The Power of the Practical

Chris Womack (Right) and Matt Laughin (Left) presenting at the Aspen Idea Festival in Aspen, Colorado, June 2019.

Christopher Womack, B.S. ‘79 in political science, exemplifies the power found in the practical application of wisdom. Born in southern Alabama, he was motivated to attend Western Michigan University by the people who were closest to him. “I decided that I did not want to go to school in Alabama. I wanted to see a different part of the world,” said Womack. The dangers and social suffocation of the Jim Crow South played a key role in his decision to leave the place of his birth for Michigan. “Michigan was not perfect, but it was above the Mason-Dixon line.” While he makes it clear that Western was largely segregated during the time he attended, he also notes that the University was invested in the development of African-American professionals and leaders. In spite of this segregation, Womack enjoyed great friendships - including with his first roommate, who was white - during his undergraduate term at school, and engagement with the whole student body. Mentorship was another source of inspiration. He cites former political science professor David Houghton as someone who guided him to the work that would initially shape his future career. “My engagements with professor David Houghton led me to an internship with the City Manager’s Office in Kalamazoo,” said Womack. Houghton emphasized practical experience. This eventually led Womack to complete another internship, this one in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1978. “The exposure I got gave me a sense of direction concerning what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

THEORY AS PRACTICE

No outcome of one’s life can be reduced or entirely attributed to the educational institutions that one attends, but WMU undoubtedly played a crucial role in helping Womack develop the skills that have made his varied career possible. Womack was able to put his considerable skills in both theoretical and applied analysis to use over his extensive career at the Southern Company. Joining in 1988 after working for the U.S. House of Representatives as a legislative aide, Womack held several leadership positions within the company and its subsidiaries, where he worked on shaping public policy and developing various logistical strategies. Another key to his success has been his desire to constantly reach beyond what is merely sufficient. This desire led to his doctoral studies. Womack notes that he pursued his undergraduate degree for his family, but his pursuit of a doctorate was a result of his own intellectual appetite. “I had this crazy idea and personal philosophy,” said Womack. “It was that my undergraduate degree was for my family and my community. It was a celebration for them. My graduate degree was for greater opportunities and growth potential. My doctorate degree would selfishly be for me.” Womack’s continued education has been of great use to him in his current role as CEO of Georgia Power. His approach has been to use his background in political science as a basis for grounding theory in reality.

There are several theoretical concerns that go into every process and social engagement,” he said. “Social science deals with every aspect of humanity.”

Womack maintains that so-called theoretical social science is actually closely connected to historical facts, and as such, the theoretical and the practical act as figure and shadow in Womack’s work, complementing and informing each other at every step.

LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

As the CEO of Georgia Power, Womack is always looking to the future. The expertise, background and perspective he has developed inform two critical issues: racial justice and climate change.

Womack brings a powerful combination of lived experience and a grounded view of social science to issues of diversity and racial equity at Georgia Power. Although Womack uses the word “selfishly” when describing his pursuit of a doctorate, his ambitions for Georgia Power benefit the entire region and are enhanced by his scholarly accomplishments. His vision stands to benefit employees and community members of diverse backgrounds.

“What does social injustice and racial injustice mean for our company, our community and our stakeholders? What does that look like?” Womack takes these questions very seriously. “Making sure we are increasing and expanding our workforce and supplier base and making sure all of our employees are being included is work that we are seriously committed to.”

Climate change is another issue that is on Womack’s mind; he takes note of the progress that Georgia Power has made on this front, with his focus on establishing a greater independence from carbon-based energy.

“8 to 10 years ago, most of our [power] generation came from coal. Today, probably less than twenty percent of our generation comes from coal. We’ve increased the amount of renewables that are in our system. We’ve also increased in the area of solar energy,” Womack said.

As in the case of racial injustice, he approaches this issue with the particular conceptual toolset acquired through his education and experience as a Black man who has worked his way up from his beginnings in Alabama to a present leadership position for one of the largest providers of energy in the U.S.

With his bold, progressive, yet grounded vision, Womack is a WMU alumnus who can be counted on to continue to lead Georgia Power as it addresses some of the world’s most critical challenges. ◆

Western Michigan University, 1978 - 1979 Alpha Phi Alpha at the Kalamazoo Hilton Hotel. From left to right: Kevin Thornton, Bruce Perry, Harold Hill, Raliegh McCormick, Rodney McCormick, Anthony Samara, John White, Chris Womack, Marty Wagner, Lawrence Claxton, Warren Miller and Mike Dennis.

Meet our 2021 College of Arts and Sciences Student Contributor Writers

Jamel T. West, BA ‘22

WMU student writer, English major

Jamel T. West is an English major with a concentration in literature. He has worked with the Writing Center and WMU’s College of Arts and Sciences Alumni magazine. After graduation, West plans to pursue work in book reviewing, teaching and submitting his fiction for publication. He also plans on pursuing a doctorate in literature. His greatest passions are literature and cinema. In his free time, West loves to go bowling and spend time on leftist politics and theory.

Moline Tucker Mallamo, BA ‘20

WMU student writer, Medieval Studies MA candidate

Moline Tucker Mallamo is a current MA candidate in medieval studies with WMU’s Medieval Institute. She graduated from the Lee Honors College at WMU in 2020 with her BA in anthropology and English rhetoric and writing studies, and is a current member of Phi Beta Kappa. Mallamo teaches a first-year writing course with the Department of English. She also works as a graduate research assistant for two projects; these include an interdisciplinary research project with Drs. Brian Gogan, Lisa Singleterry, and Sue Caulfield, and planning the 2022 Conference on College Composition and Communication with Dr. Staci Perryman-Clark. After graduation (slated for April 2022), Mallamo plans to continue pursuing her education at the doctoral level.

Mohammed Hashim, a doctoral candidate in the Depart ment of Geological and Environmental Sciences,was awarded a highly competitive Schlanger Ocean Drilling Fellowship from the U.S. Science Support Program. This program facilitates involvement of the U.S. scientific community in the International Ocean Discovery Program, which focuses on fundamental research in marine geoscience. Hashim was also recently honored with the Best Student Talk Award at the Midwest Geobiology Conference for his talk “An Experimental Investigation of Iodine Incorporation into Dolomite: Implications for the Iodine Redox Proxy.”

Thomas Weinandy, an applied economics doctoral candidate, was a finalist in the Three Minute Thesis competition hosted by the Midwest Association of Graduate Schools. He placed as one of the top six finalists in the Midwest for his video, “The Chicken Sandwich Wars” which was based on his research into social media’s effect on retail food traffic.

Ky’Aria Moses, a second-year master’s student in the behavior analysis program, received the 2020 Cooper and Andronis Scholarship from the National Institute for Effective Instruction for her thesis research. Her research examines the impact of self-monitoring and feedback on teachers’ rates of behavior-specific praise in classroom settings.

Ronnie Miller, a doctoral candidate in sociology, received a Fulbright Research Award and American Center for Mongolian Studies Field Research Fellowship for his dissertation research, “Former Herders in the Mongolian Capital of Ulaanbaatar: Rural-to-Urban Migration and Adaptation.” This is the first time in the Sociology Department’s history that a graduate student has received a Fulbright grant for dissertation research. Miller’s study seeks to understand how political economy and climate change in rural Mongolia have pushed herders to migrate to cities and how these former herders navigate their new lives in the urban area.

Michael Caliendo, an offensive lineman for the Bronco football team, was named a MAC Distinguished Scholar Athlete, a finalist for the William V. Campbell Trophy and an Academic All-District by the College Sports Information Directors of America. This marks the second Academic All District selection for Caliendo. He graduated with a degree in biological sciences in 2019 and is currently pursuing a master’s in biological sciences at WMU. Caliendo was also a semi-finalist for the Wuerffel Trophy in 2020, college foot ball's premier award for community service, and named a CoSIDA First Team Academic All American over the summer. Deirdre Courtney, a doctoral graduate assistant, proposed, created and taught a course titled “Climate Change in African-American Communities.” The new course focuses on climate change, the role that people serve in nature, and how global warming disproportionately impacts communities of color. She hopes her class inspires students to act and become more civically engaged.

Courtney was recently awarded a fellowship from the Michigan Space Grant Consortium to develop climate change educational materials and curriculum for vulnerable communities in the state of Michigan. She also serves as a fellow on the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE Midwest Partnership project. Working with colleagues from WMU, Iowa State University, Michigan Technological University and North Dakota State University, Courtney helps organize programming including presentations, workshops and training for university faculty and leadership to promote the advancement of diversity and inclusion in STEM fields

Tabitha Mpamira, a clinical psychology doctoral candidate, was awarded the 2021 Champion Award by the Female Founders Alliance, which promotes grassroots celebration of diverse leadership. The award recognizes the advocacy Mpamira has organized through her public platform to promote and advance her work against sexual and gender-based violence. Mpamira is a licensed clinical psychologist with more than 10 years of experience as a mental health therapist. In 2015, she created the EDJA Foundation to provide free medical, legal and mental health services to survivors of sexual assault in East Africa. In just a few years, EDJA has supported hundreds of survivors— female and male, from ages 4 to 90— through counseling, legal advocacy and medical services in the Rukungiri and Kanungu districts in Southwest Uganda. The foundation provides a legal advocate to every survivor. The advocate takes responsibility for assisting the police with arrests, paying fees and making police reports, and supports the families through the long, complicated, and often expensive court process.

Quinn Heiser, a third-year student majoring in geography and geographic information science and minoring in philosophy and computer science, was recently awarded a USGIF scholarship by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation to further the advancement of geospatial tradecraft. Through academic research at Western Michigan University, he has studied the dispersion of sexually transmitted infections in lowincome areas in southeastern Michigan, population projections based on existing construction for Charlotte County, Florida, and the prevalence of cases of diseases of the nervous system in Michigan counties.

Alberto Cintron-Colon, a doctoral candidate in biological sciences, was selected as a mentor for the Puerto Ricans in STEM Mentoring Program. Cintron-Colon will support fellow Puerto Ricans around the world in STEM fields, connecting and empowering them to reach their goals.

Cintron-Colon is also the recipient of a 2020 Yale Ciencia Academy Fellow.

Reducing Relapse in Patients Through Smartphone Technology

Dr. Anthony DeFulio, associate professor of psychology, was two months into a study in partnership with DynamiCare Health in early 2020 when the pandemic hit. The study, funded by a $222,383 grant from the NIH’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative, was intended to facilitate DeFulio’s collaboration with local hospitals to recruit recent overdose patients to enroll in treatment and to participate in his research. Recruitment for the study started in February of 2020, and went well for the first month. “Recruiting in emergency departments became a functional impossibility for the duration of 2020,” DeFulio said. “We even tried bringing on additional hospitals,” expanding beyond Kalamazoo to St. Joseph and Grand Rapids. That didn’t work. “After a lot of effort of trying to complete the study as originally planned, we realized that if we wanted to produce something meaningful out of this project, we were going to have to shift our focus.”

And so, the research team targeted a population that was more accessible – patients in treatment centers and clinics rather than hospitals. By partnering with a clinic in Kalamazoo and one in Ohio, the team finally had everything in place to test DynamiCare’s technology, designed to disrupt opioid dependence and subsequent relapse in patients.

The project began without precise procedures to promote medication adherence. By the end of the project, DeFulio says that they were able to develop these procedures and complete feasibility testing, which proved that their approach was working.

THE PROCEDURES LONG-TERM OUTCOMES

The study conducted by DeFulio’s team was short term, and as such, does not have data on the longterm outcomes of patients who participated. Relapse is an ongoing challenge for many patients, regardless of their specific substance dependence. If a patient stops taking prescribed medication or stops going to counseling, relapse is common.

“There’s growing evidence that the effects of contingency management for a significant proportion of the people who receive it produce really long-term positive outcomes,” said DeFulio. “We’ll really learn the most about long-term outcomes as this becomes more widely available because we’ll have much bigger datasets. Once we have that then we’ll understand the kinds of things that will help us promote those good long-term outcomes.” This will be the focus of research for at least the next ten years.

What are these procedures and how do they work? Patients download a smart phone app which offers a reliable, verifiable measure of their behavior by tracking GPS location data, proving patients are where they’re supposed to be, when they’re supposed to be there. It also allows patients to upload what DeFulio calls “video selfies” as proof that they are taking prescribed medications or completing saliva toxicology testing.

The app implements an intervention called contingency management, which has been studied since the early 90s with ample evidence of its effectiveness in modifying a wide variety of behaviors. Despite its demonstrated efficacy, it hasn’t been widely implemented.

The biggest barriers to implementation and dissemination of contingency management therapy to date have been resources, time and space – and outpatient treatment clinics lack all of these. Smartphone technology allows clinicians to implement the intervention right in your pocket at relatively low cost. “There is a bigger need for treatment than there is a capacity for treatment,” said DeFulio. “It’s important for the community to understand and support” the work of clinics. Also available to those participating in the contingency management therapy is a team of recovery coaches who are readily accessible to patients via text messaging and video calls.

What is perhaps most important to the success of contingency management is the incentive system. For DeFulio’s study, the incentive was money delivered via reloadable gift cards. The monetary incentive does come with restrictions that ensure that patients use the money for daily needs, and not to further fuel drug dependence. Spending can be tracked by clinicians to determine if extra help is needed in recovery.

WHAT’S NEXT?

“There’s growing evidence that the effects DeFulio is working on a new grant funded study that addresses one of the primary barriers to implemen tation – the human element. of contingency management for a “Even after we sort out the whole problem about logistics with this smartphone intervention, people significant proportion of the people who receive it produce really long-term positive outcomes” still have to do stuff … clinicians in particular have to introduce their patients to this intervention, explain it to them, and then assist in monitoring outcomes as the intervention unfolds, and provide additional support.” DeFulio’s team is coupling two independent intervention methods — interdisciplinary teams who develop individualized care plans to meet each patients’ unique needs and incentives shown to be highly effective at achieving specific clinical outcomes — to create a better delivery method for substance abuse treatment, which they’re calling “incentivized collaborative care.”

COMMUNITY IMPACT

Given that treatment of drug addiction costs up wards of a trillion dollars annually in the UnitedDoctoral candidate Hayley Brown and Dr. DeFulio discuss the results of a recent contingency management study. States, DeFulio’s research has the potential to save millions of dollars each year. More importantly, DeFulio’s work could save countless lives. ◆

EXAMINING SOCIAL SUFFERING

Her inquisitiveness remains unabated as she dives into a new project, developed in response to the recent influx of Burmese refugees in Battle Creek, Michigan – a city that has become a destination for refugees and others fleeing political violence in Myanmar thanks to the support of local church groups in the mid-1970s. The project seeks to explore how the expansion of a particular ethnic group, Burmese Christian refugees, changes social dynamics, economic development, job markets and the culture of the city. Since 2015, Gu has traveled frequently to the southcentral Michigan city to conduct ethnographic research, interviewing members of the Burmese

▲ Left Dr. Chien-Juh Gu Right ▲ Gu with Edward Thawnghmung, a Burmese refugee, in his garden, in Battle Creek, MI.

Unveiling Marginalized Refugee Communities

For Dr. Chien-Juh Gu, it is impossible to disentangle the roles that gender and immigration play in marginalized communities across the world. The Western Michigan University professor of sociology has spent her career listening to members of migrant communities — analyzing and exploring the factors contributing to their resilience in the face of enormous challenges.

An immigrant herself, Gu was born and raised in Taiwan. Her passion for inquiry developed from her own lived experiences. Growing up, she was always asking questions about why people behave the way they do and how social inequalities are shaped by gender or age.

“Students were discouraged to ask questions in a society in which conformity and obedience were highly valued,” said Gu. “It was not until my freshman year when I took Introduction to Sociology that I found the key to answering my own questions. Since then, I have not stopped studying sociology because it provides a means to satisfy my curiosity.”

That curiosity has led to her distinguished career as a sociologist, marked by numerous academic articles, two books, and an abundance of awards. Most recently, Gu was named a finalist for the Rosabeth Moss Kanter International Award for Research Excellence in Work and Family. Of the 2,500+ articles published in 2019 in over 80 leading English-language journals from around the world, just four finalists were selected for this prestigious award. refugee community. She seeks to understand the transition of Burmese Christians, from an oppressed religious minority in Myanmar (formerly Burma, a Buddhist country) to a visible racial minority in the United States, and how this impacts both individuals and communities.

Her most recent article, titled “Displaced Social Suffering: Burmese Christian Refugees in a U.S. Midwestern City,” was published in the Journal of Refugee Studies, and demonstrates that the suffering doesn’t necessarily stop after they arrive in the U.S. Often, they continue to encounter mistreatment and racial prejudice as they work to rebuild their lives. For instance, many Burmese refugees find employment in slaughterhouses and factories where they frequently encounter difficult working conditions, including being denied time off, use of restroom, or receiving verbal abuse from supervisors and co-workers. “During many interviews with Burmese refugees, I listened to how they were mistreated in factories and how they survived the horror in the sending and transit countries,” said Gu. “My heart ached for my subjects during these interviews, but I also find it meaningful when I write up their experiences in my books and articles.”

With a new book in the works, Gu’s observations are helping to bring scholarly and public attention to this often invisible refugee group. Through life stories and interviews of their lived realities of displacement, Gu’s book provides further understanding and knowledge to help dispel stereotypes of the community, hopefully influencing policies and social practices that can improve their life situations.

“In spite of the growing number of Burmese refugees in the U.S. in recent years, little is known about this community. Their life experiences are heard through my research.” ◆