Campus has been quiet this summer, but GIC faculty have been busy in our work spaces and around the globe. Here's what we have been up to behind the scenes as we prepare for another semester:

Indivar Jonnalagadda published the article "Reactive Regulation: Rethinking Urban Growth and Governance through Property Relations" in the leading academic journal Cultural Anthropology. In it, he shows that  a reactive, micropolitical, and disjointed mode of regulation shapes urban growth in Hyderabad, India, and stymies planning for macro goals like sustainable and inclusive development. This article is one of the products of his long-term ethnographic work in this burgeoning urban sector of India, part of his larger body of scholarship that attends to the everyday legal, social, and environmental negotiations that accompany large-scale growth.

Cristina Alcalde published a chapter titled "El cosmopolitismo excluyente en las trayectorias de peruanos en el extranjero" [Exclusionary cosmopolitanism in the trajectories of Peruvians abroad] in the book El privilegio en el Perú. Cómo construyen desigualdades quienes se benefician de ellas [Privilege in Peru: How those who benefit from inequalities construct them], edited by Alvaro Grompone and Luciana Reategui, Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. 

Liz Wilson edited and served as the lead co-author to the volume Understanding Your Students' Religions: A Guide to Culturally Responsive Practices (Routledge 2025), a guide for educators to understand the religious diversity of their student bodies. It offers concise descriptions of the religious traditions that teachers might encounter, and provides guidance for how to respond to their students with sensitivity and surmount stereotypes. 

Wilson also published the article “Child Ordination in South and Southeast Asian Buddhism,” online now and forthcoming in print this month in the academic journal Religion Compass. In it, she examines the practice of initiating minors in Jain communities in South Asia, and what this means for the social construct of childhood. 

Kenna Neitch published a co-authored article (with April Scarlette Callis and Tina Coyne), titled “Pulling Off the Con: Mobilizing Queer Joy in a Student-Centered Conference.” It came out in June in the journal Feminist Formations. It is a critical exploration of the challenges and rewards associated with organizing a public-facing conference on LGBTQIA+ issues and identities in a college campus setting. 

Elena Jackson Albarrán, along with librarian Katie Gibson and former student Craig Verniest (History MA, '23), co-authored the article “The Rodolfo Usigli Archive of the Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University,” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Latin American History (June 2025). It serves as a descriptive guide of the archive of one of Mexico's most distinguished playwrights and diplomats of the twentieth century. The article abstract is accessible here. (Miami users can see full text with login). 

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy published the book Videotape, the latest in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series, with a release date of September 3, 2025. The series examines the cultural. literary, social, historical, and economic implications of an everyday object in material culture. In this volume, Godeanu-Kenworthy explores the Cold War implications of VHS technology in popular culture as it constructed media literacy and cultural exchange across the Iron Curtain. 

Her book was also the subject of a New Books Network podcast episode released in June 2025.

Elena Jackson Albarrán's book Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas (Brill 2024) won Honorable Mention for the Grace Abbott Book Prize from the Society of the History of Children and Youth. This award annually recognizes emerging global scholarship in childhood history. The award committee "honors Good Neighbor Empires as an ambitious and compelling work that skillfully combines macro-level analysis of discourse and geopolitics with richly detailed, micro-historical narratives."

Cristina Alcalde will be joining the GIC faculty full time in the 2026-7 academic year. In the meantime, she will take a much-deserved leave from her previous administrative post. She was named among the Top 50 Women Leaders in Ohio for 2025 by the organization Women We Admire. She was recognized for her work as former Vice President for Transformational and Inclusive Excellence at Miami University, for her scholarly contributions on issues of race, diversity, leadership, and the politics of inclusion in the fields of Latin American Studies and Anthropology.

She was also selected as one of a cohort of 25 2025-2026 Fellows selected nationwide by the AGB (Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges) Institute for Leadership and Governance in Higher Education.

Madelyn Detloff gave the keynote lecture at the 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf at University of Sussex in the UK on July 22, 2025.  The title was “Throwing a brick like a grrrl: When to break and when to build in perilous political times.” 

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy was invited to give a guest talk on "The Historical Context of Contemporary Geopolitical Tensions between Canada and the United States", on May 22, 2025, at the University of Craiova, Romania. 

In May, Elena Jackson Albarrán conducted a mini book tour, presenting at the University of California Santa Cruz's Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, followed by a talk at the University of California Davis. Also in May, via a hybrid presentation to classroom and Zoom participants, she delivered a graduate workshop on working with child-produced historical sources. Attendees included students and faculty in the working group Laboratory for the History of Childhood at the Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco in Brazil, and members of the Network of Historians of Latin American Childhoods. 

Mark Allen Peterson, a longtime ITS faculty member who is now a GIC affiliate, and his family met with 2011 Grayson Kirk speaker Ben Wedeman and his wife Yasmine Perni in Italy this summer.  

Peterson also presented with his son Jaden '24, in aa workshop on "Gamification for Classroom Engagement" at Gen-Con in Indianapolis. Several case studies are drawn from Dr. Peterson's ITS classes.

Cristina Alcalde spent much of the summer (Peru's winter) in Lima, where she conducts research. 

Naaborle Sackeyfio traveled to Nepal to present her paper "African Labor, Identity and Inclusion in Japan: Place-making, Mobilities and Its Discontents," at the Association for Asian Studies conference, where she collaborated with Miami colleagues, and made new connections with others working on immigrant rights and labor issues in the region. 

She also conducted ongoing research in Japan, where she continued to build connections with labor cooperatives that assist foreign workers with various skill sets while helping to mitigate precarity. This research advances Sackeyfio's current book project. 

GIC Faculty members Damon Scott, José Amador, and Juan Carlos Albarrán joined FSB Faculty members Jenny Minier and Janice Kinghorn on an exploratory trip to Ecuador at the beginning of August with our partner organization the Tandana Foundation. They developed connections with community leaders to expand opportunities for GIC students and faculty in the future. Stay tuned for a full feature on their experiences in an upcoming edition of the newsletter. 

Thursday, August 21, 1:30-4:30pm | MacMillan 114 & 115

This year's faculty retreat will be preceded by an optional meditation session guided by Naaborle in room 114 beginning at 1pm. 

Refreshments will be served in the faculty lounge prior to the start of the retreat. 

Wednesday, September 3, 4:30-6pm | MacMillan Lobby 

GIC majors, minors, prospective majors, faculty, and staff are all invited to the annual GIC open house! Join us in the MacMillan Lobby for some treats, information about career and study opportunities, and to get to know each other. 

Wednesday, September 17, 4:30-6pm | Wilks Theater

"Anchored in uBuntu: Reflecting on Power Dynamics in International Negotiations, Global Citizenship, and Artificial Intelligence" 

Dr. José Cossa, Associate Professor of Education, Penn State College 

Submit newsletter content to Elena Jackson Albarrán at albarrej@miamioh.edu

Global and Intercultural Studies Contact Info

513-529-5333

MacMillan 120

Dr. Sande Garner, Chair

garners2@miamioh.edu

Martha Sapiro, Admin Assistant

sapiromc@miamioh.edu

Denise Roell, Admin Assistant

roelled@miamioh.edu