Skip to content

News and features

Are you ready for REAL ID?

Thursday, April 17 // 12:00 PM PT

The new federal REAL ID Act goes into effect May 7th. This will change the way we are able to board flights to travel within the United States. Your standard driver license or identification card will no longer be accepted by the Transportation Security Administration. 

This webinar will provide information about the new federal REAL ID travel requirements and your options for acceptable travel documents. 

Sponsored by the UW Office of Global Affairs and the WA State Department of Licensing

Register Now!

Global Visionaries: Vanessa de Veritch Woodside

The Office of Global Affairs is excited to celebrate Vanessa de Veritch Woodside for our March 2025 edition of the Global Visionaries series. The Global Visionaries series highlights the UW’s global impact by featuring innovative, globally-engaged faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Vanessa de Veritch Woodside

Vanessa de Veritch Woodside, PhD, is Associate Professor of Spanish Language and Cultures, Associate Dean of Equity and Inclusion in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and Executive Director of the Office of Global Affairs at UW Tacoma. Dr. Vanessa de Veritch Woodside describes her experience advancing global learning opportunities for students as a faculty member and as an administrative leader, advocating for Collaborative Online International Learning and researching the lived experiences of immigrants, refugees and their families.

Dr. Vanessa de Veritch Woodside obtained a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese and a MA in Spanish/Hispanic Literature from the University of New Mexico and a BA in Spanish from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her knowledge and expertise includes transnational migration, the subversive power of voice and storytelling in Latine and borderlands literature, community-engaged projects with local immigrant and refugee communities and the non-profits that serve them, and innovative pedagogical techniques for global and community-engaged learning.


Tell us about your background and experience.

I’m the granddaughter of Slavic, Russian Jewish, and Norwegian immigrants, and was born and raised in Southern California, where the use of Spanish alongside English was commonplace. When I began to learn Spanish in high school, I never imagined I would ultimately pursue a career in the field! As an undergraduate at the University of California Santa Barbara, I explored a variety of fields, but after studying abroad in Salamanca, Spain, decided to pursue Spanish, Linguistics, and Speech and Hearing Sciences. Upon graduation, I began a joint PhD program that combined neuroscience and cognitive linguistics at the University of California San Diego and San Diego State University, focusing on the neurological basis for bilingual language processing and how to best support bilingual youth diagnosed with language and communicative disorders. As fascinating as the topics were, I wasn’t entirely sure that was the best path forward for me. When the opportunity to travel the world while following a passion of mine presented itself, I temporarily stepped away from academia to perform in Broadway-style shows as a dancer on Holland America Line cruise ships. One six-month contract became another… and then others, and I discovered how much I loved learning more about the cultures and histories of Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Colombia while also honing my Spanish skills by communicating with locals in those regions. When I felt pulled to return to grad school, I decided this time to follow my passion for the Spanish language, literature, and their use within the context of social justice. I completed my MA in Spanish/Hispanic Literature and my PhD in Spanish and Portuguese with a focus on Latinx/Chicanx Literature at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

When I initially applied for a faculty position at UW Tacoma, I was attracted by its commitment to interdisciplinarity and its role as an urban-serving university. Since my arrival in 2012, I’ve had amazing opportunities to pursue interdisciplinary scholarly research and teaching, and to engage in service at the university and community levels that aligns with, and contributes to, UWT’s pillars of access, diversity, innovation, community, and excellence. After a decade as a faculty member, I was eager to deepen this work with leadership opportunities that leverage my administrative experience, collaborative relationships across and beyond campus, and the inherent importance of DEI in scholarship and higher education to work alongside colleagues to develop positive systemic change, I graciously accepted the opportunity to serve as the inaugural School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Associate Dean of Equity and Inclusion in December 2022. When I was initially asked to step into the role of Interim Executive Director of the Office of Global Affairs in May 2023 as well, my immediate reaction was one of trepidation. Upon further reflection, though, I embraced the exciting potential of the natural convergence of my passions and professional experiences related to global learning and high-impact practices; the study of languages, literatures, and cultures; community-engaged work with local immigrants, refugees, and their families; and equity-minded teaching, research, service, and leadership for social justice. I’m delighted that, as of December 2023, I have served as the Executive Director of our UWT Office of Global Affairs on a more permanent basis.

Why are you a champion of Collaborative Online International Learning?

I first learned about Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) at UW Bothell’s 2015 Global Engagement through Technology Symposium and jumped at the chance to participate in the 2016-2017 cohort of UW COIL Fellows. The more I began to learn about the pedagogical framework and incorporate COIL components in my courses, the more I recognized COIL’s potential to substantially expand student access to high-impact global learning and exemplify the mission and vision of UWT with regards to global citizenship, access, equity, and diversity. High-impact international learning experiences may also improve belonging among culturally diverse students within the classroom and increase student retention and graduation rates. Yet, NAFSA: Association of International Educators indicates that only 1.5% of US university students studied abroad in 2022-23 (NAFSA, “Trends in U.S. Study Abroad,” n.d.). Notably, the pre-pandemic figure of 1.68% isn’t much higher (NAFSA, “Study Abroad,” n.d.). This becomes, then, a question of access, inclusion and equity—or lack thereof—particularly in the case of our student population at UWT.

With COIL Collaborator Bethzabé López Peñaloza of UNAM Campus Morelia

At the national level, the discrepancies between the percentage of US university students that study abroad based on categories of race and ethnicity are alarming. A recent report indicates that 66.4% of US post-secondary students participating in international programs in 2022-23 were Caucasian, 5.9% were African American/Black, 12.2% were Hispanic/Latino(a) American, 9.6% were Asian/Pacific Islander, and 0.35 were American Indian/Alaska Native despite respectively constituting 52.3%, 12.5%, 20.3%, 7.6%, and 0.7% of US postsecondary enrollment for the same year (NAFSA, “Trends,” n.d.). At UWT, we are proud of the remarkable diversity of our students, not only in terms of race and ethnicity, but also with respect to age, socioeconomic status, military affiliation, and more. A 2024-25 snapshot of student demographics of our urban-serving university indicates that 53% of our undergraduate students are “first-generation students” (e.g., the first of their family to attend college or the first to obtain a degree), 32% self-identify as underserved minorities, and 63% as students of color (“UW Tacoma 2024-25,” n.d.). Although we have been successful in having parallel percentages of students from these categories participate in our UWT study abroad programs, less than 1% of our total undergraduate population goes abroad. How, then, could our university better serve the overwhelming majority of our unique student body—those who do not participate in more traditional international learning experiences?

COIL affords the opportunity to put into practice our broader institutional goals of access, innovation, high-impact practices, and global citizenship while also contributing to the achievement of specific linguistic and cultural learning objectives at the course level. My COIL collaborators and I have created highly interactive course content in which our students engage in collaborative problem-solving and creation of knowledge with their international peers. Particularly in the language classroom, COIL offers a way to incorporate communicative activities in an authentic context to encourage use of the target language and develop an awareness of the relevance of studying Spanish (or English) through personal explorations of the language and culture, to challenge their preconceptions about Mexico and Mexicans (or the US and Americans), and to motivate them to embrace the value of an often required course and perhaps even continue their linguistic and cultural studies.

Collaborative Online International Learning not only enhances students’ disciplinary knowledge, but it inherently provides exposure to new perspectives, new interpersonal connections, and an opportunity for the development of intercultural skills that will serve them well professionally and personally.

Dr. Vanessa de Veritch WoodsideUW Tacoma

In this political moment, it seems as though we receive an incessant stream of reports about the latest conflicts and tensions between governments and an emphasis on constructing obstacles to cooperation, whether they be new economic or immigration policies or physical structures. While it may be idealistic and optimistic, I wholeheartedly believe in the power of interpersonal connections to effect positive change on a larger scale. For many of my students, their work with international peers via COIL is the first time they have engaged to any degree with others from outside the US.

Tell us more about your research on Mexican and Central American migrants.

 

de Veritch Woodside’s 2020 monograph

In my dissertation research, I analyzed the progression of literary representations that mirror the progressively intensified criminalization of Mexican and Central American women and child migrants over time, and the ensuing impact on gendered norms. In the years since then, I’ve completed various projects focusing both on the lived experiences of immigrants, refugees, and their families, as well as literary, theatrical, musical, and cinematographic representations of these. I received the 2022 International Latino Book Awards Silver Medal and the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies Judy Ewell Award for my 2020 monograph, Ripped Apart: Unsettling Transnational Narratives. Grounded in theories of narrative empathy and the representation of trauma, Ripped Apart is an innovative and interdisciplinary analysis of Latina narratives of transnational migration that underscore the intersections of the physical, psychological, sociocultural, and legal/structural traumas endured by migrants and their families.

In collaboration with Dr. Rachel Hershberg and our undergrad RAs, we conducted publicly engaged work with partner organizations involving interviews with individuals recently released from detention in Tacoma’s Northwest ICE Processing Center (formally the Northwest Detention Center) and their family members, and documenting psychosocial effects of displacement, detention, and deportation on individuals affected by immigration. Analysis of emergent themes revealed the need to raise awareness of human rights violations, and our data enabled community partners to improve and expand their services and successfully obtain grants and donor funding. Our more recent work focuses on the experiences of UWT students who are DACA recipients and/or undocumented within the framework of intersectionality and phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST), which involves a more nuanced understanding of emergent identities based on students’ own interpretations of their vulnerabilities and supports as they cope with their experiences of interconnected systems of oppression due to their (or their family members’) immigration status.

With Invited Speaker Sonia Nazario and Latinos Embracing Education RSO students at a past event

More recently, I’ve expanded work on various community-based projects that intersect with my previous research on narratives of Latine migration and collaborations with local non-profits that serve local immigrant and refugee communities. In partnership with Communities for a Healthy Bay and La Resistencia, Dr. Robin Evans-Agnew (UWT School of Nursing and Healthcare Leadership) and I have developed a community-based participatory action project that focuses on the intersections of environmental racism, immigrant justice, and climate change. I’m also at work collecting oral histories that document Latine community-organizing and community-building efforts to Tacoma and the South Sound from the years of the Chicano Movement (late 60s) to the present, partially funded by a 2023 UWT Founders Endowment Award.

What guides your leadership style?

Along with intellectual curiosity, relationship-building—with students, colleagues, and community partners alike—is at the core of all I do. As a leader, I strive to embody what Dr. Estela Mara Bensimon terms “equity-mindedness,” that is, “the perspective or mode of thinking exhibited by practitioners who call attention to patterns of inequity in student outcomes. These practitioners are willing to take personal and institutional responsibility for the success of their students, and critically reassess their own practices. It also requires that practitioners are race-conscious and aware of the social and historical context of exclusionary practices in American Higher Education” (HERS Equity-Minded Leadership Institute).

I recognize the importance of personal and cultural humility, the value of collaborative problem-solving, and making data-based and values-driven decisions.

Dr. Vanessa de Veritch WoodsideUW Tacoma
How do you approach teaching courses about Spanish Language and Cultures?
Teaching at UW Tacoma

Though I don’t teach much these days due to my administrative roles, I’ve had the opportunity to teach all levels of Spanish language courses as well as courses in Latin American and Latinx literature and cultural studies in both Spanish and English during my 12 years at UWT. While the content and format differ depending on the course, I typically want students to interrogate notions that they have assumed were standard. Ultimately, I want them to question what has framed their own experiences and understand what the experiences of others might be and why. Literature can be a highly effective way to open up a conversation about history that’s not generally taught in K-12 curriculum or even on college campuses. In my courses on immigration and transnational families, for example, I incorporate a variety of materials—from films, novels, and ethnographic works to podcasts, news stories, and interactive websites—to provide a more comprehensive and interdisciplinary understanding of the topics at hand. The assignments in those courses go beyond the traditional academic assessment and focus on self-reflection and potential connections to their personal and professional aspirations.

My approach also centers relationships with students within and beyond the classroom and connecting them to opportunities to engage meaningfully abroad and with local Latine and Spanish-speaking communities. Most of my students have been from the South Sound region and many have themselves experienced the lack of access to resources like language interpretation in medical care, or inequities, whether it be in terms of public services, issues in school systems, or elsewhere. I strive to connect students with opportunities for community-engaged learning to effect positive change in our region and worldwide, with a focus on reciprocal and equitable relationships with community partners.

What is your vision as the Executive Director of the UW Tacoma Office of Global Affairs?

In a nutshell, my vision is to leverage my collaborative and equity-minded leadership to work with colleagues to expand our students’ access to global learning opportunities and to embrace a reparative international education framework that both honors the experiences, knowledges, and assets of our students and entails mindful, not extractive, engagement with local and global communities. I also look forward to working with our team and colleagues to build capacity to strategically support a growing international student population and create a more visible centralized infrastructure to support faculty and staff interested in pursuing international research/teaching, hosting visitors, or establishing formal institutional partnerships. Ultimately, my hope is that global learning (whether it be through COIL, local engagement with international communities, or abroad) will come to be seen not as an add-on, but an integral component of the university experience for all students.

Visit from HRH Prince Carl Philip of Sweden

The delegation visited the UW Seattle campus on Thursday, March 27, 2025.

His Royal Highness Prince Carl Philip of Sweden, representatives from The Prince Couple’s Foundation, and other institutions in Sweden were welcomed by Vice Provost for Global Affairs Ahmad Ezzeddine and met with our panel of UW faculty from the Information School (Katie Davis, Alexis Hiniker, Michelle H. Martin, Temi Odumosu, Jason C. Yip) and Human Centered Design & Engineering (Julie Kientz, R. Benjamin Shapiro). The discussion centered on the faculty’s research and projects with topics ranging from human-computer design & interaction to reading comprehension, dyslexia and online safety for children.

 

The cherry blossoms represent long ties between the UW and Japan

Cherry blossoms on the Quad

The University of Washington has enduring ties with Japan. Our iconic Yoshino cherry trees, planted in the 1930s, are a reminder of this friendship, attracting thousands of visitors to the Quad when they bloom every spring.

These cherry trees symbolize the continued relations between Japan and the United States, along with the more than 120 years of history of Japanese and Japanese-American students at the University of Washington.

Behind The Blossoms

Global Visionaries: Tony Lucero

José Antonio (Tony) Lucero

The Office of Global Affairs is excited to celebrate Tony Lucero for our February 2025 edition of the Global Visionaries series. The Global Visionaries series highlights the UW’s global impact by featuring innovative, globally-engaged faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Dr. José Antonio (Tony) Lucero, is Professor and Chair of the Comparative History of Ideas Department and a Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. He also has courtesy appointments in the Department of Geography and in American Indian Studies. Dr. Lucero describes his experience centering reciprocity in his research and teaching, leading study abroad programs to Peru and Ecuador, and exploring the role universities can play in challenging global hierarchies of knowledge.

Dr. Lucero obtained a MA/PhD in Politics from Princeton University and a BA in Political Science from Stanford University. His knowledge and expertise includes Indigenous politics, critical university studies, social movements, Latin American politics and borderlands.


Tell us about your background and experience.

I was born in El Paso, Texas and raised on both sides of the Mexico-US border. My dad’s family has been crossing the border between New Mexico and Chihuahua for generations, before there was even a border to cross. From a very young age, border-crossing was just a matter of everyday life. Everyone had family on both sides of the border. I grew up speaking Spanish and English. I spent my early years in Ciudad Juárez but my family moved to El Paso when I was about six years old. It wasn’t until I left El Paso that I realized how unusual it was to move so fluidly across international lines. As I got older, though, I realized I had a very thin understanding of my own family’s history.

In college, I became more curious about Latin America. I ultimately decided to pursue it as my area of expertise as I thought about PhD programs. However, before I decided to focus on Latin America, I was initially interested in Italy. I studied Italian for two years and studied abroad in Italy. I was really interested in Machiavelli, so I decided to study in Florence where I read Machiavelli’s journals in the archives, and was so amazed to be reading things he wrote in his own hand. That experience was transformative. It was on that study abroad program that I realized that an academic life could be an international one.

Ever since my own experience studying abroad in Italy, I was captivated by the idea of interacting with other peoples, ideas, histories and languages as part of one’s education.

Dr. Tony LuceroChair, Comparative History of Ideas Department

Before I came to the University of Washington, my wife (María Elena García, Comparative History of Ideas Department) and I were both teaching on the East Coast. We were living in New Jersey – she was teaching in New York and I was teaching in Philadelphia– New Jersey was in the middle. When we had the opportunity to come to the UW, we were very excited about living and working in the same city. The UW was, though, never on our radar. However, for me, the University and Seattle were kind of love at first sight.

I was hired to teach in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, and after being at UW for a couple of years became the Chair of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. A few years later, I asked to move part of my line to the Comparative History of Ideas Department (CHID). I was drawn to this one-of-a-kind department where students are free to explore an interdisciplinary liberal arts degree within the context of a big public research university. CHID is really unique – it questions orthodoxy, encourages students to follow their interests, and challenges faculty to unlearn some of their disciplinary habits. It’s a department where ideas can thrive and roam free. I eventually became Chair of CHID and am currently in year three of a five year term.

How do you center reciprocity and equity in your approach to global research, teaching and learning?

My research is on Indigenous politics. Some of the concepts that are internalized are the values of reciprocity, relevance and respect. It’s about moving away from extracting things – the kind of logic where certain people get to go to certain places and take certain things and certain ideas. For me, leading study abroad programs was an amazing opportunity to live that kind of relationality. I have been fortunate to lead a lot of study abroad programs at the UW and we only go to places where we already have deep relationships.

I started working in the Andes in the 1990s. I was on a research trip in the early 2000s when I met an incredible group of actors, artists and musicians doing impressive human rights work. We connected at a talk by one of the most famous Peruvian academics at the time, Aníbal Quijano. Quijano came up with a very famous idea called coloniality of power – the idea that colonialism operates through the racialization and hierarchies of knowledge and people and that it becomes a machinery that exists across time in different ways and in different manifestations. After that talk, which was held at the headquarters of an anti-mining Indigenous social movement organization, I developed long-lasting and meaningful ties with that group of artists in Peru. They were all working artists who had incredible commitments to thinking about how to keep the conversation alive about truth and reconciliation. Peru had just gone through the truth and reconciliation process after two decades of internal war and authoritarianism.

In 2009, my wife and I created a study abroad program on art and politics in Peru. I’ve always felt that the UW is one of those universities where if you have a good idea you can pretty much run with it. Our idea came together – through the support of CHID. Our main collaborator was Jorge Miyagui, a Japanese Peruvian artist. He was just magic to work with. One of the highlights from that first year was collaborating on a mural project. We worked with kids in a local community on an initiative called the muralist brigade. We all met at a spot where we had permission to do the mural and then worked together to come to a consensus about what story the community wanted to tell in the mural. The artists started the mural by adding outlines and then everybody contributed with paint and sponges.

After we ran our first program, we decided we really needed to bring Jorge and one of the other artists to Seattle. We wanted to include an element of reciprocity for the people that we worked most closely with and this set the foundation for all of our study abroad programs moving forward. After our first cohort of students went to Peru, we applied for a grant through the Simpson Center for the Humanities in partnership with another CHID study abroad program. The funding enabled us to bring three artists (two from Peru and one from Martinique) to Seattle. It was called Visual Ecologies of Solidarity. The idea was to compare various ways that art can connect people to different political ecologies through a series of individual and collective talks. It was an amazing opportunity for these three artists to share their work with the UW and communities in Seattle.

This approach to designing study abroad programs has become part of the CHID ethos. We believe study abroad has to be three things: it has to be intellectually serious; it has to think critically about colonial history; and it has to have an element of reciprocity and collegiality. This way of thinking naturally carried over to study abroad since it’s in CHID’s approach to scholarship and teaching at the UW.

Over the past fifteen years, we’ve shared the networks we’ve established in Peru with other colleagues at the UW, and they have shared their networks with us. For example, Monica Rojas-Stewart in the Department of Dance and Adam Warren in the Department of History lead a study abroad program to Peru focused on Afro Peruvian history and culture. They collaborate with some of the partners from our own study abroad program. Looking back, it’s been amazing to support the work of these Peruvian artists over the last fifteen years. It’s also incredible that some of our students who participated in our first cohort in 2009 are still in touch with Jorge and many of the artists they met in Peru.

Tell us about your new study abroad program to Ecuador, Land, Native Knowledge, and Agro-ecology in the Andes and Amazon.

Our study abroad program to Peru emerged organically. I did my dissertation research in Ecuador in the 1990s and it’s a place that I had been meaning to go back to for a long time. Two years ago, I was on the dissertation committee of a brilliant Ecuadorian PhD student, Juan Mateo Espinosa. He is a medical doctor and his family has been farming the same land for generations, just outside of Quito. He felt that the best way to contribute to people’s health was through the soil. He wrote this incredible dissertation about what we can learn from herbs, plants and the land. He shared that we can really learn from the way Indigenous people have been in relationship with different ecosystems and food systems for millenia. During his dissertation defense, Juan Mateo Espinosa shared photographs of the soil. It’s a technique called chromatography; you take a photograph of the soil, and it gives you a sense of the health of the soil. It was amazing to see the soil come alive in incredible patterns and colors. He also collaborated with Ecuadorian poets. He shared the photographs with them and they composed verses based on the images of the land. It was very moving to see him share multiple stories – scientific, visual and poetic – about the land.

This approach to centering native knowledge really resonated with me. CHID is all about different ways of knowing in the world. I connected with Juan Mateo Espinosa afterwards to pitch a CHID study abroad program to him and he agreed. He is committed to being in Ecuador but he likes to have a connection with the academy in the Global North. We ran the program for the first time last year and it was tremendous. We had a terrific group of UW students. We worked with five Indigenous farmers who are incredible human beings. They were very generous hosts and we learned so much from them. The program went so well that one of our students has already booked his travel to go back to Ecuador this summer. He’s going to be living on one of the farms we visited for a couple of weeks before going to the Amazon. Another student, for their CHID thesis, is bringing an Amazonian Indigenous leader that we worked closely with to Seattle in May to create a toolkit for other students about how they can create experiences of reciprocity.

The study abroad program is based on Juan Mateo Espinosa’s work in agro-ecology. It’s all about how people have different ways of thinking and knowing. Fundamentally, it’s about how we can work with nature instead of against it. Instead of relying on pesticides and fertilizers, the program explores how to support the soil by leveraging microorganisms and other living forces in the soil and environment. Indigenous people have been doing this forever. The program has urban and rural components to it. We begin in a university town and do day trips to local Andean farms that are accessible by bus. We learn about the relationships between Indigenous farmers and the land and what they farm. We learn about traditional cooking techniques, such as Pachamanca. It means to cook in the earth and involves digging a hole, setting a fire, heating up stones and adding layers of herbs and spices and meat in an earth oven. You have to wait a couple of hours but it’s an incredible meal. The ceremony behind this process of Mother Earth birthing food is powerful. We also learn about creative ways Indigenous farmers are working with what is available to navigate drought and how they are leveraging herbs and trees for medicinal purposes to heal their communities.

We also spend time in a Kichwa community in the Amazon. While there, our host shares a practice that they do in their community every day around three o’clock in the morning. Everybody gets up and drinks a tea called guayusa. It’s sourced from a local plant, and everyone drinks the tea and shares about their dreams around the fire. It’s a sort of intergenerational transfer of knowledge. There is even knowledge to be learned from how much foam is in the tea each day, as it guides the community on whether to go out fishing or stay close to home.
We’re planning to run this study abroad program again this Early Fall Start and we are still looking for students to join us. The deadline has been extended to March 1st. It’s an amazing opportunity for students who want to spend time in the Andes and the Amazon. Ecuador is a small country so you can go from the Andes to the Amazon in a few hours.

What inspired you to collaborate on the Activating the Third University Project?
Tony Lucero (left) and K. Wayne Yang (right) in San Diego

For a long time, we’ve been trying to figure out how to create more equitable relationships between the university and the Global South. Over the past few years, I have become increasingly interested in teaching about and researching critical university studies. One of the great books about this is A Third University Is Possible by K. Wayne Yang, Provost of John Muir College and Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC, San Diego. Under the pen name of la paperson, he suggests there is a way to think about the university as a machine. He argues machines don’t care for us, and so we should not romanticize any university as a place that’s going to take care of all our wants, needs and desires. He takes the idea of a scyborg and suggests that even though we are all within the machinery of the university, which can feel confining at times, there are opportunities to do things differently and that the machinery can extend our own agency. He gives a great example of how R2-D2 is the true hero of Star Wars. R2-D2, by connecting with the Death Star, makes the victory of the rebels possible.

During the 2023-2024 academic year, I collaborated with Anita Ramasastry in the School of Law and the Office of Global Affairs, and Muindi F Muindi in the Office of Global Affairs on an initiative called Worlds of Difference. We were grateful to receive financial support from the Simpson Center for the Humanities for a project called Activating the Third University. We were curious about how to borrow K. Wayne Yang’s ideas and apply them to a global context. Our aim was to facilitate conversations and collective endeavors to investigate, address, and redress the UW’s implicit and complicit contributions, as a global university, to the reproduction of global hierarchies of race, gender, class, and geography, and in the reproduction of knowledge as the preserve of those most privileged by such hierarchies.

We organized an iterative and participatory process to involve the UW community and our global partners in tasks that focused on institutional, intellectual, and relational change. We brought in fellow thinkers from inside and outside the university to help us imagine different ways of connecting the university to partners in the Global South. We sought knowledge from Ben Gardner (School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell), Anu Taranath (Department of English and Comparative History of Ideas Department, UW Seattle) and Ron Krabill (School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell) through their work with the Global Reciprocity Network. We hosted working groups, virtual and in-person events and a graduate microseminar to examine these big questions. It was all about how we can use the idea of a third university to really inform and guide the way the university engages with the world. It was incredible to gather hundreds of students, staff and faculty across all three campuses and create space for them to share their experiences and perspectives.

The book is a collaboration with a tribal member of the Tohono O’odham community and nation. Tohon O’odham means “people of the desert.” It’s an Indigenous nation that exists on both sides of the Mexico-US border, and it’s existed there since time immemorial. At one point, the northern quarter of the reservation was the deadliest corridor for migrant passing in the Americas. Mike Wilson, my coauthor, is a renowned human rights activist. His religious and ethical commitments led him to set up water stations for migrants on the Nation’s lands. He had a crisis of conscience after serving in the US military in Central America in the 1980s, leading him to seminary education in San Francisco. He believed he had a different way to work in the world. He became an immigration advocate after witnessing poverty, racism and border policing at the Mexico-US border.

I spent over a decade working on this book with Mike. It’s an oral history project, but told in two voices. Mike tells a story in his own words and then I share an essay in between the chapters of the stories Mike shares.

My essays zoom out and are hyperlink testimonials – every part of his life opens up a different moment of thinking about the legacies of colonialism, missionary culture and US immigration policies.

Dr. Tony LuceroChair, Comparative History of Ideas Department

For example, there is a chapter on residential boarding schools. Mike’s grandfather was one of the first O’odham kids taken to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. I found pictures of his grandfather that Mike had never seen. It was incredibly powerful to see those images and share those stories. The book sparks conversation about immigration justice and the importance of rethinking borders. The current narrative around immigration is that it only starts once people cross the Mexico-US border line. However, that obscures the incredible dynamics that displace people from their own homes and their own countries.

Mike’s story illuminates all of that in a personal way. It was an incredible opportunity to work with him and to help him tell his story. In these dark times, Mike’s story is a hopeful one. It’s a story about a person who had really strong convictions and then changed his mind about some of his most fundamental beliefs. He then went out into the world and did something and continues to do things for others in the world. Mike’s story also shows the centrality of Indigenous perspectives. It’s an important reminder that indigeneity is a way of understanding the interconnections of people, land, water and histories.

The UW is a Fulbright top producer for 2024-2025

The University of Washington made the Chronicle of Higher Education’s list of the top Fulbright producing institutions. The Fulbright U.S. Scholar and Fulbright U.S. Student Programs are sponsored by the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs to support academic exchanges between the United States and over 160 countries around the world.

Five undergraduate or recent graduates and eight graduate-level students (a total of 13 students) received Fulbright awards and six UW faculty were named Fulbright scholars. The Fulbright experience gives students and scholars the opportunity to live and work abroad, learning about their host country and developing a new community of colleagues and friends. These programs are designed to help participants gain a greater understanding of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, ultimately promoting an atmosphere of openness and mutual understanding.

Learn More

About the Fulbright Program

Founded in 1946, the Fulbright Program is an international academic exchange program that aims to increase mutual understanding and support friendly and peaceful relations between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The UW is proud to have had Fulbright recipients as far back as 1949.

Applying for Fulbright at the UW

The Office of Merit Scholarships, Fellowships and Awards supports UW undergraduate students with their Fulbright applications.

The Graduate School Office of Fellowships & Awards supports UW graduate and professional students and alumni with their Fulbright applications.

The Office of Global Affairs is the liaison for UW faculty for the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program. Please contact Anita Ramasastry (arama@uw.edu) if you have any questions or need support.

Trump in the World 2.0 Spring Lecture Series

March 31 – June 2, 2025 // Mondays, 5:00-6:20 PM

Join us for a spring lecture series on the international impact of the second Trump presidency.

These talks and discussions are available as an in-person 2-credit/no-credit course for UW students. It is also available and free for the public via livestream only. Faculty and guest speaker presentations will explore how different regions and global issues are affected by the policies of the Trump administration. Moderated by Danny Hoffman, Director of the Jackson School of International Studies and Stanley D. Golub Chair of International Studies.

Sponsored by the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and co-sponsored by the Office of Global Affairs.


UW students: 
  • JSIS 478 E – Trump in the World 2.0 (SLN 21568) – listed in MyPlan under Special Topics in International and Global Studies. Register in MyPlan for the course; regular attendance required if taking the course
For the public: 

Questions? For course information, email jsisoas@uw.edu; for public livestream registration, email jsiscom@uw.edu

For general disability accommodation requests, contact us at 206-543-6450 (voice), 206-543-6452 (TTY), 206-685-7264 (fax), or dso@uw.edu.

 

Meet the 2025 UW COIL Fellows

The Office of Global Affairs is excited to announce that 10 faculty members have been selected as 2025 UW Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) Fellows!

White globe on a purple background with two gold people in front of computersCOIL is a virtual exchange pedagogy that fosters global competence through development of a multicultural learning environment, linking university classes in different countries. Using both synchronous and asynchronous technologies, students from different countries complete shared assignments and projects, with instructors from each country co-teaching and managing coursework. COIL is an innovative way to traverse boundaries and make the “classroom learning” experience globally connected.

Since 2014, the UW COIL Fellows program has been supporting faculty in developing and implementing COIL modules in their courses with structured training, a community of practice and a stipend. Building on several years of collaboration between the UW Bothell and UW Tacoma campuses, the UW COIL Fellows is now a tri-campus program.

The program will span two years:

  • Winter 2025-Spring 2025 will focus on course development
  • Summer 2025-Summer 2026 and beyond will focus on implementation

The 2025 UW COIL Fellows are:

Anindita Bhattacharya

School of Social Work & Criminal Justice

TSOCW 541: Adult and Adolescent Interpersonal Violence or a new course on Global Mental Health Needs

UW Tacoma

Codrin Nedita

School of Business

BBUS 221 / BIS 201: Introduction to Macroeconomics

UW Bothell

Enrique Reynoso

School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences 

BIS 326: Race, Space, and Segregation or BISAES 367: Exploring American Culture

UW Bothell

Gene Wang

School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences 

Art History

UW Tacoma

Jaki Yi

School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences 

BIS: 449 Advanced Topics or BISPSY: 489 Projects in Psych

UW Bothell

Jason Lambacher

School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences 

BIS 284: International Relations

UW Bothell

Hsinmei (May) Lin

School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences 

BWRIT 135: Research Writing

UW Bothell

Meichun Liu

School of Art + Art History + Design

DES 582: Graduate Studio

UW Seattle

Michelle H. Martin

Information School

LIS 564: Multicultural Resources for Youth

UW Seattle

Yolanda Padilla

School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences 

BIS 258: Introduction to Latinx Studies

UW Bothell

Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Panel

Wednesday, February 26 // 4:30-5:30 PM // UW Career & Internship Center Lobby

Are you curious about what it’s like to serve in the Peace Corps?

Join us at 134 Mary Gates Hall to learn about the challenging, rewarding, and inspiring moments of service from returned Peace Corps Volunteers who will share stories from their unique service journeys abroad.

This free event is co-hosted by the UW Peace Corps Recruiter and the Office of Global Affairs.

Register Now

Did you know?

  • The UW is No. 3 on a list of top volunteer-producing institutions over the past two decades
  • Since 1961, more than 3,000 UW alumni have served abroad as Peace Corps Volunteers

Globalizing the Syllabus

Thursday, February 20 // 2:30-3:30 PM

Co-sponsored by the Office of Global Affairs and the Center for Teaching and Learning, this workshop will focus on helping faculty create syllabi that are globally inclusive. Participants will explore how to design syllabi and select course content to elevate different voices, traditions, perspectives, and ways of knowing.

This interactive workshop is designed for members of the UW.

You will need a UW NetID to register.

Register Now


Facilitators:

  • Anita Ramasastry, Henry M. Jackson Endowed Professor of Law, School of Law; Director of Faculty Engagement, Office of Global Affairs, Seattle
  • Wei Zuo, Instructional Consultant, UW Center for Teaching and Learning, Seattle

Panelists:

  • Jayadev Athreya, Professor, Mathematics and the Comparative History of Ideas, Seattle
  • Salwa Al-Noori, Associate Teaching Professor, Division of Biological Sciences, School of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, UW Bothell

The University is committed to providing access, equal opportunity, and reasonable accommodation in its services, programs, activities, education, and employment for individuals with disabilities. If you need disability accommodations, please reach out to the UW Disability Services Office (DSO): dso@uw.edu.