Goals of the Expands Initiative:
The goal of EXPANDS is to address the devaluation of scholarship and the resulting isolation and often delayed promotions among STEM women faculty by supporting collaborative and interdisciplinary scholarship.
What the Expands Initiative offers:
To further support scholarship in community, the Expands initiative coordinates scholarship hubs, offers events and seminars in collaboration with hub fellows, and provides space for social networking activities focused on reducing isolation, building connections, and generating collaborative scholarship.
With growing enrollments and the absence of additional resources, the demands of service and teaching on faculty have created challenges in advancing scholarship. Currently, SF State has few mechanisms for supporting faculty scholarship; those that do exist are fragmented and primarily individual. There is no formal support for faculty pursuing collaborative and interdisciplinary research, a situation especially challenging for women and underrepresented faculty members.
Focus groups with women faculty on campus found that there were few opportunities to meet colleagues and learn about research underway, no structures to foster collaboration, and an absence of mentoring and support (Domingo et al. 2020). Expands seeks to implement programs to increase support for women faculty scholarship, especially collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches.
Interdisciplinary scholarship is rooted in empowering communities and academic perspectives (e.g., ethnic studies/women and gender studies), addressing social problems, and for the ways it breaks disciplinary silos. The Advance Scholarship Hub provides a structure for interdisciplinary collaboration by creating an institutional mechanism for faculty to meet, share, and exchange ideas for research; to read and discuss relevant literature; peer review grants and writings; and share on-going and newly developed scholarship. It is a supportive and encouraging environment to create a community of SF State scholars that leads with principles of equity and recognition of scholars from diverse gender and ethnocultural backgrounds.
Research and scholarship hubs will be organized around faculty interest areas beginning with the theme of equitable collaboration and expanding to other faculty interests such as intersectionality, community science and engagement, and promoting faculty justice and equity.