ASU professor encourages students to defy body hair norms

Excellent Research
https://asunews.asu.edu/20140703-body-shaving#.U7gk07tzEEg.twitter

Since 2010 Breanne Fahs, associate professor of women and gender studies in ASU’s New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences has offered students the chance to participate in an extra-credit exercise related to body hair.

Female student participants stop shaving their legs and underarms for 10 weeks during the semester while keeping a journal to document their experiences. For male students, the assignment is to shave all body hair from the neck down.

Robinson says part of her motivation for deciding to participate in the exercise was that in previous semesters she felt left out of the sense of the camaraderie of the students who were all bonding over their body hair, or lack thereof for males in the class.

That act of rebellion isn’t quite the same for males as females, according to Fahs. It’s not uncommon in our society for some men to engage in “manscaping,” removing hair from some parts of their bodies. For the extra-credit assignment, she asks male students to shave everything below the neck and maintain it for 10 weeks. This makes the process labor-intensive and gives men some insight into what women who shave go through, she said.

Collaborative Problem Solving

Lives in the Balance http://www.livesinthebalance.org/: non-profit organization founded by child psychologist Dr. Ross Greene, author of The Explosive Child and Lost at School, and originator of the Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) approach. This website contains a ton of information – streaming video, an extensive Listening Library, and a boatload of additional resources -- to help you learn about and implement the research-based CPS model and provide you with the support you need. The SITE GUIDE will help you figure out where to start.

And if you’re ready to help Lives in the Balance educate others about the true factors contributing to kids’ behavioral challenges...about why time-outs, detentions, suspensions, expulsions, restraints, and locked-door seclusion often make things worse (and about what to do instead)...

Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race Studies http://www.mixedracestudies.org/wordpress/?page_id=4495:  A non-commercial website that provides a gateway to contemporary interdisciplinary (sociology, psychology, history, law, anthropology, etc.) English language scholarship about the relevant issues surrounding the topic of multiracialism.

The goals of the site are to:

• Provide visitors with links to books, articles, dissertations, multimedia and any other resources to enable them to further their (and my) knowledge on the topic.
• Remind visitors that so-called “racial mixing” has been occurring in the Americas for over five centuries and in fact, all of the founding nations of the Americas were mixed-race societies at their inception.
• Ultimately support a vision of the irrelevance of race.

This is by no means an exhaustive listing of discourses on ‘mixed race’ scholarship.  Some examples of the scholarship that is not available on this site are as follows:

• Non-English language resources.
• Out-of-print resources.  (This includes important texts such as Everett V. Stonequist‘s The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (1937) and other works.)
• Non-web-based resources.

I created the site in April 2009 in recognition of our family members and friends who are ‘mixed-race’ and/or raising ‘mixed-race’ children, in response the growing number self-identifying ‘mixed-race’ living here in the Washington, DC area, and finally in celebration of my interracial marriage to my loving wife of 16 years.