Faculty research and development continues to be supported by the Dean’s office this academic year. We are pleased to share how this funding has impacted faculty.
Todd LeVasseur, Department of Religious Studies:
“The Dean’s funding has helped me tremendously in terms of my ability to undertake regional research. I was able to attend a workshop at Springbank Ecospirituality Retreat Center in Kingstree, and generated an article that is currently under review in a peer-reviewed journal. I also was able to 
present at the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences 2013 conference in Pittsburgh, where I was part of a panel working on issues of food resiliency. We are currently working on submitting various co-authored articles to journals. In other words, the Dean’s funding has played a very key role in my networking and in developing my identity as a professional, and I am VERY thankful for having been a recipient. I also am about to go do some more research next week to help turn my dissertation into a book, updating Ph.D. research, and received money for that, so another example.”
Hector Qirko, Department of Sociology and Anthropology:
“One of my main research pursuits has been a comparative analysis of organizations that require costly altruistic commitment from their members. I have looked at institutional practices in military, religious, and terrorist organizations to see if there might be patterns in the ways organizations, even in 
very different cultural settings, similarly attempt to reinforce commitment to sacrificial behavior. While the sacrifice in such organizations is often very costly, including risk of life, lifelong celibacy, and suicide, organizational practices designed to reinforce commitment should be relevant even when costs are lower. For this reason I have begun to look more broadly at organizational patterns in what are often called intentional communities, including communes, eco-villages, and urban housing cooperatives. An important step in this was attending the annual meeting of the Communal Studies Association in Historic Harmony and Old Economy, PA last October, a trip supported by the Dean’s fund. By attending and presenting at the meeting I learned about current research on intentional communities of many types, met researchers and community members, learned about several print and online intentional communities directories that will be helpful in my developing samples, and explored possibilities that may result in opportunities to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in one or more communities. As a direct result of receiving the award, I now have a much clearer idea as to how to proceed in the next phase of my research. I’m very grateful for the help!”
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