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Faculty Spotlight: William Riggs

Posted on by tssankalia

William (Billy) Riggs, Associate Professor in the School of Management, recently published a book titled End of the Road: Reimaging the Street as the Heart of the City. The book brings together Prof. Riggs’ ideas and thought leadership in the areas of autonomy and smart transportation, housing, economics and urban development. Since 2016, under the aegis of the University of San Francisco, Prof. Riggs has also organized six conferences on “Autonomous Vehicles and the City”—conferences that have been critical in bringing together academics, the public sector (planners, engineers), the private sector (tech entrepreneurs), and philanthropists to consider how technology may shape future transportation modes and models in our cities.

In our conversation, Prof. Riggs talked about his recently published book, the conferences he has organized, and plans for future research.

Can you tell us about your recently published book – End of the Road: Reimagining the Street as the Heart of the City?

 Basically, the book is something I worked on for 10 years. It explores how streets are at the heart of public space in the city, and that they are far more than something to just move people through the city. I was interested in streets as part of the social and cultural fabric of the city, and wanted to explore how streets can inject life into cities—jobs, housing, businesses, and so on. It is about thinking of all the ways we engage with streets other than movement. The book has case studies from all around the world: San Luis Obispo (U.S.), Utrecht (The Netherlands), Santiago (Chile).

One thing I reflect a lot in the book is about future kinds of mobility, future network-based approaches, and how streets will have to adapt to this new moment. With autonomous vehicles, transportation systems are evolving and the book addresses how the built environment and urban form need to adapt with this evolution.

Can you tell us about the conferences on mobility—Autonomous Vehicles and the City—that you have organized over the past six years?

The conference engages complementary thinking about cities and automation and what should cities look like in the future. My goal was to put USF at the center of this discussion on automation and technical innovation. How can USF advance policy and thinking about the public good within the spectrum of large cities, and advance goals of sustainability and social justice. In other words, how can USF innovate for the public good. In order to do so, we have to talk about housing, zoning, land use, spatial inequalities, and all that has to be discussed with transportation and an evolving dialogue about automation.

In the last conference we highlighted mobility, social justice, and access. There are people in the private sector who are interested in addressing social issues in tandem with their commercial interests, which is why we need the private sector, the public sector, and philanthropists to come to the table to tackle the future of mobility in San Francisco

I have now organized six conferences. We began in 2015 before I came to USF. Michael Boswell (from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo) and I had the idea of bringing people together to write about issues regarding automated vehicles and to stop writing about widening roads. We first penned an op-ed in the “autonomous futures” series of Planetizen, and this led to five or six thought pieces that made us realize we need a larger discussion.

As a result, we have now hosted a number of conversations. The mechanics of doing this involves core members of faculty from San Jose State, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and the Urbanism Next program at University of Oregon. I believe the idea of shaping the future must be greater than a single individual or a single institution, and I have had no expectation (or illusion) that the dialogue should last for forever;  but as long it is relevant to the original intent, I think it can grow .

The conferences typically have 200 – 250 attendees every year in-person, in San Francisco, and with the livestream there have been upwards of 2000 people attending. We have had European colleagues asking questions and learning what is happening in the bay area. USF has thus become a powerful force in this dialogue.

How did you get into the field of transportation planning, city planning, and specifically Autonomous Vehicles (AV’s)?

 I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. It was not an environment that planners would call “walkable.” For college, I went to Ball State University in Indiana to study architectural history, and I became interested in being able to walk and bike everywhere. I am also an athlete and very much enjoyed running in cities, and then, my senior year in college, I ruptured my Achilles tendon. As a result, I couldn’t walk, and that was when I realized my identity was so tied up with running and walking in cities.

I had plans to study and travel in Europe, but as I took time off because of my injury, I thought I might lose the ability to see cities on foot and this ended up being a pivotal point in my life and changed my life’s trajectory. I was able to travel to England, France and the Netherlands and got very interested in city planning, urban design, and aspects of how to design places for walking and biking. I later went to graduate school at the University of Louisville to study urban planning with a focus on transportation planning. After this I took a job with the U.S. Coast Guard in San Francisco for a few years, before going to UC Berkeley for my PhD in city and regional planning.

What made you come to USF?

San Francisco is a good example of urbanism. One can go out and study the city right through USF’s backdoor. When I was teaching at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, I had to bring students to Los Angeles or San Francisco to experience and observe city life and city form; things like parklets which were first coming up in San Francisco, adaptive reuse, transit hubs and so forth. So, I felt San Francisco was great for what I research and what I teach.

I also love the incredibly diverse student body at USF. In comparison to USF, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is very culturally diverse. I am love interacting with this diverse student body, to be on a journey that nurtures global citizens, and I believe USF is well situated for that journey.

Plans for future research?

 I am continuing to work on transatlantic multinational policy for autonomous vehicles that function as shared assets and can operate within many urban contexts.  Autonomous vehicles need to be seen as complementary to existing transit systems. And in thinking about this, one has to also consider global business models for automated transit systems.

How does one pay for the infrastructure to support these systems? Can community members pay directly to support and avail of these systems or even directly invest in them? Creatively thinking about these questions has led me to look into disaggregated and distributed financial models for automated transit in cities. Given all this, my scholarship seems to be taking a somewhat different turn. While in the past I was more focused on discovery, I am now thinking about adaptation and application of systems.

I also have a book project that will be published in 2024. It tells the story of how the rideshare revolution came about; what happened to taxis when Uber and Lyft showed up, and how much it changed our perspective on how we travel. Having a ride in our pockets did not exist before 2012 and this new form of transportation has had significant impacts on how we access transport “on-demand” but also  on traffic patterns and labor in our cities. The book will tell some of that that story.

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

Posted on by tssankalia

Tika Lamsal, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Language, has published a co-edited a new book (with Deepak Shimkhada, Iswari Pandey, and Santosh Khadka; Mandala Book Point, 2022).

by Tika Lamsal

We conceived this anthology of narratives in 2019 with the launch of a website, Nepal Memory Project. The website, which is still active today, was exclusively dedicated to collecting a broad range of essays that were eventually compiled under the title, Nepal, a Shangri-La? Narratives of Culture, Contact, and Memory.

While assembling this volume that has over four dozen contributors, and which focuses on micro-narratives about Nepal, we wondered about the power of memory, and its role in crafting narratives, as we try to make sense of our identity and belonging in an interconnected world. We also wondered about ideas that bring Nepalis and non-Nepalis together: how does the space—that Himalayan country—in both geo-political and cultural terms bind us together? Our starting point was to pose a series of questions to our contributors as we invited them to describe and think about the most salient experiences or memories that represented the country for them. We were interested in how those personal narratives related to the master narratives of the nation, i.e., how they echoed, contested, or resonated with the constructs promoted by the powers that be.

Going by the master narratives of Nepal, we see a careful selection of historically verifiable facts and some imagined ideals. For example, the country is the oldest nation-state in South Asia, as the Himalayan nation was never directly colonized. It is the birthplace of Gautama Buddha, and the land of the Himalayas – actually, the only country with eight of the ten highest mountains in the world. Nepal is also a country with a remarkable diversity of flora and fauna, peoples, traditions, and stupas or temples at virtually every step of the way. It is the home of the Gurkha soldiers whose stories of bravery are told and retold around the world. Untouched by outside influences until recently, it is the Shangri-La that we know of that could potentially function as an antidote to human despair borne off industrialization.

These are the attributes most frequently used to construct a grand narrative about the nation of Nepal, often coupled with the phrase sundar, shanta, bishal (beautiful, peaceful, great), which, as in the case of any nation-state, conveniently leaves out the details that undercut or challenge it. One way to explore the complexity of the lived nation and its memory would be to look back at the experience of various engagements in the space under discussion, engagements that could be as uniquely personal and intimate as growing up within it or as purposeful and strategic as traveling from outside to work, study/research or both. Our assumption has been that “re-membering” and writing about these experiences will not only reveal some complex stories about the nation but also provide specific insights into life, culture, community, citizenship, nation, labor, education, history, memory, mobility, and even (post-)modernity in the 21st century of global interconnectedness.

As this anthology shows, we have multiple Nepals within the geographical boundaries of the nation-state, as is the case with any multicultural, multilingual nation-state. Rephrasing Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy – especially their discussions of English identity—one could argue that it is reductive to discuss Nepali national identity or the forms of national belonging without taking into account the ways in which Nepali identity itself has often been defined through the exclusion of a range of “others” in terms of language and customs. By the same token, Nepali identity has been denied the rights and privileges of equality of recognition until recently in the country’s laws and constitutions. Even the notion of singular Nepalese identity becomes an oxymoron for some authors, such as Shabnam Koirala-Azad, Sonya Dios, and Khushbu Mishra (in this volume), who share their experiences of negotiating their Nepali identity as the “other” even while living within the geo-political space of Nepal. Their narratives challenge the dominant narratives of Nepal while other authors recount their negotiations from multiple locations, both from within and without Nepal’s geographical boundaries. This multi-locational, and multi-subjective challenge to a singular prescribed Nepali identity is the main goal of our anthology of narratives.

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

Posted on by tssankalia

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

 

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

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

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

Data Collection

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

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

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

Preliminary Findings

Emotional valence reflected in the counter-hate content on Twitter

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

Discrete emotions reflected in counter-hate content on Twitter

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

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

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

Next Steps and Implications

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

Teaching Social Justice: Critical Issues for the Intercultural Communication Classroom

Posted on by tssankalia

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

 

By Brandi Lawless

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Fearful News Traveled Slow on Twitter in Disinformation Campaigns

Posted on by Kirsten

By Violet Cheung

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

The lead author can be reached via email vcheung@usfca.edu

CRASE PechaKucha

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Celebrate USF Presenters

CelebrateUSF PechaKucha
Saturday, October 19, 11 a.m.–12 p.m.
Gleeson Library Monihan Atrium

PechaKucha Challenge and Happy Hour
Wednesday, September 25, 2019 3–5 p.m.
Lone Mountain 100 – Handlery Room

CRASE hosted two PechaKucha’s during Fall 2019—the PechaKucha Challenge and Happy Hour with 90 attendees and the Celebrate USF PechaKucha with over 230 attendees including students, alumni, faculty, staff, and leadership. PechaKucha is a presentation style in which the speaker talks about their work with 20 slides shown for 15 seconds each (5 minutes in total). The format keeps presentations concise and fast-paced and powers multiple-speaker PechaKucha Nights across the globe.

Our featured presenters included:

  • Liat Berdugo, College of Arts and Sciences, Art + Architecture
  • Brandon Brown, College of Arts and Sciences, Physics
  • Shawn Calhoun, Gleeson Library Geschke Center
  • Laura Chyu, School of Nursing and Health Professions, Health Professions
  • Candice Lynn Harrison, College of Arts and Sciences, History
  • Jeremy Kasdin, College of Arts and Sciences, Engineering
  • Shabnam Koirala-Azad, School of Education
  • Michelle Millar, School of Management, Hospitality Management
  • Michelle Travis, School of Law

CRASE Statistics and Methods Camp

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Qualitative Research Methods Session

Over 35 faculty members attended one or more workshops during the CRASE Statistics and Methods Camp.

Building and Sustaining a Research Program Using Mixed Methods

Designed for researchers at all stages of their careers and fields of research, this workshop focused on how to implement a mixed methods approach to creating research that is programmatic and generative. During the workshop, participants: (1) Honed in on their research priorities; (2) Created a storyboard of their research arc; (3) Learned different mixed methods designs and how they can be used in mapping career trajectory; and (4) Learned about multiple types of methods and make decisions on how and when to use them appropriately. This holistic approach to research methods helped augment faculty research programs and career trajectories.

Dr. Christine Yeh, Professor of Counseling Psychology at the School of Education, has taught mixed methods and completed numerous projects employing a sequential mixed methods design.

Qualitative Research Methods Refresher

This workshop focused on qualitative data analysis was designed for faculty who have collected (or are about to collect) qualitative data and are trying to figure out what to do next. The first half of the workshop covered popularly used data analysis methods such as grounded theory, thematic analysis, and discourse analysis. Participants did initial analysis using a “data session” model often used by discourse/conversation analysts (but really can be used by anyone doing qualitative coding). The second half of the workshop covered technologies for qualitative analysis with special emphasis on Dedoose: a cloud-based (and desktop) qualitative data analysis software that is reasonably priced and allows for team coding.

Dr. Evelyn Ho, Professor of Communication Studies, has taught qualitative research and led numerous interdisciplinary projects using qualitative methods.

Creating Surveys Using Qualtrics

This workshop covered how to get started in using Qualtrics, a software program that allows you to create surveys quickly and easily using both open and close ended types of questions. Qualtrics is more powerful than Google Forms and its menus allow you to create different questions and responses, score and recode data. With the click of a button you can see your results or download data for analysis in Excel, SPSS, etc. In this workshop, faculty spent time creating surveys according to their research needs.

Dr. Saera Khan, Professor of Psychology, has taught how to use Qualtrics for research to her undergraduates in her advanced research methods course and in her social cognition lab.

ANOVA and MANOVA Refresher

ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) and MANOVA (Multivariate Analysis of Variance) are statistical analyses frequently used in many disciplines of research. They allow researchers to compare meaningful group differences to reveal similarities and disparities exist among groups to inform policy, educational, and public health practices, to name a few. This workshop refreshed basic concepts of ANOVA and MANOVA and took participants step by step to gain familiarity with these statistical skills through SPSS.

Dr. Hsiu-Lan Cheng, Associate Professor in Counseling Psychology at the School of Education, has taught research methods and statistical analyses across multiple levels of graduate student courses.

No-Shame Revise and Resubmit Workshop

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Presenters show spreadsheet

This workshop, led by Erin Grinshteyn (Assistant Professor, School of Nursing and Health Professions) and Christine Yeh (CRASE Co-Director and Professor, School of Education), helped participants develop strategies for tackling manuscript revisions by sharing project management tools for tracking manuscripts and how to manage conflicting advice. Workshop facilitators walked participants through revision letter templates and provide tips for tackling the next revision in a no-shame, supportive environment.

Participants felt that the templates and tips were very helpful and that the presenters were very knowledgeable.

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

Posted on by craseadmin

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.