in Los Angeles to his work in the School of Communication.
better for residents. “That deepened my interest and kept me thinking about how to turn the city around. LA could have gone much more nega- tively than it has in the last 30 years,” he says. “I’ve seen so many examples where people have banded together to work for the common good.” That work made Villanueva aware of how im-
penetrable urban planning is for most people— how much of it is complicated by its fiscal aspects and capital infrastructure projects—and he decided to return to school. His goal was to learn how to better engage and teach others how to communicate urban planning. He earned his doctorate at USC’s Annenberg School for Com- munication and Journalism, where he focused his research on civic engagement, spatial justice, and sustainable urban development. So why is this Angeleno, a man deep in LA
politics, at Loyola in Chicago? “I wanted to be in a big city and at an institution that would sup- port social justice work,” he says. “Chicago and Loyola—with its Plan 2020 and Jesuit tradition— were a big draw.” Villanueva dove into learning about Chicago’s
77 community areas and more than 200 self- identified neighborhoods. “Chicago has a strong sense of itself as a city but also as neighborhoods,” he says. “Before communities can successfully organize, there needs to be a feeling of belonging, of neighborhood pride. Neighborhoods aren’t just geography, they’re also social perception.” Villanueva himself has become involved with
Chicago community organizations and taken part in local summits, most recently for conflict resolution and peacebuilding. “What I’ve see here
Tisha Rajendra teaches a course on morality and food, encouraging students to think about their dietary choices.
is the process for democracy versus violence,” he says. “My own sense of optimism tells me people can come together and work towards solutions in their neighborhoods.”
RESPONSIBLE CHOICES
TISHA RAJENDRA COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
Growing up in North Carolina, Tisha Rajendra, PhD, saw history all around her: statues honor- ing Confederate generals and soldiers who had fought and died for a set of principles that were wrong, she says. “But no one ever talked about that. Part of my fascination with the responsibili- ties of the past comes from growing up in a place where no one talks about their responsibilities.” Most of Rajendra’s articles and her forthcom-
ing book, Migrants and Citizens: Justice as Respon- sibility in the Ethics of Migration, look at issues of migration and the responsibilities of receiving nations. That’s because it’s their policies that often are to blame for driving waves of refugees. “Migration is patterned,” says Rajendra, an as- sistant professor of theology. “Migration flows. Something sets migration flows in motion.” Her research is focused on viewing migration
in a larger context. “It’s not just poverty or unem- ployment that drives it,” she says. “A fuller picture of justice needs to be discussed. Responsibilities also need to be part of the understanding.” Rajendra offers the United States’s history of
looking towards Mexico for low-cost labor as an example. There had long been a pattern of circular migration, she explains, where workers
would come for the harvests and then return to Mexico. A 1986 policy reform made it more dif- ficult and expensive to cross the border. Workers began coming to stay and bringing their families. “It began what we have today, a huge population of undocumented workers,” she says. In contrast with her work on international
migration, Rajendra teaches about mostly domestic, hands-on issues. In “Moral Problems: Food Systems,” for instance, she urges students to think through their dietary choices. The class has experiential components—the students gar- den, interview farmers, and live on the budget of someone on food stamps. Students may come in saying they don’t understand why people in pov- erty eat so many potato chips, but when living on a food stamps budget they get hungry and fill up on low-cost chips. “That’s from the stress of a mere weekend, worrying over every penny and running out of food,” Rajendra says. Rajendra hadn’t planned on teaching and writ-
ing about social justice. Her Bryn Mawr under- graduate degree was in linguistics; she wanted to be a New Testament scholar. “Then I learned that I preferred the concrete questions of my Christian ethics classes,” she says. Her Harvard master’s in theological studies led her to Boston College, where she earned a doctorate in philosophy in theological ethics and became better acquainted with the Jesuits. She came to Loyola in 2010. “I was familiar with Jesuit institutions, and the
Jesuit ethos, so I was very aware of Loyola,” she says. “It’s a great environment for someone who wants to teach what I want to teach and to write what I want to write about,” she says. L
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