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“One of the things that helps define Latino identity is this sense of having a history but also not knowing the history.”
The post Héctor Tobar on “Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino’” appeared first on Public Books.
The Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board has honored philosophers Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch with plaques at their former homes.
The Blue Plaques program “promotes recognition and awareness of people, places and events that have been of lasting significance in the life of Oxfordshire or more widely.”
You can see a list of other Blue Plaque honorees here.
The post Foot & Murdoch Honored With Plaques in Oxfordshire first appeared on Daily Nous.
Three philosophers have been named 2023 Guggenheim Fellows.
They are:
Stephen Darwall, Jennifer Morton, and Susanna Siegel
The fellowships are for 6-12 months, with monetary awards of varying amounts, and are given with no strings attached. There were 180 new fellows announced. You can view the entire list of them here.
A few philosophers have picked up grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently.
They are:
You can learn more about NSF grants here.
(Previous post about NSF grant winners is here.)
Oron Shagrir, professor of philosophy and cognitive and brain sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the winner of the 2023 Covey Award.
The Covey Award, presented by the International Association of Computing and Philosophy (IACAP), “recognizes senior scholars with a substantial record of innovative research in the field of computing and philosophy broadly conceived”.
The IACAP says: “The board recognised Professor Shagrir’s significant contribution to our field over several decades; in particular, his contribution to theories of computation.”
He will present the Covey Award Keynote Address at IACAP 2023 conference this July in Prague.
You can learn more about Professor Shagrir’s research here.
A list of previous winners of the Covey Award is here.
The Joseph Levenson Prize is awarded by the Association for Asian Studies to “the English-language books that make the greatest contribution to increasing understanding of the history, culture, society, politics, or economy of China.”
This year’s prize contest recognized books published in 2021, and honorable mention in the pre-1900 category was awarded to Tao Jiang, (a philosopher in the Department of Religion at Rutgers University, and director of the university’s Center for Chinese Studies) for his book, Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China (Oxford University Press).
It appears that Professor Jiang’s book is one of the few philosophy titles recognized in the history of the Levenson Prize since its inception in 1987.
Here’s a description of the book:
This book rewrites the story of classical Chinese philosophy, which has always been considered the single most creative and vibrant chapter in the history of Chinese philosophy. Works attributed to Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi and many others represent the very origins of moral and political thinking in China. As testimony to their enduring stature, in recent decades many Chinese intellectuals, and even leading politicians, have turned to those classics, especially Confucian texts, for alternative or complementary sources of moral authority and political legitimacy. Therefore, philosophical inquiries into core normative values embedded in those classical texts are crucial to the ongoing scholarly discussion about China as China turns more culturally inward. It can also contribute to the spirited contemporary debate about the nature of philosophical reasoning, especially in the non-Western traditions.
This book offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three normative values, humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated, reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains, the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible sources within the context of an evolving understanding of Heaven and its relationship with the humans. Tao Jiang argues that the competing visions in that debate can be characterized as a contestation between partialist humaneness and impartialist justice as the guiding norm for the newly imagined moral-political order, with the Confucians, the Mohists, the Laoists, and the so-called fajia thinkers being the major participants, constituting the mainstream philosophical project during this period. Thinkers lined up differently along the justice-humaneness spectrum with earlier ones maintaining some continuity between the two normative values (or at least trying to accommodate both to some extent) while later ones leaning more toward their exclusivity in the political/public domain. Zhuangzi and the Zhuangists were the outliers of the mainstream moral-political debate who rejected the very parameter of humaneness versus justice in that discourse. They were a lone voice advocating personal freedom, but the Zhuangist expressions of freedom were self-restricted to the margins of the political world and the interiority of one’s heartmind. Such a take can shed new light on how the Zhuangist approach to personal freedom would profoundly impact the development of this idea in pre-modern Chinese political and intellectual history.
The winning book this year is by historian Ruth Mostern (Pittsburgh): The Yellow River (Yale University Press), a 3000-year history of China’s Yellow River.
You can learn more about the prize, including its previous recipients, here.
The Journal of Applied Philosophy has awarded its 2022 Best Essay Prize to Scott Altman (USC).
Professor Altman won the prize for his article, “Selling Silence: The Morality of Sexual Harassment NDAs“. Here’s its abstract:
This article argues against enforcing sexual harassment nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). Although NDAs guard privacy, facilitate settlement, and compensate victims, they also help repeat perpetrators avoid detection and punishment, endangering future victims and undermining efforts to combat sexual harassment. Advocates argue that victims have no duty to prevent these harms, given the risks and trauma of reporting. I offer three responses. First, although most victims have no duty to speak, some victims might come to have such a duty. The state should not help them commit to violating a future duty. Second, some initially reticent victims may later want to disclose. The state should not enforce promises not to do supererogatory acts. Third, NDAs make victims complicit with the perpetrator’s future harassment and wrongful efforts to avoid social punishment. If perpetrators refuse to compensate victims adequately without NDAs, we should increase victim compensation rather than enforce NDAs. Accused harassers might claim they need NDAs to guard against wrongful or excessive social punishment. For guilty perpetrators, NDAs resemble felony expungement statutes. However, arguments for expungement do not apply to NDAs. Although falsely accused people have legitimate privacy interests, NDAs are an excessively broad way to protect this interest.
The prize of £1,000 is awarded to the author of the best paper published in the journal that year, as judged by journal’s editors.
A list of previous winners of the prize is here.
Claire Katz, professor of philosophy at Texas A & M University, is one of three finalists for the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching from Baylor University, which includes generous prizes for the finalists, winner, and their home departments.
As a finalist, Professor Katz will receive $15,000 and will be invited to present a series of lectures at Baylor University, and her home department at Texas A & M will receive $10,000 for pedagogical development. The winner of the award will receive an additional $250,000 prize and will teach in residence at Baylor University for a semester; the winner’s home department will receive an additional $25,000.
The award site’s description of Professor Katz describes what contributes to her being a good candidate for the award:
Claire Katz is professor of philosophy of education and serves as interim department head of the Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture at Texas A&M. Before joining A&M in 2006, she was associate professor of philosophy and Jewish studies at Penn State University. She teaches and conducts research in two primary areas: (1) the intersection of philosophy, gender, education and religion and (2) K-12 philosophy.
In 2015, Katz launched the preK-12 philosophy program, which are educator workshops for K-12 and university teachers/administrators that have reached more than 100 teachers and administrators in Texas; training for university students in facilitating philosophical discussions with pre-college students; and developing and running a week-long philosophy summer camp (Aggie School of Athens) for middle and high school students from communities across Texas and the U.S.
She is the recipient of several awards, including the 2019 Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award (University Level) for Teaching, the 2019 American Philosophical Association Prize for Excellence in Teaching Philosophy and the 2020 Presidential Professor for Teaching Excellence, and was named a Piper Professor in Texas in 2021.
Professor Katz wrote a guest post for Daily Nous about the philosophy summer camp she runs, which you can check out here, and put together two edited collections about it, Growing Up with Philosophy Camp: How Thinking Develops Friendship, Community, and a Sense of Self, and Philosophy Camps for Youths: Everything You Wanted To Know about Starting, Organizing, and Running a Philosophy Camp.
The Cherry Award is named for, and was established with a bequest from, Baylor alumus Robert Foster Cherry, who graduated from the university in 1929. It is awarded biennially. You can learn more about it here.
(via Daniel Conway)
The British Journal for the History of Philosophy has announced the winners of three of its prizes.
The journal awarded the 2022 Rogers Prize—its annual prize for the best article it publishes—to Michael Kremer (University of Chicago) for his paper “Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle: a philosophical friendship”. Here’s the abstract of his article:
This article considers the personal and philosophical relationship between two philosophers, Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle. I show that a letter from MacDonald to Ryle found at Linacre College, Oxford, was part of an extensive correspondence, and that the two were intimate friends and philosophical interlocutors, and I explore the relationship between their respective philosophies. MacDonald, who studied with Wittgenstein before coming to Oxford in 1937, deployed and developed Wittgensteinian themes in her own subsequent work. I show that this work was an important source of ideas in Ryle’s philosophy. I examine two episodes: (1) a 1937 symposium in which MacDonald gave the lead paper, and Ryle was a respondent—I argue that Ryle derived his famous distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that from her paper; and (2) Ryle’s rejection in Dilemmas (1953/4) of the central importance of the idea of a ‘category mistake’—I argue that this may have been in response to MacDonald’s critical review of The Concept of Mind. Along the way I consider the development of MacDonald’s metaphilosophical views, and I shed new light on MacDonald’s remarkable biography.
This article and the topic of underappreciated philosophical friendships were discussed previously at Daily Nous here.
clockwise from top left: Michael Kremer, Lea Cantor, Michael Morgan, and Claudia Dumitru
The winner of the Rogers Prize receives £1,000. The prize was established in 2012 in honor of John Rogers, the founding editor of the journal.
The journal awarded its Beaney Prize—its annual prize for the best contribution to widening the canon it publishes—to Lea Cantor (University of Oxford) for her paper “Thales – the ‘first philosopher’? A troubled chapter in the historiography of philosophy”. Here’s the abstract of her article:
It is widely believed that the ancient Greeks thought that Thales was the first philosopher, and that they therefore maintained that philosophy had a Greek origin. This paper challenges these assumptions, arguing that most ancient Greek thinkers who expressed views about the history and development of philosophy rejected both positions. I argue that not even Aristotle presented Thales as the first philosopher, and that doing so would have undermined his philosophical commitments and interests. Beyond Aristotle, the view that Thales was the first philosopher is attested almost nowhere in antiquity. In the classical, Hellenistic, and post-Hellenistic periods, we witness a marked tendency to locate the beginning of philosophy in a time going back further than Thales. Remarkably, ancient Greek thinkers most often traced the origins of philosophy to earlier non-Greek peoples. Contrary to the received view, then, I argue that (1) vanishingly few Greek writers pronounced Thales the first philosopher; and (2) most Greek thinkers did not even advocate a Greek origin of philosophy. Finally, I show that the view that philosophy originated with Thales (along with its misleading attribution to the Greeks in general) has roots in problematic, and in some cases manifestly racist, eighteenth-century historiography of philosophy.
The winner of the Beaney Prize receives £1,000. The prize was established in 2021 in honour of Mike Beaney, Editor of the journal from 2011 to 2021.
Lastly, the journal awarded its Best Graduate Essay Prize for 2022 to Claudia Dumitru (
The Graduate Essay Prize is £1000, and is awarded annually to the writer of an essay that makes a significant contribution to the history of philosophy. The competition is open to all graduate students, anywhere in the world, studying any subject.
Simon Keller, professor of philosophy and head of the School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, has been elected as a fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi (formerly known as the Royal Society of New Zealand).
The mission of the Royal Society is to “honour, recognise and encourage outstanding achievement in the sciences, technologies and humanities”.
The society announced its most recent class of fellows yesterday, describing their work. Of Professor Keller, they write:
Simon Keller is a philosopher who specialises in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of mental health and disorder. He has written extensively about the moral and political dimensions of relationships, examining family relationships, friendships, erotic love, and patriotism. His work on mental health looks at the assumptions that lie behind our ways of dividing mental conditions into the healthy and the unhealthy, and the links between mental health and the living of a good human life. In other work, Keller explores such topics as well-being (“welfare”), political freedom, equality, the significance of death, and the way we form beliefs about science. Unifying his work is a concern with how small, often unnoticed details of human life are amplified so as to become powerful political and social forces. He is the author of The Limits of Loyalty (winner of the American Philosophical Association Book Prize) and Partiality, and a co-author of The Ethics of Patriotism: A Debate. He is Professor of Philosophy at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, having worked previously at Boston University and University of Melbourne. He has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, Rice University, and LMU Munich.
Keller is the only philosopher among the 34 new fellows. You can learn more about his work here.
(via Michael Smith)
An interdisciplinary team led by philosopher Havi Carel (Bristol) has won a £2.6 million grant for its project, “Epistemic Injustice in Health Care” (EPIC).
The “Discovery Grant“, from the charitable science foundation Wellcome, will fund the project for six years, beginning this September.
In addition to Professor Carel, the core team is:
They will be bringing on six* postdoctoral researchers and a range of other researchers and collaborators from Swansea, City and Aston Universities, and the Universities of Bologna and Ferrara.
(l to r) Lisa Bortolotti, Matthew Broome, Havi Carel, Ian James Kidd, Sheelagh McGuinness
According to the team, the project
will offer a systematic investigation of epistemic injustice across a diverse range of case studies—including somatic and psychiatric illnesses, and neurodiverse persons, as well as children and those in later-life care. EPIC aims to identify the interpersonal, institutional, and cultural dimensions of epistemic injustices. The project will include a range of events, postdoctoral positions, and publications and aims to identify practical measures for the benefit of patients and healthcare practitioners alike.
Inquiries about the project should be sent to Professor Carel.
(* Note: the original post stated there would be eight postdocs. That was an error.)
Writing Latinos is a new podcast featuring interviews with Latino authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.
The post Natalia Molina on “A Place at the Nayarit” appeared first on Public Books.
The Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) has awarded a €8.9 million “Cluster of Excellence” grant to the “Knowledge in Crisis” project headed by philosopher Tim Crane (Central European University).
The project involves researchers at CEU as well as the Universities of Vienna, Graz and Salzburg. The universities themselves have also committed money to the project, bringing its total funding to roughly €15 million. The project looks at how recent social and technological deveopments affect knowledge:
Today we face a crisis of knowledge. Our claims to knowledge are being threatened by rapid and spectacular developments in technology, and by attacks on the very ideas of knowledge and truth themselves. The flood of information on the internet challenges our ability to tell truth from falsehood, and there is a widespread rejection of the standards of scientific evidence and expertise. The crisis raises deep philosophical questions about knowledge, truth, science, ethics, and politics, and ultimately about our relationship to reality itself. These questions will be addressed in entirely new ways by this Cluster of Excellence, which will work to understand the crisis of knowledge in all its manifestations, and to find ways to combat it and reshape our relationship to knowledge.
Professor Crane writes that the aim of the project is to “to investigate various challenges to scientific and other knowledge by connecting many otherwise unconnected areas of philosophy: metaphysics, ethics, political and social philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. The idea is to bring together areas of philosophy which are often isolated from one another, with the aim of getting a deeper understanding of the current crises of knowledge.”
He notes that the funds will be used for, among other things, 18 new academic appointments (postdocs and professors) and for funding PhD students.
The board of directors for the Knowledge in Crisis Project (l to r): Katalin Farkas, Marian David, Paulina Sliwa, Max Kölbel, Tim Crane, Hans Bernhard Schmid, and Charlotte Werndl.
In addition to Professor Crane, the project’s board of directors includes:
You can learn more about the Cluster of Excellence awards here.
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science has named Zina B. Ward (Florida State) the winner of its 2022 Popper Prize.
The Popper Prize, named for Karl Popper, is awarded to the best articles appearing in the journal which concern themselves with topics in the philosophy of science to which Popper made a significant contribution, as determined by the Editors-in-Chief and the British Society for the Philosophy of Science Committee.
Professor Ward won the prize for her “Registration Pluralism and the Cartographic Approach to Data Aggregation across Brains“. Here’s what the judges had to say about it:
In ‘Registration Pluralism and the Cartographic Approach to Data Aggregation across Brains’, Zina B. Ward tackles a methodological issue of central importance in cognitive neuroscience: how to register data from multiple subjects in a common spatial framework despite significant variation in human brain structure, that is, how to map activity in different subjects’ neural structures onto a single template or into a common representational space. In a typical fMRI-based investigation, experimenters run a series of subjects through a scanner and, if the experiment is fruitful, draw conclusions, from the data collected, about the functional contributions of certain areas of the brain—that, for instance, the ACC regulates emotional responses to pain. Such work presupposes normalization of the images from various subjects, so as to allow experimenters to claim that, across subjects, the same area of the brain exhibited elevated activity during scanning. The requirements of normalization might seem to pose a mere technical problem; perhaps with hard work and ingenuity, neuroscientists can identify the single, correct method for pairing brain areas or regions across subjects. Ward argues against this kind of monism. For principled reasons to do with the extent and nature of variation in neural structure—for example, variation in the location of sulci relative to cytoarchitectonic boundaries—Ward argues that the choice of spatial framework and method of registration must vary, depending on the purpose of a given study. No single method will simultaneously effect all of the correct pairings of relevance to cognitive neuroscience. From a practical standpoint, such methodological pluralism may seem daunting, and it might also seem excessively theory-laden. In response to such concerns, Ward offers and defends a series of constructive proposals concerning how to implement registration pluralism.
For its impressive theoretical and practical contributions to an issue of central importance in cognitive neuroscience, the BJPS Co-Editors-in-Chief and the BSPS Committee judge ‘Registration Pluralism and the Cartographic Approach to Data Aggregation across Brains’ to be worthy of the 2022 BJPS Popper Prize.
The prize includes £500.
Three others received honorable mention. They are:
You can learn more about the Popper Prize and see a list of past winners here.
Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.
Saint Louis University received a five-year $2,830,00 grant from the National Cancer Institute for programs to increase HPV vaccination and HPV screening to lower incidents of cervical cancer among girls and women in Nigeria. Currently, in Nigeria, only 10 percent of eligible women have been screened and 14 percent of girls are vaccinated for HPV. The project is under the direction of Juliet Iwelunmor, a professor of global health and behavioral science and health education in the university’s College for Public Health and Social Justice. Dr. Iwelenmor holds a Ph.D. in bio-behavioral health from Pennsylvania State University.
Spelman College, the historically Black liberal arts educational institution for women in Atlanta, received a $10 million gift from Rosemary K. and John W. Brown to support STEM educational programs at the college. The Browns’ gift will support the architectural, construction, and equipment costs for the college’s new Center for Innovation & the Arts, scheduled to open in the fall of 2024. John Brown is chairman emeritus of Stryker Corporation, a multinational medical technologies corporation based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Rosemary K. Brown is a long-time educator.
The School of Medicine at the University of Louisville in Kentucky received a $1.2 million grant from the Humana Foundation that will support cardiac disease screening and nutrition-based interventions to address cardiac health disparities among older Black adults in Louisville.
Historically Black Bowie State University in Maryland received a $1,589,014 Augustus F. Hawkins Centers of Excellence Program Grant from the U.S. Department of Education for programs to recruit and prepare Black male educators in early childhood/special education, elementary, or secondary education who can provide effective, culturally relevant/responsive instruction.
The Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, a historically Black educational institution in Los Angeles, received a $150,000 grant Grifols, a biopharmaceutical solutions company. The funds will support a scholarship in nursing and the university’s Saturday Science Academy program. The Saturday Science Academy exposes pre-K through 12th-grade students to fun and engaging science material in an effort to motivate them to move into the healthcare field after graduating high school.
The Philosophy of Animal Minds and Behavior Association (PAMBA) has announced the winners of its first Essay Prize.
They are: Rhys Borchert and Caleb Dewey of the University of Arizona.
Borchert and Dewey won the prize for their essay, “In Praise of Animals”. Here’s the abstract of the paper:
Reasons-responsive accounts of praiseworthiness say, roughly, that an agent is praiseworthy for an action if the reasons that explain why they acted are also the reasons that explain why the action is right. In this paper, we argue that reasons-responsive accounts imply that some actions of non-human animals are praiseworthy. Trying to exclude non-human animals, we argue, risks neglecting cases of inadvertent virtue in human action and undermining the anti-intellectualist commitments that are typically associated with reasons-responsive accounts. Of course, this could be taken as a reason to reject reasons-responsive accounts, rather than as a reason to attribute praiseworthiness to non-human animal action. We respond to two reasons that one might resist the implication that non-human animal action is praiseworthy. The first appeals to intuition: it’s too counterintuitive to attribute praiseworthiness to non-human animal action. In response, we argue that once the factors that determine an action’s praiseworthiness are disambiguated from the factors that determine whether an agent should be praised, the intuitive objection loses much of its force. The second appeals to empirical evidence: attributing praiseworthiness to non-human animal action involves a problematic kind of anthropomorphizing. First, we point out that this objection is mostly an a priori objection in a posteriori clothes: whether we give anthropomorphic vs. anthropectic explanations is a methodological choice, not an empirical one. Second, we argue that considerations from the cognitive modeling literature actually support anthropomorphic explanations over anthropectic explanations.
The prize includes publication of the winning essay in Biology and Philosophy, as well as travel funds of up to CA$3000 to present their work at the Inaugural Meeting of PAMBA, to be held in Madrid in April 26–28, 2023.
The jury awarded an Honorable Mention to Giulia Palazzolo (University of Warwick) for her paper titled ‘A Case for Animal Reference: Beyond functional referentialism and meaning attribution’.
The jurors for this year’s competition were Colin Allen (University of Pittsburgh), Kristin Andrews (York University), Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University), and Richard Moore (University of Warwick), and the committee was chaired by Susan Monsó (UNED).
On Thursday, March 2, 2023, I was honored to receive the 2023 MSU Institutional Champion Award for Community Engagement Scholarship. Below is the text of my remarks at the moving awards ceremony that took place in the Kellogg Center.
One of the great joys of being a dean is celebrating the accomplishments of our students, staff, and faculty. And while email can be the bane of a dean’s existence, there are moments when an email arrives announcing an award or an exciting achievement and my enthusiasm builds as I anticipate writing to celebrate the excellent work that our colleagues are doing every day.
So it was, one afternoon last December, when I received an email from Laurie Van Egeren about the 2023 MSU Institutional Champion Award for Community Engagement Scholarship. As I began scanning the message for the name of the colleague who had won this award, I was already beginning to compose the congratulatory message in my mind. So, it took me a beat or two to realize that it was Laurie who was congratulating me!
And as I read and re-read the email, I began to wonder precisely what it meant to be an institutional champion for community engaged scholarship. And this brought me back to early in my tenure as Dean of the College of Arts & Letters here at MSU.
In 2015, I was drawn to MSU because of the way the community spoke so eloquently about the value of the land-grant mission; our commitment “to advance knowledge and transform lives” made me feel immediately at home.
But it wasn’t long before the ideals I had about the vital importance of publicly engaged scholarship and participatory action research came into conflict with the traditional practices and policies of faculty evaluation.
We had hired and recruited a dynamic cohort of faculty from traditionally under-represented backgrounds to do the transdisciplinary, community engaged work they found so meaningful. Soon thereafter, however, our new colleagues were asking to meet with me to talk about how their work was being torn apart by the categories of the tenure and promotion process itself. They understood their teaching, research, and service as an integrated whole, yet, in their annual reviews they were being asked to segregate their teaching from their research and their research from their service, and they were rarely being asked at all about what they considered their most vital work–the mentoring of graduate and undergraduate students of color.
During this time, I also had one of the most transformative experiences of my academic career. I joined a small group of colleagues at the Scholarly Communications Institute in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We had gathered there in the fall 2016 to reimagine the metrics that determine academic excellence from a more humanistic perspective. In dialogue over the course of three days, we began to think about how we might move the academy from valuing what it measures, to measuring what it says it values. The Mellon-funded HuMetricsHSS initiative designed to align indicators of academic excellence with core personal and institutional values was born from those conversations.
And as my MSU colleagues and I considered how we might support the faculty we had recruited to do the work we said we cared most deeply about, we began to realize that we needed to change what we did—how we evaluated and rewarded the interdisciplinary, community engaged scholarship at the heart of the land-grant mission.
This led to the Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership initiative, which invites faculty to imagine how they might create a meaningful academic life by shifting the framework for advancement from teaching, research, and service to three higher order objectives that align more effectively with the purpose of the university. We now ask them how they will 1) share knowledge; 2) expand opportunity; and 3) participate in mentorship and stewardship activities. This shift opens the space for our faculty to put their values into practice through their teaching, research, and service by doing very traditional work or by pushing the boundaries of innovation in participatory action research, public scholarship, or new modes of digital engagement.
I’m proud to say that those faculty who came to the Deans Office feeling like their most important work was being torn apart have all been promoted as Associate Professors with tenure, having pursued a wide diversity of community engaged scholarship that aligns both with their personal purpose and with the purpose that animates the life of the university.
As you can hear, an interconnected web of relationships has shaped the work that is recognized today, for although I accept this award with gratitude and humility, I receive it on behalf of a dedicated, conscientious, and creative group of colleagues whose collaborative work made it possible. As Angela Davis put it when she visited campus earlier this semester: “We would not be who we are without relationality with others” (Angela Davis at MSU, February 9, 2023).
So let me end in gratitude, first for my wife Valerie, who is my truest partner and inspiration. Your commitment to living your values with integrity through your community service is a model to me and to our daughters, who were early on brought to the food bank in State College to begin their lives of service. To my colleagues on the HuMetricsHSS initiative, thank you for the wholeheartedness each of you brings to the work we do together—I am a better person because you have taught me how to be intentional about my values in everything I do. To my colleagues here at MSU—my leadership team in the College of Arts & Letters, and to our Chairs, Directors, staff, and faculty, thank you for creating a culture of care in which everyone can flourish. And to my colleagues in the Honors College—thank you for helping our honors students find meaningful pathways to their purpose. And to those who nominated me for this award, to my fellow awardees, and to all of you here today, thank you for your commitment to making good on the transformative promise of higher education.
Below you will find articles, websites, and stories about our community engagement scholarship efforts.
For more on HuMetricsHSS, please visit the HuMetricsHSS website.
The Mellon-Funded Less Commonly Taught Languages Partnership grant fosters collaboration across the Big 10 Academic Alliance in the teaching and learning of less commonly taught languages with a
focus on indigenous languages.
The Public Philosophy Journal is an innovative online publication for accessible scholarship that deepens our understanding of publicly relevant issues.
When I talk to honors students at graduation, they often identify the Honors College Impact program, an annual service week focused on areas of social inequity and inequality in the greater Lansing region, as one of the most transformative experiences of their MSU careers. Last year, the team recorded over 800 hours of service in our local communities.
In addition, HC Impact connects incoming first-year students with faculty and mentors, creating a network that will last throughout their college experience. These students begin their journey at MSU with an open mind and a passion for helping others.
As an extension of HC Impact, the same students participate in an Honors seminar course focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Here, students each complete 24 hours of volunteer service dedicated to their choice of organization, totaling up to over 1,000 hours of service collectively as a class.
Mississippi State University received a $347,959 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for development of a hands-on, research field school for students to help preserve a historic Black cemetery near campus. The cemetery was used by the Black community in Starkville from the late 1800s to the mid-1950s, with the oldest marker dated 1882. Students will learn Geographic Information System and Ground-Penetrating Radar analysis while also delving into archival searches and oral histories within the community. The project is under the direction of Jordon Lynton Cox, an assistant professor of anthropology
Coppin State University, the historically Black educational institution in Baltimore received a $2 million grant from Truist Financial Corporation to establish the Truist Hub for Black Economic Mobility. The hub will enhance the quality of advising, programming, and technology related to educational opportunities and career pathways for Coppin students. The $2 million grant is the largest corporate commitment in Coppin’s history.
Historically Black Fayetteville State University in North Carolina received nearly $400,000 from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to enhance the Collegiate Recovery Community Program. The funding will create the Bystander and Mental Health First Aid training programs, enhance alcohol/drug-free social activities for students, and increase involvement of student groups and peer mentorship.
Saint Augustine’s University, the historically Black educational institution in Raleigh, North Carolina, received a $490,000 federal grant to fund the Public Health Education Center at the university. The Public Health Education Center will support health and wellness education, student research regarding the long-term effects of COVID-19, and related programs. Funding will also support faculty, establish smart classrooms for students, and purchase research and lab equipment.
The University of Georgia received a $5 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development for the implementation of a program entitled Higher Education Conservation Activity in the Republic of Liberia in Africa. The program aims to strengthen forest management and conservation in Liberia through education, training, and technical assistance.
Historically Black Morgan State University in Baltimore was awarded a $420,000 grant by the Army Research Office to conduct pioneering, interdisciplinary research integrating mathematics with computational science, mechanical engineering, and medical research in the study of respiratory conditions and other lung diseases. Using high-performance computing, including mathematical equations, and lung geometry, researchers in the School of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences will pursue simulations of respiratory mechanics that can replicate the condition of lungs, and provide knowledge about respiratory patterns and rates that lead to pulmonary fibrosis, as well as asthmatic, chronic breathing conditions.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is partnering with eight historically Black universities on research projects involving data science. The awarded projects – totaling $11.7 million – have up to three years to establish institutes and partnerships to increase the number and research capacity of STEM students at HBCUs, accelerate innovation in a wide range of NASA science, technology, engineering, and mathematic research areas, and prepare the future workforce for data-intensive space-based Earth sciences.
The HBCUs participating in these research projects are:
Bethune-Cookman University
Fayetteville State University
Florida A&M University
Lincoln University (Missouri)
Morgan State University
North Carolina A&T State University
North Carolina Central University
Prairie View A&M University
“We’re pleased to make progress through awards like this to intentionally build the STEM pipeline of the future, especially in communities of color,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy. “It’s fitting that we make this tangible step to build on the talent pool at HBCUs in our ongoing work to bring to the table all the talents and perspectives we’ll need to send humans to the moon, Mars, and beyond, and do amazing science throughout the solar system.”
“NASA is tackling how to use the latest techniques in data science combined with the volumes of data produced by our missions to answer questions about our changing planet,” added Steven Crawford, senior program executive for scientific data and computing. “Working with students from HBCUs will not only engage the generation that will be most affected by these subjects but will help NASA scientists and engineers address these challenges.”
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