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.
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.
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.
Marie-Claude Couture is an Associate Professor and Chair of Health Professions in the School of Nursing and Health Professions. Dr. Couture was recently awarded two large NIH grants to support her research on infectious disease prevention, substance use and violence and victimization. In collaboration with fellow USF faculty, Dr. Erin Grinshteyn, Dr. Couture was awarded a R15 in 2022 to support their project, “Determining the causal pathways of social and environmental predictors of high-risk alcohol drinking among college students.” These awards are highly competitive, with a success rate between 4-17% and are used to promote research opportunities at educational institutions that have not been previously major recipients of NIH support.The award provides $432,136 from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to the team over three years to support their research on the determinants of high-risk alcohol consumption among college students.
In our conversation, we talk with Dr. Couture about the research she plans to lead with support from this R15 award and her plans for future research at USF.
How long have you been at USF and what brought you here?
I arrived in 2013, coming from University of California, San Francisco as a postdoctoral fellow in HIV prevention research and global health. At the time, the Masters of Public Health (MPH) program was just launching, and I wanted the chance to teach more and help build this program from the ground up.
Prior to joining USF, I was an online instructor for a continuing education program at the Public Health Agency of Canada while completing my PhD at Université de Montréal. I taught a range of online epidemiology courses for healthcare professionals. There was a real need for this type of training during this time, due to the emerging SARS epidemic, which really affected Toronto, Canada in 2003. We had 361 cases in the city with a 9% death rate. It was clear at the start that many healthcare professionals were not well prepared to respond to this health emergency, and so there was a real need to teach epidemiology and basic public health courses for all healthcare professionals.
In addition to wanting more opportunities to teach, I was drawn to USF due to the attention the university pays to social justice. My HIV prevention research in global health often involves addressing health disparities and working with underserved communities, and this was important for continuing my research program.
Can you tell us about your research program and how it has evolved recently?
My research focuses on the intersection of substance use, violence and infectious disease transmission. Originally, my research career started with HIV prevention among marginalized and underserved populations, including drug users and sex workers. Since drug and alcohol use are major drivers of sexually transmitted infections, like HIV, my work naturally included these risk factors. As my HIV prevention work continued, I began detecting major overlaps with violence and victimization, particularly among sex workers. These issues intersect and represent my major interests and current research work.
I have always been interested in infectious diseases. I started in microbiology, with a Bachelor in Microbiology from Universite Laval, then continued with a Master in Biochemistry focusing on molecular biology from McGill University. When an opportunity presented itself to pursue my PhD in epidemiology at the University of Montreal with a team working in global health and HIV prevention, it seemed to really fit. I had the opportunity to conduct research and perform data collection in the field for my research projects with female sex workers and other vulnerable populations, including Cambodia, Thailand, Haiti, Ghana, Zambia, and Côte d’Ivoire. I have a lot of great stories from some of these crazy data collection experiences – come talk to me sometime about it!
Going forward, I plan to continue to look at the effect of victimization and violence on substance use and mental health which brought me to my current R15 work.
Can you tell us about your recent R15? What is an R15 and what work will you be doing with this award?
This grant is based on preliminary results that we got from a CRASE Interdisciplinary Action Group (IAG). In 2017, the IAG gave us a $300 award to address health post-Trump administration on mental health and substance use in college students. The title of the project was, “title was “Trumping fear: The impact of the new administration on fear and mental health sequelae among college students.” In collaboration with Drs. Erin Grinshteyn and Dellanira Garcia from the School of Nursing and Health Professions, we looked at different forms of fear (victimization, discrimination, deportation) during the Trump administration and their effects on mental health and substance use. From this small IAG award, we published 5 peer-reviewed articles and had 13 presentations at conferences. We also used the findings as preliminary results to secure our R15 from the National Institutes of Health NIH.
An R15 is a grant awarded by the NIH to support non-research universities and to mentor graduate students in research. Our NIH R15 is titled “Determining the causal pathways of social and environmental predictors of high-risk alcohol drinking among college students” and is $432,136 for 3 years. Dr. Erin Grinshteyn is a Co-PI on the project with me and this is a partnership with the GIS Spatial Analysis Lab in the College of Arts & Sciences.
Through this work, we hope to identify where, when, how, and with whom college students experience violence and victimization and how that impacts high risk alcohol drinking. Measuring behaviors and experiences is difficult, because they are subject to recall bias and other errors. One of the novel aspects of this project is that we are using ecological momentary assessment to follow students for 30 days and collect data on victimization and violence and alcohol use in real-time using a mobile app. Using the mobile app, we will also collect geospatial data to track where they are (e.g., what we call their “activity space”) and to identify their location when violence or victimization experiences and alcohol use happen. The GIS Spatial Analysis Lab will use the GPS coordinates from the app along with google street view to examine the environment and apply a scale to determine physical disorder, crimes, and other neighborhood-level disadvantages. This way we can connect neighborhood-level information on crime and physical disorder with substance use behavior and violence or victimization – thereby addressing structural and environmental issues through geographic information.
We’re excited to give USF graduate students the opportunity to gain research experience through this R15. We plan to involve students in the data collection and analyses for this project, who will help us implement some of our surveys.
What are your plans for the future?
Get more grants! Do more research! In the future, I’d really like to find more opportunities to collaborate with faculty across the university – both within our school and across other schools. I would like to share our expertise on geospatial ecological momentary assessment with other faculty interested to use this methodology for their projects. I value interdisciplinary collaboration and would like to find other topics and research areas to collaborate.
I’d also like to continue to progress my research program on substance abuse and mental health and bring in some aspects of COVID-19. Stemming from our R15-funded work, I’d also like to work toward securing future funding to continue to learn from our geospatial ecological momentary assessment findings and to develop interventions to address substance use among college students.
Richard Greggory Johnson III, professor of Public Administration and Policy in the School of Management, and chair of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at USF, recently co-edited a book titled Lessons in Social Equity: A Case Study Book, Birkdale Publishers, 2022. In conjunction with the book’s publication, Prof. Johnson planned and chaired the 21st Annual Social Equity Leadership Conference (SELC) that was hosted by USF and the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA). The conference was attended by over 1500 participants, and was organized by a team of over 25 people who worked hard to deliver a program that inspired, informed, and introduced various elements of social equity in public administration and public policy to attendees from numerous fields.
In our conversation, Prof. Johnson talked about his co-edited volume, the 21st Annual SELC conference, and his research interests.
Can you tell us about your recently published, co-edited volume?
The book is the first of its kind on social equity with case studies on how to teach classes on social equity in the field of public administration. The research, broadly speaking, is in the area of human rights, and takes into account issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity and disability. I have been interested in researching these areas for some time now; for instance, the question of “allyship,” and how this concept relates to social equity. The book also takes a global approach to social equity with case studies from places like India where we see many human rights infractions. In the book, we also examine the issue of women in the military and how equity plays out in that case; or, the question of how men are sexually abused in the military, which is a serious matter we don’t hear a great deal about. Other questions of pay scales and social equity, intersectionality, and gender inequality are also covered in the book. At the core of social equity is the idea of human rights, and that’s what we need to pay attention to.
Can you tell us about the conference you organized?
The 21st Annual Social Equity Leadership Conference (SELC) that was hosted by USF and the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), was a great success. In short, it was a fabulous conference. Given COVID-19 restrictions, it was a virtual conference with about 1500 people attending online, and 300 speakers. As conference chair, I made the decision early on that we would not be charging registration fees and this was a first for this conference. It will also go down in history as the second SELC conference hosted by a Catholic university, and on the West Coast for the second time. Years ago, we did not have social equity scholars and now we do have them; and, this is changing hiring practices in many different fields, including in academia where social equity is now being included in hiring practices.
How did you get into the field of public administration and public policy? And, how did you choose to become a social equity scholar?
My parents were civil rights workers. They were involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League. I got a chance to witness firsthand their activities in social movements. I attended an HBCU and that really helped me get to where I am. That said, I got into the fields of public administration and public policy by accident. My undergraduate education was in urban planning, and I had plans to go to law school or pursue a master’s in public administration. At the time, traditional programs in public administration had no focus on social equity and did not pay it much attention. Nonetheless, it was at the University of Vermont where I took up a tenure-track position that I became more aware of social equity and what it meant. I realized that this is what I have been interested in all along, and I had the good fortune that I could now research this area in greater depth. Over the past 20 years, from about 2003 until now, I have been researching areas of equal pay and how this relates to race, ethnicity, and gender in the field of public administration. I am now working on issues of disability in public administration. It has been a fruitful journey.
How did you come to USF?
I was a tenured associate professor at the University of Vermont. I had a home and a great life there. One of my colleagues, a USF professor who is now retired, approached me at a conference and asked if I would be interested in joining USF – because I would be in San Francisco. I took my colleague up on his offer—it was a free trip to San Francisco and an opportunity to get out of Vermont in the winter—and came to interview at USF. I got an offer to teach, and here I am 12 years later.
Research plans for the future?
I always have some book or article in my head. Currently, I am particularly interested in disability awareness and disability rights in the workplace under the umbrella of social equity. I am also drawn to researching intersex individuals in the workplace. There’s not much known on the subject because not so long-ago parents and/or physicians made individuals decide one way or the other, and what we are finding out is that as a child grows up it is quite likely that their gender is something else. I would like my research and work to have an impact globally. I see myself as a citizen of the world, I love to travel, and I am working on further internationalization of the masters in public administration (MPA) degree at USF. This relates to my research interest in cultural competence and intersectionality as they relate to the field of public administration.
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.
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.
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.
As a psychology professor with a specialization in mass emotion and public sentiment, I have conducted research on anger, fear and anxiety in the contexts of terrorist attacks, cyber insecurity, and the migrant crisis. In 2018, I was aware of the rising prominence of social media in shaping public opinions and the limited utility of traditional analytic tools on large datasets from social media. I owe a debt of gratitude to a workshop at CRASE for its guidance and inspiration on one of my research projects at USF. The recently published findings shed light on the affective strategies in foreign disinformation operations.
In Twitter’s first release of data on state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, Russian and Iranian troll farms posted a majority of their tweets in fearful and negative sentiments according to our research published by the American Psychological Association. Furthermore, each additional fearful word in a tweet was found to correspond with a drop in “Likes” and retweets. Negative tweets were disengaging as compared to positive (and even neutral) ones. Since the dataset contains users’ responses from the entire Twitter space to a large number of tweets, the results have a high degree of confidence.
Twitter’s data corpus contains roughly 4,000 accounts and over 10 million tweets by Russian and Iranian operatives. The study, published in Analysis of Social Issues and Public Policy, identified a majority of the tweets as retweets and therefore focused on a subset of about 1.5 million unique English tweets that originated from the fake accounts. These unique tweets were not sent uniformly throughout the entrenched information warfare that spanned from 2010 to 2018. Rather, a third of them were concentrated in the year prior to the 2016 US election.
The results contradicted the notion that “bad news travels fast,” as well as the burgeoning research on polarization, and even some well-established emotion theories. For example, the negative bias theory would assert that negatively framed information is disproportionately influential and salient compared to positive and neutral events. As such, negative tweets have the potential to engage the audience and spread on Twitter.
However, fear is a negative emotion in a class of its own. The functionalist approach to emotions, pioneered by Darwin, purports that fear’s adaptive function is to prompt a person to freeze, hide or run away – tendencies more akin to disengagement than engagement on social media. Fearful tweets are inherently negative and as a result both emotion undercurrents have to be considered. After all, the dataset contains a lot of negative tweets with a major of them employing fearful themes. When negativity and fear work in opposite directions, the effect of fear prevailed over that of negativity in this dataset.
Much of the media’s reporting on election interference stressed the foreign operatives’ strengths but failed to acknowledge the lack of sophistication in their strategies. Russia and Iran overinvested in fear mongering and undelivered in engagement. That said, the Russian disinformation operation seemed more nuanced than Iran’s. The Russian troll farm might be aware of the unpopularity of fear and only used the strategies at the critical moment. They spent from between early 2013 and late 2014 ingratiating themselves with upbeat tweets, only to revert to fear in time for the 2016 election. Iran’s campaign adhered to fear tactics throughout their accounts’ lifespan.
The rich data trove released by Twitter in late 2018 could have left me feeling overwhelmed if it were not for a workshop on statistical computing in R, offered by CRASE in the summer of 2018. It piqued my interest in big data analytics and I decided to learn more about it by taking a class at USF during my sabbatical in 2018-2019. The rest of my sabbatical was spent on analyzing Twitter’s data corpus with the help from student assistants at USF in psychology, computer science, and business. One of my student co-authors now works on big data in a tech company in the Bay Area. Another student co-author has just completed his Master’s degree at the University of Washington in Human Centered Design and Engineering. What I gleaned from this experience is that professional development, sabbatical, research projects and student outcomes do not have to be competing forces but forces to be marshalled to build synergy and purpose.
Citation of the Article: Cheung-Blunden V., Sonar, K. U., Zhou, E. A., & Tan, C. (2021). Foreign disinformation operation’s affective engagement: Valence versus discrete emotions as drivers of tweet popularity. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy (ASAP). Published online July 27, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1111/asap.12262
June Lee is an Assistant Professor in Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Strategy, and International Business at University of San Francisco’s School of Management, and recent recipient of the 2020 Emerging Scholar Award from the Women in the Academy of International Business. This award recognizes one female AIB junior scholar for her potential and high-quality research in international business and gender. Our conversation discusses her research interests and how she became a professor at USF.
Briefly describe your research and recent work. How did you first become interested in this topic?
Before I began my career in academia, I was working in financial services. During the global financial crisis in 2008, I noticed that entrepreneurship was withstanding the weight of the crisis; in fact, entrepreneurship was booming. So I became interested in the discipline academically, and decided to pursue graduate degrees at Stanford University where I studied entrepreneurship and innovation.
How have the themes or focuses of your research changed over time? Are the discourses changing in international entrepreneurship and gender?
In recent years, I became more interested in the international aspect of entrepreneurship. Everything is becoming global these days, and unsurprisingly, entrepreneurship is at the forefront of this phenomenon. This leads to interesting topics that we can study and observe. For instance, immigrant entrepreneurs that I interviewed were utilizing cross-border resources and networks, and their outcome and performance would vary greatly because of the institutional contexts that they were faced with. I also became interested in the journey undertaken by female immigrant entrepreneurs—how and why they were choosing to become entrepreneurs, and how their multi-faceted identity shaped the type of entrepreneurship activities that they were engaged in.
What research or work are you most proud of?
I am most proud of my recent publication on female transnational entrepreneurs. In this study, my co-author and I developed a qualitative case study of Korean American female entrepreneurship in the San Francisco Bay Area and explored the intersectionality dynamic of ethnicity and gender. My study establishes a specific ‘gendered’ trajectory of female transnational entrepreneurs whose entrepreneurial motives and performances are influenced and shaped by a number of different individual and structural factors (e.g., gender, family role, immigrant status, ethnic identity, and transnational networks and resources).
Lee, J. Y., & Lee, J. Y. (2020). Female Transnational Entrepreneurs (FTEs): A Case Study of Korean American Female Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Emerging Economies, 6(1), 67-83.
When you earned your PhD from Stanford University, were you focused on becoming an academic or did you consider another career?
My focus was to find an opportunity with which I could apply my knowledge, skills, and interests in the areas of entrepreneurship. In particular, an academic position that would allow me to engage in entrepreneurship research and education was compelling to me.
What brought you to USF?
I discovered this USF faculty position through a professional association to which I belong. I did like the proximity to San Francisco Bay Area, which is considered as the hub of entrepreneurship and innovation. In addition, it would allow me to leverage my existing network of entrepreneurs, investors, corporates, and other professionals in this area. Finally, I liked the balance of both teaching and research at USF and how the two could be aligned to inform each other.
What does the Emerging Scholar Award mean to you?
It was definitely a humbling experience to receive the 2020 Emerging Scholar Award from the Women in Academy of International Business. It motivates me to keep learning from more experienced scholars and senior researchers, and to make greater contributions to the field.
What are you looking at next?
I am working on numerous exciting research projects in the field of international and gender entrepreneurship, with faculty members at both USF and other institutions. For example, one study examines how female immigrant entrepreneurs utilize social media platforms in their entrepreneurship journey; another project assesses the impact of COVID-19 on the Silicon Valley entrepreneurship ecosystem.
USF Professor and English Department chair Susan Steinberg is the author of four books and recent recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship. Awarded on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, Professor Steinberg was chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants in the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s ninety-sixth competition. Our conversation discusses her writing achievements and plans for the future.
When did you realize you had a passion for writing?
I liked to write stories as a kid, and I kept diaries as a teenager, but I was always more interested in visual art—I went to art school and majored in painting. At the end of my junior year, I was injured in a car accident and couldn’t paint for months. During that time, I was writing a lot—they were mostly rants that I wrote in columns in a spiral notebook—and I continued to work on these after I was back in the studio. I gradually started taking the writing more seriously, and after graduating, I decided to take a few workshops and was encouraged by a teacher to pursue an MFA in fiction.
How did you end up at USF?
After grad school, I taught in a small town in western Missouri for two years. It was a great experience, but I wanted to live in a city again, so I applied for several teaching jobs and was most excited about USF.
How has winning a Guggenheim Fellowship impacted your writing?
The Guggenheim has coincided with the pandemic, and I haven’t fully benefitted from it yet. That said, I feel inspired just knowing the support is there, and I’ve been hard at work on a new project. Once we can travel again, I plan to do much of the writing in Paris and Rome.
Describe some of your recent work.
My most recently published book, Machine, is an experimental novel that follows a group of teenagers living in a beach town in a summer during which a girl drowns; the narrator is a girl who’s fixated on the night it happened. My previous book, Spectacle, is a collection of linked experimental short stories.
How have the themes of your writing evolved over time, and have recent events changed those?
I’m often convinced that we write one story for our entire lives; it just takes on new forms and details from piece to piece. Recently, I looked back at some things I wrote when I was a teenager, and I was amazed by how much it resembled the writing in my books, even formally. I often write about family dysfunction, relationships, gender, privilege, trauma, and loss. Recent personal events have shifted the themes even more, but recent global events haven’t contributed as much. It’s unlikely I’ll be writing about the pandemic or the election.
How do you bring these themes to your courses at USF?
I don’t intend to bring my own writing topics into class, though similar issues often appear in the work we’re discussing, whether it’s published or student work. My course topics are often on whatever I’m questioning at the time. Most recently I’ve taught courses on Point of View, Excess, and Literary Controversy, and next semester I’m teaching a course on Distance at the University of Iowa.
What are you looking at next?
I’m currently working on a novel which attempts to subvert the literary “trope” of the “missing girl.” It also explores perceptions of masculinity.
Please tell us a bit about yourself! How long have you been at USF, what do you teach, and what are your research interests? 
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