January
Barbara Allen, Science, Technology, and Society, was awarded a two-year, $600,000 National Science Foundation Collaborative Grant as the Principal Investigator for the project titled “Science with the People: Collaborative Analysis of Government Data for Policy Reach and Structural Change in Environmentally Contested Regions” with collaborators Alison Cohen and Michelle Smith. The project supports residents living in Louisiana’s polluted industrial regions to use government data to document and examine patterns of health in their communities.
The project is based at Dillard University, a historically Black university in New Orleans, and builds researcher, community, and institutional capacity to continue collaborative science work on environmental health justice and health equity beyond the project.
Amy Price Azano, Education and Director of the Center for Rural Education, was elected to the Executive Board of the National Rural Education Association as its Rural Research Center Representative, a newly created position. In this role, Azano represents all rural centers across the United States.
Chase Catalano, Education, published “Making a Case for General Qualitative Descriptive: Revealing Cisgender and Heterosexual Fragilities,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research
12.4 (2023): 29–52, with Maria-Victoria Perez.
Carolyn Commer, English, published “Rhetorical Histories In Motu: On Teaching the Octalogs” as well as the book review forum “Review of Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon,” with Mark Garrett Longaker et al., in Journal for the History of Rhetoric 26.2 (July 2023): 255–66 and 267–82 respectively.
School of Education doctoral student Amanda Flanagan and faculty member Carol Mullen published “Teacher Psychological Capital and Leadership Responsibility for Developing Staff in the Great Resignation,” Education Leadership Review 24.1 (Fall 2023): 64–79.
Jim Garrison, Professor Emeritus of Education, published “Exploring ‘The Vital Depths of Experience’: A Reader’s Response to Henning,” The Pluralist 19.1 (2024): 90–94, and “Hickman, Buddhism, and Algorithmic Technology,” Contemporary Pragmatism 20.1–2 (2023): 118–39. In addition, Garrison presented the keynote titled “Dewey, Eastern Humanism, and Education” at the Center for Dewey Studies Conference “John Dewey and His Legacy for Education,” which took place October 12–14 in Carbondale, Illinois.
Jennifer Hart, Professor and Chair in the Department of History, is part of a research team that was awarded a three-year, three million Swedish Kronor grant from the Swedish Council on Sustainable Development to study grassroots transport solutions in Detroit. The Principal Investigator is Stephen Marr, University of Malmö, Sweden.
Carol Mullen, Education, published “Post-pandemic Doctoral Mentoring: A Mentor’s Perspective,” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 17.2 (2023), Article 3.
Ashley Reed, English, was one of four faculty recipients of a Provost’s Residential Faculty Fellowship this semester; the faculty fellowship is a new designation to clarify the role of Faculty Principals in several residence halls. Reed has completed her first semester as the Faculty Principal for the Residential College at West Ambler Johnston. The new title reflects the holistic living-learning laboratory of a residential college and the opportunities for faculty to live for a limited time in a place where they can conduct research, produce creative scholarship, teach, and build relationships within and outside their discipline.
Brett Shadle, History, published “Humiliation and Violence in Kenya’s Colonial Days – When Old Men Were Called ‘Boy’ and Africans Were Publicly Beaten,” The Conversation, on December 8.
Clara Suong, Political Science, was awarded a Summer Centennial Center Research Grant from the American Political Science Association for her project titled “The Cost of (Not) Being Pale, Male, and Yale: Ambassadorial Attributes and Foreign Policy Legitimacy.”
The Virginia Tech Prison Book Project recently passed the milestone of sending 1,500 packages of books to incarcerated readers in Virginia. The project is sponsored by the Department of Religion and Culture and the Center for Humanities and is directed by Brian Britt, Religion and Culture and Director of ASPECT. Its book wrapping parties are hosted by different campus service organizations throughout the semester; the first took place November 9, 2021, and there have been 34 to date. Students read each request letter aloud before matching a book or two from the project’s collection to the request.