In the Spotlight: April 20, 2012

Kudos to these faculty, staff and students
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  • KNAU staff recently won four regional Edward R. Murrow journalism awards. The winning entries will now compete against other regional winners for national Murrow awards, to be presented in June. The four winners in the five-state Intermountain West Region include:
    • Overall writing: Gillian Ferris Kohl for her piece Pollen Blizzard. This is the fourth year Kohl has won the award for best overall writing.
    • Feature: Laurel Morales, KNAU’s Fronteras Desk correspondent, for her piece Blind Youth See the Grand Canyon.
    • Newscast: January 10, 2010, newscast the morning after Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords was shot outside of a Tucson grocery store.
    • Reporting Hard News: Daniel Kraker, KNAU alumnus, for his story on the Navajo Census.

    In the last eight years, KNAU has won 46 regional Murrow awards and four national awards.

  • Eric Otenyo, professor of politics and international affairs, recently was appointed associate editor of the peer-reviewed International Journal of the Academy of Organizational Behavior Management by the International Academy of Organizational Behavior Management. He also serves on the editorial board of The International Journal of Management Science and Information Technology, the official publication of the North American Institute of Science and Information Technology, and the International Journal of Services, Economics and Management.
  • Ricardo Guthrie, assistant professor of ethnic studies, organized a panel and presented a paper, “Not Just The Help: Black Women’s Resistance and Activism,” at the 36th annual conference of the National Council for Black Studies last month in Atlanta. The panel examined the role of black women in developing resistance, activism and independent voices during the Jim Crow to Civil Rights era (late-1890s to 1960s), as expressed through literary imaginings, pop culture and political activism. Guthrie’s paper compared the historical record of black women’s resistance to cinematic treatments such as The Help, based on the fictional novel of the same title.
  • Linda Robyn, professor of criminology and criminal justice, recently published the article, “State-Corporate Crime on the Navajo Nation: The Legacy of Uranium Mining,” in the Journal of Indigenous Studies Network. The article is available online.
  • Barbara Torre Veltri, assistant professor of education, recently published “Educator Abroad: Teaching (Insegnare) and Learning (Imparare) with Italian Children,” in Social Studies and the Young Learner. The article abstract is available here.
  • Faculty and students from the department of physics and astronomy recently participated in the 43rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in the The Woodlands, Texas.
    • Nadine Barlow, professor, presented “Distribution and Characteristics of Martian Low Aspect Ratio Layered Ejecta (LARLE) Craters.”
    • Christine Atkins, graduate student, presented “Impact Crater Morphologies as Indicators of Volatiles in Northeastern Arabia Terra, Mars.”
    • Margaret Landis, undergraduate student, presented “Analysis of Impact Craters in the 0-20N 0-30E Region of Arabia Terra, Mars, and Implications for Volatiles.”
    • Christopher Mount, graduate student, presented “Time Evolution and Inter-Annual Variability of Seasonal Ice on the Mars Northern Polar Cap.”
  • Faculty and students in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences participated in the National Ethnic Studies Association’s 40th annual conference this month in New Orleans.
    • T. Mark Montoya, instructor of ethnic studies, presented a paper, “I Could Be Illegal: The Citizenship Regime and Other-Americans in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” and chaired a panel, “Mediating Citizenship and Ideology among Latino/a Populations.”
    • Bryan Kimoto, senior philosophy major, presented a paper, “Recasting Identity: Counter-Hegemonic Views of the Self.”
    • Dana Krementz, junior biology major, presented a paper, “Subjected to the Border: How the Material Border Produces Disposable Subjects.”
    • Nathania Garcia, senior sociology major, presented a paper, “Deconstructing Control: Citizenship for Undocumented and Queer Identities.”
    • Montoya also presented a paper, “When Injustice Becomes Law: Border Politics and the Banning of Ethnic Studies in Arizona;” chaired a panel, “Injustice, Information and Nativism;” and was a respondent for a panel, “Borderlands Short Films,” at the Association for Borderlands Studies annual meeting and Western Social Science Association 54th annual conference last week in Houston, Texas.
  • Wendy Garrison, solution center team lead in ITS, and Gretchen Wesbrock, assistant director in residence life, were presented with this year’s leadership award by the Service Professional Advisory Council at its annual meeting this week.
  • Susan Maestas and Lyndsey Fox
    Susan Maestas, mail services supervisor, left, nominated Lyndsey Fox, undergraduate student and employee of Postal Services, for the 2012 Student Employee of the Year award.

    Lyndsey Fox, an undergraduate student majoring in geology and history, was selected as NAU’s Student Employee of the Year for 2012. Fox has worked for three years as a student employee for NAU Postal Services and will graduate in December. She was presented with the award last week and also received a gift certificate donated by the NAU Bookstore. Emily Kaufman, a senior majoring in biology who works at NAU’s Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics, was selected as runner-up for the award.