Marjorie Bernard is Executive Director of Minority and Special Education Services in Austin, a non-profit advocacy organization in support of children with special education needs. She is a native of Haiti and has studied at both Florida State University and University of South Florida.

Ms. Bernard is using her Research Associateship to access legal and educational resources in the university related to special education advocacy for minority and immigrant parents. She is undertaking her research in support of her work for Minority and Special Education Services. She seeks in her project to improve her ability to educate parents, teachers, professionals, and school administrators on cross-cultural issues relevant to minority and special needs services in the area. In particular, she will use law cases, research materials, and legal databases in the Tarlton Law Library to expand her familiarity with special education and minority legal issues. She will create bi-lingual information literature, training materials, and videotapes for teaching workshops and for marketing her organization. These materials will be used to empower parents to access the public healthcare and school systems more effectively for their children with special education needs. She also will utilize her associateship to locate other university and community organizations with which her organization can collaborate and which can aid it in its ongoing strategic development.

Dr. Ruth Adlof Haak grew up in a wonderful country school in J. Frank Dobie country, the brush country of Texas. Married at 16, she and husband graduated from then Texas A and I and followed the lifestyle of a small town football coach—town to town. At 37, she was selected for a special counseling institute at the University of Texas at Austin, obtained a doctorate, and then directed a psychological services group for 20 years in Travis County.

As a Research Associate, Dr. Haak is continuing her work on "Lighthorse Harry" Lee, Revolutionary War hero and father of Robert E. Lee. Pushing disciplinary boundaries, Dr. Haak is writing a historical biography of Lee with the training and knowledge of a professional psychologist. Dr. Haak hopes to correct some of the prevalent misinformation and denigration of Lee by illuminating the effects his manic-depression had on his life and providing information from heretofore neglected primary sources, including Lee's personal letters. Having already completed a more than five hundred page manuscript, Dr. Haak will use her Associateship to spend more time with certain restricted-use primary sources and to revise her text with feedback from faculty members of the UT History Department.

Dr. Alyssa Harad is a writer, independent scholar and consultant. Her current work includes collaborating with intimate violence therapists to help their clients create public testimony. As part of her longstanding interest in university-community partnerships, she helped to develop the UT Humanities Institute's community sabbatical and research associate programs. She received her Ph.D. in English from UT-Austin in August 2003.

Dr. Harad is using the Research Associate Program to work on two projects. First, she is revising her manuscript, "Ordinary Witnesses," an exploration of the way contemporary American literature testifies to the everyday presence of historical trauma and provides opportunities for ethical witnessing that elude clinical and legal testimony. Dr. Harad is also beginning a new book project, "After the Scandal," a post-history of the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality. Bitter confrontations between conference participants and anti-pornography feminists kicked off the "sex wars" of the 1980's and laid the ground work for present day conversations about sex and desire, yet, partly due to the aftermath of these struggles, the story of Barnard is often unknown to the present generation of feminists. With her collaborator Dr. Ednie Garrison, Dr. Harad will track the post-1982 lives of the conference's participants and protestors, and the conference's continued impact on the following generation of activists, writers and scholars.

Dr. James Kraft is assistant professor of philosophy and religion at Huston-Tillotson College. His scholarly interests are in the philosophy of religion, epistemology, and methodologies for inter-religious dialogue.

As a Research Associate, Dr. Kraft is at work on three papers about religious philosophy and epistemology. First, he is updating and revising a paper describing philosopher of religion Philip Quinn's solution to the challenge of religious diversity. In late November 2005, the paper will be read at the annual meeting of the American Association of Religion. He is also revising a second paper that compares different epistemological approaches to religious diversity and argues for the importance of the contextualist approach. His third paper relates the theological perspective on the middle knowledge of God to the problem of skepticism in philosophical epistemology. By the end of the 2006 Spring semester, he hopes to send this paper to the journal Religious Studies.

Dr. Katherine Durham Oldmixon is a poet, scholar and teacher, salsa dancer, and supporter of arts and cultures on campus and in community. She serves on the board of Texas Folklife Resources and works closely with ProArts Collective, a non-profit supporting African-American theater in Austin. She is also the Director of the Writing Program and Faculty Development and an Assistant Professor of English at Huston-Tillotson University.

Dr. Oldmixon is using her Research Associateship to pursue her study of the cultural insularity of island communities, as well as those communities segregated or self-isolated from dominant cultures sharing the same territory. Dr. Oldmixon's work stems from her dissertation entitled "Otherworlds/Otherness: The Cultural Politics of the Middle English 'Breton' Lays," a recent study of Caribbean literatures and cultures facilitated by a six-week NEH Summer Seminar on Caribbean Theater and Culture Performance at the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras, and her ongoing involvement with Texas non-profit organizations. She plans to expand her study to include conceptual, or perceived, insularity such as that of historically black colleges and universities. Dr. Oldmixon seeks to produce curricula for an upper-division college-level course in this area, a series of presentations and articles suitable for community forums, as well as at least one scholarly article.

Matt Oliver has devoted the past seven years of his life to being a songwriter and musician, currently of the popular music band SOUND team. He lives in Austin.

Mr. Oliver is using materials available through the Research Associate Program to develop song ideas for two full-length albums to be recorded by his pop/rock group SOUND team. As a songwriter and researcher, Mr. Oliver describes his composing process as one of "distillation"—a process that "demands constant renewal of the materials at hand." Access to manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center, rare recordings, and UT's electronic databases is broadening and deepening Oliver's range of materials, and helping to shape the voices, characters, and moods of his songs.

Marva Overton spent most of her professional career working in the fields of Human Resources and Information Technology prior to making the decision to change career paths and focus on volunteerism. Most recently she was employed by IBM Corporation as an SAP Software Consultant. Ms. Overton received her B.S. degree in Psychology from Vanderbilt University and MBA from the University of Texas at Austin. Ms. Overton is actively involved in her community and currently serves on the advisory board of the Alamo Recreation Center and the executive committee of the Blackland Neighborhood Association. She is a member of the Austin Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., the Taskforce on African American Health Care Disparities, and she also volunteers with CASA of Travis County.

Ms. Overton is using her access to the University's library services to research volunteerism within the African-American community on a national and local level. Through her research she hopes to answer the following questions: Is there a need for greater advocacy in the Austin African-American community regarding volunteerism? If there is a need, what specific programs can be implemented and how will its results be measured? Is this an issue of importance to the African-American community and/or the larger community?

Dr. Chris Strickling completed her doctorate in English at the University of Texas in May of 2003. She is the current director of The Actual Lives Performance Project in Austin, Texas, a theatre ensemble comprised primarily of crips with attitude performing all original autobiographical material. Her scholarly work focuses on performance by and representations of people with disability and ways in which representation impacts public policy and social practice.

Dr. Strickling is using her Research Associateship to explore two articles. The first examines representations of disability as they impact the eroding state of the Americans with Disabilities Act, illustrates effects of and responses to Clint Eastwood's recent film "Million Dollar Baby" and the Terry Shiavo debacle, and identifies examples of disabled performance that "disidentify" the stereotypical images of mainstream culture. The second article studies how representation influences rehabilitation practices, particularly the dissociation of adult disability from childhood disability. Dr. Strickling believes that changing the ways in which disability is represented, relocating disability in the cultural systems of power and reshaping the "therapeutic relationship" to include a wider knowledge and respect for the productivity of difference might energize rehabilitation services.