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The contributions of Western Michigan University’s faculty and students to research and scholarship in the humanities, social sciences and sciences, have long been at the forefront of nationally and internationally recognized discovery, innovation and creative efforts in the United States and beyond. College of Arts and Sciences faculty and students continue to lead, engaging in transformative public impact research that promotes thriving, equitable, resilient and sustainable communities, in Kalamazoo and beyond. From their work documenting the stories and history of Muslim Americans in Detroit to providing the next generation of researchers opportunities to engage in biomedical quantum biology studies, faculty scholarship in disciplines spanning the college are making a positive impact on the world. The following stories provide just a glimpse into the outstanding work our students and faculty engage in every day to improve the well-being of our communities, from local to global.
It’s 2004 and a small city near Detroit, MI, has made national headlines for igniting tension over a call to prayer. Hamtramck, a historically PolishAmerican city, was experiencing an influx of ethnically diverse Muslim Americans moving into its neighborhoods.That year, a Hamtramck mosque’s request sparked a national debate about whether MuslimAmericans had the right to broadcast their call to prayer, or adhan, over outdoor speakers into the city’s streets.
With protesters gathering in front of theAl-Islah IslamicCenter, some Hamtramck residents were strongly opposed to the decision its municipal leaders had made: Hamtrack’s city council had unanimously approved the mosque’s request to broadcast the calls by changing the city’s noise ordinance to specifically include the adhan.
It was during this time that MuslimAmericans in Hamtramck first drew the interest of Dr.Alisa Perkins, an associate professor of comparative religion at Western MichiganUniversity, who was then a doctoral student in anthropology at the University ofTexas. She moved to the city in 2007, immersing herself in the different cultures that could be found in the area.
“The call to prayer debate sped up a process of mutual learning for the city’s residents.After the tensions defused, the call to prayer became an accepted part of the city’s soundscape,” Perkins said. “Hamtramck is a gateway city long known for welcoming newcomer immigrants – first PolishCatholicAmericans and then the Bangladeshi,Yemeni, and Bosnian Muslims who have since gained prominence in the city’s economic and political life.As perhaps the first U.S. city with a majority Muslim population, Hamtramck potentially can serve as a model for how other cities nationwide can gracefully manage new kinds of diversity. ”
HIGHLIGHTING HISTORY IN DETROIT
Having spent more than a decade carrying out research on the civic engagement of ethnically diverse Muslim American communities in Hamtramck and subsequently publishing her book, “MuslimAmericanCity:Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit” (NewYork University Press, 2020), Perkins is now working in partnership with Dream of Detroit, a neighborhood revitalization organization, to garner and disseminate knowledge aboutAfrican American Muslims andAfrican-born Muslims in Detroit.
“Detroit is one of the most important cities in the history ofAmerican Islam, being home to the Nation of Islam in the 1930s,” said Perkins. “Over the decades, AfricanAmerican Muslims have made enormously positive contributions to Detroit’s social, economic, and political life. In recent decades,African-born Muslims, coming from places likeSenegal andGhana, are also enriching the city. ”
Dream of Detroit is a Muslim-led nonprofit organization combining community organizing with housing and land development to build a healthy community and empower a marginalized neighborhood on the westside of Detroit. It is headquartered within MuslimCenter Mosque andCommunity Center.
In conjunction with the leaders of this organization, as well as localAfrican American Muslim students, media experts, and activists, Perkins is documenting the history ofAfricanAmerican Muslims andAfrican-born Muslims in the area through a public humanities initiative called “The Detroit Muslim Storytelling Project.”
“On both local and national levels, the histories ofAfricanAmerican Muslims andAfrican-born Muslims inAmerica tend to be marginalized due to racism and Islamophobia,” Perkins said. “OurStorytelling Project creates publicly accessible materials and employs an anti-racist, critical methodology calledCommunity Based Participatory Research to help ensure that people from the communities being represented in the project have a main role in creating and controlling these representations.” The Dream of Detroit Storytelling team intends to create an interactive multimedia website, a public archive, a short film and publications documenting AfricanAmerican andAfrican-born Muslim leadership and community development in Detroit historically and today.
Perkins serves as the project manager, research director, intern coordinator and grant-writer for the initiative. She works closely with people such as Dream of Detroit’s executive director MarkCrain, independent filmmaker Malikah Shabazz, web-designer Sabreen Hanifa, andWMU alumna andCEO of Book Power Publishing, Zarinah El-Amin, to advance the project.
The Storytelling team has already collected more than fifty videorecorded oral history interviews of DetroitAfrican-born andAfricanAmerican Muslim community leaders.The interviews are being collected in a ScholarWorks online database throughWestern Michigan University Libraries.
“WMU libraries, and especially digital humanities librarian, professor Amy Bocko, have given our work a tremendous boost,” Perkins said.
Malia KaiSalaam, a Detroit-based Muslim American community leader, at her oral history interview. (Photo courtesy of Brooklynne Bates)
SURROUNDINGCOMMUNITY SUPPORT
The Detroit Muslim Storytelling Project is made possible via collaboration among a wide range of community and institutional partners, activists, and residents, while also providing an opportunity for community-based high school and college student interns to get involved. Interns have the opportunity to dive deeper into their roots by conducting interviews with their elders.The project is also supported by university-based interns from across the country who work remotely preparing materials for the archive and website.
Already receiving financial support through the Pillars Fund, Perkins was also recently honored with one of tenWhiting Public Engagement SeedGrants to support the project’s ongoing work.
This community-led initiative will safeguard the neighborhood’s history and empower a new generation with knowledge about the past.
You can view the project’s growing archive by visiting:
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/dream-storytelling-interviews/
To support the students and faculty within the Department ofComparative Religion, visit https://wmich.edu/religion/giving. ◆
Innovation is about exploring the unknown, facing challenges head-on and daring to find new solutions. Western Michigan University seeks to foster the innovative spirit of its faculty in a myriad of ways, one of the most exciting of which is the Presidential Innovation Professorship. This highly competitive three-year award, bestowed by the Office of Research and Innovation, is granted to only three faculty members at a time. The College of Arts and Sciences is home to two of this cycle’s awardees: Sue Ellen Christian and Dr. Wendy Beane.
School of Communication Professor Sue Ellen Christian (center) and SoC intern Zaria S. Bell listen as Tamara Barnes of the Kalamazoo Valley Museum discusses the exhibit layout. Barnes is assistant director for material culture at the museum.
UNDERSTANDING THE EFFECTS OF MEDIA CONSUMPTION
Sue Ellen Christian, a professor of communication, teaches journalism and information literacy. She sees the importance of media literacy as not only an academic subject, but a critical life skill. As Christian points out, media literacy isn’t just about reading the news or having a social media presence, it’s also about understanding the effects that media consumption can have on our view of the world around us. Christian seeks to educate others with an innovative new exhibit she has designed for the Kalamazoo Valley Museum, the city’s free public museum. “It was important from a community point of view to make this as accessible as possible,” said Christian. As part of her aim to make this project accessible, key components of the exhibit will also be available on the Kalamazoo Valley Museum website. The exhibit has fourteen interactive stations, both digital and analog, which are aimed at educating the public regarding media literacy and the effects of their media consumption. Christian wants to engage people of all ages, but she’s specifically encouraging seventh graders to interact with this exhibit. She believes that catching young people at a time when they are starting to use media (especially social media) with less parental supervision is crucial. In particular, Christian wants to equip young people with the tools necessary to effectively use media in their own lives. Christian’s passion for this project is rooted in her commitment to social justice issues. “People in our society are depicted by the media both positively and negatively, in simplified formats and nuanced formats,” and that can lead to issues of misinformation and ignorance. Christian wants people to understand that their voices matter, and what they consume matters, too. The exhibit opens at Kalamazoo Valley Museum in April of 2022 and will remain open for over a year. While Kalamazoo is the proud home of this project, a traveling national exhibit is also in the works.
Dr. Beane assists Arts and Sciences students during a grant-funded summer course aimed at providing biological sciences majors and minors with the opportunity to participate in original research.
PROMOTING ADVANCES IN QUANTUM BIOLOGY
Dr. Wendy Beane, an associate professor of biological sciences, is working to increase interdisciplinary communication within her field of quantum biology. Beane is a classically trained biologist who works in her lab with planarian flatworms to determine the mechanisms of regeneration. She began branching out and collaborating with researchers in other fields, such as physics and engineering, when she saw the great potential for this interdisciplinary research.
Quantum biology, as Beane explains, is a relatively new field of scientific inquiry. It deals with processes that occur on the subatomic level. Quantum biology is highly interdisciplinary as it brings together various fields, including physics, nanoscience, chemistry, biology, and engineering.
While there are centers of quantum research in Europe and Asia, there currently is not one in the United States. Beane is working to change that, via her work here at WMU.
In her cutting-edge research, Beane is exploring how external environmental factors affect stem cell activity. This research is leading her to look at the impact of weak magnetic fields on concentrations of free radicals, which might have positive effects like the promotion of cell proliferation. Beane explains that the potential therapeutic implications of this kind of research could be tremendous, and she’s excited to be able to contribute to the new field of quantum biology in her lab. While the research has exciting potential implications and applications, conducting it can present a challenge. As Beane notes, this largely stems from communication barriers. Different disciplines have different styles of research, and that means different styles of communication, too.
“Even though we’re all scientists…we find that we have trouble talking to each other,” Beane said.
Beane wasn’t going to let that hinder her research, so she developed a solution. The Quantum Biology Interdisciplinary Trainee Exchange program, or QBITE, will provide scientists with opportunities to shadow scientists in other labs to better understand how their colleagues in different fields operate and communicate. By facilitating this kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration, Beane hopes communication will be enhanced within the scientific research community.
“We’re studying some potentially really exciting things, and we’re using this professorship as a way to establish a community of people who are capable of investigating these questions,” said Beane. ◆
New research may help smokers quit permanently
Dr. Ricky Stull didn’t expect his research into potential enzymatic therapies for treating nicotine addiction to get so much attention, but it has been a welcome surprise. Researchers have known for decades that tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable illness and death in the world, and have been working to develop reliable, effective methods to help tobacco users kick the habit. The discovery of NicA2 provides a tantalizing opportunity to explore new ways to do just that. NicA2 is an enzyme that degrades nicotine and is produced by bacteria growing in tobacco fields; pilot studies on rats suggested that administration of the enzyme as a nicotine blocking therapy could be effective. However, Stull’s lab showed that the enzyme degraded nicotine very poorly, requiring dosages that would not be feasible for human application.
But Stull’s lab not only identified this roadblock, they also uncovered the first step in a potential solution. For the enzyme to work, it requires a second molecule to act as an electron acceptor, completing the reaction which degrades the nicotine. According to Stull, it made sense for the researchers who first described NicA2 to assume that degradation of nicotine occurred with molecular oxygen functioning as the electron acceptor. In fact, the enzyme uses a protein known as cytochrome c instead.
DUMB LUCK
How did Stull’s lab discover that this protein was the missing link? “Dumb luck,” Stull says. “The answer was hidden right in front of everyone’s faces all along.”
Computer algorithms are used by the researchers to analyze genome data, and the protein was missed in the initial scan.
A follow up scan caught the protein, leading to the key breakthrough: that cytochrome c was required to efficiently and quickly facilitate the breakdown of nicotine by NicA2. The subsequent media attention took Stull by surprise, especially given that potential therapeutic application is likely still years away.
Quitting smoking is challenging, and the products currently available to aid in smoking cessation are not effective enough as standalone treatment options. As Stull points out, someone who slips while attending a social event is likely to re-trigger the addiction, despite the use of cessation aids. Additionally, one of the more well-known drugs on the market recently made national news when it was recalled by its manufacturer, Pfizer, over concerns that it may lead to cancer when used long-term. Given the difficulty of kicking the smoking habit, as well as the disappointing efficacy in available nicotine replacement therapies, the media interest in Stull’s work is, perhaps, understandable.
With the pandemic interrupting laboratory-based work, Stull spent his time writing a grant proposal to the National Institutes of Health, which garnered $448,682 that will support his research group over the next three years. What will the team work on with this funding? First, they hope to find a potential combination therapy for human application using NicA2, the cytochrome c protein, and the next step in the chain reaction that degrades nicotine in the environmental systems – cytochrome c oxidase. They will also attempt to re-engineer NicA2, forcing it to use plentiful molecular oxygen as the electron acceptor rather than cytochrome c.
THE VALUE OF UNDERGRADUATE CONTRIBUTION
Stull enjoys working with undergraduate students, and in fact, his NIH funding is contingent on the research being conducted primarily by those students. It was, notably, one of Stull’s undergrads, Christopher Clark, who discovered that cytochrome c was the key to unlocking the enzyme’s potential to be a useful tool to combat nicotine dependency. Currently Stull is mentoring six undergraduate students in his lab.
Dr. Stull (left) preparing an experiment with a re-engineered version of NicA2. Undergraduate Christopher Clark (right) purifying NicA2 for analysis.
“They are really eager and hungry, and can get a lot done. The passion is incredible. For their development and education, getting experience in the lab is critical for them. Getting handson experience doing research is incredibly important for when they get on the job market, or when they go to grad school, or even informing them about whether or not they want to pursue a degree and a career in the chemical sciences.”
OTHER IMPACTFUL RESEARCH
Nicotine enzymes are not Stull’s only area of research interest these days. Currently he is working with a partner at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, studying bacterial responses to reactive oxidants. This research focuses on the ways bacteria use a flavin dependent enzyme to evade immune system responses.
“If we can find an inhibitor or a drug that kills that enzyme we can make bacteria more sensitive to our immune response and prevent infection, or get rid of an infection,” Stull said. “Bacteria are evolving resistance to the antibiotic compounds that we have,” and this research provides potential new solutions to this critical problem. The two are hoping to publish this research in the near future. ◆
Activist Scholarship for Equity and Justice
he world of academia isn’t just about concepts, theories or ideas; it’s about making real-world changes to help underrepresented communities. That’s precisely what Dr. Staci Perryman-Clark is striving to do with her work at Western Michigan University. As director of the Institute for Intercultural and Anthropological Studies and professor of English, Perryman-Clark juggles her work among various roles. This year she was selected to be an officer of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and is currently planning the 2022 annual convention, slated to be held in Chicago. As the program chair for the convention, Perryman-Clark wanted to find a theme that brought together her love for education and her passion for social justice issues. The theme, “The Promises and Perils of Higher Education: Our Discipline’s Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Linguistic Justice,” invites scholars of diverse backgrounds to contribute their scholarship to the field of rhetoric and writing. This is another step toward inclusion, as Perryman-Clark realizes that in order to change the world for the better, we have to start by changing academia to be more inclusive and diverse. Diversity needs to be reflected in both the student body and the faculty of universities, and scholars of color need to have their voices heard by the rest of the academy. This passion for diversity and inclusion is deeply rooted in her own lived experiences. While receiving her education, Perryman-Clark noticed that there were very few professors who looked like her. “I was constantly having to read from the perspective of others, I learned content from the perspective of others without having my experience included.” Perryman-Clark adds, “It matters to see people who look like you in the fields you aspire to go into because that means you belong.”
Without representation, students of color oftentimes feel left out of their fields of choice, which can have detrimental effects on their chances of success.
Perryman-Clark’s scholarship-activism has led her to write two books and edit one anthology on educational and pedagogical issues impacting African American students.
Her first book, “Afrocentric Teacher-Research: Rethinking Appropriateness and Inclusion” (Peter Lang Publishing, 2013), delves into the topic of African American Language, and the myth of language versus dialect. Perryman-Clark explains how languages are subject to systems of power and privilege, and how language is frequently used as a tool of oppression: “What gets classified as a language versus a dialect often is arbitrary and is based on power and privilege and who decides what gets to have the prestige of a language.” Respecting students’ own languages is vitally important in pedagogy, as PerrymanClark’s second book, “Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL): A Critical Sourcebook” (Bedford St. Martins, 2015) attests. Her most recently published book (co-edited with Collin Craig), “Black Perspectives in Writing Program Administrations: From the Margins to the Center'' (NCTE/CCCC, 2019), won the Council of Writing Program Administrators Best Book Award for 2020. Perryman-Clark explains that this came at a critical time for race relations, and she felt great pride in co-editing a book that considered the experiences of educators working with students of color. Increased dialogue leads to increased representation, which helps students succeed. At the end of the day, Perryman-Clark hopes that her legacy in higher education will be one of consistency. Regardless of the position she fills, whether it be as professor, director, dean or chair, “it all comes back to this work and why it matters.” She also wants to encourage others to make a lasting impact.
Contributions toward fundraising opportunities for students majoring in African American and African Studies can be made at wmich.edu/intercultural/giving. ◆
