Kristine J. Ajrouch, Professor of Sociology, was quoted in a National Public Radio story, The U.S. census sees Middle Eastern and North African people as white. Many don't. Her research on Middle Eastern/Arab American identity was also cited in this newly published study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found that Middle Eastern and North African (MENA)-related ancestries and names are not seen as white by both MENA people and people who identify as non-Hispanic white, despite the Office of Management and Business categorizing people of MENA descent as "white."

Professor Ajrouch's research has focused, for over twenty years, on Middle Eastern/Arab Americans beginning with ethnic identity formation among adolescent children of immigrants followed by the study of social relations, aging and health. She has studied factors that influence racial identity among those with Middle Eastern/Arab ancestry, as well as how race and ethnicity influence health disparities. Professor Ajrouch has actively advocated inclusion of the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) identity category on the US Census. For the NPR story, Professor Ajrouch was asked to comment about the relationship immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa have with white identity in the U.S. and how that has changed over history, including when earlier generations of immigrants from Lebanon and Syria were more likely to identify as white.

Sandra Murchison, Director of the School of Art and Design, was recently elected to the Board of Directors of the National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA). The National Council of Arts Administrators is an organization whose primary purpose is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, the identification of problems, and the generation of shared solutions to the multitude of issues that confront arts administrators in higher education today. Murchison was also recently elected as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Riverside Arts Center in Ypsilanti.

Bethany Ball, award-winning novelist, will serve as the Dennis M. Beagen Keynote Speaker for the 42nd Undergraduate Symposium on Friday, March 25.

"We are thrilled to have Bethany Ball return to Eastern as our 42nd Undergraduate Research Symposium keynote speaker," said Dana Heller, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Ball holds an undergraduate degree from Eastern and a Master of Fine Arts from Sarah Lawrence College. During her time at EMU, she served as a communications coordinator for the Women’s Center and worked in various departments, including Women’s Studies, Geology, and Student Affairs. Additionally, Ball was an Undergraduate Symposium participant in 1996 in the Department of History and Philosophy. She was also an intern at the University of Michigan Press.

The Department of English and the Journal of Narrative Theory would like to extend an invitation to members of the College of Arts and Sciences to attend our 2022 Dialogue event in which we collectively explore what cognitive narrative theory might teach us about the discourse around race in this complex historical moment. Even as we find ourselves physically isolated by a pandemic, we participate in reading/listening communities that are shaped increasingly by media and cultural artifacts that narrativize and mediate our contemporary moment, creating, for better or worse, spaces of affect for us to inhabit. Consequently, in an era when the illusion of the bourgeois liberal subject as independent, self-regulating and self-helping, has been exposed by national conversations about racism, we need to turn our attention to the complex phenomena of collective cognition and affect. How do the communities we belong to and the narratives created and consumed in these spaces shape how and what we feel?

This year’s Dialogue features two outstanding scholars in conversation. Dr. Sue J. Kim is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. This year’s Dialogue is inspired by her book, On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative (2013), which brings cognitive studies and cultural studies into dialogue to argue that predominant individualistic conceptions of anger and emotion are insufficient to explain its collective, structural, and historical nature. Dr. Kim is also the coeditor (with Meghan M. Hammond) of Rethinking Empathy Through Literature (2014), and was guest editor for “Decolonizing Narrative Theory,” a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory (Fall 2012). She will be in conversation with Dr. aliyyah i. abdur-rahman, Associate Professor of American Studies and English at Brown University. Her first book was Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race (2012). We are especially excited to hear more about Dr. abdur-rahman’s second book, Millennial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture (forthcoming from Duke UP), which examines the interrelation of political terror, social abjection, and aesthetic abstraction in contemporary African Diasporic literary and visual media.

JNT’s annual Dialogue is unique in that it foregrounds the importance of collaboration and discussion. Invited speakers not only present their expert research, but engage with each other’s work, and with questions prepared by members of the EMU community. This year we will contemplate questions of narrative, affect, and collective cognition particularly as they pertain to contemporary American discourse around race: Our current condition is one of profound unfulfillment and a sense of stasis. What are the aesthetic modes that help us survive, push through, and build relation in this space of disillusionment? Are what narrative theorist David Herman refers to as our “collective emotional standards” being changed by narrative forms that currently dominate our world? If, through their ability to summon anger or create empathy, political narratives have often been seen as the vehicles for action and agency, why and how are these stories failing us so frequently now? How have we yet to shift our approaches to narrative studies to account for these profound failures? What are the aesthetics that might chart a future without dictating what it might look like, or falling back on facile notions of liberal progress?