Mariana Pacheco
Mariana completed a year-long ethnography of the Southside Free Press. This is a non-school-affiliated, community-based organization serving diverse adolescent staff writers who prepare articles for a monthly newspaper publication. She has just published a report of her research as Learning and Becoming Writers: Meaning, Identity, and Epistemology in a Newsroom Community of Practice in Mind, Culture, and Activity.
Mariana was lead PI on three research grants to support her research on:
- Equitable inclusion of immigrant parents and students in educational policy and decision-making
- Translanguaging practices in bilingual classrooms
- Participatory action research with bilingual Hmong and Latino youth with/out disabilities.
She also coordinated a colloquium at AAAL in Chicago on Teaching and Learning with Nationalist Narratives: Students and Teachers Crossing Borders with Agency, Cariño and Heart. Here she’s pictured with her co-presenters, including SLA student Colleen Hamilton.
Katrina Daly Thompson
Katrina received a Vilas Associates Award for 2018-2020, which recognizes new and on-going research of the highest quality and significance. She has also been selected for the Summer Humanities Research Fellowship, which supports tenured humanities faculty in pursuing the next big project. The fellowship seeks to inspire participants to think programmatically about their research as well as how effectively to pursue external funding to support their scholarship and advance their career. Both awards will enable her to continue work on her next book project, Progressive Muslims through Discourse.
As UW-Madison’s Swahili Specialist for the Mellon Big 10 Less Commonly Taught Languages Partnership with Michigan State University, Katrina produced two modules for advanced learners of Swahili: Jinsia na Mapenzi Afrika ya Mashariki [Gender and Sexuality in East Africa] and Dini Afrika ya Mashariki [Religion in East Africa] and presented at AAAL on “Queering Swahili-as-a-Foreign-Language Instruction.”
Katrina’s SLA student, Nelly Martin, finished her PhD in SLA in 2017 and has just published an article online in World Englishes: Bahasa gado‐gado: English in Indonesian popular texts.
Kate Vieira
Kate’s research, teaching, and service in adolescent literacies and multiliteracy studies in education have been recognized with her appointment as the Susan J. Cellmer Distinguished Chair in Literacy. Her position begins in fall 2018 in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
Her first year will be spent in Colombia together with scholars at the University of Manizales Center for the Advanced Study of Children and Youth working on the project, Writing for Peace: An Ethnographic Study of a Youth Peace Education Program in Colombia.
So far the year has seen publication of two essays by Kate: Shifting Global Literacy Networks: How Emigration Promotes Literacy Learning in Latvia in Anthropology and Education Quarterly and Literacy Studies in the 1990s: Moving through Space, Moving with Time in College Composition and Communication.
But Kate’s writing is not just of academic interest. If you want to read something wild, read her creative nonfiction piece Fieldwork with a Five-Year-Old: A Summative Report, which won the 2018 Donald Murray Prize for creative nonfiction and was featured in Writing on the Edge. Kate begins, “So I wrote this thing for anyone who is divorced, is a single parent, has field-worked, and/or has a love-hate relationship with the social scientific research report. Ok. I wrote it for myself. It kind of broke me open. It’s about writing, by the way, and also pain, and also research methods.”