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Ua3/10 President's Messages - Spring Semester, Wku President's Office - Caboni

WKU Administration Documents

President's Message emails sent by Timothy Caboni to faculty & staff during spring semester, 2021.

• Big Red Restart Plan
• Commencement
• Commencement
• Council for Advancement & Support of Education
• COVID-19 Immunizations
• COVID-19 Masks
• Healthy on the Hill
• Juneteenth Holiday
• Naming & Symbols Task Force Report
• Provost Robert Fischer
• SACSCOC Accreditation
• Spring Semester Strategic Initiatives

Equity & Inclusion Matters- Issue 10, Spring 2021, Otterbein Office Of Social Justice & Activism

Equity and Inclusion Newsletter

Included in this issue:

• Otterbein Joins with Westerville Community to Launch Racial Equity Organization
• INST Course Helps Stonewall Columbus Tell Their Stories
• Activism on Campus
• Desmond Fernandez '21 Receives Community Honor at MLK Celebration
• Student Organization Spotlight: Otterbein Deaf Culture Club
• MLK Day of Service Project Goes DIY

To What Extent Is The Death Penalty A Tool Of Racial Terror In America, And How Can We Fix It?, Gabrielle Boileau

Honors Projects

In this project, I seek to answer the question: To what extent is the death penalty a tool of racial terror in America, and how can we fix it? America has long been plagued by the legacy of slavery and white supremacy. In the reconstruction era, when slavery was no longer legal, angry white citizens would simply round up African-Americans and lynch them if they felt they had done something “wrong”. However, in the modern era, such blatant displays of racism are illegal, and the racist views of society are subverted into the court system. Black men are disproportionately arrested …

Roles Of Social Media In The Black Lives Matter Movement During Covid-19, Reilly E. Olson

Honors Projects

By definition social movements reflect unique times in history. To fully grasp the implications of a movement the social and political climate that induce them must be understood. An intersectional model should be used when framing and studying the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, a modern descendant of both the NAACP and Civil Rights movement. From its inception, BLM has utilized social media as an important tool by coining #BlackLivesMatter, a hashtag that frequently comes to life offline as BLM organizers use it as a call for action and mobilization. The accessibility of social media made its role in the …

Employment Trends And Poverty Status: Men And Women In The New York City Metro Area Between 2000 And 2017, Sarah Kostecki

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction:

This report examines employment trends and poverty status among men and women aged 25-54 in the New York City metropolitan area. The report assesses the characteristics of these persons, while examining trends and differences in poverty status by sex, race/ethnicity, and across the five largest Latino nationalities.

Methods:

This report uses the American Community Survey PUMS (Public Use Microdata Series) data for all years released by the Census Bureau and reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa, (https://usa.ipums.org/usa/index.shtml). See Public Use Microdata Series Steven Ruggles, J. Trent Alexander, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Matthew …

The Library As A Safe(R) Space: Student Thoughts About The Library’S Role On Campus, Jessica Crossfield Mcintosh, Kristin Cole, Megan Powell

All Faculty and Staff Scholarship

As the demographics of college students continue to evolve, libraries must examine areas of need between their staff and the campus community. These changes and recent other recent campus events required Otterbein’s Courtright Memorial Library to question its role in providing safe(r) spaces to students of minority communities and to examine its role as a social justice advocate for inclusivity on campus. Our student body is historically white, yet our 2019 freshman class was the most diverse in its history with 23% students of color. The enrollment of students with diverse backgrounds continues to climb with our welcoming of first-generation …

Clash Of Totalitarian Titans: Nazi Germany, The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, And The Racial And Ideological War Of Annihilation On The Eastern Front, John M. Zak

Student Publications

The eastern front in the Second World War was one of unparalleled ferocity and brutality unseen on any other front during civilization’s largest and most destructive war. This work contends that in order to understand how the eastern front was such can only be understood through the lens of Nazi ideology and its long-terms goals for Lebensraum and the Greater Germany it sought to secure. The role of Nazi racial ideology and its belief in the inherent racial inferiority of the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, along with totalitarian ideology viewing Soviet Communism as Nazism’s chief …

Teaching In The Right Context: Textbook Supply Program, Language, And Vocabulary Ability In Vietnam, Tomoki Fujii, Maki Nakajima, Sijia Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

While past two decades have witnessed a remarkable educational progress in Vietnam, ethnic minority children consistently lagged behind ethnic majority children in academic performance. The government of Vietnam has stepped up efforts to assist ethnic minority students in their learning by lowering the linguistic and cultural barriers they face. Among such efforts is the textbook supply program, and we examine its impact on the learning of children proxied by vocabulary test. We apply difference-in-differences estimation to four rounds of the Young Lives data between 2006 and 2015 in order to investigate how the textbook supply program narrowed the gap between …

Grassroots On Common Ground

DePaul Magazine

This article looks at various student organizations at DePaul that work with outside agencies, other universities and within various disciplines to achieve social justice and understanding. The organizations are Community Peacemakers, Students Against Incarceration, Chicago Area Peace Action-DePaul, The Women's Center and the DePaul Alliance for Latinx Empowerment.

Attachment And Identity In Higher Education: Lived Experiences Of Korean Adoptees, Janeice A. Garrard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

South Korea has been the largest sending country of adoptees since the Korean War. Many of the adoptees were placed in predominantly White communities in the Midwest United States. In the existing literature, researchers revealed that Korean adoptees expressed feelings related to loss of ethnic identity, birth culture, and place of belonging. It has not been fully understood how attachment and identity influence Korean adoptees in their pursuit of a higher education. Therefore, this study sought to examine the impacts of attachment to birth culture, adoptive culture, and adoptive family combined with issues of ethnic identity in the lived …

Catholics & Cultures As An Act Of Improvisation: A Response, Thomas M. Landy

Journal of Global Catholicism

This essay responds to seven articles published in the same issue of the Journal of Global Catholicism on the use of Catholics & Cultures, a multimedia website, as a pedagogical resource for college classrooms. The site is deliberately presented in a fashion that undermines notions of center and periphery and presents Catholicism from a lay, lived-religion perspective as the multicultural faith that it is, minimizing reference to religious typologies. Particular attention is given to how to navigate tensions around theorizing, categorizing and sorting information for cross-cultural comparison. Given scholars’ current state of knowledge, writing about and teaching about global Catholicism …

Catholics & Cultures: A Panoramic View In Search Of Greater Understanding, Stephanie M. Wong

Journal of Global Catholicism

While internet-based technologies can open up greater awareness of the world or create self-perpetuating echo-chambers, the Catholics & Cultures project aspires to do the former. Aiming to ‘widen the lens’ on the variety of Catholic communities and practices, the site delivers on this goal by introducing viewers to a vast array of articles, pictures and videos from around the world. The organization of the site by country and by certain key features of lived Catholicism offers some interpretive guidance. However, the project could be strengthened as a pedagogical resource if it were more extensively thematized and hosted reflections on potential …

The Value Of Online Resources: Reflections On Teaching An Introduction To Global Christianity, Hillary Kaell

Journal of Global Catholicism

Reflecting on my experience teaching Introduction to Global Christianity, this essay ponders questions at the heart of undergraduate teaching: How can we encourage students to utilize online sources? How can we empower them to seek out answers to their questions? It offers practical examples of how I have used the Catholics & Cultures website in my classroom at a large public university. In particular, I reflect on my experience working with students who are mostly of Catholic heritage, but from many cultural and social contexts.

Ritual Among The Scilohtac: Global Catholicism, The Nacirema, And Interfaith Studies, Anita Houck

Journal of Global Catholicism

More than six decades after its publication, Horace Miner’s 1956 article “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” remains a reliable pedagogical tool, remarkably successful in helping students see their own ethnocentric biases. Catholics & Cultures has potential to do similar work. The site lacks some of what makes Miner’s text so effective, in particular its capacity to bring about a sudden shift in perception. The site also shares some of the article’s limitations, particularly in focusing on ritual to the relative exclusion of other aspects of religion. That said, the site can help students gain the religious literacy and develop the …

Focus On The Busy Intersections Of Culture And Cultural Change, Laura Elder

Journal of Global Catholicism

The dynamics of religious resurgence reveal the important ways that religious ritual and performance are meaning making spaces which are not self-contained or cut off from the rest of culture, but rather are a key locus of cultural change. A renewed emphasis on the busy intersections of meaning making – as rituals are connected, disconnected, and reconnected to other domains of social life – would improve the utility of the Catholics & Cultures website for understanding global cultural change. And a renewed emphasis on cultural change would also provide a better means for exploring reflexively by seeking to understand both …

A Widened Angle Of View: Teaching Theology And Racial Embodiment, Mara Brecht

Journal of Global Catholicism

Today’s undergraduate students are digital natives, shaped by constant access to information and countless experiences of encountering the world through the convenience of a screen. The ostensible comfort students have with difference gives way to a paradox, and one that’s made especially apparent in the theology classroom: Students are comfortable with seeing difference and particularity at a distance, but not adept at locating difference and particularity “at home.” I contend that Catholics & Cultures can help students from the dominant culture—namely, white students who comprise the vast majority of Catholic college students—destabilize their notion of the Catholic tradition as tightly …

Introducing Catholics & Cultures: Ethnography, Encyclopedia, Cyborg, Mathew N. Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

In introducing the Catholics & Cultures site and the articles in this special issue, this essay initially locates the overall Catholic & Cultures project within the traditions of ethnography and encyclopedia. Drawing extensively on the work of J. Z. Smith, this essay reflects upon the theoretical implications of emphasizing the diversity of Catholicism in and through a web-based platform that facilitates comparative study and pedagogy. This essay then more specifically considers the web-based aspects of Catholics & Cultures by identifying a nascent cyborgian aesthetic in the site and considering how the site might eventually engage post-modern themes and concerns.

Barriers To Post-Secondary Success, Douglas Swanson, Najeana Henderson, Maritza Sloan

Dissertations

This study reviews factors that prior studies have identified or failed to consider as barriers to post-secondary success. The three main areas include academic success for Latinx students after high school, organizational systems and their impact on African-American students’ postsecondary readiness, and what workers think of their high school education with regards to career preparedness.

Five factors are identified as major barriers for Latinx students to continue in a higher education system. A survey of former students from Saint Louis, Missouri, and Dallas, Texas, metroplex area identified 56 Latinx students that participated in an initial survey. This led to a …

Racial Equality And Social Equity In International Settings: The Anti-Discriminatory Perspective In Mexico, Felipe Blanco

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Among the many elements that make social equity a pillar of public administration in the US, racial equity and equality have had a prominent role. The literature around the topic recognizes that race and ethnicity are socially constructed categories shaped by specific socio-historical contexts and that race, as a nervous area of government is a global phenomenon. However, understanding of the social construction of race and social equity in other national settings remains fairly limited. This research contributes to closing this gap by studying the case of the National Commission to Prevent and Eradicate Discrimination (CONAPRED), a Mexican federal organization …

Melding Critical Literacy And Christianity: A Three-Layered Response To The Murder Of George Floyd, Elena M. Venegas

The Journal of Faith, Education, and Community

In this critical autoethnography, I share my three-layered response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department in May of 2020. This three-layered response stems from my situated identities (Gee, 1999) as a mother, Christian, and academic. I was not only appalled by the dehumanization of George Floyd by public servants but also by the responses of self-professed Christians to his murder as well as the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests. Such responses, I argue, are rooted in Christian nationalism (Davis & Perry, 2020) and the White supremacy that has long plagued the American …