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Faculty Spotlight: Brian Komei Dempster

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Resonance and Connection

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.

Faculty Spotlight: William Riggs

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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.

Nepal, a Shangri-La? Narratives of Culture, Contact, and Memory

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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).

by Tika Lamsal

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.

Faculty Spotlight: Sergio De La Torre

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Sergio De La Torre, Associate Professor of Fine Arts in the Department of Art + Architecture at USF, was recently awarded the Art for Justice Fund grant for $100,000. The fund is focused on supporting and promoting art projects that take on the prison industrial complex in the United States. Awardees are nominated from a large pool of individual artists and artists’ collectives working in the United States. 

Prof. De La Torre was nominated for the remarkable work of his Sanctuary City Project, which investigates the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the implications of border arrests, and the emergence of private detention centers. Using art that includes print-making, banners, billboards, photography, and video, Prof. De La Torre’s goal is to reveal the hidden and not-so-hidden motivations behind the U.S. government’s punitive actions in the sphere of immigration and the space of the U.S – Mexico border. 

In our conversation, Prof. De La Torre talked about the award, his work, and future projects.  

Tell us how you received the award and your reaction on learning about it?

When I received the award, I got an email in March 2022 from a person saying that they were looking for Sergio De La Torre because he, that is I, had received an Art for Justice Fund award. At first, I thought this was a phishing email. Is this real? The email sender then said that if I don’t believe him, I should check my spam folder. I did, and there it was, in my USF email spam folder where it said I had received an award from the Art for Justice Fund in the amount of $100,000. I was absolutely elated! 

Going back, can you tell us how you got into art, or became an artist? 

That’s another funny story. I finished high school in Mexico when I was 17 years old. I was born in San Diego and so was an U.S. citizen living in Mexico. At 18, in Mexico, you have to decide which citizenship you are going to pick (back then, 1984, there was no dual citizenship) and so I picked the U.S. I never saw myself living in the United States and therefore was kind of surprised that I picked U.S. citizenship. I couldn’t continue studying in Mexico as a national but had to continue as a foreigner and with tuition very high, I didn’t go to school for three years. I had to then establish residency in the U.S., which is when I started working in San Diego. During this time, I took ESL classes, and got thoroughly bored. A friend of mine said, “study art because you don’t need to speak English.” And that’s how I got into photography, painting, design, drawing, and printmaking at the Southwestern College in Chula Vista. 

The art teachers there were part of a collective focused on “border art.” They organized art events – performances, dinner parties, conversations – and had branched out into these other forms in contrast to traditional drawing, painting, and sculpture. Back then, the border didn’t have a wall, it wasn’t militarized, and was far more fluid (that’s where most of the migration from other parts of South and Central America took place, through Tijuana). 

During the 1980s, I was not particularly drawn to “border art” or the kind of work my teachers were doing. I didn’t fully understand these forms of art practice and their implications. After coming to San Francisco in the early 90s—I came to study photography at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC)— acquiring some physical distance between myself and the border is what helped me understand my relationship to the border and the art practices around it. Later, I went and got an MFA in Fine Art at UC San Diego where I worked on my film MAQUILAPOLIS that examines the lives of factory workers at the U.S.-Mexico border. The film premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and was received very well. 

So, my becoming an artist, and my current practice, owes a lot to my early teachers who were practicing “border art’, in particular Liz Sisco.

What can you tell us about your art practice?

During my arts education, I came to the realization that museums and galleries were no longer at the center for the display and dissemination of art. There were other places that were far more vital for art. That realization changed my practice and made me focus more on process, research, interactions with audiences, talking to subjects, and so on. Subsequently, I turned these immersive and experiential practices into artwork. My work is indeed present in museums and galleries but understanding these processes and practices has informed my work. 

What projects are you working on and what are your plans for the future?

An immediate project is to finish a book for the Sanctuary City project. The book will include every phrase we have collected and every poster we have made – about 40 of them – that speak about immigration issues and sanctuary cities. The book will also include data about immigration policy and practice from 1989, when San Francisco became a sanctuary city, to the present. I also have new projects I am working on, in particular about “surveillance ankle monitors” and for that I am working with Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA) and the Dreamer Fund. My plan is to interview people that wear these monitors and understand the stigma as well as the emotional and psychological states they go through. I am envisioning an audio installation that expresses these feelings. 

Installation of Sanctuary City posters at the Palo Alto Art Center.

 

 

Affective Engagement in #StopAAPIHate on Social Media: The Role of Emotion in Driving Engagement for Counter-hate Content on Twitter

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Zifei Fay Chen (Communication Studies, CAS), June Y. Lee (Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Strategy, and International Business, SOM), Shan Wang (Data Science, CAS), Diane Woodbridge (Data Science, CAS)

 

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic in early 2020, the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities have experienced an uptick of anti-AAPI discrimination, racism, and hate incidents. These hate incidents range from individual acts of shunning, verbal harassment, and physical attacks, to civil rights violations including refusal of service and workplace discrimination. According to Stop AAPI Hate, a total of 10,905 anti-AAPI incidents were reported from March 19, 2020 to December 31, 2021, causing significant detrimental impact on AAPI persons’ mental health. Importantly, scholars and activists have noted that these anti-AAPI hate incidents are not only associated with the anti-AAPI rhetoric during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also have their historical roots of anti-AAPI discrimination and racism, such as the “perpetual foreigners” and “Yellow Peril” stigmas, as well as the “model minority” myth that was used to delegitimaze and silence concerns from the AAPI communities.  

To cope with racial trauma, many AAPI persons have turned to social media to view related content, share information, participate in online communities/forums, and join discussions. Besides being a coping tool, social media can  also be a tool to advocate for counter-hate messages and facilitate social movement.  Previous social media research has highlighted the role of emotion, where it was suggested that by engaging with emotion-carrying content on social media, people can better regulate their emotions and reconstruct their emotional episodes. In this Interdisciplinary Action Group project supported by CRASE, we set out to explore if and how emotion may drive engagement in counter-hate content on Twitter during the #StopAAPIHate movement. 

We drew insights from the emotion theories, social media engagement literature, and used machine learning and computational methods to analyze data. To delineate a more nuanced understanding, we focused on two types of frameworks in our categorization and analyses of emotion: (1) the valence approach where emotion was categorized into positive, negative, and neutral, and (2) the discrete approach where emotion was further categorized into joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. 

Data Collection

Using Twitter API for Academic Research, we collected tweets between January 1, 2020 to August 31, 2021. The retrieval search criteria included 1) tweets written in English and 2) tweets with at least one of the following hashtags: #StopAAPIhate, #StopAsianhate,  #IAmNotAVirus, #WashTheHate, #RacismIsAVirus, #IAmNotCovid19, #BeCool2Asians, and #HateIsAVirus, resulting in a total of 1,773,683 tweets. 

To identify sentiment (negative, positive, and neutral) and the existence of six discrete emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise) in the tweets, we used the RoBERTa model, the robustly optimized Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) Pre-training Approach. 

We then applied the developed models for sentiment/valence analysis and discrete emotion classification. Further, we developed a regression model and applied feature importance to understand the valence and discrete emotions affecting the level of engagement (likes, retweets, and replies) towards a tweet.

Preliminary Findings

Emotional valence reflected in the counter-hate content on Twitter

Among all tweets collected, about 22.7% were negative, 25.3% were positive, and 52% were neutral. In this analysis, one tweet may only include one valence. 

Discrete emotions reflected in counter-hate content on Twitter

Among the tweets collected, about 21.5% contained anger, 17.4% contained sadness, 11.9% contained joy, 5% contained disgust, 2.1% contained fear, and 1% contained surprise. In this analysis, a single tweet may include multiple emotions or no emotion. 

The impact of emotional valence and discrete emotions on social media engagement

Emotional valence was a moderate predictor of the number of favorites, retweets, and replies, along with other tweet features including hashtag counts, referencing another tweet, multimedia attachment, and replying to other users. For discrete emotions, the emotion of anger, sadness, and disgust were predictors of the number of favorites, retweets, and replies, along with other tweet features including hashtag count, referencing another tweet, multimedia attachment, and replying to other users. Particularly for replies, joy was also shown as a predictor in driving the volume of replies. 

Next Steps and Implications

The current stage of the project has demonstrated the features that drive engagement in counter-hate content on Twitter. For the next steps of the study, we will continue building models that inform the direction and magnitude of the effects specifically from each emotional valence and discrete emotion. Using these research insights, we hope to achieve a more in-depth and nuanced understanding of the effects from emotional valence and discrete emotions in driving further engagement in counter-hate content. And in order to achieve this engagement, we will provide greater empirical communication evidence from the large data set to further support the #StopAAPIHate movement on social media.

Faculty Spotlight: Annette Regan

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Annette K Regan is Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Community Public Health Practice Concentration in Orange County, CA

When did you realize you had a passion for epidemiology?

I didn’t know what epidemiology was until I was in my fourth year of psychology in undergrad. I was about to graduate, and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next. I was volunteering in a sleep lab, and one of my coworkers was talking about epidemiology. I started looking into it, and it sounded perfect for me. It was math plus health plus all these things I liked all in one field. On my first day in epidemiology class during my MPH at Emory I thought, “This is where I belong.” Epi is one of the best fields. We can tackle all of these different health problems and use data and data science to better understand important health problems and identify effective solutions. 

How did you end up at USF?

My family was transitioning back to the US from Australia, and we were looking for a place where our family could be happy and grow. My husband and I settled on southern CA – he works for the State Lands Commission (oil and gas guy) and fortunately USF was hiring for a MPH faculty in Orange County to extend their MPH program. Starting this MPH program in OC sounded really exciting. And our family is definitely settled here – we welcomed our son right before I started at USF!

Can you describe some of your recent work?

Right now I’m really busy with COVID-19 vaccine evaluation. I recently completed a series of papers on COVID-19 infection during pregnancy and how it affects the health of the mother and the infant.  I’ve just launched a large study looking at COVID-19 vaccine safety and effectiveness in mothers and babies. Another big study I’m working on in collaboration with Boston University is a preconception cohort study to examine vaccine exposure around the time of conception and whether it influences the risk of miscarriage. We recently published a paper showing that vaccination is not associated with fertility but that COVID-19 infection in the male partner could reduce one’s chances of getting pregnant. It might be my favorite paper I’ve worked on, because it’s the only research I’ve ever done that was mentioned on SNL! Anthony Fauci also talked about it to try to dispel these myths about the COVID-19 vaccine and fertility.  

I think it’s also important to acknowledge other impacts the COVID-19 pandemic has had beyond infection. In addition to examining the direct health impacts of COVID-19, I’m also currently leading a large cohort study on the mental and societal impacts of COVID-19 on pregnant individuals, their partners, and their babies. It’s been very meaningful to learn from parents about their experiences birthing and parenting during the pandemic.

What has it been like doing so much research on COVID and vaccines during this pandemic?

Interestingly, I didn’t originally want to do COVID-19 research because I knew everyone was going to be doing it. I supported some student work looking at the impact of COVID-19 on childhood vaccination, but felt like I didn’t want to take on COVID-19 research myself. It’s a tough field. Almost any project you start to draft up has already been published five times by the time you get started. But, I’ve been doing influenza research for so long, all of my influenza colleagues were entirely consumed by COVID-19 work, and I just knew I was going to have to start doing this work eventually. Just as I was coming back from maternity leave, the recommendations started to come out for COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy, so this was my sign that I could not continue to do the type of research that I do around respiratory diseases and vaccines and without including COVID-19. 

How do you bring the themes of your research to your courses at USF?

This past Fall, I offered a vaccine epidemiology course for the first time. It was a really fun course to teach and I think the students got a lot out of it. There has never been a better time to teach about vaccines than during a pandemic!

I also get a lot of students who are interested in doing research, so I have a few Research Assistants and volunteers who are helping with my cohort study. I bring in a lot of my own research as examples in my classes especially when teaching epidemiology methods. 

What are you planning on doing next?

Taking a nap. But seriously, what I really want to do is continue to grow this COVID-19 research area with pregnant individuals. They are a really high risk group, but they have the lowest vaccination rates. I want to use the results of my work to co-design interventions with communities to improve maternal immunization rates. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done to increase these vaccination rates. I also want to build more of a team and further mentor junior scientists to do this work. I really want to develop the next generation of scientists in this area. 

Teaching Social Justice: Critical Issues for the Intercultural Communication Classroom

Posted on by tssankalia

Brandi Lawless, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication Studies, has co-authored a new book with Yea-Wen Chen of San Diego State University.

 

By Brandi Lawless

The motivation for my new co-authored book is three-fold. First, Intercultural Communication is one of the top 3 most-offered communication classes across the country, often fulfilling Core/General Education requirements for cultural diversity. However, most instructors who teach the class are only taught how to teach Public Speaking (if they receive pedagogical training at all) and are not specifically taught intercultural communication, which is quite different. Second, some instructors are even handed the class because they look “intercultural,” which unfairly saddles instructors of color and international instructors with additional pedagogical burdens without having excellent resources with which to teach this class. Third, even for the most experienced and knowledgeable instructors, the intercultural communication classroom can be an emotionally and intellectually heavy place for many students and teachers, like other classes that also fulfill our Cultural Diversity (CD) requirement. Sensitive topics arise and students must face complex issues with intellectual curiosity and collegial respect. To navigate the precarious waters of intercultural communication, teachers need an intentional, proactive approach to foster meaningful discussion and learning.

After struggling to teach this type of course and navigate the difficult conversations in each class, my co-author and I created this book as a sort of pedagogical guide. Each chapter presents conceptual overviews, student activities, and problem-solving strategies for teaching intercultural communication. We work our way through eight categories of potential conflict, including: communicating power and privilege, community engagement in social justice, and assessing intercultural pedagogies for social justice. In addition to empirical studies and our own classroom experiences, our book features personal narratives of junior and senior intercultural communication teacher-scholars whose journeys will encourage and instruct readers towards more fulfilling teaching experiences. We wrote this book so that anyone could pick it up and have a stronger foundation for teaching these topics. It is well suited for new and continuing instructors of courses that teach about culture, diversity, and social justice (particularly Intercultural Communication) and for graduate students learning how to teach these topics.

I’m excited to use the principles of this book in my own teaching, more intentionally. I have yet to teach Intercultural Communication since the publication of the book, but have been rethinking the content and structure for the next time I teach the course. I’m anxious to hear feedback from others and to continue to grow in my pedagogical approach.