SBS Newsletter – November 2010
In this issue
|
|
|
|
SBS Dean Appoints Faculty to Oversee Program Innovation and Diversity Issues |
Alumni Association Scholarships and Awards Upcoming Events Alumni News Ken Ansin '87 (political science) has joined the board of directors of New Resource Bank in San Francisco. A business executive and entrepreneur, Ansin has previously served as a board member of Root Capital and director of Enterprise Bank & Trust Co. of Lowell, Massachusetts. The New Resource Bank organizing group came together in 2005 to build a bank that is “by the people and for the people” of their community. Read more... Christine G. [Solt] Savage '92 (political science), chair of Choate's Healthcare Group, has been named to the "Top 50 Women Massachusetts Super Lawyers" list for attaining the highest level of recognition and professional achievement in the state for 2010. Read more... This is the second major recognition for Savage in the past few weeks. In October Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly selected her as a 2010 "Top Woman of Law" for outstanding leadership, vision, passion, and advocacy in the healthcare industry. David William Murray '10 (journalism/philosophy) has been blogging for TLC's "Sarah Palin's Alaska." Will McGuinness '10 (journalism), online product manager for the Fall River Herald, is also blogging. Read a recent entry about "multimedia expectations." Congratulations to Jason Rodriguez PhD '09 (sociology). His revised dissertation will be included in "The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work" series, edited by Suzanne Gorden (Cornell University Press). Localocracy, a forum through which people can engage in serious discussion about local issues, has been developed by Conor White-Sullivan '10 (anthropology), Aaron Soules '10 (communication), et al. It recently won the Poynter Promise Prize, an incubation project in entrepreneurial journalism run by The Poynter Institute and funded by the Ford Foundation. The group operates forums in Amherst, Granby and South Hadley and is expanding to other communities across the state. Ultimately, the group wants to partner with area newspapers. Read more... Cosmo Macero ’90 (communication), senior vice president at the communications and public relations firm O’Neill and Associates in Boston and veteran political, business, and public policy journalist, recently shared his insights on the 2010 elections with the Alumni Association. Read more... David Pakman '06 (communication and economics), a multimedia maven based in Northampton, visited Mary Carey's Intro to Journalism class. Pakman is a new-media entrepreneur who really knows how to expand his audience. As an undergrad, he started his own political talk radio show, now called "The David Pakman Show." The nationally syndicated show airs, in audio and video format, on over 100 radio and TV stations and on YouTube. Pakman also writes a regular column for the Daily Hampshire Gazette. KJ Hannah Greenberg PhD '87 (communication) recently published Oblivious to the Obvious: Wishfully Mindful Parenting (French Creek Press, 2010). Both sweet and sour, this collection of 41 essays zings across many aspects of parenting, including: exhaustion, pets, sibling rivalry, access to convergent media and integrating family with fortune. Throughout this book’s pages, Greenberg holds up the lighter side of life for examination. Read more about Greenberg and her work. After going on parrot safaris, George Sommers '78 (journalism) has documented his findings in a new children's book, I Saw Wild Parrots in New York City! (Wiggles Press, 2010). This true story of feral parrots successfully colonizing the Big Apple explains how these exotic birds journeyed from South America and how they adapted from tropical life to the cold and gritty northern urban environment. Sommers, who lives in Quincy, MA, is a freelance writer who has been widely published. Cartoonist Drew Aquilina '90 (landscape architecture and regional planning) created the "Iggman on Campus" comic strip published first in the Daily Collegian and later, renamed Green Pieces, in newspapers in Connecticut and Arizona. Iggman and his critter friends are now available in Green Pieces: Green from the Pond Up (Five Star Publications, Inc, 2010). Read a review that calls the illustrations "unsurpassable." The book was this year's Comics/Graphic Novels Honorable Mention winner at the Green Book Festival, San Francisco. Visit the Green Pieces website. Please send us your news! Also, view upcoming alumni events, sponsored by the Alumni Assocation, on their Events Listing. And check out MaroonCentral, the Alumni Association's online community. This is a FREE social networking service that encourages communication and professional networking among alumni and students through class notes, profiles, a searchable directory, and more. Department/Faculty News The ECSA (Engaged, Connect, Service, Achieve) Committee has awarded the Anthropology Club an $1,800 grant for its spring break service learning trip to Jonestown, Mississippi. Entitled "Spring Break 2011: Social Justice in the Heart of Blues Country", the experience is open to any Five College student. Applications will be taken on a first-come first-serve basis, and selection may be competitive. More information [pdf] on the Jonestown trip. ECSA grants fund events that foster connections, bring students together, build relationships across different parts of the campus community in unique and innovative ways, and serve as models for diverse community building. Registered Student Organizations, programs, offices, and agencies under Student Affairs may apply for grants. In November Peter Haas (political science) was a featured panelist at “Science & Society: IPCC Reform and the Global Climate Challenge” at Columbia University. The event was sponsored by The Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI), the Earth Institute’s Columbia Climate Center, and Columbia-Paris Alliance Program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). Other panelists included Simon Buckle, director, Climate Policy, Grantham Institute, Imperial College; Syukuro Manabe, senior meteorologist, Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Princeton University; and Laurence Tubiana, director, IDDRI, Sciences Po and Alliance Visiting Professor, Columbia University. Panelists presented the major controversies surrounding climate change today, with a special focus on the heightened scrutiny surrounding the IPCC assessment reports. Hampshire Life, the weekly magazine for the Pioneer Valley published by the Daily Hampshire Gazette, ran a Q&A on Laura Reed (political science). Take a look if you'd like to know what makes her tick. Legal Studies and Political Science are offering seven online courses starting December 20th, including Government & Politics of the Middle East. Amy Schalet (sociology) gave the keynote address and participated on a panel at the California Adolescent Health Conference. She also gave a webinar for the Academy of Pediatrics. Read more... [pdf] Brian McDermott (journalism) is chair of the National Press Photographers Association's Student Clip Contest. Recognizing the best in student photojournalism and multimedia, the contest runs quarterly segments with contestants accruing points towards being named NPPA Student Photographer of the Year. Read more... The Journalism Program has been bringing lots of interesting speakers to campus. In November Gene Weingarten, the Washington Post’s two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer and columnist, spoke about his new book, The Fiddler in the Subway. Women's issues journalist Sharon Lerner came to present a talk entitled "Family-Unfriendly: Working to Improve Life for Caregivers in the U.S." Pulitzer prize-winner and literary journalist Tom French came to speak about his new book, Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives. Norm Sims (journalism) organized a panel on literary journalism for the Bedill NonFictionNow conference at the University of Iowa on Nov. 6. Panelists included representatives from the University of South Carolina, Northwestern University, Ryerson University, St. Louis University, and Sims, who spoke on "The Personal and the Historical: Literary Journalism and Literary History." Razvan Sibii (journalism) presented "The Easy Example: Pedagogical Convenience or Clever Distraction?" on Nov. 14, at the National Communication Association's Annual Convention in San Francisco. Also, the Romania newspaper, Adevarul, published two feature articles by Sibii about the U.S. midterm elections. The first piece examined the fate of third-party and independent candidates, while the second piece looked at some of the trends in evidence during the elections. (Both texts are in Romanian; a rough translation can be obtained through Google translate). Anthropology faculty Jean Forward, Betsy Krause, and Michael Sugerman received David Fellowships on behalf of the Department for the creation of "Integrative Experience" courses related to the new General Education Requirement. Anthropology was one of 10 departments selected from across campus. Read more about Integrative Experience at UMass. SBS in the News Boston.com, 11/23/10. B.J. Roche (journalism) writes about November being National Family Caregivers Month. She cites research done by Nancy Folbre (economics) on this subject. New York Times (Economix blog), 11/22/10. Nancy Folbre (economics) writes about the political reaction to recent proposals for reducing the national debt through spending cuts and tax increases. She says most people don’t have a clear idea how these plans would affect them and calls for new analytic tools to reveal more details about needed cutbacks and sacrifices to lower the national debt. New York Times (Economix blog), 11/8/10. Folbre writes about the need for ethical standards among professional economists. She notes a recent survey done by her colleague Gerald Epstein (economics). It found that of the 19 most prominent academic financial economists who played a role in debates about financial reform and regulation, 13 owned stock in, advised or served on the boards of commercial financial institutions. New York Times (Economix blog), 11/1/10. Folbre explores the ongoing disagreement among economists over the effects of minimum wage on jobs. She references a new study, co-authored by Arindrajit Dube (economics), published in this month's The Review of Economics and Statistics, which prints important articles related to empirical economics. The study closely analyzes employment trends for several categories of low-wage workers over a 16-year period in all contiguous counties across state borders where minimum wage increases followed a different trajectory. It has found that increases in minimum wages had no negative impact on employment rates. Huffington Post, 11/1/10. Folbre's blog and Dube's October interview on The Real News Network are cited. Springfield Republican, 11/16/10. Raymond J. La Raja (political science) says not revealing the identities of search committee members, who are seeking a new police chief in Holyoke, allows them to offer honest opinions that aren’t subject to pressure from various interest groups. Los Angeles Times, 11/14/10. One of eight economic experts invited to comment on whether the economy can be saved, Robert Pollin (economics), co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute, says the federal government must continue to aggressively fight the recession created by Wall Street hyper-speculation and promote recovery through both spending and credit market interventions. (His comments appear on pages 5-6.) Wall Street Journal, 11/5/10. A columnist, writing about how President Obama needs to lay out a clear plan to create jobs, references Pollin. According to Pollin, the recovery is stalled because private credit markets are locked up, especially for small businesses. The federal government should expand existing loan guarantees and tax excess cash reserves held by banks. The Real News Network, 11/13/10. Emeritus Prof. James Crotty (economics), a fellow of the Political Economy Research Institute, says calls by conservatives and newly-elected Republican members of Congress for austerity and budget cutting could send the U.S. economy deeper into recession. Foreign Policy, 11/7/10. Prof. Jillian Schwedler (political science) and honors student Josh Sowalsky '11 (political science, Middle Eastern studies, social thought and political economy) coauthored a column discussing November's parliamentary elections in Jordan. WFXT-TV 25, 11/4/10. Prof. Emeritus Jerome Mileur (political science) says the Democratic sweep of congressional seats in Massachusetts means Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown is now a bigger target when he runs for re-election in two years. Huffington Post, 11/3/10. Brian Schaffner (political science) shares findings of a Massachusetts exit poll he and his students conducted in 18 randomly selected precincts during the recent election. Most striking was that Gov. Deval Patrick owes his re-election to women, 57% of whom supported him, as opposed to 34% for Republican Charlie Baker. The poll also showed 10% of voters were between ages 18-29, as opposed to 17% in 2008. New York Times (You're the Boss), 11/2/10. Jane D’Arista (Political Economy Research Institute) says a change included in the financial reform law recently passed by Congress, that allows banks to pay interest on business checking accounts, could help attract more accounts for banks from smaller businesses. A Word from SBS Gifts from alumni and friends are vital to the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Your investment allows us to create remarkable opportunities for today’s—and tomorrow's—students. If you are already a donor, please accept our sincere thanks. If not, please consider a gift to SBS for your department, student financial aid, a purpose that speaks to your personal experiences and priorities, or an unrestricted designation. To make a gift online, click here. Or, send a check to the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Draper Hall, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 40 Campus Center Way, Amherst, MA 01003-9244. Questions? Contact James Mallet, 413.577.1700. We welcome feedback related to this newsletter, the college in general, specific concerns, or topics of interest. Please address all correspondence, including story ideas, to Sabine Cray, director of communications and marketing. If you wish to add your name to the mailing list, or if you wish to unsubscribe, please contact us. If you have had a change of address, email or other personal information, you can update it online. The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences respects your privacy. Your contact information will not be shared with anyone unrelated to the University of Massachusetts Amherst. |
