HOLD THE DATES!
March 9 - Author Tony Platt
March 30 - All School Day Event
Dear alumni, friends, and colleagues,
The School of Social Work has two wonderful programs coming up in March. We hope you’ll join us for them (both events are free). The first is a Friday, March 9th Colloquium at 1:00 pm in Room 106 of the Business Building. Dr. Tony Platt, professor of social work emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, will be speaking on his book, Grave Matters: Excavating California’s Buried Past. This will be (my opinion!) a top notch presentation about ethical issues that impact many disciplines including social work. From the book’s jacket:
“Grave Matters tells the untold story of Native American graves plundered and looted by the thousands in California. It’s a quite shocking expose filled with entirely new material, and yet also much more: an indictment of some of twentieth century anthropology’s most famous names; an account of tribal struggles for control over their dead; and a meditation about history, violence and the tension between memory and forgetting. Tony Platt has given us an original, haunting, and necessary tour de force of a book.” Orin Starn, Professor…Duke University; author of Ishi’s Brain
“A truly marvelous account. The conqueror usually writes history. Now, thanks to Tony Platt digging up the facts, everybody knows the truth.” Joy Sundberg, Cher-Ae Heights Indian Community of the Trinidad Rancheria.
Second, we’ll be celebrating the School of Social Work’s All School Day on Friday, March 30 from 11am to 4pm. All School Day will also be held in room 106 of the Business Building. Our speakers this year are Dr. Debora Ortega (at 11:00 am) and Dr. Ricky Bluthenthal (at 2:00pm). A free lunch will be served at 1:00. CEUs for both speakers are being applied for.
Deb Ortega teaches at the Denver University School of Social Work and directs DU’s Latino Center for Community Engagement and Scholarship, an interdisciplinary group of faculty members who engage in scholarship, research and service for the benefit of the Latino community. Professor Ortega, a wonderfully engaged and passionate social work scholar, has authored and co-authored numerous journal articles, book chapters and grant reports. Her many grant-funded projects include private provider training, programs to assist youth transitioning from foster care and a three-year effort to develop models of effective child welfare with Hispanic families. Here’s a link to Dr. Ortega’s webpage: http://www.du.edu/socialwork/faculty/facultypages/ortega.html.
Ricky Bluthenthal is director of the Urban Community Research Center and a Professor in the Sociology Department at California State University Dominguez Hills. Dr. Bluthenthal’s major research contributions have been in the areas of HIV epidemiology and prevention for drug injectors, racial/ethnic differences in alcohol consumption, consequences, and treatment outcomes, and community approaches to health promotion. An amazingly prolific scholar, Dr. Bluthenthal will be speaking about harm reduction--what harm reduction is, where it came from, its history (mostly through needle exchange programs) in the US, and its evidence-based as well as emerging application areas and new research efforts. Dr. Bluthenthal’s web page: http://www.nbs.csudh.edu/Ricky.html.
Please plan to attend both events—I can guarantee that these three speakers will take us into important and somewhat unexplored domains, all needing ethical and informed social work presence. Our best to all of you—we always appreciate your keeping in touch!
Susan Chandler, MSW, PhD
Associate Professor