Professor Ruben Garcia’s (Law) op-ed on the U.S. Supreme Court’s labor law decision in Glacier Northwest v. Teamsters was published by The Washington Monthly this week.

Source: UNLV News Center

Jeff Schauer (History) participated in the European Conference on African Studies in Cologne, Germany. He was a contributor to the panel titled “Wilder Futures? Rewilding and multispecies coexistence in rural Africa” alongside colleagues from Germany, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. Schauer’s paper was titled “Chongololo: The Children’s Wildlife Magazine and the future of conservation and the wild from 1970s Zambia.” 

Chongololo was among other things, Schauer argued, a project for treating hyper-local spaces — the garden, the farm ditch, the city park — as conservation spaces. This challenges traditional conceptions of “rewilding” because the Chongololo movement involved investment in a philosophical or ethical reconceptualisation of the value of spaces, rather than their physical transformation — reconstituting what we consider “wild” rather than reintroducing the “wild” to a somehow diminished landscape. It was also part of the hinge whereby environmentalism in Zambia expanded from focusing solely on wildlife conservation to including concerns about pollution, environmental justice issues, and eventually anthropogenic climate change.

Source: UNLV News Center

[Eduardo] Robleto (Life Sciences) oversees the National Science Foundation REU Site grant that supports 10 undergraduate students for nine weeks each summer. The program aims to provide the students with hypothesis-based projects that investigate mechanisms of evolution and promote careers in science. 

The REU grant has been funded at UNLV for the past 16 years and Robleto and his colleague Kurt Michael Regner were awarded the grant again this year. It will support a total of 30 students over the next three years. 

Robleto says it has proven to be an effective tool to for increasing the representation of students from historically excluded communities in science overall. And more specifically, to help UNLV recruit graduate students. Grifaldo is now a Ph.D. student at UNLV.

“We need to make stories like Jessica’s more common. We have a diverse campus. It’s easy to find minority undergraduate students in the science fields, but it gets harder at the graduate and Ph.D. levels. It is important to give them a chance. We have great talent at UNLV, but unless we help them, they don’t have a chance to express that talent.”

Read more from “First-Gen Student Awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship“

Source: UNLV News Center

For many school districts in multi-ethnic communities, supporting the needs of English language learners can be like running a never-ending race. The Clark County School District (CCSD) is training for the ultimate marathon. While many districts across the country have significant populations of English language learners, one in every five Southern Nevada public school students is an emergent bilingual. 

To address this challenge, UNLV’s department of early childhood, multilingual, and special education created an accelerated master’s degree program in English language development. The program, Progressive Understandings of Emergent Bilingual Learners Opportunities, also known as Project PUEBLO, started in the Summer of 2022 and graduated its first cohort of 96 teachers in spring 2023 at an impressive 98.9% completion rate….

Alain Bengochea, an assistant professor in the department of early childhood, multilingual, and special education, leads the Project PUEBLO effort.

Read more from “Project PUEBLO: Unlocking the Potential of Emergent Bilingual Students“

Source: UNLV News Center

Aidy Weeks (Libraries) is the co-author of an article, “Shannon D. Jones, MLS, MED, AHIP, FMLA, Medical Library Association President, 2022-2023,” published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association. Weeks is an assistant professor within UNLV Libraries and director of the School of Medicine Library serving the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV.

Source: UNLV News Center

Roberto Lovato (English) appeared on the popular Bitchuation Room podcast, where he talked about, among other things, the role of trauma and forgetting in enabling fascism, writing a memoir about “unforgetting,” and U.S. foreign and immigration policy

Source: UNLV News Center

Cassaundra Rodriguez (Sociology) has a forthcoming book Contested Americans: Mixed-Status Families in Anti-Immigrant Times through the New York University Press.

In Contested Americans, Cassaundra Rodriguez explores how members of mixed-status families experience and articulate belonging in the United States. The sixteen million people in the US who fall under this classification share the fear of a family member’s possible deportation or the anxiety of leaving behind a child or elderly relative.

Rodriguez highlights how different members of the same mixed-status families mediate undocumented statuses while maintaining the collective whole of a family. For many young adults, this may mean negotiating the sponsorship of their immigrant parents, and for the parents, planning for the emotional, physical, and financial well-being of their children in case of deportation.

Contested Americans is a timely book, filled with vivid storytelling, that shows how immigration policies, racism, and privilege collide in the backdrop of the lives of millions of mixed-status families.

Source: NYU Press

On Saturday, February 4th, 2023, the BBC’s Outlook program re-broadcast a 45-minute special on the life and work of UNLV visiting professor Roberto Lovato (English) and his award-winning memoir, Unforgetting. The program was broadcast worldwide.

Source: UNLV News Center

Michael Alarid (History) authored a book Hispano Bastion: New Mexican Power In the Age of Manifest Destiny, 1837 – 2860 through the University of New Mexico Press. Michael J. Alarid examines New Mexico’s transition from Spanish to Mexican to US control during the nineteenth century and illuminates how emerging class differences played a crucial role in the regime change. After Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, trade between Mexico and the United States attracted wealthy Hispanos into a new market economy and increased trade along El Camino Real, turning it into a burgeoning exchange route. As landowning Hispanos benefited from the Santa Fe trade, traditional relationships between wealthy and poor Nuevomexicanos–whom Alarid calls patrónes and vecinos–started to shift. Far from being displaced by US colonialism, wealthy Nuevomexicanos often worked in concert with new American officials after US troops marched into New Mexico in 1846, and in the process, Alarid argues, the patrónes abandoned their customary obligations to vecinos, who were now evolving into a working class. Ultimately wealthy Nuevomexicanos, the book argues, succeeded in preserving New Mexico as a Hispano bastion, but they did so at the expense of poor vecinos.

Source: New Mexico University Press

Carlos S. Dimas (History) authored a book, Poisoned Eden: Cholera Epidemics, State-Building, and the Problem of Public Health in Tucumán, Argentina, 1865-1908 through the University of Nebraska Press. The book analyzes the social, political, and cultural effects of three cholera epidemics, in 1868, 1886, and 1895, that shook the northwestern province of Tucumán to understand the role of public health in building the Argentine state in the late 19th nineteenth century.

Source: UNLV News Center