Tag Archives: academia

New job at Arizona State University

Posted in University life by

This week I began a new position as an Assistant Professor in the School for Social Transformation at Arizona State University. I come to this position after working for five years as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University in Washington DC.

My time at Howard went quickly. When I drove cross-country to DC with my luggage and my cat in May of 2015, I was excited about many things: having a job with benefits, a new role as a faculty member after many years as a graduate student, new opportunities for learning at Historically Black University, and starting a new life in Washington DC. The transition from Santa Cruz to Washington DC went smoothly. Even though I’d never lived anywhere more than an hour away from the San Francisco Bay area for more than five months, life in Washington DC wasn’t hard to adapt to. People are people, after all. I (mostly) got used to the fact that it rains in the summer, gloried in the fireflies, tried to adopt the more formal dress-code and mode of address (“hello, Dr. so-and-so”), and then settled into a middle ground between Santa Cruz and DC professional standards. I met wonderful new friends and quirky, smart colleagues, got to know dedicated students, and developed what I believe will be a lasting interest in Black Studies.

I drove back across the country to Arizona this spring a little older and a little wiser. A few things were different this time. My cat and I were accompanied by my partner, I was six months pregnant, and we drove a rented RV to minimize our exposure to the coronavirus pandemic that had exploded in the US a short time before. The pandemic restrictions got looser and looser as we traveled west from DC. When we arrived in Arizona hardly anyone was wearing masks, and the host of our RV campground referred to the virus making scare quotes around the term with her hands as she talked (“virus”). Soon after, George Floyd was murdered. Protests across the nation, including here in Pheonix, have brought longstanding anti-black police violence more forcefully into the national eye. The resulting conversations led to working with my partner Vernon Morris, my tech mentor Allen Gunn and several of Vernon’s colleagues on a public letter to address systemic racism in the academy. It was one of many such letters, the results of which are still unspooling.

I miss my friends at Howard and in Washington DC, but I’m looking forward to new adventures here in Arizona. My position in the School for Social Transformation promises many new and interesting colleagues, even if it will be a while before I meet them anywhere other than on Zoom. The coronavirus pandemic, soaring temperatures in Tempe and a newborn at home mean I have rarely left the house since arriving. But the weather will cool off eventually, and I look forward to exploring the desert and the mountains that surround Phoenix when that happens. I’m grateful to have stable employment and health care in these troubled times – so far, ASU has not announced any layoffs or furloughs.

Going forward, please contact me at my new ASU e-mail address.

First siting of saguaro cacti as we drive West, as seen through a very dirty windshield.

Teaching Environmental Inequality: 2016 Syllabus

Posted in Environmental justice, Teaching by

This post is the first of several about the the Environmental Inequality class that I finished teaching at Howard earlier this month. It was my third time teaching the class.  I wrote about its first incarnation at UC Santa Cruz in 2012 here, and shared my Howard University syllabus from 2015 here. Here’s what I did this time around:

 

The first time I taught the class, I kept the assignments simple with pop-quizzes and take-home essay exams. The second around, I had students do research and writing on websites they built themselves. You can find an overview of that assignment and all of the prompts I gave the students to complete it here.

This year we did a community-based research project. I’ve wanted to do a class project like this for a long time but the timing has never been right. The first time I taught Environmental Inequality at UC Santa Cruz I was filling in for my advisor for one semester only. It didn’t seem to make sense to do an intricate community-based project when I couldn’t design the project to last over multiple semesters. Also, it was my first time teaching my own college-level class as a graduate student. Also, my dad was ill. The second time I taught the class, last fall, I was brand new to Washington D.C. and didn’t yet have local contacts with whom to collaborate. This fall the timing was finally right. I had put some time into getting to know local organizations, and thought I could use the project to continue to get my bearings on the world of Washington D.C. environmental justice activism. Here’s the project overview from the syllabus above:

This semester we will work on a collaborative research project with the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, Empower DC, and ANC commissioner Rhonda Hamilton from the neighborhood directly adjacent to Buzzard Point in Washington, D.C. Buzzard Point is currently being redeveloped. It will be the site of the new DC United Soccer Stadium and many other new construction projects. Our work will involve conducting oral history interviews with residents living near Buzzard Point to document their family history in the neighborhood, relationship to the community and to the adjacent Anacostia River, and experiences with pollution and development. We will host guest speakers as well as go on field trips and conduct off-campus research activities as part of this project. The Anacostia Community Museum will then add the transcripts to their archives and create a booklet based on your interviews to distribute to research participants in the winter of 2017. When the booklet is ready (early 2017), there will be an optional reception at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum to which you will be invited. This effort is a pilot project to upon which I hope to build a longer-term research relationship with our off-campus partners. You will be provided with detailed assignment prompts to guide each stage of your work as the course progresses.

In the next few posts, I’ll share reflections on the boat tour we took as a class on the Anacostia River, the interviews the students conducted, and some of our in-class activities. Some of the posts will also have slideshows. Stay tuned!

Back-to-school checklist

Posted in Professionalization, Teaching, University life by

Although the weather continues to be hot here in Washington D.C., summer has come to an end for the students and workers of Howard University. I attended the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting just as school was beginning. This conference is spectacularly ill-timed to take place right before or during many schools’ first week of classes every year. I cancelled  my first day of classes and taught two days later after getting off a red-eye from the West Coast at 6am.

Regardless of  how you spend the last few days of summer, you may feel overwhelmed by the administrative details associated with resuming classes and committee work each fall. Because I think there are few life-problems that a good list can’t help address, I created a Back to School Checklist this year to help me remember some of the details that need to get taken care of for a smooth start. Feel free to adapt it for your own purposes as you like, I know I’ll be adding things as I remember them. And if you’re really list-crazy, take a look at the fun ones available at Knock-Knock (I find their “Pack This!” list particularly helpful). Or check out Atul Gawande’s book The Checklist Manifesto – if nothing else, it’ll make you glad you don’t have to worry about whether you left a pair of scissors inside the last person you did surgery on before sewing them up.

 

Back to School Checklist

Classes

  • Confirm class time and space
  • Check audio-visual supplies: screen, projector, speakers
  • Finalize Syllabus
    • Update readings
    • Add new dates for each class meeting that correspond to this calendar year
    • Look at campus academic calendar and add dates to syllabus as needed (campus closed, last day to drop, etc)
    • Update assignments
    • Schedule guest-speakers
    • Schedule office-hours
  • Create course website (Blackboard, etc)
    • Make sure that enrolled students are in the system
    • Add syllabus
    • Upload readings
    • Set up places for students to turn in work for each assignment
    • Set up gradebook
    • “Publish” site so it is visible to students
  • Create attendance sheet
  • Create sign-up sheets (for example, if students will each facilitate a day of classroom discussion)
  • Order required books at campus bookstore
  • Put required books on reserve at campus library
  • Add chalk, eraser, or whiteboard pens to teaching bag as needed
  • Add paper and pens for big nametags on desk as needed
  • Prepare lesson plan and slides for first day of class. Make time to:
    • Do names and/or ice-breaker
    • Introduce self
    • Introduce class – with hook!
    • Review syllabus – use screenshots of book covers when possible
    • Sign up for assignments that are date-specific
    • Take attendance
    • Collect information of students hoping to get in to class

 

Research Assistants

  • Get students signed up for independent study classes as appropriate
  • Create proxy library accounts that let students check out books to my library account
  • Schedule first team meeting with students
  • Reserve room for team meeting
  • Prepare for first meeting
    • Review and organize prior student work
    • Prepare list of projects and tasks to be divvied up amongst group. Decide how many people are needed for each project
    • Create agenda
    • Create sharable to-do lists and timesheets
    • Update IRB “how to” document that details what students need to give me in order to be approved by the IRB as research assistants
    • Update all other “how-to” documents as needed to support student tasks
    • Select and upload introductory readings to help frame research tasks
    • Add students to Google Drive folder that houses group files
  • At first meeting
    • Introductions
    • Background on research projects and descriptions of tasks
    • Divide up tasks
    • Describe optional events happening this semester that students can participate in as part of their weekly hours to supplement their learning
    • Share contact information
    • Assign background reading
    • Give overview of the IRB and the describe the documents students need to provide to be approved by IRB as research assistants
    • Get familiar with the documents in the shared folder on Google Drive
    • Review project communications and tracking (to-do list, hours sheet)
    • Schedule training for students with librarian on how to find scholarly articles
    • Pick weekly meeting time
    • Schedule meeting between each project group and myself to provide training about how to get started with their task

 

Other

  • Add campus calendar dates to personal calendar (due dates for grades, last day of classes, etc)
  • Add dates on department calendar to personal calendar (faculty meetings, report due dates, etc)
  • Make work plan for year/semester
  • Post office hours on door
  • Return or renew library books
  • Clean office!