P.L.A.C.E. with CAMPSSAH Announces Five Participants in the Summer Writing Retreat
We are delighted to announce five UC Davis faculty have been selected to participate in this year’s cohort for the “P.L.A.C.E. with CAMPSSAH Summer Writing Symposium.”
“Professors Leveraging A Community of Engagement (P.L.A.C.E.) with CAMPSSAH” is a University of California Office of the President 2020-2022 Advancing Faculty Diversity through Improved Climate and Retention grant under the direction of Kimberly Nettles-Barcelón.
The goal of P.L.A.C.E. is to promote the development and retention of faculty by providing resources and programs at critical moments in faculty progress toward tenure and promotion – with a specific emphasis on Associate Professors. P.L.A.C.E. is an interdisciplinary hub for research activities for faculty of color, URM faculty, and those faculty whose work forms the foundation of inclusive excellence at UC Davis.
The Summer Writing Symposium is for faculty working to complete a big task, such as writing an introduction, a book proposal, or a chapter and would benefit from uninterrupted, concentrated writing time and structured feedback.
Faculty will share work, read and comment on each other’s work, and provide a report about the work completed or progress made at the end of the retreat. This retreat will offer writing consultant support from Elena K. Abbott, Ph.D., a professional editor, writing coach, historian, and author. She has experience consulting with scholars across many disciplinary and other divides (fiction and nonfiction, for instance) and offers a suite of services that can be specialized to fit the needs of the person/group.
Participants in the inaugural Summer Writing Symposium (August 2021) unanimously expressed how the time to work in community with other faculty and the writing coach had a positive impact not just on their research and writing, but also on their sense of possibility to thrive at UC Davis.
2022 Award Recipients
Corrie Decker: Associate Professor, History
Decker’s book project The Age of Sex: Custom, Law, and Ritual in East Africa explore evolving cultural ideas that surround gender, puberty, and chronological age in twentieth-century East African countries of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. The Age of Sex will demonstrate how changes in coming-of-age rituals contributed to the racialization, sexualization, and criminalization of East African boys and girls. Decker’s participation in the P.L.A.C.E. Symposium will allow her the time to complete one chapter of the book.
Lisa Materson: Associate Professor, History
Materson’s second book, Radical Solidarity follows the story of activist and organizer Ruth Reynolds through a feminist biography and an exploration of Reynolds’ multiple activist communities to tell the history of solidarity activism. She focuses on key moments in Reynold’s transformation from an observer to a leader in the Puerto Rican independence movement. At each stage of her activist career–as a reporter, protestor, political prisoner–Reynolds refined her vision of solidarity that bridged strategic differences.
The P.L.A.C.E. Writing Symposium will give Materson the ability to complete the book’s final chapter before sending the manuscript out to reviewers.
Susette S. Min: Associate Professor, Asian American Studies
In her upcoming book, The Disorder of Democracy, Min explores the ways that art can unsettle and/or disrupt dominant arrangements and narratives of law, justice, and immigration. Min seeks to answer questions about how art can engage and intervene in discourses surrounding immigration as well as examine how exhibitions and specific artworks provide when thinking about immigration, belonging, and citizenship. During her time at the P.L.A.C.E. Writing Symposium, Min will focus on drafting and circulating a chapter of her book manuscript or book proposal.
Michael V. Singh: Assistant Professor, Chicana/o Studies
Singh’s working paper entitled “Cultural Relevancy and Toxic Masculinity: Latino Male Teachers Navigating Heteropatriarchical Expectations of Manhood” examines how Latino male teachers navigate heteropatriarchal expectations of both their pedagogy and gender performance. Singh will be using data from interviews he has conducted with Latino male teachers to highlight the ways that gender and sexuality intersect with race in the lives of Latino male teachers. Singh will utilize his time at the P.L.A.C.E. Writing Symposium incorporating new data from his research as well as completing and submitting his article to a journal.
Grace Wang: Associate Professor, American Studies
Wang’s work discusses the history of race in the music industry with a specific focus on the history of organizing and Black activism in the classical orchestral field. She is currently working on a documentary focusing specifically on the story of Elayne Jones, a percussionist who broke racial and gender barriers in the field of classical music. Wang will use her time at the P.L.A.C.E Writing Symposium to further her book proposal on how those racial and gender barriers shaped the classical music genre.