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| April 5, 2024 | Submit a Note |
 Theatre and Dance major and minor students on the 6-day Performing Arts immersion trip met Theatre Arts alumni working in New York Erin Coffey '13, Caroline Eby '20 (Theatre Arts, Economics), Juliet Kulusic '23 (Psychology, Theatre Arts), Tina Stafford '92, and Kalina Venugopal '17 at the Signature Theatre (founded by another alumnus, Jim Houghton '81); took dance classes; went behind-the-scenes at ABC News; attended the New York SCU alumni event with Dean Press and President Sullivan, and helped prep meals at God's Love We Deliver. They saw Suffs, & Juliet, and many other Broadway shows before returning to Santa Clara!
We are back at it! I hope you had a nice spring “break” and an energetic Week 1. I had a fruitful trip to New York City over break with President Sullivan and some of our alumni. I am very pleased to say we were successful in raising money to support the Performing Arts (especially for Mayer Theatre) at Santa Clara. Many of our performing arts students are also studying other subjects during their time on campus, but it was obvious on this trip the passion that our students have for theatre, dance, and music. We coordinated a dinner with the student immersion trip led by the Department of Theatre and Dance. It was a great chance for our students and alumni to reflect on their career opportunities - both being professionals in the industry, or perhaps not. Students come to the performing arts at Santa Clara through a variety of channels and with a variety of goals, and I am proud that no matter how students get to us, they will find support through our programs. Looking ahead, we will be quite busy on campus this next week. The 47th Annual West Coast Biological Sciences Undergraduate Research Conference will be held all day tomorrow. This conference was co-founded by one of our own biology faculty, Dr. Bill Eisinger, in 1976, and is the oldest continuously ongoing, intercollegiate conference of its kind in the nation. It is a real hallmark of what we do here at Santa Clara and the many colleges and universities that participate—provide the opportunity for undergraduates to do firsthand research with our faculty. Additionally, our annual Day of Giving is on Wednesday and Preview Day for admitted students is next Saturday. Already we are seeing admitted students and their families checking out campus as they decide where they’ll go next fall. Have a great weekend and a productive Week 2! Sincerely, Daniel Highlights
Tom Plante (Psychology) presented a workshop at Stanford University entitled, "Better Than SoulCycle: Living Better with Spiritually Based Strategies that Work" on March 2nd and 9th hosted by the Catholic Community at Stanford. Workshop Description: Mindfulness, meditation, and yoga are excellent spiritual practices proven to improve physical and mental health but there is something more in the Catholic arsenal. In this workshop, a variety of Catholic-based approaches for better health and wellness that are receiving more attention and empirical support are offered. The core tenets from Jesuit spirituality discussed include seeing God (or the sacred) in all things, attending to the whole person (cura personalis), decision-making using reflection and discernment, managing conflict with accomodtion, humility, and the expectation of goodness, and ending each day with the Examen, among other strategies. March 2nd introduced these tools and the research evidence for them while March 9th focused on the evidence based sustainable implementation of these tools in everyday life. The workshop was based on Tom's recent book projects: Living Better with Spiritually Based Strategies that Work: Workbook for Spiritually Informed Therapy (SIT) and Health Behavior Change: Proven Strategies for a Longer and Healthier Life.
Yujie Ge (Modern Languages & Literatures) attended the 2024 California Language Teachers Association (CLTA) spring conference in Monterey, CA, from March 8-10, where she presented “Incorporate Tale Readings in Chinese Learning.” Her presentation discussed how to improve students’ reading skills and make reading a more engaging activity in class. She used one of her intermediate Chinese class reading activities as an example, highlighting two main components: ensuring that the reading materials are enjoyable and accessible, containing cultural components behind stories, which led to the selection of famous tales; and clearly organizing all the steps of the reading activities to facilitate student completion of the task. These steps include pre-reading and in-class reading instructions. Additionally, an assessment worksheet, designed based on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL)’s Integrated Performance Assessment guidebook, was used to conclude the reading activity. She also applied a technique acquired from the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) in the process.
Together with alumna Sofia Sandoval Larco '21 (Psychology), Birgit Koopmann-Holm (Psychology) just published her latest work on compassion in Ecuador in the journal Emotion, a top-tier, peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Psychological Association. Given that most research in psychology is conducted by WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic; Henrich et al., 2010) scientists with WEIRD participants, this work is important as it shows that conceptualizations of compassion are culture-dependent, and to be culturally competent and humble, we may want to adjust the Golden Rule from “Treat others the way you want to be treated” to “Treat others the way they want to be treated” to show and experience true compassion for others.
Chad Raphael (Communication) published a chapter in the edited anthology, Public Scholarship in Communication Studies, edited by Thomas J. Billard and Silvio Waisbord, and published by University of Illinois Press. Raphael’s chapter focuses on public scholarship on environmental communication, including the major approaches to this kind of research, and their potential rewards and risks for scholars, communities, and the natural world. The chapter argues that the purposes of this research should especially drive scholars to practice participatory research with communities, not simply on or for them, and to center issues of environmental justice.
Sonja Mackenzie (Public Health) with co-authors Marcin Smietana (Cambridge University) and Laura Mamo (SFSU) presented their paper, "What’s Queer Got to Do With It? Building an Integrated Theory of Queer Reproductive Justice" at the University of Graz Institute for Healthcare Ethics conference, Reproductive Justice in the context of Queer and Trans Reproduction on February 23, 2024. This paper interrogates the shared analyses of power and social oppression in the tenets of Reproductive Justice and queer justice to offer a critical frame of Queer Reproductive Justice. The paper traces intersectional justice-based approaches to reproduction over the past three decades in the US and beyond, drawing on Mackenzie’s ethnographic research with transgender children in the Bay Area and Smietana’s transnational research with gay men using surrogacy. We operationalize key tenets of Queer Reproductive Justice as a critical theoretical contribution to the fields of reproduction, queer theory, and critical race, indigenous, and postcolonial scholarship and praxis at a time when threats to and stratifications of reproduction are growing and maintain white supremacy and cisgender and heteronormativity in global bio-economies.
Alberto Ribas-Casasayas (Modern Languages & Literatures) co-led with Ana Luengo (SFSU) the 4-session seminar "Promises and Perils of the Psychedelic Renaissance: A Critical Perspective from the Humanities" at the American Comparative Literature Association conference in Montréal in March 2024. The seminar featured an interdisciplinary array of presentations in the fledging field of Psychedelic Humanities. He also presented his paper "Notes towards a Psychoactive Theory."
Giselle Laiduc (Psychology) published a new article with collaborators Ian Slattery and Rebecca Covarrubias (UC Santa Cruz) titled: 'Disrupting neoliberal diversity discourse with critical race college transition stories" in the Journal of Social Issues. The research is part of a larger campus-wide intervention in which incoming students were exposed to different videos of student stories during summer orientation. In one condition, more senior students discussed their challenges in the university and how they overcame them. In the critical stories condition, seniors provided a more contextual understanding of challenge, noting how their challenges were informed by their social identities and structural barriers within the university. The authors used discourse analysis to investigate what these stories surface for students, including their beliefs about the importance of diversity, whose interests it serves, and what functions it has.
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