Center for Social Concerns

2007-2009 Faculty Fellows

Carl Ackermann is Associate Professional Specialist in the Department of Finance.  For the last six years, he has collaborated with the Director of Summer Service Learning Programs at the Center for Social Concerns on ACCION, a micro-lending program that seeks to reduce poverty and create employment in the Americas. Through ACCION, Notre Dame undergraduates travel to sites across the country to participate in microlending programs as part of a three-credit course for which credits are assigned both through the College of Business and through the Department of Theology. Professor Ackerman will continue this work and will also now team with several local organizations to address financial literacy with the goal of educating and empowering those in greatest financial need. Professor Ackerman studies and writes on the mutual fund industry, and his scholarly work has appeared in the Journal of Finance and the Journal of Business Ethics.

Susan Ohmer is the William T. and Helen Kuhn Carey Assistant Professor of Modern Communication in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre, where she teaches classes on film and television history, media industries, and digital culture. Dr. Ohmer also serves as the Director of Debate at Notre Dame. Through the generous support of the Careys, Notre Dame has reintroduced a program in Policy Debate which offers students the opportunity to research and argue one focused topic each year.  Through her faculty fellow position at the Center for Social Concerns, Professor Ohmer and her students will make this research available to policy makers around the country through an effort initiated through the Bonner Foundation and a grant from the Corporation for National and Community Service titled Policy Options.

2006-2008 Faculty Fellows

Jennifer Warlick is Chair of the Economics and Policy Studies Department and Associate Professor of Economics. As Center Fellow, she will lead an initiative aimed toward the development of a poverty studies minor, in collaboration with Center Associate Director Mary Beckman and several faculty members from across the campus. Also, she will collaborate with Center Seminar Director Angela Miller McGraw to create complementarities between and her own economics course on rural poverty, and the Center Appalachia Seminar, through which almost 300 students travel to nineteen sites in the region over fall or spring break. Professor Warlick’s scholarly interests are in the area of poverty policy and the effect of income taxes and transfers on low income families and the elderly. Her course offerings include economics of poverty and the economics of education.

Todd D. Whitmore is Associate Professor of Theology, Concurrent Associate Professor in the Masters in Nonprofit Administration, and the Director of Notre Dame’s Program in Catholic Social Tradition.  As a Center for Social Concerns Faculty Fellow, Professor Whitmore will be working with Bill Purcell, the Center’s Associate Director for Catholic Social Tradition and Practice, to deepen the integration of Catholic social thought within Center community-based learning opportunities and to incorporate Catholic social thought into the Center’s strategic plan for justice education. Also, the Center will collaborate with Professor Whitmore to enhance the university Program in Catholic Social Tradition. Professor Whitmore is the author of numerous articles on Catholic social teaching as it relates to economic life, war and peace, civil society, and education.  His most recent work takes him to northern Uganda to investigate the possibilities of peace and reconciliation in war-torn districts.

2005-2007 Faculty Fellows

Agustin Fuentes is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Flatley Director of the Office of Undergraduate and Post-Baccalaureate Fellowships.  As Fellow, Fuentes will be assisting the Center in linking undergraduates with community-based research opportunities, and in providing information about community research to the campus and area community through speakers and other means. Fuentes has written extensively in the areas of human evolution and behavior, primate behavior, conservation , and the importance of collaborative research and undergraduate teaching.

Darcia Narvaez is Associate Professor of Psychology. She directs the Center for Ethical Education. She works on lifespan moral character formation. As a Center Fellow, she will be working with Jay Brandenberger to conduct an ethics audit of the campus. Professor Narvaez is a member, with Center Executive Director Fr. Bill Lies, CSC, of the Faculty Learning Community on integrating Catholic Social Teaching into university instruction. She will be assisting the Center to review its courses and programs for how ethical skill development can be incorporated. Professor Narvaez has published more than 40 articles, books and chapters.

Michael C.F. Wiescher is the Freimann Professor of Physics and the Director of the Joint Institute of Nuclear Astrophysics (JINA) at the University of Notre Dame and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Michigan State University. As Faculty Fellow he will expand his one-credit interdisciplinary course "Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Warfare" into a three-credit class with research opportunities for undergraduate students that utilize the  community links of the Center for Social Concerns. He will also create, with the assistance of Suzanne Coshow, Director of Educational Outreach for JINA, a special outreach program through which physics undergraduates and graduate students develop computer games and movies for presentations at local schools on topics of general interest in nuclear physics and astrophysics.  Wiescher also will plan a public lecture series on Nuclear Weapons and Aspects of Non-Proliferation to provide opportunities for a broad audience to learn about the legal, political, historical, and physics aspects.

Renewed for two more years, 2005-2007 Faculty Fellow

Don Pope-Davis, Professor of Counseling Psychology and Assistant Vice President and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, is working with the Center for Social Concerns to enhance the role of graduate students in its work. Through his facilitation, graduate students are now eligible for small grants to develop community-based learning courses. Pope-Davis also is helping the Center expand its efforts in multicultural contexts. For example, post-docs in multicultural studies under his direction work with Center staff on research projects and other activities related to their areas of expertise. Pope-Davis’s primary research interests are in multicultural psychology, counseling, and education. He is a research fellow of the American Psychological Association.