Sigmund Shipp, Department of Urban Affairs and Planning
“Changing the Faces of Poverty: Race, Class, and Space.” Paper presented at the Association for College School of Planning Conference, Salt Lake City, UT in October 2011. The presentation represented an exploratory examination of the white poor—a critical void in the literature about poverty. The research posits that at an earlier point whites were depicted as being poor but that changed as blacks became the sole image of poverty. The research juxtaposes photos and other portrayals with a timeline of social, political, and economic policies to analyze the changing face of poverty over time.
Carol Roye, Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing
“Partnerships to Enhance Nursing Education In Haiti.” The January 2010 earthquake in Haiti destroyed the national School of Nursing. In April 2011 Hunter college faculty, led by Professor Roye, hosted a 2-day conference at the Roosevelt House, “Partnerships To Enhance Nursing Education in Haiti”, attended by Haitian and North American nurse educators. The goal of the conference was to create effective partnerships to improve nursing education in Haiti. Funding will allow Professor Roye to attend a follow-up conference in Haiti to provide an update and develop next steps for meeting the goals.
Partha Deb, Department of Economics
“Finite Mixture Models in Health Economics.” Paper presented in a keynote address at the 10th Annual Canadian Health Economists’ Study Group Meeting. A slightly different version of this talk was also presented at the World Congress of the International Health Economics Association. Policy makers have become very aware of heterogeneity of responses to policy changes including those in health and healthcare. Finite mixture models provide a promising approach to identifying heterogeneity in populations that go beyond simple, observable sources such as gender and race. These presentations demonstrated the value of finite mixture models in such contexts.
Ellen Trief, School of Education
“Personnel Preparation Programs: Focus on Literacy” Workshop presented at the Getting in Touch with Literacy Conference in Louisville, Kentucky in December 2011. The workshop discusses and presents an on online video clip library to be accessed by Personnel Preparation Programs in Visual Impairment and Blindness throughout the country. The video clip library will contain exemplary 8-10 minute video clips of Teachers of the Blind and Visually Impaired throughout the country demonstrating evidence-based practice. A primary focus will be to discuss and establish criteria for the types of video clips particularly in the area of literacy that could be shown in the library. The video clip library is being funded by a three-year grant from the Lavelle Fund.
Nico Israel, Department of English
Funding will support his paper concerning the relationship between the rise of the constructed auxiliary international language Esperanto and the development, around the turn of the twentieth century, of idioms of universal human rights—rights that began to be articulated just after the French revolution and were codified with the approval of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Specifically, it explores how the Irish novelist James Joyce, in his novels Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), deploys Esperanto in passages that, when analyzed fully, both acknowledge the impulse for universal language, suffrage, and human rights (as they were then being codified around the rise of the League of Nations up to the disintegration of internationalism in the late 30s), and simultaneously point to impasses in human rights rhetoric—impasses that have been recently theorized in critical human rights academic studies of the early 2000s (including the work of Joseph Slaughter, who has written on the relationship between the rhetoric of human rights and the post-colonial novel of “development”).
Omar Dahbour, Department of Philosophy
This paper will attempt to define a new philosophical paradigm for understanding claims to indigenous rights, as well as other legitimate claims to political self-determination in the current period. The concept of eco-sovereignty will be defined and employed to make it serviceable for the needs of new, non-state, constituencies in twenty-first-century conflicts over cultural traditions, natural resources, and territorial boundaries. This concept is derived from the twentieth-century discourse of anti-colonialism, especially the principle of self-determination that was used to criticize imperial rule. But it also constitutes a rejection of the nationalist and statist interpretations of the principle of sovereignty.
Tom Angotti, Department of Urban Affairs and Planning
Funding will offset the costs of travelling and participating in two conferences: Latin American Studies Association conference in San Francisco, May 23-26 to chair an approved panel titled “Urbanization and Inequality in Latin America.” This includes authors of a forthcoming issue of Latin American Perspectives on urbanization and inequality that is expected to come out in time for the conference, which will his article as lead. At the second conference, Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning conference in Cincinnati, November 1-4 professor Angotti organized a panel session on global urban planning policies focused on topics related to his forthcoming book, “The New Century of the Metropolis: Enclave Development and Urban Orientalism,” to be released by Routledge in July 2012. The book is an energetic challenge to urban planning policies at the global scale and proposes new approaches that address issues of environmental justice and inequality.
John Wallach, Department of Political Science
“The Responsibility to Protect: Sanctioning Permanent Legitimation Crises in the 21st Century.” Presentation of paper at The International Studies Association conference. This paper examines “the responsibility to protect” doctrine as a reflection, as much as a solution, to the perpetual legitimation crises of sovereign states in the 21st century that stem from the conjunction of human rights and foreign policy. It delineates how the noble aims of “the responsibility to protect” also call into question the role of new agents of international political responsibility in the 21st century (aka “the international community”) and the relationship between justifiable sovereignty and democracy.
Nancy Foner, Department of Sociology
“How Warm is the Welcome? Race and Religion in Europe and the United States.” Paper to be presented at the international conference of the Council for European Studies. The paper explores the challenges of diversity in the wake of mass immigration to Western Europe and the United States in recent decades, with a focus on racial inequalities and religious identities. Race-as-color, Professor Foner argues, is a greater barrier in the United States, yet immigrants and their children there have benefited from the presence of the huge African American population and policies and institutional mechanisms created in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and legislation. Immigrants’ religion – in particular, Islam — has become the marker of a fundamental social divide in Western Europe and a common source of conflict with mainstream institutions and practices as compared to the United States, where immigrant religion more often operates as a bridge to inclusion. The paper analyzes the transatlantic differences and discusses the implications for social integration policies.
Carol Gould, Department of Philosophy
“The Human Right to Democracy and its Global Import.” Paper will be presented at the American Philosophical Association Annual Meeting in Washington, DC from December 27-30, 2011. I will be participating in a panel on the theme “The Human Right to Democracy: For and Against,” with two other speakers and a chair, all well-known political philosophers and we expect a large audience. This opportunity to present my work at the premier meeting of philosophers in North America—the most important in our profession—will help me to disseminate my distinctive approach to human rights. Importantly, it will provide me with valuable feedback for revising the paper as a chapter of my new book, Interactive Democracy: The Social Roots of Global Justice, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. That book, like my previous one Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights proposes a human rights perspective as central to politics and policy in the contemporary period.
Jen Samson, School of Education
“Teacher Quality and the Ivory Tower: Examining the Relationship Between Teacher Education, Teachers, and Student Performance.” Research has shown that teacher quality is a significant factor in student achievement, however, there has been relatively little research on how a teacher becomes highly effective. The premise behind the very existence of schools of education is that teachers can be cultivated through coursework and field experiences which in turn will result in high student achievement. This investigation looks at the factors that facilitate high quality teaching, with a specific focus on schools of education and education policy.
Rupal Oza, Women and Gender Studies Program
“Improbable Coalitions: Seeking New Dialogues on the Politics of Secularism, Religion, and Fundamentalisms” Panel to be presented at the International Forum of the Association for Women in Development on April 19-22, 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey. In light of the recent events that have come to be called ‘Arab Spring’ there has emerged a series of important debates among feminists and Human Rights practitioners centering on how we simultaneously navigate the concerns of women in Muslim countries, as they confront religious conservatism, while not falling into an expanding Islamaphobic frame. Additional panelists include Ros Petchesky, Samira Haj and Dina Siddiqi.
