Faculty

Associate Professor of Education Mara Tieken recently offered a stirring and evidence-driven defense of the Department of Education in the Portland Press Herald and a commentary about rural school closures in The Daily Yonder, a national news outlet dedicated to reporting on rural people and places. Tieken, who studies rural education and previously worked as a third grade teacher in rural Tennessee, detailed how school closures and consolidations harm students and their communities. “Every year, hundreds of thousands of children are displaced when their schools are permanently shuttered,” Tieken writes.

Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Carrie Diaz Eaton was part of a rich discussion about AI on “Maine Calling,” Maine Public’s weekday radio program, on April 7. Diaz Eaton discussed the widely varying attitudes of her students to AI and talked about her course “Calling Bull: Data Literacy and Information Science,” which she’ll be teaching in Fall 2025. It’s a course she teaches regularly, but in recent years, discussion of AI has become a more substantive portion of that course. “Because you’ve got misinformation being created at a scale, on purpose or not,” Diaz Eaton told listeners. Panelists included Michael Donihue, interim director at Colby’s Davis Institute for AI, Bowdoin’s Fernando Nascimento, assistant professor, digital and computational studies, and from the Roux Institute, Berkeley Almand-Hunter, technical director of partner products.

An essay by Associate Professor of Philosophy Paul Schofield, whose research focuses on moral and political philosophy, was published on Jacobin, a quarterly magazine and website. In the essay, titled “An Autonomy Worth Having,” Schofield looks at the current homelessness crisis and the idea of involuntary hospitalization, which is once again being offered as a solution in some quarters after being roundly rejected by both the left and the right 40 years ago. Schofield examines the historical perspective on involuntary hospitalization, describes the political alignments for and against it and then advocates for what he calls a “deeper autonomy, a kind of autonomy worth having,” outlining a new middle ground.

Assistant Professor of Music Asha Tamirisa spoke to the Portland Press Herald about the IMStudio, a flexible high-tech space in Coram Library that recently hosted a multimedia project called Chronicle of a Fall, which depicts the layered sensory experiences of immigrant workers in the United States using projections, bodycam footage and surround sound. Co-created by artists Nadav Assor and Tirtza Even, Chronicle of a Fall, which ran from April 3 to May 2, 2025, is a prime example of the kinds of creative works Tamirisa and her colleagues in the Bates Arts Collaborative hoped to bring to Bates when they were advocating for and planning a multimedia studio on campus. The IMStudio opened in 2023. “We want it to feel like it could belong to anyone,” Tamirisa told the paper.