Shared Futures

University of Wyoming

Garth M. Massey
Professor, International Studies Program
gmmassey@uwyo.edu

Garth Massey is Director of International Studies and Professor of International Studies and Sociology at the University of Wyoming where he joined the faculty in 1974. He teaches courses in social research methods, ethnic conflict, social change, sociology of work, and social inequality.  He is currently working with Jimm Myers of the UW Geology Department on a FIPSE project to create a pair of interdisciplinary, international Earth resources courses. This grows out of his interest and involvement in the scholarship of teaching and learning that include problem-based, interdisciplinary, and collaborative learning. 

As a comparative sociologist, Massey has studied comparative institutions and lived overseas on several occasions: Tanzania (1979-80), Somalia (1983-85), Yugoslavia (1986-88), Hungary (1992-93), England (1998), Australia (2001) and Israel (2002), teaching courses in Tanzania and England. These experiences have not only enriched his own life and that of his family. He has sought to incorporate international materials, practices, and an interest in international issues and cross-cultural perspectives into all of his courses.

In the early 1980s Massey worked with the College of Arts and Sciences to develop UW’s first college-wide general education curriculum and served on the General Education Committee for a brief time. When UW chose to adopt a university-wide general education curriculum (the University Studies Program – USP), Massey served on a committee to develop the curriculum guidelines. He later worked closely with the committee developing the Global Awareness requirement of the current USP curriculum that has been in effect for three years.  

Garth Massey’s research interests include nationalism and ethnic conflict, social stratification and labor. His publications include articles in the journals Social Forces, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Gender & Society, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Qualitative Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, American Indian Quarterly, and Women and Politics.  He is the author of Subsistence and Change: Lessons of Agropastoralism in Somalia (Westview Press) and Readings for Sociology, 5th Edition (WW Norton). He is currently working on a study of ethnic tolerance among Israelis and Palestinians.

Massey took his Ph.D. at Indiana University-Bloomington in1975 and his BA at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1970. 

Marianne R. Kamp
Assistant Professor of History
mkamp@uwyo.edu

I am an associate professor of History at the University of Wyoming, teaching courses on the Modern Middle East, Soviet Union, Central Asia, and women and Islam.  I am also the chair of the faculty committee that guides the general education program (University Studies Program, USP) at the University of Wyoming.  As an educator, I am involved in teaching global issues, and as chair of the USP committee, I am involved in examining course proposals on global topics, determining whether they meet USP standards, and trying to work out approaches to assessment for those courses.

As an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, I studied Russian language and literature, and studied abroad in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia).  In graduate school I studied Persian, Turkish, and Uzbek, and earned a degree in Near Eastern languages and civilizations (an interdisciplinary degree; my emphasis was history).  During graduate studies I did language study and dissertation research in Uzbekistan.  Since that time I have continued with my own historical research in Uzbekistan, which involves oral histories, and I have been involved with broader, comparative research on current issues. 

The University of Wyoming’s general studies program is determined by the faculty, represented by the faculty senate.  The senate oversees a committee, the University Studies Committee, made up of representative elected by each of the colleges, and representatives from administrative offices whose work is directly related to student achievement and advising.  As a member of the USP committee, I have become very familiar with our processes for developing our general education curriculum, and one element of that curriculum is that each student must take one three hour class that fulfills a “global” requirement.  As chair of the USP committee, I carry some responsibility for working out strategies for assessing the success of general education, and that entails assessing courses across the disciplines that fulfill each particular category--in this case, the G or global category.  We have worked out assessment procedures for some of our USP categories, and I am especially interested in participating in this AAC&U program in order to develop such assessment procedures.

Some of my publications are: The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity and Unveiling under Communism. Forthcoming, University of Washington Press, 2006; "Gender Ideals and Income Realities: Discourses about Labor and Gender in Uzbekistan,” Nationalities Papers, 2005, 33 (3): 403-422; “Between Women and the State: Mahalla Committees and Social Welfare in Uzbekistan,” in The Transformation of Central Asia: States and Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence, ed. Pauline Jones Luong, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004, 29-58.