Dr. Melanie Rathburn

Dr. Melanie Rathburn is a cross-appointed faculty member between the Department of General Education and the Department of Biology and her research interests also span both disciplines.  Over the past few years, Dr. Rathburn has been investigating how international field schools influence student learning including the role of community-service learning initiatives to shape student experiences. She has also recently published a new framework for how Canadian universities discuss the concept of global citizenship. On the biological side, Dr. Rathburn’s interests include mate choice in birds, primarily how females assess males and make their mate choice decisions accordingly, and a separate project that assesses different factors that influence biodiversity in Honduran coffee plantation.

 

Dr. Roberta Lexier

Roberta Lexier is an associate professor in the Department of General Education. Her main research interests include social movements and social change, scholarship of teaching and learning, and Canadian history and politics. She is currently organizing a conference titled “Social Democracy and the Left in Canada: Past, Present, and Future” and is working on a book project titled “Resisting the Ivory Tower: Activism in Canadian Universities.” She has previously published on Canadian student movements, the Waffle Movement and the New Democratic Party, and the scholarship of teaching international courses and community service learning. She teaches primarily in Cluster Three in courses at the Foundation Level as well as GNED 2302: Rethinking the Public Sphere and GNED 3030: Global Communities and Societies.

 

Dr. Michael Truscello

Michael Truscello is an Associate Professor in English and General Education. His academic interests include the aesthetics and politics of infrastructure, anarchism, and radical media. He is the co-editor of Why Don’t The Poor Rise Up? Organizing Twenty-First Century Resistance (AK Press, 2017), and author of Infrastructural Brutalism (MIT Press, 2017). In 2011, he directed the documentary Capitalism Is The Crisis: Radical Politics in the Age of Austerity (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYFw3O–2R0).

 

Dr. Randy Schroeder 

Randy Schroeder teaches in Cluster Two, where anything is possible. In terms of research, he currently studies the unintended consequences of democracy, especially in countries like Bhutan, where democracy is new and experimental. He’s also an active creative writer, but under a pseudonym that he will not reveal to anyone except CSIS.