Karina Gutiérrez (Theatre and Dance) directed the staged reading of WMB by Marisela Treviño Orta at TheatreFirst in Berkeley.  Stephanie Prentice '96 (Theatre Arts) is the Co-Artistic Director of TheatreFirst and Carolina Morones '09 (Theatre Arts) acted in the production.

Dear College Faculty and Staff,

Happy Friday to you all! I would like to officially welcome all of our new faculty who begin their work at SCU today. They are all so talented – every year I feel like the College won the lottery, and I know each Department feels the same about their new colleagues. Most of all, I am so curious to see how our students connect with these wonderful teacher-scholars!

I would also like to welcome our incoming department chairs: Korin Wheeler (Chemistry and Biochemistry), Tim Urdan (Child Studies, serving one year while Brett Solomon is on sabbatical), Scot Hanna-Weir (Music), Chris Kulp and Larry Nelson (co-chairs for Philosophy), Elsa Chen (Political Science), and Laura Nichols (Sociology). I’d be remiss if I didn’t also acknowledge our outgoing chairs who have dedicated much of their time to leading their departments. A big round of applause to: Amelia Fuller (Chemistry and Biochemistry), Bruno Ruviaro (Music), Scott LaBarge (Philosophy), Greg Corning (Political Science), and Laura Robinson (Sociology) for their service. I know it is not an easy job to be chair, but it’s an important one, and we appreciate those who step into the role.

It’s that time of year to invite all of our faculty and staff to attend our annual College Convocation! Please join us on September 12 at 10:30 am on the Varsi Lawn. I’ll have some remarks and we’ll announce the College Awards before we proceed to lunch on the Ignatian Lawn. As usual, we have scheduled a photographer for faculty and staff who want or need to update their head shots. Please sign up for a timeslot to help cut down on wait time.

Sincerely,

Daniel

Highlights

Tom Plante (Psychology) has had a new book published, Living Ethically in an Unethical World: Doing the Right Thing, Second Edition. San Diego, CA: Cognella (2024).

Living Ethically in an Unethical World: Doing the Right Thing provides readers with an easy-to-read and understand set of principles and tools that anyone can use to help them make good ethical decisions.

Part I of the book presents the rationale for using an ethics-based approach to decision-making. The chapters explore a variety of approaches to ethics, five steps to making ethical decisions, and what doing the right thing entails. In Part II, readers discover five ethical principles to live by: respect, responsibility, integrity, competence, and compassion. Part III focuses on sustaining the principles set forth in the text by developing ethical muscle and applying ethical decision-making to ongoing life challenges. Each chapter concludes with Test Yourself sections, designed to help readers apply what they’ve learned to make tough ethical decisions in hypothetical situations.

Developed to help readers engage in ethical thought and lead lives of which they can be proud, Living Ethically in an Unethical World is an ideal text for anyone with interest in ethics-based reflection and action.

Jesica S. Fernández (Ethnic Studies) attended the 2023 Society for Community Research & Action (SCRA) Biennial Conference in Atlanta, GA where she presented her research on the Youth for Justice Project, which is an afterschool participatory arts in action program at Sacred Heart Nativity School. This project is a community/school-university collaboration that is supported by funding from the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship and the Environmental Justice & the Common Good Initiative. Jesica's research talks and workshop centered on her scholarship on youth sociopolitical development, participatory action research, and decolonial feminist praxes. Additionally, Dr. Dominique Thomas (Morehouse College) and Jesica were named as the recipients of the 2023 Early Career Award. Jesica was recognized for her scholarly contributions to the discipline, specifically her research and efforts to decolonize U.S.-based community psychology training and discourses in the goal of transforming the discipline toward more liberatory practices of epistemic justice.

Image: SCRA 2023 Early Career Award recipients: Jesica S. Fernández & Dominique Thomas (Morehouse College). Photo: Thomas Fernandez.

Janice Thornburg M.A. '12 (Graduate Program in Pastoral Ministries) recently completed her Doctor of Ministry in Congregational Development through Bexley Seabury Seminary Federation, an Episcopal Seminary located in Chicago. Janice’s passion for integrating best business practices in a ministerial context motivated her to seek a degree that emphasized the integration of both theory and practice. Through Bexley Seabury, D.Min. students “reflect theologically on the nature of the church, understand the challenges and opportunities facing today’s faith communities, analyze congregations and their contexts, practice effective community organizing and strategizing.”

Following Vatican II the Roman Catholic Church has highlighted parents, as head of the domestic church, to be the primary teachers of faith. Janice’s thesis looked at one path to effectively support parents in their lifelong learning, paving a path for the intersection of faith in daily life experiences. Her model draws upon faith transmission practices from the church in late antiquity (pre-325AD), a time of robust growth in Christianity.

Can preschoolers learn new words from reading aloud over Zoom? Kirsten Read (Psychology) and alumnae co-authors, Hayley Harrison '23 (Psychology), Brianna Mireku '22 (Psychology) and Katrina Ying '22 (Psychology) published a new study last month that investigates this question. The study, which began in 2021 while the lab was still fully remote, reports the findings and implications from testing how well children could learn new vocabulary words (cute monster names) from a story read-aloud over Zoom. It turns out, the word learning task was very challenging for 3- to 5-year-olds relative to similar in-person studies, but the variation in ways in which the children engaged with Zoom-based shared reading unearthed many interesting future questions about the impacts of set-up and attentional resources.

Image: Co-author Hayley Harrison presented the findings from this project at the 2023 Sigma Xi Honors Society poster session.

Sharmila Lodhia (Women's and Gender Studies), Brett Solomon (Child Studies), and Michael Whalen (Communication) published an article with Marco Bravo (School of Education and Counseling Psychology) and Bryant Alexander (Dean of the LMU College of Communication and Fine Arts) entitled, "Resounding/Resonating Sounds of Home, Heritage, and Heart: A Collaborative Autoethnography of Re/Membering the Self Through Storying Family" in Sage Journals' Critical Studies/Critical Methodologies. The collaborative autoethnography brought together five authors to explore the trope of sound through re/membering the self and storying family. It's an exploration of the inter-reliability and inner relatability of sounds of home, heritage, and the heart across diverse human lived experiences of grief, mourning, recovery, and intergenerational legacies of hope. The essay explores the relational practice between self in relation to culture that always informs autoethnography as qualitative inquiry, which is intentionally exploited and magnified in this collaborative autoethnography.

James Lai's (Ethnic Studies) book Asian American Connective Action in the Age of Social Media (Temple University Press) was recently selected by the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (REP) Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) as the "2022-23 Best Book on Race, Ethnicity, and Identity." The award was presented in Los Angeles during the APSA meetings. According to the REP website: "REP Section's annual book awards recognize the very best research exploring the multiple junctures between politics and issues of race, ethnicity, immigration, and indigeneity, as well as their intersections with other axes of identity and marginalization."

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar

Camino classes (Virtual)

The Mobile Professor

September 1, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Camino Course Design

September 1, 1:30 - 3:00 PM

Camino Quizzes

September 5, 1:30 - 3:00 PM

Camino Gradebook

September 8, 1:00 - 2:30 PM