Hazel Dick Leonard Faculty Fellowship

Hazel Dick Leonard Chair

Jyoti Puri

Jyoti Puri is the Hazel Dick Leonard Chair and Professor of Sociology at Simmons University. She is leading a Faculty Fellowship program at Simmons University, designed to foster a community of scholars engaged in public-oriented research, scholarly, and artistic projects. This innovative program gathers eight faculty members from diverse disciplines and cohorts to collaborate on projects, ranging from serving historically marginalized communities to making scholarly and artistic contributions accessible to the wider public. Faculty members' projects span an array of scholarly formats, including books-in-progress, articles, and book chapters.

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Faculty Fellows

Naresh Agarwal

Naresh Agarwal is a Professor and Director of the Information Science & Technology Concentration at the School of Library & Information Science at Simmons University. Naresh’s research area is information behavior and knowledge management. His first book ‘Exploring Context in Information Behavior’ was published by Morgan & Claypool in 2018. His second book was published in 2021 as 'Engineering to Ikigai' in South Asia and 'You know the glory, not the story' internationally. He has been a keynote/invited speaker in several countries, including Bangladesh, France, India, Iran, Japan, Nepal, Pakistan, South Africa, the UK, and the US. Naresh is a Past President of the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T), where he held various leadership positions and founded its South Asia Chapter. In 2012, he was awarded the ASIS&T James M. Cretsos Leadership Award. In 2018, he started projectonenessworld.com to gather human stories through interviews. You can learn more about Naresh at nareshagarwal.com.

Modeling Happiness

Research in information-seeking behavior has looked at the way a person goes about looking for information when faced with information need. However, the relationship between happiness and information and how information impacts happiness is often left out. Also, higher education in the field has not explored happiness as a learning outcome even though empirical research in psychology has shown that up to 40% of our happiness is within our power to change. Naresh Agarwal has been giving happiness talks since 2010. In Spring 2023, he developed and taught an undergraduate course at Simmons, LDR 101-16 “Happiness and Leadership”. In this book project, he will continue to examine the concept of happiness. The book will explore his 8 commandments in life and arrive at theoretical models linking each of them. By recognizing happiness as a construct and taking up the teaching and learning of happiness, we should be able to bring about transformative learning, while making happiness practical and achievable at the same time. 

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Abel Djassi Amado

Abel Djassi Amado is an associate professor of political science and international relations at Simmons University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science/African Studies from Boston University. He researches on the politics of language in West Africa/Cabo Verde, Amílcar Cabral, and the political history of national liberation in Africa. His works have been published inLusotopie, The Journal of Cape Verdean Studies, Desafios, and Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies. His book Creole Language, Democracy, and the Illegible State in Cabo Verde was published in 2023. Amado is currently the president of the Cabo Verdean Center for Applied Research, a Boston-based think tank that advances Cabo Verdean studies.

Prestige Planning for Cabo Verdean Bilingual Education 

Hazel Dick Leonard Faculty Fellowships (2024) 
Abel Djassi Amado
Department of Political Science and International Relations

With the passing of the LOOK Act in 2017 in Massachusetts, Boston Public Schools have revamped its bilingual education programs. One of the language communities that is being contemplated with this new bilingual program is Cabo Verdeans. The presence of this social group in Boston remotes to the early twentieth century, and the Cabo Verdean language (also known as the Cabo Verdean Creole) was used in bilingual education in the city from the 1970s until the early 2000s when bilingual education suffered enormous blow as voters rejected it. The Cabo Verdean language, like many other minority languages of Boston, has become an essential component of the Boston language ecology. In essence, bilingual education programs constitute multidimensional approaches to language planning insofar as they include elements of status, corpus, and prestige planning. Going to the heart of the fellowship in its objective to aim at underserved communities, I propose to develop four different brochures designed to support Cabo Verdean language prestige planning. The success of bilingual programs depends on its acceptance by the community. Given the long history of demeaning and belittling the Cabo Verdean language, the deliverables I propose to develop are designed to boost the level of regard for their language. The four brochures center on (a) the history of the Cabo Verdean language; (b) the history of Cabo Verdean language bilingual education in Massachusetts; (c) myths and facts about the Cabo Verdean language; (d) the socioeconomic value of the Cabo Verdean language. These brochures, in both English and Cabo Verdean, will be distributed to Cabo Verdean community organizations in Boston (and beyond) and other key stakeholders, such as Boston Public Schools.

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Marilisa Jiménez García

Marilisa Jiménez García is an associate professor of children's literature at Simmons University. She is the author of Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of Youth Literature and Culture (2021, UP Mississippi). She won the 2023 Children's Literature Association Book Award for Side by Side and is the first Latina scholar to do so. She researches the role of youth literature in education and racial justice struggles in the US. Jiménez García's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Refinery 21, Children's Literature,and Latino Studies.

Project Description

Imperial Legacies in Lands of Make Believe: From Puerto Rico to Florida is my current book project which looks at the history of curriculum battles vis a vis children's and youth literature and textbooks in the State of Florida while also analyzing the growing Puerto Rican diaspora and its impact on the States voting and school age population.

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Hugo Kamya

Hugo Kamya is a Professor and Associate Director of the Center For Innovation in Clinical Social Work at Simmons School of Social Work where he teaches clinical practice, trauma, research and narrative practices. Originally from Uganda, he came to the United States more than thirty years ago; studied at Harvard University, Boston College and Boston University and began a career in the interrelated fields of social work, psychology, and theology. His work is embedded in local and global communities through scholarship, teaching, and strong community engagement.

Dr. Kamya’s work has focused on immigrant and international efforts to assess mental health and social service needs of people. He uses story and storytelling in his research and practice. He writes:

“I have always loved stories. I like to listen to stories. My name was given to me because I was born after twins. Twins, in my culture, hold an important place. When twins are born, they affect the naming structure of the family. Twins are believed to have special powers. In my case, my mother did not only have one set of twins. She had two! She has told me many stories about the names in my family. As I have listened to the stories of the names in my family I have marveled at the richness of culture, history, and purpose our names carry. I believe that we need to witness people’s stories by carefully listening to them. When we do we expand their stories and ours! Such listening is caring.”

Exploring Immigrant Stories: Being, belonging, longing, surviving, thriving (race, fear, pain, resilience, survival, success) and a whole lot more!!

Immigrants live through stories. They are the stories they tell. 

People are full of stories. I still find myself at a crossroad of many stories. These stories shape who I am and where I belong. My story has been woven together by the threads of others. Stories of home. Stories of identity. Stories of belonging and longing, stories of connecting and encountering. Stories strung together across person, place, and time. They reveal passion and perseverance, surviving and thriving, fear, pain, hope, courage, and a will to live.

What is this project about? Inspired by Peabody Award Winning journalist Michelle Norris’ book, Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Think about Race and Identity, I have launched out to ask a similar question to immigrants about what they think of themselves or how others have constructed them. What do they think about their story? Being and belonging, yearning, and longing, surviving and thriving? 

There are indeed many stories in people's lives. The Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Adichie says: “Stories are defined by how they are told, who tells them, when they are told, how many stories are told and are all dependent on power.” We are all storytellers and story listeners.

Maya Angelou says, “There is no greater agony than a story that remains untold.” Cultures all over the world tell stories and use them for different purposes. Stories engage people in their day to day lives. Stories build healing spaces. Stories explore issues of power and powerlessness. Some can communicate certain truths, malign, or find fault. In this project, I plan to explore stories that immigrants tell or have been told about them. I hope to explore issues of power and powerlessness, asking questions about how a story gets told? Who tells it? Who sanctions it? Drawing from story and story metaphor I will explore how stories communicate certain truths and untruths. I will interrogate and examine embedded messages in these stories using a decolonial/anti-colonial lens. As part of this fellowship with colleagues, I hope to build this work in my ongoing book project.

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Suzanne Leonard

Suzanne Leonard is Professor of Literature and Writing, and Director of the Graduate Program in Gender and Cultural Studies at Simmons University. She is the co-coordinator of Simmons' interdisciplinary minor in Cinema and Media Studies, and co-chair of the executive committee of the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality, housed at MIT.

Leonard is the author of Wife, Inc.: The Business of Marriage in the Twenty-First Century (2018) and Fatal Attraction (2009). She is also co-editor of Fifty Hollywood Directors (2014) and Imagining We in the Age of I: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (2021), which won MeCCSA's (Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies Association) Outstanding Achievement Award for Edited Collection of the Year. Her latest project, a manuscript entitled A Feminist Guide to Marriage, is under contract at Goldsmiths University Press.

Project Description

I am currently working on a monograph titled A Feminist Guide to Marriage, which is under contract at Goldsmiths University Press. Part crash course in feminism, part social guide, part memoir, and part manifesto, A Feminist Guide to Marriage promises to articulate why marriage matters to everyone—married or not. It acknowledges the reality that many well-meaning people do desire to marry. And, it takes those investments seriously by asking: how do we live our desires ethically and with integrity? What does a just marriage look like? What should we ask of ourselves? What should we ask of our partner(s)?

A Feminist Guide to Marriage will explain what commitments marriage organizes and the ways in which many of those can be rethought in explicitly feminist terms. Ultimately, it argues that marriage must be considered and analyzed for a feminist project centralizing social justice to ever succeed. I strongly believe that we must do this intellectual work for ourselves, our institutions, and our world.

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Lydia Ogden

Lydia Ogden is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Innovation in Clinical Social Work at the Simmons University School of Social Work. Dr. Ogden's research focuses on psychiatric disability, mental health, and wellbeing, with a particular focus on older adults living with serious mental illnesses. She has published over two dozen peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in her areas of expertise and regularly presents at national and international conferences. Dr. Ogden has earned numerous awards and honors throughout her career, highlights of which include the 2019 Disability Manuscript Award from the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), and the national leadership position of Co-Chair of the CSWE Council on Disability and Persons with Disability from 2015-2018.

Project Description

Psychosocial clubhouses serve as crucial rehabilitation centers for individuals with disabling serious mental illnesses (SMIs), offering educational, vocational, and social support with a focus on empowerment and inclusion. This project centers on a particular clubhouse with a large population of older adults, utilizing ethnographic and oral history methods to construct a comprehensive social portrait of a clubhouse that supports older adult members. Through immersion in the clubhouse environment, I aim to capture dynamics of inclusion and belonging experienced by its older members, often a neglected demographic in psychiatric rehabilitation research and within the historic record. The project delves into the daily interactions, routines, and rituals within the clubhouse, providing rich insights into its functioning and impact on the lives of older adults with SMIs. Additionally, by collecting oral histories I will explore the history of the clubhouse as well as personal narratives surrounding lived experience with SMIs, clubhouse involvement, and current life circumstances. The resulting compilation of stories of the clubhouse and its older adult members contributes to the broader discourse on mental health recovery pathways, amplifying the voices of older adults with SMIs. The project outcomes, including a book and website, aim to disseminate findings, participant narratives, and highlight the clubhouse's role in psychiatric rehabilitation through later life, fostering understanding and support while combating discrimination and stigma surrounding those with SMIs.

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Dr. Cherie Lynn Ramirez

Dr. Cherie Lynn Ramirez is Associate Teaching Professor in the Chemistry and Physics Department at Simmons University, where she teaches courses in biochemistry, public health, and science advocacy. She is also associate faculty at Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She earned her PhD in genetics at Harvard studying site-specific nucleases and their applications in genome engineering. She completed her post-doctoral training at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and has held appointments at the Harvard Global Health Institute and the Global Health Education and Learning Incubator at Harvard University, where she led faculty, graduate, and post-doctoral professional development activities related to global health teaching across Harvard University. After joining Simmons University, she served as the inaugural Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics (STEM) faculty fellow at the University's Center for Excellence in Teaching (CET). Among her current research projects are studying institutional mechanisms that promote healthy workplaces and improving access to medicines, including COVID-19 rapid tests, as a Collaborator of Global Access in Action (GAiA), a project of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Project Description

Workplace bullying is a pervasive problem in many industries, including healthcare, in part due to inadequate legal protections and workplace policies. According to a 2017 national survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute, 1 in 5 American workers have experienced “abusive conduct” in the workplace and 77% are in favor of having a law to establish legal protections to ensure healthy workplaces. In parallel with other sensitive topics like sexual assault, workplace bullying is particularly difficult to study because it is often not discussed due to fear, shame, or embarrassment of the victims and lack of motivation to address the problem by employers directly, despite the fact that there are many costs associated with workplace bullying such as high turnover, low productivity, and healthcare costs for severe physical and mental distress. For these reasons, there have been efforts for the past several years to better study workplace bullying and to identify ways to prevent and address this abuse, such as the proposal of Healthy Workplace legislation in most states. Our research team previously developed and administered the Workplace Health Insights from Students (WHIS) mixed methods survey to all Simmons undergraduate and graduate students in October 2021. We would use the Hazel Dick Leonard Faculty Fellowship support to continue analyzing the data with collaborators to better understand whether and what forms of workplace bullying are reported by respondents, how these results compare to trends in other populations, which factors contribute to the results, and what future research may be appropriate to conduct.

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Jeffrey Steen, PhD

Jeffrey Steen, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work. His clinical practice, research, and teaching are in the field of substance use. He is involved with several addictions-focused studies, in addition to conducting research exploring the experiences of social work practitioners and students. During his doctoral studies at New York University, he was awarded a pre-doctoral fellowship from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and continues to work and publish articles in peer-reviewed journals with mentors from this research training program. Jeffrey is currently co-authoring the latest edition of a textbook on social work practice for people with substance use disorders, a resource that is widely used in the training of many behavioral health professionals. He is co-chair of the Addictions track for the Council on Social Work Education's Annual Program Meeting, and is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Social Work Practice in the Addictions. Regarding community involvement, Jeffrey is a member of the National Association of Social Workers, and a Disaster Mental Health volunteer with the Red Cross, through which he frequently deploys in response to local and national emergencies.

Project Description

Substance-related overdose deaths are a public health emergency. In recent years, this crisis has been exacerbated due to numerous factors, such as an increasingly tainted drug supply, inadequate treatment services, shame and stigma, and punitive policies reflecting a War on Drugs approach that disproportionately harms communities of color and other historically marginalized groups. The development of overdose prevention centers (OPCs), also referred to as supervised consumption sites, offers promising opportunities to reduce substance-related health disparities and drug fatalities. Hundreds of these sites have been operating globally for decades, achieving beneficial outcomes including reduced rates of HIV/HCV transmission, increased utilization of health and behavioral health services, improved social connection, and a drastic reduction in overdose deaths. Although OPCs are illegal in the U.S., several states are funding and developing OPCs to support the health and safety of people who use drugs. Informed by his involvement with local advocacy groups, Dr. Steen is writing a paper that urges social workers to develop practices and policies that advance OPCs and other harm reduction approaches. This commentary, which is slated to be published in an academic journal, is informing the development of his upcoming presentations at professional conferences and with community groups, in addition to his formulation of grants that will study OPCs in Massachusetts. These efforts are guided by a social justice approach and discussions with community members and health professionals who have been impacted by substance misuse.