SMU Research - Volume 14 2007

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Canadian Caroline Brettell took a long walk in her neighborhood the day before her naturalization ceremony as a U.S. citizen in 1993. “The moment was emotional because you give up a part of yourself when you renounce and abjure your country of birth,” says the anthropologist, who has studied immigration issues for more than 35 years.

Now the Dedman Family Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and dean ad interim of Dedman College, Brettell first entered the United States in 1967 on a student visa to attend Smith College, then transferred to Yale University. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Brown University. Brettell later married an American citizen and obtained a green card, which she owned for 18 years. She decided to become an American citizen to obtain the full rights of citizenship, including not only the right to vote but also the right to serve as executor on a spouse’s estate and to obtain inheritance exemptions that are automatic for citizen spouses, a right being challenged at the time by a proposed law before Congress.

The tug between old and new worlds experienced by all immigrants is familiar to Brettell. She wrote in the September 2006 issue of American Behavioral Scientist, “Bridging the divide between reason and emotion, between citizenship (with the rights and responsibilities that accompany it) and identity, and between political belonging and cultural belonging is something that many first-generation immigrants in the United States face.”

Brettell, who joined SMU in 1988, is considered one of the leading cultural anthropologists on the role of women in the migration process, as well as the movement of populations among countries and incorporation as citizens into their new cultures and societies. She began researching the subject for her senior thesis at Yale University, and since has written 48 books or book chapters and 36 articles for scholarly journals.

She has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation for her research. With a recent $445,000 NSF grant Brettell has studied various immigrant groups and how they integrate into the economic, social and political fabric of their new communities in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, considered an emerging gateway city of immigration. The study examines the populations of Mexicans, Salvadorans, Asian Indians, Vietnamese, and Nigerians who have moved to the area since the 1980s.be research crossed disciplines, drawing on the expertise of SMU professors Jim Hollifield (Political Science) and Dennis Cordell (History), as well as political scientist Manuel Garcia y Griego at the University of Texas at Arlington. Brettell and Hollifield also collaborated on and co-edited a widely used text,
Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines.

Through interviews with the immigrant groups, Brettell found that they become naturalized citizens for pragmatic reasons but identify with and remain emotionally attached to their cultural roots. She asked them to assess what it means to be American on one hand and Indian/Nigerian/Salvadoran/ Vietnamese on the other. “Most respondents do not want to choose between being one or the other,” she says. “They believe they can be both, and will emphasize different identities depending on the situation and context.”

A 2005-07 grant from the Russell Sage Foundation is funding research on citizenship practice and civic engagement among Asian Indians and Vietnamese in the Dallas area. Brettell and Deborah Reed-Danahay have co-edited a collection of articles that explore the issues in Immigration and Citizenship in Europe and the United States: Anthropological Perspectives (Rutgers University Press, under contract).

Brettell continues to maintain a full research agenda while juggling the responsibilities of dean of Dedman College, an act that is not without its challenges, she says. In fact, Brettell believes that being an active researcher helps her better understand the issues that faculty face when balancing the roles of teaching and research, and the many steps they encounter when applying for research grants. Having participated on review panels for the National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities, “I know how competitive it is to get these grants,” she says. “It takes patience, mentoring and support, particularly for junior faculty.”

For more information:
http://www.smu.edu/anthro/SMU_Anthro/FacultyPages/Brettell_Page.htm.

Several SMU faculty members are conducting research into methods that can help ease the symptoms of asthma sufferers, detect glucose levels in diabetics, and take more precise aim at cancerous cells.

Sweet Relief For Diabetics
For Type 1 diabetics, life often is measured by the hours between insulin injections. Less frequent and invasive treatment could improve the quality of life for the more than 20 million adults and children who suffer from the disease.

SMU Assistant Professor of Chemistry Brent Sumerlin is researching polymers that can detect high glucose levels in the blood stream and automatically release insulin, which could free diabetics from a daily injection schedule.

Sumerlin and his team of researchers have designed large, chain-like molecules with two different segments attached to each other at their ends. When these polymers are dissolved in water, they convert themselves into tiny, hollow spheres called vesicles, with one segment inside the other’s exterior wall. This segment is not water-soluble and can act as a “molecular handle” that binds to glucose molecules.

“When a high concentration of glucose is present, the sugar molecules diffuse into the vesicle walls, and the molecular handles begin to absorb them,” Sumerlin says. “The chemical changes caused by binding to the glucose should cause the vesicles to rupture, similar to a balloon popping.” Fill the vesicles with insulin, and when they encounter dangerously high glucose levels in the bloodstream, that pop releases the medication.

Sumerlin’s work is supported by a two-year, $35,000 grant from the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society.

For more information: http://faculty.smu.edu/bsumerlin.

Tiny Lasers, Large Result
SMU’s Photonics Group in the School of Engineering is conducting research on photodynamic therapy (PDT), which destroys cancer cells through the use of red laser light in combination with a photosensitizing drug. The drug, administered to a patient hours before treatment, accumulates mainly in cancerous cells. Illuminating the cancerous area activates the drug and kills the cells, with little damage to surrounding healthy tissue.

Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Gemunu Happawana’s research uses semiconductor diode lasers – equally powerful as but about 1,000 times smaller than existing PDT lasers – as the optical source for PDT. Semiconductor lasers also are less costly and more efficient. He has developed a self-contained light delivery PDT system for Barrett’s esophagus that positions semiconductor lasers at the end of a thin coaxial cable, which is inserted into a balloon catheter, allowing precise optical, electrical and thermal control at the tumor’s location.

“A significant advantage to this design is individual segments or spot locations across the illuminator can be turned on or off and the intensity changed during treatment,” Happawana says. “In addition, as new photosensitive drugs become available, semiconductor lasers with the appropriate activation wavelength can be added to the balloon catheter system. In such cases, multiple PDT drugs providing a potent cancer cocktail can be activated in a single treatment.”

For more information: http://engr.smu.edu/ee/smuphotonics.

Breathing Easier
Associate Professor Thomas Ritz and Assistant Professor Alicia Meuret of SMU’s Psychology Department are researching the interaction between physiological and psychological aspects of asthma and other diseases.

Asthmatics suffer from a higher rate of panic or other anxiety disorders than does the general population, especially those who develop the disease as adults, Meuret says. Her research into anxiety disorders first showed that breathing exercises were highly effective in reducing panic symptoms in panic patients.

Whether suffering asthma or from anxiety, “patients tend to breathe much too deeply and too fast when they’re having difficulty. Their bodies are telling them to get more oxygen, but the problem is they’re retaining too little carbon dioxide”, Meuret says.

While at Stanford University Medical School, Ritz and Meuret developed a four-week pilot program to teach asthma patients how to breathe more effectively. During the program, supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, asthma patients learned through exercises to take slower, shorter breaths. They used devices called capnometers to measure and store data on their oxygen and carbon dioxide levels and respiration rates.

Ritz and Meuret observed stable increases in patients’ carbon dioxide levels during the program and a two-month follow-up period. They also noticed reduced frequency and distress of symptoms and an increase in reported asthma control. They have applied for additional NIH funding to expand the study to larger trial groups.
For more information: http://faculty.smu.edu/ameuret.

Law Professor Beth Thornburg wants to toss the “No Fishing” sign out of courtrooms – metaphorically speaking. In her research on legal language, she found that civil cases have used the phrase “fishing expedition” as a rhetorical weapon for at least 250 years, and it has become more than a tired cliché. “People think of metaphors as pretty figures of speech,” she says, “but when these phrases become culturally pervasive, they influence the way we think about things.

” In the case of “fishing expedition,” which parties have used to argue against discovery requests, pleadings and entire lawsuits, the metaphor tends to favor defendants, Thornburg says. “When plaintiffs are accused of ‘fishing for information,’ it implies that they’re doing something improper and in bad faith, and probably are incompetent.

” And when an inquiry or lawsuit is condemned as a “fishing expedition,” the metaphor obscures the court’s decision-making process and, worse, can taint the way the courts perceive similar cases. Instead of drawing a difficult line on policy, for example, judges can dismiss something as “fishing” without having to explain why, she says.

Thornburg’s article on the history and impact of “fishing expedition,” which will be published in the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, evolved from her earlier work on war and sports metaphors and how they shape the legal adversary system. “Fishing expedition” kept popping up during her research – in a Texas Supreme Court case, and again in Scottish, Australian, and Canadian pretrial procedures. Those common-law countries inherited their legal systems from England, and Thornburg wondered how far back
the phrase could be traced.

With the help of Dedman School of Law’s reference librarians and electronic databases, she found her answer: a 1752 English land title dispute, in which a Lord Chancellor criticizes a plaintiff’s “fishing bill.”

The metaphor’s meaning and use evolved, Thornburg learned, but it consistently appears in the “unpopular” lawsuits of its day: the property claims of 18th-century England, debtor-creditor cases in early America, election contests and worker-employer conflicts during the Industrial Revolution. Today, “no fishing” has made a comeback in cases involving securities fraud, product liability, discrimination, and the environment.

“On the one hand, you want people who have been genuinely wronged to gain relief through the law, ”Thornburg says. “On the other, you don’t want frivolous lawsuits. That tension is at the heart of many procedural issues, and they’ll get decided more fairly and thoughtfully if judges and lawyers don’t just slap the ‘fishing expedition’ label on them.”

Thornburg, whose courses include Civil Procedure and Conflict of Laws, will continue researching legal language for her contributions to the book-in-progress Law Talk, by the University of Wisconsin’s Marc Galanter, Yale Law’s Fred Shapiro, and James Clapp, formerly of Columbia Law Review.

Among the words she has studied is “boilerplate,” which she has traced to 1860 and sheets of rolled metal that were made into steam engine boilers. The word jumped first to newspapers and, by the 1950s, to law, where it stands for the standard clauses in contracts. Next up: “pound of flesh” from Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure.”

“The law is a verbal profession,” Thornburg says, “so the better lawyers and judges use their words, the better off we all are. Cases are more likely to be decided on their merits if the language is precise, and that helps the court system do its job enforcing legal norms.

” Thornburg, who earned her J.D. at SMU and B.A. in history from the College of William and Mary, was an associate with the law firm of Locke, Purnell, Boren, Laney & Neely before joining Dedman School of Law as an assistant professor in 1989. She has published articles on federal and Texas procedure, including “The Story of Lassiter: The Importance of Counsel in an Adversary System” in Civil Procedure Stories (Foundation Press, 2004) and “Civil Procedure: Questions & Answers” (LexisNexis, 2003) with SMU Law Professor William V. Dorsaneo III.

For more information: http://faculty.smu.edu/ethornbu.

One of the numerous ways that the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies supports research in public policy and international relations is through providing fellowships to SMU faculty.

“The research that we do as scholars, and that the Tower Center supports, informs all of our teaching,” says James F. Hollifield, director of the Tower Center and the Arnold Professor of International Political Economy. “Research is the lifeblood of our business. So the Tower Center isn’t just energizing research agendas, but also teaching and scholarship.

”The Colin Powell Global Order and Foreign Policy Fellowship, for example, awards up to $5,000 and is open to SMU faculty members working on issues such as the role of the United States in what former President George H.W. Bush called the New World Order. Stephen Wegren, political science professor and director of International and Area Studies, has been named this year’s Powell Fellow for his work on the post-communist transition.

The Tower Center also offers several SMU faculty members annual grants of up to $2,500 to conduct preliminary research and promote collaborative efforts in areas related to international relations, national security issues, comparative politics, political economy and political institutions.

As the Tower Center welcomes its newest fellow, some current and outgoing fellows are studying the subjects of free trade, Mexican emigration, and political corruption.

Transcending Borders and History
In barrios from Los Angeles to Chicago to Dallas, immigrants from the Mexican federal state of Zacatecas have organized Zacatecan clubs. For an upcoming collection of essays on ethnic regions, History Professor John Chávez, a Tower Center Faculty Fellow, is researching how migrants form such regional identities within and across national borders and generations.

With funding from the Tower Center and SMU’s University Research Council, Chávez traveled last summer to archives in Mexico City, Xalapa in the state of Vera Cruz, and Guadalupe in Zacatecas. He worked with primary sources on the history of federal states and their loss of population to emigration.

“Seeing the landscape, interacting with the people and experiencing the life was as important to me as digging through the archives,” he says. “My experiences and research relate directly to my major teaching area, Mexican-American history, which is inherently a transnational field, given migration patterns and the history of the U.S. Southwest as the former Mexican Far North.”

Chávez, whose collection is tentatively titled Imagining Federations, is the author of Eastside Landmark: A History of the East Los Angeles Community Union (Stanford University Press, 1998) andGe Lost Land:Ge Chicano Image of the Southwest (University of NewMexico Press, 1984).

The Cost of Political Corruption
Why do voters put corrupt politicians in office? Associate Professor of Political Science Luigi Manzetti, a Tower Center Faculty Fellow, pursued a hypothesis that, until now, lacked supporting statistical evidence: The poorer the country – and the more ineffective its government – the more likely that corrupt leaders are elected by delivering handouts.

“On the one hand, corrupt politicians thrive by manipulating government resources to help their supporters, and corruption thrives when the institutions in charge of political accountability are weak,” he says. “On the other, poor people sell their votes to get services that, in principle, they’re already entitled to. Corruption deprives them of their rights.”

The Tower Center fellowship supported his research with Carole Wilson, assistant professor of government, politics and political economy at the University of Texas at Dallas, which included statistical analysis of World Values Survey data and trips to Latin America and Eastern Europe to interview opinion leaders. His findings will be published in the August Comparative Political Studies, and they show it will take more than administrative reforms to end corruption. “As long as countries stay poor, corrupt leaders will stay in power,” he says.

Manzetti, who is working on a book about U.S.-backed economic reforms in emerging markets during the 1990s and the corruption it spawned, is the author of Privatization South American Style (Oxford University Press, 1999) and the editor of Regulatory Policy in Latin America: Post-Privatization Realities (North-South Center Press, University of Miami, 2000).

NAFTA and Mexico, 12 Years Later

Free trade does two things, says Michael Lusztig, the outgoing Powell Fellow: It grows wealth throughout a society and it grows a middle class, which, in turn, demands political freedom.

Now that the North American Free Trade Agreement has been in effect for 12 years, the associate professor of political science is investigating whether Mexico has imported the foundations of democracy: liberal republican values. “I am looking for ways to construct the good society, and one way to do that is through increasing wealth – through free trade, for example,” he says. “Another way is to have legitimate restraints on that freedom in the name of community values; you don’t want everybody writing their own rules, and this is where republicanism comes in.”

Lusztig is analyzing data from the World Values Survey, which has polled citizens of every country since 1981 on issues such as politics, religion, race and education. His early findings are mixed: Although Mexico held its first democratic election this year and its middle class shows signs of growth, republican values are not as strong as he had hypothesized. “Political cultures change very slowly,” he says, “and there has to be some manifestation that liberal democracy is working – that it translates into a better life.”

Lusztig, who is beginning a book on the evolution of republicanism, recently co-authored articles on institutionalizing NAFTA and on democracy and economic growth, which were published in The International Political Science Review. He is the author of The Limits of Protectionism: Building Coalitions for Free Trade (Pittsburgh University Press, 2004) and Risking Free Trade: The Politics of Trade in Britain, Canada, Mexico and the United States (Pittsburgh University Press, 1996).

For more information, visit the Tower Center Web site:http://smu.edu/tower.

Theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher pauses before answering the often-asked question of whether she is a feminist or an African American woman.

“I like ‘womanist,’” says Baker-Fletcher, associate professor in Perkins School of Theology, “because it means you can be a feminist and a woman of color in one body. It answers the obvious – that you can be both and more, that you can embrace the love of God, stand up to senseless violence, and serve the needs of your community. It is a holistic term.”

For more than 12 years, through four books and numerous papers and lectures, she has been among those giving breadth and fuller meaning to “womanist,” a term first coined in 1983 by Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple.

In her latest book, Dancing with God: The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective (Chalice Press, 2006), Baker-Fletcher focuses on African American women’s struggle for survival and liberation within the meaning of an ever-present God as embodied in the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

“The Trinity helps us overcome the hatred and violence that is an unfortunate part of human existence,” she says. “The crucifixion is both literally and metaphorically a hate crime. Through it, Christ overcomes hatred, and by embracing the Trinity, which is rigorous and just love, we can, too.”

For victims of extreme hatred and violence, Christ’s overcoming of hatred is important because it helps them to avoid becoming like those who have attacked them, she explains.

She received inspiration for her book from a dance performed at St. Luke United Methodist Church in Dallas that depicted the story of Mamie Carthan Till, mother of 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American youth brutally murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1954. One mother’s decision to hold an open-casket funeral so all could see what had been done to her child helped spark the Civil Rights Movement.

“What she did,” Baker-Fletcher says, “was an act of bravery to overcome unjust suffering and violence. It is important for all of us to understand this.”

Womanist theology stands apart from African American (male) theology and feminist theology. African American theology is a liberation theology directed at white racism that would deny people of color equal standing in society.

Some African American women see as its shortcoming a failure to appreciate the oppressions they suffer because of both racist and sexist attitudes. Feminist theology, on the other hand, focuses primarily on the oppression of white women without adequately addressing the racial and economic issues that are part of the everyday realities of women of color.

Baker-Fletcher and others seek to fill this void through a theological discourse focused on the spiritual needs of women of color by addressing their relationships with God, their communities, the economy and the environment.

“Some of my critics have accused me of being more psychological than spiritual,” Baker-Fletcher says. “I think, though, that what I bring is a deeper understanding of the emotional needs . . . for love, to be beloved and the spirit of love.”

Baker-Fletcher joined SMU in 2001. She received a B.A. in philosophy and French from Wellesley College in 1981, a Master of Divinity in theology and literature from Harvard Divinity School in 1984, and an M.A. in religion in 1990 and a Ph.D. in constructive and historical theology from Harvard University in 1991. Her other books include Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit: Womanist Wordings (Fortress Press, 1998),My Sister, My Brother: Womanist and Xodus God-Talk (Orbis, 1997), and A Singing Something: Womanist Reflections on Anna Julia Cooper (Crossroad, 1994).

For more information: kbakerfl@mail.smu.edu.

Cox Distinguished Professor of Finance Andrew Chen often finds inspiration for a research topic from events of the day. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, provided a valuable resource for his research on contemporary finance and economics.

Chen and co-author Thomas Siems of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank wrote about the effects of 9/11 and other terrorist and military events in “The Effects of Terrorism on Global Capital Markets,” published in the June 2004 issue of the European Journal of Political Economy. In the article they illustrated the capabilities and resilience of U.S. capital markets and the federal government’s response to highlight a milestone in economic history.

“In the days that followed 9/11, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank provided massive liquidity to the banking and financial system, virtually at the click of a mouse,” Chen says. “The action quickly restored the confidence of U.S. financial markets, which recovered faster than other large international capital markets, including those in London, Tokyo and Hong Kong, among others.”

Today, Chen continues to research the long-term effects of terrorism on various sectors. “Five years after 9/11, I found that terrorism no longer causes immediate shock waves to the stock market as it did following the attacks on American soil,” he says. Sector differences, however, do affect the overall Gross Domestic Product, including transportation, defense, tourism and insurance.”

Chen also studies how global capital markets can be used to aid economic development in India. He analyzes how infrastructure project financing can help overcome obstacles in current financing strategies to further India’s role in the global economy.

Chen, who joined SMU in 1983, began formulating his theories on finance nearly 40 years ago while a graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley, from which he earned his Ph.D. His dissertation focused on options pricing at a time when options were not even in the mindset of financial professionals. First published in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Chen since has become one of the most prolific authors based on the number of articles published in 72 finance journals – ranking No. 11 in the world.

For information: http://cox.smu.edu/academic/professor.do/achen.