Harmonizing Her Life in Academic Motherhood : An Interview with Dr. Cleopatra Abdou – Part I

Harmonizing Her Life in Academic Motherhood : An Interview with Dr. Cleopatra Abdou – Part I

By Kimine Mayuzumi   Dr. Cleopatra Abdou is an assistant professor of Social Work, Psychology, and Gerontology at University of Southern California. She specializes in the intersection of reproductive health, human flourishing, and how health is transmitted from one generation to the next. Through her website, she communicates with the non-academic world about her passion for women’s health and wellness and provides fertility, pregnancy, and Mommy Lifecycle consulting and programs to women and families nationally…

Developing your own academic “index”: An interview with Dr. Beronda Montgomery

Developing your own academic “index”: An interview with Dr. Beronda Montgomery

By Kimine Mayuzumi Dr. Beronda Montgomery is Michigan State University Foundation Professor in the Department of Energy Plant Research Laboratory. Her research focuses on understanding how individuals perceive, respond to, and are impacted by the environments in which they exist. Beronda also pursues the research theme in the context of effective mentoring and leading in research environments. She often shares mentoring and faculty development issues on Twitter. My partner, Riyad, and I, met Beronda last…

The Taiji Ten for resistance and healing: An embodied meditative practice by a scholar-activist

The Taiji Ten for resistance and healing: An embodied meditative practice by a scholar-activist

By Lisette E. Torres As a newly disabled Puerto Rican scholar-activist, I have been grappling with how to continue my scholarship in the academy.  I have begun a process of returning to meditation and slowness after stopping due to graduate school. In this multimedia blog post, I narrate my poem  that focuses on my use of Taiji as an embodied meditative practice and form of resistance through self-care. As I read my poem aloud, my…

Towards a healthier relationship with online activities: 5 useful tips for using technology

Towards a healthier relationship with online activities: 5 useful tips for using technology

By Kimine Mayuzumi Email is a great human innovation. It’s quick, easy, and cheap. We used to send our hard-copy manuscripts to journals by snail mail, which was costly, slow, and tedious compared to our current system. Yet, we still suffer from our online activities including emails (Holmes, 2014; Seal, 2017). The below table shows the comparison between the benefits of using technology we intend to receive and the actual consequences that we often face…

Dear academic dads: 5 recommendations from a faculty of color

Dear academic dads: 5 recommendations from a faculty of color

Riyad A. Shahjahan Dear academic dads, Seven years ago, at the beginning of my academic career, my partner, Kimine, and I had dinner with a Japanese distinguished scholar in Vancouver. Given the presence of our 3-year-old son at the table, our colleague shared a personal story about his son and expressed his biggest regret in his life. While he had worked hard as an academic pursuing grants and chairing his department, he hardly spent time…