People
Professor Anne Marie Todd
Co-Director of The Loneliness Project
Dean of the College of Social Sciences
Anne Marie's scholarship explores environmental aesthetics and sense of place, as well as issues of sustainability education, community engagement and integrative learning.
Her work examines the way environmental rhetoric shapes our community history and sense of place. Her most recent book, Valley of Heart's Delight: Environment and Sense of Place in the Santa Clara Valley, focuses on the agricultural history of Silicon Valley. Her book, Communicating Environmental Patriotism: A Rhetorical History of the American Environmental Movement received the Christine Oravec Environmental Communication Research Award.
She has published more than 30 scholarly journal articles and book chapters, including research on climate literacy, gardening and food activism, and environmental messages in popular culture. She was named an SJSU Salzburg Fellow and SJSU University Scholar.
Anne Marie is a founding member of the International Environmental Communication Association.
Anne Marie received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Cultural Studies from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication in 2002.
Lawrence Quill is Professor of Political Theory at San José State University and a recipient of the S.J.S.U. President’s Scholar Award (2019-2020). He was a Technology and Democracy Fellow at the Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (C.R.A.S.S.H) at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom in 2015 and 2017. His latest book Nostalgia and Political Theory, was published by Routledge in 2024.
His current research focuses on loneliness, technology, and conservatism as a political philosophy.
Expertise: Family caregiving and care relationships, morality, home care, community-based aging, qualitative research methods, community-based research, ethnography, applied anthropology, communicating health science, aging and the life course
The main question that drives my research is, "What features of interpersonal communication enhance individual health and well-being?" I examine this question in both the health and family contexts. In health, I explore features of patient-provider-caregiver communication and how these communication behaviors and patterns impact individual health outcomes including mental and physical health as well as health care utilization and health management such as medication adherence. In the context of families, I am interested in how communication within a family system, particularly families that are considered high-risk (e.g., parental substance misuse), influences offspring developmental outcomes including mental health, substance use behaviors, and resilience. I employ mixed-methods and frequently collaborate with health care systems (i.e., Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, Stanford University School of Medicine, Santa Clara Valley Medical) and organizations pertaining to my research interests (i.e., Al-Anon World Services). My research goal is to implement programming (e.g., workshops, material resources) that facilitates change in communication behavior and promotes improved health and well-being.
Research Connections to Current Events
I am working on two projects that directly address current events. First, my Co-Investigator role on the Presence for Racial Justice study explores communication strategies that protect against anti-black racism in medicine. Specifically, we are partnering with four community clinics, that predominantly serve Black patients, to conduct interviews and focus groups with patients as well as providers to better understand the communication behaviors that positively and negatively affect Black patients. As part of this project, we also created a Community Advisory Board with clinic representatives from across the nation. The goal of this research is to develop educational programming for providers and resources for patients that enhance clinical interactions and reduce anti-black racism in medicine. Another project that directly addresses current events is an international survey study, of which I am Principal Investigator, about family rituals and resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey explores family rituals pre- and post-shelter-in-place in both the U.S. and Israel to examine how and which type of rituals foster resilience amidst the many challenges resulting from the pandemic. Findings will inform cultural differences in the way family is defined, the ritual behaviors that family’s practice, and how family rituals are associated with perceived ability to cope. This study extends theory on family systems and family rituals in terms of their utility to protect family’s against unexpected (non-normative) stressors and will support the development of practical recommendations that promote family rituals associated with greater resilience.
Personal Connections to Research
Three personal factors contributed to my RSCA pursuits: societal issues impacting relationships and health, scholarly partnerships, and student involvement. Following the death of George Floyd and the reigniting of the Black Lives Matter movement, I was deeply moved to act. I wanted to help support the mission of the Black Lives Matter movement and address the historical mistreatment towards people of color. As such, I was eager to participate in a successfully funded grant that examines and works to eliminate systemic racism in medicine, particularly towards Black patients. Another societal issue that I was eager to address was the pandemic and the subsequent challenges families faced. As I reflected on my own struggles during the pandemic, managing the care of two young children in a dual-income household, I noticed the rituals that helped us to maintain family function and resilience. Then I began to wonder how other families, particular those who experienced greater adversity during the shelter-in-place transition, used rituals to cope. Fortunately, I have a network of colleagues that are also invested in addressing these societal issues. My colleagues at Stanford University, School of Medicine, led the effort in developing the Presence for Racial Justice study to improve care of Black patients. The international survey to examine family rituals and resilience was made possible through my relationships with other family communication scholars. I contacted my colleagues at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Haifa to express my study idea to which they enthusiastically agreed to collaborate. Given the scope of these projects, I also wanted to include undergraduate and graduate student involvement. Multiple undergraduate and graduate students are supporting the Presence for Racial Justice program by coordinating interview and focus group recruitment, scheduling, and analyzing study data. I also incorporated a class assignment in my Advanced Family Communication course, where graduate students conducted a content analysis of the survey data, from operationalizing categories to coding and analyzing data, and wrote a paper to report their findings. Several students from this course are now co-authors on a manuscript stemming from this research.
Keywords
Interpersonal Communication, Health Communication, Family Communication, Resilience, Mental Health, Substance Use, Palliative Care, Patient-Provider Relationship, Implementation Science, Veterans
John Marlovits’ work addresses affect and psychogeography – the psychic and material infrastructures of everyday life -- and the way in which place-based practices facilitate personal and collective transformation. Marlovits’ research has focused on places – such as Seattle, California, Osaka – where the utopian, the futuristic, the retro, and the dystopian intermingle in odd combinations, shaping tensions that generate imaginative responses to cultural impasses, and formulating emerging and jury-rigged worlds. Marlovits is drawn to hybrid and “bad subjects” – such as the depressed, the skateboarder, the bohemian, the slacker, or the surf bum – that live out their cultural impasse, refuse its normativities, and seek new forms of personhood beyond melancholic attachments to impossible, or highly labor-disciplined, lives. He has written about psychogeographies of depression and the affective contradictions of neoliberalism in Seattle; and is currently working on a project titled “Stupid Wooden Toys: Infrastructure and the Dream-Work of Skateboarding” that examines skateboarding as a vernacular design practice for remaking publics and spaces of belonging in the margins of capitalist ruins.
Keywords:
Medical anthropology and psychiatry, science and technology, popular culture and publics
Dr. Woodhead is a clinical psychologist who studies mental health and aging, including depression, substance use, and loneliness. Her current work focuses on treatment of substance use among older adults (65 years and older), and understanding how substance use and mental health change throughout the adult lifespan. Her interest in loneliness stems from this line of research, as many individuals increase substance use in response to stress, transitions, and loneliness. In addition, her prior work at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System focused on treating veterans with depression, which is often highly related to loneliness.
Keywords
clinical geropsychology; substance use; aging; mental health; longitudinal data
Current Research Activities
My current RSCA activities answers a few questions: What are the impacts of high-tech economic geography/clusters in the nation on the surrounding communities? 2) How does the built environment & new micromobility infrastructure affect different crime (surrounding transit stations)? How successful was the SJ Bike system in residents mode change and what factors can support this further?
Research Connections to Current Events
My work on the impacts of high-tech clusters cope with the rise of anchor/high-tech based economic development/urban revitalization (e.g., Google-San Jose new development), The City's effort in expanding bike system and achieving their vision zero goal, encouraging transit ridership which is highly impacted by crime in the bay area.
Personal Connections to Research
The work on SJ Bikeways system and crime are personal motivation which brought me to San Jose to pursue my research in supporting a big change in a very auto-dominated area. My work on the tech clusters is for a book contract I have with Elsevier. My work on the SJ Bikeway is a sponsored grant too.
Keywords
Economic Geography, Built Environment, Healthy City, Active Mobility