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A Community of Cultures

Faculty Research

 

Enriqueta Canseco-Gonzalez

Enriqueta Canseco-Gonzalez, an associate professor of psychology, was recently awarded a Minority Career Advancement Award (MCAA) grant from the National Science Foundation to study how bilingual individuals recognize words. The award comes in the form of a $55,645 stipend.

In the study, Canseco-Gonzalez intends to explore the nature or word recognition of bilinguals, and whether or not the recognition of words is limited to the language context of the sentence. For example, Canseco-Gonzalez notes, "when a Spanish-English bilingual hears the sentence, ‘Click on the beaker,’ does he/she only activate English words compatible with the initial phonemes of the word beaker (e.g. beetle), or does he/she also activate compatible Spanish words as well (e.g. bigote, or ‘mustache,’ and pronounced ‘bee-goat-ay’)?

Canseco-Gonzalez believes the study to be of immense importance to society. She states that "the results of this [research] will directly benefit society by increasing our understanding of bilingualism." For example, she suggests it will aid policy makers in places like California in making decisions regarding such diverse areas as education, language, policies in the work place, immigration, and human services.

Kambiz GhaneaBassiri

Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, assistant professor of religion and humanities, has been awarded a $6,000 grant from Harvard University's Pluralism Project to narrate the history of Muslim built communities, including mosques, Islamic centers, and schools, in Portland, Oregon.

The funding from Harvard's Pluralism Project will underwrite the research of Reed students assisting GhaneaBassiri in interviewing those involved in building Portland's Muslim community and in developing profiles of Portland's mosques for the Pluralism Project. In addition, they will research city records and local newspapers for the larger non-Muslim population's attitudes toward the presence of Muslim communities within the city's built environment. The project will explore how Muslims in Portland have built an actual American Muslim community and will examine the resources and strategies used by Muslims to participate in American public life.

GhaneaBassiri will use his research to write a scholarly history of Portland's Muslim built communities. With the permission of the sources used, he also hopes to archive the interviews and other research attained in the process at Reed College's Eric V. Hauser Library or the Oregon Historical Society.

GhaneaBassiri believes this will be the first scholarly history of a local Muslim built community in the United States. "American social norms, the constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion, and regulations governing the building of religious institutions have all contributed to giving a distinctly American character to built Muslim communities in the United States," he notes.

Muslims in Portland
According to conservative estimates, Portland is home to 6,000 to 10,000 Muslims, making it an ideal site for this study. There are approximately eleven mosques or Islamic centers in the greater Portland region, including a twelver Shi'i mosque, a mosque which supports the teachings of Warith Deen Mohammed, an Ahmadi mosque, and at least one Sufi center that brings together members of several Sufi orders. The rest of the mosques or Islamic centers are Sunni of varying ethnic backgrounds.

Despite its small size, Portland's Muslims community has been very active in the larger community.   There are several ongoing interfaith dialogue groups in which Muslims regularly participate.   Recently, a number of Muslim activists founded the Islamic Social Services of Oregon State to "help provide for the needs of the community."   The Muslim Education Trust (MET) of Portland, founded in 1991, administers an Islamic elementary school and organizes monthly outreach events for the larger community.   It also establishes and maintains ties between Muslims in Portland and national Muslim organizations by sponsoring lecturers from these organizations.   MET also works with local civil rights groups to advance political agendas for the benefit of Muslims in the United States.

David Garrett

David Garrett, associate professor of history and humanities at Reed College, has released a new book entitled Shadows of Empire: The Indian Nobility of Cusco, 1750-1825 [Cambridge University Press, 2005]. Focusing on the descendants of the former Inca nobility and their relation to the Spanish government and local Indian communities of the period, Garrett’s new book explores the indigenous elite’s social, economic, cultural, and political positions in the Americas after the Spanish conquest.
“The people chronicled in my book comprised the top few percent of wealth and social class in their society,” Garrett notes. “In writing the book, I was interested in exploring how those Incas and other indigenous elites, whom the Spanish considered legally noble, interacted with Spain and their communities.”

Garrett found the research especially fascinating, in part because the topic of the relationship between the Inca nobility and the Spanish government after conquest has not been significantly studied.

“I wanted to explore the relationship of the Spanish government and the Inca nobility beyond the standard colonizer/colonized dichotomy,” he says.

Beyond the Inca nobility, Garrett also focuses heavily on the internal organization and the diversity of cultures within the colonial Indian communities of the bishopric of Cusco and how the nobility and these communities interacted.

For his next book project, Garrett plans to continue his exploration of Cusco by studying the bishopric’s economy in the 17th century.

“In the future, I plan to explore the conceptual spaces, the networks within the societies of Cusco,” Garrett says. “My next project will explore the tensions between the social, economic, and political structures within the society and how the new colonial administration and government performed their role.”

As a professor who often teaches classes on Latin American history, Garrett believes that his teaching and curriculum benefit from his research.

“Since I teach classes on Latin American history, pre-columbian civilizations, conquest, colonialism, and the golden age of Spain, working on projects like this allows me to stay in tune with the current historical debates and present interesting, relevant historical discussion to my students.”