“Reframing offers the greatest potential to change the response on the public’s perception,” Kara Laskowski, assistant professor of human communications, said. Once a phrase or catch word is entered into the lexicon, it becomes part of the collective conscience. By changing how we connotate the phrase “the War on Christmas,” we can “reframe” what these words truly mean. Laskowski presented her paper, based on the book, The War on Christmas, at the NationalCommunication Association convention in San Antonio.

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Associate professor of modern languages, Agnes Ragone, along with geography/earth science professor Paul Marr published their article “Language Maintenance in the Meseta Purepecha Region of Michoacan, Mexico” in the Anthropological Linguistics journal.

The native language of Purepecha once was spoken from the southwestern corner of Mexico all the way to the U.S. border. The professors concluded that while the land area has diminished over the years, the language still thrives in many bi-lingual communities.

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Jonathan Skaff, associate professor of history, has devoted his academic career to the study of Chinese culture, highlighted by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship award. Skaff will continue his research of the Chinese frontier, and the cultural evolution that took place along the fringes of one of the world’s oldest empires. “Previous perception holds there was very little cultural change in China,” he said. “My work shows there was a great exchange between the Chinese and the nomadic tribes on the edges of the empire.” Skaff will begin his 2007-2008 sabbatical by attending the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton before leaving for China.