In a year that featured a record number of votes cast, Theo Gonzalves, an associate professor of American studies, has been elected to serve as president of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS).

The association was founded in 1979 to advance high standards of teaching, research, and service in the field of Asian American Studies. The national organization hosts conferences, events, special projects, and symposia each year to engage AAAS priorities. “Equally important is the degree to which the association’s various objectives – specifically as they intersect with advocating and representing the interests and welfare of Asian American Studies and Asian Americans – reflect multiple communities and varied identities,” notes the association’s website.

The AAAS president serves as the chief executive officer of the association, leads an executive board, convenes the annual meeting, and establishes operational budgets for the organization. Professor Gonzalves will serve a one-year term in 2017-2018 as president-elect, and a two-year term from 2018 to 2020 as president.

Gonzalves has research interests in Asian American studies, ethnic studies, U.S.-Philippine relations, Filipino American histories and cultures, and performance studies. He has a particular focus on the power of expressive forms.

His book-length projects include: Stage Presence: Conversations with Filipino American Artists (2007); The Day the Dancers Stayed: Performing in the Filipino/American Diaspora (2009); Carlos Villa and the Integrity of Spaces (2011); and, with Rod Labrador, Filipinos in Hawaii (2011). His work has been supported with a Fulbright award, a Meet the Composer grant, and senior fellowships at the Library of Congress and Smithsonian.

“Since 1989, the Association for Asian American Studies has been my professional home,” Gonzalves says. “I have served as a graduate student representative, Hawaii Regional representative, a member of site and program committees, and a member of the Filipino Studies caucus. I have seen up close how colleagues have worked diligently to sustain our Association. I continue to fight for our field by mentoring young scholars, helping to build an Asian American studies minor program from scratch, creating new courses, and founding UMBC’s Asian American Faculty Council.”

As president, Gonzalves says he will aim to coordinate a robust AAAS social media presence; improve external funding to support students, community activists, and conference attendance; advance opportunities for professional development for K-12 instructors; and explore international exchange opportunities in Asia and other regions.

Read more about Gonzalves’ work and research on the American studies website, and learn more about his Smithsonian fellowship to study music’s cultural impact in UMBC Magazine.

Image: Theo Gonzalves. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC. 

“We’ve ran out of seats. What a great problem to have,” Jess Myers, Director of UMBC’s Women’s Center, said as she looked into her lounge full of students.

For the past twenty five years, the Women’s Center at UMBC has been committed to advancing gender equity and inclusion across campus, by creating authentic dialogues between students and faculty. Since the beginning, the Center has hosted a variety of workshops and events in hopes to empower students of all races, sexualities and backgrounds. The Center also supports longer term projects such as Spectrum and the Women of Color Coalition.

One of the center’s larger projects, a roundtable series titled “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” concluded this past Wednesday. Rounding out the series, the Women’s Center presented “Fatness in Focus,” a panel discussion focusing on fatness from a feminist perspective and its intersections with an individual’s identity and the social injustices that may result.

Students of all sizes, races, genders, and hair colors (most with natural colors, some with the occasional turquoise highlight, some with flaming red curls) gathered in the narrowing Women’s Lounge. Even without the various talks and events the Women’s Center hosts, the space speaks for empowerment of all genders and races, with posters of Anita Hill and metal chairs decorated by visitors.

Sandwiched between two student facilitators under a tapestry sketched with different translations of the word trend (furthering the center’s pursuit for racial inclusion), a panel comprised of two Gender and Women’s Studies professors, Kate Drabinski and Doctor Mejdulene Shomali, and Daniel Willey, a member of the Women’s Center staff.

Throughout the chat, the panel talked to the semicircle of undergraduate students, many attending for extra credit, about fat studies, the social and intercultural perceptions of fatness and what the term “fatness” actually means.

“This is a pretty great turnout,” Drabinski said. She started the discussion off with an insight to one of the courses she teaches, Unruly Bodies, where students discuss how the built environment illustrates how a body should be.

“Think about how you’re sitting right now, in the chair you’re sitting. Anyone uncomfortable?” Drabinski said. “Take the desks that you sit on during lecture, what do they tell you about bodies? They’re saying the proper body should be small, right-handed, have short legs and didn’t bring anything with it, which can cause discomfort for some.”

From there, Shomali segued into fatness as an intersectional study that raises questions of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and gender identification. She shared a personal account about her time abroad in Palestine.

“I’m Palestinian; my family’s Palestinian. We visited Palestine one summer, and I went into this shop, and someone asked me, ‘are you a Palestinian from Israel?’ I said ‘no,’ explaining to her that I was from America,” Shomali said.  “The reason this person asked me that question was because parts of my body don’t code as an authentic Palestinian. In my opinion, that has to do with the fact that I have piercings and largely with that I am fat.”

While this was the final roundtable of the semester, be sure to look out for more of the center’s events on their website and myUMBC.

The post Focusing on fatness appeared first on The Retriever.

Thursday, January 5, 2017

UMBC vs. Binghamton

5 P.M. Pre-Game Pizza Social featuring swag giveaways (UC310)

7 P.M. GAME TIME (RAC)

James Sanders, who is pursuing a PhD in Environmental Engineering, placed 2^nd at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Trainee poster competition at the 50^th Anniversary Celebration of the NIEHS

He accepted the award in Durham, North Carolina, at the NIEHS trainee reception on Monday, Dec 5th, 2106. 

UMBC’s Mobile Pervasive and Sensor Systems Laboratory is collaborating with researchers at the Army Research Laboratory as part of their Center For Adaptive Soldier Technologies (CAST) laboratory. The UMBC group, led by Prof. Nilanjan Banerjee, is funded to work on the Human Variablility Project. The ARL described and motivates the project as follows.

“While it is understood that significant behavioral and performance variability within Soldiers exists, there is a clear knowledge gap with respect to quantifying and predicting the degree and dynamics of this variability. We posit that this critical scientific gap that has led to inflexible systems designed to mitigate against human variability by simplifying system operations and interfaces to be usable by operators performing at below-average levels. Alternatively, by understanding and predicting human variability across multiple time scales, we will enable adaptive system designs that are dynamic and capable of eliciting the full potential of the humans with which they interact.”

As part of this project, UMBC researchers are developing novel sensors and virtual reality environments to collect human behavioral and physiology data to study the variability of human states in immersive environments.

The post UMBC researchers collaborate with Army Research Laboratory to understand human variability appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.