Lise-Hélène Smith - Research Beyond Borders: Multidisciplinary Reflections

Lise-Hlne Smith received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Davis, and is currently assistant professor of World Literature at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her research interests include exile, hybridity, and migration as linked to race and gender in the Southeast Asian diaspora as well as in Francophone, and colonial/postcolonial literatures. She is currently working on a book project on exile, mtissage, and the aesthetics of representation in Vietnamese diasporic literature from North America and France.

Anjana Narayan is an assistant professor at California State Polytechnic University Pomona. Her areas of interest are ethnicity, migration, and gender. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Connecticut and is the coauthor of Living our Religions: Hindu and Muslim South Asian-American Women Narrate Their Experiences (Kumarian Press 2009). She is a recipient of the American Sociological Association Section on Asia and Asian America 2010 Early Career Award. She also has a postgraduate degree in social work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai (India). She has been associated with a range of innovative initiatives in the field of women and development in India.

Kelly Shimabukuro received her MA in Literature from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and holds a BA in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include transnationalism, interracial relationships, particularly those depicted within Asian and Asian American literature, and identity formation as presented in works by interracial/religious individuals.

David Del Testa is currently associate professor of History at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in History, with a focus on Modern Europe, from the University of California at Davis in 2001. His primary research concerns the radicalization of Vietnamese and Cambodian railroad workers during the 1920s and 1930s in French colonial Indochina, and for this research he has worked extensively with Vietnamese and French archival materials in France and Vietnam. He also has an important secondary research interest in the mtis or mixed-race community of the French colonial empire between the two world wars.

Mark Carey is an assistant professor of History at the University of Oregon, where he teaches Latin American and environmental history. He holds a PhD in History from the University of California, Davis, and was a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the geography department at the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Leopold-Hidy Prize for the best article in the journal Environmental History in 2007. Ongoing research on the history of climate change, environmental sciences, and natural disasters is currently supported by the National Science Foundation. His book, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society, will be published in 2010 by Oxford University Press.

Wiline Pangle is currently a lecturer at Central Michigan University, where she teaches courses in Ecology and Biology. She obtained a PhD in Behavioral Ecology in 2008 at Michigan State University, East Lansing, under the supervision of Kay E. Holekamp. Her dissertation, entitled Threat-sensitive behavior and its ontogenetic development in to mammalian carnivores, focused on the antipredator behavior of spotted hyenas in the wild and led her to carry out data collection in the Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya, where she resided for over sixteen months. A native of France, Wiline Pangle holds a B.S. from McGill University, Montreal, where she completed a thesis that examined the antipredator behavior of the Eastern chipmunk. She has received multiple fellowships and grants to conduct her doctoral research, including the American Association of University Women International Fellowship and the Graduate Women in Sciences Eloise Gerry Fellowship. Wiline Pangle has also been actively involved in improving science education in the K-12, including the teaching of evolution. She has worked in close collaborations with science teachers across Michigan and Ohio to develop inquiry-based activities that promote science at all levels of education.

Jack Fong is a political sociologist who focuses on issues and strategies related to a non-economistic approach toward global development, particularly the role of ethnicity, race, self-determination and nationalism in development processes. A native of Southeast Asia, Jack Fong continues to focus his research on emergent and existential identities, as well as political systems in the nation-construction projects of Thailand and Burma, as well as in the United States among the Southeast Asian diaspora and their nexus with Asian Americans. Jack Fong received his PhD from the sociology department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is currently assistant professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Mnlca Rulz-Casares is an assistant professor in the Division of Social and Cultural Psychiatry and at the Center for Research on Children and Families at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She holds a Law degree from Universidad Pontificia Comillas-ICADE (Spain), a MA in International Development from The George Washington University, and a MSc in Program Planning and Evaluation and PhD in Policy Analysis and Management/Human Services Studies from Cornell University. Building on her previous research on orphan care in the Majority World (a.k.a. developing countries), where she has traveled and worked extensively, her doctoral dissertation was the first to study the social relations and wellbeing of children heads of household in Namibia. Her main areas of expertise cover the wellbeing and protection of orphan, separated, and unsupervised children across cultures; childrens rights and participation; and social policy and program evaluation. She is committed to research and evaluation that affects programs and policies to protect vulnerable children early, strengthen the capacity and efficiency of social services, and involve children in decision-making and action. She can be reached at mr225@cornell.edu.

Kristen Conway-Gmez holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Florida since 2004. She obtained an MA in Tropical Conservation and Development and Latin American Studies from the University of Florida in 1997. She graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota with a BA in Environmental Studies and Religious Studies. Her research focuses on rural Latin American natural resource conservation with an emphasis on community involvement in the process, from start to finish. She has conducted research in Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Panama. Kristen Conway-Gomez is currently an assistant professor in the geography and anthropology department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Cecily Jones is an associate professor in Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK, and a former Director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the same institution. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of London. Her research interests primarily address issues of race, gender and childhood within colonial and postcolonial societies. Her recent publications include Engendering Whiteness: White Women and Colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627-1865; Manchester University Press [April 2007]; Oxford Companion to Black British History,[co-editor] Oxford University Press, (March 2007, Oct 2008); If this be living Id rather be dead: enslaved youth, agency and resistance on an eighteenth century Jamaican estate: History of the Family, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2007, pp. 92-103.;Youthful Rebels: Young people, agency and resistance against colonial slavery in the British Atlantic World; in Gwynn Campbell ed.,