My dear community,
I am writing today to share some important news about recent transitions on the SSW faculty and to update you on the work of our Priorities Committee over the last several months.
A TREMENDOUS FACULTY SEARCH
Our faculty search has now concluded and I am pleased to announce that we will have five new resident faculty members join SSW in June 2021. Each of these scholars is a strong teacher with a powerful voice and they all bring with them a wealth of knowledge, experience, talent, skill and wisdom. They are each committed to the same values and understandings that underlie our five Core Principles. It is an honor to have them join us. We will be welcoming to the tenure line faculty:
Assistant Professor Loren Cahill, M.S.W., Ph.D. (expected), focuses her research on identifying and understanding institutional and informal spaces of strength, resilience and thriving for Black women and girls, how they are created, how they work and how Black women and girls engage with them. Loren engages in deep and rich community partnerships to do this work. Her doctoral work is in Critical Social Personality Environmental Psychology.
Assistant Professor Shveta Kumaria, M.A., Ph.D. (social work), LCSW, has focused her research on the development and use of clinician wisdom in clinical practice with BIPOC clients, how clinicians integrate this wisdom with clinical theory and in the training and supervision of therapists. Shveta has completed a psychoanalytic pre-doctoral fellowship with the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis, as well as a M.Phil. in clinical psychology from the National Institute of Mental Health & Neurosciences in India. She completed a post-doctoral clinical scholar fellowship at The Family Institute at Northwestern University in 2019 and now holds the position of staff therapist and research associate there.
Assistant Professor Brandyn Dior McKinley, M.S. (social work), Ph.D., focuses on the strategies that middle-class African American mothers use to support their daughters to navigate the complexities of institutional and interpersonal racism and to ensure their thriving. Brandyn’s doctoral work has been in human development and family studies with a particular focus on Black families and mothering.
For a 15 month appointment, we will also welcome:
Lecturer Alberto Guerrero, M.S.W., Ph.D., who is a deeply experienced instructor both in the classroom and field education settings. Alberto currently teaches at SSW in our clinical practice courses and field lab. With doctoral studies in social justice education with an emphasis on student development, Alberto brings particular expertise in student advisement. His research and practice experience has centered on mental health services within the justice system, housing and healthcare and substance misuse and treatment.
Lecturer JaLisa Williams, M.S.W., LCSW, is currently on the faculty of the Metropolitan State University in Denver where she has taught both in the classroom and in field settings. JaLisa’s teaching and research interests center on anti-oppressive social work, generational trauma in the Black community and mindfulness based interventions among other topics. She has a strong clinical background and has been running a private therapy practice, Yemaya Innergy Therapeutics, serving Black and Queer folk in the Denver area. JaLisa integrates strengths-based and narrative approaches into her mindfulness based CBT work and is a certified yoga instructor.
We will highlight each of our new faculty members in the next InDepth magazine, due to be published this spring.
I want to take a moment to recognize and thank the members of the search committee who put in hours of time and thought to be careful in their work and, importantly, to bring care into this work. Guided by our five Core Principles, the committee brought attention, thinking and care to the work that helped make it such a success.
DEEP THANKS TO PROFESSOR KATHRYN BASHAM, PROFESSOR JIM DRISKO AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR YOOSUN PARK
Both Professor Kathryn Basham and Professor Jim Drisko will be retiring from the School on June 30, 2021. It is difficult in a few words to capture the important and valuable contributions of these faculty members so we will publish a more full appreciation for the work and contributions of these two extraordinary faculty members in the next edition of InDepth magazine.
During her tenure at SSW, Kathryn Basham, Ph.D. ’90, has provided great leadership in clinical practice education. She was deeply involved in the establishment of the School’s Anti-Racism Commitment in 1995, has chaired two sequences and served as the editor of Smith College Studies in Social Work. For a decade, Professor Basham also served as clinical co-director of the Ph.D. program, serving on 51 dissertation committees and as chair for 16 Ph.D. students and graduates. She is also a tireless advocate for Veterans and their families and has been appointed to three congressional research committees focused on the health and mental health of service members.
Jim Drisko, Ph.D., is also an alum of the School, graduating with his M.S.W. in 1977. He joined the SSW faculty as an adjunct thesis advisor in 1984 before becoming a tenured faculty member in 1989. During his more than 35 years at SSW, Professor Drisko taught, advised and mentored scores of doctoral students. He has taught practice and research courses as well as child development and child treatment, he served for 12 years as M.S.W. Research Sequence chair and was a faculty field advisor for the Denver-Boulder area for nearly 20 years. He was also the first faculty member to do both Ph.D. field and research advising and he participated in the development of the School’s first anti-racism commitment in 1995. Professor Drisko was inducted as a Fellow into the Society for Social Work and Research in 2014.
I also want to share that Associate Professor Yoosun Park, M.S.W., Ph.D., will be leaving SSW this June to pursue another opportunity. Associate Professor Park joined SSW in 2005 and she has made significant contributions to our M.S.W. program during her time at the School. Over the years, she coordinated and taught the Racism in the US course, served as the chair of our Human Behavior and Social Environment curricular sequence, served on a number of college committees and served as interim Associate Dean of Academic Affairs on two occasions. She also served as a dynamic faculty liaison to the Council for Students of Color for many years and during her time as Liaison participation in Council increased dramatically as did their collaboration with other student groups and their voice in shaping direction at the SSW. She recently authored an award-winning book, Facilitating Injustice: The Complicity of Social Workers in the Forced Removal and Incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1941–1946 which highlights an enduring tension in the field—the conflict between its purported value-base promoting pluralism and social justice and its professional functions enabling injustice and actualizing social biases.
Please join me in thanking Professor Kathryn Basham, Professor Jim Drisko and Associate Professor Yoosun Park for their years of teaching, advising and service and all the ways that they have made and continue to make our profession stronger.
RECOGNITION FOR IMPORTANT WORK ON CORE PRINCIPLES
I want to close by sharing some of the work of our Priorities Committee since I last wrote. As you know, I brought together this committee to work with me and the faculty to guide a change plan for SSW that places the five Core Principles as foundational to all aspects of our School. These principles were created by our 2020 Anti-Racism Planning Group. It is my intention and goal that SSW will fully embody these principles in all of our operations, programs and policies and, importantly, within each of us as faculty members, staff members and students. This is the only way to realize the vision within these powerful principles that allow Black faculty, students and staff, indigenous faculty, students and staff and faculty, students and staff color to feel valued, seen and able to bring their voice and their full selves to SSW.
As I close this long and full communication, I want to acknowledge that we are at a point of culmination (of a search), a middle (of an aspiration set by this School in 1995 to continuously evolve to mitigate and eliminate racism and oppression in our School) and a beginning (of the promise and challenge that the Core Principles present).
We will do this – together, caring for each other, finding together the ways to build accountability to the principles and in celebration of the many gifts and contributions within SSW. I am so pleased with what we have already accomplished by grounding our work in these principles. This is the beginning.
With thanks and determination,
Marianne R.M. Yoshioka, MBA, Ph.D., LCSW
Dean and Elizabeth Marting Treuhaft Professor
Co-editor, Smith College Studies in Social Work
Smith College School for Social Work
