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2020 Awardees
Below are the 10 UCSC faculty selected in fall 2020 for a Global Classrooms award. Awardees will work with their teaching partners at institutions abroad to learn how to re-design their UCSC courses as Global Classrooms, and deliver their Global Classroom courses in AY 2021-22.
Elizabeth Abrams
Teaching partner: Joseph Akuma Misati, Professor, Community Development, Cooperative University of Kenya
Global Classroom: Reading Ourselves, Reading the World (MERR 1)
Elizabeth Abrams is the Provost of Merrill College and Senior Teaching Professor at University of California, Santa Cruz. Before joining UC Santa Cruz in 2000, she taught for six years at Harvard University, where she developed teaching and learning guides for the Harvard Writing Project. Abrams served as chair of the UCSC Writing Program for six years, working closely with college provosts on ensuring the consistency and effectiveness of the lower-division writing curriculum at UCSC. She is an active member of the Academic Senate, having served on the Committee on Teaching, and having chaired the Committees on Faculty Welfare and Preparatory Education. She has taught core courses at two colleges; composition; an upper-division course on writing in the arts; and a graduate seminar on constructing and teaching writing courses. She has facilitated workshops for faculty across the campus interested in such subjects as developing effective writing assignments and coping with students' grammar.
Alvaro A. Cardenas
Teaching partner: Sandra Rueda - Associate Professor, Information Technology, Universidad de los Andes (Colombia)
Global Classroom: Information Security (CSE 132)
Alvaro A. Cardenas is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before joining UCSC, he was the Eugene McDermott Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. Earlier in his career, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and a research staff member at Fujitsu Laboratories. He holds M.S. and PhD degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a B.S. from Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia. His research interests focus on cyber-physical systems and IoT security and privacy. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the 2018 faculty excellence in research award from the Erik Johnson School of Engineering and Computer Science, and the Eugene McDermott Fellow Endowed Chair at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has also received best paper awards from the IEEE Smart Grid Communications Conference and the U.S. Army Research Conference. One of his papers was also a finalist to the CSAW competition in Israel.
Melvin Cox
Teaching partner: Denis Kamau Muthoni, Lecturer, Department of Entrepreneurship and Economics and Director, Directorate of Alumni, Career Services and International Students, Cooperative University of Kenya
Global Classroom: Focus on Africa (MERR 183F - 01)
Melvin Cox is a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A member of the Paralegal Studies Faculty (Advanced Computer) at the University of San Francisco from 1991 through 1996, he was honored in 1994 for his outstanding and dedicated teaching service. Between 1991 and 2002, he served as a Technical Support Engineer for Sybase, Inc., a major computer software company. Melvin is a graduate of Merrill College at the University of California, Santa Cruz; and holds a Certificate in UNIX System Management and Administration. In December 2000 he was awarded a Diplome D'Honneur by Université Simon Kimbangu in Kinshasa, DR Congo. He is the founder of the AFRICAN CONNECTIONS Research and Education Fund (ACREF) www.africanconnections.com.
Angus Forbes
Teaching partner: Andres Burbano, Associate Professor, Design, Universidad de los Andes (Colombia)
Global Classroom: Creative AI: Machine Learning for Creativity and Design (CMPM 269)
Tentatively Planned - Spring 2022
Angus Forbes is an Associate Professor in the Computational Media Department at University of California, Santa Cruz, where he directs UCSC Creative Coding. His research investigates novel techniques for visualizing and interacting with complex scientific information; his interactive artwork has been featured at museums, galleries, and festivals throughout the world. From 2013 through 2017, Angus chaired the IEEE VIS Arts Program (VISAP), a forum that promotes dialogue about the relation of aesthetics and design to visualization research.
Jess H.K. Law
Teaching partner: Haoze Li, Assistant Professor, English Language & Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (China)
Global Classroom: Structure of Chinese Languages (LING 188 - 1)
Jess H.K. Law is a semanticist from the Linguistics Department. Prior to joining UCSC, Law received a B.A. from Chinese University of Hong Kong, and PhD from Rutgers University. Benefiting tremendously from learning alongside a diverse group of peers, Law is very interested in bringing together educators and students from different cultures. In 2021-22, Law will bring together students from UCSC and students from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in China (through collaboration with Haoze Li, PhD) in the Global Classroom course The Structure of Chinese Languages.
Annapurna Pandey
Teaching partner: Jyortimayee Acharya - Professor, Gender Studies, Rama Devi Women's University (India)
Global Classroom: Women in Politics: A Third World Perspective (ANTH 194X)
Pending confirmed quarter
Annapurna Pandey - Annapurna Devi Pandey teaches Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Pandey holds a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Anthropology at Cambridge, UK. Her current research interests are diaspora studies, South Asian religions, and immigrant women’s identity making in the Diaspora in California. She is the author of numerous essays on Indian Women’s activism, agency, entrepreneurship, and empowerment in India and Indian diaspora. Dr. Pandey was awarded a senior Fulbright U.S. Scholarship (2017- 2018) working in India. She is an accomplished filmmaker (Homeland in the Heart; The Myth of Buddha’s Birthplace (with Prof. James Freeman) and Road to Zuni. Her most recent film, Road to Zuni has already been nominated to nine international film festivals in 2018 and has received several national and international awards.
Jennifer Parker
Teaching partner: José Carlos Espinel Velasco, Associate Professor, Sculpture & Artistic Training, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)
Global Classroom: 3D Art + Design Studio 2 (ART 185)
Tentatively Planned - Spring 2022
Jennifer Parker is an artist, professor of Digital Art & New Media, and founding Director of the OpenLab Collaborative Research Center (openlabresearch.com). Parker investigates methods of Arts Integration in Higher Education by combining creative research practices with science, engineering, and technology. As an artist, Parker carves sites for collective entanglement between disciplines. Facilitating, identifying, and determining the boundaries of complex, multi-dimensional space with the aim to develop shared patches and a sense of community to encourage learning, and inform and develop the practice of its members. Her methods of inquiry build on lab and studio visits, literature reviews, and conversations with faculty and students across disciplines triggering a heuristic learning process to pursue creative research for exhibitions and publications.
Kirsten Rudestam, Abigail Brown
Teaching partner: Sarah Elizabeth Wolfe - Associate Professor, Environment and Sustainability, Royal Roads University (Canada)
Global Classroom: Water and Sanitation Justice (SOCY 173X)
Tentatively Planned - Fall 2022
Kirsten Rudestam completed her PhD at the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz in 2017. Kirsten's research interests are water policy and management, sense of place with respect to resource management practices, and the role of affect and emotion in environmental politics. Her doctoral research focused on the dynamics of contested land and water use practices within the Deschutes Basin of Central Oregon. Kirsten has an MSc in Environmental Science from the University of Oregon. Prior to her doctoral research, she spent two years co-directing the University of Oregon's Environmental Leadership Program. She has over ten years of experience teaching environmental field courses for undergraduate college students in the western United States and is strongly motivated by her commitment to experiential education as a mode of radical environmental pedagogy.
Abigail Brown was a Sociology PhD student at UC Santa Cruz. She is an enthusiastic and dedicated researcher and educator with over fifteen years of experience in the environmental field. She holds a BSc in Environmental Studies from The Evergreen State College, an MSc in Water Resources Policy and Management from Oregon State University, and an MA in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz. Her research interests include gender, water, and sanitation; collaborative decision-making for water management; and the human rights to water and sanitation. Her master’s projects focused on: 1) empowerment and gender equality around water and sanitation in rural India and 2) equitable participation around groundwater decision-making in Central California. Abigail was a board member of Public Hygiene Lets Us Stay Human from 2014 to 2020. Her professional background includes positions evaluating surface and groundwater policies with state water agencies, conducting watershed restoration with non-profit organizations, and teaching about water issues with non-profits and universities.
Matt Sparke, David Shaw
Teaching partner: Swati Banerjee, Associate Professor, Social Work, Tata Institute of Social Studies (TISS)
Global Classroom: Global Health Problems and Political-Ecology Responses (POLI 190U)
Tentatively Planned - Winter 2022
Matt Sparke is Director of Global and Community Health, and a Professor of Politics at the University of California Santa Cruz. He has published widely on global health politics, the geopolitics of globalization. and political theories of citizenship and sub-citizenship under neoliberalism. His books and articles on political theory and globalization examine how responses to globalization take varied forms across the political spectrum from reaction to resilience to resistance. Relatedly, he continues to engage with debates over the implications for educators seeking to prepare students with varied understandings of global citizenship and political action.
David Shaw is the Coordinator of the Right Livelihood College at UC Santa Cruz, a program linking students and faculty with laureates of the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ for research and education about solutions to the world’s most pressing global problems. His research and teaching centrally focuses on processes of social transformation, specifically examining how communities worldwide have overcome barriers in order to produce political, economic, cultural, and environmental change in service of social justice and large-scale ecosystem regeneration.
Beth Stephens
Teaching partner: Sheila Atala, Teacher, Art, Annecy Alpes Art School (France)
Global Classroom: Environmental Art in the Expanded World (ART 80E)
Tentatively Planned - Winter 2022
Beth Stephens, PhD, is a filmmaker, performance artist, activist, and theoretician. Stephens gained her MFA at Rutgers in 1992 and completed her PhD in Performance Studies at UC Davis in 2015. Her most recent project is the book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover from the University of Minnesota Press, 2021. She is the Founding Director of the EARTH Lab (Environmental Art, Research, Theory, and Happenings) at UC Santa Cruz. Originally a sculptor, Stephens has exhibited visual art, created performance art pieces, theater pieces, and screened her films nationally and internationally at museums and galleries such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Reina Sophia in Madrid, Museum Kunst Palast in Dusseldorf, the Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow, MoMA New York, the 53rd Venice Biennale and documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany.
