French Film Screening & Q&A: "Une Histoire à Soi" - (l-r) Jimia Boutouba (Modern Languages & Literatures), moderator; Amandine Gay, filmmaker; Enrico Bartolucci, producer.

Dear College Faculty and Staff,

If ever a week can illustrate how triumph and tragedy coexist, this is one.

Like many of us on campus, I am thrilled that our university has selected Julie H. Sullivan—our first layperson and woman president—to lead us in the years to come. In my interactions with her, I have found her to be warm, compassionate, thoughtful, smart and so present. I can’t wait for her to begin this summer!

Meanwhile, the news from Ukraine gets scarier and more tragic, though it is heartening to see so much support for our Ukrainian sisters and brothers. Many thanks to Professors Jane Curry (Political Science), Amy Randall (History) and David Sloss (SCU School of Law) for quickly organizing and participating in Monday’s forum, “Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: What Happened and Why It Matters.”

As we all head into the last weeks of winter quarter, I wish for you strength, resilience and solidarity. May these nurture you through the highs and lows of this moment in our communities near and far.

In gratitude,

Daniel

Student Advisory Council

Ramon Duran is a senior from San Jose, California, studying Religious Studies and Economics at Santa Clara University.

On the Student Advisory Council Ramon wants to ensure that student voices are amplified amid the varying perspectives that often arise. Another goal is to gain a more holistic view of the intricacies associated with administering the College of Arts and Sciences. While on the Council, Ramon would like to make student success less of a function of luck and more of a function of talent, fairness, and accessibility. One reason for this is that it is somewhat difficult to know as a first-year or transfer student which departments, programs, and resources align most appropriately with one's ambitions and needs. Finding a faculty or staff member early on who is willing to serve as a mentor can greatly improve the college experience. On the council, Ramon has enjoyed getting to collaborate with other students from a variety of majors, interests, and backgrounds.

A fun fact about Ramon is that he is working on accomplishing his goal of visiting all 50 states! So far, he has checked off 20 states—mostly in the West and a handful of states on the East Coast.

The Student Advisory Council was started during Fall 2021 and is made up of 10 students from across the College. They meet twice a quarter with Dean Press to discuss their aspirations, suggestions for new initiatives, and their responses to issues of the day.

Highlights

CalEPA Environmental Justice Small Grants Program awarded Sacred Heart Community Services (SHCS) and Santa Clara University’s Environmental Justice and Common Good Initiative (EJ&CGI) $50,000 for a collaborative project. This project will facilitate food justice in the South Bay by employing research-based agroecology techniques to reduce food waste, produce compost, and improve the sustainability of emergency food assistance programs. Chris Bacon (Environmental Studies & Sciences, EJ&CGI) will guide the research component of this project, working with CFIE postdoctoral fellow Christopher McNeil and student researchers, including Ava Gleicher '22 (Environmental Studies, Political Science) and Brooke Rose '22 (Environmental Studies, Sociology), as they partner with SHCS staff to co-develop a community-based food justice approach. Together they will craft materials for five community-oriented educational workshops, facilitate leadership development opportunities for backyard gardeners, pantry volunteers and students, and create a replicable resource guide available to food pantries and urban gardeners so that they may use and adapt this food justice approach. This project will culminate in a Composting Distribution Day where key policy stakeholders, City Council Officials, and community members will be invited to celebrate the work accomplished and be encouraged to support county-wide efforts to build a nourishing, equitable, environmentally-sound, and community-oriented food system. Sacred Heart is the lead agency for this grant, and SCU will receive a $15,000 subaward.

Jamie Chang (Public Health) and Philip Boo Riley (Religious Studies) recently published a paper entitled "Harms of Encampment Abatements on the Health of Unhoused People" in the journal SSM Qualitative Research in Health. It was co-authored with SCU alumni Katherine Lin '18 (Public Health Science) MPH, Nicole Nelson '21 (Public Health Science, Political Science), Marius Corwin '20 (Public Health Science, Biology), and Madison Rodriguez '21 (Public Health Science, Anthropology). Based on interviews with unhoused people, they identify the social environmental mechanisms through which homeless encampment sweeps undermined or directly harmed unhoused people’s health. They argue that common abatement practices are social policies that may be causal factors in the declining health of unhoused people.

Justin Boren (Communication) was awarded a presidential citation for service by the Western States Communication Association for his work on the association's finance committee. He has served as chair of the committee for the past 2 years (a term that was extended due to COVID). Through his work in this role, he led a rewrite of the association's financial policies, spearheaded a change to ensure that the association's investment accounts were socially and environmentally responsible, and designed and administered a conference travel grant program for contingent faculty, students, and community college teachers with priority given to BIPOC individuals.

Emily Frankel (Modern Languages & Literatures) wrote "When Surviving is Not Enough: From Militancy to Collaboration (On the Ethical Implications of Researching the Political Transformations of Marcia Alejandra Merino Vega, Luz Arce Sandoval, and María Alicia Uribe Gómez)" that was recently published in the journal, Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana in their 50th Volume. 

This study analyzes the herstories of three Chilean women militants who later evolved into political collaborators of Agosto Pinochet's military regime (1973-1990). In addition to looking at the ways in which cultural productions on their stories of survival have added to the misconceptions of their political transformations, this article also seeks to understand the underlying motives for their collaboration as a reparative force that dispels false accusations directed against them.

From left to right: Malarie Howard, Katherine Tolentino, and Juan Velasco-Moreno

On February 24, Juan Velasco-Moreno (English), a Fellow for the Center for the Arts and Humanities, organized a webinar titled "Translating the Past and Future onto the Screen: Latinx and Black Cinema and Television." His project is to bring into a film the story of Salaria Kea, the only African-American woman who was present during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). For this event, he invited two SCU alumni who are also screenwriters and producers, Malarie Howard '14 (Communication) and Katherine Tolentino '11 (English), for a conversation related to multimedia adaptations of Latinx and Black History into TV or film.

On February 15, Rohit Chopra (Communication) delivered an invited talk, "Socially-mediated visions of the Hindu nation in the Modi era" as part of a teach-in on the topic of Hinduism, Politics, and the Nation, organized by the Center for South Asia and Global Studies Program in International Relations at Stanford University. The talk was followed by a discussion with two other scholars and Stanford faculty and students.

On February 23, Rohit delivered an invited lecture, "Media, Identity Politics, and Populism in Modi’s India: Implications for Democracy and Conflict," to a graduate class, "The Politics of Resentment," taught by Oliver Mains, a US State Department official. The talk offered a high-level summary of the state of Indian politics, focusing on how the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a hardline Hindu rightwinger, effectively mobilized media and technology to engender anti-minority sentiment for political gains. Rohit's talk also focused on the possibilities offered by online media and civil society to push back against these developments.

Rohit also organized a conference, "Religion and Its Publics in South Asia: Perspectives on the Past and Present" in collaboration with the Canopy Forum of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University's school of law. Bringing together leading scholars from history, religious studies, media studies, anthropology, South Asian studies and law, the interdisciplinary conference examined the relationship between the many religious traditions of South Asia and their diverse publics in the premodern, early modern, and modern periods. Over four panels on February 24 and 25, conference papers addressed how Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, and Sikhism have shaped and been shaped by different publics, from marginalized communities to online groups. Rohit also delivered the opening and closing remarks for the conference.

Image: Clockwise starting top left - Rohit Chopra, Thomas Blom Hansen, and Dheepa Sundaram, speakers at the Stanford talk on Hinduism, Politics, and the Nation.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar