CURRENT PROJECTS
GRANT PROPOSAL (pending):
NSF ADVANCE NSF 05-584: More than the Sum of Its Parts: Advancing Women at NJIT through Collaborative Research Networks.
Heartbreaker--a play in 2 Acts (synopsis)
First staged public reading: June 14, 2005, at the Arthur Seelen Theatre in New York.
PROJECT SUMMARY: More than the Sum of Its Parts--Advancing Women at NJIT through Collaborative Research Networks
Intellectual Merit: The absence of women faculty in the science and technology classroom creates a negative feedback loop that resists change. Few women want to go to places where few women are. This is understandable. Gender schema bias increases exponentially as the proportion of women in a given population decreases. The women who do stay in science and technology tend to migrate away from academia toward industry where there is no tenure clock to create conflict with the biological clock and where family-friendly policies and resources make it somewhat easier to have a balanced life.
NJIT ADVANCE offers an innovative, exportable, and low-cost solution to this conundrum of small numbers. The ADVANCE strategy builds on Sue Rosser’s observation that women researchers often respond to a chilly university climate by creating “a small, empowering environment in their own labs” (Rosser 2004). That is, they achieve in microcosm what they are not able to achieve in macrocosm: functional critical mass. Functional critical mass changes more than the number. It changes the way men see women (dampens gender schema bias effects); and it changes the way women see themselves (the quorum sensing effect). It generates strategic power for sustainable structural transformation.
NJIT ADVANCE will generate strategic power for change by enabling and funding a network of interdisciplinary research collaborations among NJIT’s current women faculty and a few of their male peers--beginning with a collaboration in Geospatial Technologies, an area that has many applications to other disciplines. By positioning these female-majority research communities in the interstices between disciplinary departments--the “structural holes” in the NJIT organizational map--ADVANCE will exploit what sociologist Mark Granovetter (1973, 1983) has called “the strength of weak ties”--that is, information and control advantages of being a broker in relations between people otherwise disconnected in the social structure (Burt 1998). Using a combination of traditional networking techniques and new pervasive information technologies (including NJIT’s NSF-funded SmartCampus cyberinfrastructure), ADVANCE will interconnect these communities to each other, to NJIT’s provost, who has an established record of supporting women faculty--and to an industrial diversity advisory board. This network will increase the social capital of the women faculty as a whole and create leverage in the departmental P&T process. ADVANCE Minority Researcher and Cognitive Apprentice programs will connect women researchers to women graduate students, creating a conduit through which the female faculty of the future can flow. Training programs, including workshops for chairs and deans, will inculcate cross-gender and cross-cultural communication skills and greater sensitivity to gender schema bias in search and P&T evaluation. A Work-Life Alliance will foster family-friendly policies that have the support of both male and female faculty members. The existence of interconnected collaboraties of women scholars on the NJIT campus will improve retention and recruitment simultaneously.
Broader Impacts: The gender climate change model that will be field-tested by NJIT ADVANCE will provide a template for transformation that can be replicated at technological universities across the country. The synergy between the NJIT ADVANCE strategy and existing trends toward greater interdisciplinarity and collaboration in academic R&D will insure that cultural transformation is sustainable. NJIT ADVANCE’S innovative use of pervasive information technologies to diminish isolation, increase social capital, and support community among women faculty is unprecedented and has potential national significance. The project’s equally innovative assessment strategy--mapping networks in research-oriented social space over time--promises to offer a dynamic method of measuring institutional climate change. The integration of cross-cultural with cross-gender communication in a teamwork training program designed specifically for scientists and engineers fills an important need as the ethnic diversity of the S&T workforce increases. These training modules will be captured on digital video and disseminated nationally via Webcast, rich media, and DVD, along with the results of the project’s Living Laboratory studies. Thus advances at NJIT can be used to create functional critical mass among women researchers at other universities, breaking the negative feedback loop that has made the recruitment and retention of women in science and technology such a disturbing social conundrum.
Heartbreaker is an existential comedy, loosely based on the life of the legendary Swedish tenor Jussi Bjorling (1911-1960), a man who sang with such “ecstasy…that, 40 years after his death, he is still able to reduce us to tears.”*
There are three parallel plot lines. The first plot tracks the unnamed SINGER’s internalized will-struggle with his dead father, whom he ostensibly adored. The second tracks the bumpy but passionate love story of the Singer and his WIFE, a diva-manqué whose desire for a predictable and orderly life coexists uneasily with her desire for desire. These two plots are connected by a frame in which the Singer interacts with a fastidious young male WRITER who is ghosting the alcoholic Singer’s autobiography.
Although the play begins surrealistically with a death-that-is-not-a-death, the Act I frame story, set in 1946 at the Singer’s summer home in the Stockholm archipelago, seems to be a traditional, linear narrative at first. Its solidity is gradually compromised, however, not only by inter-cut memory sequences but by strange skips, repeats, gaps, and anachronistic intrusions. It gradually becomes apparent that the summer home sits inside a larger, surrealistic set that seems to be a bar, which, in turn, is enclosed by a shimmering world of water and light.
In Act II, the frame narrative world falls away. The Singer finds himself outside of normal timespace in a kind of rehearsal hall of the soul: a Bar and Grille inhabited by ENRICO CARUSO and Swedish-American ventriloquist EDGAR BERGEN who function as the Singer’s surrogate fathers. After a climactic encounter with a Mephistophelean 21st century psycho-pharmacologist (DOCTOR DOKTOR) who tempts him with a Faustian bargain, the Singer achieves a measure of peace and existential understanding. Although he is subsequently stripped of that understanding and thrust back into the chaos of his life, his ability to “remember the things we do not remember” allows him to negotiate a happy ending with his wife. In its final scenes, the play circles back to the opening death scene, transforming it into a libestod.
As the possibility of “remembering the things we do not remember” suggests, the play is built around a set of existential paradoxes: paradoxes about strength and weakness, intelligence and stupidity, brokenness and wholeness--indeed, brokenness as wholeness. This curious notion, what the Japanese call wabi, is first suggested by the head-quote, from a song by Leonard Cohen: “There’s a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in.” In a sense, the play exists to explain the meaning of that line.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Nancy Steffen Fluhr
1172 Green Pond Road
Newfoundland, NJ 07435
973-208-9015 (h) 973-596-3295 (w)
201-919-4018 (cell)
steffen@njit.edu or steffen@optonline.net