Recent Faculty and Graduate Student Activities to Promote Diversity in Teaching and Research

The combination of a diverse group of graduate students with an emphasis in graduate coursework about understanding and embracing differences has engendered an environment, we believe, in which faculty are challenged and encouraged to relate to, and embrace, diverse backgrounds and ways of thought. As you can see in the list below, creating a diverse curriculum has been a high priority for our faculty, and we continue to include significant units on race and gender in our classes. A testament to our success is that our graduate teaching assistants feel empowered to include diversity issues in their courses, and to discuss these issues with the undergraduate students they teach.

Faculty and Graduate Student Teaching

Assistant Professor Ralina Joseph developed and taught a new graduate seminar in Autumn 2005, Racism and Sexism in the Contemporary U.S., which enrolled 11 graduate students.

Professor Gerald Baldasty’s History of Communication course in Spring 2006 focused the student work on the history of two ethnic/community newspapers in Seattle—the Medium (African American) and the International Examiner (Asian American).

Associate Professor David Domke taught the graduate course Ethnicity, Gender, and Communication in Spring 2005. This course examined the roles of language and communication in enacting, reinforcing, or challenging certain conceptions of ethnicity, gender, and difference more broadly. Students wrote weekly journals reflecting on the course ideas and their roles in the cultural processes we examine. They also undertook group research projects in which they analyzed public communications about matters of communication, ethnicity, and gender.

A new course, Journalism and Diversity, was offered for the first time in Winter 2005. The course was taught by Lecturer Florangela Davila, a Seattle Times reporter with expertise in covering a range of ethnic communities. This course focused on journalistic reporting and writing on topics that intersect substantially with race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, and age. This course was a needed, and wonderful contribution to the Department of Communication’s journalism curriculum.

Faculty and Graduate Student Research

The Department, through its development efforts, has created a new endowment, the Janice and William Ames Fund. This Fund will provide support for graduate students doing research on difference and diversity. Moreover, many of the scholarly works produced by students and faculty already help us fulfill the goal of our diversity plan to produce works relevant to issues of inclusion, identity, and discrimination:

Associate Professor Kathleen Fearn Banks has completed the Historical Dictionary of African American Television (Scarecrow Press, 2005)

A student-faculty collaboration among Meg Spratt, Gerald Baldasty, Fiona Clark, and others, produced, “News, Race, and the Status Quo: The Case of Emmett Louis Till,” accepted for publication by The Howard Journal of Communication.

Graduate student Maria Garrido and Raul Roman published “Women Appropriating Information and Communication Technologies for Social Change in Latin America—A Contemporary Snapshot,” in Hafkin & Huyer (eds.) Cinderella or Cyberella: Empowering Women in Knowledge Society. Kumarian Press: Connecticut (in press).

Our faculty and students made numerous presentations at conferences relevant to diversity, difference, and cultural identity:

Nancy van Leuven presented “Perspectives on Urban Ecology: Tribal Casinos and the Nature of Cities” at the Society for Literature, Science and Arts, Chicago, Nov. 10-13, 2005.

Graduate student Jon Tomhave and Native Voices alum Rachel Nez had their films, “Half of Anything,” and “The Border Crossed Us,” screened at festivals and conferences in recent months, including the 2005 IMAGe Nation Film Festival (Vancouver, B.C.), the 30th Annual American Indian Film Festival (San Francisco), and the Aboriginal Film Festival .

Graduate student Kristin Gustafson presented “Nellie Francis and the NAACP: Agents for Social Change in 1920” at the American Journalism Historians Association, San Antonio, October, 2005.

Graduate student Kate Dunsmore presented “Voices of African American Youth: Aspiration and Struggle” at the Rocky Mountain Modern Languages Association, 2005 Convention, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Oct. 2005.

Graduate student Laura Black presented “Listening to the city: Storytelling, difference, and identity in online discussions about commemorating September 11th” at the National Communication Association, Boston, MA.

Associate Professor Patricia Moy presented “Frames and Sources in New York Times Coverage of Abu Ghraib” with graduate students Andrea Hickerson and Kate Dunsmore at the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research.

Native Voices Co-Directors Luana Ross and Daniel Hart presented a paper at the Indigenous Professors Conference at the University of Kansas, entitled “Decolonizing Documentary: Indigenous Research in the Native Voices Center.” Daniel Hart and Native Voices grad Rosemary Gibbons, along with Native Voices graduate students Lyana Patrick, Alicia Woods, Teresa Powers, and Angelo Baca, presented two panels at the National Oral History Association Conference in Portland, OR, entitled “Decolonizing the Documentary: Oral History in UW Native Voices Program.”

Graduate student Andrea Hickerson presented a paper entitled “The Kurds of Southern Kurdistan: Kurdish opinion on American intervention in Iraq,” at the Ethnic Studies panel for the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Conference in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, Oct. 17-19. Her presentation has been nominated for the Charles Davis Award for best conference presentation by a graduate student. (The winner is announced early next year.)

Graduate students Andrea Hickerson and Kate Dunsmore, with Associate Professor Patricia Moy, presented “Sanctioning torture: Power indexing in the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales” at the Midwest Association of Public Opinion Research conference in Chicago, Nov. 2005.

Workshops, Lectures, and Service

The Department of Communication has created an Alumni Hall of Fame to recognize the remarkable careers of alumni from the Department of Communication and the two divisions that merged to form the department in 2001 (the Department of Speech Communication and the School of Communications). Our 2004 and 2005 honorees have included many alumni who have contributed greatly to Seattle’s ethnic and minority communities. 2005’s inductees included:

Micki Flowers, B.A. 1973, recently retired KIRO TV reporter and anchor.

Evelyn Keiko Iritani, B.A. 1978, Reporter (Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Los Angeles Times), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 (with Abigail Goldman, Nancy Cleeland and Tyler Marshall) for a seven-part investigative series on Wal-Mart.

Lori Lei Matsukawa, M.A. 1996, award-winning journalist and anchor (KING 5 News, KONG TV).

These alumni joined an equally distinguished Hall of Fame class from 2004, which included among its honorees the following individuals:

Ron Chew, B.A., 2002, Executive director, Wing Luke Asian Museum, founder of the Chinese Oral History Project of Seattle.

Assunta Ng, M.A. 1979, publisher, Chinese Post, Northwest Asian Weekly.

Steve Pool, B.A. 1977, broadcaster, civic leader.

Norman Rice, B.A. 1972, former city council member, mayor, president of the Federal Home Loan Bank.

Other activities ranged from sponsorship to participating in workshops and special events.

The Department was one of the many sponsors of the Mavin Foundation's cross-country tour.

Professor Roger Simpson traveled to Biloxi, Mississippi, in mid Dec. as part of a Poynter-Dart team working with journalists from the Mississippi Gulf coast (concurrent with a similar Dart-Poynter workshop with Louisiana journalists in New Orleans). This is a significant effort to provide support for the local and regional journalists who have continued to deal with the hurricanes' aftermath.

Recent Native Voices graduate Rachel Nez’s film, “The Border Crossed Us,” was shown on November 22 at the Office of Minority Affairs Ethnic Cultural Center. The event was sponsored by MEChA, ASUW La Raza Student Commission, First Nations, and ASUW American Indian Student Commission.

Graduate student Tim Pasch received a grant from the Foreign Language and Area Studies program (FLAS) for Inuktitut. This grant is the first to be awarded for the acquisition of an aboriginal language, and the first to be conducted using teleconferencing technology to the Arctic. Pasch was also awarded client-status from the Center for Advanced Research for Technology in the Arts and Humanities (CARTAH), for the development of web content related to an Ainu (Japan)/Inuit (Canada) portal.

Associate Professor Kirsten Foot's students in the Global Communication course in autumn quarter did group presentations based on their 3-week simulation exercise modeled on the World Summit on the Information Society, the UN/ITU conference underway in Tunis this week. Each student represented an organization/entity in one of these categories: business, national governmental, nongovernmental, or intergovernmental.

Associate Professor David Domke was part of a small group of College of Arts & Sciences faculty engaged in the creation of an undergraduate minor in diversity for the College.