The Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University has received a national award from the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) for its commitment to diversity and for demonstrating that commitment through programs for underrepresented students in high school and college.

Marisol Diaz, director of Admissions and Student Groups at the College of Law, accepted the third annual Diversity Matters Award on behalf of the law school during the LSAC’s annual meeting in Boca Raton, Fla. Download Full Image

The award is made each year to schools that demonstrate a strong commitment to diversity by designing programming for high school and college students from racial and ethnic groups that are underrepresented in law schools and the legal profession.

“We are very proud of the efforts of faculty, staff, students and our partners in the community to continue to reach out to underserved communities,” said Douglas Sylvester, dean of the college. “Having our outreach programs recognized as the best in the country by the Law School Admission Council is a high honor.” 

The award is sponsored by the council’s Diversity Initiatives Office and its website discoverlaw.org. More than 200 law schools are members of LSAC, which administers the Law School Admission Test and otherwise assists with admissions of students.

The umbrella for the College of Law’s diversity programs is the Hispanic National Bar Association’s (HNBA) Mentoring Program. It assigns students in K-12 to mentoring teams comprising attorneys, law students, college students and high school students. Although the HNBA program serves many students of color, it is open to those of all ethnicities.

The program acts as a stepladder for these students to fulfilling and meaningful work in the legal profession in a number of ways. High school students gain exposure to information about college, undergraduate and pre-law students learn about the law school admissions process and the importance of taking challenging classes, and all students, including law students, get an inside view of the practice of law with attorney mentors.

Law students in the program periodically provide mentoring and outreach to elementary school students. For example, a law student organized an outreach program in which several minority law students visited the Eliseo Felix Elementary School in Goodyear, Ariz., and taught sessions in the classrooms. A couple of months later, the elementary students were excited to visit the state courts and legislature, under a grant from the State Bar of Arizona Diversity Program.

Other diversity programs at the College of Law include:

Street Law strives not only to educate young people about the law, but to empower them to take an active role in the civic affairs of their schools, communities and country, and to enable them to identify problems and make positive changes in their lives and in others. With a primary goal to increase diversity in the legal profession, law students from the College of Law’s Youth Mentoring Board are guest teachers in freshman classes at South Mountain High School.

Library tours and exercises – Each October, students from South Mountain High tour the College of Law’s Ross-Blakley Law Library and receive instruction from staff about legal research. They are assigned to find, read, analyze and report on a U.S. Supreme Court opinion. The event traditionally takes place in the same week as the fall kick-off dinner for the HNBA/ASU Mentoring Program.

Junior Law/CourtWorks exposes local middle school students in Phoenix, specifically focusing on Title I schools, to aspects of law school. Students are engaged in discussing an issue that is relevant to them and impacts their lives. The program seeks to foster an interest in the study of law and to encourage students to focus on academic achievement and higher education.

Law students guide middle school students through the constitutional framework, the facts of the case, the arguments and counterarguments, writing and presenting opening and closing arguments, examining and cross examining witnesses, and the final U.S. Supreme Court decision. CourtWorks culminates in a mock trial at the federal district courthouse where students perform the roles of judge, attorneys, witnesses and jury members.

Practicing attorneys and law students assist the students as they try their case, and at the end of the trial, students hear from U.S. District Court Judge Mary Murguia, the program’s host. Attorneys in the community, parole and police officers, court personnel and U.S. marshals also speak to the students, exposing them to a wide range of professions within the legal system.

Arizona State University students were among the first to participate in the Intel Ultimate Engineering Experience launched by the Intel Corp. in Chandler, Ariz., this summer with the first of a series of six-week “boot camps” for engineering students.

Through a competitive application process, 120 students – half of them from ASU and half from Chandler-Gilbert Community College – were selected to participate. Download Full Image

The students got hands-on technical training from veteran Intel engineers and guidance in professional networking, exploring career paths and job hunting.

They designed and tested robots, developed applications for electronic devices and tackled other real-world engineering challenges.

They also got advice from recent engineering graduates who led a discussion about how to survive engineering school.

Intel launched five additional Ultimate Engineering Experience sessions near its facilities in Folsom, Calif., Columbia, S.C., Hillsboro, Ore., Austin, Texas and Rio Rancho, N.M.

Students who successfully completed the program received a stipend and a scholarship from Intel.

Read more about the program and one ASU engineering student’s experience at the Chandler camp.

From novels and plays to personal ads, dolls and Disney movies – it’s all fair game for literary analysis as far as Neal A. Lester is concerned.

“I can look at anything as a text,” says Lester, associate vice president for humanities and arts, and professor of English at Arizona State University. “I’ve always tried to look at what seems to be insignificant, to raise that to this other level of significance. Texts don’t create themselves in a vacuum. They come from some sort of cultural context.” Download Full Image

Lester directs Project Humanities, a university initiative that seeks to make humanities at ASU more robust through research and public programs. Some of the project’s past programs include a conversation on Truth and the Arts featuring acclaimed choreographer Bill T. Jones, and a celebration of American music with performances and discussions of jazz, rock, gospel, barbershop, Native American music and more.

Lester joined Research Matters writer Diane Boudreau to discuss what humanities are, why and how they are important, and where his own research has led him.

What do the humanities encompass? What does it mean when you talk about “doing humanities?”

As humanists, we analyze texts, we look at things, we raise questions. The thing that can frustrate people about humanities is that we are trained to pose a series of questions and a series of multiple answers. How do you make moral decisions? How do you arrive at truth? How do you resolve conflict?

It’s always about people. It’s about people as whole. It’s about more than one person coming together. We’re doing humanities when we have a connection on some significant level.

What I like to talk about is “everyday humanities.” I like to observe and make people aware of the kinds of questions and the things we do that become so everyday that they become invisible.

Can you give an example of this?

One thing I study is the race and gender politics of hair. What happens in conversations about hair is that telling my story inherently connects to somebody else’s story. We may not have the same story, but we all have a story to tell.

When I taught a class on hair, I had students make a collage of their hair stories, and the things that they came up with were always things that connected them to parents, or friends, or neighbors, or barbershops or boyfriends.

There was one student who said that in her relationship with her boyfriend, every time she became angry with him, she would cut her hair. Her hair represented her power and she knew that he liked her long hair.

All this effort to comb hair, to tease hair, becomes a social construction of something. We are constructing meaning in that. That to me becomes an embodiment of humanities, because we’re all trying to make meaning of something.

So what is your hair story?

I started growing dreadlocks when I decided to leave the University of Alabama, just before coming to ASU in 1997. It was a way of claiming a part of me that I felt was being taken because of a situation I was going through. So it was a spiritual reclamation of sorts. I was concerned about that, because I’d always been conservative in my hairstyle and in my dress. Conservative equaled “professional.” So for me to have dreadlocks – that was always for somebody else, it wasn’t for me.

It’s been interesting because I’ve been able to learn about other people as well as myself through my hair. I’ve had responses ranging from “Oh you must be a musician,” or “I can tell you’re not in corporate America.” Or, everybody insists that I’m the black male they know with dreadlocks. So if they’ve ever known a black male with dreadlocks, I must be that person. We must all look alike – black males with dreadlocks!

Why is it important to study hair?

I’ve been contacted by attorneys before about a case where someone was discriminated against based on hair. A parent contacted me because her son was not being allowed to play on a basketball team because of his hair. So this research is not disconnected from everyday experiences.

An interesting thing related to hair and its relevance came last year when there was a rash of hair thieving across the country. The New York Times and Channel 12 approached me for interviews. But each person who approached me did so with suspicion, as though it was funny that people were stealing hair.

What I tried to say is that hair is extremely important in folks’ lives. In these economic times people are trying to be entrepreneurial. It was actually quite clever – you can steal this hair, it has no barcodes on it to trace origins, and you can sell it out of the trunk of your car. And it’s sustainable, because if you wear hair extensions, you have to have it done again every few months, and get new ones ‘installed.' They damage your hair if left in too long.

It’s not odd that people would steal hair. What’s insane is that folks are still so wed to this notion that there’s “good hair” and “bad hair” that these standards of beauty will drive people to all kinds of ends.

Tell us about your research on personal ads.

I was curious about personal ads because I teach courses on biography and autobiography. To me, personal ads were just abbreviated versions of autobiographies and biographies. You choose what you want to write about yourself and another person based on some activity or desire, but you do it in this really succinct and abbreviated way.

The existing literature on personal ads looks at sexuality and gender, and even class, but people had stayed away from race. So I came up with this idea that I would see how we can read race in these ads. The research led to a book, Racialized Politics of Desire in Personal Ads (Lexington Books, 2007), co-edited with Maureen Daly Goggin, a rhetorician and material culturalist, and now the chair of English at ASU.

What is interesting about personal ads is that they illustrate this difference between the public and the private. We can be very polite and politically correct in our everyday lives but in these private spaces of our imaginations, some of the most racist, sexist and homophobic things happen. Personal ads give people a place where they can hide behind anonymity. I found they were blatantly not neutral.

You also claim that children’s literature is not neutral. Can you tell us more about that?

We tend to perceive children’s literature as non-political, but it’s very political. Children aren’t writing it – adults are writing it.

In those “Mother, Father, Dick and Jane” early readers, someone made a decision about the characters’ skin color. Somebody made a decision, whether consciously or not, about their height, how they were going to be dressed, what their hair would look like.

As a brown scholar, as a brown person, I say, 'Where are the brown people in this story?' Well in the Dick and Jane world, they come in the 70s after integration. But it’s interesting to me that they’re described as being just like Father, Mother, Dick and Jane. There was no identity there – they were just sort of vanilla characters 'dipped in chocolate.'

You’ve gotten a lot of national attention for creating a course about the “n-word.” How did that come about?

The class actually started because of very real stuff that was happening. Then-Senator Obama was running for president. And I kept seeing on the Internet where this word was used to refer to him. The first incidence I recall was in a middle school in Florida, where a teacher had written on the board that the acronym 'CHANGE' meant, 'Come Help a N----- Get Elected.'

I started looking to see just how prevalent this kind of blatant personal attack on him was. And there was also this sense that the word was being used in hip-hop. So I said, 'Let’s study this because I want to know what’s really going on in terms of race relations and our national identities and language.' And the way that I could study it was by trying to teach it. It wasn’t a class that was trying to get people to use or not use the word; it was to better understand it in a series of cultural contexts.

People have asked, 'How can you have a whole class on a word?' Well, the class isn’t on a word. The class starts with a word, but the word exists in a context. You cannot talk about a word without talking about historical contexts, without talking about race, gender, class and, in this case, American history. The word is just a series of sounds coming together to make meaning. How, then, is that meaning constructed, by whom, and why? That’s what the course is about.

And now this work is getting international attention.

Yes. I’m in communication with folks in Ghana and Scotland about this word, because people in other places are reading American texts. There’s a hip-hop store in Malawi that’s called “The N-Word.”

What I hear when I’ve consulted people about it in other places is, 'Well we don’t have the same history as Americans.' I’ve been conversing with a student at the University of Edinburgh, whose teacher is an alum of ASU. They were studying an African-American text from the Harlem Renaissance, and the tutor was uncomfortable with the white students reading the n-word out loud with no real understanding of the context.

The students didn’t understand why. Their response was, 'Well this is not our history and so we don’t have the same connection.'

That’s interesting to me, because if we can only connect with experiences that we have lived, then that doesn’t demonstrate our capacity to have empathy or to care about people who have experiences that we haven’t had. And the human capacity is much bigger than that. I mean, we write checks when there’s a tsunami, when there’s an earthquake on the other side of the world. We care about people, fundamentally.

Is that what Project Humanities aims to demonstrate?

Project Humanities allows people to recognize that we are more alike than we are different, and each of us is trying to make sense of our everyday lives and experiences. The big challenge in everyday living is 'talking, listening and connecting.'

What I think makes Project Humanities interesting and a model for other universities is that it involves students, it involves faculty and it involves staff. For example, we sponsored a poetry contest about defining the humanities through couplets that was staff-created and staff-judged.

During Project Humanities launch week in February 2010, students came up with the idea of asking visitors to paint responses to provocative questions on giant sandwich boards: 'Is your tattoo your philosophy of life?' 'How do you adjust your moral compass?' It was amazing to watch different people come up and participate in that. Then we moved those boards around campus and they became public art pieces.

Can you explain the Project Humanities theme of “Perspectives on Place?”

So much of ASU is about place. Where are we as a New American University? What is our place among other institutions? It was also coming out of the headlines – what is the perception of the Southwest generally and of Arizona specifically relative to the Tucson Tragedy, or the ban on ethnic studies, or the signing of SB1070? How can humanities at ASU create a different narrative of what it means to be in Arizona, at ASU and in the Southwest?

But it’s also about the place of the humanities. We formed right after the major crisis in the economy, and a lot of universities were cutting their language programs. Project Humanities, with the university’s support and resources, is the other narrative we want in the headlines locally and nationally. We are doing important and necessary work within ASU and beyond.

How do you respond to universities cutting humanities programs, and to the claim that schools should focus on disciplines that provide job prospects?

Well, first of all, people have jobs in humanities. I recently went to Italy to present at a conference. While there, I also went on a number of excellent research-related cultural tours. The people who led these were art historians. These were people who have jobs and are following their passion for the humanities. They were not on the streets begging; nor were they trapped in high-paying jobs that they hated. So humanities does present possibilities professionally like other fields or disciplines.

But it’s not just that you need a job. You need other things to make you whole. A job can’t – or shouldn’t – make you or be you. Folks lose jobs; we do not want to lose our humanity or our instinctive ability to connect with another person. One of our most popular Project Humanities bookmarks reads, “Humans need meaning, understanding, and perspective as well as jobs.” Humanities allows for meaning, understanding and perspective.

Neal A. Lester is an associate vice president within the Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development. The Department of English is a unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

When the Olympic Games open in London on July 27, a small band of Arizona’s elite canoe paddlers will be preparing to pit their skills against the best in the world, but in Canada at the International Va’a Federation (IVF) Outrigger World Sprint Championships in Calgary, Alberta.

The paddlers, who are quick to tell you they are not rowers, are Kehaulani Young, Alicia Lin-Kee, Terry Santiago, Anne Cook, Catherine Hershfelt, Marisalyn Singpradith and Margaret Coulombe. The team, the first ever from Arizona, will race against competitors from 22 countries, Aug. 11-15. Download Full Image

Coulombe, Cook and Singpradith will also be carrying the banner of Arizona State University with them into battle. The group trains on Tempe Town Lake four times a week, during temperatures that often soar into the triple digits; a challenge that makes their journey to Worlds just “that more compelling,” says Cook, who is a graduate student in ASU’s School of Social Work.

The racers are members of Na Leo O Ke Kai (or Voices of the Sea), the largest competitive outrigger canoe club in Arizona. This nonprofit group supports the athletic dreams of more than 120 members, who come from all across the Valley and as far as away as Lake Havasu. Club members, men, women and children, paddle all year round, and race in Arizona, California, Hawaii and Canada from April to October.

“Outrigger canoe is a huge part of my upbringing. I grew up on Molokai, with both of my parents paddling competitively in Hawaii,” said Lin-Kee, who is a mother of two little boys. “I fell in love with the positive attitudes and energy in the sport. It’s something I want my boys to experience and share.”

Much like the fondly-remembered Jamaican bobsled team – underdogs of the 1988 Olympics – Arizona’s land-locked World Sprint crew strives to be crowned fastest in the world. They have trained together since 2011 and qualified this last March. However, the paddlers themselves have competed for up to 17 years in canoes. The Arizona team will be part of a larger group of men and women drawn together to represent the U.S. from four IVF-U.S. regional groups in California, the Pacific Northwest, the eastern U.S., and Hawaii. And while outrigger canoe is not yet an Olympic sport, the top teams attract some of the best canoeists in the world, including present and former Olympians and Paracanoe athletes.

The va’a or outrigger canoe originated in Hawaii nearly 4,000 years ago and a sailing version of the canoe was used to populate islands chains throughout Polynesia. The modern sport has likewise spread from Tahiti and Hawaii across the United States, Canada, South America, Europe and Asia. Traditional boats in Hawaii were made of the native tropical hardwood, koa, which has become rare. Modern racing canoes are lightweight, from 250-400 pounds, typically made of fiberglass or other lightweight man-made materials. 

Calgary crewmates Singpradith and Santiago also paddle or coach dragon boat with the Arizona Dragon Boat Association. Both joined Na Leo O’ Ke Kai to expand their skills as competitive paddlers. “I found more than what I bargained for!” said Singpradith, who is an ASU alumnus. “Whether it’s one or 60 paddlers, Na Leo O’ Ke Kai has showed me what it is to be one team striving to bring out the very best in the community.” 

Arizona’s Na Leo O Ke Kai Outrigger Canoe Club has been a feeder club for the establishment of five other canoe clubs in the Southwest. Founded by Louise and Lono Navarro in 1997, the group offers much more than a high level of competition. It also has summer paddling programs for Native American and other local youth, promotes team work and leadership, as well as an understanding of Polynesian culture and heritage, and a close family atmosphere or Ohana.

“Even though I am not Hawaiian, growing up with Hawaiian traditions has been a blessing and this culture continues to bring many new experiences into my life,” said Hershfelt, a dental hygienist who learned to paddle in Northern California at age 6.

“Our Calgary crew has students, mothers, retired Air Force and active members of the Arizona Army National Guard; women working at universities; professionals working with Honeywell Aerospace, Honeywell Defense and Space and American Express. I am constantly impressed by my teammates, their dedication and feel fortunate to be part of the first team to represent Arizona as part of a U.S. team in Calgary,” said Coulombe, the club’s head coach and staff member with ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Despite training hard for the race itself, the sprint crew’s challenges still include one more major hurdle – fundraising. They are asking the public for their support. To find out more about the group http://outriggeraz.org, the competition www.vaaworldsprints2012.com or to help support the crew: https://www.wepay.com/x1tkoza/donations/donations-to-get-na-leo-o-ke-kai-to-canada-world-competition.

What’s ahead after Worlds? Coulombe hopes to bring the sport of outrigger to ASU, working with John Parker, a lecturer with Barrett Honors College, and ASU students to establish a student club, with support from partner Na Leo O Ke Kai. 

A common belief in the West is that al Qaeda wishes to impose Islam everywhere. This might be a pipe dream for the group, but a new study of their use of religious texts suggests that Islamists’ goals are much more modest.

Researchers with ASU’s Center for Strategic Communication (CSC) analyzed more than 2,000 items of propaganda from al Qaeda and related Islamist groups from 1998 to 2011. They catalogued more than 1,500 quotes from the Qur’an that extremists used to support their arguments, and identified the chapter (surah) and verse represented in the quote. Download Full Image

Results showed that most of quotes are about enduring hardships and maintaining faith and hope in the face of attacks by enemies of Islam. The so-called “Verse of the Sword” (9:5) that says “fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them” was used only three times.

“We were surprised at the very limited use of the sword verse,” said Bennett Furlow, a research assistant and one of three co-authors of the study, “How Islamist Extremists Quote the Qur’an.” “Conventional wisdom says Islamists are bent on world domination and this verse is the justification. We found it to be insignificant,” he said.

The verses most frequently cited came from three surah, Surah Nine, Surat at-Tawbah (“The Repentance”), Surah Three, Surat al-Imran (“Family of Imran”) and Surah Four, Surat an-Nisa (“The Women”). They address enduring hardships and the importance of fighting against the unjust outsiders who oppress men, women and children.

“These findings challenge the idea of a clash of civilizations,” said the study’s lead author Jeff Halverson, a professor of communication in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in reference to the theory that future wars will be fought over religious identity rather than national boundaries. “What extremists are really saying to Muslims is, ‘our communities are under siege and God will defend us if we have faith and courage’.”

It is important to be realistic about Islamists’ arguments when trying to counter their influence attempts, noted ASU’s Herberger Professor and study co-author Steve Corman. “If we try to portray them as evil conquerors when their audience sees them as protectors and champions, it damages our credibility and makes our communication less effective,” he said.

The study concludes with four recommendations for the West: 1) abandon claims that Islamist extremists seek world domination; 2) focus on addressing claims of victimization; 3) emphasize alternative means of deliverance; and 4) reveal that the image of “champion” sought by extremists is a false one. Other studies have shown in fact that al Qaeda-linked militants are 38 times more likely to kill a Muslim than a member of another group – hardly the activity of a “competent champion,” the ASU study states. 

The study of Qur’an quotes is part of the larger project at the center titled “Identifying Terrorist Narratives and Counter-Narratives: Embedding Story Analysis in Expeditionary Units,” which examines Islamists use of narrative and persuasion to influence contested populations in the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia. The six-year effort is being funded by the Office of Naval Research.

The Center for Strategic Communication is a research unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a strategic initiative of the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. Established in 2005, the center promotes advanced research, teaching, and public discussions of the role of communication in combating terrorism, promoting national security, and improving public diplomacy.

To learn more about this project: http://asu.edu/courses/fms000/CSC_Video/CSC-FINAL.swf.

Arizona State University offers the intellectual community, teaching and cutting-edge research to create “the perfect fit,” says Matt Garcia, a food justice scholar who has just been appointed the director of the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies.

“If you studied the civil rights movement, wouldn’t you want to be at the heart of where it’s happening?” says Garcia. “It’s in Arizona where policies, such as SB 1070, the elimination of Latino Studies, and decision-making are being formulated, discussed and tested. It is the natural place for me to be.” Download Full Image

Recruited from Brown University, Matt Garcia joined the ASU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 2011, with a shared position in the School of Transborder Studies. Here he helped to build ASU’s Comparative Border Studies program, an initiative that examines the U.S.-Mexico border and other border regions around the world. However, his primary focus as director will center on restoring understanding of the important roles that the humanities play in today’s society.

“Humanities is all around us,” says Garcia, quickly referencing the influence of agriculture and food, the roles of women, marriage and religion on politics and society. “Philosophers and historians can shed light on these topics and more. Marriage, for example, has been an evolving conversation in society, never the set situation that it is often presently perceived to be.”

“Too often we as scholars forget how we can contribute to discussions about public issues of great importance,” he adds.

Garcia is particularly interested in how the culture of food and agricultural production in the United States provides pivotal insights for our future. He has penned book chapters and numerous journal articles, and, most recently, the book: “From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement.”

Published by University of California Press in 2012, Garcia says that his book offers the most comprehensive history ever written on the accomplishments and shortcomings of the United Farm Workers (UFW), the most successful farm labor union in U.S. history. He originally started by looking at the parallel efforts of Filipino American and Mexican agricultural workers, whose united efforts around the grape boycott allowed the UFW to gain traction in the 1960s.

But during his exploration of the archive at the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, Garcia unearthed a treasure trove of taped recordings that the Arizona-born Chavez had made of all his meetings. The tapes included Chavez’s fights with the UFW executive board, purges of boycott volunteers and the UFW legal department. Ultimately, the archive revealed Chavez’s instability, and how it contributed to the dissolution of the executive board.

“I was hearing Chavez’ own words. It was gripping,” says Garcia. “Knowing this history informs our future choices.”

“Our agricultural workers are working in conditions similar to those 40 years ago. Awareness of how food is produced should create in the public a consciousness about social justice, as well as the importance of ‘eating locally’ or ‘eating healthy,’” adds Garcia.

Garcia hopes that the schools’ students will make connections between the ideas that they explore in their classes and the process of moving forward as a society: “Learning history is not simply about studying the past, but understanding how past events guide us to a better, more sustainable and socially aware future.”

“ASU is an incredible place to work and learn and do what I do best,” says Garcia. “I can’t think of another place to do it.”

The writings of the late Chicana scholar Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa will be the focus of Vital Voices, an evening of discussion, performance and reading, from 6:30 to 9 p.m., June 21, at the Arizona Latino Arts & Cultural Center, 147 E. Adams, Phoenix.

Vital Voices is a partnership between Arizona State University’s Project Humanities, Performance in the Borderlands, and the community organization Savvy Pen Productions. Download Full Image

The program’s purpose is to bring together individuals and communities to “talk, listen, and connect” through literature, language and performance in cultural spaces around the Valley.

Anzaldúa was born and grew up on the Mexican-Texas border and was a scholar of Chicano cultural theory, feminist theory and queer theory. She loosely based her most well-known book, “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza,” on her life in the border area, incorporating her lifelong feelings of social and cultural marginalization into that and her other works.

She edited or co-edited such publications as “This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color,” “Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color” and “This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation.”

Her works weave English and Spanish together as one language, an idea stemming from her theory of "borderlands" identity.

Anzaldúa also is noted for her reported out-of-body spiritual events involving narcotics, such as a night when she mixed alcohol and “percada” and, she said, her soul left her body. In her later writings, she developed the concepts of spiritual activism and “nepantleras” to describe the ways contemporary social actors can combine spirituality with politics to enact revolutionary change.

Performance in the Borderlands is part of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts’ School of Theater and Film. Project Humanities is a President’s Initiative based in the Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development under the direction of associate vice president Neal Lester.

Following the June event, the next Vital Voices will take place from 6:30 to 9 p.m., July 19, at Sunshine’s Motor City Café, 7425 S Harl Ave., Tempe. The Vital Voices event series runs the third Thursday of every month.

Vital Voices’ format includes a facilitator who is connected with the local arts, music and performance scene; one musician and one performer; locally owned or culturally significant venues; and local caterers who utilize local produce.

For more information, contact Patrick D. Reid, project assistant, Project Humanities, at 480-727-7030 or ProjectHumanities@asu.edu.

Throughout history, women have faced intense discrimination – from a lack of legal rights and very little independence from their husbands, to being thought to have inferior brains. In many societies, women have long been viewed as less than fully human.

American society has come a long way in recognizing and protecting women’s humanity and human rights. However, women will always be fundamentally different than men because of their ability to bear children. We are reminded of this by current political debates concerning abortion and contraception, which some have called a “war on women.” Download Full Image

What are the roots of gender inequality? How have the challenges faced by women changed over time? Sally Kitch, an ASU Regents’ Professor of Women and Gender Studies, has spent many years exploring the reasons why the world sees men and women so differently. To find answers, she has explored questions ranging from the gendered origins of race to American utopian communities.

The intersection of race and gender

Kitch, who is also the director of ASU’s Institute for Humanities Research, covered 300 years of history tracing the connection between gender and race in her book, "The Specter of Sex: Gendered Foundations of Racial Formation in the United States" (State University of New York Press, 2009). She discovered that gender inequities have been central to societies for centuries, but race is a very modern idea.

“One thing we know about race is that it doesn’t exist. It’s not a biological category,” Kitch says. Some believe that groups of people who share similar physiological characteristics constitute races, but race is really a system imposed by historical, cultural and political processes, Kitch says. Genetically speaking, a black and white person may have more in common than two people of the same race. How, then, did race become so significant?

European explorers of the sixteenth century noticed differences like skin color when they encountered natives of other continents, but they were even more interested in the unfamiliar sexual and reproductive practices of other cultures, Kitch says.

“The Europeans thought that cultures in which men and women weren’t that different in terms of their behavior or appearance were uncivilized,” Kitch says. Marriage customs, sexual practices, and even whether or not women experienced pain during childbirth (it was considered more civilized to feel pain) were all important distinctions used to disparage certain groups and, eventually, define races.

“That gave me the insight that racial characteristics really evolved on the basis of comparative gender characteristics,” Kitch says. “My work provides the backstory of the concept of intersectionality by showing how race and gender judgments evolved together and influenced one another.”

Differences in gender behavior also served as Europeans’ justification for using slavery to further their own economic interests. “When Europeans began to enslave Africans, they didn’t start with their skin color to explain why,” Kitch says. Instead, they used observations on sexual behavior and religious practices to decide the African culture was inferior.

A history of discrimination

To understand how gender continued to influence race over time, Kitch traced five racial groups in the U.S. from the Colonial period to the mid-20th century – American Indians, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and European whites. After exploring the roots of racial formation, she focused on the categories of bodies, blood and citizenship, finding evidence that gender and sex were foundations of racial judgment throughout the centuries.

For example, before race meant anything more than a person’s geographic location, European settlers in Virginia made distinctions between English and African women based on the work they did. The work done by African women was considered labor and was taxable by her employer, while work done by English women was considered domestic (and therefore more civilized) and could not be taxed.

“It disadvantaged one group over the other, but it was entirely arbitrary because both groups of women did all kinds of work,” Kitch says. These kinds of distinctions provided a foundation for the belief that Africans were culturally inferior and should be enslaved.

Gender distinctions were also involved in the process of granting U.S. citizenship. While American women achieved the right to vote in 1920, their citizenship was still vested in a father or husband until 1934. Up until then, a woman would lose her citizenship if she married a man from another country.

“If you had offspring outside of the U.S. with a non-American husband, your children wouldn’t have been seen as American because a woman couldn’t transfer her citizenship to her children,” Kitch says.

Perhaps one of the most powerful factors affecting women’s social power and status, however, is their ability to bear children.

“For some reason, societies have decided that there’s something inherently inferior about having a female body and producing offspring,” Kitch says.

Utopian solutions

Throughout history, and especially in the 19th century, the United States witnessed the formation of several “utopian” communities that attempted to overcome gender inequality. Kitch has written three books on the subject of utopianism and gender, including "Higher Ground: From Utopianism to Realism in American Feminist Thought and Theory" (University of Chicago Press, 2000). She wanted to explore whether these communal societies could achieve gender neutrality, and what that would look like.

“What I discovered was that the only communities that managed to achieve gender equity of any kind were celibate societies in which sex and reproduction were just taken out of the equation,” Kitch says.

One such community was the Shakers, a religious group that came to the United States from England. Officially called the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, they advocated for gender equality more than a century-and-a-half before American women were granted the right to vote.

“Reproduction, as these people rightly saw, was a way that women were kept subordinated and kept from achieving other things in their lives. So they would prohibit sex and raise children collectively,” Kitch says. The community often took in orphaned and homeless children in lieu of bearing their own.

Modern challenges

While the Shakers and other experimental utopian communities lost traction over the years, their ideas about women’s freedoms and social status eventually caught on. Today, women vote, own property, have custody rights, and pursue careers. However, holding down a high-powered job usually involves sacrifices to family life.

A recent "State of the World's Mothers" report by the Save the Children foundation found that maternity leave policies in the U.S. are among the least generous in the developed world. Unlike families in other first-world countries such as France, which provides free 24-hour childcare for working parents, Americans receive little support in caring for their children. Because women still shoulder the majority of child-rearing responsibilities, they are most affected by these policies.

“We do see women empowered, but when we start studying who these women are and what their lives have been like, you discover that marriage and family and high-powered careers are still extremely difficult to navigate,” Kitch says.

In addition, political debates over access to family planning services are raising fears that women in the United States may face increased obstacles to balancing work and family. An example of this is the Blunt Amendment, which was narrowly defeated in the U.S. Senate, but would have allowed any employer or health insurance company to deny coverage for contraception.

“We’ve been reminded again recently about how sex and reproduction work in terms of social status in the United States,” Kitch says. “It certainly feels right now like we’re back to the place where some men in power are willing and eager to make decisions about women’s bodies and reproductive rights, without women’s consent or participation. It’s coming out in some pretty aggressive ways.”

Women and Gender Studies is part of the School of Social Transformation, an academic unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Written by Allie Nicodemo, Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development. This article first appeared on Research Matters.

After Bedar Fars Aziz graduated first in his law class at Salahaddin University in Hewler, the capital of the Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq, his government offered to pay for him to obtain an advanced law degree at any university in the world. In exchange, Aziz someday would come home to work as a law professor.

Armed with a scholarship from the Kurdistan Regional Government, Aziz chose the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law’s Master of Laws (LL.M.) program. Knowing almost no English, Aziz and his wife moved to Arizona six months before his courses began to immerse themselves in the new language. Download Full Image

Aziz said he chose the customized LL.M. program at ASU because it gave him the opportunity to concentrate his studies in subjects that interested him. He focused on government and administration law in the hope of being able to make a difference when he returns to Kurdistan.

“If my government was free from corruption and more transparent, it would change everything,” Aziz said. “It is our right to become a free and independent country, and I want to help do that.”

The 23-year-old Aziz will receive his LL.M. during the College of Law’s convocation, beginning at 1:30 p.m., May 3, in Gammage Auditorium, on ASU’s Tempe campus.

Professors in Kurdistan teach strictly by the book, Aziz said, and don’t focus on more recent developments in the law. He hopes to incorporate some of what he has learned from his College of Law professors into his own teaching style.

“I want my students to know how the law is right now, not just how it used to be,” Aziz said. “This will help them to make bigger changes.”

After graduation, Aziz will return to Kurdistan for the summer. He will then spend the next year with his wife, who graduated second in her class at Salahaddin University and is also sponsored by the Kurdistan government, while she pursues her LL.M. at Penn State. The couple plans to return to Kurdistan for good after she graduates, and they will both work as law professors at Salahaddin University.

“This is the first time that I don’t want to graduate,” Aziz said. “I want to have more of these classes, more of this education. I want more.”

Written by Meghan McCarthy

As she graduates with a doctorate in biochemistry, Chelsea McIntosh says she came to ASU because of the university’s emphasis on photosynthesis and solar energy research.

Her desire to pursue alternative energy sources has resulted in significant research and opportunities to excel at ASU. As a Science Foundation Arizona (SFAz) Graduate Research Fellow, McIntosh was part of a research project working to develop a sustainable catalyst for use in hydrogen energy. Hydrogen shows promise as a renewable fuel for the future and one of the long-term solutions to our dependence on fossil fuels. Download Full Image

Being a woman in science can still be challenging, says McIntosh. “I have had to overcome many doubts in myself and my abilities to get to this day, and even now I still have a long trek ahead.”  

“Graduation is the completion of my formal education and training,” she continues. “Though in some ways I will always be a student, I have become competent enough in my field that my teachers now consider me their peers. It's a pretty cool feeling.”    

In addition to becoming an accomplished research scientist, McIntosh notes that the well-rounded education she received at ASU included learning how to effectively communicate the need for scientific research to the general public.

As a member of the first cohort of SFAz Graduate Research Fellows, she helped develop the ASU Citizen Scientist-Engineer program for students in the Kyrene School District. The educational project, funded by Science Foundation Arizona, seeks to make science, technology and engineering relevant to K-12 students and help prepare them for 21st century jobs.

Doctoral students, who teach side-by-side with middle school teachers, learn to be citizen scientist-engineers who can effectively communicate their science and engineering knowledge and research to K-12 students, their families and their communities.

“I collaboratively designed hands-on learning activities for middle school students that focused on energy and sustainability,” says McIntosh. "I really enjoyed my time in the program and my interaction with the students, especially in introducing them to our current and future energy sources.”  

McIntosh has previously earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Oklahoma. She will receive her doctorate in biochemistry on May 2 from ASU’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

She has accepted a postdoctoral position at Washington University in St. Louis. In the future, she plans to teach biochemistry at a college or university.