The Center for the Arts and Humanities sponsored "Remembering the Winchester Mystery House" where panelists discussed the history, including the indigenous history, of the area. Left to right: Mary Jo Ignoffo, Janan Boehme, Isabella 'Amne Gomez, and Amy Lueck (English).

Dear College Faculty and Staff,

As many may know, Family Weekend is approaching. We plan to welcome families of current students to campus next weekend to showcase the work and activities students are involved in. Stay tuned next week for more information!

I know you will all have received a prompt for a community survey about campus strategic planning. I strongly encourage you to respond. The strategic planning process gives us an opportunity to think about how we can turn problems into opportunities. We worry a lot about what we cannot do; strategic planning encourages us to think about what we can do if we take a different approach. Strategic planning can be as much about new initiatives as it can be about processes, campus climate and culture. I have already heard many important topics raised by members of the College community.

For example, do our budget models serve us in an era of rising inflation and concerns over access and affordability? Should Santa Clara University play a larger role in preparing students for healthcare professions? How do we think about the nexus between pedagogy and student mental health? CAPS does a wonderful job with students in crisis; can we look at our students’ first year experiences navigating the transition to college and ask if we could do anything in our classrooms to reduce their stress and anxiety?

The College is the largest academic unit on campus. As such, I feel it is vital for your voices and perspectives to be heard and recognized. Please participate, not just in surveys but also in town halls, position papers and through shared governance.

Thank you for all you do, I hope the long weekend is restorative!

Sincerely,

Daniel

Highlights

Di Di (Sociology) published a manuscript, "Ethical ambiguity and complexity: tech workers’ perceptions of big data ethics in China and the US," on Information, Communication, and Society. This paper focuses on tech workers, as insiders of a profession that heavily rely on data and algorithms, make sense of the ethical issues that emerge from the extensive application of big data in a global context. This work is supported by the "Science and Religion: Identity and Belief Formation" funding initiative, funded through the Templeton Religion Trust, and a Hackworth Grant from the Markkula Center of Applied Ethics.

Kieran Sullivan (Psychology) has published an article, "A Psychometric Analysis of the Relationship Attribution Measure–Online Behavior," with co-authors Aine Sullivan (Seattle University) and Thomas Bradbury (UCLA). The attributions that intimate partners make for one another's actions foreshadow deterioration in relationship satisfaction. Although online communication is now pervasive, tools for assessing the attributions partners make for online behavior (e.g., why a partner hasn't responded to a text message) are not yet available. The RAM-OB was created and subjected to psychometric evaluation using three samples. The RAM-OB was found to be a reliable and valid measure of the attributions partners make about online behavior. The availability of the RAM-OB may create new opportunities for understanding the role of technology and media-related behaviors in intimate relationships.

Danielle Morgan's (English) chapter "Reframing and Reappropriating Blackness in 1980s Satire" was published in the edited collection, African American Literature in Transition, 1980–1990, published by Cambridge University Press. Her chapter examines the “Black Stereotype Sketch” on Saturday Night Live (featuring Eddie Murphy and Louis Gossett, Jr.), George C. Wolfe’s play The Colored Museum, and Sherley Anne Williams’s novel Dessa Rose to demonstrate how 1980s satirists scrutinized stereotypes surrounding Blackness in an effort to subvert them. Through the embodiment of the limiting stereotypes of Black identity, these satirists reveal the ridiculousness of mainstream presumptions of Black abjection and open up a space for an autonomous declaration of nuanced Black identity. The subversive nature of satire in the 1980s comes through in the acknowledgment of the calculated nature of Black stereotypes and their reappropriated performance.

Mark Duplass met and worked closely with dozens of SCU students in fields across the creative arts during his visit to campus this February.

Much of that activity took place through a new, interdisciplinary course developed around Mark's residency as the Sinatra Chair. In that course, eight teams of four students each—including short story writers, screenplay writers, film directors, and musical composers—are collaborating to create and adapt student work across multiple genres and forms of media. This Winter, they are adapting a student-authored story or play into a screenplay. In the Spring, they will adapt that screenplay into a short film with a musical score. All of the adaptations and creative works are original student productions.

Mark met this February with these student groups to provide feedback on their writing and adaptations, and to get them ready for the next phase of the project. But he also met with students outside of the course, including a visit to the campus Playspace Writing Workshop, where he helped student playwrights develop their craft. He held an open master class on writing, filmmaking, and creative collaboration, where he answered student questions about what it takes to be a writer, director, producer, or musician. He also talked with the student editors of The Owl and The Santa Clara Review to brainstorm ways of featuring this student work in forthcoming publications.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar