a publication of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga College of Arts and Sciences
in every issue
arts
03 DEAN’S MESSAGE 44 DONOR SPOTLIGHT 46 ALUMNI NOTES
16 “CARE AND DESTRUCTION” 18 ENERGY AND ENTHUSIASM
features 04 08 10 14
EYES ON THE SKIES PHOTOGRAPHIC AMBASSADORS SEEDS OF HOPE CREATIVITY IN THE TIME OF COVID
humanities 20 22 24 26 28
COVID AND THE POOR FANTASTIC FOUR PAST-WAYS TO THE FUTURE INTERNATIONAL UNDERSTANDING EDUCATIONAL TAPESTRY
on the cover
natural sciences and mathematics
Students taking the Photojournalism II course offered by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga College of Arts and Sciences Communication Department and taught by notable photographer Billy Weeks submitted a selection of photos for consideration as the cover art of this edition of Method magazine.
30 KEEPING BEES HEALTHY 34 MATH STUDIES DIVISION
The chosen artwork taken by Serretta Malaikham, a communication major in her senior year at UTC, was one of many excellent photographs provided by our students. Pictured below is Malaikham’s original, unedited photo. See the inside back cover for another winning selection.
military science
behavioral and social sciences 36 DNA-DEEP BELIEF 38 ANCIENT WISDOM, MODERN METHODS
40 RECORD NUMBERS
women, gender and sexuality 42 GETTIN’ YOUR VOTE ON
“Above the Streets of Chattanooga” Serretta Malaikham Andy Coyne skating across E 7th St. in downtown Chattanooga.
dean PAM RIGGS GELASCO editor GINA STAFFORD writers SHAWN RYAN CHUCK WASSERSTROM SARAH JOYNER creative director STEPHEN RUMBAUGH graphic designer MEGHAN PHILLIPS photographer ANGELA FOSTER
UTC is a comprehensive, community-engaged campus of the University of Tennessee System. UTC is an EEO/AA/Titles VI & IX/ Section 504/ADA/ADEA institution. E041002-004-22
message from the dean
PAMELA RIGGS GELASCO Alumni and friends, I am happy to present to you our latest issue of Method, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga College of Arts and Sciences magazine. It has been a while since our last issue as we have been preoccupied with adapting to the pandemic and have also undergone a leadership change. I became the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in July of 2020, and it has been a whirlwind of activity since then. It is indeed a privilege to lead this talented faculty, even in this challenging era in higher education. We have been through a contentious election, civil unrest, tragic natural disasters and a global pandemic since our last update. I have witnessed our faculty responding to all of this by adapting lessons and adding courses that address the pressing issues of our time. We feel strongly that the liberal arts foundation we provide in the College of Arts and Sciences helps our students to think critically and to embrace the complexity of many issues, even as we are bearing witness to them. As you will see in the stories that follow, the faculty in the college have persevered and continue to develop scholarship, teaching and community connections despite the many challenges of the past two years. Our students, too, have worked hard to overcome obstacles as we all adapted to a new “normal” on campus. Enjoy these updates and we thank you for your continued advocacy of the many programs in the College of Arts and Sciences.
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by SHAWN RYAN
VISIT UTC.EDU/JONES-OBSERVATORY TO LEARN MORE.
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n 2003, Mars and Earth were only about 34.8 million miles apart. Usually, they average about 140 million miles of separation. It was the closest the two planets will get to each other until 2287, NASA says, so it was a big deal around the world. Including Chattanooga. At the Clarence T. Jones Observatory on Brainerd Road, the line to get in and look at Mars through the 20-inch lens of its telescope was about two hours long, says Jack Pitkin, director of the observatory. Adults turned into excited kids, and excited kids were just plain excited. "A chance to see the icecaps of Mars," he says. Seeing not just Mars and its icecaps but the rest of the solar system, as well as light-years beyond, all are possible at the observatory, now owned and operated by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. It was built in 1938 by the Barnard Astronomical Society of Chattanooga with a $50,000 grant (about $904,000 in 2021 dollars) from the federal Public Works Association. Clarence T. Jones was the society's first president. "Think of it in operation and think of it in the eyes of a seven- or eight-year-old who sees the moon. The Orion nebula. The rings of Saturn. The moons of Jupiter," Pitkin says, excitement in his voice. "It's one of the most profoundly educational things you can do as a kid, and we're the ones that do it." The observatory was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.
Clarence T. Jones Observatory UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE AT CHATTANOOGA COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
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Opened in 1953, a planetarium inside the observatory projects the night sky above Chattanooga onto its 20-foot-tall, rounded dome, pinpointing which stars are where in relation to landmarks such as Lookout Mountain and Cameron Hill. Astronomy lessons are offered at the observatory. On most Sunday nights from April through October, it's open to the public for free visits to take in a planetarium show and look through the telescope. In 1944, the then-University of Chattanooga took over the observatory's operation. It is now part of the UTC astronomy program in the Department of Chemistry and Physics. Student workers and community volunteers run events. While UTC owns and operates the observatory, its arms spread far out from the campus, Pitkin says. "This is for all of Chattanooga."
Since the Clarence T. Jones Observatory opened in 1938, and since it was leased to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 1944, children and adults alike have gathered within its dome to gaze with wonderment at the heavens through its telescope. Community-wide events hosted in the space by the university’s astrology program continue to be one of Chattanooga’s premier free attractions. But over the years, the observatory has been repeatedly vandalized, and its basement has suffered from severe flooding. The cost to repair and mitigate such damage to the building in order to keep the observatory operable and open for use is high, and private donor support for the maintenance of the space is lacking.
That’s where you come in. Help us keep the Clarence T. Jones Observatory accessible to our students and our community. Donate today at give.utc.edu/observatory and support the continuation of the observatory’s educational legacy. 06
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Hal McAlister ’71, left, former astronomer, professor and director of the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles, poses with Karel Hujer, former associate professor of physics and astronomy at UTC, in the Clarence T. Jones Observatory in 1967 when McAlister was a student. They are standing with the 20.5 inch reflecting telescope, pictured above, which was housed in the observatory. The photo on the left depicts the Orion nebula, while the photo on the right shows a close-up of the moon and man of its craters as seen through the Jones Observatory telescope. Both images were captured using the 5 inch refractor attached the to the telescope.
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A HANDSHAKE. A SMILE. A CONVERSATION. A CONNECTION. Those will make a difference in the world. A lasting difference, Irina Khmelko says. “We will change this world one person at a time. If we can see each other as people, we can have a better planet,” she says. Citizen diplomacy is a sentiment first expressed by U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower in the late 1950s, but it still holds true today, says Khmelko, UC Foundation professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Service at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. The Sister City Association of Chattanooga, of which Khmelko is a member, and the city’s Office of Multicultural Affairs collaborated to organize a cross-cultural competition that brought Chattanoogans, including those at UTC, together with residents of the Russian city of Nizhny Tagil, one of Chattanooga’s sister cities. Also included were sister cities to Nizhny Tagil—Krivoy Rog in Ukraine, Brest in Belarus, Novokuznetsk and Evpatoria in Russia and Cheb in the Czech Republic. In the competition, titled “World Through the Eyes of Children and Youth,” participants took photos in four categories: reporting, portrait, landscape and city landscape. The purpose was twofold, to identify and support talented young people in photography and to strengthen the relationship between Chattanooga and Nizhny Tagil. Two age groups competed against each other: 10 to 17 and 18 to 30. In Chattanooga, photos were entered by students from UTC, the McCallie School, Chattanooga School for the Creative Arts and the Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences. Forty-nine photos from 29 entrants were chosen; the youngest photographer selected was 15, the oldest was 22. Winning photos were hung in Chattanooga City Hall. An opening ceremony for the 08
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exhibition was attended by, among others, the winning photographers, former Chattanooga Mayr Andy Berke and Karen Claypool, president of the Sister City Association of Chattanooga, which sponsored the competition. A similar exhibition was organized and attended by Irina Darenskaya and Vladimir Mitin, members of the Sister City Association in the Nizhny Tagil. “These projects allowed our Chattanoogans and people in Russia to communicate via pictures and understand each other by looking at what and how children and youth in both countries see in the world and what it is they are paying attention to,” according to an event press release. “It has been an eye-opening experience to many of our students and community members and certainly contributed to a better understanding between people in the two countries.” When Russians saw the photos taken in Chattanooga, they “were very much impressed,” Khmelko says. “It humanized a lot of experiences when they saw how our children see the world.” The same was true in Chattanooga, especially with portraits of Russian people, she says. “The major response was, ‘Look at those faces. How amazingly beautiful.’” In fact, she says, if you didn’t know that some of the portraits were Russians or Americans, it might be hard to tell the difference. “You certainly could look at that person and think they’re from Chattanooga,” Khmelko says. Russian landscapes, while beautiful, were a tad different. Located in the Ural Mountains in Siberia, Nizhny Tagil has mild summers but long, harsh winters, so Chattanooga doesn’t look much the same. “They can get 10 feet of snow and be minus-30 degrees,” Khmelko says, laughing.
“Arch” | Ian Campbell Untitled | Anna Kadnikova
“Really Red Night” | Duke Richey
“Winter Beads” | Ruslan Okhin
“Window to the Soul” | Jaren Dildine
“Cityscape” | Alexander Timoshenka
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ABSTRACT IDEAS TAKE ROOT IN COMMUNITY FARM
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nna Smith thought she was just signing up for yet another online class when she enrolled in the philosophy course “Values and the Environment” for the fall 2020 semester. Smith, a political science nonprofit management major, says she was pleasantly surprised to learn the class would involve more than just those Zoom squares. “I didn’t even know it would have a community outreach or involvement,” explains Smith, who is minoring in philosophy and environmental science. “I actually got to get outside of my house and be around other people, and that was quite a novelty.” As part of the course, Smith and her classmates volunteered with Grow Hope Farm, a community garden maintained by Hope for the Inner City in East Chattanooga. The partnership continued into spring with “Exploring the Benefits of Urban Farming,” another philosophy course. Both courses were led by philosophy lecturer Lucy Schultz. Schultz started volunteering at Hope for the Inner City in summer 2020, helping with their COVID Mercy Relief program that supplied free groceries and precooked meals to neighbors in the surrounding Avondale community. Near the end of the summer, she was introduced to Joel Tippens, executive director of City Farms Grower Coalition who helped start Grow Hope Farm in 2012. During the height of the pandemic in early 2020, the farm wasn’t tended, although the still-rich soil grew an “incredible batch of weeds,” Tippens says. After they met, he and Schultz began making plans to revitalize the farm.
PRACTICE WHAT YOU TEACH From pulling weeds to painting murals, students in Schultz’s class sowed seeds, harvested collard greens, built a greenhouse and shared fresh produce with the farm’s neighbors. They watched as the gardens slowly came back to life. Schultz sees the course as fulfilling the University’s mission to incorporate more experiential learning into the curriculum but, more importantly, getting students engaged with the community as they help address local food insecurity. “I want students to understand how philosophy is not just sitting back, reflecting on abstract ideas. It really does make a difference in the way that we live in the world and how we relate to each other and the environment,” Schultz says. “This is a real hands-on way to see those ideas in practice.” Anthony Watkins, executive director at Hope for the Inner City, says it’s an education in itself to connect the students with a community that’s only a few miles from the University yet far away in terms day-to-day living.
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“There are students here learning and growing in the same way as the garden by connecting with community. Young people need to be exposed to that as much as they can. That’s what college is all about. “There are so many wins here,” he says. From the mental and physical benefits of working in the gardens, to gaining practical skills and new hobbies, to better understanding the socio-economic impacts the urban farm has on its community and more, Schultz’s list of ways students benefited from the course is a mile long. “I think that what students took away from the experience is varied and personal depending on what their background is,” Schultz says. “That was really exciting to see and experience because I couldn’t have planned it. We just dove right in and developed this partnership and now we’re seeing the fruits of it, and I’m really eager to see what else will come of it.” NOT THAT UNIQUE Without the class, Nia Alston doesn’t think she would have ever volunteered on a farm. “I don’t think I ever would have been like, ‘Oh yeah, let me go,’ because I was pushed to kind of go and do it. I really have seen how much I enjoy just being out there,” explains Alston, an environmental science major concentrating in engineering science. Around the farm, the word “play” comes up a good bit, as in “playing in the dirt,” Watkins says. But with the students, “play” leads beyond the context of just having fun, he says. “We love to play, but the whole idea is to really produce enough product that we’re not a total food desert. So really that collaboration created opportunity for us to start producing product. Since I don’t have the funds to hire someone, the benefit was we had activity students helping us to, you know, we create the land produce product.
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“There’s just so much awareness that’s being brought out by them being exposed to things that they would never—well, I can’t say ‘never’—that they were exposed to communities closer to an urban environment, exposed to this farm and you know, seeing the fruit of the harvest. I think they get a lot out of that.” Tony Houston, senior philosophy major with an environmental science minor, says his experience in the course has caused some serious self-reflection. Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, he lived in a similar neighborhood and had a detached relationship with food. “I didn’t even know what a potato was beyond something that can be consumed. What I mean by that is: I had no idea how a potato was grown or where they were grown. “I remember growing up, that’s how it was. You go to the corner store. You get your bag of chips. You’re going to eat the chips, split the bag open, lick the crumbs. Then you’re just going to toss it.
“You don’t really value your environment at all. It comes from a sense that your environment doesn’t really value you because of where you are, how you’ve been treated, how hard it is, the situations and opportunities you’re presented.” When Houston interviewed Grow Hope Farm neighbor Charlie Bell for an assignment, the conversation was eye-opening. “She told me, ‘Some of these children don’t know where their food comes from.’ That grounded me. My experience wasn’t that unique. Children are facing the same problems I did when I was younger, two states away from my hometown. It made me realize that this lack of nutrition affected a lot of low-income communities. “I greatly enjoyed my experience on the farm this semester, and it has changed my relationship with food as well as my understanding of it.”
Students at work in Lucy Schultz’s Benefits of Urban Farming class Friday, March 5, 2021, at the Hope for the Inner City campus in East Chattanooga.
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VISIT UTC.EDU/THE-BALD-SOPRANO TO WATCH SNIPPETS AND INTERVIEWS FROM THE BALD SOPRANO TO SEE HOW THE UTC THEATRE COMPANY PULLED OFF THE PLAY’S PRODUCTION IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PANDEMIC.
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ith the dangers of COVID-19 racing around the globe, faculty at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga had to find creative ways to teach over the past few semesters. The UTC Theatre Company’s production of The Bald Soprano was performed on Chamberlain Field and used two different casts: physical actors and voice actors. Physical actors pantomimed the characters’ actions while voice actors provided the characters’ voices from behind Plexiglas baffles. The theatre company’s Antigone used nine Zoom-like boxes filled with symbolic images of family, war and the 24-hour news cycle in the city of Thebes. Actors filmed their performances on cellphones in their rooms/homes. Their footage was uploaded and edited together into a virtual setting. In the Department of Psychology, UC Foundation Associate Professor Jill Shelton’s students created activity kits filled with cognitive stimulation materials—games and puzzles—which they delivered to Summit View Senior Community. Senior Lecturer Jeremy Bramblett in the Department of Biology, Geology and Environmental Science used cameras to remotely perform dissections in his Functional Human Anatomy lab. Using the same technology, he showed examples of minerals, rocks, fossils and sand in his Historical Geology lab. In the Department of History, Department Head Michael Thompson’s outdoor “Chattanooga History Walking Tours” provided the campus community an up-close look at some of the city’s historical landmarks while promoting safety and social distancing protocols. Associate Professor of Psychology Amanda Clark had students in her Principles of Neuropsychology class gather virtually after-hours for movie night social events. Each faculty member in the Department of Political Science and Public Service selected a poster reflecting their interests
and approach to politics, careful to avoid advocating for a particular party or candidate. The posters were framed, numbered and hung on the walls of the department’s public spaces. Students in each of the department’s majors tried to identify the faculty member affiliated with each poster, and the students who accurately matched the most posters to the correct faculty members won prizes. Also in political science and public service, students in UC Foundation Professor Irina Khmelko’s International Non-governmental Organizations course considered non-governmental organizations’ responses to challenges brought by COVID-19 as part of their class research projects. In the Department of Communication, Assistant Professor Nagwan Zahry and Associate Department Head Michael McCluskey conducted multiple studies examining governmental mass communication during the pandemic. In her History of Epidemics and Society course, Assistant Professor Julia Cummiskey explored the ways diseases reflect social, political and cultural aspects of human society, and how epidemic disease has reshaped society. Yes, COVID-19 was among the topics included. Students in Associate Professor Jeremy Strickler’s Public Policy Theory class studied aspects of the pandemic and governmental reactions to illustrate concepts and theories about policymaking in the United States. Students enrolled in UC Foundation Professor Margaret Kovach’s Virology class wrote a report on COVID-19 epidemiology, prevention and control with the pandemic serving as a backdrop to understanding the nature of new and emergent viruses. In a time when singers and wind instrumentalists are considered COVID-19 “super spreaders,” faculty in the Music Division of Performing Arts trained students to use recording technology to create video assessments.
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Exploring the Emotions of Natural Beauty
E Christina Vogel, left, and Katie Hargrave
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arlier this year, associate professors Christina Renfer Vogel and Katie Hargrave exhibited their artwork at “Of Care and Destruction: Atlanta Biennial 2021,” an invitation-only exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Vogel showcased two paintings, both of which follow a traditional style. She says, “I have turned toward still life most recently, a genre with deep historical roots and one that reflects my interest in the everyday. Painting flowers has become a way for me to embrace beauty as an act of care. I think of the work as nonthreatening, benign, but with the potential to seduce or disarm. I want these paintings to feel lush, verdant and abundant, a restorative balm by way of pure visual pleasure.” For her piece, Hargrave and her collaborator Meredith Lynn, an assistant professor at Florida State University, traveled to Cumberland Island on the coast of Georgia. “We used crowd-sourced images of tourist experiences on Cumberland Island National Seashore to create a functional tent which tries (and fails) to blend into the landscape of the island. The project explores how tourists record their experience of a place through social media posts and campers’ search for authentic experiences of wildness,” says Hargrave.
Christina Vogel B’s Scarf with Delicate Flowers, 2020 Oil on canvas
Christina Vogel Yellow Roses, 2021 Oil on linen
Katie Hargrave and Meredith Lynn
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ON JULY 1, RANDALL COLEMAN BEGAN HIS ROLE AS THE NEW DIRECTOR OF BANDS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE AT CHATTANOOGA. Within months of his hire, word spread statewide about his enthusiasm, upbeat personality and musical skills. His guiding hand on the Marching Mocs band has caught the attention of high school band members trying to decide where to attend college. “He has already generated a tremendous amount of energy and excitement with high school band directors from around the state,” says Stuart Benkert, head of the UTC Department of Music. “UTC is now a definite choice for students coming from strong high school band programs,” Benkert adds. Coleman previously was associate director of the Million Dollar Band at the University of Alabama, a 400-piece outfit considered one of the best collegiate bands in the country. Part of his job at UTC is to use that experience to energize the Marching Mocs. “I stand on the shoulders of the UTC band directors who came before me,” he says, “and I couldn’t be more inspired to be a part of such a rich history and legacy as we all work toward providing the UTC students with positive learning experiences through the pursuit of excellence in all that we do.” “UTC is thrilled to have recruited Randall Coleman to help re-energize our band program,” UTC Chancellor Steven Angle says. “His experience as a high school band director and long tenure with the University of Alabama band coupled with his engaging, student-friendly approach make him a perfect fit for UTC.”
Randall Cole, opposite, conducts the UTC Marching Mocs, pictured right, during the Mocs football home opener against Austin Peay on Saturday, September 2, 2021.
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Coleman was planning to retire when the job as band director at UTC opened up. He’d even bought a condo in Florida. But the position was too tempting. “When this opportunity presented itself, I thought one more challenge would be nice. When I began talking to the people here on campus, I just felt this real desire to improve the band program, to rebuild and get it back on track,” Coleman told the Chattanooga Times Free Press. “This is like the one last hurrah before I move to that condo in Florida. I’ll still go; it will just be a few years later than planned.”
He says that the pursuit of excellence for the Marching Mocs isn’t a task just for himself and the band members. “I am a believer in the quote ‘It takes a village,’ and, in the case of a university band program, that quote is especially true,” Coleman says. “In order to fulfill a vision, it takes a team effort from us all.”
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hen you read the words “Department of Communication,” you might think about radio, TV, newspapers or social media. Thoughts of COVID-19 studies conducted in a university setting probably evoke thoughts of departments such as nursing or public health. But a faculty member in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Department of Communication has been working on research that focuses on improving the quality of life for at-risk populations. Assistant Professor Nagwan Zahry has been interested in health communication since her student days at Michigan State University. As a doctoral student, she worked as a research assistant collaborating with nursing, medicine and engineering faculty on a project linked to health, social media and messaging campaigns. After joining the UTC faculty in August 2018, Zahry continued to pursue her passion for health communication by specifically looking at low-income families in different
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contexts such as eating behaviors, physical activity and mental health. The pandemic has allowed her to advance that research. Zahry and her team recently conducted an analysis on stress management intervention among socio-economically disadvantaged families, which was published in the International Journal of Nursing Studies. A new study has Zahry and her team exploring how COVID-19 has affected lifestyle behaviors and mental health, she says, “and what coping strategies were helpful for dealing with challenges induced by COVID-19. “I am leading a team to study the impact of COVID-19 on low-income parents with preschoolers aged 3 to 5 years old to provide an in-depth snapshot of this vulnerable population’s lived experience during the pandemic. It is the first study in the U.S. that looks at this topic.” Results suggest that COVID-19 has profoundly changed low-income parents’ and their preschoolers’ lifestyle behaviors
and mental health in many ways. Zahry’s study was based on a representative sample from around the country and included a total of 273 parents. She explains that financial hardships and employment changes have reduced parents’ ability to cover basic living expenses such as utilities, rent and transportation, requiring them to cut back on food purchases with the resulting increases in food insecurity.
problems adversely affect low-income parents who resigned or were laid off from their jobs because they were caregivers for young children or older family members. Zahry says she was surprised at the degree to which preschoolers aged 3 to 5 felt and suffered from the non-infection effects of COVID-19, finding evidence of the stress contagion, the association between a mother’s stress and her children’s mental health.
Some parents indicated problematic changes in their eating behaviors, including increases in food portions, high frequency of snacking, high intake of unhealthy food and eating because of boredom, all of which resulted in weight gain. In contrast, other parents shared positive changes such as healthier meals with the family, more time to plan and prepare food together and a higher intake of healthy food than before COVID-19. “We find an increased physical activity in preschoolers but a decline among parents,” Zahry says. She says that parents and their preschool children experienced poorer sleep quality, increased sleep disturbances and insomnia during the pandemic. Parents and preschoolers also experienced high levels of stress, anxiety and depression. According to Zahry’s findings, COVID-19 has disproportionately intensified economic inequalities by severely impacting socioeconomically disadvantaged families. Increased unemployment and financial
“As such, the mother’s stress was reflected in their children’s lack of sleep, increased anxiety, restlessness, anger and frustration,” Zahry says. One finding is related to parents’ separation anxiety. She says her research found that parents who became accustomed to having their children at home during the COVID-19 lockdown “experienced high levels of anxiety after the reopening of daycare centers.” As the pandemic continues, so do the research opportunities. Zahry is leading two studies related to families from different socio-economic backgrounds, with a particular focus on differences in the willingness to get vaccinated based on gender and race. “One study is related to a persuasive communication campaign to promote the vaccine,” she says. “The second study is a theoretical paper to explore the health factors associated with people’s willingness to take the vaccine.”
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KAREN BABINE Assistant Professor of English
AARON SHAHEEN George C. Conner Professor of American Literature
All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer, winner of the Minnesota Book Award for memoir/ creative nonfiction, was written throughout her mother’s battle with cancer and is a narrative of food and illness and loss. Cooking comforting meals for her mother gave Babine purpose, she says. She fed her mother mashed potatoes “spiked with as much butter and heavy cream” as she could manage, nourishing with a complete protein after a chemo treatment when her mother wanted to eat only the blandest of foods.
Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture was written by Shaheen, the George C. Connor Professor of American Literature. He specializes in late 19th- and early 20th-century literature. His teaching and research interests include disability and gender studies, Southern literature and World War I.
“In those days, I was really trying to work through how I was feeling about cancer and this really mirrored cancer and her treatment and things that should not exist. It was nice to know that A plus B equals C if I do this in a recipe. At least I had something tangible in my hands to work with.”
“The book helps to explain how our current reliance on technology dates back to World War I, when prosthetists developed the idea that the prosthetic device should be an extension of a person’s soul or ‘personality.’ These ideas were then reflected in much of the war-related literature produced during the 1920s and ‘30s. At the practical level, this meant designing prostheses with an eye for physical compatibility. It also implied a more sophisticated rapprochement between humans and machines.”
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EARL S. BRAGGS Herman H. Battle Professor of African American Studies
MEGAN FAVER HARTLINE Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Writing
Obama’s Children is Braggs’ 15th collection of poetry. He is the winner of, among others, the Jack Kerouac International Literary Prize, the C&R Press Poetry Prize, the Anhinga Poetry Prize, the Cleveland State (Ohio) Poetry Prize and others. At UTC, he has won two Student Government Association Outstanding Professor Awards, the University of Tennessee Alumni Association Outstanding Teacher Award and the Horace J. Traylor Minority Leadership Award.
Along with being one of the editors for Mobility Work in Composition, Hartline was an editor on Writing for Engagement: Responsive Practice for Social Action (Cultural Studies/ Pedagogy/Activism). She came to UTC in August of 2020 after three years at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where she was associate director of the Community Learning Initiative before being promoted into the director position. “Mobility Work in Composition examines how a mobilities perspective allows new ways of thinking about concerns across the field of rhetoric and composition, taking up questions of how the movement of texts, ideas and people, both geographically and socially, affect the ways we think about writing, language, literacy and teaching.”
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BUY NOW | UPCOLORADO.COM UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE AT CHATTANOOGA COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
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Olivia Cawood and Noah Allen-Darden
INTERNSHIP PROGRAMS PROVIDE BENEFITS BEYOND THE CLASSROOM. Since summer 2015, more than 90 students in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Department of History have participated in about 12,000 hours serving the community through internships. Nearly 20 community partnerships provide students with the opportunity to sharpen their historical thinking abilities and improve their graduate school and employment prospects in a range of disciplines. Two recent UTC history graduates parlayed their internships into advanced degrees, full-time museum roles and the opportunity to mentor current University students. “To be able to connect current students with students who were in their shoes just a few years ago makes this more personal,” says Michael Thompson, head of the UTC history 24
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department. “I think it’s easier for us to support our students and explain the benefits of our internship program when they can relate to those who have come before them.” Rebecca Hoback P’Simer, curator of collections at the East Tennessee Historical Society in Knoxville, earned a bachelor’s degree from UTC in 2016. She landed several internships as an undergraduate, including three at the Museum Center at 5ive Points in nearby Cleveland, Tennessee. “I like to refer back to my own experience with internships when I am speaking to our interns,” P’Simer says. “I recall approaching Dr. Thompson and saying, ‘I know I don’t want to teach, but I need to explore other pathways with this history degree.’
“He knew of the Museum Center at 5ive Points and got me that internship, and that is what led me into the museum field. I immediately just fell in love with it. After that internship, I took others that were out of my comfort zone.” Among those internships was spending the summer of 2016 with the Buffalo Bill Center of the West-Cody Firearms Museum and Firearms Record Office in Wyoming. That internship aided in her acceptance into the University of Memphis’ Master of Arts in History program. She earned an advanced degree in 2019, just a few months after starting her present job. She now enjoys sharing her experiences in building a career when talking to interns from UTC and other colleges. “I don’t want to say it’s come full circle because I know I’m very early in my career,” she says, “but it just feels great to provide that side of it. I have mentors that I look up to that have helped me along the way, and it’s such a powerful thing to keep up with everybody. “I tell interns that an important aspect of this field is networking. I also tell them that it’s so important not to burn bridges because so many people know so many other people. It’s just crazy how everybody is so connected within the field.” Olivia Cawood was a couple of years behind P’Simer at UTC, graduating in 2018 following an internship at the Museum Center in Cleveland. “I was a junior when I was an intern from UTC, so I was starting to look at what my aftergraduation plans were going to be and trying to decide what I wanted to do career-wise,” Cawood says. “I knew that I liked museums, but being able to work in one really solidified that choice for me. I’m from Cleveland, too, so to work in my local museum was really cool.” After earning a master’s in public history from West Virginia University in 2020, Cawood returned to the Museum Center in 2021, progressing from program archivist to curator of education to her current role as curator of programming and collections. One of her duties is supervising interns, including UTC senior Noah Allen-Darden.
“Supervising is a cool experience because I have been in those exact shoes,” Cawood says. “I remember what it was like for me. It feels like a while ago, but it really hasn’t been that long. So I think it is beneficial for current students to hear from someone just about the impact you can make on your own future choices.” Allen-Darden says one of the biggest things he has learned from Cawood has been her road to pursuing a master’s degree. “That’s something that I didn’t realize was an avenue that would take me to a museum job, and she’s enlightened me on that,” he says. “In addition, she talks to me a lot about the laws that are regulating historical artifacts. I want to be an attorney when I get older, so that’s very interesting to hear about those laws.”
Olivia Cawood and Noah Allen-Darden sort through items displayed in an exhibit at the Museum Center at 5ive Points in Cleveland, Tennessee.
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Latin American Studies Degree Broadens International Understanding
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he University of Tennessee at Chattanooga College of Arts and Sciences has a new degree program to connect the University in new ways with realities in the United States’ changing demographics, local and regional communities and the job market. In the fall of 2021, the bachelor’s degree program in Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures: Latin American Studies launched. The idea behind it, says Edwin Murillo, an associate professor of Spanish, “speaks to UTC’s mission to offer educational experiences for students to immerse themselves in a very international multidisciplinary curriculum. It speaks to what the University is trying to do for its students, which is create, mold and produce globally-minded graduates.” Murillo led the development of the curriculum proposal. He says putting the program in place took about a year of planning, basing the UTC model on research from several universities with strong Latin American backgrounds, including the University of California Berkeley, Stanford University, the University of Miami, Duke University and the University of North Carolina. “What’s unique about our Latin American studies program is its truly interdisciplinary nature,” Murillo says. “Most degree programs are quite territorial. For example, if it’s a Spanish degree, then it’s going to be 99.9% Spanish programs without the share of any prerequisites. “In our case, we are sharing some of that curriculum with history. We have a space for the core requirements with the History
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Department. Part of the electives for the Latin American studies B.A. can be drawn from art, anthropology, sociology and other history courses, and I think that makes us pretty unique as well.” Two Spanish department faculty members, Carmen Jiménez and Bernardo Amparan, helped develop important courses for the program. Other UTC faculty participating in the fledgling program’s inaugural year included Edward Brudney in history, Brooke Persons in anthropology and Ethan Mills in philosophy. “I’m very glad that we have a new offering for the students so that they can learn about other parts of Latin America,” says Jiménez, who is teaching a course called “Afro-Latino Voices: The Caribbean and Beyond.” “I don’t fit the stereotype of Latino, so with that in mind, I want people to know about the other faces that Latin America has and about the literature and concepts of Black people in the Caribbean.” Amparan created a course titled “Highlights of Mexican Identity and Culture.” “This was the first time that I was directly involved in building a new program and it was a great experience,” Amparan says. “I wanted to present cultural artifacts that were predominant in the Mexico that I grew up with and my friends grew up with, mainly in Mexico City and in Monterey City. “Mexico is a vast mix of people and cultures and traditions, and it’s very rich in every aspect that you see.” The necessity for this new program stems from the awakening of a Hispanic-American consciousness that speaks to forces in the job market, Murillo says. “Since 2010, Hispanics are the largest minority, and I know that’s an oxymoron,” Murillo says, “but we’re the largest minority in the United States, demographically speaking, and it’s always good to be educated about a new demographic.
Edwin Murrillo, left, Carmen Jiménez, center, and Bernardo Amparan
“If we look at it as part of our collective U.S.American cultural identity, this degree will help U.S. Americans who aren’t familiarized with that Hispanic-ness become familiarized with the Hispanic-ness. It broadens the horizons and speaks to a new job market. The world is globalized. If you want to be competitive in Latin America, you should know about it. These are communities that exist and have always existed. This degree helps to educate us about those communities.” The job market Murillo speaks about isn’t limited to Latin American countries. The growing Hispanic community in Chattanooga and North Georgia has a multitude of descendants from Central America, he explains.
In contrast, the Dalton, Georgia, area—about 30 miles south of Chattanooga—has a sizable Hispanic presence of mostly Mexican descent. “Chattanooga is one of the leaders in the region in terms of education, business and medicine,” Murillo says, “and the community is growing. We’re going to need individuals who are culturally prepared to engage with these communities. This degree does that. It prepares them.”
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Ellie Bixler ’21, pictured left, earned bachelors degrees in both humanities and in sociology and anthropology at UTC. She credits the humanities program for allowing her to combine her passion for writing poetry with her interest for archeology and anthropology. Hannah Archer, pictured right, majored in international studies as part of her humanities specialization while getting a bachelor’s degree in geology. By connecting these disciplines, Archer is better prepared for a career that focuses on the development and enactment of climate change mitigation policy on a global scale.
STUDENTS WEAVE SUBJECTS TOGETHER FOR BACHELOR IN HUMANITIES
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he humanities are traditionally defined as disciplines that investigate human culture, experience and perception. They aim to rekindle the awe of human achievement while sharpening the mind and igniting the imagination. Students in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga humanities program have a great deal of autonomy when constructing their interdisciplinary curriculum but also receive guidance at critical junctures along the way. “This is a very interesting and unique degree program at UTC,” says Dennis Plaisted, an associate professor in philosophy and religion. What the humanities program allows a student to do is, in a sense, create his or her own major. “A UTC humanities degree will allow you to focus more broadly and see the connections between disciplines that you might overlook in other majors.”
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Ellie Bixler earned a bachelor’s degree in humanities (liberal arts concentration) and a bachelor’s degree in sociology and anthropology from UTC in spring 2021. She credits the humanities program for allowing her to pursue creative interests alongside archeology and anthropology. “I like to write poetry and use it as a passion project that allows my brain to take a break,” Bixler says. “Archeology is a pretty scientific academic field, and I would be in the lab all day. I used poetry to reset my brain and think about things differently.” A Brock Scholar and Honors College Scholar, Bixler is now pursuing a Master of Applied Anthropology at Oregon State University. Down the road, she wants to work as a federal archeologist for the U.S National Park Service. “With my humanities degree, a lot of my anthropology classes were courses that I chose to be the supplementary courses,” Bixler says. “I would go into a lot of those knowing that it was both a humanities credit fulfillment and a logical credit fulfillment. It offered two different perspectives on the same material.” Bixler says she has always used creative writing as an outlet—“I keep a journal and I write a lot”—and the humanities program allowed her to think about the world and tie different ideas together. Her honors thesis, “Young Adult: A Poetic Exploration of Modern American Life,” included 21 poems. “A lot of the poetry had roots in culture and humanity. Anthropology fed into my
writing,” she says. “My thesis was about how poetry has shaped American culture and vice versa, and that is inherently anthropological.” Hannah Archer majored in international studies as part of her humanities specialization while getting a bachelor’s degree in geology. Her plans include working at an international level to develop climate change mitigation policy. “I really like the hard sciences like geology and engineering, and the international studies major allowed me to incorporate some aspect of social sciences, as well,” Archer says. “I was able to take a ton of different interests that I had in academics and, using the humanities major, turn it into something that broadened my horizons.” The spring 2021 graduate is currently pursuing a master’s degree in engineering and public policy at Northeastern University in Boston. “Because I was able to choose classes for my major, I had the chance to learn about places that I hadn’t learned about before,” says Archer, who is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. “I took courses on South Asia and England and all kinds of other places to give me a well-rounded education of the world.” Archer says the UTC humanities educational experience made her a better global citizen. “I think it helped me understand the position of the entire planet in terms of climate change on a much better level than if I had just studied the U.S. and China.”
VISIT UTC.EDU/HUMANITIES TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS DEGREE PROGRAM. UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE AT CHATTANOOGA COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
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by SARAH JOYNER
ARE BEE COLONIES IN SODDY DAISY HEALTHIER THAN HIVES IN DOWNTOWN CHATTANOOGA? Caitlin Jarvis spent her summer researching that question. As a first-year environmental science graduate student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Jarvis primarily studies backyard beehives throughout Hamilton County to see which environments and beekeeping practices are most successful. Many hives belong to local hobby beekeepers and, with permission from the apiarists—the scientific name for beekeepers—Jarvis and undergraduate researchers from UTC are studying the colonies. Opening the hives, they carefully pull out bee-coated frames and take photos. Later, they compare hives. Who has the most bees? How much honey has been produced in each? “We’re generally trying to see how productive the hive is—how big it is, but mainly I’m looking for signs of disease,” Jarvis explains. She performs a sugar shake test, a surveillance method that shakes fine sugar onto bees, to check for pests like the Varroa mite. The parasite resembles a tick and attaches itself to a bee’s body, causing disease and weakening the bee. Don’t worry, the sugar shake bees return to their colonies unharmed. Caitlin Jarvis UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE AT CHATTANOOGA COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
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Caitlin Jarvis gathers information from her own backyard beehive Tuesday, June 15, 2021, at her Hixson home. DeAnna Beasley, assistant professor for the Department of Biology, Geology and Environmental Science in the College of Arts and Sciences at UTC, and other students help Jarvis collect the data for her research project. Beasley’s own research broadly explores the impacts of environmental change on development, behavior and physiology in insect model systems.
When examining the hives, Jarvis also checks for signs of deformed wing virus and hive beetles, both threats to bee colonies. Jarvis’ interest in pollinators began in the summer of 2020 with a temporary beekeeper job at Pigeon Mountain Trading Co. in Lafayette, Georgia. The beekeeping supply house has colonies of in-house honeybees. Tending to its hives and selling live bees inspired her to start her own hives back home in Hixson and to pursue a master’s degree at UTC. Her current research will last two years, but Jarvis has hopes to grow her work in the future to landscape-level pollinator restoration. The work’s goal is to bring back all kinds of native habitats, avoiding the green-grass urban lawns “that really don’t offer anything for biodiversity,” she explains. Jarvis wants to work with all pollinators, from recognizable honeybees and bumblebees to the lesser-known hoverflies, beetles and Mason bees that “are good at pollinating in orchards,” she says. “We have hundreds of species of native pollinators here in Tennessee and many more throughout the United States that just don’t get a whole lot of attention.” DeAnna Beasley, pictured far right holding the camera
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E
ver drop your headphones in your purse or push them into your pocket and, when you pull them out again, they are snarled in an inexplicable knot? The scientific name for the condition is “entanglement.” Yes, things like headphones get unscientifically tangled in life all the time, but it also happens at a cellular level. That’s where Eleni Panagiotou is focusing her attention. Panagiotou, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, received a $537,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study entanglements for the next five years. She and undergraduate and graduate students from UTC will use math—in particular “topology,” an area typically characterized as pure mathematics— to help understand how entanglement affects cell material properties. Specifically, they will examine how the entanglement of biopolymers affects cell division. Yes, “biopolymers.” DNA is a biopolymer. Proteins are biopolymers. Living things must have biopolymers to keep on living. They’re essential to cell division, but no one is quite sure how they work. “During cell division, you have all these biopolymers, but somehow they push each other away to create this division of the cell,” Panagiotou explains. “So how this happens and what is the role of the entanglement complexity of these polymers, that is not understood, but we know it has an effect.” Using the new mathematics created by her research, the result will advance
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the understanding of entanglement effects in the cell. In the long term, it could lead to understanding how to control and improve cell functions by measuring the amount of stress caused by entanglement in biopolymers and how that stress affects the push-pull of cell division. “You have things pulling, contracting or things expanding somewhere in there,” she says. “All of this is getting some communication of stress. If it is pulling in, say, in one direction, pulling in the other direction. We want to actually measure what is the effect of entanglement.” The data obtained will be loaded into the high-performance computers at the UTC Multidisciplinary Research Building, better known as the SimCenter, which can handle huge amounts of data and rapidly conduct research. “Otherwise, it would be impossible to do this research here,” Panagiotou says. “We cannot do these simulations in a conventional computer. You actually need to use the computer clusters of the SimCenter.” One outcome of her research could be a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, she says. In the disease, brain cells separate— disentangle, in other words. No one knows why or if there is a way to prevent it or get them back together. “They’re just hanging there, and they don’t even mingle with each other,” Panagiotou says. Her research also could lead to a better understanding of some of the basic workings of life. Cells need to move around easily, but too much entanglement creates stiff cells that
Eleni Panagiotou
aren’t as efficient, she explains. But the cell has mechanisms to control and suppress entanglement to perform its functions and adapt to different environments efficiently. “Understanding the role of entanglement in those systems and the transition from one state to the other would be very important,” she says. “It is to understand the mechanisms of life.”
VISIT ELENIPANAGIOTOU.COM TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE THEORY BEHIND THE RESEARCH, THE PEOPLE INVOLVED, AND NEWS AND EVENTS RELATED TO THE PROJECT.
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The DNA Behind the Data Ralph Hood
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bout 49.6% of people in Tennessee are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, among the Top 10 lowest rates in the nation. Some of the refusal rate is suspicion of the vaccine’s effectiveness. Some is a sense of personal freedom. And some is directly due to religious beliefs. It’s no surprise that religious beliefs are powerful in various contexts, says Ralph Hood, professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Religious beliefs have raised and destroyed civilizations and inspired dozens of artistic masterpieces and horrible desecrations. They continue to exert vast influence in the world today. One area not always considered is medical concerns, says Hood, whose expertise is religion and spirituality. These days, that includes COVID-19 vaccines. “It turns out that religious people and spiritual people have a wide range of reasons to use medicine. So even though medicine can be effective, you have countries that vary in religious and spiritual beliefs and whether or not they will accept vaccination,” he says. Religious and spiritual beliefs can affect someone beyond health consequences, he says. They can make you adventurous or more cautious. They can dictate your level of education. They can determine what you read and what you eat and drink. “If you’re somebody who likes security, if you like clear guidance, then you might like a religion that gives you clear guidelines and answers,” Hood says.
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“But if you’re a person who is open to experience and investigating options, what you’ll find out is, the longer you’re in that religion, the more you find its limits, and then you look elsewhere. They may even affect a person right down to the DNA. And that’s not speaking metaphorically. Hood is researching just that. He recently joined the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, a longterm, population-based research project that has traced multiple generations of families from the Avon region of the United Kingdom. It started with pregnant mothers and their children in the early 1900s, continued with their children, then their grandchildren and now their greatgrandchildren. The study has tracked their entire lives from birth to death. “One of the things we’re looking at,” he says, “is not only the changes in the physical but the changes in religious from spiritual beliefs.” Religion and spiritual beliefs are not the same, Hood explains. Religion is built on a particular faith or system of beliefs such as Christianity, Islam or Judaism. Spirituality is belief in God or a universal power but is not connected to a denomination or specific belief system. Religion can be more rigid in the doctrines on which it’s based, he says. In the Avon study, among other measurements, researchers have taken blood and bone samples, kept track of illnesses, what books have been read,
calculated the amount of pollution they encounter and how close they live to green spaces. They’ve studied the subjects’ eating habits, what they’re studying in school, their friends and relatives, their sexual partners, their careers. “They collected data from Day One on religious beliefs, their parents’ beliefs, their cohort’s beliefs,” Hood says. “They also are able to compare people that go to religious parochial schools vs. public schools, so we have that data. “The study will now be balanced between physical phenomena, medical phenomena and religious/spirituality.” The study’s overall goal is to see how all these behaviors, lifestyles and personal beliefs have affected the participants down to their very DNA and personalities. The study recently received a threeyear, $9.5-million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, a Pennsylvaniabased philanthropic organization that funds research into the intersection of religion and science. With their share of the funding, Hood and researchers from seven other American universities will take a deep dive into more than 100 years of data from past generations as well as participants now being studied, seeing whether behavior affects DNA. “Would it mean what you eat? What your job is? And how does schooling affect it?” Hoods asks. “The geneticists have all that data. I think I’d like to explore that more.”
Rendering of top-down view of DNA molecule spiral, based on an image found in Rhythms of Vision by Lawrence Blair, an out-of-print book on sacred geometry.
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The top photo depicts Zibin Guo, left, teaching a tai chi chuan class for veterans pre-COVID. The bottom screenshot shows a snippet of a virtual Wheelchair/Adaptive Tai Chi for Veterans training course which Guo developed and implemented as a way to help healthcare providers comply with COVID safety standards while still providing this service to disabled veterans.
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risis creates opportunity. That is one of Zibin Guo’s principles, and it’s a cornerstone of the Wheelchair/Adaptive Tai Chi for Veterans program he runs. Guo, a UC Foundation professor of medical anthropology in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Department of Social, Cultural and Justice Studies, says the program is part of his academic quest to redefine disability by utilizing ancient wisdom to help modern people deal with contemporary challenges. Funded by the Adaptive Sports Program of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the program integrates deep breathing with the gentle, flowing movements of tai chi chuan, a martial art known for its health benefits and meditation. It is ideal for veterans with physical or emotional difficulties that limit mobility.
The tai chi chuan program had always been demonstrated in an in-person format, but when COVID-19 reached Chattanooga, Guo faced a predicament: How do you hold this class when you can’t meet face-to-face? It turns out that contemporary challenges can be resolved in the virtual world. “When COVID-19 hit, that became a really difficult time for a lot of veterans with PTSD and emotional distress. They needed this program, but they couldn’t do it face-toface,” Guo says, “so I thought about doing a virtual training course to provide instructors and health care providers with a model of using this virtual format to deliver the program to the veterans. It was the first time we did this virtually, and I was quite surprised by how well it went. “Coronavirus is a crisis, but crisis always creates opportunities. Before the crisis, no one thought about using a virtual format, but it has worked out great.” Guo and a team of instructors with the Chattanooga-based nonprofit Adaptive Tai Chi International put together a 10-day national workshop featuring 35 Zoom virtual training sessions. The focus was to offer health care providers various modalities of implementing wheelchair/adaptive tai chi to promote physical and psychological wellbeing. During the program’s initial run in a virtual setting, 38 health care providers from 18 states completed the training, including physical therapists, respiratory therapists, occupational therapists, specialists from pain and mental health clinics and managers of whole health programs from VA medical centers. With training under their belts, health care workers can now work with their patients differently when face-to-face interaction is not advised. “As it turns out, because a lot of veterans have physical disabilities, they love this kind of format,” Guo says. “They don’t have to worry about finding somebody to drive them. And some of them who cannot drive don’t want to ask for help. But now there is a virtual format. “One gentleman with Parkinson’s Disease who had been participating in the adaptive tai chi program had stopped coming because of the deterioration of his disease. I sent him an email once we knew he could take virtual classes, and he was so happy and excited. This was perfect for him.” The training team received overwhelmingly positive comments from many training
participants, Guo says, and the encouraging feedback demonstrated the effectiveness of employing the virtual format to deliver programs and services. Guo followed up on the success of the initial virtual program by directing and conducting an 18-hour training program this summer for healthcare providers at eight VA medical centers around the country. Six of those eight workshops were done virtually. The main objectives of these training workshops, he says, are to give participants a thorough introduction to wheelchair/ applied tai chi chuan—including its development, characteristics, methods, principles, applications and benefits as an intervention strategy—as well as constructive and systemic instruction so they can gain proficiency in applying this program. His work in developing, promoting and implementing a program for people with disabilities continues to gain notice. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s International Centre of Martial Arts for Youth Development and Engagement has been developing inclusive martial arts programs to promote human rights throughout the world. Guo was invited to be a guest speaker as part of an August UNESCO ICM webinar about the implications of the wheelchair tai chi chuan program in the context of human rights and empowerment, health and wellbeing. “This is a positive story showing off a program that UTC supports, but it’s more about the community efforts,” Guo says. “Together, we created a nicely organized national training that will make a difference.”
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he University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Department of Military Science, housed within the College of Arts and Sciences, may be small in size, but it’s big in results. Twelve UTC Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program graduates were commissioned in the U.S. Army as second lieutenants following the 2020-2021 academic year. The May commissioning ceremony involved the largest ROTC graduating class since the program was reactivated at the University in 2007. “We are continuing to grow and produce quality officers for the United States Army,” says Capt. A.J. Herink, head of the department. “We have between 60 to 70 cadets in the program every year, but they don’t have to make a decision if they want to contract with us until junior year—and getting up at 6 a.m. to go running every morning isn’t for everyone. “To see our largest cohort at one commissioning is great. It shows the
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continued support we receive from the University and the campus partners in the community. Students have been actively seeking us out.” The Army is specific that degrees must be conferred before ROTC cadets can be commissioned. This year, the UTC conferral date was May 8. The commissioning ceremony, which includes oaths and first salutes, took place May 15 at The Westin Chattanooga. “Once they get the gold bars placed upon them, there are no take-backs,” Herink says. “The Army regulation is very clear: We have to wait until final grades are in.” Seven of the newly commissioned officers received bachelor’s degrees from programs offered within the College of Arts and Sciences: Taylor Ayers (political science), Active Duty Air Defense Artillery; Evan Cowger (psychology), Active Duty Field Artillery; Audrey Creighton (environmental science). Active Duty Ordnance Corps; Connor Dufrane (political science), Army
The photo on the left shows 2nd Lt. Megan Hawkford as her mother and sister pin her gold bars on her shoulders. The May commissioning ceremony involved the largest ROTC gradutaing class since the program was reactivated at UTC in 2007. A total of 12 graduates were commissioned as second lieutenants. Seven of those graduates received bachelor’s degrees from programs offered within the College of Arts and Sciences.
National Guard Aviation; Anthony Gorkowski (criminal justice), Active Duty Quartermaster; Joselyn Quintanilla (criminal justice), U.S. Army Reserve Adjutant General; and Cole Whitaker (history); Active Duty Armor. Others commissioned as second lieutenants: Emerson Brock (construction management), Army National Guard Engineering; Nicholas Chauncey (sport, outdoor recreation and tourism management), Active Duty Ordnance Corps; John Crain (human resource management), Army National Guard Signal Corps; Sydney Gilliam (exercise science), Army National Guard Medical Services Corps; and Megan Hawksford (exercise science), Active Duty Signal Corps. One of the ceremony highlights occurred when Sydney Gilliam received her first salute from her grandfather, Senior Chief (Ret.) William Gilliam. Herink came to Chattanooga before the 2020-2021 academic year, taking the ROTC and Military Science reins from Army Maj.
Kevin Beavers. He says he immediately noticed the relationship UTC has with its ROTC program, calling it very significant. “The big thing is the University is very receptive and helpful to the work we do in Military Science, especially with our department being one of the smallest on campus,” Herink says. “We have a small team, and the University makes sure to help us in any way possible, from one-on-ones with my staff and the academic advisors to understanding what the military science class track needs to be in order to commission.”
VISIT UTC.EDU/ROTC-GRADS TO READ MORE AND SEE ADDITIONAL PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT.
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DON'T TELL MARCIA NOE THAT YOU'RE NOT VOTING BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT POLITICAL. SHE AIN'T BUYIN' IT. “You're political because you're living and breathing in this world. If you don't vote, that's a political position. It has political consequences.” For the past four years, Noe, director of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, has been leading a charge to convince anyone on campus that voting is not just a right, it's a necessity. On National Voter Registration Day, the fourth Tuesday in September, she and a group of students set up a table in Heritage Plaza on campus to get as many students as they could to register to vote.
“We don't advocate people registering as Democrats, Republicans, Green party, whatever, but we're thinking over the long term,” Noe says. “These students here are going to be voting for 40, 50, 60 more years. Maybe some more than that. “The parties are going to change. The candidates are going to change. The issues are going to change, but registering to vote is a first step to becoming an active participating citizen.”
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Voter registration on the UTC campus calls attention to the importance of voting because students tend to respond to other students, says Sharon Alexander, president of the Chattanooga chapter of the League of Women Voters. “The students make a big difference. They're out there, waving to their friends, waving the signs that say, 'Register to vote here' and talking it up to their friends. Enthusiastic students can make a huge difference to get people over, talk them into registering.” For some students, especially those who come to UTC from other cities, registering to vote can seem complicated. Register in your home county or register in Hamilton County? You can do either. Vote in your home county or vote absentee from Hamilton County? You can do either. But if you live elsewhere and register here, is your ID certified by Hamilton County? If you want to stay here and vote absentee for your home county, have you made sure you've mailed your request for an absentee ballot in time for it to be returned before Election Day? “It might be kind of daunting to somebody who's never done it,” Noe says. “If they're registered here, they don't really know the local candidates. If they register at home, then they have to take a day and go home to vote unless they register absentee, which is not the easiest process in the world.
“A lot of times you're doing something for the first time, and you don't understand all the ins and outs of it. You're kind of reluctant to get involved in something you don't completely understand.” Convincing certain students to register can be more than teaching them how to wade through the bureaucracy, says Meredith Maxwell, a junior with a double major in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and political science. There's a longstanding belief that students—anyone in their age group, actually—don't vote because they figure it doesn't make any difference since politicians are all the same and don't care about anyone but themselves. In some cases, that's true. “The convincing is difficult because people already have expectations in their
mind of why they're not voting,” Maxwell says, “but it affects our future. You're going to see differences in the way you've got to live your life because of who you have elected. If you care about some of those issues, then you would probably want to do your part to try to change the outcomes.” Nicole Messer, pictured above, helps students during the League of Women Voters of Chattanooga’s voter registration drive. Messer is a political science major minoring in history at UTC.
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Fulfilling a Vow B
ill Epstein and Russell Linnemann came from different parts of the country, growing up with different backgrounds. But when their paths first crossed in the 1960s at Grinnell College, a small liberal arts institution in Iowa, they hit it off. Although they were both history majors— Epstein majoring in American history and Linnemann initially concentrating on British history—working together at a restaurant washing dishes junior year brought them together. They became fast friends, relishing in philosophical exchanges on history and politics. “We laughed a lot,” Epstein says. “I think Russell liked to hear me talk and I think I expanded his horizons. “I remember one night when I brought a couple of blues records over to his house, and that might have been his introduction to blues. I think it was John Lee Hooker, a really interesting introspective sort of stream-of-consciousness blues singer.” Following their graduations, Linnemann pursued master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Michigan before arriving at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 1970. He spent 36 years as a professor in the Department of History. Epstein went overseas, obtaining a master’s from the University of Sussex in England, before settling in the St. Louis area as a building products company executive. They remained in touch and, during a gettogether with spouses in New Orleans around 40 years ago, they made a vow. “Russell had become interested in African History and African-American History,” Epstein
recalls, “so we made a vow that when we both retired, we would spend time together and travel. The idea was to go tour Africa together.” That plan never came to fruition, as Linnemann died unexpectedly in 2006. For years, Epstein thought about the best way to pay homage to his friend. Then the idea hit: Create an endowment at UTC to ensure that Linnemann’s legacy lives on. Epstein has established the Dr. Russell Linnemann Memorial Endowment in History to support Africana Studies in the Department of History. The endowment gives $500,000 for the study of African and African-American history and the history of the blues. The money, given in perpetuity, is divided into $450,000 to fund ongoing programs and $50,000 to create an account to honor the career of Linnemann and his academic contributions. Linnemann taught African and British Empire History and was a scholar in concentrations like Western Civilization, African History and Modern European History, but he was celebrated for his courses on the blues—for which he was affectionately known as “the Blues Doctor.” Along with his teaching duties, he was the longtime host of “Blues and More,” a show on WUTC-FM 88.1 that gained national notoriety for the NPR affiliate. Thanks to Epstein’s generosity, Linnemann’s story will continue to be told. “UTC provided academic and cultural support for 36 years to my friend, Russell,” Epstein says. “That support means a lot to me, and I wanted to acknowledge it with a contribution in memory of my friend.”
Pictured is a scan of a professor profile of Russell Linnemann featured in the January 31, 1991 edition of The Student Echo. 44
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Dean Pam Riggs Gelasco and the faculty and staff of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga College of Arts and Sciences would like to congratulate the following alumni on their accomplishments. We are proud and grateful that each of you chose UTC to be a part of your respective journeys, and we wish you all the best in your future endeavors. To submit your alumni success story for consideration of placement in the next edition of Method, email cas@utc.edu. Please include your name, graduation year, major, a brief description of your recent accomplishment(s) and a headshot or photo.
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Robert Fisher ’15 (political science) was named the deputy chief of staff for Nashville Mayor John Cooper.
Zane Seals ’08 (political science) was named the chief financial officer of TennCare.
Jessica Miller ’17 (English) published two middle-grade children’s novels, The Story That Cannot Be Told (2019) and The List of Unspeakable Fears (2021), under the pen name J. Kasper Kramer.
Mercedes Llanos ’15 (fine arts: painting and drawing) was awarded an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant, an award for artists in an early stage of their career who pursue figurative work.
Sabrina Novak ’04 (environmental science) was named director of administrative services at the Hamilton County Health Department.
This photograph is the other winning selection from the Method magazine cover photo contest taken by Nardia Ingram, another photojournalism student in the Department of Communication.
UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE AT CHATTANOOGA COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
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