Applied anthropologist (and Professor of Anthropology) Kiran Cunningham ’83 designs and implements research that yields an immediately tangible result: people gain more control of the trajectories of their lives. Such work works best when it involves students at K and abroad. Welcome to the “scholar’s sweet spot,” those projects that lead to meaningful social change, integrate multiple strands of the scholarly self, connect to classroom teaching, allow for student involvement, and require collaboration with a diverse group of incredible colleagues. Cunningham’s work with Uganda’s Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment and with the city government of Kalamazoo has led to a collaboration of communities—as well as students—to help ensure that public policy works for people on two continents.
lecture
War Memories
Imagine an important story videotaped in one language and simultaneously translated into another. Such an advance would more broadly open to the world the oral history of the world. Assistant Professor of Japanese Noriko Sugimori describes the scholarly collaboration that, using and adding to an archive of videotaped World War II memories of elderly Japanese, applied a new technology to create the world’s first bilingual, synchronized translation and indexing process. Oral history is now more widely open to cross-cultural academic explorations, and Sugimori and her K students played a vital role in that access.
Social Justice Science
Who gets to do science? To whom will accrue its benefits, or costs? What happens to scientific data? What does it mean to do—and teach—science in a socially just way? These are questions that have informed the work of Professor of Chemistry Regina Stevens-Truss for the past five years. She shares her discoveries regarding the intersection of and distinction between ethics, civic engagement, and social justice in science.
More Eyes and New Eyes
The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership Assistant Professor of English Shanna Salinas elucidates two key ways to incorporate diversity into the United States literary canon. Diversity can be enhanced by expanding the canon to include more authors of color and various ethnic backgrounds and by reconsidering from different perspectives the works that have a long tradition of inclusion in the canon. In her remarks (“Mexico in the U.S. Literary Canon”) Salinas focuses on the latter, specifically the way a Chicano critical framework opens entirely new realms of meaning in The Awakening, a novel by American writer Kate Chopin published in 1899 and set in Reconstruction-era New Orleans.