Our faculty members participate in conferences around the world, conduct groundbreaking research, and publish books and articles that expand their knowledge and expertise. Here are a few recent highlights.
Kenneth Ganezer, professor of physics, delivered an invited talk at the Department of Energy’s “Fundamental Physics at the Intensity Frontier” workshop in Rockville, Md., Nov. 30-Dec. 2, 2011. He focused on a process in which regular matter, in particular a neutron, spontaneously transforms into its antimatter counterpart, an antineutron, which then annihilates with matter inside an oxygen nucleus. This process is also referred to as neutron oscillations and has been predicted by the leading theories of unification of the fundamental forces and particles on nature, including string theories, in which particles and antiparticles are entangled. The data for this search was taken by the Super-Kamiokande Experiment in Mozumi, Japan, which has been conducted for 16 years by a team of physicists including Ganezer, physics department chair Jim Hill, and William E. Keig of El Camino College, Compton Learning Center. A number of CSU Dominguez Hills students have been involved in the research at Super-Kamiokande, which is continuing to take data.
Vivian Price, coordinator of Labor Studies, presented the documentary, “Harvest of Loneliness (Cosecha Triste),” (co-directed with Gilbert Gonzalez, UC Irvine) at the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinamericano, which was held in Havana, Cuba in December. While attending the festival, Price participated in a panel on films portraying Latino lives in the United States. The film, which was aired last fall on PBS stations across the country, examines the United States’s bracero program, which recruited Mexican laborers for temporary work in the U.S. from 1942 to 1964. The documentary won the Cinelatino Audience Choice Award for a documentary at the 2010 Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival.
Franklin Strier professor emeritus of law, had his article, “The Roberts Court and the Separation of Church and State” published in the January issue of Dissent Magazine. The article, which has also been referenced on the Website, www.democraticunderground.com , discusses what Strier calls “a delicate, dual obligation upon government, under which Congress can neither empower religion nor restrict it.” The author of the books, “The Adversary System” and “Reconstructing Justice,” Strier examines a number of cases that were affected by the “Establishment Clause” and the “Free Exercise Clause” of the First Amendment, and their interpretations by what he calls “an agenda-driven Supreme Court.”
Clare Weber, chair of sociology, and Kara Z. Dellacioppa, associate professor of sociology, co-edited “Cultural Politics and Resistance in the 21st Century: Community-Based Social Movements and Global Change in the Americas” which was released by Sage Publications last December. In addition, the co-editors each contributed a chapterDellacioppa authored the chapter on “Local Communities and Global Resistance: Social Change and Autonomy Struggles in the Americas” and Weber wrote “Struggles for Social Movement Autonomy in a Global Port City and another: Global movements? Local Movements?”
According to Dellacioppa, there have been monumental political and social shifts in Latin America in the last decade that have had reverberations in the United States, particularly immigrant community-based organizations.
“Newly developed social movements in Latin America have created new discourses and political practices and envisioning ‘new ways of living politics,’” says Dellacioppa. “These movements tend to be grassroots and articulate a notion of “autonomy” from the state but at the same time they seek to redistribute resources of the state from the rich to the poor. Some of the most powerful movements have been the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, the Zapatista movement in Mexico and the indigenous rights movement in Bolivia and Ecuador as well as the unemployed movement in Argentina. One outcome of these new movements has been the rejection of U.S. hegemony in the region through the election of left-leaning leaders such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia or more moderate leaders like Cristina Kirchner of Argentina. One thing common to all of these leaders is that no matter what their individual politics are, they all reject the notion that the U.S. should dictate the economic policies of Latin America.”
