Faculty Research Update

After teaching a course in Rome this summer, Dr. Rioux spent few weeks of the summer in Brazil and India. In Brazil, as a part Scholars in Solidarity, which included University of San Francisco and University of Dayton along with St. John’s University, he partook in Catholic Relief Services The CRS planned this trip to Brazil in the hopes of alerting Brazilians of their own local political rights and raising awareness of the labor issues which plague the country, such as the indentured servitude that still exist in the country and the rise of the sweat shop industry, among students on the campuses of all three participating universities.

Later in the summer, Dr. Rioux participated in the two-day international conference, Social Justice and Education, at St. Xavier’s College in Goa, India. As the keynote speaker at the conference and with Governor of Goa Bharat Vir Wanchoo in attendance, he presented Social Justice: An Integrative Meta-Theory for Education.  His discussion focused on the application of critical methods in understanding social justice and how social justice can be incorporated into education. Dr. Rioux’s trip to India gave him a wonderful opportunity to explore an English-speaking non-Western society with an ever-increasing focus on the younger generation and learn how its education system is organized.

Dr. Angel spent time the early part of her summer in the Mid-West and Washington D.C. working on building a digital humanity program. In Chicago, she worked with the Benedictine fathers and at the University of Notre Dame working with Eric Lease Morgan , the digital projects librarian at the university, to university, to harvest metadata from member institutions that would later be available online.  Spending ten days in Ecuador later in the summer, she worked to develop a Global Studies program. Currently, two St. John’s students, Christina Orozcio and Anne Espinal, are working with Dr. Angel to develop a virtual cultural heritage museum of Incan artifacts in an effort to educate others of the rich history of Ecuador. With the development of this multilingual website, Dr. Angel hopes to “connect 3-D objects with literature and information resources.”