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Volume
75
Number
4
Vanessa
Siddle Walker earns $200,000 Grawemeyer Award
Vanessa
Siddle Walker, associate professor in the division of educational
studies at Emory, has received the 2000 University of Louisville Grawemeyer
Award in Education for her book Their Highest Potential: An African-American
School Community in the Segregated South. Walker says educators who
are seeking to understand failure among African-American students in
schools today can learn from the experiences of black students during
segregation. Using a case study of Caswell County Training School in
North Carolina from 1933 to 1969, she argues that, despite the limited
resources of segregated schools, many children in the African-American
community believed in their ability to achieve at the school. She attributes
the students’ high motivation to the school’s strong administrative
leadership, intense parental and community involvement, and high expectations
among teachers.
Shore
leads Center on Rituals and Myths in Working Families
Emory anthropologist
Bradd Shore will lead the new Center
for Myth and Ritual in American Life, established with a $3.6 million
grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Shore and a group of ten
anthropologists, psychologists, and other social scientists and fourteen
graduate students and post-doctoral fellows will study middle-class
families in the contemporary American South. “People are always
puzzled by the very idea that one can actually study myth and ritual
in middle-class American life,” says Shore. “Something as
basic as the viability of dinnertime has become a matter of national
debate. Myth and ritual are hardly dead in our lives, but they are taking
on many new and sometimes surprising forms.” He says that the issues
shaping myth and ritual for American families today include the struggles
to balance home and work obligations, the rise of mass media in creating
modern myths, the growth of culturally and religiously mixed marriages,
the changing role of organized religion for American families, and the
proliferation of new forms of communication.
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| EM
précis |
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| A
Rhodes for Danielle Sered |
|
 EMORY
SENIOR DANIELLE L. SERED
has been named a Rhodes Scholar. She is the sixteenth Emory
student—and only the second woman from Emory—to be
chosen for the scholarship, which provides for two or three
years of graduate study at Oxford University in England.
“After
spending a whole day with all the candidates and learning of
all the amazing and inspiring work they are doing, it is a very
humbling experience to have been chosen,” says Sered, a
member of Phi Beta Kappa.
Sered,
an English major with a minor in French, will pursue a master’s
degree in English at Oxford. Her concentration at Emory has
been contemporary Irish literature, particularly Irish women
poets. Last summer, the Evanston, Illinois, native spent nine
weeks in Ireland interviewing a dozen women poets for her senior
honors thesis.
A
highlight of her research, she says, was discovering poet Kerrie
Hardie, whose work is not published in the United States. “I
think she’s stunning. She’s the real thing,”
says Sered.
Her
concentration at Emory has been
contemporary Irish literature.
Sered’s
critical essay on the work of Irish poet Medbh McGuckian won
a national Norton Scholars Prize from W. W. Norton Company and
the Modern Language Association.
“Danielle
is an extraordinary student, an incredible scholar, and a wonderful
member of the Emory community,” says Assistant Dean of
Emory College Joanne B. Brzinski. “The kudos are all hers.”
Sered
has served as editor-in-chief of The Emory Fever, a student
literary and art magazine, and is president of the Stipe Society.
She is the founder of ArtsReach, an arts program that teaches
conflict resolution, prejudice reduction, and AIDS
and sex education in Atlanta city schools and juvenile detention
centers. She also founded the Emory Women’s Alliance.
Emory’s
most recent Rhodes Scholar was Stanley
J. Panikowski III, a 1992 Rhodes Scholar. The first
Emory woman to receive a Rhodes Scholarship was
Heather A. Warren ’85T,
in 1981.
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| Trinidadian
Barrow expresses faith through music at Oxford |
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| Oxford
students have been blessed with a new chaplain and director of
religious life who also brings the rich traditions of the Caribbean
to this tiny Georgia town. “You can’t limit spiritual
formation just to sitting down and talking,” says Trinidad
native Reverend Darryl R. Barrow, an accomplished steel-pan and
congo drum musician, who joined the Oxford community this fall.
“Music is another way to grow and connect spiritually.”
Barrow has served pastorates in Jamaica and the Leeward Islands
and, most recently, as associate minister at First United Methodist
Church in Pensacola, Florida, where he founded the Success Youth
Steel Band Orchestra. “I am looking forward to being part
of this community and to opening my home and my faith to those
here. I have a passion for this work, and I am ready to share
it.”
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{
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“You
can’t limit spiritual formation just to sitting down and
talking.”
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Scholar-activist
An-Na’im
receives human rights award |
| Asa
G. Candler Professor of Law Abdullahi
An-Na’im has received the 1999 Dr. J. P. Van Pragg
Award from the Dutch Humanist Ethical Society for his work in
promoting human rights. The society cited An-Na’im for his
role “as a broker between Western advocates of universal
human rights and the Islamic world, and for his academic work
that encourages dialogue and understanding on human rights between
secular and religious leaders." A specialist in comparative
and Islamic law, An-Na’im directs two international research
projects aimed at connecting scholarship with real-world reforms.
The first, “Women and Land in Africa,” is a grass-roots
investigation of women’s legal and actual access to land
ownership in seven African countries. The other is a global mapping
of the legal, cultural, sociological, demographic, and political
realities of Muslims in forty countries. “For advocacy to
be effective,” says An-Na’im, “exchange of information
is critical. [Without advocacy,] the real world will never change.” |
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