faculty spotlight

Faculty Spotlight: Susan Steinberg

Posted on by Kirsten

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.

Susan Steinberg photo

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.

Faculty Spotlight: Tim Redmond

Posted on by craseadmin

In 2013, Tim Redmond launched 48hills.org. During our conversation we discussed his project tracking evictions and how teaching affects his journalism.

Tim Redmond

How did you end up at USF?

I started in the Masters of Urban and Public Affairs program. I have been a journalist all my life. I was at the Bay Guardian for about 30 years, and I started 48hills.org, which is a digital daily newspaper. I’ve been writing about urban studies and urban issues my entire career, and at USF, I taught Urban Public Policy and then Economics of Social Justice in the Master’s in Urban and Public Affairs. The Media Studies Department was looking for someone to teach journalism, so now I teach—journalism, investigative reporting, American journalism ethics, civic media, and in the master’s program.

What research are you doing right now?

One of my master’s students and I are working on a major project that’s tracking evictions of longtime residents in the Mission and looking at who replaced them. We’re doing a socioeconomic, demographic, political and real estate study. We’ve chosen 14 buildings where there was an Ellis Act eviction, a no-fault eviction where the tenants are forced out so that the owner can flip the places.

We’re looking at who was living there, when they got evicted, where they went—a lot of them have had to leave town—and who moved in. This is all done through public records and through investigative techniques that I teach. We’re putting together a profile of the changing Mission, building by building, to show people the impact of the tech boom and the Ellis Act and that this wave of displacement has had on longtime San Franciscans.

Where did the research process start for this project?

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project looked at one building with a contested eviction. I thought, “Wow, that’s a great idea. Why don’t we do that for the entire Mission?” I’ve learned in investigative reporting that if you take on to bigger project, it never gets done. You need to take on a project that’s doable. We picked 14 buildings and analyzed building by building. That means going down to the assessor’s office and pulling all of the records on who owned the building, how long it’s been owned, who sold it, who bought the building, when it was flipped as condos, who those people are, and then go and knock on doors. A lot of the folks who move in have no idea that they’ve displaced a longtime resident. They’re just looking for a place to live. It’s doing a lot of public records work, research and phone work, and then knocking on doors.

I’m really interested in displacement and the economic impacts of displacement in San Francisco. A couple years ago, I did a big project with another reporter looking at how many of the new condo buildings in San Francisco are vacant. As many as 30% of the units appear to be unoccupied. We did that by using public records, by looking at the tax bills for each of those places, and looking to see if the tax bill went to the same residence. Most homeowners get their tax bill at their home. For 30% of the units, the property tax bill is going to New York or someplace else in California. Then you find that the person getting the tax bill owns six other houses in the state, and you get a sense that they’re not using this as a full-time residence.

How do you do these collaborative projects?

Sometimes freelance writers or researchers actively involved in political issues come to me. Some of it comes from activists and participants in the political process. Some of it comes from just noticing things.

When I started 48 Hills, I thought San Francisco as always needed to progressive daily newspaper back when I got into the business that would have required tens of millions of dollars for printing presses, so they’re expensive stuff. Now it’s a few hundred bucks for a designer and a WordPress template to get started. Rather than trying to make a profit off this, we just try to break even. This is community supported journalism. I like to think that we’re paving the way for that model. I also like to think that someone’s going to give us $5 million, and we’re going to hire a whole bunch more staff.

It’s a fairly small operation, but I don’t think you have to be a huge operation to have an impact on the community. We’re active in the community. It’s not just news, obviously. We do a lot of arts, culture, and entertainment. Democracy cannot survive without journalists, and local democracy cannot survive without local journalists.

How did you first become interested in journalism?

My first year of college, I walked into the student newspaper office and said, “Hey, I’d like to volunteer.” I ended up spending four years working in the student newspaper. By the time I graduated, I was editor and also learned that even a small publication can have a huge impact.

In 1978, the big issue on campus was university investments in businesses that did business in South Africa. This was the days of apartheid. Nelson Mandela was still in jail. Archbishop Tutu was calling on American institutions to divest from companies that did business in South Africa. I was wondering how much business Wesleyan does and how much of the portfolio is in companies doing business in South Africa. It’s a private university. It’s not public information, but we managed to get it. We did a big story on the front page listing all the investments in companies that did business in South Africa, raising all the questions, and talking about the divestment and the international anti-apartheid movement. Six weeks later, 200 students took over the president’s office. The New York Times was there, CBS, NBC, helicopters, the police. We had this little twice a week newspaper with 2,500 copies, and we had this impact.

I got out to San Francisco and started working for the Bay Guardian, which at that time was a relatively small weekly newspaper. I realized that you don’t have to be the New York Times have an impact on your community. Community journalism can have a huge impact. The Guardian grew from a circulation of 30,000 to 150,000, and we went from about 28 pages a week to about 170 pages a week. I was there through all of this growth and always kept in mind that this is community journalism with a goal of making this a better place for the people who live here.

I started off covering real estate development, tenant issues, gentrification, city planning, which became one of my key beats. I started realizing that the battleground over development in San Francisco was in thick environmental impact and economic impact reports that no one was reading. The planning commissioners weren’t reading them. The supervisors weren’t reading them, and the mayor clearly wasn’t reading them. Most daily newspaper reporters weren’t reading them because they had deadline in four hours.

I started looking into all of these government documents. When you have the data in front of you, and you can say this is the impact this project is going to have on the city—how many more cars it’s going to put on the streets, the impact on Muni, and the impact it’s going to have on water and sewer. You can just say to the decision makers, did you even know this? You’re approving this and they’re not paying for any of this? I’ve always been fascinated with data, and I’m very interested in discrepancies and knowledge missing from the political puzzle.

I call myself a political reporter, which means I write about politics, but I’m also a reporter who’s political. The politics of San Francisco, in many ways is the politics of land use and development, because that’s about who gets to live here and who doesn’t. Who lives here votes here.

What are you looking at next?

I want to write a book about how the baby boomer generation, my generation, lost faith in government and how that’s affected American politics.

My parents’ generation didn’t mind paying taxes because my parents saw government as the force that beat the Great Depression and won the World War One and World War Two. I just missed the Vietnam War. I was born in ’58, so I missed the draft by two years. The people I grew up with saw government as the force that wanted to send you to die in Vietnam and put you in jail for smoking pot. When Ronald Reagan said “Government is not the solution, government is the problem,” a lot of baby boomers said, “Yeah, you’re right.” In 1980, a majority of the people who subscribe to Rolling Stone magazine voted for Ronald Reagan.

Right now, the two fundamental issues facing humanity and civilization are economic inequality and climate change, and they’re completely linked. Those are problems that can only be solved with collective solutions, which requires government action. It requires new rules and regulations that companies have to follow. Economic inequality doesn’t happen on a voluntary basis. Philanthropy is not going to solve a problem that has to be done by government through taxation and redistribution. How do we convince the next generation that that’s worthwhile? I also want to turn my economics of social justice class into a book, but I don’t know if we’ll ever get around to that.

How does teaching inform your work as a journalist?

I am constantly interacting with the next generation of readers. I constantly think about how my students get their information and about how journalism is evolving. My students are full of great ideas.

One of the best ways to learn to be a better journalist and editor is to teach. I teach students clarity, how to write, how to write in a way that other people can understand, particularly in fields like economics. I try to teach that journalism is about making people understand things. Part of what I do in my economics and social justice class is trying to translate complex stuff into a form my students can understand. It’s always about making information clear for people.

Faculty Spotlight: Michelle Millar

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Michelle Millar lived in Las Vegas while working on her Ph.D. in Hospitality Administration. During our conversation, we discussed sustainability and greening in the hotel industry, the relationship between academia and industry, and her recent research.

Michelle Millar

How did you first become interested in sustainability?

I grew up conserving because we had to, which is the case for a lot of people, but I really began to focus on sustainability after I took a trip to Costa Rica and stayed in an ecolodge. I didn’t go with a research agenda, but I came away with a completely different perspective of what travel could be. Since the ecolodge was such a tiny place, I was able to meet other people from around the world. One couple was very conscientious about the environment and their impact on it, and they really struggled with the fact that they flew from England on a really long flight to get to this place that is so caring for our environment. That thought stuck with me.

What I quickly learned was that, in the hotel industry it is referred to as “greening” the industry, not ecotourism, which really implies only environmental awareness. Sustainability is bigger, however—it’s about the planet, it’s people, and also making a profit—yet very few people were approaching it that way in the hotel industry-related research. Sustainability is a concept that changes depending on who is giving you the definition. When I started my research in the greening part of sustainability, no one else was doing it. It’s evolved, fortunately, and has become more popular in our industry and in research

After that trip to Costa Rica, I started digging into the literature about ecotourism, but because the ecotourism world is so vast, I honed in on hotels and what they can do in terms of being green—what they can take from an ecolodge like the one I visited and bring to everyday hotel life. It started with what consumers want in a green hotel and a green hotel room. Do they want low-flow water shower heads and/or dispensers in the room instead of individual amenities? Do they want recycling? Do they care about whether the sheets are organic or bamboo? I ended up with a model that identified what consumers would be willing to stay in and pay for since there’s often an extra cost for a greener hotel—or at least there is a perception that there is an extra cost.

Describe your recent work.

I teach classes in the Hospitality Management program about managing meetings and events. I’ve written two papers about whether or not hospitality industry managers want students to learn about sustainability in college. The interest has grown exponentially in the past few years as colleges offer degrees in meeting and event management. I’m trying to understand what the industry wants from our students in terms of sustainability and if they even believe it’s a skill students should have. We can then report to schools that this is what the industry believes is important to know in terms of sustainability and keep our curriculum relevant.

What was it like switching from the hospitality industry over to academia?

I was a travel agent for sixteen years, and I came to a point where I was ready for a change and decided I would go get my Ph.D. I had a friend who was a professor who   told me to go for it, and if I didn’t like it, then I could do something different afterwards. I loved it, especially the teaching and would never have thought I would be going in this direction in my life. For me, it was a pretty easy transition going back to school, partly because I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but actually earning the Ph.D. was the hardest thing I had ever done.

I lived in Las Vegas for five years when I did my Ph.D., and the industry down there is effective at conserving for cost savings. For example, in Las Vegas, they recycle all water—the water you see in the fountains in Vegas comes from reclaimed water. They’re taking water from the laundry and cleaning it to a certain degree and putting it back to the fountains. You can’t drink it but you can use it. The gaming industry of Vegas uses less water than the entire community of Las Vegas because of water-saving measures. Their laundry facilities are state-of-the-art and use less power. Some properties have their own electrical co-generation plant or they have solar panels in the desert that they draw from. On the Vegas Strip, many of the larger properties have people in the back sorting trash. Another example of how the Las Vegas community attempts to conserve is through farming. There is a pig farm outside Las Vegas where all the food waste goes to feed the pigs. Then the farm sells the pigs back to the industry to use locally. All of these practices opened my eyes further to the role that sustainability can play in the industry—and it was Las Vegas!

When you initially started down this track, were you always very conscious that you wanted your research to be applicable to industry?

I did because the hospitality industry isn’t going to change the world in terms of research—it has to be applied—and that’s why it became important for me. Since I came from the industry, it was very important for me to have the connection between the two because industry doesn’t necessarily read our research journals, but I can share research with them via other avenues. It’s a good way for me to maintain the connection to industry.

I’m involved in industry associations such as the Green Meeting Industry Council. Being an educator on that committee allows me to share what we’re doing in academia and in hospitality and sustainability. The people in that association are executives or they own their own meeting/planning company, but they’re all in it because they care about the environment. An association such as the Club Managers Association of America is completely unrelated to sustainability, but being a part of it affords me the opportunity to talk to managers of golf clubs and country clubs about sustainability about what they can do and what they need from us in terms of research. Those are important avenues to reach the industry.

How do you bring your knowledge of industry and research into your courses?

The industry part is easy because students like to hear your experiences in it. So whoever you are, if you’ve worked and you teach, you can marry the two easily. For me, it’s more about sharing that I have a passion for sustainability. There aren’t just one or two lectures devoted to it, it’s infused throughout from Day 1. I can bring it into my classes and say that this is what I’ve found or this is what the industry believes you should know about sustainability.

Do students have a passion for learning more about these things, too?

Over the past seven years, the interest is rising. Students recognize the ethical side of this work. I have definitely seen a change with this generation—they do seem to care and they want to make choices that incorporate that ideal. San Francisco in particular is exceptional. Some of my students are from different parts of the U.S. and the world, and they understand that we’re uber-exposed to issues of sustainability here. It’s not the norm, however, and they recognize that when they go home they have the opportunity to educate others about these ideals.

What brought you to USF?

They had a job posting for a hospitality professor with a research focus on sustainability. It was very specific, and I felt it was written for me. All my friends who saw the posting told me I needed to apply. I grew up in Concord, California but lived in other parts of the U.S. for several years, so this job brought me back home.

I didn’t know about USF growing up, so even when I applied for the job, I didn’t know a lot about this campus. Reading about USF and teaching to the whole person resonated with me. When I came here for a pre-interview, I really hit it off with the Deans of the program and the faculty. All of that clicked together, and here I am today!

Faculty Spotlight: Rachel Brahinsky

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Rachel Brahinksy began her career as a Bay Area reporter. During our conversation, we talked about her research, historical geography, and how San Francisco has changed over the years.

Rachel Brahinsky

 

How did you first become interested in research?

Before I did my Ph.D., I was a journalist. I was always curious and wanted to find the stories that weren’t being told. Before that, in college, I took a lot of African American Literature classes, which opened up this narrative that was absolutely outside of the standard history that I had been taught. Experiences like that set me down the road of trying to find more of those stories. There’s a multiplicity of narratives and lives and relationships. The power dynamics at play, and how things are written, is really important.

How did you start with journalism?

I always wanted to write. When I was working on my undergraduate thesis my writing professor thought I was too political, and my politics professors wanted me to get away from the storytelling. I wanted both and thought both were possible. I went off and got an internship at The Valley Advocate, which is a lot like The Village Voice, The Bay Guardian, or City Paper, and did that for about a year. Then I came here for an internship at The Bay Guardian and was a reporter there for 5 years.

How did you transition from journalism to your Ph.D.?

I had repetitive strain in my arms from typing really fast all the time, which is what you do when you’re a reporter, so I went through a round of physical therapy to deal with that. I came out of that process a lot better physically but realized that it wasn’t sustainable for me to be at a desk in a stressed-out position all day long.

I wanted a different pace, and teaching was something I was always interested in. Ultimately, I was trained as a human/critical geographer. That does mean certain things about how I understand what matters and what to look for in research, but my work is very interdisciplinary. I bring history, urban planning, ethnic studies, African American studies, and a little bit of gender studies together in a geographical frame.

What are you working on now?

My primary book project evolved out of my dissertation, which was called “The Making and Unmaking of Southern San Francisco.” It was a story about Bayview Hunter’s Point, race, redevelopment, and industrial land use—and how all of those things fit together over the course of about 100 years, so it covers a long historical geography. I’m expanding that and the working title is Race in the City: A Story of Property. It’s a book about the way that race fits into those categories of property and ownership, how race and space make each other, and how urban change and urban development can help us understand both how race and racism are created and re-formed, and also how to deconstruct them. It’s a story of urban development and fights over social justice and urban planning.

I also have a collaborative book that is called A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s a social and political history of the Bay Area, mostly focused on social-movement histories in the form of a scholarly guidebook. We take you to lots of sites and tell stories about social movement histories that intersect with that place. It builds out of an urban field class that I teach at USF where we walk around different neighborhoods and I teach students about landscape theory and the history and politics of place.

Is there a story that really resonated with you?

When I was doing research on the Fillmore District and thinking about the intersecting displacement of African American and Japanese American communities, I came across this about this group of women in Bayview. People would say “If we had the Big Five around, things would be different—they knew what they were doing.” And I was like: what’s the Big Five? I ended up studying them—there were more than five of them, it turned out, and the people included in the group changed over time. It was an evolving organization. They were African American women who were struggling economically and financially in Bayview, and they saw what had happened in the Fillmore where twenty square blocks were razed to the ground by the redevelopment agency, with people displaced from their homes and businesses.

At the time, Bayview was covered with temporary war housing. It was never meant to be permanent, and about 20 years later it was falling apart. The redevelopment agency turned to Bayview and started making plans for clearance and development there. The Big Five went down to various meetings and said: “If you want to develop in Bayview, you have to come through us.” They persisted, and they became part of the redevelopment process. Bayview Hill was actually remade actually quite beautifully. The vision people have of Bayview now is distorted by time, but when housing was first remade on Bayview Hill with little cul-de-sacs, it was quaint and cute and welcoming. The streets are all named after these women, so you’ll see their names all around the hill: Eloise Westbrook, Marcelee Cashmere, etc.

But there was not really an economic development plan that came with the housing development plan, so Bayview continued to struggle, even though people were happy to be living in this brand-new housing. The end of the story is challenging, but there was this moment of about 15 years where community members were figuring out how to turn resources toward the community and learning how to work together to organize. There were challenges, but these women were what some people call street scholars, and they learned all the language of urban planning “setbacks” and “maximum heights.” They taught it to themselves and each other and they went down to the meetings and they said this is what we need in our neighborhood. And they kept doing it, and sometimes they would get hired. That gets complicated. Some people said they sold out because they were willing to become part of the agency, but what they won for the community was very significant. It was a small community effort where people learned from other neighborhoods and were really able to make a difference, for a moment.

How do you bring your research into the classroom?

My research shows up in the material through lectures, and sometimes a student will ask a very innocent question, which kind of sparks me to think, “I don’t know the answer and I need to go figure that out,” and it sends me down some new research paths. I find the teaching process really fun in that way. Ultimately, I want my students to leave with the capacity and curiosity to keep asking questions and to see that as an integral part of their lives.

Do you have a moment when a student asked you a question and it guided your research?

A couple of years ago I had students reading a book by Neil Smith, a classic book on gentrification. The question that came out was “what comes next after gentrification?”  In some ways it’s simple—of course we don’t know what’s next, but when you’re studying cycles of urban change, you need to think about the patterns of the past and what they may be turning in to, as we study them.  And there was something about the simplicity of that question that sent me down this research path, hoping to clarify the language I use when I teach about the changing city. There’s always something new to understand.

Faculty Spotlight: Julie Nice

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Before going to law school, Julie Nice worked as a domestic violence advocate. During our conversation, we discussed the importance of telling the stories behind cases, the interdisciplinary nature of poverty law, and how her students inspire her.

Julie Nice

How did you become interested in law?

When I was an undergraduate, I studied rhetoric at Northwestern, and I was fascinated by the power of words, the power of arguments, not just the process of persuasion, but also words as articulations of ideals and values. Law reflects and relies on the power of language. After all, the only way for courts to maintain legitimacy is to convey their reasoning in a way that is sufficiently persuasive to the public.

After my undergraduate education, I worked the overnight shift at a domestic violence shelter in inner city Chicago. I saw the inability to attack injustices without the credentials and credibility that come from knowing the language of the legal system. Nobody listened to me when I was a domestic violence advocate. My legal education enabled me to translate the stories of victims of domestic violence in a way that the system could understand. I always remind my students that you need to become proficient in the language of law, rights, and legal argumentation but you should never lose sight of the human story you’re trying to convey.

I represented mostly impoverished clients in Chicago, and I saw first-hand how the legal system completely and generally disregarded them.  I had so many clients that at the end of the hearing—before we knew if we had won or lost—often said, “Thank you for telling my story.” What mattered to them was that the system heard their story.  Just being heard by the system affirmed their dignity.

What are you working on now?

I’m comparing how the law regulates human sexuality and how the law regulates poverty and poor people.  Within constitutional law, the government must, at the minimum, have a rational basis for how it regulates us all, meaning the government’s means must be rationally related to serving some legitimate ends.  It usually takes some concerted effort by constitutional lawyers to teach legislators and judges to see the irrationality behind many of our cultural assumptions and prejudices.

We’ve made some progress in the past several decades in reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights in having legislation and judicial decisions that recognize that governmental policies regulating human sexuality have to at least be rational. If you’re going to ban same-sex marriage, what’s your reason, what are you trying to achieve? You need something that you can say the policy is at least rationally related to.  After twenty-five years of same-sex marriage litigation, it became clear that the government simply wasn’t able to defend the rationality of banning same-sex marriage.

At the same time, we’ve made almost no progress in getting legislators or judges to even think about whether the way we treat poor people is rationally based. The truth is that legislators and judges mostly think that whatever we do that denigrates or penalizes a person who is receiving welfare benefits might motivate them to go get a job, so they won’t be on welfare anymore. As this thinking goes, anything we do to poor people is rationally related to making them pull themselves up by their bootstraps and magically become not poor. This overarching ideology justifies our harsh and discriminatory treatment of poor people.

How do we change that narrative?

I have to say that I don’t really see much of a change happening, and one of the greatest disappointments for me is that I haven’t been more successful in helping to produce a meaningful dialogue about what economic conditions and system might be just. It is extremely difficult to get assumptions about class onto the radar screen and to get someone to see their own assumptions and examine whether these assumptions are rational.

The current cohort of undergrad and grad students are my inspiration because the inquiry and exploration I’m trying to do—both with my students and in my research—are speaking to the future, which really is in the hands of the people in the classrooms now. There is a glimmer of hope that this generation gets it more than prior generations have. It’s truly where I get my daily inspiration.

Are the discourses changing in poverty law?

In the late 1960’s, there was a spike of interest in how the law treated poor people, and a few poverty law textbooks were written. With the rise of conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s, however, these textbooks went out of print and poverty law was almost entirely extinguished in law schools.

When I started teaching at Northwestern law school in 1989, some students came to me and said, “We want to learn about poverty and law.” So I put together a set of teaching materials that were published as a new poverty law textbook. I am proud of helping to revive the field of poverty law, and there are now several textbooks and a lot of critical class scholars doing legal scholarship on issues of poverty law across the academy. Those young scholars also give me a lot of hope.

Those of us who do poverty law rely on people from various disciplines. I need economists and sociologists and political scientists and anthropologists. I use so much material from other disciplines to explain what is happening with regard to economic injustice right now. Then the question will be what do we want to do about economic injustice. We have to start by identifying the assumptions underlying our economic policies and considering whether those assumptions are rationally supported by data. But it takes political will to comit to conducting this analysis. It’s very much about politics.

Your students really do inspire you and give you hope. How do you bring this research and knowledge to them?

I work with each individual student on their interests and their career objectives and try to see how the student’s own interests and objectives intersect and interact with the subject matter. Whether they’re interested in intellectual property, tax law, estates and trust, family law, employment law, housing law, or criminal law—all of those things have implications related to economic justice. It takes a lot of one-on-one time, but I haven’t found any short cut that gets us to that genuinely engaged inquiry that creates educational magic.

I do find that real stories help to create that educational magic. I recently uncovered one family’s story behind the famous constitutional law case that established the precedent that courts do not have to look carefully at how the government treats poor people. In this case from 1970, Dandridge v. Williams, the United States Supreme Court said it wasn’t interested in hearing about how poor people might think they’re being treated in an unconstitutional way. The court basically said, “We’re hoping to keep these cases out of court; we really don’t want to hear them.” It’s a very famous case. The parents that brought this case were married parents of eight children, and the state of Maryland was giving their family of ten the same amount of welfare to live on as a family of two. The Supreme Court said the government’s policy might look harsh but it’s okay because it’s welfare and the states basically can do whatever they want to motivate families to get off welfare.

As part of this book project, we were getting the backstory of famous poverty law cases that were constitutionally based. The parents who brought this lawsuit had already died, but I found the grown children of that family, interviewed them, and discovered the real story of how that family had survived with their father and mother both disabled. The father took on work at a chicken farm and worked long hours when he was able, and he brought home chicken feet that the mother would use to create meals for this family of ten. The children regularly went without meals and without heat, but the parents somehow managed to keep the family together.  Unfortunately, you won’t find their story in the Supreme Court’s decision. The Court never grappled with the reality of this familiy’s struggle to survive. I was deeply affected by the family’s real story and thought it needed to be told.

I find that students are inspired by learning the real stories of people involved in Supreme Court cases. Most of the human aspect is long gone by the time the case has made its way all the way up to the Supreme Court, but students really connect with understanding how constitutional issues affect people’s lives. In the end, law is always about the human story.  How law affects our lives is what justice is all about.

Faculty Spotlight: Sadia Saeed

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Sadia Saeed is a historical sociologist who researches global inequalities. During our conversation, we discussed how growing up in Pakistan shaped her and how she brings her research into the classroom.  Her book Politics of Desecularization: Law and the Minority Question in Pakistan is now available.

Sadia Saeed

Thinking about your start, when did you become interested in global inequality?

I hail from Pakistan, which is where I first studied sociology and history as an undergrad. Many of these courses were quite explicitly organized around questions of global inequalities, and these questions have stayed with me since. Oftentimes when we talk about issues around nationalism or rights, it’s not put in the context of global inequalities. I think this is a serious omission because a lot of what is going on in the world today in supposedly domestic contexts can be explained, or at least further clarified, by taking the global dimension into account.

How does your research in sociology look at aspects of global inequality?

In my first book, I examined how inequalities are produced in a local national context by looking at the issue of religious minorities and their rights in Pakistan. As I concluded that project, I became interested in how domestic inequalities are justified, or at least tolerated, within systems of international law, how rights are articulated in international law, and how global inequalities shape how different people think about international law. Basically, I’m now trying to connect what happens domestically to global structures and vice versa.

What was the moment that first sparked your interest in really understanding global inequality?

When you come from the so-called developing world and study social sciences, you can never really escape the profound gaps that exist between the West and the rest of the world. Also, growing up in a place like Pakistan, you just know that there are global inequalities and that these are not natural, and it was household talk that IMF and World Bank and other such global institutions are run by Western countries. I remember many conversations around how the IMF was imposing things on Pakistan —collecting more taxes, cutting state expenditures—and the American military involvements in the region and their continuing effects also clearly pointed to other kinds of global inequalities.

What brought you to the United States to complete your Ph.D.?

America has some of the best universities in the world and some of the most dynamic researchers and scholars. It’s so diverse, and you can learn more here because there are better resources and better training.

What is your research process like when you’re exploring these topics?

For my first book, which just came out, my research process was very field-based. I spent a lot of time in Pakistan. It was very organic. I was interested in why and how the Pakistani state instituted laws which favor the dominant religious group of Sunni Muslims over others and why the states discriminates against particular minorities. How and why does the state make these decisions, especially when they run counter to values of equality that the state also claims to uphold?

I looked at newspapers to figure out the events that were happening at the time when people were making these decisions. I went and spoke to a lot of activists, government officials, and people who were part of the deliberations in making these policies. That was really eye opening because you understand the constraints with which state officials work.

Pakistan often makes policies against religious minorities because that is what the majority wants, or at least that is the justification the state gives. Oftentimes, proponents of discriminatory laws say that such laws are actually democratic because they are what the majority desires— they say that the will of the majority should be heard.

We tend to think that discrimination in places like Pakistan against religious minorities is a different beast than what you might see here in the United States, with respect to race, for example. But in Pakistan, as with everywhere else, there are also activists such as the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and a lot of dedicated lawyers and judges who push back against these policies. People write against policies in venues they think are safe. They talk against these laws when they think it is safe.

I could not have learned a lot of what I subsequently wrote about without doing a lot of research. In my book, I focused on both the people who made discriminatory laws and the people who pushed back, the constraints that both sides faced, and the constraints continued to be faced by activists and people trying to change these laws.

Tell us about your new project.

My second project is in the initial stages and looks at how minority rights are instituted in international organizations, particularly in the United Nations and the United Nations predecessor, which was the League of Nations. I’m looking at international laws surrounding minority rights—which countries and which groups of people or individuals have pushed for specific declarations, conventions, etc. I’m also interested in questions of resistance to international law, especially forms of resistance that are premised on arguments about global inequalities. I am also interested in looking at international laws against racial discrimination, those advocating for indigenous rights, and also the convention against genocide.

This is a tentative thought, but it also seems to me that not all minorities are treated equally when it comes to matters of international law. Some minorities figure more when it comes to drafting international laws and others are marginalized in the discourses surrounding minority rights. Some marginalized groups are invisible and others become very visible. Some genocides become internationally recognized whereas other genocides do not. Not all minorities and not all groups’ narratives and plights are equally important in international law, and this goes back to questions of domestic and global inequalities. Who makes these laws? Who are they supposed to protect? Which minorities get left out? What is the politics behind it all?

How does your research inform your teaching?

When I teach, I try to convey to students critical approaches to questions of global and domestic inequalities. I try to get students to understand the social issues that people in the rest of the world, that is, outside U.S. face. There is an idea that something happening in Pakistan can’t possibly help us think about what is happening here in the United States. It’s hard in this globalized world, but a world that also creates highly segmented and stratified communities, to really understand how things are connected. I try to bring in everything I work on and what’s dear to me in my research and translate that into my teaching. Students everywhere long to learn new things and they want to question and to be pushed, but often it means that you have to do it in creative ways. For me, this creative way is through literally thinking outside the box, that is, thinking beyond the U.S.

Are there specific moments when you see your students come to an understanding?

The first semester here I taught a course called Islam, Politics and Society, and when we began, people had very different perceptions of the relationship between Islam and politics. Some people were suspicious of religion and politics. Some people were more sympathetic to the idea that different cultures do things differently.

Over the course of this amazing semester, everybody still had different opinions but everyone was able to talk to each other and discuss the pros and cons of one position and the pros and cons of another position. I think everyone left the class knowing a little bit more about the issues that are at stake. I could see the students learning because I could see them talking to each other and really engage with other ways of thinking. This was just a fantastic course for me.

What brought you to USF?

The University of San Francisco was one of the really exciting places for me to interview at because the job ad was for global inequality, which is precisely what I work on. Also, USF has such a wonderful mission of social justice, and my work fits in really well with this university. And I loved my campus visit. I am still quite new here. This is my first year here.

Faculty Spotlight: Juliet Spencer

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Juliet Spencer’s research focuses on herpes viruses and the way they manipulate host immune responses. During our conversation, we discussed the support from her family, how she views herself as a mentor, and how she became interested in viruses and cells.

Juliet Spencer, Biology

 

What started your interest in biology and biotechnology?

I always had a love for learning and fantastic teachers along the way. I was always very interested in DNA and molecular biology—that attracted me to Worcester Polytechnic Institute. They had an actual program dedicated to biotechnology, and it was a dream of mine to learn about biology and how to use it in a more applied way—learning not just for the sake of learning but also for the sake of doing something with that.

Did your family encourage your focus in biology? Were your parents scientists?

My mom was a clerk, and my dad ran a bar. They didn’t exactly know the scientist thing, but they knew I was very interested in science and encouraged me every way they knew how. I really appreciate that—it was something very vague and unknown to them and yet they gave me all the support. I hope that I can do for my son, to be very open and supportive of whatever he chooses even if I don’t understand what it is.

How did your mentors shape you and how does your experience come into your teaching or your lab when you are mentoring students?

I’ve been fortunate to always have great women role models, and I think it is important for girls, as they’re coming into the field, to see what a female scientist looks like and what a female scientist does and to have someone to identify with.

I’m a firm believer in mentoring. I think mentoring isn’t just working with students and training them but opening doors career-wise or exposing them to ideas. I also encourage college students to be mentors to younger kids and show what it’s like to be a girl in college in the science field. A fourth grade class visited recently, and we do enrichment activities with middle school kids. When the women I’m mentoring are placed in the position of being a mentor, they take themselves more seriously and start to think of themselves as a scientist not just as a student. I really like the mentoring process moving forward and backwards.

Did anyone ever tell you, if you’re going to do all this work, why do research? Why not go to med school?

I probably told myself that (laughter). I definitely had a crisis while I was in grad school because I was using my research skills for things with only the potential to improve human health. I decided to become an EMT and rode around in the ambulance for about a week, which was enough to convince me that I made the right decision—it was research for me and not necessarily direct interaction with patients or being in the hospital. I explored that option, but I’m much better at the bench working with my cells and viruses.

After getting your PhD, you worked at a biotechnology company before going back to academia. Was there a specific experience that made you think I would rather be in academia?

Well the opposite actually. When I was in college, I identified with my academic advisor, who was a fantastic professor and mentor, and I thought, “This is the job that I want.” I always wanted an academic career, but I also realized that if my goal was really to use my research skills for improving human health, that’s a very applied thing. To learn more and to teach people how to do that, I should experience it myself, so the impetus for going into industry was to understand better how to translate basic science research into deliverables—products that actually help people. Now I’ve come full circle, and I’m doing research that I hope will be translatable into actual products and have a human health impact.

So how did you get interested specifically in viruses and cells? What focused your research in that direction?

For some people, Biology is a very visual science because it’s trees and animals, things that you can really see, and I became very interested in the parts that you can’t see. My interest in viruses is that there is this thing that you can’t see that can take over a cell and change its behavior—trying to understand how that happens and trying to visualize things that are at the limits of what we can visualize.

What are some ways that you try to convey your passion for what we can’t see to your students?

I ask them to draw pictures and describe things. Even though I’m a scientist—I will admit that I am probably the absolute worst artist in the world—to me everything is really visual. Even if it’s not a picture of the virus, it’s a picture of what do we think is happening—the virus is going into the cell, the cell explodes. There’s trying to visualize what’s going on and once we have a visual of what we think is going on, then drilling down and figuring out what could be causing it.

What projects are you currently working on?

We have a few different projects in the lab. The Avon Breast Cancer Study was a big one. For that one, we explored the possibility that a common virus, Human cytomegalovirus (CMV), may be useful as a biomarker or parts of the virus might be useful for indicating the onset of breast cancer.

Other projects have to do with the virus and the way it manipulates the host immune system. We examined different viral proteins and the way they affect immune cells, the way they affect signaling pathways in the body.

What is the role of your students in the lab? How do you lure them into research?

I’ve been really lucky. The research projects touch on topics that people can relate to—breast cancer, the immune system. I get a lot of interested students, and I try to ignite the student’s interest and keep them interested by reminding them to step back. I always tell them there’s two parts about doing science, and the easy part, even though it doesn’t seem easy when you’re learning it, is the sort of technical steps involved in the lab and the manipulations. Sometimes the harder part is understanding the big picture. Why are we sort of doing all these manipulations? What is our real purpose and goal?

I teach them to conduct experiments and be proficient in the lab and learn skills that will be useful if they go on to work in industry or go to graduate school, but I also try to keep them motivated and thinking about the big picture goals.

What do you see as your role as a researcher and a mentor and a teacher?

Cheerleader. I think of myself as a cheerleader in the sense that I try to be really supportive of my students. I convey to them that if things don’t work out the way we had hoped, they’re still learning. If things do work out, I am positive and encouraging—this is taking us one step forward on our journey of this greater goal—and I try to make them see where they fit into the big picture. Even if they have a tiny sliver of a project, it’s part of a greater plan in the lab for addressing this important question. With teaching, I remind students that this isn’t about memorizing for a test, it’s about learning skills and concepts that you can apply to solve real world problems.

What is the big picture that you have for your research with public health?

The area I’m most interested in right now is diagnostics—how can we detect disease earlier, what are the clues that there is an imbalance or process going on in the body. In this day and age of big data, how can we integrate all the information and have predictive value or early diagnostic values so that people have the best possible outcomes? Of course prevention is always a worthy goal, but being realistic, how can we bring that information to people earlier?

Why did you decided to come to USF?

I went to a small school where I was really fortunate to have great mentorship and personal interactions with the faculty and that made such a big impression on me, especially since I didn’t come from a family of professionals or scientists. When I came to interview at USF, I felt that this is the same type of environment—people here really care about students, and they’re dedicated to developing those relationships with the students and seeing them growing and succeed. That fits perfectly with my personal goals and mission in life.

Do you take some of those ideas from your own undergraduate experience and apply them now that you’re a professor?

Absolutely! That’s something I think back on—what were the things I really enjoyed about my undergraduate experience and try to give those opportunities to my students such as doing independent projects. I tell the students that we’re going to spend half the semester learning basic microbiology and microscope skills, and then the second half they are going to come up with a problem that they want to investigate and use these skills independently. I’m blown away by the awesome projects that they think about that would never cross my mind, so it’s really fun to nurture that and encourage them to think outside the box and think big.

Faculty Spotlight: Sonja Martin Poole

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Sonja Martin Poole’s research explores gamification and influencing behavior. During our conversation, we discussed her path to becoming a professor and how she navigates interdisciplinary research.

Sonya Poole
Sonya Martin Poole

When you started at the University of California Berkeley, were you focused on becoming an academic or did you consider going into business?

Even though I come from a long line of educators, I wasn’t focused on becoming an academic. My grandfather was a geography professor for many many years at Southern University in New Orleans, which is where I’m from, and my grandmother was an elementary school teacher. My mother is an elementary school teacher. I have an uncle and two aunts who are university professors. I wanted to do something different than everyone else in my family, so I initially went to college with the intent to be a lawyer. In the middle of freshman year, I decided that I wanted to go into business. However, I took microeconomics, one of the prerequisites of the business major, and said, “This is it. This is a new way of thinking. I love this.” I got a bachelor’s in economics and then later a master’s in public sector economics. I had no idea at the time what I would do with my economics training. I was just intrigued by it.

While I was in graduate school, I worked as a high school teacher in a public school. It was then that I started asking economic questions about educational institutions. I became interested in studying the ways in which education resources are distributed in our society and if there’s a way that we can develop educational systems that are more efficient. That’s what I studied in my Ph.D. program.

Somewhere along the way I then became intrigued by the ways that educational institutions strategically attracted students, maintained a student body, and communicated value. That’s a marketing question, so after my Ph.D., I did a post-doc in marketing.

Was it the experience in the classroom that made you want to change the world?

I really wanted to improve people’s lives, and I saw how educational systems can influence people’s beliefs, behaviors, and life trajectories. In graduate school, I wanted to study how we can improve these structures.

What work are you most proud of?

Right now, I’m looking at the ways in which games can influence people’s behavior. I first became interested in this topic when tracking devices for fitness came out like Fitbit. This device had a gamified aspect. Within the application, users can compete not only against themselves and their own progress but against others that you may or may not know. It presents an incentive to do more. I found myself drawn to this device and to the activity that the device personally encouraged me to participate in.

I then began to wonder if gamification can be used to influence other behaviors, ones that have a big impact on our environments and communities. Can we use it for getting people to recycle more, drive safer, or donate to charitable causes? What about using the tool to reduce or eliminate social problems such as racism, poverty, or disease? Can we get people to do things that they otherwise wouldn’t do just by making it fun? I am interested in the practice of influencing people to do things that are not only good for them, but also for society as a whole.

How does your research come into the classroom?

My students are the best people to run my ideas by because they’re honest, and they’ll give me hypotheses to test in my research. For that reason, I love dealing with students regularly because they bring fresher ideas to light.

A few years ago I developed a course called Marketing for Social Change. In this course we examine marketing strategies that can influence individual and collective behavior for social good, and while teaching this course, I identified my interest in gamification. Gamification was introduced as a possible means to encourage pro-social behavior and I got a sense from my students that it is worthy of further study.

Your work sounds very interdisciplinary. How do you navigate the different disciplines or how do you try to work between them or with them?

Economics is the basis of all that I do. It’s all about incentives, incentivizing behavior, and that is my foundation. When I was in my Ph.D. program, I got into educational policy with the idea that I was going to apply economics and economic decision-making tools to education policymaking. As a marketing professor, I now use behavioral economics to understand and explain consumer behavior. Marketing and education are both disciplines that are based on some other foundational discipline, such as psychology, sociology, or economics. We use the foundational disciplines to inform what we do in marketing and education. I tend to think like an economist.

How has being at USF impacted your research?

USF has been supportive of the kinds of things that I want to do. Every activity that I’ve been involved in has been not only encouraged but also supported through resources and collaborations and people wanting to help. I feel that spirit of helpfulness throughout everything that I’ve done here and almost every interaction at USF, and that includes writing retreats that are supported by the school to make sure that researchers get research completed and writing done.

USF also provides opportunities, such as the Ignatian Faculty Forum, to consider our role as professors, Ignatian values and mission, and how those things relate. The development opportunities help to shape my ideas around what I want to do in the classroom and in my research. In addition to that, I participate in different faith formation activities here at USF. They are particularly valuable for thinking people. I appreciate the opportunity to participate in those kinds of opportunities whether they be the Spiritual Exercises or silent retreats, or any other University Ministry activities. That’s really the unique aspect of being here at this University—finding out how your spirituality and your sense of self relate to your work. It’s very hard to separate that out—who you are spiritually and your vocation are intimately connected, or at least I believe they should be. I really appreciate those opportunities to think through and talk to other people about these ideas.

What brought you to USF?

I believe that the university mission is in line with my own personal mission. I came to USF because I wanted to be an agent of change. As long as the university continues to be about social justice and life-changing action, I will love being here.

Faculty Spotlight: Amy Gilgan

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Amy Gilgan works with students and faculty as a Gleeson Library reference librarian and education liaison. During our conversation, we discussed the issues she’s passionate about and how research shapes her teaching and activism.

Amy Gilgan

 

How did you end up at the University of San Francisco?

Initially, my background was in archives. I became interested in preserving queer culture while volunteering at GLBT Historical Society. As an archives intern, I processed collections on AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a direct action AIDS advocacy organization, and my internship lead to a grant funded position at the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Archives where I helped process the Kem Lee photograph collection. When the project concluded, I accepted a position as a librarian at an arts college in San Francisco. I did a lot of instruction there and discovered I have a passion for it. I also worked for a short period of time at City College of San Francisco as a reference librarian. When I was hired at USF as a reference and instructional librarian, I was excited to grow my teaching skills in an environment committed to social justice.

How did you first become interested in research?

I have always had an interest in science, art, and activism. Library science allows me to research across disciplines. I was drawn to the way librarians empower folks to learn about the world around them. Here at USF, I work primarily with students and faculty in the School of Education. It’s really rewarding to provide research support for folks invested in social change.

How did you first become interested in activism?

I grew up in a white working class community, and discovering the punk subculture was my gateway to activism. The subculture connected me to human rights organizations and the movement against neoliberal capitalism. Currently, I’m very interested in housing rights. I didn’t have a lot of resources growing up working class, but I never had to worry about not having a home. Moving to the Bay Area in 2003 really radicalized me around housing. I became more active around housing in 2008, when Proposition 98 threatened to overturn rent control in the state of California. Through political organizing, I learned a lot about the history of displacement in San Francisco. This isn’t a new narrative; working class communities of color have been facing displacement in the Bay Area for decades.

How does that play into your role here at USF?

One of the nice things about USF is the “Change the World from Here” emphasis on social justice. I really appreciate the opportunities to weave in my passion for community activism into the work that I do. In addition to supporting the research of faculty and students, I have created social justice resource guides to support the annual Critical Diversity Studies Forum and the Office of Diversity Engagement and Community Outreach. I strive to not only connect students to information but also grassroots community organizations.

What is your role with the School of Education?

As the liaison to the School of Education (SOE), I make sure that students and faculty have access to the resources they need for their research. I also provide library research instruction for classes, particularly when the students are working on literature reviews. If students or faculty need additional help, I meet one-on-one to help them formulate search strategies and use citation management tools, like Zotero or RefWorks. I learn so much about teaching and facilitation from activist educators.

What other projects have you learned a lot from working on them?

For four years, I taught a section of the Information Literacy Class for the Muscat Scholars Program, an immersion program for first generation college students. As an instructional librarian, I often do single class sessions where I see the students for 1-2 hours. With Muscat Scholars, I got to work with the students for two weeks. I love learning about their experiences and interests, and the students have taught me a lot about resilience and hope.

It sounds like you inhabit a lot of roles here at USF—you help with research, you’re teaching, you’re also active in the community. How do you define your role or do you define it all?

As a librarian, my primary focus us to help folks connect to resources. I strive to help students not only learn about social justice issues but also connect to community organizations engaged in the struggle.

How do these roles play into Open Access and educating faculty and students about resources?

When faculty publish in a proprietary journal, their work is often placed behind a paywall that not everyone can afford to access. Open access publishing can provide a way for faculty to build their professional portfolio while making their research freely available to a much broader audience. I encourage faculty to work with Charlotte Roh, our scholarly communications librarian, to explore open access options.

I work with a lot of teachers K-12 teachers in the School of Education. Some of the schools they work for cannot afford subscriptions to scholarly databases. There is so much information that their students can’t afford to access. It’s a big issue.

How do you bring your own personal research into those interactions when teaching?

I am very open about my housing rights activism. I talk about my own biases and how they can affect my ability to find and evaluate information. I also give personal examples of times when my assumptions lead me to believe misinformation. I want students to realize that critical thinking will not only help you write a better research paper but also help you when strategizing for social change.