2024 Founders Endowment Awards

Humanities Theme:
Dr. Emma Rose, SIAS and Dr. Maria-Tania Bandes Becerra Weingarden, SIAS
Performance as Praxis: Teaching storytelling for career connections

In this project, Dr. Rose and Dr. Bandes Becerra Weingarden plan to partner together to develop and research the efficacy of a module on storytelling for professional contexts that is steeped in evidence-based educational practices from theatre and applied to other disciplines such as design.  Human skills, colloquially known as "soft skills," are consistently considered differentiators by employers.  Students who develop strong human skills like communication, collaboration, teamwork, and conflict resolution, are well-positioned to transition into professional careers and experience success.  However, many courses and programs do not explicitly teach these skills.  A previous study conducted by Dr. Rose (Rose, Putnam, MacDonald, in press), identified storytelling as a particular human skill that students were interested in getting more explicit practice in.  During the upcoming research project, the PIs will design a unit on storytelling and pilot the unit in one or more design courses.  This research has the dual benefit of highlighting the importance of the humanities for students and connecting these concepts to career related skills.

Humanities Theme:
Dr. Cassie Miura, SIAS
Hajichi Hand Tattoos as Embodied Rhetoric of Resistance

This project explores the growing interest in hajichi tattoos by young women in the global Okinawan diaspora with special emphasis on Hawaii which is home to the largest Uchinanchu population outside of Okinawa.  By examining the print-based and digital discourse that has made hajichi revival possible.  Historically, hajichi refers to hand tattoos featuring organic and geometric shapes with a wide range of cultural and spiritual significance.  The tattoos are hand-poked with bamboo needles and black ink on the wrists, backs of hands, knuckles, and fingers to mark significant rites of passage for Uchinanchu girls and women.  The practice of Hajichi, an indigenous art practiced exclusively by and for women, was banned by the Meiji government in 1899 because it was regarded by the Japanese as primitive and disfiguring.  During this project the PI will "read" hajichi tattoos as an embodied form of rhetoric that resists colonization and advocates for the preservation and continuance of indigenous art forms and cultural practices.  She will visit the Okinawan festival in Hawaii and meet and conduct interviews in person with practicing haijchi artists, Uchinancu women who have elected to get hajichi tattoos and Okinawan scholar Lee A. Tonouchi.

Social Justice Theme:
Dr. Jingyi Li, School of Nursing and Healthcare Leadership
Promoting Health Equity Through Cultural Adaptation of Alzheimer's Cafe in Chinese American Communities

Dr. Li proposes to pilot test cultural adaptation of Alzheimer's Cafe (AC) in Chinese American communities through established partnerships with community health organizations supporting Chinese American families in the Puget Sound region.  AC is a regular social gathering for people with dementia (PWD) and their care partners.  Most cafe sessions include education on dementia or structured activities to provide opportunities for social connections.  Nearly 20 ACs meet regularly in Washington state.  However, there are currently no ACs developed with explicit consideration of the social and care needs of the Chinese American families caring for PWD. Chinese American families, as the largest Asian group in Washington State, often experience significant physical, mental, and social burdens associated with dementia diagnosis and caregiving activities.  Despite overwhelming and disparate needs, the use of supportive programs is lower among Chinese American families, in large part due to stigma around dementia and the lack of culturally and linguistically appropriate programs.  In Chinese, dementia translates as "crazy catatonic," and the symptoms of dementia are interpreted as a mental illness.  As a result, stigma around dementia triggers an intense negative response among Chinese Americans to seek support.  The pilot project aims to culturally adapt AC in Chinese American communities through established partnerships with community health organizations, integrating expertise from the advisory board of the Dementia-Friendly Washington Learning Collaborative initiated by the University of Washington Memory and Brain Wellness Center to catalyze a community-centered, interdisciplinary collaboration.

Social Justice Theme:
Dr. Alison Cardinal, SIAS
Language Justice in Communication Design

Dr. Cardinal will complete the draft of a book proposal and showcase the findings from her HIV/AIDS clinical research study work. This book project will bring together multiple community-engaged scholarship projects that Dr. Cardinal has been part of for the last six years that work towards equality for immigrant and refugee populations locally and nationally by improving language access.  Her work seeks to not only define language justice but to demonstrate through extensive community work what language justice looks like and how to do it.  Her research focuses on working with immigrant and refugee communities to understand the communication barriers multilingual communities face due to English-centric communication design.  The manuscript theorizes that the design of language content as a social justice issue, provides concrete examples of language justice in practice and will provide a robust toolkit for transforming how language access is practiced in whatever context someone find themselves in.  

Social Science Theme:
Dr. Bara Safarova, School of Urban Studies and Dr. Nara Almeida, School of Engineering and Technology
Community Engaged Civil Engineering and Urban Design Learning Experience at UWT

This project is to enhance the learning experience of UWT students directly by offering a new interdisciplinary, community engaged course, and indirectly, by involving students in the currently ongoing campus master planning process and giving our students a voice in the process.  Students will be charged with developing a campus master-plan based on resilient city principles, addressing climate change, building in equity, and involving the student body in the design process by leading a campus-wide engagement campaign.  Regular meetings between urban design and civil engineering students will facilitate knowledge exchange and skill development.  In summary, this collaborative project seeks to bridge the gap between civil engineering and urban design education, preparing students to tackle the challenges of resilient city design, climate change, urban equity, and engaging community in engineering and urban design projects.  By integrating interdisciplinary learning, community engagement, and practical application, the capstone program aims to produce graduates equipped to address the complex sustainability issues facing urban environments.

Social Science Theme:
Dr. Amanda Sesko, SIAS
Capturing Experienced Invisibility Among Individuals with Multiple Stigmatized Identities

The focus of this project is on intersectional invisibility, a unique form of discrimination, experienced by individuals with multiple stigmatized identities (e.g., Black women); an experience discussed for decades by Black feminist scholars. During psychosocial work with a collaborator, Dr. Sesko has documented the invisibility effects from the perceiver's perspective. The most recent research sought to bring a quantitative lens to qualitative experiences of invisibility, by capturing how experiences of invisibility (not being seen or heard) matter for well-being among individuals with multiple-stigmatized identities. To measure invisibility, based on our previous work, we created an experienced invisibility scale (EIS).  The 13-item EIS asks questions such as "my contributions to group discussions often go unnoticed", "things I have said are sometimes misremembered as being said by someone else" (answered on 1-not at all true, to 7-very true scales).  We conducted initial psychometric tests; however, there is a need to more adequately validate the scale.  This proposed work will test the psychometrics of the EIS, with the aim of allowing for broad-scale use by scholars interested in capturing, understanding, and reducing experiences of invisibility, a relatively under-recognized, but acute form of discrimination.  To accomplish this, we will be collecting large samples of participants to establish validity, asking questions such as does the EIS measure invisibility with good psychometric "fit", distinguish from like-constructs, and predict expected outcomes.

STEM Theme:
Dr. Martine De Cock, SET, Dr. Ling-Hong Hung, SET and Dr. Weichao Yuwen, School of Nursing and Healthcare Leadership 
Privacy-Preserving Generative AI for Equitable Cancer Research

AI is driving novel approaches for the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of cancer, the second leading cause of death in the US.  In healthcare, difficulties in obtaining training data, which is the lifeblood of AI models, are exacerbated by privacy concerns of patients and laws such as HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996). Synthetic Data Generation (SDG), the generation of data using generative AI models trained on real data (similar to GPT), is a potential solution of this data logjam.  Compared to other domains, SDG in healthcare is very challenging as one must ensure that the generation process preserves patient privacy and avoids systematic biases.  Indeed, synthetic data should not reveal sensitive information about patients in the real data and should be equally reliable for analysis across demographic subgroups.  The lack of equitable, privacy-preserving techniques to generate synthetic data for cancer research has severely affected the impact of SDG in this domain so far.  The long-term goal of this project is to develop equitable AI for the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of chronic diseases while protecting patient privacy. The hypothesis is that an advanced combination of machine learning and privacy-enhancing technologies will result in synthetic cancer research data that provides utility and privacy in an equitable manner across demographic subgroups.