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| September 24, 2021 | Submit a Note |
 Welcome Weekend: Orientation leader Olivia Owens '23 (Communication, Accounting & Information Systems).
I hope you’ve all had a good Week 1 and have felt the energy that students have brought back to our campus, as I have. Riding on to campus Monday morning showed me for the first time what our campus looks like with thousands of students here; it sure beats the tumbleweeds-empty feeling of last fall! I wanted to share an article that I wrote with four other deans of arts and sciences at Jesuit Universities in which we reflect on the journey and responsibility of beginning our new roles, together, during the 2020-21 academic year. I also want to announce that we have a new College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Student Advisory Council, comprised of 10 students from across the College. These 10 students were selected from a list of nearly 80 nominees; they are all tremendously accomplished, dedicated and talented students, who will meet with me twice a quarter to discuss their aspirations, suggestions for new initiatives and their responses to issues of the day. Please join me in congratulating these inaugural members. They include: Abigail Alvarez, Political Science and Spanish I wish for you all as smooth a return to campus as possible; see you soon! Daniel
Highlights
Image: Students Saunder Salazar '22 (front) and Anthony Wang '23 (back) work on Virtual Reality projects in the WAVE+Imaginarium lab. The Imaginarium Lab, dedicated to Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality production and formerly located in Dowd, has a new home on the second floor of Heafey (Room 237). In its new location, it will share both space and a new sense of mission with the WAVE computing cluster and visualization lab in what we're now calling the WAVE+Imaginarium. This lab space will be a central hub for teaching, researching with, and collaborating around digital visualization and immersive storytelling work across disciplines, explicitly bridging Engineering, Sciences, the Arts, and Humanities to enrich current projects and inspire new ones. The facility provides SCU and the surrounding community with the opportunity to explore the various uses of HPC and data visualization in an interdisciplinary and intellectually heterogeneous context—that is, in a physical space where other kinds of data visualization, representation work, digital imaging, storytelling, etc. is being visibly and communally engaged. Students have been hard at work for weeks helping to set up the new Cintiq pen display monitors and testing out the new HP Reverb headsets, getting it ready for classes, workshops, and other events. Stop by and check it out, or email Amy Lueck (English) or David Jeong (Communication) to learn about how you can utilize visualization technology in your own courses.
David Jeong (Communication) published an article in Frontiers in Psychology titled “Protean Kinematics: A blended model of VR physics”, which presents both a theoretical (typology) and methodological (physics-based measurement) approach to understanding the complex blend of physical inputs and virtual outputs that occur in the perceptual experience of VR, particularly in consideration of the collection of hippocampal (e.g., place cells, grid cells) and entorhinal neurons (e.g., speed cells) that fire topologically relative to physical movement in physical space. This work was supported by the WAVE+Imaginarium Lab. Jeong also published a chapter in the book Measuring and Modeling Persons and Situations, titled “Virtual environments for the representative assessment of personality: VE-RAP”. The chapter calls for personality psychologists to reconsider traditional methods for assessment and measurement in favor of graphically generated assessment tools that may afford a greater generalizability to everyday life. This work was also supported by the WAVE+Imaginarium Lab. Jeong also published an article in the International Journal of Communication titled “Parental Rejection After Coming Out: Detachment, Shame, and the Reparative Power of Romantic Love”, which discusses the fragile process of coming out, namely parental rejection, and the potential reparative potential of romantic bonding and intimacy to heal the destructive effects of parental rejection and detachment.
Lee Panich (Anthropology) and Sara Gonzalez (University of Washington) recently published the Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas. This volume includes thirty-three chapters authored by scholars from more than a dozen different countries and tribal nations. The contributions both acknowledge the colonial underpinnings of archaeology and show how archaeology can illuminate the persistence of Indigenous peoples who have negotiated colonial systems from the fifteenth century through the present day.
Peter Minowitz (Political Science) published two items related to Critical Race Theory. The first is "Getting 'Woke' with Socrates," a 7800-word article that highlights pedagogy. The second is a 220-word letter to the Washington Post, titled "It's bad, but not that bad" (the letter appears roughly a third of the way down the page).
Rohit Chopra (Communication) was invited by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, for a discussion on his recent book, The Gita for a Global World: Ethical Action in an Age of Flux, on August 5, 2021. The discussants were Ananya Vajpeyi, Associate Professor (CSDS) and Devasia M. Antony, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Hindu College, University of Delhi, with the conversation followed by a Q&A session from online audiences. The online recording can be found here. Rohit's book was also the subject of a conversation organized by Scroll India on August 19, 2021, centered on the value of the Gita for a globalized world, with Audrey Truschke, Associate Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University. The online recording can be found here. Rohit was invited in August 2021 to join the advisory council of the South Asian Scholar Activist Collective (SASAC), an initiative to combat the harassment and intimidation of scholars by the Hindu far-right.
Aparajita Nanda (Ethnic Studies and English) just published a chapter, "A Palimpsestuous Reading of Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood," in Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture: Surfacing Histories edited by Yiorgos D. Kalogeras, Johanna C. Kardux (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). She analyses the text through the critical lens provided by Sarah Dillon -- her definition of "palimpsestous" as distinguished from the palimpsest.
Enrique S. Pumar (Sociology) edited a special issue on human capital for the journal Foro Cubano and another special issue for the journal Sustainability on Moving toward Sustainability: Rethinking Gender Structures in Education and Occupation Systems, where he also published papers. He published additional papers in Sociological Forum and the Journal for Leadership, Equity, and Research. In the summer, Pumar was elected chair of the American Sociological Association Section on International Development.
Di Di (Sociology) recently published an article, entitled, "Publishing and Parenting in Academic Science: A Study of Different National Contexts," in Socius as the first author. In the first cross-national, mixed-methods study on gender, family, and science, the authors examined the relationship between research productivity and family life for male and female physicists and biologists in four countries: India, Taiwan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Drawing on surveys of 5,756 respondents and follow-up interviews with 369 participants, the authors found that the relationship between family responsibilities and publishing operates differently for men and women. Additionally, this relationship is conditioned by the national context in which the scientists work. The interviews indicate that family responsibilities constrain women’s publication productivity according to context. Cross-contextual differences are partially explained by the macro-level gender norms transmitted to academic scientists and how women navigate their scientific research productivity and family responsibilities. The findings have implications for the broader literature on the dialectical relationship between macro-level gender norms and responses by scientists in India, Taiwan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Other authors of this article include Robert A. Thomson at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and Elaine Howard Ecklund at Rice University. Di Di also published an op-ed in Times Higher Education, entitled, "Parenting is the mother of gender inequality in science." The op-ed is co-authored with Elaine Howard Ecklund at Rice University. In this op-ed, the authors argue that science is a global enterprise and so are its inequities. To achieve true equity in science, we need global institutional solutions.
Image: Top left: Smallholder farming; Top right: Summer precipitation declines; Bottom left: Regions most vulnerable to drying by several climate measures; Bottom right: Performance comparison of several global datasets. Iris Stewart-Frey (ESS, EJ&CGI), Ed Maurer (CESE, EJ&CGI), Kerstin Stahl (Freiburg), and undergraduate Kenny Joseph '21 (Bioengineering and Biology) published an article on the recent evidence for warmer and drier growing seasons in climate sensitive regions of Central America in the International Journal of Climatology. Smallholder livelihoods throughout Central America are built on rain-fed agriculture and depend on seasonal variations in temperature and precipitation. Recent climatic shifts in this region are not well understood due to sparse observations, and as the skill of global climate products have not been thoroughly evaluated. The work by the team found a general warming across the region, particularly for spring and winter, while widespread drying was indicated by several measures for the summer growing season. Changes in annual precipitation were most significant in eastern Honduras/Nicaragua and in several parts of Mexico. Some regions most vulnerable to drying have been subject to summer drying, increases in drought and aridity driven by precipitation declines, and/or a lengthening of the winter dry season, highlighting areas where climate adaptation measures may be most urgent. Funding provided by NSF, DFG, and Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies.
Image: Exhibition View of Valokuvakeskus Nykyaik Takeshi Moro (Art & Art History) had a solo exhibition in Tampere, Finland during July-August, 2021. Photographs, videos, and prints from Manzanar and Tule Lake former concentration camps were on display. His plan to reconnect with Qalandar, an Afghan refugee whom he collaborated with in 2012, was postponed to summer 2022. In the mean time, images of Qalandar from 2012 and 2014 were featured in the exhibition.
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