Elect Her – Campus Women Win is the only program in the country that encourages and trains college women and everybody else to run for student government and future political office. A collaboration between AAUW and Running Start, Elect Her addresses the need to expand the pipeline to women running for office and to diminish the longstanding political leadership gender gap. Women Involved in Learning and Leadership (WILL) is Elect Her to campus, and you're invited to join us for this exciting leadership training opportunity!

Our campus training will be held Saturday, March 10 from 10:30am-3:30pm in Fine Arts 011. Lunch will be provided (and it will be delicious). You will learn how to figure out what your message and platform is, how to craft a communication strategy that works, and you'll hear from campus and community leaders about what it takes to win. Delegate Mary Washington will join us to share her journey to elected office. People of all genders are invited to attend. It is going to be a great day!

Envisioning The “Woke” Academy™ is the theme for the 2018 ASHE Conference in Tampa, FL.  Although a fairly recent colloquialism, the term “woke” has become synonymous with the Black Lives Matter Movement and other activist efforts, as well as social media campaigns and hashtags (#staywoke; #getwoke; #bewoke).  Being “woke” is meant to encourage a heightened level of consciousness both locally and transnationally regarding societal ills and the need to unabashedly name and dismantle inequitable power structures and their disproportionately negative effects on minoritized peoples.  Being “woke” engages us in the envisioning of futures characterized by freedom and emancipatory struggle.

 

More than a theme, Envisioning the “Woke” Academy™ is a critique.  Colleges and universities are often touted as spaces of enlightenment.  As higher education researchers and scholars, we have access to information and the power to determine what knowledge is and which knowledges are valuable.  We oftentimes enact that power in ways that dictate who can access our institutions; promote elitism to suggest which people belong and which do not; deny particular types of scholarship from appearing in our closely guarded academic publishing spaces; and, that refuse to grapple with how our research, the types of questions we ask and the methodologies we use, make us complicit in academic sleepwalking.  As a community of scholars, we comfortably enact oppression disguised in a beautifully crafted quilt of patches we call diversity, equity, and social justice. We may sound “woke” through our rhetoric, but perhaps we are sound asleep.  We function under a false security that allows us to close our eyes to those most vulnerable and invisible in higher education and the larger transnational context.

 

Even beyond this critique, Envisioning The “Woke” Academy™ is a charge to all of us as higher education scholars, to get woke and stay woke.

 

The Woke Academy™ is critically conscious and thoughtful about the ways in which postsecondary institutions, and we as researchers in these institutions facilitate spaces that are experienced as violent and inaccessible.  Critically conscious scholars are those who envision and actively contribute to the academy as a space for immeasurable possibilities, particularly for those who have been repeatedly disenfranchised. 

 

The Woke Academy™ values history as a process of remembering that the societal ills we face today are the direct result of settler colonialism and its manifestation through deeply entrenched acts, laws, and policies enacted over time.  We are first called to remember that our colleges and universities are on stolen land built by stolen and exploited bodies.  The process of recognizing who we remember, what we remember and how we remember either implicates us in the creation of healing spaces that openly acknowledge past wrongs or relegates us to a continued pattern of ahistoricism and epistemological erasure of people and communities we claim to care about. 

 

The Woke Academy™ is purposefully intersectional and concerned with how multiple axes of power operate and shape retrenchment of opportunity for the masses while increasing these same opportunities for a select few. 

 

The Woke Academy™ is transdisciplinary, indicating that multiple knowledges can be intertwined to promote more diverse perspectives and ideas and that such knowledges are not only contained in postsecondary institutional spaces, but also in our surrounding and transnational communities. 

 

The Woke Academy™ values communities, identities, and the need for representation through a polyvocality that is accessible to a range of audiences. 

 

The Woke Academy™ is activist and cognizant about “doing” as knowledge-building, resource-sharing, and action-driven. Doing all this requires our attention to some fundamental questions about our work, our relationships, and our lives.

 

Questions that preoccupy The Woke Academy™ include:

 

Grappling with these types of questions and several others also allows us the space to envision The Woke Academy™.

 

To employ Envisioning the “Woke” Academy as a conference theme, critique, and charge, the 2018 ASHE Annual Meeting will provide opportunities for members to engage with ideas and activities that promote critical consciousness, history and memory, intersectionality, transdisciplinarity, representation, and activism.  All are invited to submit proposals that connect to these ideas and others that promote an awakening of ourselves and the academy.  

UMBC Office of Residential Life is seeking candidates for five graduate assistant opportunities available for the 2018-2019 academic year:

Assistant Community Director

Residential Academic Initiatives Graduate Assistant

Community Development Graduate Assistant

Graduate Assistant Coordinator of Residential Facilities

Graduate Assistant for Assessment

Information regarding the openings and application process can be found here. 

DoIT is now providing NVivo, a qualitative research software package equivalent to SPSS, Stata, SAS, or R. This software is available to all faculty, staff, and graduate students. It allows the user to import, code, and arrange data for methodologically rigorous and scalable analyses. This acquisition aligns with efforts to support UMBC's strategic plan, including the objective to "vigorously promote a campus culture of multidisciplinary collaboration and multidisciplinary research, scholarship, and creative activity."

Professor Anne Brodsky of the Department of Psychology, who also serves as Interim Director, Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research (MIPAR) and Special Assistant for Social Science Research with the CAHSS Dean's Office, has been conducting qualitative research since arriving at UMBC 20 years ago. She believes this procurement is "great news for UMBC researchers and students" and access to NVivo "will further promote the excellent qualitative and mixed methods scholarship being done across the Social Sciences, Humanities, Arts, and STEM fields at UMBC as we work to further our understanding into some of the most important and exciting questions of our time."

If you are considering qualitative or mixed-methods research, or you are currently gathering qualitative data, this might be just the tool you're looking for to systematize your analytic strategy.

NVivo can be downloaded here. 

Click here for the proposal instructions and an application form. Applicants should mark on the application form whether they are applying for fall 2018 or spring 2019. 

The Dresher Center for the Humanities invites applications for two Residential Faculty Research Fellowships for Academic Year 2018-19 (one in fall 2018 and one in spring 2019). Funding is intended to support and promote significant humanities research at UMBC. The UMBC Faculty Research Fellows will join our new residential Inclusion Imperative Visiting Faculty Fellows in the Dresher Center. Dresher Center fellowships offer the gift of time, space, and collegial conversation within a robust humanities center environment that will, in turn, enhance the UMBC conversation surrounding inclusive excellence. 

All full-time, tenured and tenure-track faculty members pursuing humanities research in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences are welcome to submit a proposal. Applications are especially encouraged from, but not limited to, full-time faculty with appointments in departments and programs with a humanities focus. Proposals will be reviewed by the Dresher Center Advisory Board, with decisions on fall semester fellowships by mid-May and decisions on spring semester fellowships by late June.

More information: https://dreshercenter.umbc.edu/internal-residential-fellowship-program/

The Counseling Center has developed a series of workshops, and there are a few that the center wants to bring to the attention of graduate students. 

The "Graduate Student Support" group, in particular, was developed in response to graduate students' requests for a group to specifically address grad-level needs. Please take advantage of this group. If your schedule does not allow you to meet during the group's time, please contact Dr. Soonhee Lee at the Counseling Center, soonhee@umbc.edu to see if there might be some alternatives. Recommended groups are listed below. An expanded list with the groups' respective details (times, dates, location), along with information about additional workshops, is attached.