Cross-Cultural Studies - Collaborations and Community Engagements

The Cross-Cultural Studies Program collaborates with and engages local communities, both through teaching-related activities and through research programs. What follows are a few key snapshots:

• Institute of Interfaith Dialog (IID)
• Turkish American Community in Houston
• Immigrant Communities in Houston
• Indian Community in Houston
  

With the Institute of Interfaith Dialog (IID):

In 2008, the UHCL HSH CRCL (Cross-Cultural MA Program) signed an MoU with the Institute of Interfaith Dialog (IID).  UHCL CRCL faculty will partner with IID to offer to students across the university new courses related to religious and interfaith dialogue.  IID will continue to provide underwriting for its Dialog for Peace trips that take place in Turkey annually.  IID will offer support to HSH CRCL students by offering a wide variety of annual events and conferences around Houston, as well as sponsoring guest lecturers who will visit the UHCL campus and speak on a number of issues important to our campus community.  In addition to the many luncheon events IID organizes around Houston, it will also sponsor a luncheon series on campus. IID will also offer possibilities for faculty research on topics related to religion, peace and consensus building, health and social justice issues.  UHCL CRCL students will be entitled to apply for IID scholarships, volunteer for exciting IID programs, and internship opportunities.

To find out more about available opportunities, please contact either Dr. Curtis curtis@uhcl.edu or Dr. Kovic kovic@uhcl.edu

With the Turkish American Community in Houston:

The Turkish American community has fascinated Maria Curtis since 1998 when she began volunteering with fellow Turkish graduate students at UT Austin as a graduate student herself.  She has traveled widely in Turkey and studied Turkish at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, and at UT Austin.  As a graduate student in Austin, she helped organize two performances of the Whirling Dervishes of Konya, a conference entitled Preventing Another September 11 that featured Prof. John Esposito as the keynote speaker, and poetry readings for the Islamic Student Dialogue Association. She participated regularly with TAWA (the Turkish American Women's Association), the University of Texas Interfaith Council, and the Austin Interfaith Arts Festival. Along with the Turkish community in Austin, she helped organize a symposium with international performers who were touring with the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music during their performance in Austin.  

Since joining the UHCL faculty, Dr. Curtis has helped initiate a UHCL study abroad program to Turkey and has worked to formalize the relationship between the Turkish American Institute for Interfaith Dialog.  Students visited Istanbul, Ankara, Konya, Gaziantep, Urfa, Harran, Izmir, Kayseri, Bergama, Selcuk, and Cappadocia.  On the trip UHCL students met with journalists, teachers, students of all age groups, and attended numerous meals in Turkish families' homes.  In addition to the trip to Turkey, UHCL students have attended a wide array of events at the Turquoise Center, a Turkish American cultural center in southwest Houston.  The Raindrop Women's Association visited the UHCL campus to talk about women in Turkey, as well as hosted several events for UHCL students such as a mevlud, a ceremony to celebrate the birth of a new baby, and a kermes, or a Turkish traditional arts and crafts festival where delicious, traditional Turkish food was served.  UHCL students had the opportunity to enroll in calligraphy and water marbling courses offered at Turquoise Center when a well known Turkish artist offered these classes to the community in the summer of 2009. 

Maria Curtis has helped in organizing a number of events for the greater Houston area community and spoken at events for the larger Houston-area Turkish American community.  For example, she spoke on the shared meaning of Thanksgiving and the Islamic Feast of Sacrifice (Kurban Bayrami) and offered two talks on the history of the Muslim American community.  Maria Curtis (known as Maria Abla, or "Big Sister" Maria) is often called on by the Turkish American community to take part in various events. She has volunteered at the UHCL Turkey Immersion Day, the UHL Global Expo representing Turkey, the Annual Turkic Festival, and the Turkish Language Olympiads, to name but a few.  Maria Curtis believes strongly in the value of "off campus" learning and enjoys very much bringing students from the university together with the Turkish American community. 

Maria Curtis is currently writing on Turkish and Turkish American women and the Sufi influences in their beliefs in practices and their volunteerism in the Gülen movement; she is also writing a book-length project on women and leadership in the Gülen movement with an accompanying documentary component. She is also interested in the history of the American Muslim community and how the post Civil Rights movement discourse shapes their notions of participation in the American public sphere.  Dr. Curtis is essentially interested in helping provide settings, both in and out of the classroom, where people who might not otherwise come into contact with each other have opportunities for cultural exchange and friendship. She also enjoys feeding people her homemade baklava that has elements drawn from Palestinian, Lebanese, and Turkish recipes woven together.  Students who know her will most certainly eat, either in the classroom, in Turkey, with Turkish Americans, or in one of Houston's many wonderful Mediterranean restaurants.

With Mexican and Other Immigrant Groups in Houston:

Christine Kovic’s research is centered on issues of human rights, particularly how people organize to defend their rights, both in Mexico and in the United States. Her recent research in Mexico focuses on the human rights situation of Central American migrants passing through the southern state of Chiapas en route to the United States. As part of this project, she has interviewed migrants and their allies at shelters in southern Mexico including Jesus el Buen Pastor Shelter [Jesus el Buen Pastor Shelter : http://alberguebuenpastor.org.mx/ ] in Tapachula, Mexico and the Hogar de la Misericordia Shelter in Arriaga, Mexico [Hogar de la Misericordia Shelter : http://migrantes.webgarden.es/]
In Houston, Christine Kovic has collaborated with a number of organizations working on issues of immigrants rights, especially in Houston’s large community of Mexican and Central American migrants. She wrote a short blog [“short blog” = http://www.race-talk.org/?p=4236 ] about a recent march for immigrants rights in Houston.
To summarize just a few of her projects:

(1) With several UHCL students, she assisted the Houston Inter-Faith Worker Justice (EMBED LINK http://www.hiwj.org/), Impact Church and the Houston Area Women’s Center, in the event “Para Nosotras” (“For Us”). The event was held in Spanish to inform the Latina immigrant community in Houston of services that are available. Issues of domestic violence, workers rights, and human trafficking were discussed and women made a commitment to work on these issues in their own communities.

UHCL students volunteer at the event, September 2009

(2) Christine Kovic partnered with local organizations to assess the work conditions of Houston day laborers. She and a group of UHCL students gathered data at a series of Houston Day Labor Rights Forums held in 2008.

Photo collage of the Day Labor Forums, images by student Linda Sulpacio.

(3) Together with her students, Christine Kovic has been engaged in a participatory research project with the Living Hope Wheelchair Association. This Houston-based group is composed of Latino migrants from Mexico and Central America with spinal cord injuries. They work in community advocacy and to promote the rights of persons with disabilities and of immigrants. With several UHCL students, Christine Kovic has taught a weekly English as a Second Language course, which often includes discussions of history, human rights, and other topics.

With the Indian Community in Houston:

Watch a video here of Dr. Subramanian leading a discussion of the Danny Boyle film, Slumdog Millionaire (whose “Jai Ho” has perhaps changed American dance floors for good), in collaboration with members of the Indian community in Houston.

Deepa Reddy has been a part of the Indian community in Houston ever since she began graduate school at Rice University in 1994. In early 2003, however, she became involved with a research project that would give her a far more active role as participant and require her to take on the mantle of researcher-observer as well. The project was “Indian and Hindu perspectives on Genetic Variation research,” a collaboration between Baylor College of Medicine, UH and UHCL, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Human Genome Research Institute. The team in Houston was to investigate the Indian community’s interest in participating in and contributing blood samples to the International HapMap Project. Dr. Reddy was the only Indian on the research team (but one of three anthropologists), charged with developing methods by which to engage Indians in Houston on questions of genetic research. You can find out more about Dr. Reddy’s research with the Indian Community in Houston by reading her essays “Good Gifts for the Common Good” (published in Cultural Anthropology in Summer 2007) and “Caught in Collaboration” (published in the inaugural issue of Collaborative Anthropology, in 2008). Both are available on PubMed, thanks to an NIH mandate that the results of publicly funded research should be made public ally available—a theme that resonates well with the arguments made in the “Good Gifts” essay, as it happens.

Read about Dr. Reddy’s continuing involvement with another international collaboration focused on things Hindu, the “Public Representation of a Religion called Hinduism” network project here.