The mission of any institution is not defined simply by a set of texts or ideas that exist outside and independent from the community that comprises the organization. Emerging from the experiences, knowledge, and passions of faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community partners, the mission of Santa Clara University blends the Jesuit, Catholic tradition with our particular community and context. This month, as we restart the Mission Monday series, we are excited to focus on our own institutional efforts to put into action a mission inspired by the Jesuit roots of our community and activated by all of us on a daily basis. 

The 2020-2021 Bannan Mission Integration grants outlined below speak to a range of issues that are of importance both to the charge of any Jesuit, Catholic institution of higher education and to our wider community in particular. They are rooted in our context as a university committed to meaningful reflection and action. We are a community striving to become an anti-racist institution. We seek to fully incorporate the experiences of all residents of the Santa Clara Valley: from indigenous voices; to those of our students, faculty, and staff; and community members marginalized in the context of rising housing costs. We also recognize our relationship to the global migration and refugee crises that call out for greater understanding and more humane responses. Across all the projects there is an underlying desire to support the flourishing in mind, body, and spirit of our local and global community as a fundamental representation of Santa Clara’s mission. 

MISSION INTEGRATION GRANTS

Building an Evidence-Based Anti-Racist Discussion Toolkit for Santa Clara University 

• Naomi Levy  |  Associate Professor, Political Science
• Natalie Linnell  |  Lecturer, Mathematics and Computer Science
• Laura Nichols  |  Associate Professor, Sociology
• Katia Moles  |  Academic Year Adjunct Lecturer, Religious Studies
• Christelle Sabatier  |  Senior Lecturer, Biology

This grant will support efforts to to create a toolkit of anti-racist practices, which will contain transferable resources available to individuals and departments across SCU. The toolkit will outline examples of different approaches to starting conversations within a unit and guidance on how to progress from various starting points to more meaningful work. The project will be based in the Racial Justice Coalition and use the RJC network to disseminate the toolkit across campus units.

Building with a Conscience? New Housing Initiatives and Justice in the Silicon Valley

• Sreela Sarkar  |  Associate Professor, Communication

This grant will fund research on the housing crisis in Silicon Valley that asks “three inter-related questions: 1) How are Big Tech and the state addressing this crisis through their policies and actions? 2) What are the racialized and class-based complexities of housing access especially in the context of new policy actions? 3) How are housing activists and social movements positioning themselves as effective actors for social change vis-à-vis institutions like the state and corporations?” While challenging neoliberal and technocratic policies, the project will highlight the experiences of marginalized residents.  The project will also include collaborative work with academics, policy makers, and activists through events at Santa Clara University. 

Devotions of Bondage: English Jesuits and American Slavery

• Andrew Keener  |  Assistant Professor, English

This grant will fund research on the ways professors, staff, and students at the world’s first English Jesuit colleges positioned themselves rhetorically in relation to the wider world and its developing problems of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism.  The project will examine the foundations of Jesuit humanism and its earliest Anglophone circumstances to understand the problems of white supremacy and racism embedded within today’s American Jesuit colleges.

Integrating Ohlone Voices into the Santa Clara University Archives: A Summer Speaker Series

• Kelci Baughman McDowell  |  Research & Instruction Services Coordinator, University Library, Archives & Special Collections
• Erin Louthen  |  University Archivist, University Library

This grant will support the implementation, hosting, and digital preservation of three programmatic events as part of a Santa Clara University Library Archives & Special Collections department program entitled, Integrating Ohlone Voices into the Santa Clara University Archives: A Summer Speaker Series.  The project will provide a venue to host events that incorporate indigenous representation into the intellectual life of Santa Clara University. The series will address the silences, erasure and elision of Native American lives and voices in the archives, including the Santa Clara Mission Manuscript Collection.

Radical Healing: A Student Activist Participatory Action Research (PAR) Zine Project for Sociopolitical Wellbeing

• Jesica S. Fernández  |  Assistant Professor, Ethnic Studies
• Sharmila Lodhia  |  Associate Professor and Department Chair, Women's & Gender Studies

This grant will support The Radical Healing Zine Project, a participatory action research (PAR) collaborative project that aims to center the voices and experiences of student activists. Through the use of photovoice (e.g., photographs and stories/narratives), testimonios and critical reflexivity journaling, the project will document how student activists experience healing and wellbeing, and thus develop practices for self and collective community relational care. The project will document, dialogue and disseminate practices of and for radical healing that can sustain student activists, particularly in relation to racial justice work.

Undergraduate Studies Antiracism Reading Group

• Katharine Heintz  |  Associate Provost, Undergraduate Studies and Senior Lecturer, Communication Department 

This grant will support the Undergraduate Studies team’s effort to realize the mission of SCU to become an anti-racist institution through the development of mission-based programming and initiatives targeted at students, faculty, staff, and/or the wider community. This will include revision and development of anti-racist curricular and co-curricular programs to serve undergraduate students and the faculty and staff who support them.

DIALOG AND DESIGN GRANTS

Engaged Learning: Cura Personalis in the Classroom

• Allia Griffin  |  Lecturer, Ethnic Studies
• Amy Lueck  |  Assistant Professor, English

This grant will support a video and blog series, Engaged Learning: Cura Personalis in the Classroom. The series will act as a digital archive that seeks to highlight ways that faculty, staff, students and alumni are maintaining or forging community. The theme for the series this year will be “Cura Personalis in the Time of COVID.” The project leads intend to create a sustainable digital archive that can simultaneously document the many projects occurring on campus as well as be a gathering space for members of the community looking for resources, inspiration, innovation, and ways to remain connected.

Global Migration and Refugee Studies Program

• Enrique Pumar  |  Fay Boyle Professor and Department Chair, Sociology

This grant will support the establishment of the Global Migration and Refugee Studies Program (GMRSP) at Santa Clara University. This program intends to provide a home for all the faculty, students, and staff of the university who are interested in migration and refugee movements around the world. The program plans to follow a comparative historical approach to investigate and study why people migrate, how they move, what trajectory they follow and why, and what are the consequences of migration movements for all of us. The funding requested will be used as seed money to create and institutionalize the program.

Mapping Inequality and Justice Interventions in Googleville

• Jaime Wright  |  Academic Year Adjunct Lecturer, Religious Studies
• Elizabeth Drescher  |  Adjunct Associate Professor, Religious Studies
• Edrick Servando Bondoc  |  Program Director, Arrupe Engagement, Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education

This grant will support the development of a community-based learning course sequence that brings together faculty, Arrupe staff, students, and community leaders to explore, analyze, and document the impact of the proposed Google Transit Village (“Googleville”) development on spatially structured experiences of inequality and justice in impacted neighborhoods of Silicon Valley. The project will build upon the existing Engaged Learning for Social Justice (ELSJ) framework and seeks to address the systemic inequalities in Silicon Valley through longer-term research and analytical techniques that are data-generating and data-driven.