In the Spotlight: Feb. 7, 2014

Kudos to these faculty, staff and students

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  • Laura Gray-Rosendale, professor of English, was recently interviewed by 12News in Phoenix about her book, College Girl: A Memoir, as well as President Barack Obama’s appointment of a task force to examine sexual violence issues on university campuses.
  • Lori Poloni-Staudinger, associate professor of politics and international affairs, along with Candice Ortbals of Pepperdine University, coauthored “Gendering Abbottabad: Agency and Hegemonic Masculinity in an Age of Global Terrorism,” in the January 2014 issue of Gender Issues journal.

    Poloni-Staudinger also recently signed a learning agreement grant with the Kettering Foundation. As part of the agreement, she will collaborate with the foundation to research democratic capacity-building associated with statewide issue forums. Poloni-Staudinger has been serving for the last year as statewide coordinator of Arizona Deliberates, a collaborative effort between Poloni-Staudinger at NAU and partners at Maricopa Community College District and Our Family Services, a non-profit in Pima County. The learning agreement will investigate how coordination of statewide forums can increase democratic capacity at both a state and local level, thereby ameliorating a democracy void in Arizona.

  • Wendy Holliday, head of academic programs and course support at Cline Library, and Jim Rogers, associate professor and director of the Intensive English Language Institute at Utah State University, have been chosen as the winners of the Association of College and Research Libraries Instruction Section Ilene F. Rockman Publication of the Year Award for their article “Talking About Information Literacy: The Mediating Role of Discourse in a College Writing Classroom.” The award recognizes an outstanding publication related to library instruction published in the past two years. In their study, Holliday and Rogers analyze how librarians and writing instructors’ word choices focusing on “sources” as containers instead of the ideas within them may lead students to focus on finding sources to fulfill the assignment parameters rather than engaging more fully with the information to learn about the research topic. The award, donated by Emerald Group Publishing Ltd., consists of a plaque and a cash prize of $3,000. Holliday and Rogers will receive the award during the 2014 ALA annual conference in Las Vegas.