Tag Research

Research Groundbreakers: Spotlighting Ashton, Fukushima, Rothberg, Simmons and Williams for their research work at the U

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Research Groundbreakers: Spotlighting Ashton, Fukushima, Rothberg, Simmons and Williams for their research work at the U

The University of Utah has a rich research history. Thanks to its students, faculty, staff and shareholders, research at the U will only continue to grow, bringing innovations and discoveries to our society.

With this in mind, the Office of the Vice President for Research (VPR) and Office of Sponsored Projects (OSP) are showcasing different researchers to spotlight our university’s studies and potential breakthroughs. Here are some of the U’s Research Groundbreakers.

Dr. Annie Isabel Fukushima – Featured and interviewed for Hulu’s ‘Out There: Crimes of the Paranormal’ – Episode 8, ‘The Ghosts of Chinatown’

Dr. Annie Isabel Fukushima was featured and interviewed for the Hulu special “Out There: Crimes of the Paranormal” – Episode 8, “The Ghosts of Chinatown” produced by the Duplass Brothers and directed by Dolly Li.

Fukushima served as an expert witness for a criminal case in 2012. Discussion of the case appeared in her award-winning book, Migrant Crossings: Witnessing Human trafficking in the U.S. (Stanford University Press, 2019), which received the American Sociological Association’s Book Award on Asia America. The Ghosts of Chinatown is based on a legal case of People of the State of California Plaintiff v. Tam, Liu, Wu, and Zeng. The complicated case involved elders being scammed and also tapped into a community’s belief system about ghosts and ghost marriages.

As part of the societal impact of her research as an ethnic studies scholar, Dr. Fukushima has offered her expertise for criminal, civil, and immigration cases. Her expertise in racialized and gender-based violence is nationally recognized. “We oftentimes think of research and the furtherance of knowledge in scholarly publications, grant implementation, and as pedagogues in the classroom,” said Fukushima. “However, the scholar’s impact is so wide and how we further knowledge can even shape policy, law, and the courtroom.”

In this particular case, it was one where immigration, criminalization, and quasi-human trafficking cohered. Over a decade later, the case was covered on Hulu because the use of ghosts to facilitate scams has re-emerged.

Check out the full-length groundbreakers here.

INTERDISCIPLINARY POST-DOCTORAL AND FACULTY TRAINING FELLOWSHIP

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Fellowship Start Date: August 1st 2024, Fellowship End Date: July 31st 2026

Apply Now

STEM education research on inclusive environments and interdisciplinary STEM research is growing. As the field continues to reflect dynamic communities and community research priorities, this novel post-doctoral program seeks to bring to the center critical frameworks. Through a thematic of “Queering STEM Education” we propose to bring together a cohort of STEM education and science studies scholars who take seriously critical frameworks of queer, decolonial, transnational, and / or intersectionality. To queer is to offer a critique, to contest the “naturalization of the categories of normal and deviant sexuality and binarized notions of sexed anatomy, gender identity, sexual desire, and sexual identity” (Thinking with Kristina Gupta and David Rubin 2021). To bring to the center analytics that are historically on the margins of STEM research, is, so to speak, a queering endeavor. Therefore, to queer STEM is truly an interdisciplinary and methodological complex undertaking. That is, to queer is to contend with the norms with how one does research, the modalities of research, the subjects in research, and the research questions asked that further how we come to know what counts as STEM. As conveyed by Jin a queer methodology “only works if we know where we stand, where we are trying to go, and whom we are trying to take with us” (Haritworn 2017). As fields of STEM seek to diversify, it is ever more pressing through a cohort model of scholars that we also to take seriously how research is done, and how a next generation of scholars are supported and trained to cross disciplines.

Who Should Apply: This program will support the training of three postdoctoral fellows. Ideal candidates include individuals who graduated in the past 4 years, and whose research includes:

  • Discipline-based education researchers (DBER) interested in queering their methodologies or bringing into their research queer analytics.
  • Science studies scholars who bring into their research queer methods or frameworks.
  • Interdisciplinary scholars who bring to the center of their research STEM related fields.