Dear College Faculty and Staff,

Happy New Year and happy new quarter! To kick off this quarter, I went to last weekend’s game versus Gonzaga—my first Bronco basketball game. It was great despite the loss – our Broncos really made the Zags work very hard for their win! Braving the windy, rainy night, so many of our fans turned out, bringing wonderful energy and team spirit to Leavey. Even though this is my third academic year at Santa Clara, I feel like it’s the first time I’ve been able to get a full sense of what life on Santa Clara’s campus really feels like, and I am thoroughly enjoying the experience.

I hope you have all stayed safe and dry throughout the storms we’ve been experiencing this week. Please, be mindful of each other and the difficulties of managing this kind of weather. Many of us have been able to stay snug and warm in our homes, while others are facing pretty big challenges depending on where they live—mudslides, power outages, downed trees and flooding. Let’s all double down on compassion and flexibility with each other and our students.

Après la pluie, le beau temps, as they say in French!

Daniel

Highlights

^{Image: Visiting the Boyle Heights neighborhood, from left to right: Katie Heintz, Arturo Pacheco Martinez '25 (Finance), Karla Santos '24 (Ethnic Studies), Yomaira Cruz Cristobal '23 (Accounting), Camryn Brown '24 (Psychology, Music), Renae Romandia McCoy '23 (Civil Engineering), Natalie Plaia '24 (French & Francophone Studies), Sarita Pettus '25 (Political Science), Kat Temple '26 (History).}

Katie Heintz (Communication) accompanied eight undergraduate students and Maria Autrey (Ignatian Center) on a week-long immersion in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East L.A. in December. The group was hosted by the Dolores Mission Parish Community. The week included celebrations of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe (beginning with mariachis at 3:30 am!) and the first night of Las Posadas with the community; visits to Homeboy Industries and brunch at Homegirl Cafe; spending time with students at the Dolores Mission School and Impacto after school program; cooking for, serving, and enjoying breakfast with unhoused residents of the Mission's shelters (another 3:30 am start to the day); and outreach to those living on Skid Row.

Mythri Jegathesan (Anthropology) was featured on a podcast episode of the Whetstone Radio Collective series, Taste of Place, hosted by Dr. Anna Sulan Masing. The episode discusses the power of storytelling around food and ethical ways to approach feelings of nostalgia amidst state violence and harm. She also published an article in the Social Scientists' Association Polity online magazine's special issue on women in the labor force. The article, "Policing the Patriline: Reading the Current Economic and Political Crisis through the Plantation" views Sri Lanka's current economic crisis through recent policies in the plantation industry. It calls upon policymakers and scholars to challenge the neoliberal tendency to gloss and equate all kinds of women’s labor force participation with empowerment.

^{Image by Whetstone Radio Collective.}

There is growing attention to racial health disparities in homeless populations, but research and reporting into Asians and Pacific Islanders experiencing homelessness is exceedingly rare. Jamie Chang (Public Health) and Kat Saxton (Public Health, Dean's Office) recently published a paper in Frontiers in Public Health's special issue on Anti-Asian racism. The paper, "Invisibility as a structural determinant: Mortality outcomes of Asians and Pacific Islanders experiencing homelessness," was co-authored with three Santa Clara University students, Georgia Bright '22 (Public Health Science, Biology), Maya Ryan '23 (Public Health Science, Biology), and Francis Lai' 24 (Public Health Science). They report on API homelessness in Santa Clara County and racial differences in mortality outcomes.

Pedro Hernandez-Ramos (Education), Verónica Miranda (Anthropology), and Isaura Cruz (Anthropology) were invited by the Mexican Consulate in San José to participate in their event celebrating the bicentennial anniversary of diplomatic relations between México and the United States. The event took place on Monday, December 12 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library on the San José State campus. The other panelists were Dr. Alberto Días-Cayeros, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University, and Dr. Julia Curry, director of Chicano and Chicana Studies at San José State University. Students, other academics, and members of the public were in attendance and engaged with topics around the lived experiences of Chicanx in the U.S., elements of indigenous identity in México and the U.S., and health consequences of migration.

^{Image: Pedro Hernandez-Ramos, Isaura Cruz, and Verónica Miranda.}

Rohit Chopra (Communication) presented an invited paper, "Ruins of History, Fragments of Memory: Representations of the Demolition of the Babri Masjid (1992)" at a conference, Afterlives of Babri Masjid: Thirty Years Later, organized by the South Asia Institute at Columbia University on December 9 and 10, 2022. The conference addressed the impact of the demolition of the Babri mosque by a Hindu nationalist mob in 1992, a turning point in Indian politics and a key moment in the resurgence of the Hindu Right in independent India. Drawn from his current in-progress monograph, Rohit's paper was part of a panel on media and technological representations of the destruction of the mosque. The paper examined the portrayal of the event in Indian cinema, journalistic coverage, official reports, and online. In the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, mediated memories in these various archives emphasized a narrative of loss and attempted recuperation of a shared, secular Indian identity. Since the political ascendancy of the Hindu Right in 2014, however, the event is increasingly recast through a lens of Hindu trauma and historical Muslim culpability through the political management of media memory and willful production of historical amnesia.

Qiuwen Li (Art and Art History) showed her work in a solo exhibition at the Chesapeake Gallery at Harford Community College in Maryland. It featured thirty-three of her design pieces. The exhibition Beyond Form & Color explored graphic design in destructive and reconstructive ways. As a designer, Qiuwen has been interested in the space between linguistic and pictorial communication. Her work explores the relationships between legibility and illegibility: typographic shape as image.

Tom Plante (Psychology) and co-authors published an article, "Human interaction with the divine, the sacred, and the deceased: topics that warrant increased attention by psychologists," in Current Psychology.

Abstract: Humans have been attempting to communicate with entities believed to exist, such as the divine, sacred beings, and deceased people, since the dawn of time. Many people—religious, agnostic, and atheists alike—report communication with their departed loved ones. During highly stressful times, the frequency and intensity of these activities and associated experiences substantially increase. Although this human phenomenon seems to be universal, the empirical literature on the topic within psychology is thin. This paper reviews what we know from the professional literature about how people perceive communication with these unseen entities. It highlights the perceptual and social cognition evidence and discusses the role of attribution theory, which might help us understand the beliefs, motivations, and practices of those engaged with communication with the unseen. Empirical laboratory research with mediums is discussed as well, examining the evidence for communication with the deceased. Suggestions for future research are also offered.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar