Faculty Affiliates

Craig Anthony (Tony) Arnold is the Boehl Chair in Property and Land Use at the University of Louisville, where he teaches in both law and urban planning and chairs the Center for Land Use and Environmental Responsibility. Professor Arnold is a nationally recognized expert on the environmental regulation of land use. His work addresses environmental justice and land use, land use regulation to sustain healthy watersheds, environmentally responsible concepts of private property, and the structure of the land use regulatory system. His current interdisciplinary work is on discretionary land use decision making and how it can be improved as a mediating force between people and places. These improvements include healthier natural environments (“vital places”) for children and youth, and the engagement of children and youth in deliberative, equitable, and participatory land use processes, as Arnold’s recent grant-funded project with low-income and minority youth in West Louisville demonstrates. He has served in various planning and legal roles, including as a city attorney and as a planning commission chairman, and in community service roles on the environment and social justice. He taught at Stanford University, the University of Puerto Rico, the University of Wyoming, and Chapman University. In 2008-09, he is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cincinnati School of Planning.

Meredith Banasiak is interested in exploring the dialogue between human factors and the designed environment through the lens of cognitive science. During her tenure as a Research Associate with the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), Meredith engaged in cognitive neuroscience research at the Krasnow Institute of Advanced Studies, George Mason University where she used behavioral paradigms and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate environmental context effects on cognitive processes across the life cycle. Currently, Meredith is researching "Design for Active Outdoor Play and Nature Exploration" with the Children's Youth and Environments (CYE) research center.

Meghan Cope is an urban social geographer, interested in the ways that social, economic, political, and environmental processes influence cities and communities, as well as the ways that people's everyday lives create meaningful spaces and places within, or even against, the larger-scale processes operating on them. She focuses on social/spatial processes of marginalization and disempowerment, for example, through gender, race/ethnicity, class, youth, etc. and is especially motivated by issues such as employment, households and neighborhoods, welfare, public space, poverty, discrimination, and identity. She is a qualitative researcher who uses ethnography and other methods to learn about the geographic meanings and processes that matter to marginalized groups. Over the past 5 years she has developed an associated interest in critical perspectives on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and explored methods of combining qualitative research with GIS.

Mike Cummings founded the Political Science Department at the University of Colorado Denver, where he serves as Professor and as a CU President's Teaching Scholar. He oversees the Department's Center for New Directions in Politics and Public Policy, which has won two international awards for its service to local governments in Colorado. His book Beyond Political Correctness: Social Transformation in the United States, won an American Political Science Association sectional award as the best book in transformational politics published in either 2000 or 2001. In it, he argues for youth empowerment and against age-based discrimination limiting the political voices and participation of children and youth. His own children, Eliza (now 13) and Anthony (now 15), became active as elementary school-school students in testifying at the Colorado State Legislature on behalf of parental leave from work and, in the local media, in opposition to the testing and other aspects of the No Child Left Behind federal mandates.

Samuel Dennis is interested in the intersection of urban open space and issues of social justice. His work examines the ways public open space can support the positive development of children, youth and families—particularly where planning and design processes include the meaningful participation of marginalized social groups. For the past two years, his Harrisburg Studio hasworked with at-risk youth on several participatory design/build projects in the South Allison Hill community in Harrisburg, PA. He also continues to be involved with the American Indian Housing Initiative’s partnership with the Northern Cheyenne (www.engr.psu.edu/greenbuild/intro.html). His community-based work is strongly influenced by the emerging idea of Public Scholarship, an approach to theory and practice that seeks a more profound University-Community partnership.

Margaret Eisenhart is University Distinguished Professor and Charles Professor of Education in the School of Education at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her areas of special interest are educational anthropology, ethnographic research methods, and women in science, engineering and technology. Recent projects include outreach and research with urban Latina and African-American middle and high school girls to raise their interest in science, engineering, and information technology as career possibilities. In 2006-08 she and her students conducted research on the cultural meanings of play and social interactions among elementary school students on the redeveloped playgrounds of the Denver Learning Landscapes Initiative.

Mark Francis is Professor and past Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Davis where he founded and directed the Center for Design Research. His work is concerned with the theory and design of urban and community landscapes. Trained in landscape architecture and urban design at Harvard and Berkeley, he is also a Senior Design Consultant with the firm MIG/CoDesign in Berkeley and Davis California, where he has designed projects in the United States and abroad. At UC Davis he is a member of the Institute for Transportation Studies and the John Muir Institute for the Environment. He is author of several books and more than 70 articles and book chapters translated into a dozen languages. Mark has received national awards for his work from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Institute of Architects, the American Planning Association, the Local Government Commission, and the American Society for Landscape Architects. His design work is concerned with public space including urban gardens, community open space, nearby nature, and urban places.

Stephen Guberman is associate professor of educational psychology. His research interests focus on social and cultural processes in children’s learning and development. Recent projects have studied (a) how preschool children learn and use mathematics in parent-child interactions, (b) how school-aged children with little formal education (in Recife, Brazil) learn and use mathematics in everyday activities, (c) ethnic differences in children’s mathematical activities and achievements, and (d) the emergence and solution of mathematical problems in children’s play of educational and board games. He is currently studying the nature of science learning in informal educational settings by analyzing conversations between adults and children in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and conversations among school children in a science discovery center.

Julee Herdt is a professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Colorado and award-winning architect whose work focuses on biomass, petroleum-alternative building material research, commercialization and application, and renewable energy design and construction. Her environmental research and educational projects have been funded by the United States Department of Agriculture, the National Science Foundation, the University of Colorado, and the Department of Energy. She is interested in expanding the notion of The Edible School Yard to The Edible School Building, using innovative green construction materials and methods.

Ben Kirshner is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Education in the area of educational psychology and adolescent development. His research examines how young people learn to exercise agency in social and political arenas. His ethnographic research about youth activism led to findings about effective adult guidance strategies and the roots of collective agency. In recent work, Ben developed a participatory action research study to understand the impact of a school closure on students. Dr. Kirshner also has an ongoing study of a community organization that mentors and supports young people who seek to become the first in their families to go to college. His publications have discussed youth civic engagement and activism, youth-adult research partnerships, and cultural influences on identity development. He is a member of the American Educational Research Association and the Society for Research on Adolescence. From 1993 to 1997 he was education program manager in a youth organization in San Francisco's Mission District.

Dr. Litt is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Colorado School of Public Health and the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Litt received her PhD in environmental health and public policy from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. She has extensive experience in the area of urban environmental health working over the past decade in the neighborhoods of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston and Denver on a variety of issues related to the built environment and health including urban brownfields cleanup and redevelopment, lead poisoning, residential demolition, environmental justice, chemical risk assessment, and most recently, housing, community gardens and local food systems. As an interdisciplinary researcher, Dr. Litt utilizes the methods of community-based participatory research, epidemiology, risk assessment, and ethnography to study the relationships between residential environments and health. Dr. Litt is currently the Concentration Director for MPH in Environmental Health at the CSPH and is Past Chair of the Environment Section of the American Public Health Association. She is also active in local organizations and is a Board of Directors member for Groundwork Denver Inc., a local non-profit dedicated to the revitalization of urban neighborhoods and Denver Urban Gardens, a local non-profit dedicated to growing community one garden at a time.

Kathleen Man is an independent filmmaker whose films have shown in festivals around the world. She received her B.A. in Film Studies from Yale and her M.F.A. in Film/Video Production from the University of Iowa. Her short, French-language film, L’Entretien (The Interview), was an Official Selection at over 20 international festivals in 2002-3, winning 3 awards, including the 2003 Colorado Biennial. Kathleen produced and shot Kind of a Blur, starring Golden Globe winner Sandra Oh. Blur was invited to 25 top international festivals in 2005-6, winning Best Comedic Film at the San Francisco International Festival of Short Films. Sita, a Girl from Jambu, a documentary on child sex trafficking in Nepal, was an official selection at over 30 film festivals and won 7 awards in 2006-7, including Best Feature Film in the Children’s Advocacy Category at the Artivist Film Festival and the Audience Award at the San Diego Women Film Festival. Currently, Kathleen is co-directing and editing a feature-length documentary entitled Beauty Mark, a film that examines American society’s obsession with unattainable beauty and perfection.

Bella Mody specializes in the political economy of media in developing countries and in design research on public service applications of communication media. She coordinated the graduate program in international development communication at Stanford University as an assistant professor (1978-1983) and taught at San Francisco State University as an associate professor (1983-1985). She has consulted for UN agencies, national governments and nongovernmental organizations on media applications for agriculture, health and education in India, Malaysia, Singapore, Nepal, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Barbados, Ghana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Kenya and South Africa. Her current focus is HIV-AIDS.

Brian Muller is interested in Land Use Modeling, Geographic Information Systems, Agricultural/Open Space Land Preservation, and Regional Economic Development