Self-Reflexivity of a Dance Scholar: The Place of Structured Improvisation, Care, and Debate

A New Feature, New Assignment, and Fresh Perspective Worth Noting Tomalee Doan (bio) I was pleasantly surprised and pleased to become a member of the portal Editorial Board and editor of the new feature “Worth Noting.” The opportunity to gather, present, or help create new content based on the interest of readers and noteworthy trends in libraries and the academy is an exciting venture. This new assignment comes at a time of significant change in my own life. Last August, I became an associate university librarian at Arizona State University (ASU) Library in Tempe. Yes, despite the Arizona heat, moving in the summer was a great time to relocate from Midwest to the Southwest! Previously, I was the associate dean for academic affairs at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. My professional interests include managerial leadership, librarians as educators, information literacy, information technologies for improved discovery, and learning space design to enhance student success. Now, I am adding editorial acumen. As I began to mull potential topics of interest to share in this feature, I gravitated to the recently published NMC (New Media Consortium) Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Education Edition.1 This 14th edition of the Horizon Report is a collaborative effort between two nonprofit organizations: the NMC, an international group of experts in educational technology, and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, whose mission is “to advance higher education through the use of information technology.” The annual reports examine findings from the Horizon Project, an ongoing program to identify and describe emerging technologies for learning and teaching. The reports track higher education trends, challenges, and the development of educational technologies in hopes to promote teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. These documents have been some of my benchmark readings to decipher what to watch for in higher education, information technology, and academic libraries. The NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Education Edition states, “Across the world, education has become the most important currency.”2 A major theme of the 2017 Horizon Report is digital equity, which it defines as “equal access to technology, particularly broadband Internet.” In its executive summary, the report lists the top 10 trends that will likely drive educational change for the next five [End Page 447] years. Trend 4 is: “Despite the proliferation of technology and online learning materials, access is still unequal. Gaps persist across the world that are hampering college completion for student groups by socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, and gender. Further, sufficient internet access remains uneven.”2 In the section “Significant Challenges Impeding Technology Adoption in Higher Education,” the report categorizes increasing digital equity as a “difficult challenge”—that is, one “that we understand but for which solutions are elusive.” It explains: UNESCO reports that while 3.2 billion people across the globe are using the internet, only 41% of those that live in developing countries are online. Further, 200 million fewer women than men are accessing the internet around the world. The United Nations has identified internet access as essential to meeting its sustainable development goals of alleviating poverty and hunger and improving health and education worldwide by 2030. This rampant social justice issue is not just affecting developing nations: more than 30 million Americans lack access to high-speed internet. Efforts to improve these figures are necessary to promote full participation, communication, and learning within society.3 Since I arrived at ASU, the topic of digital equity has become even more prominent on my radar. ASU was the university rated number one by U.S. News & World Report in the category of innovation for both 2016 and 2017. The criteria for the ranking lists improvements of curriculum, faculty, students, campus life, technology, or facilities. U.S. News does not say exactly what earned ASU the top ranking, but among the likely factors are many new programs the university has recently launched, including several focused on widening access to higher education and ensuring student success. In 2015, for example, ASU began the Global Freshman Academy, the first university program to allow students to complete their first year online through massive open online courses (MOOCs), without even going through the application process. ASU also developed a system called eAdvisor™, which helps students select a field that...

More than two-dozen members of a cancer drug research group at Arizona State University (ASU) have lost their jobs in what observers say is an escalating battle between a prominent chemistry professor and the university's administration. An ASU spokesman says the Tempe-based group headed by George R. Pettit was dissolved because it wasn't able to renew its federal funding. Pettit's supporters say personal clashes have fueled the university's real desire: to supplant Pettit's original Cancer Research Institute (CRI) with ASU's much larger, new facility, the Biodesign Institute. On Jan. 27, 31 of Pettit's group members, whose salaries are paid by grant money, were told they would be given 30 days' severance pay. They were locked out of their labs immediately, and their e-mail accounts were canceled, they say. Nine members of the group remain at ASU, and a handful of his students and staff will be incorporated into other university labs, ASU officials say. Pettit remains ...

In recent years the recruitment and retention of engineering students, especially underrepresented minorities and women have received increased attention in the United States. Underrepresented minorities and women are the largest untapped resources available to help maintain and/or increase engineering enrollments and to ensure a diverse engineering working force. In order to understand better and to serve their first-year students in the School of Engineering, a survey is administered to these students each semester at Arizona State University (ASU). In addition to basic demographics, the survey asks for information on when and why students chose to study engineering at ASU, what recruitment events they attended and which were most effective, how many contacts the student had with ASU, how many hours per week they work, and predictions of success in graduating from ASU with an engineering degree. The data is analyzed to give direction for more successful recruitment and retention efforts, including advisement about course and work loads. The results are further analyzed to determine if recruitment efforts have differential success when the target population is men, women, underrepresented minorities, students who considered another university, local residents, traditional-age, or community college transfer students. The results of this analysis are being used to guide recruitment and retention efforts of our engineering students, especially women and underrepresented minorities. While not exhaustive, this paper contains a discussion on several of the survey items. The survey, although developed at ASU, can be customized for any individual institution.

The Sixth Annual Conference of the Islamic Social Services Association(ISSA) was held June 17-19, 2005, at Arizona State University (ASU) andthe Holiday Inn in Tempe, Arizona. Sponsors included the Department ofSocial Work, ASU at the West Campus; the School of Social Work, ASU atthe Tempe Campus; the National Association of Social Workers–Arizonachapter; the Muslim American Society–Arizona chapter; the Council onAmerican Islamic Relations–Arizona chapter; the Muslim Students Associationat ASU Tempe Campus; the Muslim Law Students’Association at ASU;the Islamic Center of the East Valley; and Global Medical Technologies.The conference and pre-conference institute continued ISSA’s mission:promoting awareness of the social welfare, mental health, and family concernsfacing Muslims in North America by educating mainstreamproviders, Muslim practitioners involved in providing human services,imams, and community leaders. The pre-conference institute’s theme was“Muslim Culture and Faith,” the title of ISSA’s anti-bias project training formainstream providers. The conference’s theme was “Islamic SocialServices: Challenges and Opportunities.”Pre-conference institute presenters Aneesah Nadir (Arizona StateUniversity and ISSA–USA) and Shahina Siddiqui (ISSA–Canada) providedinformation about Muslim culture, traditions, beliefs, the history of Islamand Muslims in North America, and social issues facing Muslims, as wellas guidelines and considerations for addressing the social issues thatMuslims’ experience. Social workers, counselors, teachers, health-care andmental-health providers from mainstream social service organizations, publicand private schools attended the pre-conference institute.Social work educators, doctoral candidates, and Muslim communitysocial service providers were among the presenters for the overall ISSA conference.Abdul Malik Mujahid (Soundvision), Omar Shahin (NationalAssociation of Imams Federation [NAIF]), Mohamed Magid (All DullesArea Muslim Society [ADAMS]) and Bonita McGee (ISSA–USA) facilitateddiscussions with imams and community leaders. This session exploredways imams can address social issues and strategies Muslim social serviceproviders can employ to help them meet the community’s social needs.While the imams identified a complex situation with a variety of problemsand solutions, it became clear that they do not have the knowledge and skillsto address the community’s many social and family issues. Opportunities forconsultation and education with imams and mosque leaders are necessary,therefore, organizations like NAIF are working with ISSA to provide this totheir members. Imams also need to be recognized as professionals with clearjob descriptions and regular (including counseling) hours. One imam is notenough; perhaps youth imams and assistant imams are needed ...

Editor’s CommentaryHonoring the Legacy of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn James Riding In (bio) When Melanie K. Yazzie and Nick Estes approached me several years ago with the suggestion for a special issue of Wicazo Sa Review in honor of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s many accomplishments, I became ecstatic because these graduate students had recognized the significance of her intellectual contributions to our knowledge. Liz, as we call her, truly deserves such an acknowledgment of her accomplishments from the journal that she cofounded in 1985.1 Although now in her mid-eighties and living in the Black Hills near Rapid City, South Dakota, she continues to fiercely oppose the crippling effects of colonialism and anti-Indianism on Indian life and sovereignty. What should we expect? After all, she is legendary for her fervor to develop American Indian studies as a stand-alone academic discipline, criticism of academia for its flawed research methodologies and analyses pertaining to the history of Indian–white relations, scathing critiques of imperialistic U.S. Indian laws and policies, and promotion of Indian nationalism as a strategy of Indian survival as distinct, self-governing political entities. In this commentary, I will share a few of my memories about the role that Cook-Lynn played in the creation of the American Indian studies program at Arizona State University (ASU). I had the good fortune to meet her on February 8, 1993, at Scottsdale Community College on the Salt River Pima and Maricopa Indian Community in Arizona during a regional hearing of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs about amending the “toothless” American Indian Religious [End Page 5] Freedom Act of 1978. Dr. Beatrice Medicine,2 a mutual friend, introduced us. Of course, I did not realize then that Cook-Lynn and her writings would have such a lasting influence on my views about what American Indian studies should be.3 Cook-Lynn’s association with ASU started in the late 1990s. As Dr. Carol Chiago Lujan, I, and others began the work of developing an AIS program, we called on Cook-Lynn for her expertise and leadership in this area. She subsequently agreed to come to campus during several spring semesters in the capacity of a visiting professor. During meetings and one-on-one conversations, she spoke with eloquence and authority about the defensive, regulatory, and transformative roles of AIS while stressing that AIS must be grounded on the principles of sovereignty and indigenousness.4 With the support of the ASU administration and our allies, we have built a stand-alone program with its own paradigm, faculty, curriculum, methodologies, journal, conference, and undergraduate and graduate programs.5 Our curriculum has grown to include a rich array of course offerings about matters such as U.S. Indian law, U.S. policy, human rights, governance, repatriation and sacred place issues, colonization/decolonization, human rights, health, historical trauma, activism, leadership, economic development, intellectualism, and language. Our eight full-time faculty members, all citizens of various Indian nations, earned doctorates in AIS, history, philosophy, education, sociology, and social work.6 Adhering to a Cook-Lynn tenet,7 we faculty members view our research, teaching, and service as a “‘sacred’ responsibility to Indian nations undertaken for the sake of cultural survival.”8 Essentially then, the AIS model at ASU is tacitly grounded in the notion that being an AIS professor is substantially more than an eight-to-five job: it is a way of life that entails a willingness to make sacrifices for the common good. We strive to equip our students with a useful set of skills for success in various employment settings with practical and intellectual knowledge of Indian issues. Some of our undergraduate alumni have entered graduate studies and law school while others have found employment in the public and private sectors. Of particular note, Stephen Roe Lewis, a 2005 graduate, is now completing his first term as the governor of the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona.9 Graduates of our relatively new master’s program are finding similar opportunities. Over the years, ASU’s administrative support for AIS and other Indian-focused programs has grown. On August 31, 2015, President Michael M. Crow sent an...

Rachel G. Fuchs (1939–2016)

IntroductionThe HfE Project and Beyond: New Constellations of Practice in the Environmental and Digital Humanities Joni Adamson (bio) Since the publication of "The Future We Want," the outcome document of the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (dubbed Rio+20),1 there has been growing infrastructural support and funding for curricular innovation and programming in the environmental humanities.2 International researchers are increasingly advocating for the integration of humanities insights into codesigned and coproduced knowledge about anthropogenically caused change (Bai et al. 2015, 10; Hartman 2015; Nye et al. 2013). But what forms will integrated or transdisciplinary codesigned research take? Can the humanities (which typically are characterized as weakly tooled to address social and environmental crises) catalyze imagination of new ideas, narratives, frameworks, alternatives, demands, and projects that will enable people to envision plausibly different, even livable, futures (Adamson 2015, 139)? Most articles and white papers calling for integration of the humanities into global environmental-change sciences suggest how far we have come in advocating successfully for the value of the humanities. Still, the argument of many of these position papers often starts from embedded assumptions that take the form of statements such as "We need to begin now to incorporate the insights of the humanities" (Bai et al. 2015). This special issue of Resilience, "The Green Humanities Lab," will report and reflect on an ambitious Andrew W. Mellon–funded project called Humanities for the Environment, or HfE, which took [End Page 1] place between 2013 and 2015. Most of the contributors to this issue collaborated together as part of an HfE steering committee based at Arizona State University (ASU), while other contributors are part of a larger international EcoDH (ecological digital humanities) network. Each article in this issue discusses projects or initiatives the authors have been working on for two years or more. All of us are excited to be stepping out of the shade, so to speak, to illustrate that calls for what Steven Hartman and others have called integrated environmental humanities or integrated codesigned research are being creatively and generatively answered by expanding and increasingly well-organized groups of humanists (Hartman 2015). Hartman's collaboration with Anders Birgersson and Peter Norrman on the highly innovative Bifrost Project, an arts-research intervention to bring "hundreds, if not thousands of artists, writers, scientists, educators, community leaders and activists" together to "educate the public on climate change," is only one of the most developed of these arts-media initiatives (Birgersson, Hartman, and Norrman 2015). The steering committee that collaboratively developed the HfE project included nine environmental humanists from ASU and nine from other universities throughout the US and Canada.3 Some are artists, many have long been involved in establishing the environmental humanities, some are new to the field, some have been piloting digital humanities labs and projects, and one is a Nobel Prize–winning member of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Most members of this steering committee have been networking for over a decade through the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, the American Society of Environmental History, and the Environment and Culture Caucus of the American Studies Association. Many had also networked previously through Mellon Foundation grants including one at the University of California, Davis, that brought many of the members of the steering committee together for Davis's Initiative on Environments and Societies.4 Through these associations and others, the steering committee brought a wealth of public humanities and collaborative experience in environmental justice and sustainability community outreach to their work at ASU.5 Having been funded by the Mellon Foundation, the HfE project at ASU was guided by Mellon's persistent defense of the value of the humanities and by its consistent encouragement of "scholars and institutions [End Page 2] to experiment and adapt" (Howard 2014, 4). Members of the steering committee were aware that a high percentage of Mellon dollars have been granted to support the environmental and digital humanities and to make project outcomes "openly available" (Howard 2014, 9, 10–11). With this in mind, the steering committee saw their charge as piloting experimental EcoDH projects...

Martin Reisslein is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering at Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe. He received the Dipl.-Ing. (FH) degree from the Fachhochschule Dieburg, Germany, in 1994, and the M.S.E. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in 1996; both in electrical engineering. He received his Ph.D. in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. During the academic year 1994-1995 he visited the University of Pennsylvania as a Fulbright scholar. From July 1998 through October 2000 he was a scientist with the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD FOKUS), Berlin and lecturer at the Technical University Berlin. From October 2000 through August 2005 he was an Assistant Professor at ASU. From January 2003 through February 2007, he was editor-in-chief of the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. He maintains an extensive library of video traces for network performance evaluation, including frame size traces of MPEG-4 and H.264 encoded video, at http://trace.eas.asu.edu. He is a member of the ASEE and a senior member of the ACM and the IEEE. Address: School of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering, Goldwater Center, MC 5706, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-5706; telephone: (+1)480-965-8593; fax (+1)480-965-8325; e-mail: reisslein@asu.edu.

The CIB Working Commission W117, “Performance Measurement in Construction,” is one of the more innovative and productive research-based commissions in CIB. It focuses on the utilization of performance metrics in the delivery of construction services. The home for W117 is the Performance Based Studies Research Group (PBSRG) at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe, Arizona, where W117 and ASU-PBSRG hold their annual Best Value Conference. From its start in 2009, W117 was led by Prof. Dean Kashiwagi (ASU), and his group of innovators (Dr. Kenneth Sullivan, Sylvia Romero, John Savicky and Dr. Jacob Kashiwagi) and co-coordinator, Professor Charles Egbu, (Glasgow Caledonian University). In 2016, W117 was joined by Co-Coordinator Prof. Sicco Santema, (University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands) the visionary who led to the proliferation of the W117 technology in the Netherlands.
 W117 aims to change construction procurement and stakeholder organizations worldwide through the use of the information-based Best Value Approach (BVA). As such, it differs from most CIB Commissions that are more science driven, while W117 is more concept and impact driven. It has been one of the most successful CIB Commissions in bridging the gap between the construction industry practice and academic research. It has been prolific in publishing and running research tests with industry partners. W117 and PBSRG have published over 300 papers and generated licensed technology (47 licenses from AZTech, the licensing body of ASU for intellectual property rights). It is the most licensed technology from the most innovative university in the U.S. (as rated by U.S. News and World Report (2016).

Arthropods are vectors for many pathogens that significantly harm human and animal health globally, and research into vector-borne diseases is of critical public health importance. Arthropods present unique risks for containment, and therefore insectary facilities are essential to the safe handling of arthropod-borne hazards. In 2018, the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University (ASU) began the process to build a level 3 arthropod containment (ACL-3) facility. Even with the COVID-19 pandemic, it took more than 4 years for the insectary to be granted a Certificate of Occupancy. At the request of the ASU Environmental Health and Safety team, Gryphon Scientific, an independent team with biosafety and biological research expertise, studied the project lifecycle through the design, construction, and commissioning of the ACL-3 facility with the goal of identifying lessons learned from the delayed timeline. These lessons learned convey insight into best practices for assessing potential facility sites, anticipating challenges with retrofitted construction, preparing for commissioning, equipping the project team with necessary expertise and expectations, and supplementing the gaps in available containment guidance. Several unique mitigations designed by the ASU team to address research risks not specifically addressed in the American Committee of Medical Entomology Arthropod Containment Guidelines are also described. Completion of the ACL-3 insectary at ASU was delayed, but the team thoroughly assessed potential risks and enabled appropriate practices for the safe handling of arthropod vectors. These efforts will enhance future ACL-3 construction by helping to avoid similar setbacks and streamlining progress from concept to operation.

A new learning paradigm has been tested in the delivery of services. It identifies that the act of directing and influencing a vendor or an individual to increase their performance is not effective or efficient. It is based on a deductive logic methodology called “Information Measurement Theory” (IMT) which has been developed over the past 46 years through one of the author’s personal and family life, the delivery of services in the construction industry, and in Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University (ASU). IMT identifies that the concepts of influence, randomness, chance, or one person attempting to change another person are inaccurate concepts. These facets occur when one party attempts to forcibly change another party, which is a form of abuse. When tested out in the industry, these concepts returned 5 to 50% reduction in cost, simultaneously lowering owner costs, increasing value and resulting in higher profits for the expert vendor. When practiced in the honors education program at ASU, students were able to learn concepts five times as quickly and understand complex concepts with very little detailed data. In 2015, the IMT author brought the education to his alma mater, Saint Louis High School, and the first full year of IMT concepts were tested at the high school level. The results were consistent with the results from industry tests, the honors program at ASU, and the Kashiwagi family.

This article presents outcomes from a Workshop entitled "Bioarchaeology: Taking Stock and Moving Forward," which was held at Arizona State University (ASU) on March 6-8, 2020. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the School of Human Evolution and Social Change (ASU), and the Center for Bioarchaeological Research (CBR, ASU), the Workshop's overall goal was to explore reasons why research proposals submitted by bioarchaeologists, both graduate students and established scholars, fared disproportionately poorly within recent NSF Anthropology Program competitions and to offer advice for increasing success. Therefore, this Workshop comprised 43 international scholars and four advanced graduate students with a history of successful grant acquisition, primarily from the United States. Ultimately, we focused on two related aims: (1) best practices for improving research designs and training and (2) evaluating topics of contemporary significance that reverberate through history and beyond as promising trajectories for bioarchaeological research. Among the former were contextual grounding, research question/hypothesis generation, statistical procedures appropriate for small samples and mixed qualitative/quantitative data, the salience of Bayesian methods, and training program content. Topical foci included ethics, social inequality, identity (including intersectionality), climate change, migration, violence, epidemic disease, adaptability/plasticity, the osteological paradox, and the developmental origins of health and disease. Given the profound changes required globally to address decolonization in the 21st century, this concern also entered many formal and informal discussions.

The (Mis)measure of a Man: Martin “Jack” J. Fouquette, Jr., 1930–2014

For the past five years, the Minority Engineering Program in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Arizona State University (ASU) has channeled retention efforts through their Academic Excellence Program. This program housed two components: peer tutoring and mentoring and group workshops. While both produced successful retention rates among minority students within the College, both students and faculty strongly expressed a need for a more structured anti intensive program to assist engineering students with the more challenging courses. In fall of 2000, ASU's MEP remodeled their efforts at retention and created the Academic Excellence Workshop program. The workshop program replaces tutoring and mentoring programs with weekly workshop sessions. This nontraditional approach to academic support has necessitated a change in paradigm for staff faculty, and students. The response to this change has been promising. This paper discusses the AEW program structure and how the workshop concept has been promoted to students and faculty.

The Office of Minority Engineering Programs (OMEP) in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS) at Arizona State University (ASU) is a growing support system for underrepresented minority students and others. Nearly 500, approximately 14%, of the undergraduate students in the CEAS are underrepresented minorities (African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans). During the Fall 1995 semester, the OMEP served over 300 students, including 13.5% non-minority. The OMEP is composed of a Director, Minority Engineering Program (MEP) Coordinator, Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) Program Coordinator, an Administrative Assistant, a half-time graduate assistant, and two undergraduate part-time students, as well as student tutors and MESA liaisons. The OMEP reports to and is strongly supported by the CEAS Associate Dean of Student Affairs and Special Programs. None the less, there are internal challenges for the survival of the OMEP. The MEP, along with the Women in Applied Science and Engineering (WISE) Program, has been asked by the University for an accounting of its program and whom they serve. The OMEP budget is continually reviewed to “prove” that the program is making a difference. Not all are convinced that colleges should be funding K-12 educational support programs such as MESA. The Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) has proposed eliminating scholarship funding for minority students. The ABOR has also discussed the necessity for and legality of diversity programs during public hearings over the past two years. The external challenges for the survival of the MEP come primarily from the national review of affirmative action policies associated with presumed preferential treatment of minority students. Perceptions that a great amount of resources are designated to only a few selective students needs close review if minority support programs are to survive. Since the CEAS works very closely with industry, the OMEP must keep pace with the changing work force needs of the future if we are to remain a competitive resource for strengthening the economy. ASU is making progress towards increasing diversity and quality through campus wide efforts that are based on twenty recommendations made by a 1994 task force. ASU recognizes that campus diversity is needed for an educated citizenry and for international competitiveness. ASU is dedicated to developing and to supporting additional programs to improve student preparation for university success. ASU recognizes that any such programs must be outcome based and have commitment from top management. The OMEP model strongly aligns with the diversity objectives and strategies of the university.