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From left to right: Teresa Ramos, Nicole Ortegón, Nancy Cantor, Rene Bangert, Nancy Abelmann, Amy Wan, Mark Aber, Peter Mortensen, William Kelleher
 
     
  Nancy Abelmann  
  Nancy Abelmann is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  She currently serves as the director of the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies. She has published books on social movements in contemporary South Korea (Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement, University of California Press, 1996); on women and social mobility in post-colonial South Korea (The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk and Class in Contemporary South Korea, University of Hawai’i Press, 2003); on Korean America (Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots, with John Lie, Harvard University Press, 1995); and on Korean film with Kathleen McHugh, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and Nation (Wayne State University Press, 2005). Currently she is completing The Intimate University: College and the Korean American Family, based on 4 years of transnational ethnography on the educational trajectories of Korean American public college students as they articulate with the educational histories of their émigré parents.  She is the co-founder of the Ethnography of the University (EOTU), a project that has been lots of fun!  
     
  Mark Aber  
  Mark S. Aber is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and a past Faculty Fellow at the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Aber is white Irish Catholic and grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He earned his B.A. in psychology and philosophy from Yale University in 1981and his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Virginia in 1989. He served as a member of the Council of Program Directors in Community Research and Action since 1991. He has served on the editorial board of the American Journal of Community Psychology and as reviewer for a number of NIH study sections. Aber’s research aims to explain and promote the healthy development of children and families living in economically impoverished neighborhoods, and, (2) collaborative community-based interventions designed to build community organization and promote community development. Current research includes studies of (1) white college students’ understanding and feelings about of their race and ethnicity, and, (2) community based efforts to eliminate racial inequities in public schools.  
     
  Rene Bangert  
  Rene Bangert, a senior in International Studies with a focus on Latin American Development and Social Justice, is interested in cross cultural experiences. She spent a year in Ecuador studying and volunteering in an Afro-Ecuadorian community and in the rural highlands. Rene has enjoyed working with EOTU, both on Brown as well as with international students. Being white and coming from the most heterogeneous,(white) Republican neighborhood in Chicago, Rene was very happy to become engaged with different cultures at U of I. She hopes to work for an Non-Governmental Organization in Latin America in the future.  
     
  Paul Davis  
     
     
  William Kelleher, Jr.  
  Bill Kelleher is a Professor of Anthropology at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. His interests include institutional analysis and his primary research has been on workplace and state institutions in Northern Ireland, particularly state violence and its effects. He has conducted ethnographic research in a factory in Northern Ireland and on British state institutions in Northern Ireland. He has written Telling Identities: The Work of Memory in Northern Ireland (University of Michigan Press), a book dealing with workplace and state institutions that will be published November/December. He is working on a book dealing with the transformation of state institutions, particularly those dealing with the organization of social justice and the making of peace in contemporary Northern Ireland. It is under contract with the University of California Press.  
     
  Peter Mortensen  
  Peter Mortensen is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is Director of Rhetoric, Co-Director of the Ethnography of the University Cross-Campus Initiative, and a core faculty affiliate of the Center for Writing Studies. He is co-author of Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States (2002), and co-editor of Women and Literacy: Local and Global Inquiries for a New Century (in press) and Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy (1996). He is completing a book on the rhetoric of illiteracy in U.S. journalistic, bureaucratic, and literary discourse at the turn of the twentieth century.  
     
  Nicole Ortegón  
  Nicole Desiree Ortegón. Born in Chicago, IL. Multiethnic female of Mexican and Italian cultural heritage. December 2003. Graduated summa cum laude with highest distinction in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign with a B.A. in Liberal Arts and Sciences. June 2005.  Graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education with an M.Ed. in Technology in Education. Currently pursuing a career in management with a focus on international business, as an employee of McMaster-Carr Supply Company.  
     
  Teresa Ramos  
  Teresa Ramos is a second year Ph.D. student in cultural anthropology. Her social justice interests have lead her to educational anthropology and she hopes to use critical race theory to study student racial identity formation in the United States. Personal experience as a multiracial (White Latina) student in Chicago has reinforced in the importance of childhood interactions in schools as a factor in racial identity formation. Teresa's ethnographic work on the Brown v Board of Education Commemoration taught her about the strength and detrimental nature of the colorblind mentality: "Unfortunately, we are living in a world that although clearly not colorblind operates under the illusion that we are all born on equal footing." She hopes to work towards the breakdown of structural and personal racisms with future work.  
     
  Gardner Rogers  
  Gardner Rogers, Program Coordinator for EOTU, is a doctoral student in English. His dissertation (in progress), entitled Whose South? Contesting Representations, 1930-1976, examines fiction and photographs of the American South. His work for EOTU allows him to act on two long-held articles of faith. First, he believes that undergraduate students can perform meaningful and important research, and that institutions of higher learning must demand this work of them. Second, he believes colleges and universities must provide instruction that disturbs implicit and unexamined comfort with the cultural, political, and social status quo; if such instruction discomfits teachers as well as students, so much the better.  
     
  Amy Wan  
  Amy Wan is doctoral student in the Center for Writing Studies and Department of English. Her (in progress) dissertation, Producing Good Citizens: Literacy and Citizenship in Anxious Times, studies the credentialing role of literacy for immigrants and workers by examining worker education and Americanization programs against the development of writing classes at public universities in the early 20th century. In addition to being a research assistant for EBC, she has also served as the Assistant Director for the Academic Writing Program and has incorporated EOTU into her freshman writing courses. Her academic interests emerge out of experiences as a writing instructor, but equally, the real root of her academic interests emerge from “life experiences”—child of Chinese immigrants, uprooted city dweller, active citizen, and former worker for a multinational media corporation. This awareness has encouraged her to pursue academic studies, including her work with EBC, that come to bear on the realities of people outside of the university.