Laureen Hom (School of Planning, Policy, and Environmental Studies) provided a talk for her book “The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles” for the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern University on May 8th, 2025.
Emmanuel Watkins (African American Studies) co-facilitated a discussion alongside respected scholars in Curriculum Studies, titled “Envisioning Curriculum Toward Just Education Renewal: A Discussion about Culture, Gender, and Race.” He contributed to critical conversations in the field while drawing from both his academic work and lived experiences. His research centers on the intersection of spirituality, curriculum, mentoring, and character education in the academic experiences of Black males—work that continues to shape and inform my commitment to an equitable and transformative education.
Mark Barash (Justice Studies) has co-authored a new conference paper presented at the 2024 IEEE/WIC International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT) in Bangkok, Thailand. The paper, titled “Exploring a Large Language Model Approach to Visual Appearance Prediction in Forensic Investigations,” explores innovative applications of AI, specifically large language models, to assist in predicting visual characteristics for forensic purposes.
Co-authored with H. Thota, N. Pandkar, and T.-S. Moh, the paper appears in the conference proceedings (pp. 522–528) and can be accessed via DOI: 10.1109/WI-IAT62293.2024.00084.
“School resources and teen suicide risk, 1991–2016: a longitudinal analysis at the state level” was published in the International Journal of Social Economics by Megan Thiele Strong (Sociology & Interdisciplinary Social Sciences). This paper investigates how investments in public education, specifically teacher salary, relate to adolescent well-being across 25 years of data. It’s a call to recognize that school resources are public health infrastructure.
In a recent Diverse: Issues in Higher Education op-ed, Yolanda Wiggins (Sociology & Interdisciplinary Social Sciences) stresses the critical role of higher education in countering misinformation. She confronts Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s false claims linking vaccines to autism – misinformation that’s been debunked by the CDC and scientific community.