Teaching: GIF My Feedback

I can’t always get students to read my feedback, so this year I decided to try something different and include students in the process. I had students peer review their first paper. Afterwards I gave them a brief overview of my main feedback comments so they could go ahead and know up front the rangeContinue reading “Teaching: GIF My Feedback”

Hawaiian Food Flag

As one component of the final project for my AMST 202 class at Honolulu Community College this semester, students were asked to create a food flag. And as I’ve mentioned in this past blog post, I love food flags! A flag is a symbol of national identity – we salute flags, we sing to flags,Continue reading “Hawaiian Food Flag”

Race, Gender, and the Promises and Perils of “Radical” Manifest Destiny

As an expansion of my dissertation, my book project titled, The People’s Park: Work, the Body, and the Environment in Radical Postwar Placemaking, traces the transnational People’s Park movement of insurgent park creation as a method of protest against urban renewal. Having conducted archival research across seven states, this work breaks ground by documenting more than fourContinue reading “Race, Gender, and the Promises and Perils of “Radical” Manifest Destiny”

Teaching

I have taught a variety of university-level interdisciplinary courses (undergraduate and graduate) across five universities. You can see some of my student work at GlobalFoodStudies.com and TeachingWithPodcasts.com. In the fall of 2018 I began a faculty position as Assistant Professor at the University of Utah’s Asia Campus in Incheon, South Korea, where I teach coursesContinue reading “Teaching”

Farms are Cities

This past week I toured Kahumana Organic Farm on O’ahu as part of my broader research on urban food studies as well as prep for a student tour for my American Studies class. As part of our tour and tasting, I was guided by my friend and farmer at Kahumana, Rachel LaDrig — a MichiganContinue reading “Farms are Cities”

Global Family Meal

This semester I taught an online graduate level course on American culture to a mixed nationality group – two students from the University of Hawaii studying abroad in Tongji, China, and four students from Tongji who are about to study abroad in Hawaii at UH next year. Food became a way for us to talkContinue reading “Global Family Meal”

Research Spotlight: Visualizing Chicago’s People’s Park in the Archives

Two weeks in the Special Collections at UIC’s Richard Daley Library as a Short-Term Travel Fellow resulted in significant finds for my research on illegal activist-created parks in the late-1960s and early-1970s.  These parks emerged at the intersection of several political forces: anti-urban renewal activism, environmentalism, hippie utopian communalism, anti-colonial land sovereignty organizing, and racial self-determinationContinue reading “Research Spotlight: Visualizing Chicago’s People’s Park in the Archives”

Teaching Spotlight: Indianapolis Urban Design

During the summer of 2016 I worked with a handful of graduate students in Ball State University’s Master of Urban Design program advising their graduate theses.  Taken together, they all tackled different sites in the Indianapolis-area that could better capitalize on existing yet underutilized waterways to accomplish the following tasks: drive job development, provide housing and socialContinue reading “Teaching Spotlight: Indianapolis Urban Design”