Faculty in Residence

Connecting with Students Online

UCSB’s faculty in residence, or FiR, weren’t going to let the pandemic prevent them from meeting with students.

This past April some of the FiRs organized virtual informative sessions for undergraduates. In particular, Professor Anne Charity-Hudley organized and led the meetings. Hudley is a resident of Malibu Court in San Joaquin Villages with her husband Chris. She is the director of research in the office of Undergraduate Education and a sociolinguist with a focus on African-American language and culture and educational linguistics, among other notable titles.

Sessions included an overview of the Undergraduate Research & Creative Activities (URCA) and Faculty Research Assistance Program and how to submit to the URCA Journal and prepare a poster for online presentation.

More intriguing, Professor Hudley offered a session where she was able to give insight to quarantining due to a past experience. In 2018, she was diagnosed with lung cancer that required her to live on campus in quarantine for six months. In her zoom session, she invited questions based on how to “work together to live in quarantine on the UCSB campus the best that we can.”

A third session included Professor Amit Ahuja, who is a Manzanita Village resident. Both Hudley and Ahuja led a student-focused webinar on how to do undergrad research remotely. Well-known to campus, Prof. Ahuja’s background research focuses the processes of inclusion and exclusion in multiethnic societies. He also has a published book, “Mobilizing the Marginalized: Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movements.”