SPEAKERS
Kelsey Kauffman
Kelsey Kauffman founded the Higher Education Program at the Indiana Women’s Prison in 2012 and directed the program until 2017. Kelsey’s interest in prisons and related topics of race and violence began as a teenager with three experiences: marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Montgomery, AL, working with an all-male inmate crew assigned to the Maryland Statehouse where she was working, and living with a tribe of active headhunters in the Philippines. After graduating from Yale in 1971 as a member of the university’s first class of women, Kelsey became a correctional officer at the Connecticut State Prison for Women in Niantic. She later went to graduate school at Harvard where she wrote her dissertation on the devastating effect that working in prisons has on officers. Her book, Prison Officers and Their World (Harvard U. Press, 1988), remains one of the few in-depth studies of men and women who work in prison.
Visit Kelsey Kauffman's Website |
The Kheprw Institute (KI)
The Kheprw Institute (KI) is a community organization that works to create a more just, equitable, human-centered world by nurturing youth and young adults to be leaders, critical thinkers and doers. We empower communities to develop the skills and mental fortitude to become self-sufficient and resilient. We work to empower the community through four tenets:
Empowerment, Economy, Education and Environment. Visit the Kheprw Institute Website |
Nina Mehta
Nina Mehta is a co-director of PARCEO living in New York City. She has worked in many contexts with a wide range of community groups and organizations on collaborative research, education, cultural organizing and media projects. She has organized large-scale convergence spaces for community and movement-building, and has worked with neighborhood assemblies, coordinating public events and participatory conversations. Nina has taught participatory research and visual ethnography to public health practitioners, graduate students, artists and community groups. Nina has a background in anthropology, with a BA from Barnard College and MA from The New School for Social Research.
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Dr. Eve Tuck
Eve Tuck is an Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. She is Canada Research Chair of Indigenous Methodologies with Youth and Communities. She is a William T Grant Scholar (2015-2020) and was a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow (2011-2012). Tuck's writing and research is on urban education and Indigenous studies. As a whole, her work focuses on how Indigenous social thought can be engaged to create more fair and just social policy, more meaningful social movements, and when that doesn't work, robust approaches to decolonization.
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Dr. Vetta Sanders Thompson
Dr. Vetta Sanders Thompson is the E. Desmond Lee Professor of Racial and Ethnic Diversity at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work focuses on the health and well-being of ethnic and racial minority communities, particularly the African-American community. She is a noted researcher in the areas of racial identity, psychosocial implications of race and ethnicity in health behavior and access to health services, and determinants of health and mental health disparities. Sanders Thompson’s work combines a social science understanding of racial identity, rigorous measurement, and community-based participatory research. Her goal is to empower members of the community to improve their health and well-being.
Visit Dr. Sanders Thompson's Website |
Dr. David Stovall
Dr. David Stovall is a Professor of African American Studies and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Dr. Stovall studies the influence of race in urban education, community development, and housing. His work investigates the significance of race in the quality of schools located in communities that are changing both racially and economically. From a practical and theoretical perspective, his research draws from Critical Race Theory, educational policy analysis, sociology, urban planning, political science, community organizing, and youth culture.
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Interdisciplinary Panel of Community-Engaged Scholars
Dr. Crystal Hill Morton
Associate Professor, School of Education
Crystal H. Morton is currently an Associate Professor of mathematics education at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) and a member of the Enhancing the Effectiveness of Socially Transformative STEM Education (ES)2 Research Program. Dr. Morton teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Elementary and Secondary Mathematics Methods, General Secondary Methods, and Assessment in Schools. Her research is driven by a passion to understand why African American students, particularly females, are disproportionately underachieving in mathematics.
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Dr. Pamela Napier
Assistant Professor, Herron School of Art + Design
Pamela Napier is both a design educator and practitioner of Design Thinking and Design Research with about a decade of experience in the field. As cofounding partner of Collabo Creative—a people-centered service design company based in Indianapolis, Indiana—she manages design research and strategy projects for a diverse range of organizations including non-profits, start-ups and fortune 500 companies. As an assistant professor in the Visual Communication Design Department at Indiana University Herron School of Art and Design—with over 7 years experience teaching across graduate and undergraduate curricula—Pamela has been invited to give presentations, facilitate workshops, and co-design events both nationally and internationally. Her research focuses on developing methods, frameworks and curriculum for People-Centered Design, skills and processes for Design Facilitation, and the integration of sustainable values into the design process.
Pamela is a member of the UCDA Education Advisory Committee, and is currently the Education Director for the AIGA Indy chapter. Most recently, her team was awarded the highly competitive AIGA Design Faculty Research Grant for their ongoing work developing tools and curriculum around People-Centered Design. She holds an M.F.A. focused on Design Thinking and Design Leadership, and a B.F.A. in Visual Communication Design from Indiana University Herron School of Art and Design. Visit Dr. Napier's Website |
Dr. Wanda Thruston
Clinical Assistant Professor, School of Nursing
Dr. Wanda Thruston, is now serving her third four-year term as a member of the Metropolitan School District Board of Trustees, having first been elected in 2008. To the board, she brings her experience in executive management and leadership, child and youth development, implementation of evidence-based program planning, disparities in health and education, developing trauma responsive learning communities, grant writing and program evaluation. During her tenure as a board member, she has served as president, vice president and secretary, as well as having worked on the policy committee. As a Board liaison to district committees, she has participated on the Advancement Center Board, Safety Committee, Community Advisory Council, Health and Wellness Council and Parent Council Network. She actively participates in board development through the Indiana School Boards Association, National School Boards Association, Indiana State Department of Education and Council of Urban Boards of Education.
With the exception of three years, Dr. Thruston has been a resident of Washington Township since 1967. She is a 1977 graduate of North Central High School and is the proud mother of five children who all received their education in Washington Township Schools, beginning in 1987: Carrie Spann (NCHS, 2001), Christopher Spann (NCHS, 2003), Crystal Spann (NCHS, 2005) Chad Spann (NCHS, 2007) and George Roddy IV (NCHS, 2018). During her 31 consecutive years as a Washington Township Schools parent, in addition to serving over a decade on the school board, she has been involved with various PTOs, Parent Council, NCHS Band Parent and Football Parent organizations as well as many ad hoc committees and has assisted with many classroom or teacher projects and field trips. Dr. Thruston is a nurse and has actively worked in the area of maternal/child health for nearly 40 years as a public health administrator, clinician, educator and advocate. As a nurse practitioner for the National Service Corp, she provided health care services in several Indianapolis inner-city neighborhood health clinics serving women, children and adolescents who lived in low income neighborhoods, housing complexes, homeless shelters and the streets. Understanding the intersection between the health of children and their primary and secondary education, Dr. Thruston has targeted much of her health care work in public schools. She created and operated school-based and school-linked health clinics serving middle and high school students. She is the founder and former director of the Future Promises Program — a multi- school-based health promotion and wrap around services program for high school students that are expecting or parenting a child, including those young parents attending North Central High School. Further, she developed the Young Families of Indiana Network and the Indy Coalition for Pregnant and Parenting Teens, where she provided leadership, consultation and education for Indiana professionals that care for and support young families. Internationally, she provided expert consultation to improve the health services to West African pregnant and parenting teens living in Monrovia, Liberia. Currently, Dr. Thruston is a Clinical Assistant Professor at Indiana University School of Nursing, with a Community Action Engaged Research focus on evidence-based program implementation and trauma responsive learning communities for children and youth. Her graduate-level teaching focus is on Family Dynamics in Health Care. She has earned numerous local and national awards such as the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Center for Leadership Development; Breakthrough Woman Award from the Indianapolis Chapter of 100 Black Women; the Charles R. Bantz Chancellor’s Community Fellowship Award from Indiana University; Clinical Scholar Leadership Fellowship from Robert Wood Johnson; Champion for Youth from the Marion County Council on Youth; Clinical Excellent Award from IU School of Nursing Alumni Association; National Emerging Program Awardfrom Healthy Teen Network; and Leadership in Nursing from Sigma Theta Tau. Dr. Thruston recently co-authored position papers entitled “Educational Equity for young people who are pregnant and parenting” and “Adolescent Human Trafficking” for Healthy Teen Network and “Racism and its harmful effects on non-dominant racial-ethnic youth and youth serving providers: A call to action for Organizational Change” for the Society of Adolescent Health and Medicine. She presents her work on children and youth at many local and national conferences, including most recently, “Using Evidence-Based Approaches to Develop Program Services for Pregnant and Parenting Students” during the 2018 School-Based Health Alliance National Conference held in Indianapolis, IN. She is a graduate of United Way’s Diversity in Leadership Program, as well as Leadership, Education and Development (LEAD) and Opportunity Indianapolis (OI) both sponsored by Leadership Indianapolis. She is active on several local and national women and youth-focused non-profit board of directors, advisory boards or ad hoc committees, most notably Healthy Teen Network (Baltimore, MD), Nurse Family Partnership of Goodwill Industries of Central and Southern Indiana (Indianapolis, IN), and the Women’s Fund of Central Indiana (Indianapolis, IN). Dr. Thruston earned her bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and her masters and doctorate from Indiana University School of Nursing. |
Dr. Paul Mullins
Professor, Anthropology, School of Liberal Arts
My research interests focus on the relationship between racism and material consumption. My book Race and Affluence: An Archaeology of African America and Consumer Culture (Kluwer/Plenum, 1999) examines how African-American consumers in the Annapolis, Maryland area negotiated post-Civil War racism through a complex range of everyday consumption tactics that simultaneously evaded anti-Black racism and secured African Americans the modest yet very meaningful privileges of American consumer citizenship. The book received the 2000 John L. Cotter Award from the Society for Historical Archaeology. Since 1999 much of my research has focused on the relationship between materiality and racism in Indianapolis' near-Westside. My archaeological research focused on the Ransom Place Historic District and surrounding neighborhoods examines everyday life, materialism, and African-American culture since the late-19th century and the systematic displacement of that community after World War II for the expansion of the Indiana University Medical Center and eventually the campus of IUPUI. Through a 2001 grant from the Indiana University Arts and Humanities Initiative, I began an archival survey of the community that once lived in the near-Westside neighborhoods that are now part of the IUPUI campus. That survey systematically inventoried the neighborhood residents since the 1850s, their cultural identity, their occupations, where they lived, and the stores, workplaces, churches, and schools that were part of this community.
In Fall 2010 I completed an oral history project with Glenn Stanton White that collected African-American memories of life in Indianapolis' near-Westside and the displacement of that longstanding community by urban renewal projects after World War II. The book The Price of Progress: IUPUI, The Color Line, and Urban Displacement was released in September 2010. The project is part of IUPUI's 40th Anniversary and is discussed on the 40th Anniversary Celebration web site. I am interested in how archaeology can illuminate the concrete ways that various people embraced, resisted, and circumspectly became part of consumer society in the last 500 years. I examine the archaeological study of such issues in my 2011 book The Archaeology of Consumer Culture, which is part of the University of Florida Press's The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective series. The book examines historical archaeological studies of consumption in the United States, identifying persistent themes, unique insights provided by archaeological scholarship, and my own sense of the most fruitful directions for material culture research on consumption. Since 2011 I have been conducting a series of collaborative projects in the UK and Europe that examine the emergence of transatlantic consumer society. In Spring 2011, for instance, I conducted a study of Victorian-era household material goods from a series of post-1700 London sites that are now archived in the London Archaeological Archive and Research Center (LAARC) . The project uses seemingly mundane bric-a-brac to examine patterns in Victorian ideology across the Atlantic World and assess how various consumers participated in, rejected, and negotiated dominant behavioral and decorative ideologies. In Summer 2011 I had a visiting faculty fellowship in the Newcastle University School of Historical Studies and was part of the two-day roundtable meeting "Engaging with Oral History: New Developments in the Archaeology of 19th Century Britain” organized by Jane Webster. In Fall 2011 I returned to the UK to conduct research on Victorian materiality and Atlantic World notions of impoverishment, studying the Alderley Sandhills collection in Manchester, the Hungate site in York, and materials from the London Archaeological Archive and Research Center (LAARC) that I had worked with in February 2011. Research from that project appeared in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology in 2012 (The Banality of Gilding: Innocuous Materiality and Transatlantic Consumption in the Gilded Age, with Nigel Jeffries) and Historical Archaeology in 2011 (The Importance of Innocuous Things: Prosaic Materiality, Everyday Life, and Historical Archaeology). In July 2011 I spent a month at the University of Oulu, Finland working with archaeological material from the project "Towns, borders and material culture – the effects of modernisation and globalisation in the Northern Finnish towns and their hinterlands since the c. 17th century." I was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oulu in Fall 2012, where I have worked with Finnish historical archaeologists developing comparative scholarship that links Finnish colonization to global patterns. Scholars at the University of Oulu have examined Finnish historical archaeological contexts since 2004, and sites in the Oulu region provide a rich range of exceptionally well-preserved urban, rural, and sub-arctic archaeological resources covering 500 years of Finnish heritage. Nevertheless, archaeological research on Finland’s recent past is little-known outside the Nordic world, which has exceptionally rich archaeological resources and preservation. I have contributed to research papers from the project that have appeared in Journal of Material Culture, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Journal of Social Archaeology, and Scandinavian Journal of History. My book Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut (University Press of Florida) came out in September, 2008. The study uses doughnuts as a mechanism to examine consumer culture’s development over the last century-and-a-half. Once a modestly consumed ethnic food introduced by Dutch immigrants, doughnuts were served to the troops in World War I and quickly became mass-produced indulgences after the war. By the end of World War II, doughnut marketers blanketed the nation behind a wave of chains led by North Carolina’s Krispy Kreme in 1937 and Massachusetts’ Dunkin’ Donuts in 1950. However, in the past 20 years doughnuts have come under attack by a host of moralizing dietary challenges and competition from forces including bagels and bourgeois coffee house chains. Many doughnut critics cast food as a moral battleground: Doughnuts loom as one more horrid substance we shovel into our collective mouths, symbols of Americans’ ever-increasing laziness and obesity. In the face of the “low carb” diet movement some observers--and even a few doughnut makers--have divined the doughnuts’ imminent demise. Doughnut consumption reflects the dominant currents in twentieth-century marketing, the dynamic meanings assumed by any one commodity, the nationalist symbolism projected onto goods and marketers, and the moralizing that a host of observers associate with particular consumption patterns. For more on the book and project, see ABC News's July 2008 story, a Sept. 2008 article in Indianapolis Dine, a September 24 blog piece by the Baltimore Sun restaurant critic in dining@large, and my piece in Ambidextrous for more on the project. I teach popular culture, examining many of these same issues of inequality, materiality, and consumption in the context of more broadly defined popular cultural contexts (e.g., how race and dystopian sentiments are discussed in the Planet of the Apes film series; for more on that, see my August 2011 interview with On Point on WBUR Boston). I also appear briefly in the documentary "Anthropology: Looking at the Human Condition" in The Adventures of the Young Indiana Jones volume 3 DVD set. My other thoughts on a variety of threads of popular culture and the material world appear on my blog Archaeology and Material Culture. Visit Dr. Mullins' Website |
Dr. Gerardo Maupomé
Professor, School of Dentistry and Associate Dean, Fairbanks School of Public Health
Dr. Maupomé is an oral health researcher with primary interests in dental health services research and oral epidemiology, oral treatment needs among patients at high risk of disease or subject to health and social disparities, and analysis of professional practices – including how dental professionals make therapeutic decisions.
After receiving his dental training at the Universidad Nacional in México City, Dr. Maupomé was awarded a MSc in Experimental Oral Pathology in 1986 and a PhD in Public Health in 1991 from the University of London, in the United Kingdom. He received a diploma in Dental Public Health from the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1991, and completed a residency in Dental Public Health with Baylor College of Dentistry in 2006. From 2000 until 2005, Dr. Maupomé was a researcher with the scientific program of a large HMO in the private sector, the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Oregon. From 1995 until 2000, Dr. Maupomé was a faculty member at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He had academic appointments with the Institute of Health Promotion Research and the Department of Oral Health Sciences from 2000 until 2005, and an honorary affiliation with the University of California at San Francisco Dental School from 2002 until 2005. Besides being a Professor with Indiana University School of Dentistry since 2005, he currently has an affiliation with the Regenstrief Institute, Inc. in Indianapolis. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Public Health, IUPUI School of Medicine, and an Investigator with the Center for Urban Health in the Schools of Science, of Liberal Arts, and of Medicine, in Indianapolis. Dr. Maupomé is a Visiting Professor with the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom; and an Affiliated Professor, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Indiana University at Bloomington. Dr. Maupomé has been involved in various research projects – spanning from epidemiological studies assessing the impact of public health fluoridation, to clinical trials of chlorhexidine varnishes; from community demonstrations to promote healthier lifestyle decisions, to quantitative appraisals of factors contributing to poor oral health and failure to access dental services; and from qualitative investigations into social and economic determinants of health, to economic analyses of the costs implied in health conditions and associated therapeutic procedures. Some of these studies have been focused on American Indians, people of Mexican and Hispanic origin, those 65 years of age and older, children, and population groups with restricted access to dental services. Visit Dr. Maupomé's Website |