Following the recent publication of her monograph, Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing (Routledge/Ashgate, 2017), Associate Professor Kate Lusheck (Art History & Museum Studies) discussed the graphic art of the great, seventeenth-century painter, Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577-1640) in light of the historical and rhetorical concept of eloquence. In this large lecture style talk, Lusheck presented a close, case study approach, focusing in detail on how one Rubens drawing of Medea and her dead children powerfully demonstrates the artist’s interest in drawing together form and content through an unusually conscious approach to style and emulation. Cross-disciplinary in her concerns, Lusheck demonstrated how such spectacles of graphic eloquence, grounded in borrowing from ideas located in great texts and objects of the distant and recent past, highlight Rubens’s fascination with creating more conceptually robust models of design. She contends that in the end, such drawings reflect the inimitable ways of thinking of an erudite, humanist artist who loved to design as much in his mind as on paper.
Professor Tanu Sankalia discusses the history of Treasure Island and how earthquake risk, toxic contamination, and sea-level rise still imperil plans for large-scale, capital intensive, development on the island.
The man-made, low-lying, Treasure Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Photo copyright Barrie Rokeach 2017.
Few Bay Area residents are entirely aware of Treasure Island’s presence, and fewer still know its history: when it was built, how it has been used over the past decades, and what are plans for its future. Despite its very central location in the San Francisco Bay, this flat, low-lying, man-made island has remained at the periphery of most people’s local and geographical consciousness.
As an architect and urban planner, Treasure Island first caught my attention when plans for its redevelopment were unveiled in 2005. The project was promoted as a cutting-edge sustainable development, especially at a time in the early 2000s when sustainability had caught on rapidly among architecture and planning firms. Yet I was intrigued as to how a multi-billion dollar development that consumed great resources, required massive new infrastructure, and was proposed on what appeared to be a risky site (more about this later), could actually be sustainable.
Over the last eight years, my research on the planning and design history of the redevelopment project, together with contributions from a group of excellent scholars on a range of historic and contemporary issues concerning the island, has recently culminated in a co-edited book, Lynne Horiuchi and Tanu Sankalia, Eds., Urban Reinventions: San Francisco’s Treasure Island published by the University of Hawaii Press. While our work focuses on a single site and underscores its local significance, it also reaches out to topics of global importance such as the Pacific Rim, New Deal, world’s fairs, World War II, Cold War military industrial complex, nuclear contamination, sustainability, and eco-cities, among others. This research has also informed my teaching as I have been able to use Treasure Island as a case study in the urban planning and design course I teach in the Masters of Science in Environmental Management (MSEM) program at USF.
The Army Corps of Engineers built Treasure Island between 1936-1937 with New Deal money. It was constructed concurrently with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, to serve as San Francisco’s airport, at a time of major transportation infrastructure expansion. Between 1939-1940 the island hosted the Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE), which shifted the focus of world’s fairs as venues of science and industry to representations of international unity exemplified in the idea of a Pacific Rim interconnected through commerce and trade. World War II scuttled this utopian imagination, and in early 1942 Treasure Island was converted into an active naval base that cycled 4.5 million US soldiers on their way to and back from the Pacific theater of war. After World War II, Naval Station Treasure Island focused on training and distribution activities until it was officially closed in 1997. In 2011, the City and County of San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a redevelopment project for a new sustainable city of 19,000 residents, which critics and commentators see as an example of twenty-first century, “ecotopian” urbanism.
Underlying Treasure Island’s historical narrative, our research found that since its conception, the island has remained a contested site with federal and local agencies vying for its control. These agencies have recurrently shaped the physical character of the island (what we call urban reinventions) through ambitious projects like the airport, world’s fair, military base and now, eco-city. But despite these important historical lessons, which are crucial in understanding how cities and communities conceive projects, the material risks—earthquakes, toxic soil and rising seas—surrounding its latest grand vision are rather pressing.
Treasure Island was built on the shoals of the natural Yerba Buena Island from dredged bay mud filled into a trough enclosed by a sea wall made of large boulders. The shoals, which function as bedrock into which tall buildings must pierce their foundations, are deeper away from the island. Although most buildings in the proposed plan are clustered where the shoals are shallower, there is considerable infrastructure on parts of the island that geotechnical reports (produced in the first reuse plan of 1996) indicate to be unstable. Given the island’s proximity to some of the Bay Area’s largest earthquake faults, a significant tremor can cause the landfill to function like jelly.
Toxic soil remains a major concern on Treasure Island. The US Navy established a Damage Control School in 1947 during its tenure on the island to train naval personnel in decontamination procedures in the event of an atomic, chemical or biological attack. For training purposes they built a mock training ship—the USS Pandemonium—from scrap metal, which was periodically contaminated with cesium-137 and a diluted solution of radioactive bromine-82. In 1971, they dragged this mock ship from the northwest to the southeast of the island further spreading radioactive substances across the island. According to the Department of Toxic Substances Control, the state agency charged with monitoring toxic cleanup at Treasure Island, the island’s soils contain a long list of toxic chemical substances harmful to humans including plutonium and radium. Furthermore, the current Historical Radiological Assessment report that the Navy must produce to guide management and remediation of toxic soils states that the island’s soils simply cannot return to their pre-military state.
Almost twenty years after the redevelopment process for the island was initiated, we have greater awareness about climate change, global warming, and one of its major effects—sea level rise. Maps produced by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) and the San Francisco Public Press show Treasure Island and the edges of San Francisco Bay under threat from rising seas and storm surges. There are plans to raise the entire island and build a higher, stronger seawall to protect against this danger. Still there is little evidence—especially considering the example of Miami Beach, which is constantly inundated despite its massive seawalls and giant pumps—that such measures will actually succeed.
The Bay Area indeed needs more housing, which Treasure Island’s development could well deliver. There are also many good ideas such as manmade wetlands, urban agriculture and energy efficient buildings, in the redevelopment plans. But they well may be great ideas in the wrong place. Why jeopardize billions of dollars in development and risk the lives of almost twenty thousand residents on an unstable, contaminated, low-lying island site?
Looking back to the very construction of Treasure Island and its recurrent urban reinventions, I am reminded of the German writer W.G. Sebald’s prescient observation that “it is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.” It is in moments of vulnerability that governments, cities, and communities take on ambitious and, often, risky projects. In recognizing this risk, it still may not be too late to rethink the viability of development on Treasure Island.
CRASE will fund three proposals for the Fall 2017 Interdisciplinary Action Groups: Preservation in the Midst of Change.
Flint’s Legacy: Trusting Science and Pursuing Justice
Rachel Brahinsky, Urban and Public Affairs, College of Arts and Sciences
David Donahue, McCarthy Center for Public Service and The Common Good
Alice Kaswan, School of Law
Jack Lendvay, Environmental Science, College of Arts and Sciences
Thomas MacDonald, Environmental Science, College of Arts and Sciences
Teresa Moore, Media Studies, College of Arts and Sciences
Peter Novak, Performing Arts, College of Arts and Sciences, Lead
Jeffrey Paris, Environmental Studies, College of Arts and Sciences
J Michael Robertson, Media Studies, College of Arts and Sciences
David Silver, Environmental Studies, College of Arts and Sciences
Rebecca Seeman, Performing Arts, College of Arts and Sciences
Carol Spector, Gleeson Library | Geschke Center
We propose a series of events centered around the themes of environmental justice, water safety as a human right, and belief in science. Through a theatrical production, an educational symposium, and exhibits, we will educate the USF community about the realities of the water our community drinks, the water issues in greater California, and the water issues in towns like Flint, MI across the country.
Forum for Transnational Collaboration in the Arts
John Zarobell, International Studies, College of Arts and Sciences
Pedro Lange-Churion, Modern and Classical Languages, College of Arts and Sciences
Tanu Sankalia, Art and Architecture, College of Arts and Sciences
Sumer Seiki, Teacher Education, School of Education
The goal of the “Forum for Transnational Collaboration” is to bring together emerging voices from previously marginalized countries that are poised to become an essential part of the global conversation in contemporary art today. The relationship between art and globalization is seen by many experts as a one-way street in which powerful countries, their art institutions, and their artists, dominate a broadening sphere of cultural production. There is more than a grain of truth in that analysis, but this Forum aims to provide a platform for the development of a countervailing narrative.
The Preservation of the Human Dignity and Rights of the Trans Community
Daniela Domínguez, Counseling Psychology, School of Education
Jane Bleasdale, Leadership Studies, School of Education
Amie Dowling, Performing Arts, College of Arts and Sciences
Through the use of advocacy, activism, and a social justice framework, we will create an experiential, and creative space that will promote the idea that our society functions best when celebratory spaces and initiatives are inclusive of Trans individuals. Our exhibit will be grounded in intersectional practice, an appreciation for the preservation of Trans rights, and it will reflect a spirit of resistance to the reversal of progress. Our project, consisting of a photo exhibit and dramatic performance, aims to demonstrate that students, educators, administrators, and members of the San Francisco community, will not sit quietly when discrimination takes place against the Trans community. Through photography and staged readings, we will demonstrate the unique advantages of committing to the notion that all Trans individuals deserve equal rights, protection, and a satisfactory academic/professional/military career.
School of Nursing and Health Professions Mary Donnelly lived all of the world before she started working at the University of San Francisco. During our conversation, we discussed how working and living abroad informed her nursing and practice and how she approaches collaboration in research.
Mary Donnelly
How did you first start in the field of nursing?
When I was in high school and beginning to think about college and talked about my goals with my parents who were both public school educators, and they gave me a choice—this was back in the ‘60s—I could be a nurse or I could be a teacher. Trying as a teenager to find my own unique way, I chose to study nursing, in Villanova, Philadelphia, where I completed my undergraduate degree in nursing. While an undergraduate student, I became aware of the social factors, which created barriers to access to care. From that moment, I became aware of health disparities I wanted to be part of the solutions to increase access to healthcare. I worked with the Panthers and the Medical Committee for Human Rights. We provided sickle cell testing at health fairs in Philadelphia, PA and provided acute care and health promotion interventions to antiwar and anti-segregation demonstrators along the East Coast. I wanted to learn how health care could be utilized and provided beyond the walls of hospitals and clinics and I wanted to respond to the health concerns and needs of social activists working in urban areas.
I moved back to upstate New York soon after graduating from Villanova to work at a Community Health Center in Lackawanna. I worked with community health workers and made home visits to a unique population of Bethlehem Steel workers from around the world. Our Health Center treated people from Yemen, Puerto Rico, Mexico as well as Southern African Americans who had all come for the hope of better wages. I went back to school, attending State University of New York at Rochester while working. I graduated as an adult nurse practitioner, and became the first adult nurse practitioner in Erie County. I was still on a quest to learn how best to provide community health so I entered the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University to get my Masters of Public Health. My life has provided opportunities that were often unexpected. After marrying a Navy officer, I had the opportunity to learn about health care in Europe and Asia. I worked in Japan and Italy, and with the National Health Service in London. When my husband retired, we came back to the United States in 2005, and I continued my nurse practitioner practice and teaching at Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing.
How did working and living abroad inform your nursing and your practice?
Japan was so different, and I had to learn the language and culture to be successful. I was providing occupational health services through the Department of Defense, and many of my patients were Japanese. One of my patients did not pass the hearing test, so I could no longer qualify him to drive a forklift in the shipyard. A hearing deficit could be potentially harmful when driving. Soon after, all of his co-workers came to my office and said, “He’s got to work; what can we do?” I said that he needed a hearing aid, and while wearing the hearing aid, if he passed the hearing test, he could work. His work team bought him a hearing aid and brought him back to take the hearing test. It was a group effort. They cared for each other, worked together, and supported each other. This incident was crucial to my understanding of Japanese culture. Keeping the team together was important to achieve work goals. Each individual of that group was supported by the group’s efforts.
How do you approach interdisciplinary research?
Healthcare is so complex that we cannot live and work in silos, and we really need to reach out to all stakeholders involved in the provision of high- performing systems. Microsystem analysis utilizes a failure mode effect and analysis (FMEA) for potential risk analysis. I see FMEA as a reasonable and evidence-based approach to teach our students and to identify areas of research. We owe a debt a gratitude to W. Edwards Deming, an American statistician who is credited with the rise of Japan as a manufacturing nation, and with the invention of Total Quality Management (TQM). Deming went to Japan just after the War to help set up a census of the Japanese population. While he was there, he taught ‘statistical process control’ to Japanese engineers – a set of techniques, which allowed them to manufacture high-quality goods without expensive machinery. Deming insisted that we create a work culture, which would create a constancy of purpose towards improvement. This means we do not wait for failure or an error but analyze where potential benefits or efficiencies could occur. I believe this campus is unique because it fosters partnerships across disciplines. Here, I have the opportunity to work with someone in the School of Education, and we are able to collaborate on research.
What brought you to USF?
The USF is a perfect place for collaboration. For example, I needed help looking at reliability, so I approached a colleague and asked, “Will you help me with those statistics?” I also like to work in groups. Writing group members may motivate each other while providing various skills and qualities. Personally, I am not terribly interested in writing alone. I might have a good statistician or I might know a person who is a good editor and we can learn from one another, at least that is what I am trying to establish here. We can continually help each other to produce research.
When I came to interview, there was a discussion on the similarities between Malcolm X philosophy and Jesuit philosophy, so I knew this was the place for me. I was also concerned about diversity, and my daughter-in-law’s aunt went to school here. She’s from Afghanistan, and they left because of the Taliban. I asked, “How were you treated? How did you feel when you were accepted?” She gave me good answers and she highly recommended coming to USF.
What are your different research interests?
I look at primary care topics, which are of interest to primary care providers, and provide up to date standards and case studies for application. I published a few articles last year on hyperparathyroidism—and one on the use of certain antibiotics and the relationship to Achilles tendon ruptures. Fluoroquinolone is a very common class of antibiotics and with certain populations there’s an increased risk of Achilles tendon ruptures.
I’ve been commissioned by the American Journal of Nursing to write about hypertension and to discuss the best approaches to treatment of hypertension. One of the newer items we need to consider is motivational interviewing because hypertension can be addressed by motivating people to change their lifestyles, which are associated with risk factors. I talk about treatment standards, which are pretty well established, and how are we approach the patient and how we can help patients toward better outcomes. Motivational interviewing is evidence-based and there’s a lot of research indicating that this is an effective communication technique has the potential to effect changes in patients’ behaviors.
How do you bring your research into your teaching?
Teaching, writing, and working with our nursing clinical groups keeps us on our toes, and healthcare as a profession continues to change. Our population changes, and in primary care, we’re at the front line treating anything that our patients come in with. I try to teach my students that we need to look at our practices and at the evidence to support them. Motivational interviewing is supported by research. It takes a lot of time to learn it, and it’s hard in a busy primary care practice to develop those skills when you might only be given fifteen minutes to interview a patient and provide some intervention.
What are you thinking about with your research interests now?
I did my doctoral work on decision-making. One of my interests is looking at how we communicate whether it’s with a student, patient, peer, or other professionals. I’m looking at better ways to engage students in learning. I recently had an article published about the use of VoiceThread in graduate education, which uses audio or video to engage students with each other’s work. This method can help our profession because as a provider of care, you need to discuss cases in front of people. You need to be able to analyze and be clear and succinct. Our graduate students come from a variety of backgrounds—they can be in management, they might have been in the Arts and Sciences—so they bring a range of gifts. We’ve seen that these videotaped discussions increases engagement and the desire to learn, and also, it brings more confidence.
Ben Levy’s research focuses on how people remember and why they forget. During our conversation, we talked about studying habits and his own experience learning basketball skills.
Ben Levy
How did you first get interested in research?
As an undergrad I knew that I was interested in psychology, but at first I wasn’t sure what I actually wanted to do. At the end of my sophomore year I took a class on learning and memory just because it filled a requirement. I didn’t have any expectations for the class, but I really connected with the professor and the ideas. I approached him at the end of the semester about research opportunities, and I was fortunate that he gave me a position in his lab. His research was focused on the distinction between two different forms of memory that we call familiarity and recollection. When you recollect an experience you can provide details about when and where something happened, but a memory can also be familiar where you are confident you know the thing but you cannot recall those specific details. For example, imagine recognizing the face of a person walking past you on campus. You might recollect that you know the person from your Biological Psychology class and even where they sit in the room and who they normally talk to before class. Or you might simply find the face familiar where you are positive you know them, but you’re not sure how. I found this distinction fascinating and I spent my first few years in research exploring how these types of memory are different.
How has your research evolved over time?
In graduate school, I worked with a professor who also studies memory, but he was interested in why we forget. One big idea from that research is that while we generally think of forgetting as a bad thing, sometimes it can actually be adaptive or useful. In fact, in many instances forgetting is our goal and would be hard to function effectively if you couldn’t forget. As I progressed in research I also became interested in neuroscience, so I developed expertise in methods like functional magnetic resonance imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation. These methods allow us to identify how these behavioral processes occur in the brain, which helps us better understand those behaviors.
How has your research translated in your own personal life?
I’d honestly never thought about memory much before I took that class as an undergrad, but once I did I quickly realized that memory is critical to virtually all aspects of our behavior. Even others areas of psychology that seem very different, like personality psychology, depend on memory. A big part of how you know about your own personality is based on your ability to remember things that you’ve done in the past. I started to realize how fundamentally integrated memory is into everything we do.
Is there a personal interest that you have with forgetting?
Once you start to specialize in something, you see that in everything you do. It obviously had big implications for my life as a student, but I also saw connections to things I liked to do outside the classroom, like playing basketball. So I try think about these principles of learning and memory now in all aspects of my life. For example, how do they affect my ability to acquire a new skill like becoming a better basketball player? Sadly, being aware of these things doesn’t always instantly solve your problems, though. I give my students advice on how to do study more efficiently but then I don’t always apply these same rules to myself when I’m learning a new skill.
How does your research impact your teaching?
In my Learning and Memory class, I talk a lot about study strategies and how students often use strategies that we know are pretty inefficient. Students are fairly resistant to these ideas early in college, because they feel comfortable with the way they’ve been studying and they’ve usually experienced success with their approach. That means it can be a little bit of a challenge to convince them that there are other more effective strategies they could use. When I teach students as juniors or seniors in my Learning and Memory class, the first comment that I get from my students is “I wish I knew this when I was a freshmen.”
Based on those kinds of comments we are now conducting a research project to see if exposure to these ideas about how to study effectively could help younger students perform better in their classes. We’re doing it through USF 101, a course for freshmen students to get acclimated to USF. Each week, they talk about different topics like study skills, ethical behavior, and many other aspects of life at USF. As one small part of that, we’re incorporating information about how to study more efficiently.
As one example, a popular strategy for getting ready for a test is to look over the class notes again or re-read a textbook chapter. Essentially, every psychological study that has been done on this approach says that this is a total waste of time. It is important to read the textbook in the first place, to show up in class and listen, and to see those slides, but doing those things a second time adds no benefit over the first exposure. It doesn’t hurt your performance, but it is basically a waste of your time, despite the fact that most students believe that this is a very effective strategy. We’re trying to make them realize that their beliefs about study strategies can be mistaken and then we try to suggest more efficient ways of studying.
What are more efficient ways to study?
They’re not that surprising or different—things like using flash cards or quizzing yourself. I think the critical distinction is between being an active versus a passive learner. Rather than looking at your notes or re-reading the textbook, which is a passive way of trying to receive the material again, what you should do is actively try to make yourself remember the material. Trying to reconstruct something from memory can feel frustrating in that moment when you are studying, but if you adopt that approach you’ll find that in much less time you can get just as good as results.
What do you see as your role as a researcher and a mentor?
I think the main job of any good researcher is just to be curious. I want to understand how people behave and how they remember. I want to know if there are better ways to approach studying for school or to become a better basketball player. In science one of the best ways to make you understand how something works is to try to change it. So I try to follow my curiosity to figure out how memory works and then I want to use that understanding to help people learn more successfully.
As a mentor my job is to help my students develop their own ideas and interests. Being a mentor is one of my favorite parts of my life at USF and I really enjoy the fact that I am privileged to watch my undergraduate research assistants grow over the time that they’re in the lab. I get to see them progress through different stages as a researcher and come to a deeper understanding of psychology and of their own interests and passions.
I think part of the reason I value mentoring students so much is that I personally really enjoyed this period of my life. You start undergrad sampling from lots of different ideas and broadening your horizons, but you also start to triangulate in on the things you really care about. And those interests often develop into careers and lifelong passions. For me the moment I joined that lab and starting getting research experience, I found something to anchor my interests and something that felt bigger and more rewarding than just taking a series of courses. I found the experience very fulfilling, and I want to provide the same kind of experience to my students.
What are some of the questions and hypotheses that you are thinking about for your research?
Some things are these intervention questions—can we use the kind of things we have learned from cognitive psychology to help students study more effectively? I want to see if I teach students about the importance of doing retrieval practice rather than extra exposures, could that end up having a positive outcome for students?
Students have a set of skills they’ve developed and they feel very attached to those skills. Part of the challenge of being the teacher is learning how they think about things. What is their model and how do you get them to let go of some things that are not as effective? How do you help them to revise their habits? It’s a real challenge to the teacher.
What lessons do you want to impart to your students?
One of the ones my students always laugh about in lab meetings is my personal crusade to have them pay attention to graphs and data. In psychology, a lot of students prefer the format where you are told a fact—the amygdala is responsible for emotion, this high level statement. When they go to read papers they want to read the abstract or the introduction where it’s all laid out. I think the heart of science is about understanding data and understanding how data support or challenge a theory. I try to train them to go right to the method and results section to understand what the researchers actually did and what they found. More broadly, though, I want my students to become deeper and more careful thinkers. I want to challenge them and get them to think really critically about an idea. If I can do that, I feel like I’ve helped them.
Professor Jeffrey Paller discusses how democracy and political accountability really works in urban Ghana, emphasizing the importance of daily practices and collective action.
Residents of some of Ghana’s poorest neighborhoods claim, “Housing is a human right.”
Rapid urbanization is changing the African continent. By 2050, the majority of Africans are expected to live in urban areas, up from 40 percent today. Cities improve access to healthcare and education, while presenting new challenges to sanitation, housing provision, and air quality. Residents come into contact with people from different ethnic, religious, and class groups at work and in their neighborhoods. These daily interactions have the potential to positively change attitudes and build new social contracts, but can also create conflict between diverse types of people competing over limited resources, space, and opportunities.
While the demographic, economic, and cultural shifts are potentially transformative, the pressure on urban land and space is an emerging and real challenge. Many of the future political struggles across the continent will take place in the urban neighborhoods of Africa’s rapidly growing cities. My research examines the impact of urbanization on democracy in Africa, and tries to understand how these political processes shape prospects of sustainable urban development. I’ve conducted most of my field research in Ghana, a country in West Africa.
The existing scholarship on African urban politics focuses primarily on formal institutions. These include elections, the rule of law, the police force, and state bureaucracies and planning agencies. A related scholarship examines how societal conditions like ethnicity and religion contribute to urban governance and political clientelism – the exchange of resources and favors for votes.
But after conducting ethnographic fieldwork, interviewing residents and leaders, and running an original household survey in some of Ghana’s poorest neighborhoods – often called slums or informal settlements – I uncovered a different story. I found that social practices that bring representatives and their constituents together in daily life provide the basis of democratic politics and political accountability.
Citizens engage in a variety of different social practices to hold their representatives to account, including appealing to their moral standing in daily activities like town hall meetings, nighttime chats, and house visits, as well as civic activism and street protests. Social gatherings like funerals, weddings, and festivals can also serve this purpose. I call these informal practices of accountability. I further theorize how daily interactions and power structures shape city- and national-level politics.
In-depth fieldwork helped me understand how social practices outside the official view – in the “hidden transcript,” as James Scott famously called it – shapes the political behavior of politicians, state bureaucrats, and traditional authorities. Paying close attention to this arena of politics also showed me that leaders gain power and authority by relying on informal norms and rules. For example, leaders are expected to act as friends, employers, parents, and religious leaders to their constituents. This provides one powerful explanation for why political clientelism persists despite the strengthening of liberal-democratic institutions.
Perhaps most importantly, I argue against conventional wisdom that democratic accountability does not emerge in poor, ethnically diverse, informal settlements. A dominant public and scholarly narrative is that African cities are “in crisis,” and that the urban population boom will damage prospects for sustainable development. This is because the majority of residents will live in unplanned and unsafe slums that lack secure property rights.
But political accountability and good governance can emerge in these unexpected places, as long as residents satisfy informal norms of settlement and belonging. Due to customary land tenure and historical settlement patterns, indigenous ethnic groups and migrant populations must reach a political bargain for a civic public to emerge and the needs and security of all residents to be fulfilled. The grassroots of community life determines the developmental success of a neighborhood, and the city as a whole.
As the United Nations declared several years ago: The future of Africa is urban. The political consequences of Africa’s rapid urbanization will shape the continent for years to come. These outcomes will play a major role in the democratic development of African governments, as well as the form that economic growth takes. A clearer picture of what takes place in daily life of these cities, as well as the power structures that keep the status quo in place or enable transformational change is a necessary starting point on the path toward sustainable urban development.
Jeffrey W. Paller is an Assistant Professor of Politics at University of San Francisco. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Accountability in Unexpected Places: Democratic Practices in African Slums.
Desiree Zerquera, Assistant Professor in the School of Education
For the majority of us who identify as higher education scholars, we are in this field because through our own educational or professional experiences we saw problems in the way higher education is shaped and shapes others. We were called to scholarship as a way to examine these problems, find solutions and contribute to a vision of a better system of higher education. Our individual work is situated within the broader mission of the university, which has a commitment to serving the public good, achieved in large part through our research.
Traditional graduate school experience trains us to write for publication in academic journals, primarily read by academics. We are encouraged to present in the more prestigious conferences of our field, attended largely by other scholars. Further, the reward structures of academe value these types of contributions above all else. Despite efforts to resist these pressures, jobs need to be obtained, tenure and promotion need to be earned, and our value in the field needs to be recognized. Time being finite, these efforts come at the cost of other forms of engagement that speak to the very reason why we entered the field of higher education in the first place.
The problem, however, isn’t that we publish in academic journals and present at academic conferences. These are important spaces of knowledge dissemination. It is an invaluable part not just of academe but of our society as a whole—a space where ideas are shared and debated, where we can trace the contours of our collective imagination for how we see and address problems, and where research and scholarship can exist for the sake of their own existence.
The problem lies in the fact that much of the fruits of this knowledge gained stops within these spaces. Not everyone has access to these spaces, and not all voices are permitted to be amplified within them. As social scientists, we do not have the privilege to be so elitist so as to limit our knowledge to just one another.
There are a number of ways of translating our work for diverse audiences. Starting with the academic format we are socialized to communicate within as academics, journals and conferences that speak to policy- and practitioner-based audiences are valuable outlets. These spaces are important in fostering knowledge exchange around policy and practice. Just as important as the rigor reflected in our research are the ways we can utilize this work to inform change in our higher education system. Translation is needed to better connect our work to its own value within our respective fields. This can be a challenge, and require reshifting and reframing of our work, but we have an obligation to undertake this work.
Leveraging the public attention through blogs, op-eds, policy briefs, TED talks, keynote engagements, and social media are also promising and valuable ways of reaching broader audiences. Higher education scholars like Marybeth Gasman and Julian Vasquez Heilig often use these channels of influence to advocate for the higher education equity issues they research. This expands our audience reach to inform not just policy and practice, but also the public conscious around higher education.
As a field, we need to do more to develop and institute this value of translating our work. Faculty in higher education programs can incorporate assignments that have students write in various formats beyond just the traditional research paper. In my classroom, students read and write reports and op-eds. We workshop the process of discovering your voice to bridge ideas to public discourse. Further, faculty can also play a role in shaping reward systems. More value to these types of engagements needs to be added within the tenure and promotion (T&P) processes. Institutions like Loyola Marymount University have supplemented their traditional T&P requirements to account for public engagements as part of a measure of faculty’s contributions. Lastly, technology makes options like publicly-available webinars valuable outlets for communicating with administrative, practitioner and public audiences. The National Institute for Transformation and Equity (NITE) has embraced this through their Webcasts on Equity and Change (WOCE) series that brings together scholars and practitioners around relevant topics related to equity in higher education.
Being called to the work of higher education, our work cannot stop at just examining issues. We have the responsibility to communicate and engage with those who can put our research into action at the policy and practice level. Making our work more accessible and breaking down our complex ideas and higher education jargon is even more needed within our current anti-intellectual context that emphasizes 140-characters or less bits of information. As a field, we not only need to do better, but we have an obligation to do so to fulfill our commitment to contribute to improving higher education.
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.
Image credit: SF Pride 2015 by Thomas Hawk. This work is licensed under a CC BY 2.0 license.
The shooting that took place at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, FL, on a night that knowingly attracted a Latinx community, pushed to the forefront the intersectionality of discrimination. Notably, the tragedy highlighted how queer people of color are uniquely positioned to be at the receiving end of hateful violence due to the enduring legacies of racism and homophobia. Many in the queer community wondered about our community’s investment in racial equity. As queer people working towards racial equity, Ja’nina Garrett-Walker, Michelle Montagno, and I were not only personally heartbroken by the tragic deaths of those celebrating at Pulse that evening, but we felt compelled to leverage our own resources and privileges to better understand the experiences of people of color in the LGBTQ+ community.
We were awarded the Center for Research Artistic and Scholarly Excellence (CRASE) Interdisciplinary Action Group grant to investigate LGBTQ+ individuals’ racial identity and connectedness to the community. Though we are still in the data collection process, preliminary results reveal the different experiences between People of Color (POC) and White people in the LGBTQ+ community. While differences in mental health did not emerge, POC generally reported feeling less connected to the LGBTQ+ community than their White counterparts (Garrett-Walker, Felipe, & Montagno, 2017). POC also reported greater discord between their sexual and racial identities than White-identified participants. These trends of the data perhaps suggest that lived experiences of communities of color are not well reflected in dominant queer culture. What we see in the data may be the reflection of what many of us who are queer and of color have experienced all along: that the legacies of white supremacy have permeated the LGBTQ+ community, whitening the queer experience in much the same way that the feminist movement centered White voices, pushing Women of Color to demand intersectional feminism.
However, the Orlando tragedy was not the only major event impacting the participants of the study, all of whom identify as queer or claim a space somewhere along the LGBTQ+ continuum. Shortly following the launch of our study, the presidential elections took place, and we were faced with an interesting significant event that created unique response sets: we had a number of participants who responded before the election, as well as a portion of the sample who participated after the election. In examining depression scores, those who responded just prior to the election had scores that were substantially lower than those scores recorded after the election (Garrett-Walker, et al. 2017). In short, LGBTQ+ people endorsed more symptoms of depression after Trump was elected into office.
The presidential election signified a serious threat to the civil rights of the entire LGBTQ+ community, and it arrived on the heels of a massive attack that left 51 people dead. The socio-political environment created an additional stress on the psyches of the queer people in the study, and this indication of increased depression emerged regardless of how the participant identified racially. While these findings are almost sadly obvious, there is another unique finding to consider at this crossroads of identity: the post-election respondents indicated feeling more negatively towards their own racial group, regardless of their racial identity (Garrett-Walker, et al. 2017).
Orlando and the election changed all of us in the community. The accumulation of attacks draws us into a space far too familiar – that of self-loathing. Unless we, as a larger America, take up each other’s causes with the same fervor for which we stand up for our own, we are headed down a terrifyingly divisive path, where we will not only hate one another, but will end up internally empty in the process. And though the mistakes of the past seem to be revived in modern times, the successes of the past have also paved our path for survival and resistance. We just have to listen to those stories and value our own.
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.
