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Faculty & Research Spotlight
CELEBRATING BLACK FEMALE FACULTY AT FIU
THREE BLACK FEMALE FACULTY MEMBERS FROM GREEN SCHOOL ARE MAKING AN IMPACT AT FIU
CARLEEN VINCENT-ROBINSON’s contributions to the Green School cannot be understated. She is a Teaching Professor in the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice and the Assistant Dean of the Green School. She began her career at FIU 14 years ago as an instructor at the Biscayne Bay Campus where she taught every criminal justice course that was offered.
Since joining her colleagues at MMC, she created and oversaw a dual enrollment criminal justice program that has expanded to eight different high schools, led an internship program, facilitated prior learning assessment for law enforcement, and created a teaching practicum for doctoral students.
But her work in the department is not the only thing that warrants attention.
Known for her commitment to students, diversity, and service to the FIU community, Vincent-Robinson supports an assortment of diversity-led initiatives. She completed a fellowship with the Office to Advance Women, Equity, and Diversity and served as the Green School’s Equity Advisor. Currently, she facilitates unit-specific implicit bias, microaggressions, and bystander intervention training, serves on the FIU Diversity Council, is a Faculty Fellow for Social Justice and Inclusion and Student Access and Success, and leads the accessibility initiative within the Green School.
OKEZI T. OTOVO has been at FIU since 2012. She has focused on researching and teaching about Latin American history, in particular Brazilian history, as well as gender and sexuality and the social history of medicine and public health. Additionally, she teaches about the history of people of African descent and race, gender and intersectionality. Otovo is currently an associate professor of history and African and African Diaspora Studies and an affiliate faculty at the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center and of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at FIU.
Otovo is heavily involved in community work and outreach efforts that facilitate conversations between Black women of the community who have given birth and medical experts and birthing advocates. She has led several community dialogues throughout South Florida, such as “Perspectives on
DONNA AZA WEIR-SOLEY has been a Panther for more than two decades, having joined the institution in 1999. She is currently an associate professor of English and an affiliate faculty member in African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s Studies, and the Latin American and Caribbean Center. Additionally, she is also a literary critic, poet, essayist, fiction writer, and anthologist. She also serves as the director of Professional Development and Mentoring for the Black Faculty Association at FIU.
Weir-Soley’s ultimate vision for what she wants to accomplish in both her personal and professional life would be to “inspire, lead and provide a voice to
current and future Black scholars at FIU and create the next generation of Black excellence and governance.”
One of the many courses Weir-Soley has taught over the years has been a course on the Harlem Renaissance, a topic that fascinates her. In celebration of the 100th year since its inception, she held a creative writing workshop in which students “read poetry from the Harlem Renaissance and wrote a love poem and a social justice poem… They wrote a love quatrain poem with four stanzas and four lines; a Shakespearean sonnet was written with a social justice theme.
Having been born in Jamaica, Weir-Soley is profoundly committed to work that supports Caribbean countries. She is the president of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, an organization that specializes in promoting and disseminating literature, orature, and interdisciplinary work on the Caribbean. She was also appointed the Butler Waugh Professor in English, which is a professorship that is aimed at assisting undergraduate Hispanic and Caribbean students.
Black Motherhood and Health,” a discussion group for community members who have experiences with motherhood and health in Florida to converse with clinicians, doulas, midwives, and advocates.
Currently, she leads the “Black Mothers Care Plan,” funded by The Children’s Trust of Miami-Dade County, which focuses on reducing racial bias in obstetric and postpartum care and supporting maternal and infant health. One of her major accomplishments during her time at FIU is the publication of her book, Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850-1945. She also led a program last year that centered around Black women’s health epistemologies, which discusses “women’s knowledge and how to
share that knowledge about motherhood and
challenges that Black women face.” Otovo is
working on a new book, inspired, in part, by her own experience as a mother during the pandemic, that will center around the history of Black women’s understandings and lived experiences of health in South Florida, and how those understandings and experiences have changed over time.
WHY THE UKRAINIAN INVASION WAS PREDICTABLE: ‘IT’S TIME THE WORLD FINALLY LEARNS A LESSON ON RUSSIA’
Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 was a warning sign of future aggression, professor says
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is finally getting deserved attention. From financial sanctions to direct military assistance, the West is getting united to confront Putin’s imperialism. This development comes with the realization that the benefits of standing against Russian aggression outweigh the economic and security risks posed by these actions. While it is certainly refreshing to see the West finally throw a punch, much of this could have been done sooner.
I remember 2008, standing outside the United Nations headquarters in New York City as an international student from Georgia, screaming my lungs out: If the West ignores the Russian invasion of Georgia, this would encourage Russia’s subsequent military expansion both south and westward. Just like in 2008, the opportunities still appear endless, from Kazakhstan to the Baltic States, even if the latter are NATO members.
Russia occupies 20% of Georgia, and continues the process of creeping annexation of the land surrounding occupied territories. Russia has also orchestrated frozen conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria. Yet the move toward Ukraine seemed to yield the greatest prizes for the post-Soviet era. The invasion aimed to deter Euro-Atlantic integration of Ukraine, as well as Georgia and Moldova. Putin has always viewed Ukraine as part of the historical land of greater Russia. The 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine has tamed the raging appetite of the imperialistic monster for nearly eight years, but those who thought Putin would stop there fooled themselves.
The ground for a Ukraine invasion could not have been any more fertile.
The European Union’s increasing energy dependence on Russia has made many Europeans, and especially Germans, prioritize today’s egg over tomorrow’s chicken. As Russia’s natural gas, crude oil and solid fuel kept European cars running and buildings heated, many European politicians blamed Ukrainians (and also Georgians) for not being ready to join the EU or NATO.
During the 2008 Bucharest Summit, NATO created a pathway for Ukraine and Georgia’s membership to NATO, but no substantive next steps have been taken, leaving these fragile democracies in peril of returning to the Russian orbit.
The abandonment of Ukraine and Georgia has stagnated prodemocratic reforms in the entire post-Soviet sphere whose leaders watch carefully as both Georgia and Ukraine are paying a heavy price for looking westward.
GREEN SCHOOL RESPONDS TO RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE
Faculty experts share their views online, in the press and in a series of events
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022 left the world stunned, an unprovoked attack that received swift, widespread condemnation from global leaders. Faculty experts from the Green School – historians and political scientists to scholars of global affairs, cybersecurity and human rights – were quickly called upon to offer their views on the rapidly expanding conflict.
Many wrote op-eds and explanatory pieces for online publications and newspapers, while others took part in a series of online and in-person events designed to help the university community understand the unfolding crisis and what it might mean for the global world order.
Just a few weeks after the invasion, the Green School teamed up with the Office of Global Learning Initiatives for an online discussion of the global implications of the attacks, featuring three of the Green School’s top experts on Russian-Ukraine relations: Professor Tatiana Kostadinova, a noted expert on Russian and Eastern European politics; Markus Thiel, professor of international relations and director of the EU-Jean Monnet Center of Excellence, and Senior Fellow David J. Kramer, who is also managing director for global policy at the George W. Bush Institute. The conversation was moderated by Hilary Landorf, director of Global Learning.
Not long after that event, the Green School’s Václav Havel Program for Human Rights and Diplomacy hosted a conversation with
Ambassador Jakub Kulhánek, Permanent Representative of the Czech Republic to the United
Nations. He spoke candidly about the UN response to the invasion and its influence on the work of the Security Council and General Assembly, given the fact that Russia is a permanent member of the UN Security Council with the right to veto. The renewed conflict between East and West has had many far-reaching consequences and is perceived by some as a confrontation between world democracies and autocracies.
The Havel Program also hosted
Ambassador Michael Žantovský
to speak to students about the unlikely hero of the unfolding drama – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who began his career as an actor and standup comic. From the earliest days of the invasion, Zelensky drew praise for his determined resolve and Žantovský, who heads the Václav Havel Library, drew some comparisons to Havel, the principal architect of the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the first democratically elected president of Czechoslovakia. Both men, he said, have cemented their place in history as champions for freedom and democracy.
Next, the Havel program held a virtual conversation with Yuriy
Sergeyev, former Ukrainian Ambassador to the United
Nations, who reflected on the crisis, as well as the situation on the ground. He gave context to the ongoing struggle between Vladimir Putin’s vision to revive the Russian Empire and that of the Ukrainian patriots, whose principal goal is to protect and further build an independent, democratic, and prosperous Ukraine.
The final event in the series was perhaps the most broadly focused: The Geopolitics of the War in Ukraine: What Does the Future Hold for the Global Order? Featuring Green School Senior Fellow David Kramer, an expert on Russia, and moderated by Associate Dean Shlomi Dinar, this event attempted to explain the emerging debate about the nature of the post-Cold War world order and whether the invasion of Ukraine precipitated a realignment in the global order, whereby the world’s democracies are pitted against the world’s autocracies.
FIU collaborates with Casa Pueblo and University of Puerto Rico on NIH grant to
explore the impact of energy independence on health in Puerto Rico
A man walks past destroyed homes in Puerto Rico. Hector Retamal / AFP - Getty Images file “The research will be able to provide an evidence-based model of how to get ‘off the grid’ and establish best practices. It will also measure the precise effects on the health and wellness of the whole community and document the geographic extent of these effects.”
—Professor Mark Padilla
When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, it demonstrated the catastrophic impact natural disasters and an aging power grid could have on the most vulnerable populations, many of whom depend upon electricity for life-saving medical care. A group of scientists from FIU, the University of Puerto Rico, and Casa Pueblo want to change that.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have awarded four Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs (SIPA) FIU professors - Mark Padilla, Sheilla Rodríguez-Madera, Nelson Varas-Días, and Kevin Grove – and Arturo Massol-Deyá of Casa Pueblo and University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, $3 million for a five-year study that will look at the impact that energy security has on vulnerable populations who rely on electrical power for medical equipment. The study will examine the factors that enable local government agencies, communities, and individuals in Puerto Rico to adapt to energy independence and their implications for chronic disease management. It aims to demonstrate the positive health impact of energy independence through direct access to solar power, which has already begun to appear on the island thanks to Casa Pueblo, a non-profit community organization that has converted homes, businesses, and community centers in Puerto Rico to solar power, supporting disaster resilience.
“It is an intentional and structural intervention conducted by Casa Pueblo that aims to liberate vulnerable populations from the unreliable power grid as a means to support community health and well-being,” said Padilla, co-PI of the NIH grant and professor of global and sociocultural studies at FIU. “Therefore, the research will be able to provide an evidence-based model of how to get ‘off the grid’ and establish best practices for this work. It will also measure the precise effects on the health and wellness of the whole community and document the geographic extent of these effects.”
Puerto Rico faces frequent power outages due to damage to its power grid caused by natural disasters like Hurricane Maria. These outages increase the deaths of aging Puerto Ricans, who are already vulnerable during natural disasters. Puerto Ricans aged 50 and over account for a large proportion of patients with chronic conditions such as renal disease, respiratory disease, and diabetes. The latter, for example, has a prevalence that is 50 percent higher on the island than the mainland U.S., and a three times higher associated mortality rate, according to a recent study.
The findings of this study will contribute to policy development and dissemination regarding the role of community engagement and energy independence in managing chronic diseases among aging populations in the U.S. and the Caribbean that are vulnerable to health inequities magnified by disasters.
How Americans often misunderstand Cuba, from Fidel Castro’s rise to the Cuban American vote
Caroline McCulloch, professor of international relations, wrote this piece, republished from The Conversation.
Last year, Cuba erupted in the largest protests seen there in six decades, reflecting popular anger over a crippling economic crisis, scarce food and medicines and a halfcentury of repression. Cuba remains largely an enigma to outsiders, and especially to Americans. This article examines common areas of confusion about Cuba, Cuban Americans and the U.S.-Cuba relationship.
THE CUBAN REVOLUTION
Fidel Castro and a band of guerrillas overthrew the brutal U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959. At the time, Castro’s political ideology was unclear; he had not yet publicly committed to communism. Anti-communist revolutionaries allied with him.
In Castro’s famous 1953 “History Will Absolve Me” speech, he said his revolution would return “power to the people” and proclaimed Cuba’s liberal democratic 1940 Constitution as “the Supreme Law of the State.”
When Castro installed a socialist economy and a oneparty political system, many fellow revolutionaries felt betrayed. Cubans fought to form a government that would answer to the Cuban people, rather than foreign interests. They got Castro’s Soviet-backed regime.
Many poor Cubans revered Castro for implementing policies that promoted equity and minimized discrimination, including major reforms in land, agriculture, education and housing. Others fled because of fear and persecution.
THE US EMBARGO
The Cuban government blames the United States for poverty on the island, but many of Cuba’s economic problems are homegrown. The U.S. embargo originated in the early 1960s to prevent the spread of communism from Cuba to other Latin American countries. It also sought to compel Cuba’s new government to compensate American corporations for property expropriated by the regime and to prevent further confiscations.
Many people in the U.S. and beyond are urging President Joe Biden to lift the embargo to ease Cuba’s current food and medical shortages. But the president of the United States cannot do that unilaterally. Lifting the embargo would require Congress to either certify that Cuba has become sufficiently democratic according to the 1996 Libertad Act or pass a new bill overturning it.
However, the embargo is not the primary reason Cuban people are struggling. The Cuban government has a history of political repression and fiscal mismanagement, both of which harm the economy.
CUBAN AMERICANS
The media often stereotypes Cuban Americans as overwhelmingly conservative. But they are a racially, economically and politically heterogeneous community. Cubans who’ve come to the U.S. since 1990 are even more diverse than the largely white first waves of exiles who came after the Cuban Revolution.
Cuban Americans’ political opinions differ depending on their race, socioeconomic status, gender and age. Cuban Americans as a group became overwhelmingly Republican after Ronald Reagan courted them in the 1980s, but they are increasingly independent voters. In the 2020 presidential election, around 55% of Cubans in Florida voted for Donald Trump.
Jain Center Director Iqbal Akhtar volunteers with students from the Miami Jain pathshala (place of learning) at Sheyes of Miami in Brownsville.
Exploring Jain heritage in Pakistan
FIU’s Jain Studies Program helps effort to create first Jain Studies program in Pakistan
As a Fulbright Scholar in Pakistan for the past year, Iqbal Akhtar had plenty of tasks on his plate – collaborating with Pakistani scholars, giving guest lectures, hosting virtual exchanges between Pakistani and American students, even reviewing doctoral theses for Pakistani students.
His visit also had a far-reaching impact on the Jain Studies Program at FIU, for which he serves as director, and its efforts to help create the first Jain Studies Program at the University of the Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan.
In April, the FIU Jain Studies annual Mahavir Jayanti Lecture highlighted the contemporary research being done in Pakistan to explore the country’s Jain heritage by leading scholars.
The event featured the work of Mohammed Hameed, the leading archaeologist of Jainism in Pakistan and chair of archaeology at University of the Punjab; Zohaib Ahmed at Islamia University, who is writing the first Jain Studies textbook in modern Pakistani Urdu; and Kamin Gogri, who is working on the ancient Jain heritage of Pakistan through the Eikam Institute in Mumbai.
This work is being generously funded by the American Jain community in the hope that it can develop interest in establishing the first academic Jain Studies program in Pakistan.
Iqbal also assisted with organizing an “introduction to Jainism” lecture by Nirmal Baid of the Jain Education and Research Foundation, which was held at the University of Management and Technology’s Centre for Peace Studies in Lahore, Pakistan. This was the first annual Satadru Sen Memorial lecture honoring one of the leading scholars of South Asian Studies.
Labor Day in a global pandemic:
How are workers faring?
The national holiday came in the midst of continuing uncertainty and changing expectations for many Florida workers, say Green School labor and economics experts
The global pandemic has negatively impacted just about everyone, not least of all those who hold jobs. FIU’s Center for Labor Research & Studies’ annual report, “The State of Working Florida,” focused on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the Florida economy. The third most populous U.S. state has seen more than 3.2 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 44,000 related deaths since March 2020.
Eye-popping statistics in the report paint a tenuous picture around employment and tell a story of deepening inequity.
More than 151,000 workers, when compared with prepandemic levels, have yet to jump back into Florida’s workforce as of July 2021. And Florida employers are showing a deficit of 331,150 workers. Another key finding: unevenness in both losses and recovery among various demographic groups. Black and Latino workers, for example, have experienced greater increases in unemployment rates than their white counterparts.
Maria Ilcheva is the associate director of FIU’s Perez Metropolitan Center, an applied research center that tracks ebbs and flows through an online COVID-19 Economic Recovery Index. Ilcheva believes that hesitancy to reenter the job market correlates not so much with availability of government assistance but with the persistence of the coronavirus. “A lot of people are not taking jobs or not even seeking jobs because they’re waiting to see what will happen with the rate of infections,” she says. “It’s about safety. It’s about preservation of life. If those concerns are not addressed, people will not even think about looking for a job.”
While workers in some professions have found flexibility in how and where they work — many opting to set up home offices and connect virtually with coworkers and clients — those in other areas don’t have the “luxury” of such a choice, Ilcheva explains.
“The most severely impacted workers, and households who have these workers, are the ones employed in the service sector,” she says. “Those customer-interaction jobs, the ones that require face-to-face interactions rather than virtual, they’re the ones who suffered.”
Judith Bernier, director of the labor center, points anecdotally to changes in perceptions of work and workers that have taken place over the past two years.
“The pandemic was able to really peel back the layers of who is a worker and who is essential,” Bernier says. While first responders and medical personnel have typically topped the list, folks such as grocery store workers, for example, now land there too.
Another shift Bernier has noticed: a complete obliteration of the line between work time and personal time. Many who work from home report working longer hours or never fully disconnecting from the job.
“It becomes this long day of work,” says Bernier, “because mentally we do not have any boundaries when work life ends and home life begins.”
As for near-term economic improvement, Ilcheva foresee better times ahead as more people rejoin the workforce, possibly in the last quarter of the year — but only if society acts collectively to stem the virus.
