided to embark on a new career path in academia. After wrestling with the meaning of my work, I left agency life and pursued a PhD in Organizational Behavior to better understand how we can create better workplaces for all.
More personally, I was raised by women and men who, like many, had to make challenging work and family decisions. As a child, I watched my grandmother stay late after school and grade her students’ homework at the kitchen table. I observed my mother raise my brother and I as a single parent, return to college when we were in grade school, and, ultimately, become one of the only women partners at a global accounting firm. I saw the struggles my father experienced when he left his family and partner and moved across the country to pursue a promotion at work. These early experiences made me acutely aware that work and family are not distinct parts of our lives. Rather, our work and family roles and experiences are deeply intertwined and need to be considered in tandem when trying to improve employees’ well-being.
What impact do you hope your work will have on your field and/or the broader community?
When I interviewed at USF’s School of Management in 2015, it was immediately evident that people here share the understanding that we need to recognize one another as whole people and not simply as “workers.” On the flight back to Chicago, I knew this was where my family and I needed to be because it was a place that would not only tolerate but, more importantly, encourage me to research “non-traditional” business issues that center employees as human beings. I hope that the work I do with colleagues helps empower people to craft careers and family paths that enable them to have full, unique, and dynamic lives.
How has your involvement with CRASE influenced and enhanced your professional journey?
Being part of CRASE is a joy because positive social processes help us to generate impactful research. I am thankful to the center’s founding members who recognized the need to bring folks together from across campus and to celebrate different forms of research, scholarship, and art and put in the care to create such a special space. I am inspired by colleagues who continue this legacy of leadership and community and to those who show up to put important ideas out into the world.
Please provide a brief overview of your research and/or creative work. You are welcome to focus on your most current work or, if you prefer, any particular work you’d like to highlight.
I’m a reference librarian by vocation, and my creative and scholarly pursuits have varied over the years, with the most time and energy dedicated to work on the contemporary American writer Joyce Carol Oates. From 1995 to the present, I have created a number of related online resources for the study and appreciation of Oates (we refer to her as “JCO”) including a bibliography, a reference website, and a scholarly journal.
The bibliography includes more than 3,500 entries and is always
“in progress.” JCO is famous for many things, including her
productivity: she’s published an average of 3 books a year for the
last half century, and more than 900 short stories so far.
The reference website called Celestial Timepiece documents
JCO’s books in detail, provides biographical information, tracks
her numerous awards and nominations, and provides a generous
sampling of her stories, poems, and essays in full text.
The last component of this triptych is a peer-reviewed journal
called Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies, which has the
honor of being the first of many journals currently hosted on
Gleeson Library’s Scholarship Repository. The journal has
certainly been the most challenging of the three to compile and
edit; if any keen observers have noted a recent lull in publications,
they wouldn’t be wrong to assume that a burst of journal activity
may be coming soon.
What inspired you to pursue this area of study or creation?
Going deep into a subject is one path to creativity; another is to
follow your curiosity over many seemingly unrelated paths while
having the faith that everything will come together in the end. I
delved deeply into JCO’s work after “discovering” her in the late
1980s and finding her as terrifying and profound as the great
Russian writer Dostoevsky. A few years later, as I began my
library career, my interests and curiosity took me down science
and technology side-paths (fractal geometry, anyone? chaos
theory? “cold fusion”?), and most significantly, HTML and the
“world wide web.” In 1995 I wanted to learn how to make a web
site, and decided to teach myself HTML (the original code behind
web pages) by creating a Joyce Carol Oates bibliography web
site. All of my JCO productions grew from that concurrence; and
in the other direction, my new coding knowledge led me to
becoming the library webmaster for a couple of decades, with the
JCO website serving as my creative testbed for the library
website.
What impact do you hope your work will have on your field and/or the broader community?
From the beginning I had the hope of providing a free resource for
students, scholars, and fans of JCO’s work, as I pursued my own
interest and curiosity in the subject. This work has led me to work
(however modestly) with JCO’s biographer; filmmakers;
songwriters; the JCO archive at Syracuse University; and with
Joyce Carol Oates herself.
How has your involvement with CRASE influenced and enhanced your professional journey?
Seeing the amazing and disparate creative paths of so many
different people that CRASE promotes and supports is nothing
less than inspiring. While I can’t follow the paths that others are
pursuing, I feel nonetheless validated in pursuing my paths,
however odd or unrelated they may seem. CRASE is a window
into scholarship and creativity at USF; and it’s an open door to
joining that creative community here.
Please provide a brief overview of your research and/or creative work. You are welcome to focus on your most current work or, if you prefer, any particular work you’d like to highlight.
I am an artist/scholar whose research includes both performed choreography and written work.
My focus is contemporary experimental dance post-1960 in the US and Japan, specifically American postmodern dance, Japanese butoh, and their legacies. My writing is grounded in embodied experiences arising from somatic movement and dance practices, placed in dialogue with theories of the body and philosophies of mind. My choreographic research explores perception, expanding the boundaries of the human, and, more recently, the intersections of language, movement, and technology. I also design costumes and other elements for my company’s stage work.
Essentially, I ask questions and try to answer them through a bodymind inquiry–meaning that body and mind are not separate. I could not write without physical practice, and I could not create movement without philosophical inquiry. Dance and philosophy share a preoccupation with thinking and action as they relate to time, space, and bodies. My research explores and attempts to uncover nuances in these areas. Below are a few examples of recent work:
Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language: Thinking in Micromovement
(Palgrave, 2023) is a book about dance’s relationship to language. In this text, I draw
upon my longtime studies with seminal figures in postmodern dance and butoh, and
their language-body practices, to understand more broadly how language impacts a
moving body on a felt level, even when such communication is unspoken.
“Language Creates the Body Anew: Kasai Akira’s Post-Butoh” (Keio University Press,
2025) discusses artist Kasai Akira’s use of spoken language and recent adoption of the
term “post-butoh” to describe his post-pandemic performances. I bring notions of the
post-human and language’s current media circulation to bear on Kasai’s broader call for
an end to war, a commitment to non-discriminatory care for one another and the
planet, and ultimately the question of how to live a life.
humXn forms (2024) is a 30-minute dance work for 2 dancers and live percussion that
was presented at the San Francisco International Arts Festival. Created using exchanges
with ChatGPT, the piece explores human-human connection and human-technology
interactions and shares the forms that arise as bodies transform and adapt to ever-
changing conditions.
Shifting Time (2019; 2026) is an evening-length dance-theater work exploring thoughts,
perceptions, and experiences of human and environmental time. First presented in St. Louis and Berkeley in 2019, and scheduled to be reprised in 2026, the ensemble piece created in collaboration with Karlovsky & Company Dance weaves together solo, duet, and group movement sections, accompanied by live music and spoken word.
What inspired you to pursue this area of study or creation?
Dance was something I had to do. Why else would someone pursue a career with so little financial stability? In a sense, it chose me. I did not find dance until high school—I started out with jazz and modern; I never studied ballet. The biggest inspirations were my early dance teachers: J. Parker Copely and Deborah Sipos (both now deceased). They showed me a way to live through the body and to express beauty and complexity. I have always enjoyed problem-solving and making things. I was initially a math major in college. However, I soon switched to art history, wishing to enter a field with more community and an arts focus (the school did not have a dance major at that time). During my junior year in London, I had the opportunity to choreograph my first piece, which had surprisingly positive results.
When I returned, feeling that I might soon be “too late” to pursue dancing, I refocused. Like many young people, I was interested in performing, not in history or theory, but that changed when I entered an MFA program. After graduating, and years of directing my dance company and presenting concerts, supported by part-time teaching and a host of other temporary jobs, I returned to graduate school to pursue a PhD in performance studies. This course of academic study, combined with my embodied knowledge, opened new avenues for research that I have been able to pursue as a professor. I feel so grateful for the ongoing opportunities to live through my body as it changes and to share perspectives within a dynamic and ever-changing arts field.
What impact do you hope your work will have on your field and/or the broader community?
My hope is that I can contribute to uplifting the field of dance–both as practice and as written scholarship. Expressing nonverbal experiences in language can be difficult and intimidating. A goal of mine, in addition to simply celebrating the wonders of a moving body, is to make dance more accessible by encouraging spoken and written dialog and creating spaces for sharing movement experiences with others. In addition to my work at USF, I co-teach a community movement class in the Mission and co-facilitate a workgroup for artists in the East Bay.
How has your involvement with CRASE influenced and enhanced your professional journey?
While the performing arts are recognized in academic and university settings, I find there is often curiosity about how this field aligns with more traditional scholarship. One aspect of CRASE that I truly value is its recognition of creative research and the opportunity for me to engage with others across disciplines. Witnessing diverse research approaches is enlightening and sparks fresh ideas in my own work. Since joining the board last fall, I’ve been impressed by the dedication and enthusiasm of the directors and board members. Together, we work to highlight different research needs in support of this vital part of an academic career—an aspect that, for many of us (if not most), is what initially drew us to this path in the first place. Amidst other daily responsibilities, maintaining our research passion and finding a community can be challenging. CRASE’s workshops and public-facing opportunities have provided support, celebration, and deadlines (which I do find useful). I have gained momentum on my projects and a sense of shared purpose and respect. We are researchers and creators, but first and foremost we are people, driven to engage in ways that make a positive impact in the world. I am heartened and reminded of this every time I attend a CRASE event.
Please provide a brief overview of your research and/or creative work. You are welcome to focus on your most current work or, if you prefer, any particular work you’d like to highlight.
Broadly speaking, my research focuses on the development of interpretable statistical and computational techniques to analyze imaging and complex network data. My current work generally falls into three themes:
Modeling and Analysis of Brain Imaging Data
Modeling Social Dynamics and Influencers on Social Media
Interpretable Machine Learning
I could spend a lot of time talking about my work in each of these areas, but I want to highlight two of my recent publications that have really had an impact on my current direction of work:
These papers, different as they may seem, actually both highlight an important and often overlooked challenge in data science and analytics, which for lack of a better phrase I’ll call the “wrong data problem.” Particularly in today’s era of accessible deep learning apps like DeepSeek and ChatGPT, one could reasonably believe “the more data the better” for building predictive models (e.g., OpenAI’s strategy for ChatGPT). Though it is useful to have more information about an outcome we would like to predict, it is wrong to think that all available data should be used in the prediction, or that adding new data will necessarily help.
What I have learned from the above research is that we must understand and compensate for possible differences in data obtained from disparate sources, technologies, or people. The first publication above, for example, focused on the differences in brain images obtained from scanners from different companies (e.g., Philips, Siemens, etc.). The idea in that paper was to develop deep learning strategies to quantify and account for technical variability of images so that data from disparate scanners could be effectively analyzed together. The second publication I mentioned assessed sex-based differences in the brain’s response to anti-depressant medication for patients with late-life depression. We showed that the 24- hour change in how a person’s brain reacts to a new anti-depressant medication (a) was strongly predictive of whether or not that person would be remitted to the hospital in need of different medication, and (b) that the predictive ability of the brain scans was highly dependent on the person’s biological sex. In fact, remission prediction was 20% worse when males and females were put into the same model rather than in separate models. This work highlights the fact that in understanding the brain’s response to antidepressant treatment, medical professionals must account for sex differences; furthermore, not doing so may lead to devastating outcomes due to depression going improperly treated.
What inspired you to pursue this area of study or creation?
I have been interested in brain imaging analysis since I was a second year Ph.D. student at UNC Chapel Hill. I remember my first time diving into an imaging data set where the goal was to identify individuals with varying subtypes of ADHD (the “ADHD 200 challenge”). I threw every statistical method I knew at the time at this data and could do no better than a coin flip in making predictions. Though my predictions at the time were horrible, this experience drove me to want to figure out how to use more innovative methods in machine learning and network analysis, which I was studying in my Ph.D. thesis work, to make progress in the area. Since then, I have sought out and worked with many wonderful collaborators in psychiatry, neuroscience, biology, imaging, and physics from whom I have learned a tremendous amount about imaging analyses, neurodegenerative diseases, and mental illness. These collaborations have opened up incredibly exciting areas in medical research that I am excited to pursue.
What impact do you hope your work will have on your field and/or the broader community?
I am fortunate that I am a statistics and data science researcher and educator, where I have the opportunity both to work with incredible collaborators and to teach aspiring data scientists my own lessons learned in research. My overall hope is to show the broader community how to think about data and analyses, rather than just simply running the most accessible app or program to do the work for you. As I pointed out in my highlighted research, we cannot always assume that simply analyzing all the data we have our hands on is a good idea. Understanding individual differences, technological differences, and other sources of variation in the data we learn from is paramount to making informed decisions.
How has your involvement with CRASE influenced and enhanced your professional journey?
As a faculty member, it is easy to get carried away with preparing the next (hopefully) amazing lecture. Our devotion to excellent teaching and service to the university and broader community can make it challenging to make the time for research and scholarly work. Even when we do finally get that chance to sit down and work, it is easy to miss what amazing scholarly work everyone else at the university is up to. CRASE is a wonderful initiative at USF that focuses on motivating, making space for, and celebrating the research and scholarly work of faculty members at the university. In being part of CRASE, I have been able to witness the amazing research of my colleagues through meetings, writing workshops, and celebration events. It has opened my eyes to exciting interdisciplinary research opportunities at the university and has inspired me to investigate new areas in my own research that I wouldn’t have otherwise thought to do. I am excited to contribute to the CRASE initiative and hope to meet more of you through some of our events in the near future.
Please tell us a bit about yourself! How long have you been at USF, what do you teach, and what are your research interests?
My name is Dr. Rosa Jiménez, and I’m an Associate Professor in the International and Multicultural Education Program, in the School of Education. I am in my tenth year at USF. My graduate training is in education with a focus on language and culture, and I received that at UCLA along with a Master’s in Latin American Studies. I come to this work, to research and to the field of education, as a classroom teacher. I was a bilingual social studies middle school teacher in LA for many years before pursuing my doctorate. Those two lenses, the teaching practice and my lived experiences as a daughter of immigrant parents influenced my journey (2016). My research interests are multicultural and multilingual learners in K-12 settings. My approach is, how do we understand and practice culturally responsive and critical pedagogies in K-12 settings with youth of color and immigrant youth? I collaborate with teachers about their teaching practices and the ways we can enhance belonging, develop bilingualism, and improve critical literacy.
Please tell us about your recent study on auto-ethnographies of immigration as pedagogical practice.
I have a book chapter, Migration as counterstories (2022), published by the leading research organization, American Educational Research Association (AERA). The study was a collaboration with a high school teacher in the Bay. We were both Latinas, we both have immigrant backgrounds, and so I thought about the ways that we could share our own migration stories, to share our own lived experiences here in the US as a model to help students think about and write their own migration stories. It’s also a way to help students counter the deficit perspectives, the anti-immigrant culture that we often see in our world. Students can internalize these deficit views of one’s self, so part of my approach is to talk about our culture, language, and immigration stories as an asset, as beautiful, as surviving, and as thriving. How do we build on that and view our journeys as complex, complicated, and as beautiful. My research examines these kinds of topics, culturally responsive teaching in K-12 schools.
What do you hope readers will gain from your work? What is the impact you’re hoping to make at USF?
I think there’s a couple layers to this. I think, at USF, one of the beautiful things we do is that we embody and model these teaching practices with our own graduate students. It’s not a detached thing — learning and knowledge are not found all in a textbook. So for example, even with my graduate students, I do interactive games, icebreakers, and kinesthetic activities. Everyone’s nervous, insecure, and worried they won’t have the right thing to say, even in graduate school, so we build community together. The other central point is that we analyze power — power relations, race and racism, structures of power. We center student experiences and analyze them in relation to what we’re learning. Pedagogically, that’s one of the contributions.
The other part is my research — my work in K-12 schools and with community organizations (2020). For the past few summers, I have helped run a summer youth program for 100 children of farmworkers. Students had unique experiences to learn music and dance, participate in a surfing class, and all the while they were also reading and writing about their immigration and cultural experiences. So that’s my hope and contribution, that students and the public at large can see the value and beauty of our culture and how to center it in learning. Especially in these trying times, how can we center equity, culture, and justice in TK-12 learning and across all of our educational spaces? That’s my hope and my life’s work.
On Thursday, February 22, 2024, CRASE was proud to sponsor a lecture and conversation with Dr. Dipesh Chakrabarty, esteemed professor and author of One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax. In-person and online attendees engaged in a meaningful discussion about climate change and the necessary integration of academic disciplines that will be required to meet this challenge.
Prior to the event, nearly twenty faculty members responded to Chakrabarty’s book in short essays and even with artwork. Please look out for these responses when they’re published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Scholarship. The collective engagement and thoughtful participation of our USF community made the event a resounding success. For those who couldn’t attend or wish to revisit the enlightening discussion, please see the event recording below.
Monisha Bajaj in Conversation with Talia Knowles, CRASE Program Assistant
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us! Please tell us about yourself. Where are you from? What do you like to do outside of academia?
Well, I’m a professor here at USF in international and multicultural education. I’m a parent. I have a ten year old child. So what are some of the things I like to do? We go to a lot of his games since he’s really into sports, so that tends to occupy a lot of our free time.
I have a lot of family in the Bay Area since I grew up here. After college, I moved abroad and to the East Coast. So in the 15 years that I was away from the Bay Area, I lived in Washington, D.C., in New York, as well as in three other countries for anywhere from 8 to 12 months.
The time I’m not at work is often spent with family, extended family, friends from childhood and friends from other parts of life who live here as well. I also like being in nature. I feel like I could always be in nature more.
What’s your favorite thing about the Bay Area?
I would say it’s just the open-mindedness that’s here because I’ve lived in a lot of different places. I feel like people in the Bay Area are really open to the world and there’s a global mindedness and an openness here. Even just at USF, there’s a sort of like baseline progressiveness and willingness to engage with themes of social justice. That isn’t always true in other places that I’ve lived.
How long have you worked at USF?
I started at USF in January of 2014 and one of the first communities I was roped into was the CRASE Advisory Board!
I was doing research with two doctoral students at a high school for immigrant and refugee newcomer students in Oakland. We would go every week to work with the students and ran a club for them on human rights.
We’d do interviews with teachers, focus groups with students, activities with the students, and we also delved into the literature about immigrant and refugee youth. We wrote a few articles based on it, and as the project was ending and the data collection phase and writing was coming to an end, I kept thinking that it would make a good book, but I didn’t want to do another book for an academic audience. Yes, it would be interesting to profile what’s happening with these students in an academic way. But the need seemed to be, how do you get the lessons of what these students need into the hands of teachers who are serving these students? Most of them have never taken a class on how to work with immigrant and refugee students since it’s not required in teacher education.
So there’s a huge gap between teachers’ knowledge and what refugee, immigrant, and undocumented students really need. There are many needs that a lot of students and their families have. And some schools are really innovating and doing some really creative things. I would say that the school where we were doing research is on the cutting edge of some really creative things along with other schools we’ve heard about in other parts of the country.
That’s when the idea emerged to do a book project, not for people in academia necessarily, but more oriented towards educators, taking the research and making it very digestible, with no jargon. The strategy chapters are short and the book has a lot of other resources that teachers can reference, and then we included vignettes and narratives about immigrant and refugee students throughout the book to humanize the population of students that we’re talking about.
We heard some horror stories of places where kids were dropping out of school because no teacher even could speak Spanish at all. An entire school where 600 unaccompanied minors came in from Central America and not a single teacher could speak Spanish? There was an incident in Missouri a few years ago of an Afghan boy whose family was settled in a town with no Afghans or Muslims for miles and miles — no community support. He was really isolated and bullied and ended up committing suicide. This made us think about what it means when teachers and schools can’t integrate these students and address their needs.
Have you had any direct conversations with teachers who have read your book and been able to start implementing these strategies?
Because of COVID and the detours this book project took over the six years from when I had the idea and when it came out, we ended up adding a lot of contributing authors to the project. It was a lot of work to get all those voices and perspectives streamlined in the book and to make it cohesive. But what was beautiful about it is that we have 22 people who are affiliated with the book, and so different schools have used it for professional development. We’ve been invited to different conferences to present; we’ve shared it at bookstores, schools, and academic conferences. We have interacted with a lot of teachers who said that it’s been really useful in terms of the strategies.
We recently presented at a conference in New York that was for educators of newcomers from around the country, and a bunch of them were saying that they were going to implement these ideas and some of them have written to us and talked about how they have adapted the ideas in their own schools. That’s been really rewarding to see. And we’ve heard that people have used it in teacher education classes that they’re teaching. We see a lot of people accessing the companion site for the book as well.
So I know that the book is geared towards K-12 contexts, but are there ways that you could see these concepts implemented at USF?
Definitely. One of my favorite examples is in the family engagement chapter of something that Oakland International High School does, which is the school that I started doing research at in 2014, and is the alma mater of one of the co-authors, Gaby Martinez, who is also a staff member at USF.
Oakland International does something called community walks. They have a professional development day where the kids are not at school, but different groups of students lead an entire day of activities aimed to help educators understand the different cultural groups at the school.
The staff and the teachers are the participants on the walk. And as a researcher at the school, I went on a few walks too. So for example, I went on the one that was planned by students from Guatemala and their families. We learned that a bunch of the kids who are from Guatemala, when school is not in session, or even sometimes when school is in session, will work as day laborers to make money. So we went to a gas station where they try to pick up work and learn about how scary that is to get in a car of a random person and not know exactly what’s going to happen . . . but [they] are desperate and need that money to make the rent or to get food.
Then we went to a church that was run by one of the student’s fathers who was the pastor. It was a church for the Indigenous Mam-speaking Guatemalan community, a lot of whom live in East Oakland. Then we went to a restaurant and ate Guatemalan food. So the community walks . . . are a day where you go to different venues of importance for that community and then you end up back at the school to debrief about how to serve those students better. I think that’s a really cool example of what the school is doing and what we could do more at USF. It’s harder here because students come from all over. But I do think with the requirement of community-engaged learning and getting out into the community, at least learning about the communities that surround us is great and figuring out ways to learn more about the students and where they come from is always a valuable way to engage in the classroom.
You already said you’re teaching, but is there anything you’re particularly excited to discuss with students?
This semester, I’m teaching a class on immigration and education and we’re talking about a lot of things that are in this book. There’s always so much with immigration to talk about. There’s the current border crisis and debates that are happening. There’s historical immigration and thinking about who had an easy time getting to this country and who didn’t. I was just listening to the radio this morning and globally, there are similar issues. They were talking about an Oscar-nominated film about Senegalese immigrants who are trying to get to Italy and how many boats and migrants die en route to Europe. There’s just so many conversations to be had about migration from all those vantage points and where that intersects with education in schools.
I’d now like to turn to your other recent work, The World Yearbook of Education. Can you describe this project for us?
This is an edited book entitled the World Yearbook of Education 2023: Racialization and Educational Inequality in Global Perspective that came out about a year ago. The other book had a lot of contributing authors, but it had a cohesive conceptualization by us from the beginning to the end. Whereas the World Yearbook of Education is a book series that has been around since the mid-1960s in the field of International comparative education. This book series started as a way to focus on a topic every year and then have different contributors from around the world offer examples on that topic for that year. Previous topics have been on the expansion of schooling for formerly colonized countries or governance or funding or participation or girls’ schooling.
Different authors from around the world would contribute ideas in their chapters. A couple of years ago, the editors who ran the series, in light of George Floyd and all the “racial reckoning,” realized that there had never been a volume of the World Yearbook of Education on race, racism and racialization around the world as it pertains to education.
So they asked me and a professor who teaches at UC Berkeley to co-edit a volume. We curated about 35 authors in total that contributed to the book and the chapters include topics such as race, racialization and social movements in Brazil, affirmative action in the U.S., Brazil, and India, the Black Lives Matter at School movement in the U.S., and the racialization of refugees. It’s meant to be a first volume that demonstrates the importance of this topic for the field of international and comparative education and lays out some questions that people could use as a way to further develop research in this area. It was more definitely in the scholarly realm and it’s not going to be picked up by teachers like the other book, but it was a way to mark this topic as important for scholars and it is important that the series acknowledges this topic. We hope that students will orient their research and develop this area of scholarship in the future.
Please tell us about the open access journal you started and run yourself.
Actually, CRASE gets credit for this because I got to know Shawn Calhoun from the library during committee meetings for the first advisory committee that formed CRASE. At the time, I had just come to USF to direct this new master’s program that was starting in our department on human rights education. And at that time, there was no academic journal in the field for people to publish research on human rights education. So people would have to submit to other journals and the academic reviewers would often say, “What is this field? Why are you talking about it?” It was just hard for people to get their work in this field published. I had been thinking it would be great to have a journal, especially an online, open-access one so the work wouldn’t be behind a paywall. I had started investigating open access journals and all I could find online were journals where the person submitting has to pay and the fee subsidizes the platform to allow you on it. I was in this conundrum thinking, if you’re sitting in, say the Congo, and you have to pay $5 USD to submit an article that may or may not get accepted, that doesn’t seem to make any sense.
I think I just happened to mention it to Shawn in passing, maybe chatting before a meeting, and he told me that Gleeson Library hosts open access journals. I had no idea. And then he connected me to the person at Gleeson who had been hired to be in charge of open access journals hosted on the platform. We were the second journal that the library launched, the International Journal of Human Rights Education, and we’ve been around since 2017. We have an issue that comes out every year that’s peer-reviewed, online, and open-access. It’s academically rigorous, but open access and online for anyone in the world to download our articles and we’re about to publish Volume Eight. Since 2017, contributions to the journal have been downloaded more than 60,000 times from 186 countries from 2,992 distinct institutions.
When you look at the map here on our journal site, it will show you all the places that have downloaded the journal. It’s kind of cool because usually when you think of academic scholarship, often you only see people in the Global North able to access it, but our journal is reaching people all over the world.
I wouldn’t have known about this program had I not been on the CRASE advisory board and had that offhand conversation with Shawn. We’ve had a few special issues that are curated around a theme (like Indigenous women and human rights education or human rights education and Black liberation), but other than that, it’s just been word of mouth in terms of how people learn about our journal. We don’t have any budget. It’s a bunch of volunteer doctoral students and me engaging in this labor of love every year and putting together the issues.
Wow, that’s amazing! Lastly, are there any upcoming projects on the horizon?
We’re working on Volume Eight of the journal and it’s always a slog to get the new issue out. We’ve got six articles, four commentary pieces, and five book reviews coming out. Both of the books we talked about earlier came out at the same time last year, in 2023, so I’m still being invited to do a lot of talks, presentations, and teacher professional development.
During the COVID shutdown time, my kiddo was schooling from home and we were able to get a glimpse into his schoolwork and curriculum. He was in first and second grade at that time. His teacher was teaching the class about the origin of kites from China, and I was thinking about how in India, where my family is from, we have kite-flying festivals, and I just went down a rabbit hole learning about the origin and use of kites around the world. I drafted a children’s book manuscript about it and got a lot of rejections, and rewrote the book probably ten times. It was finally acquired last year by Bloomsbury children’s publishing, and I’m working on final edits right now. The book that will come out in 2025 is called “A Year of Kites” and it talks about kite traditions from around the world. I’m excited about taking messages of peace, human rights, and global understanding to younger audiences with this project.
Brian Komei Dempster in Conversation with Ifeoma Nzerem, Coordinator for Anti-racism, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Faculty Excellence
When did you realize you had a passion for writing?
In my formative years, when I was quite young, my parents signed me up for writing classes. I remember writing a story when I was around preschool age; I personified a rock, and its name was Loafer. That is my first memory of loving creativity, loving writing, and feeling the power to create. I found my literary passion as an undergraduate at the University of Washington. I was taking an Asian American studies course learning about Japanese American wartime incarceration. I was taken aback that this was really the first time I’d heard of this historical event. I remember going home that day and asking my mom, “Did you know about the camps? Were you in the camps?” She said that, since she was a child back then, she couldn’t remember the experience, and, as a result, there was not much to say. But I discovered a deeper psychological layer when I tried to ask my aunts and uncles who could remember these events: some were willing to speak about their experiences while others were reluctant to do so.
I became obsessed with the idea of writing about the Japanese American incarceration–not just the event, but the silences, the withholding, the ways in which that was a form of protection for the younger generation. I found that the older generation was trying to protect us and not hurt us by passing down that trauma. But, at the same time, many of us wanted to know that story and wanted to give voice to what had happened to them, because their imprisonment was an injustice. So, as an undergraduate, I wrote a lot about this subject, and these themes informed my first book of poems, Topaz.
How do you feel like that work has led you to USF in any way, or how did you end up here?
I was hired as an adjunct in 2001 into what is now known as the Department of Rhetoric and Language. I had a lot of friends who worked at USF and talked about its mission of social justice, honoring diversity, and also supporting the work of artists and scholars who give voice to marginalized communities and stories that need to be heard in the culture. At the time, I was a caretaker of my deceased grandfather’s Buddhist church in San Francisco’s Japantown, which was only a 5-10 minute drive to USF. And I was in this church finishing my first book and teaching community-based courses at the cultural center down the street. I wanted to be able to further my academic career, and I was excited to join USF and then later be hired as a full-time faculty member in 2002. In my 20 plus years with USF, I’ve taught rhetoric and language, creative writing, Asian Pacific American literature, and graduate courses in the Asia Pacific Studies program. All the while I have been working on poetry, and one thing I love about USF is that it really supports the work in a tangible way. For example, I had faculty development fund support and a sabbatical in 2017. Beyond that, the moral and personal support that administrators and colleagues have provided has been amazing.
How has winning the Guggenheim Fellowship affected your writing?
My fellowship period started in July, so I’m early on, but I can already feel the impact. I understand that there are several layers to the process. I would say the first layer is the acknowledgment of getting the recognition. It’s a stunning, humbling, affirmative experience, and processing that initially came with surprise and then the gratitude and acceptance. It’s an acknowledgement that my past work has value. Now that I’ve moved through that stage, I am ready to focus on writing. The opportunity gives me what I would call a healthy accountability, because I’m now a part of the history that exists for the Guggenheim Fellowship. I look at this list of people and see what they’ve accomplished and feel like I have a responsibility not only to my own artistic consciousness but also to the collective consciousness of what it means to be part of the circle. My father was a Guggenheim fellow in 1981 as a music composer, so there’s a father-son connection as well. The overall sense is hard to describe in just one way, but the fellowship has given me another form of motivation, confidence, and freedom.
I’m currently working on a third book in a trilogy. The manuscript can stand alone but is also meant to accompany the first two books. The first book, Topaz, is about the legacy and aftereffects of the Japanese American wartime incarceration legacy and how that relates to issues of race, gender, sexuality, and identity in a contemporary context. The second book, Seize, centers on my son Brendan, who’s 18 now. He’s a brave soul, and he’s been through a lot. In Seize, I present a father-son quest and explore how to navigate having a son with special needs–the emotional, psychological and everyday territory, the relational territory–and then connect that to other forms of seizure and incarceration historically and now.
The third book, currently titled Dust and Rain, focuses on tying together those threads and strands of the first two books, but the artistic challenge is to avoid repeating what I’ve done before and to find how to advance the work. There isn’t a singular theme in mind at this time. It’s more like a symphony or orchestra weaving together the different elements of my previous works. I’ve found writing this book to be an ancestral and spiritual experience. I’ve gone back to the ancestors, like my grandfather, and this process has catalyzed more lyricism in this book than the previous two. I describe the work as a lotus sutra for the 21st century.
What events have evolved your writing strategy or writing focus over time?
I wouldn’t call forth a singular event, but what’s been most profound for me is the evolution of my son and his growth. Now that he’s 18, my poems no longer gravitate towards emergency crisis situations like going to the ER or us managing his seizures. His and our situation feels more nuanced, subtle, and complex as, fortunately, he doesn’t have as many of these medical events. He’s evolving, and it’s been a journey trying to write about my relationship with this human being, who is still nonverbal, as he goes through the frustrating experiences of puberty that he can not fully convey. At the same time, he expresses more love and more connection with us. So there’s a beauty and tenderness to his growth. There’s also a challenge of looking to the future and thinking, 10 years or 20 years from now, what does his life look like? How long can he stay with us or live in this home? Because there’s a large part of us that never wants to let him go. So, as we witness his transformation, we do our best to be observant and in tune with his evolution, because these are not things that we can talk with him about. He understands a lot of language, but he’s unable to express himself in words. So instead, we observe and communicate with him through eye contact and body language.
What are you looking to next?
I’m working on various things. I’m energized about this epic poem in the current manuscript that my writing partner has encouraged me to dive deeper into. This could eventually be split into many individual poems, so I’m interested to see what the piece will end up becoming. I’m looking forward to pushing the boundaries of theme, content, and artistic approach as far as I can. In the first two books, a coherent subject and theme anchored the narrative throughout. The through line of this third book is more spiritual–a reconciliation of past and present, of our many identities and selves; a holistic exploration of the world here and the world out there and ancestry and the future. It feels like there are several overlapping circles rather than a linear connection. I remember Dean Rader, a Guggenheim fellow and poet at USF, described his fellowship project as a Venn diagram, and that was helpful to think about. I want to see how many things I can connect and reconnect. I’d like to explore global and local connections, events that I haven’t written about and events that are personal to me. I think it was James Joyce who said, “In the particular is contained the universal.” This is a simple idea but a profound one. I want to be as particular and concrete as I can at the literary level–to describe things fully and beautifully and with some kind of taste and elegance. At the same time, I want to reach out and find a level of transcendence that goes beyond the literal, creates new resonances and connections.
I’m also working on a nonfiction manuscript called Brendan’s Garden. The topics vary, but I think of the project as anecdotes or snapshots of life with Brendan. I’m excited to mainly focus on the poetry project and then write the nonfiction when the work emerges organically. My goal is to have a largely shaped manuscript of my third poetry book by the end of the Guggenheim period in June 2024.
William (Billy) Riggs, Associate Professor in the School of Management, recently published a book titled End of the Road: Reimaging the Street as the Heart of the City. The book brings together Prof. Riggs’ ideas and thought leadership in the areas of autonomy and smart transportation, housing, economics and urban development. Since 2016, under the aegis of the University of San Francisco, Prof. Riggs has also organized six conferences on “Autonomous Vehicles and the City”—conferences that have been critical in bringing together academics, the public sector (planners, engineers), the private sector (tech entrepreneurs), and philanthropists to consider how technology may shape future transportation modes and models in our cities.
In our conversation, Prof. Riggs talked about his recently published book, the conferences he has organized, and plans for future research.
Can you tell us about your recently published book – End of the Road: Reimagining the Street as the Heart of the City?
Basically, the book is something I worked on for 10 years. It explores how streets are at the heart of public space in the city, and that they are far more than something to just move people through the city. I was interested in streets as part of the social and cultural fabric of the city, and wanted to explore how streets can inject life into cities—jobs, housing, businesses, and so on. It is about thinking of all the ways we engage with streets other than movement. The book has case studies from all around the world: San Luis Obispo (U.S.), Utrecht (The Netherlands), Santiago (Chile).
One thing I reflect a lot in the book is about future kinds of mobility, future network-based approaches, and how streets will have to adapt to this new moment. With autonomous vehicles, transportation systems are evolving and the book addresses how the built environment and urban form need to adapt with this evolution.
Can you tell us about the conferences on mobility—Autonomous Vehicles and the City—that you have organized over the past six years?
The conference engages complementary thinking about cities and automation and what should cities look like in the future. My goal was to put USF at the center of this discussion on automation and technical innovation. How can USF advance policy and thinking about the public good within the spectrum of large cities, and advance goals of sustainability and social justice. In other words, how can USF innovate for the public good. In order to do so, we have to talk about housing, zoning, land use, spatial inequalities, and all that has to be discussed with transportation and an evolving dialogue about automation.
In the last conference we highlighted mobility, social justice, and access. There are people in the private sector who are interested in addressing social issues in tandem with their commercial interests, which is why we need the private sector, the public sector, and philanthropists to come to the table to tackle the future of mobility in San Francisco
I have now organized six conferences. We began in 2015 before I came to USF. Michael Boswell (from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo) and I had the idea of bringing people together to write about issues regarding automated vehicles and to stop writing about widening roads. We first penned an op-ed in the “autonomous futures” series of Planetizen, and this led to five or six thought pieces that made us realize we need a larger discussion.
As a result, we have now hosted a number of conversations. The mechanics of doing this involves core members of faculty from San Jose State, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and the Urbanism Next program at University of Oregon. I believe the idea of shaping the future must be greater than a single individual or a single institution, and I have had no expectation (or illusion) that the dialogue should last for forever; but as long it is relevant to the original intent, I think it can grow .
The conferences typically have 200 – 250 attendees every year in-person, in San Francisco, and with the livestream there have been upwards of 2000 people attending. We have had European colleagues asking questions and learning what is happening in the bay area. USF has thus become a powerful force in this dialogue.
How did you get into the field of transportation planning, city planning, and specifically Autonomous Vehicles (AV’s)?
I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. It was not an environment that planners would call “walkable.” For college, I went to Ball State University in Indiana to study architectural history, and I became interested in being able to walk and bike everywhere. I am also an athlete and very much enjoyed running in cities, and then, my senior year in college, I ruptured my Achilles tendon. As a result, I couldn’t walk, and that was when I realized my identity was so tied up with running and walking in cities.
I had plans to study and travel in Europe, but as I took time off because of my injury, I thought I might lose the ability to see cities on foot and this ended up being a pivotal point in my life and changed my life’s trajectory. I was able to travel to England, France and the Netherlands and got very interested in city planning, urban design, and aspects of how to design places for walking and biking. I later went to graduate school at the University of Louisville to study urban planning with a focus on transportation planning. After this I took a job with the U.S. Coast Guard in San Francisco for a few years, before going to UC Berkeley for my PhD in city and regional planning.
What made you come to USF?
San Francisco is a good example of urbanism. One can go out and study the city right through USF’s backdoor. When I was teaching at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, I had to bring students to Los Angeles or San Francisco to experience and observe city life and city form; things like parklets which were first coming up in San Francisco, adaptive reuse, transit hubs and so forth. So, I felt San Francisco was great for what I research and what I teach.
I also love the incredibly diverse student body at USF. In comparison to USF, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is very culturally diverse. I am love interacting with this diverse student body, to be on a journey that nurtures global citizens, and I believe USF is well situated for that journey.
Plans for future research?
I am continuing to work on transatlantic multinational policy for autonomous vehicles that function as shared assets and can operate within many urban contexts. Autonomous vehicles need to be seen as complementary to existing transit systems. And in thinking about this, one has to also consider global business models for automated transit systems.
How does one pay for the infrastructure to support these systems? Can community members pay directly to support and avail of these systems or even directly invest in them? Creatively thinking about these questions has led me to look into disaggregated and distributed financial models for automated transit in cities. Given all this, my scholarship seems to be taking a somewhat different turn. While in the past I was more focused on discovery, I am now thinking about adaptation and application of systems.
I also have a book project that will be published in 2024. It tells the story of how the rideshare revolution came about; what happened to taxis when Uber and Lyft showed up, and how much it changed our perspective on how we travel. Having a ride in our pockets did not exist before 2012 and this new form of transportation has had significant impacts on how we access transport “on-demand” but also on traffic patterns and labor in our cities. The book will tell some of that that story.
Tika Lamsal, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Language, has published a co-edited a new book (with Deepak Shimkhada, Iswari Pandey, and Santosh Khadka; Mandala Book Point, 2022).
We conceived this anthology of narratives in 2019 with the launch of a website, Nepal Memory Project. The website, which is still active today, was exclusively dedicated to collecting a broad range of essays that were eventually compiled under the title, Nepal, a Shangri-La? Narratives of Culture, Contact, and Memory.
While assembling this volume that has over four dozen contributors, and which focuses on micro-narratives about Nepal, we wondered about the power of memory, and its role in crafting narratives, as we try to make sense of our identity and belonging in an interconnected world. We also wondered about ideas that bring Nepalis and non-Nepalis together: how does the space—that Himalayan country—in both geo-political and cultural terms bind us together? Our starting point was to pose a series of questions to our contributors as we invited them to describe and think about the most salient experiences or memories that represented the country for them. We were interested in how those personal narratives related to the master narratives of the nation, i.e., how they echoed, contested, or resonated with the constructs promoted by the powers that be.
Going by the master narratives of Nepal, we see a careful selection of historically verifiable facts and some imagined ideals. For example, the country is the oldest nation-state in South Asia, as the Himalayan nation was never directly colonized. It is the birthplace of Gautama Buddha, and the land of the Himalayas – actually, the only country with eight of the ten highest mountains in the world. Nepal is also a country with a remarkable diversity of flora and fauna, peoples, traditions, and stupas or temples at virtually every step of the way. It is the home of the Gurkha soldiers whose stories of bravery are told and retold around the world. Untouched by outside influences until recently, it is the Shangri-La that we know of that could potentially function as an antidote to human despair borne off industrialization.
These are the attributes most frequently used to construct a grand narrative about the nation of Nepal, often coupled with the phrase sundar, shanta, bishal (beautiful, peaceful, great), which, as in the case of any nation-state, conveniently leaves out the details that undercut or challenge it. One way to explore the complexity of the lived nation and its memory would be to look back at the experience of various engagements in the space under discussion, engagements that could be as uniquely personal and intimate as growing up within it or as purposeful and strategic as traveling from outside to work, study/research or both. Our assumption has been that “re-membering” and writing about these experiences will not only reveal some complex stories about the nation but also provide specific insights into life, culture, community, citizenship, nation, labor, education, history, memory, mobility, and even (post-)modernity in the 21st century of global interconnectedness.
As this anthology shows, we have multiple Nepals within the geographical boundaries of the nation-state, as is the case with any multicultural, multilingual nation-state. Rephrasing Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy – especially their discussions of English identity—one could argue that it is reductive to discuss Nepali national identity or the forms of national belonging without taking into account the ways in which Nepali identity itself has often been defined through the exclusion of a range of “others” in terms of language and customs. By the same token, Nepali identity has been denied the rights and privileges of equality of recognition until recently in the country’s laws and constitutions. Even the notion of singular Nepalese identity becomes an oxymoron for some authors, such as Shabnam Koirala-Azad, Sonya Dios, and Khushbu Mishra (in this volume), who share their experiences of negotiating their Nepali identity as the “other” even while living within the geo-political space of Nepal. Their narratives challenge the dominant narratives of Nepal while other authors recount their negotiations from multiple locations, both from within and without Nepal’s geographical boundaries. This multi-locational, and multi-subjective challenge to a singular prescribed Nepali identity is the main goal of our anthology of narratives.
Please provide a brief overview of your research and/or creative work. You are welcome to focus on your most current work or, if you prefer, any particular work you’d like to highlight.
Please provide a brief overview of your research and/or creative work. You are welcome to focus on your most current work or, if you prefer, any particular work you’d like to highlight.
Please provide a brief overview of your research and/or creative work. You are welcome to focus on your most current work or, if you prefer, any particular work you’d like to highlight.
Please tell us a bit about yourself! How long have you been at USF, what do you teach, and what are your research interests? 
On Thursday, February 22, 2024, CRASE was proud to sponsor a lecture and conversation with 
