Lena Jones

Teaching and Learning with HECUA Students

To me, teaching political science is a lot like teaching drumming.  I can certainly teach a good amount about drumming through assigning readings, lecturing, and showing videos about technique, the different types of drums, and the different styles of drumming.  However, to truly teach my students how to drum, I need to make my students actually hold a drum and hear and feel the sensation of a hand or a stick hitting the skin of the drum.  The same could be said about teaching about politics, power, and social change.  I have found that my most profound experiences teaching have been the ones where I, with my students, have seen, heard, and touched the things that were being taught.  Since 2006, I have taught the Civil Rights Movement: History and Consequences —a course filled with profound moments where my students and I get to experience the places and talk to the people who we have read about, heard about, or seen in a video, relate the theories that we’ve learned to lived experiences, and grapple with how past struggles relate to the present and our own lives.

My Research and Current Projects

For as long as I can remember, I have had an intellectual and personal interest in the efforts of political communities to define who and what they are, the conflicts brought about by these efforts, and the factors that drive ordinary people to recognize and utilize their power to bring about extraordinary change.  

My interest in these issues extends beyond the United States.  While I was a study abroad student in Denmark during the summer of 1993, I became fascinated by the struggles over national identity in Denmark and other European countries in the context of European integration and increasing numbers of immigrants and refugees who were perceived by the host populations as being a “threat.”  I also became fascinated by the efforts of individuals and organizations from those groups that were perceived as “threatening” to find a voice and a sense of agency in Europe.  Since that summer, I have participated in research projects analyzing immigration and refugee policy, the political organizing efforts of immigrant communities, and public opinion and political discourse about immigration in Europe.

My fascination with nation-building later took me to Africa and in 2004, I received a fellowship from the University of Minnesota's Human Rights Center to support a residency with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA).  It was an amazing experience to be in South Africa during the 10th Anniversary of its first free elections and participate in IDASA’s efforts to institute civic engagement projects in the Gauteng province.  While in South Africa, I had the privilege of working with and learning from local grassroots activists who were organizing efforts in their communities to gain access to running water and fight xenophobia and discrimination.

My interest in the efforts of ordinary people to change their worlds brought me further north to Somalia in July 2006.   There, I was able to see, first hand, the efforts of individuals to rebuild a country after a devastating civil war and government collapse.  One of those individuals was a former student of mine who successfully raised the money and community support to build a library and resource center in Garowe, Somalia.

Back in the United States, I am part of a team of faculty at Minneapolis Community and Technical College that received a Minnesota Campus Compact grant to create a Center for Civic Engagement whose goals include increasing the number and quality of experiential learning opportunities at that institution.  Since January 2008, I have also been the director of the Somali Student Ambassador Project, a civic engagement program of the Minneapolis League of Women Voters and Somali Family Services that trains Somali college students to create and implement non-partisan civic engagement projects in the Twin Cities.

Presentations and Publications

RESEARCH

• “Racism at the Top” research project, University of Amsterdam, University of Vienna, and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture  (Spring 1997-Fall 1999)
• Member of a multi-national research team that examined parliamentary discourse related to immigration in six Western European countries.  The results of the project were presented to the European Parliament and published in a book titled Racism at the Top (Drava Verlag, 2000).

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

• Panelist, “An Intergenerational Conversation about Civil Rights” at the Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Youth of Today Create Tomorrow’s Change Conference, 7 November 2008, University of Minnesota—Twin Cities.
• Panelist, “Institutional Investment in Civic Agency: Experience from the Field” at the Civic Agency Initiative Kick-off Institute, 6 November 2008, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota.
• Presenter, “Somalia-- Diaspora to Partnership” The U.S. Institute of Peace’s Identity and Global conflict: Implications for the 21st Century Conference, 20 April 2007, Northern Virginia Community College.
• Panelist, "Public Achievement and Civic Engagement: The Public Work of Higher Education", Mnscu/CTL Realizing Student Potential Conference, 27 February 2004, Minneapolis Community and Technical College.
• Panelist, "Public Work as Institutional Change" at the Public Work in Higher Education: Theory and Practice of Civic Engagement, 19 March 2004, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota.
• "Immigration, Corporations and Democracy." Presented at Vanishing Democracy: Challenging Corporate Power Conference, 29 March 2003, First Universalist Church, Minneapolis, MN.
• “Closing the Floodgates: the discourse of migration, security and race in Britain.”  Presented at Race, Ethnicity, and Migration: the United States in a Global Context, 16-18 November 2000, University of Minnesota. 
• “Anti-racism and Diversity Politics in Western Europe.”  Presented at Discourse and Racism: an issue for Critical Discourse Analysis, 14-16 May 1998, University of Vienna.
• “The EU and National Discourses on Immigration.”  Presented at Space and Identity: Borders, margins, migration in late Twentieth-Century Europe, 20-21 February 1998, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• “An analysis of public opinion on immigration in Western Europe.”  Presented at International Governance in an Era of Change, 26-29 June 1995, University of Tübingen.

PUBLICATIONS

• “Foreigner and Asylum policies in Western Europe: an overview of the political systems and laws on immigration and asylum in six EU states.” Racism at the Top: Parliamentary Discourses on Ethnic Issues in Six European States.  Teun A. Van Dijk and Ruth Wodak (Eds.).  Klagenfurt: Drava Verlag, 2000.
• “Immigration and Parliamentary Discourse in Great Britain: an analysis of the debates related to 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act.”  Racism at the Top: Parliamentary Discourses on Ethnic Issues in Six European States. Teun A. Van Dijk and Ruth Wodak (Eds.).  Klagenfurt: Drava Verlag, 2000.
• Author of Instructor’s Manual for W. Phillips Shively’s  Power and Choice: an introduction to political science, 8th , 9th and 10th Editions (McGraw-Hill, 2002, 2004, 2006)

Resume / CV