Broadview Press has published (August 2019) Professor Emeritus Chris Thaiss's new textbook, Writing Science in the Twenty-First Century. Based on his years of teaching science writing to STEM majors at UC Davis, the book, along with its companion website, is directed both to STEM students in courses like those taught in the UWP and to students, undergraduate and graduate, fulfilling writing assignments in STEM courses across disciplines.
Associate Professor Sarah Perrault has been elected to the Council of the Pacfiic Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). As a council member, she is responsible for helping shape the division's policies, develop activities, and organize and promote the annual conference. She was nominated and elected on the basis of her scholarly and pedagogical work on science writing, especially public science writing.
Dan Melzer's article "Exploring White Privilege in Tutor Education” was published in volume 16 (2019) of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. The article reports on action research on the influence of white privilege on tutors' attitudes in a writing center tutor education course. The article is published online at www.praxisuwc.com/162-melzer
A news article about Prized Writing's 30th anniversary can be found on the Arts and Letters website at https://lettersandscience.ucdavis.edu/news/30-years-student-writing-cele.... A celebration event, open to the public, will begin at 6 p.m. in AGR Hall at the Walter A. Buehler Alumni Center. Chancellor Gary S. May will speak along with faculty and students. The most recent issue will be for sale ($17.72) at the event and at the campus bookstore.
Melissa Bender has published the edited collection Contested Commemoration in U.S. History: Diverging Public Interpretations in Routledge's new Global Perspectives on Public History series. Against the backdrop of two recent socio-political developments—the shift from the Obama to the Trump administration and the surge in nationalist and populist sentiment that ushered in the current administration—Contested Commemoration in U.S. History presents eleven essays focused on practices of remembering contested events in America’s national history.
Cameron Fitzpatrick, a student in Kathie Gossett's Winter 2019 104T: Technical Writing, was featured in UC Davis' Dateline on June 11. Fitzpatrick used an assignment in Gossett's course to collect and visually present data on the health of his newborn child, who was losing weight. Based on the data, Fitzpatrick's doctor changed the treatment plan and the child returned to a healthy weight. In the Dateline article Fitzpatrick says about Gossett's assignment, "Looking back at the work I've done at Davis, it's the most important project I've done."
Sasha Ambramsky has launched a subscription-based weekly political column, The Abramsky Report, at http://www.theabramskyreport.com. Each month Sasha will write four articles focused on social justice issues, including poverty, immigrants rights, voting rights, access to housing and healthcare, and environmental issues. The yearly subscription fee is $19.95.
In May of 2018 Sarah Perrault was an invited participant in a working group at the University of Alberta (Edmonton AB). The working group was on "Mapping the Emerging Issues in the Public Representation of Bioscience and Health Issues" and other working group members were specialists in law, applied ethics, psychiatry, applied linguistics, journalism, communication, and public policy.
Sarah Perrault published the article "New Metaphors for New Understandings of Genomes" with co-author Meaghan O'Keefe in the Winter 2019 edition of the journal Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. Perrault and O'Keefe offer a conceptual framework for developing, analyzing, critiquing, and choosing new metaphors of how genomes and bodies work that will help improve communication about genomes and genomic research.
