Mills Matters

On April 13, the Mills College Trans Studies Speaker Series welcomed internationally-known technologist and network security expert Chelsea Manning for a talk show-styled event at Lisser Hall with Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women’s Leadership Susan Stryker. Co-sponsored by We Are the Voices and the President’s Office, “Volatile Contexts: Identity, Technology and Politics in a Moment of Danger” addressed issues ranging from national security and surveillance, artificial intelligence, trans rights, critiques of the carceral complex, and prison abolitionism.

Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst who was convicted in 2013 after leaking thousands of classified documents to media website WikiLeaks, began the conversation describing her background and time in the military before her eventual arrest and prison sentence. “One of the key takeaways [from prison] for me personally was the solidarity and the network of people I’ve depended on to survive in this environment,” she recalled. “But time and time again, it was the guards who were the most violent people—there were never any repercussions for them or accountability.”

During that time, she also began her gender transition, which led to her fighting for a year and a half to gain access to hormone therapy. Even though she won that case, Manning was still kept in a prison for men until her eventual release in 2017, when President Barack Obama commuted her sentence. From there, Manning went on to become an outspoken activist in politics and the tech world.

“I don’t focus on one thing [for activism]—I try to dabble,” she told Stryker. During the talk, not only did she touch on trans rights—such as for gender-nonconforming prisoners in the prison-industrial complex and for transgender refugees fleeing the Ukraine War but she also addressed ethics and accountability for tech companies today.

Moreover, one of her biggest points was how social media feeds online political discourse, preventing real activism. “It’s so easy to get caught up in that ‘thing’—that ‘thing’ trending on Twitter, that ‘thing’ your friends are arguing about,” she argued. “Because I feel like that ‘thing’ is the distraction machine, distracting us from the reality of what we really need to do over the next few decades.

“We don’t have an awareness problem; we have an action problem,” Manning added. “How do we get our power back? How do we live as humans in this world?”

These are questions that We Are The Voices (WATV) continuously tackles. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, WATV connects Mills students with local and national writers, performers, and scholars, collaborating around transformative art, critical studies, and oppositional scholarship. The project sponsors a number of programs and projects, including the Mills College Trans Studies Speaker Series, multiple digital multimedia journals, and the podcast We Are The Voices Radio. WATV takes proactive steps to support and nurture the next activists of our time, namely through its Community Collaborators program.

Supervised by faculty advisor Stephanie Young, graduate students in the program design and implement public projects that explore the transformative power of literature in East Bay communities and beyond. One 2021–22 collaborator, Caroline Gasparini, MFA ’22, a poetry candidate in the English MFA program, created the digital literary journal OUT!spoken, which features works by Bay Area LGBTQIA+ writers and activists in conversation with the fight to end mass incarceration. “Ultimately, my work seeks to further catalyze discussion around mass incarceration, LGBTQIA+ rights, and the transformative social change that occurs when centering the voices and stories of those most impacted by the issues at hand,” Gasparini wrote in her community collaborator bio. Another graduate poetry student and 2021–22 collaborator, Tovah Strong, MFA ’22, runs Perforations, a digital multimedia journal seeking work that examines and peels away borders—particularly the US-Mexico border.

Gasparini and Strong are a few examples of the collaborations WATV supports, working in tandem with activists to promote their creative projects on a public platform. These students take action through transformative art and writing, uplifting the voices of marginalized communities—just as Manning called for.

The end of the academic year typically brings with it a slew of faculty retirements. But with no one calling it permanently quits at the end of the 2021–22 year, three longtime professors who are leaving (or have left) Mills to pursue different paths were granted the status of professor emeritae: • Sandra Banks, who had served as assistant adjunct professor of chemistry since 1984.

She reports that her post-Mills plans, depending on COVID-19, will involve travel. • Julie Chen, MA ’89, who departed as professor of book art at Mills since 1996. She is heading to the University of Wisconsin, which has a long history in book art, to be an art professor. • Maggie Hunter, who left Mills in 2021 to take the position of senior director for the Centers for

Education Justice and Community Engagement at UC Berkeley. She had been at Mills since 2007, starting as a professor of sociology, and leaving with the title of associate provost.

In March 2020, the Student Hardship Fund was established to assist current Mills students with pandemicrelated costs. Since then, more than $208,000 has been raised and distributed directly to students, covering needs such as: • Travel and transportation for those who left campus mid-semester • Technology to support attendance of online classes

• Basic housing and medical costs Undocumented and international students received financial relief thanks to donors and a partnership grant, as they weren’t eligible to receive money through the federal Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund.

Mills also bolstered other Collegebased support tied to pandemic needs, such as: • Additional food, hygiene products, and school supplies through the

Mills Pantry • Free housing costs in summer 2020 • The waiving of early departure fees for students who left housing • Free testing and vaccinations for

COVID-19 on campus The Student Hardship Fund will continue post-Northeastern merger; visit mills.edu/giving to contribute.

It’s quite a sight to see: grown adults shimmying up tall tree trunks, then attaching themselves near the tops. There, they move from top to bottom, sawing off chunks that come thumping to the ground. It’s the safer way to fell a tree, one that prevents teetering trunks from giving in to gravity and crashing into buildings—and people.

As the estimated 10,000 original trees still standing on the Mills campus near their 150th birthdays (and the end of their lifespans), this process is something that’s happening more and more often to keep the community safe. A particularly windy storm in January of this year brought down seven trees— including one onto the roof of a vacant Mary Morse Hall, and another along the banks of Leona Creek near Mills Hall.

Luan Stauss, senior facilities manager at Mills, is part of a hardworking staff that maintains the College’s 135 heavily wooded acres and its buildings, but handling this kind of specialized work requires different training. “You have to have two certified tree guys—one’s in the air, and one’s below,” she says. “If you’re not certified, you can’t go up and rescue.” The facilities staff previously included two such workers, but those efforts are now undertaken by an outside firm that comes to campus for a variety of problems—including a fungus that was killing off black acacias in 2021.

“We have [the firm] come every year, but it’s usually very focused—the work is on one section of the campus at a time,” Stauss says. “It’s like taking sails off of a boat, so when a big wind comes through, the trees won’t get blown over.” In the wake of that January storm, the firm—Hummingbird Tree Services, based in San Bruno—was on campus for five weeks trimming and taking down trees that were “threatening buildings, or about to be,” Stauss adds. “We prioritize the trees that are near people spaces, so we have to keep an eye on the others out in the back and other places like that.”

Those observations are carried out by Ron Galvan, the grounds manager who supervises the half-dozen groundskeepers who handle the lawns and gardens, pruning and watering, and bodies of water. Galvan, who’s been on the facilities staff at Mills since 1995, spends much of his day out and about, and he gets to know the trees fairly well. “When Ron sees a tree that’s growing, he just knows when it needs pruning: when things are too dense, how the light looks coming in,” Stauss says. The Mills facilities staff will take care of those basic tree-trimming tasks in order to free up the specialists for the more difficult projects.

There are, of course, many varieties of flora and fauna on campus—many of them planted by one of the founders himself. As mentioned in the book Celebrating the Cultural Landscape Heritage of Mills College, Cyrus Mills was fascinated with horticulture. In the years since, the collection has changed and evolved. For instance, when the original eucalyptus trees that lined Kapiolani Road by F.W. Olin Library came down, a different, more sustainable species (Eucalyptus saligna) went in, chosen by a team dedicated to heritage landscape planning at Mills, and in consultation with specialists at The Presidio in San Francisco. In 12 years, those plantings have grown to 80 feet in height.

Even with all this maintenance, efforts must continue. The five weeks of tree work this winter yielded many loads of wood scraps that needed hauling away, but the proliferation of plant life will quickly fill in the gaps. “There’s stumps everywhere, but in six months, the trees we’ve taken out now—you won’t even notice,” Stauss says.

ROBBIE SWEENY

Art+Process+Ideas: Craig Calderwood and Christy Chan ■ June 25–August 21

The 2022 Art+Process+Ideas exhibition will feature new work by the current A+P+I artists in residence, Craig Calderwood and Christy Chan. Calderwood’s intricate and decorative works are rendered through a personal vernacular of symbols and patterns. Recalling the private languages that underground communities of queer and trans people used for decades, Calderwood develops these patterns and symbols though research into history, personal narratives, and pop cultural moments to tell stories both personal and fantasized. Chan is an interdisciplinary artist who works in video, narrative filmmaking, installation, storytelling, and community organizing. The winner of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, her hybrid social practice-public art projects seek to foster opportunities for self-representation by communities of color, with the belief that story telling is a form of narrative justice—and narrative justice is a form of social justice. The museum is open 11:00 am-4:00 pm Tuesday through Sunday and until 7:30 pm Wednesday. Admission is free. Visit mcam.mills.edu for more information.

The Mills College Art Museum was featured in the 7x7 article “7 Small Museums With Mighty Offerings in the Bay Area” this January, which spotlighted small museums around the Bay Area for their boundary-pushing collections.

Sociology Gema Cardona has a chapter titled “Womxn of Color’s Community Engagement in College: The Role of Family in Defining and Sustaining Community-Engaged Service” in the newly published book Pursuit of Liberation: Critical Service-Learning as Capacity Building for Historicized, Humanizing, and Embodied Action.

In March, Professor of Spanish &

Caulfield’s essay-memoir, “La tentación por los espejos o Antonio Beneyto transformándose,” was published in the literary magazine Barcarola: Revista de Creación Literaria 98/99.

Last year, Associate Provost and

Chung published an article with her research assistants from the Mills Cognition Lab titled “How do Gender, Emotional Valence, and Attractiveness Affect Facial Recognition Memory?” in the Journal of Integrated Social Science. She also published “The Effects of Culture and View of Aging on Perspective Taking in Young Adults” in the journal Advances in Cognitive Psychology in 2021. Chung’s cognitive aging research was highlighted in The Boston Globe article “Still cautious, many older residents trim back their lifestyles in the time of COVID.” In her role as associate provost, Chung published the op-ed article “Cognitive and Diversity Principles Can Bolster Classroom Dynamics” on Psychreg in January.

Faul and 2021 Russell Scholars Sofia Almeida ’23 and Lily Jung ’23 presented a poster on last summer’s work at the Geological Society of America national annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, in October 2021.

Fenley produced one of seven unique choreographies for Li Chiao Ping, a dance professor at the University of Wisconsin, to perform in her project “Women Dancing.”

of Music Nalini Ghuman was the Wilkinson Guest Lecturer at the Wells School of Music at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, where she presented the lecture “Modes, Mantras, and Modernism: Indian Encounters & Influences in Early 20th-Century Britain.” Last December, Ghuman’s review-article, “Friendship and Prejudice: Music, Race, & Sexuality in 20th-century Britain,” appeared in the journal Fontes artis Musicae.

Karniouchina and Associate Professor of Business Carol Theokary published a study titled “The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Restaurant Resilience: Lessons, Generalizations, and Ideas for Future Research,” in Service Science.

Dean of Students Chicora Martin was recently elected as NASPA’s (Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education) next board chair.

presented her current research on “Refugeetude Aesthetics: Gender Negotiations and Cultural Production in Lebanon’s Burj al-Barajneh and Jordan’s Al-Zaatari Refugee Camps” at an Andrew W. Mellon Workshop, “Im/Mobilities: New Directions in the Humanities,” held at the American Academy in Berlin from June 13–17. She also authored the article “Contesting Militarized Violence: Indigenous Women Poets from Northeast India” in the journal Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism in 2021.

History Sarah Miller received the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for museum scholarship by the College Art Association for her book Documentary in Dispute.

in Education Julie Nicholson coauthored Supporting Gender Diversity in Early Childhood Classrooms: A Practical Guide and Radically Listening to Transgender Children: Creating Epistemic Justice through Critical Reflection and Resistant Imaginations, both centering on creating genderaffirming early learning environments for all children.

Payne received the 2022 SEAMUS Award at the Society for ElectroAcoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) National Conference, held at Western Michigan University from March 30–April 2.

gave a keynote speech in June at the Crones, Crime, and the Gothic conference at Falmouth University in the UK, and at the International Crime Fiction conference in Bamberg, Germany, she presented the paper, “Why Things Burn, Girls on Fire.”

was quoted in a Mercury News article about Jeopardy! champion Amy

Associate Professor of Studio Art Yulia Pinkusevich was featured in The Art Newspaper article “For Ukrainian artists in the US, war rekindles ties to the homeland,” posted in April. She describes her family’s immigration from Ukraine to the United States, and how art allows her to channel her emotions in light of these struggles. “I’m terribly sad for all the people going through this,” Pinkusevich says. “The trauma will last for many generations.” “Causality, Isorithm 2” (2018), seen above, is part of a series she has done based on vintage military depictions of nuclear bomb blasts. Pinkusevich also has a solo exhibition on display at Round Weather in Oakland through July 23.

Schneider, who became a trans role model in the public eye. Stryker noted how Schneider gave people “a chance to see a trans person in public without it being caught up in polarizing debates about trans issues.”

Jaci Urbani and her graduate research student, Sam Watson-Alvarado ’13, MA ’22, co-wrote a chapter in the book Contemporary Perspectives on Research on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID19) in Early Childhood Education. Their chapter is titled “Addressing Inequities: Experiences of Early Childhood Special Educators During the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

was interviewed as part of Pearson Education’s celebration of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. The audiogram featuring Urry was posted on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

was interviewed in the French magazine Tempura: un Magazine sur le Japon about the effects of personal and interpersonal development in Japanese society in the article “Japon enPhoto of Jane Yamashiro’s book Redefining Japaneseness Crise D’Identités.”

Wagner was named as one of Los Angeles’ most influential artists on the digital platform Frieze Viewing Room, and she received additional recognition from Frieze for her exhibition End Grain: the Displaced Shadow, which ran from January 11 to March 11 at Crown Point Press. Wagner also curated an exhibition at Saint Joseph’s Art Society in San Francisco, titled Transparency/ Opacity. Other participating Mills artists included Adjunct Professor of Studio Art Jennifer Brandon;

Art Kija Lucas; Assistant Professor of Practice Yétúndé Olagbaju, MFA ’20;

Art Sandra Ono; Associate Professor of Studio Art Yulia Pinkusevich; Rosana Castrillo Diaz, MFA ’03; Nicole Phungrasamee Fein, MFA ’02; Tressa Pack, MFA ’12; and Lindsay Rothwell, MFA ’19.

Zamora is the sacred drum keeper with the wellness project Spirit Root Medicine People: Indigenous Two Spirit Lifeways. In November 2021, this project was awarded a significant grant for the next two years from Belonging In Oakland: A Just City Cultural Fund, hosted by the East Bay Community Foundation’s Program for Arts and Culture for Social and Racial Justice.