The 2011 UWM Diversity Scholars are (from left) Nikki Adams, Zakiya Lane, Hsiang-Yeh Ho, Charu Stokes, Jessica S. Welburn and Alonzo M. Flowers III.
The University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee just welcomed its third group of Diversity Fellows to campus. The six Diversity Fellows, a group that includes experienced doctoral students and new Ph.D. graduates, take on teaching or research assignments at UWM, while getting to know the campus and community.
“I was impressed by this university’s diversity and its openness to having Diversity Fellows,” says Alonzo Flowers, a doctoral candidate in Higher Education Administration at Texas A&M University.
The Diversity Fellows program gives the university the opportunity to strengthen academic programs at UWM, while continuing the university’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, says Cheryl Ajirotutu, interim associate chancellor.
Flowers will teach a School of Education course on student personnel development – drawing on his experiences as a community instructor, curriculum coordinator, history teacher and dean of students. After working on a dissertation that examines giftedness and persistence among African- American male students in university engineering programs, Flowers says he’s excited about the opportunity to teach at the university level.
Fellow Zakiya Luna has been watching Wisconsin politics with a particular awareness of some of the labor issues and legislation around access to health care for underserved Americans. As a candidate in the joint Ph.D. program in Sociology and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, social movements, law and reproductive health figure prominently in her research.
“Teaching Intro to Sociology, we’ll address many topics, including how people try to make change and deal with injustice in the world, considering intersecting identities of gender, race, sexuality,” she says.
Fellow Nikki Adams received her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Chicago. “My area of specialty is Bantu-family language syntax,” Adams says. “My course, however, will look at African languages more broadly. There are, of course, a great many, so I’ll definitely have my hands full.”
Her resume includes studying in Zimbabwe and South Africa to learn the Shona and Zulu languages, and fieldwork in South Africa for her dissertation.
Coming from the University of Pittsburgh, Hsiang-Yeh Ho, a recent Ph.D. graduate in education, noted that Milwaukee could greatly inform her research into how home and school factors influence educational outcomes among at-risk children.
“Milwaukee and Pittsburgh have similar problems – budgets for education just keep being cut,” Ho says. “So part of our work is to show policymakers the challenges kids are facing. What I can do is really focus on showing policymakers and others why these programs are important.”
Prior to being a doctoral candidate at Boston College, Fellow Charu Stokes was a school social worker and substance abuse and mental health counselor. She also worked with Save the Children in Malawi. Her research explores mid-life African- American women living with HIV/AIDS, serving as informal kinship care providers. Like many of the fellows, she’s been fascinated by Wisconsin’s recent political activities. “It’s very exciting to see how people are really getting active in the process.”
Jessica Welburn, a doctoral fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at Harvard, is teaching a class on the black family in the Department of Africology this summer. Her research examines how middle-income black families view their mobility prospects.
“Sociology gave me a tool to study the mechanisms and consequences of persistent racial inequality,” she says.