2009-2010 Projects

Six faculty members from four departments—Peter Beudert and Philip Blackwood (Theatre, Film & Television), Norm Weinberg(Music), Jory Hancock (Dance) and Jerzy Rozenblit and Hal Tharp (Electrical and Computer Engineering)—worked together to produce Speed, a large-scale collaborative public performance with computer-controlled machines, where movement, music and set design interact.

Ellen McMahon (Art) collaborated with Beth Weinstein (Architecture) and Ander Monson (English) on a project exploring ways in which art, design and science can collaborate to raise public awareness of environmental issues. With help from UA science consultants and the Rillito River Project, the team and students created Ground|Water The Art, Design and Science of a Dry River, a book of art and creative writing published by UA Press. 

Jadwiga Pieper Mooney (History) joined forces with Fabio Lanza (History and East Asian Studies) and Elizabeth Oglesby (Geography and Regional Development and Center for Latin American Studies) to host a 4-day conference titled “De-Centering Cold War History: Street- Level Experiences and Global Change.” They published selected presentations in a book which focused on cutting-edge research in the study of the Cold War.

Eithne Luibheid (Gender & Women’s Studies), Sally Stevens (Southwest Institute for Research on Women) and Spike Peterson(School of Government & Public Policy) studied the barriers facing immigrant parents in Southern Arizona who seek public benefits for their citizen children. A third of children in Arizona have immigrant parents, many of whom are reluctant to seek access to public services and benefits for them. Read the team's article Intimate attachments and Migrant Deportability: Lessons from Undocumented Mothers Seeking Benefits for Citizen Children in Ethnic & Racial Studies.

Heidi Harley (Linguistics) and Bill Beezley (History) studied 14 hours of personal narratives by Yaqui elders taped in the 1960s-2000s and had them digitally re-mastered, transcribed and annotated. These tapes are valuable because they preserve the conversational language of a past generation of native speakers and provide rare first-hand evidence of the persecution of the Yaqui people by the Mexican dictatorship.

Diana Archangeli (Linguistics) partnered with Ian Fasel (Computer Science) and Jeff Berry, a linguistics graduate student, on “The Arizona Articulatory, Acoustic, and Visual Speech Data- base” project. The team extracted data from videos of the lips and tongue for the beginnings of a dataset that eventually will include audio, nasal airflow and vocal folds data, as well as ultrasound images of the tongue and video of the lips and face.

James Greenberg (Anthropology) studied a species of marine snail that produces an intense purple dye and how its high value in some places and low value in others affect the sustainability of its population. He collaborated with Raphael Sagarin (Institute of the Environment) to explore how effective certain regulations are in protecting populations of the snail to study the intersection of state regulation, markets and stakeholder communities and how those relate to the sustainable uses of natural resources. Associated research part of the 2012 book Neoliberalism and Commodity Production in Mexico, released by University of Colorado Press.

Rosario Carrillo (Mexican American Studies) worked on a project to videotape interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the Mexican American and American Indian communities to enhance the current archival holdings of the Arizona LGBT Storytelling Project Archive and to publish journal articles on the intersection of language, sexuality and identity.