The program can be heard at noon Tuesday, April 16, on the “Minnesota Public Radio News Presents” program at 91.1 FM. The program also can be heard via the Internet. Information is available here.

Alexander spoke in St. Thomas’ Woulfe Alumni Hall on Monday, April 8. Her lecture  was sponsored by Student Diversity and Inclusion Services, University Lectures Committee, College of Arts & Sciences, Dean of Students Office, St. Thomas Activities & Recreation (STAR), Luann Dummer Center for Women, Justice & Peace Studies, American Culture & Difference, and Sociology & Criminal Justice.

The multiple-award-winning documentary “Justice for My Sister” will be shown at 7 p.m. Monday, April 15, in Room 126 of the John R. Roach Center for the Liberal Arts on the university’s St. Paul campus.

The film will be followed by a question-and-answer session with Kimberly Bautista, its producer and director. “My hope is that audiences from all walks of life will be moved to recognize the violence in our own communities and take a stand against it,” she said.

Adela at age 27.

The program is free and open to the public. The film is in Spanish with English subtitles. The discussion with Bautista will be translated from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish.

The feature-length documentary begins with the story of a 27-year-old Guatemalan, Adela, who left for work one day and never returned. Her ex-boyfriend beat her until she was unrecognizable and left her at the side of road.

Despite dismal odds, Adela’s sister Rebeca takes on Guatemala’s corrupt legal system in a three-year fight to bring the ex-boyfriend to justice. Of the 6,000 cases of women murdered in Guatemala over the past decade, only 2 percent of their killers were sentenced.

A trailer for the film can be seen here.

The April 15 program includes the sale of Guatemalan crafts; free-will offerings will be accepted. Checks may be made out to La Paz International Inc. All proceeds go to provide financial support for Rebeca, the subject of the film, and Olga, another Guatemalan woman who lives with her children in poverty.

The program is co-sponsored by St. Thomas’ College of Arts and Sciences, Office of Student Diversity and Inclusion Services,  Luann Dummer Center for Women, and the departments of History, Political Science, Women’s Studies, Family Studies, Justice and Peace Studies, Modern and Classical Languages, and Sociology.

The program features presentations and panel discussions by scholars, creative writers, graduate and undergraduate student researchers, and those in the helping professions. All sessions will be held in the auditorium, Room 126, of the John R. Roach Center for the Liberal Arts.

The program is sponsored by the university’s Center for Irish Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, Sociology Department, and Family Studies Program. The Irish Genealogical Society International also is a sponsoring organization. The program can be viewed here.

Dr. Brigittine French

Dr. Brigittine French of Grinnell College will open the symposium with a keynote address titled “Anthropologists Look at the Irish Family: Solidarity and Strife, Conflict and Cooperation.” French, who has just returned from a Fulbright Fellowship at Dublin City University, is the social science representative of the American Conference for Irish Studies. She has presented numerous lectures and conference papers on Irish identity formation and on conflict resolution in the early Irish Free State.

Later panels will include sessions on “Therapists’ Perspectives on the Irish Family,” “Literary Images of Vocation in Irish Life,” and “Mothers and Fathers in Irish Life Writing.” There also will be two sessions involving creative writers. In one, memoirists Nick Hayes, Brian Nerney, Marge Barrett and Fred Nairn will discuss “Shame and Respectability in the Irish Family.”

The program will conclude with a session called “The Last Word Belongs to Poets,” in which local writers (including Pat Barone, William Cavanaugh, Ethna McKiernan and Mike Finley) will read original poems about their families.

The luncheon speaker is Dr. Patrick O’Donnell of Normandale Community College; he will speak on “Tyrone Guthrie’s Remarkable Family.”

Registration is $12 for the general public, or free with a St. Thomas ID. (A buffet lunch is available for an additional $12, and must be ordered at the time of registration.) Registrations are handled through the Tommie Central website.

For more information contact Jim Rogers, director of the Center for Irish Studies, (612) 962-5662 or jrogers@stthomas.edu.

“For some reason or another, [Menssen] thought I would make a good editor,” Clemenson said with a chuckle. After some consideration, he said yes. The department applied for the opportunity, and by October 2008 the journal was under Clemenson’s guidance. While considering the editorship, Clemenson said he reflected on one of the key responsibilities of any professor: service. “Every faculty member is expected to not only do research and teaching, but also service. That can take a variety of forms. I thought this was one of the best fits for me. I’ve always been research oriented, and [editing] involves something very close to research.”

A commitment to service and scholarly endeavors is deeply rooted in the College of Arts and Sciences, which encourages faculty to enrich the community through “discovery, artistic activity, integration and pedagogy.” This mission gives Clemenson and other faculty members the encouragement to put in extra hours every week editing academic journals that become dear to them.

Clemenson is one of several College of Arts and Sciences professors who were nudged toward or sought positions as editors or publishers of scholarly journals. (See a list of journals on Page 17.) Philosophy professors W. Matthews Grant, Christopher Toner, Gloria Frost, Timothy Pawl, Mark Spencer and Joshua Stuchlik are part of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly’s faculty editing team, which is supported by department staff member Ann Hale, who is the quarterly’s managing editor. Sociology and Criminal Justice professor Lisa Waldner co-edits Sociological Quarterly, while Art History professor Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell publishes Pacific Arts Journal, and English professor Alexis Easley edits Victorian Periodicals Review.

Increasing Expertise and Personal Growth

For Easley, the most exciting part of her editing work is the development of a deeper understanding of her subject. Easley is a scholar of Victorian journalism. When she began editing Victorian Periodicals Review in spring 2012 she did not expect to develop a new and strong connection to her research.

“It’s giving me insight into [Victorian] editors,” Easley said. “It’s giving me solidarity with these individuals.”

Easley has been a member of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals since 1998. She credits the society for mentoring her throughout graduate school. The society was founded in 1968 by scholars who were interested in Victorian journalism and studied the magazines, newspapers and journals of “every stripe” from about the 1780s until World War I, she said.

“It’s an international group of scholars. It’s pretty amazing and wonderful that we (St. Thomas) have this journal,” Easley said. “It’s quite a plum.”

Most of Easley’s work is concerned with editing the submissions, much as the philosophy faculty editing team members have their hands full with the editing and extensive review process behind the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly.

The quarterly was founded in 1920 under the title New Scholasticism as a response to a call from Pope Leo XIII for a renewal of Catholic philosophy and theology. While the journal’s name has changed since then, its spirit of bringing reason and faith together in the area of philosophy has remained.

This mission is constantly on the editors’ minds as they process submissions to the journal. As do all academic journal editors, the St. Thomas editors seek experts in the subfields of their disciplines to act as referees who determine if each submission is worthy of publication. But before that process can begin, Clemenson and Toner dig through the submissions and determine each one’s level of appropriateness for the journal.

“Part of the beauty of philosophy as a discipline, because you’re dealing with fundamental questions, is that you can’t afford to limit yourself to a narrow specialization,” Clemenson said. The greatest benefit of editing the journal, he said, is the countless chances he is given to enrich his intellectual life by reading submissions and interacting with authors and referees.

“It’s important not to put the blinders on, but to keep perspective,” Clemenson said. He sees this branching out to learn about subfields in philosophy as a wonderful scholarly opportunity.

When Waldner was seeking new scholarly opportunities, she never dreamed of applying to a journal as prominent as Sociological Quarterly. That is, until her doctoral adviser and mentor, professor Betty Dobratz of Iowa State University, asked her to apply jointly to the Midwest Sociological Society’s call for a new editor in 2011.

After a rigorous application process, the pair was chosen. They began editing the journal in March 2012.

“Sociology is so broad, and there are some things that I know more about or that she knows more about,” Waldner said. “We thought a team made sense.” The pair’s broad knowledge base is very important for a journal such as Sociological Quarterly, which focuses on “a whole gamut” of things that sociologists study, including family, crime, politics and gender topics, Waldner said.

Waldner and her co-editor face the challenge of working together across a physical distance. Video chatting plays a big role in the editorial process, with weekly Skype appointments to discuss papers submitted to the quarterly that deserve a second look. Editing is a challenging and time-consuming process after which only about 10 percent of submitted articles are published. But to Waldner, the outcome and personal growth attached to the process make it well worth the challenge.

Waldner said the most exciting part of the editing process is when a paper goes out for review. A referee is generally at the top of his or her field and an expert on the submitted paper’s topic. “I really enjoy that it has given me an excuse to contact fairly prominent sociologists and say I’m the editor of The Sociological Quarterly,” Waldner said. “It’s providing [me] an opportunity to learn.”

It gives her the opportunity to read about almost every subfield of sociology and to identify additional topics she and Dobratz believe will be of interest to readers. Waldner said they identified Occupy Wall Street and the 2012 elections as special section topics for upcoming issues, and they regard the special topics as the perfect way to increase readership while keeping the journal, and themselves, current in sociology.

Mentoring the Next Generation

Professors are not alone in receiving new opportunities with the presence of scholarly journals on campus. Students benefit, too. They gain from the increased knowledge shared by professors in their classes.

Clemenson said he brings new articles from American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly into the classroom and finds his expanded knowledge of the field a benefit when it comes time for his students to write papers, because he can direct them to the best scholarship in the field.

“Being an editor of this journal broadens my perspectives, and keeps me from being narrowly focused on my own set of interests,” Clemenson said.

Waldner noted that expanding her knowledge outside her specialty in sociology helps her in the classroom. She believes working with the journal increases her critical-thinking skills, which she can then pass on to her students. “Folks that are involved in creating knowledge are the best to impart knowledge,” Waldner said.

The more insight the professor has, the more easily students are able to access information. Easley sees editing as a natural extension of her research and teaching. “The big picture is to bring the richness of Victorian culture to the next generation,” she said.

Some of the journals, including Victorian Periodicals Review, also provide tangible opportunities for students. English graduate student Rachel MacDonald is the first of an expected long line of students to receive an editorial assistantship with Easley.

“The experience [has] confirmed my belief in the revision process as the place where good writing becomes great writing,” MacDonald said. She was surprised at how much work goes into each issue, she said. The editing is extensive, but much of the work has “nothing to do with editing, but marketing, branding and business.”

The position allows MacDonald to be integrated in every part of this editorial process.

Pacific Arts Journal also provides a graduate student position, which is currently filled by Rachel Simmons. The journal is published and produced by members of the Art History Department under the leadership of department chair Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell. Simmons hopes to make her career working with Pacific art in some way, and Stansbury-O’Donnell believes work on the journal is an excellent opportunity for her to network in the art community.

The journal publishes articles on the art of Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines and the Pacific islands. This focus may seem very far away from Summit Avenue, but with the recent establishment of the American Museum of Asmat Art on campus, the Art History Department is showing itself as an impressive resource for Pacific art.

“She’s been brilliant,” Stansbury-O’Donnell said of Simmons. “Not everybody wants to or can teach in a classroom or curate in a museum. A publication is another place. Copy editing is not specifically an art history skill, but you could get a job editing art history journals.”

As a strong advocate for mentorship of students and recent graduates, Waldner seeks to pull her former students into Sociological Quarterly.

“I reach out to my [former] students and provide them with opportunities,” Waldner said. The newest member of the journal’s editorial board is 2004 St. Thomas graduate Valerie Clark. Clark is a research scientist for the Minnesota Department of Corrections. “It gets her professionally engaged, and it’s something she can put on her résumé,” Waldner said. “I look forward to inviting more [students] in the future to give them experience.”

Providing Visibility

Each of the scholarly journals edited or published in the College of Arts and Sciences provides new information and exciting opportunities to the faculty who work on them. Editing a journal also brings recognition among other scholars. Clemenson describes the responsibility of housing a scholarly journal at St. Thomas as a true “vote of confidence” by a scholarly discipline.

“Our institution was entrusted with this responsibility,” Clemenson said. “That speaks well of our department.”

Read more from CAS Spotlight.

St. Thomas senior Kylee Joosten, 21, noticed, and subsequently she felt compelled to explore the subject by adding male victims to the equation. A sociology major, she took her observation one step further in a summer research project, “Analyzing the Use of Heterosexual Perpetration Tactics in Sexually Coercive Undergraduates.”

“Last year I asked my male friends if they had information on sexual assault in men’s restrooms on campus, and they said they did not (though now they do),” she said. ”We have a social perception that women are always the victims and men are always the perpetrators in sexual assaults. So I wanted to look at sexual coercion perpetration among both men and women.”

She also spent one month gathering background information and discovered that most research focused on male or female sexual coercion, but rarely did she find comparative studies of tactics employed by both genders in coercing unwilling partners to have sex.

Dr. Lisa Waldner

Joosten analyzed a data set provided by her project adviser, Dr. Lisa Waldner, Sociology and Criminal Justice Department, who conducted a survey on “intimate relationship issues” at an urban, southwestern U.S. university. Waldner’s sample size consisted of 411 heterosexual undergraduates (265 females, 146 males) with an average age of 26.35 years.

“Very little sexual coercion research has examined the attitudes and experiences of those who actually pressure their partners,” Waldner said. Finding a link between those who see themselves as controlling and their own self-report of initiating unwanted sexual contact is interesting and deserves more investigation.”

In Joosten’s study, which was funded by a Young Scholars Grant from St. Thomas’ Grants and Research Office, she defined sexual coercion as “the use of either physical or verbal tactics to force or persuade an unwilling person into performing sexual acts to which they would not have otherwise consented.”

She defined a perpetrator of sexual coercion as “any respondent who reported using one of the 14 listed tactics (intoxication, threats to stop seeing, making date feel guilty, persistent begging, threatening to tell lies, telling lies, threatening to blackmail, detaining one’s date, attempting to spark interest by touching, making false promises, physical restraint, using or threatening to use a weapon, threatening to use force and using physical force) to coerce a partner into an unwanted sexual act.”

Here are some of the highlights of Joosten’s study of Waldner’s survey:

• The majority of instances did not result in sexual intercourse; rather, the most common perpetration tactics used were milder tactics, such as verbal pressure, and not physical force.
• There were significant gender differences in five of the 14 sexual coercion tactics: telling lies (males: 12.6 percent vs. females: 5.2 percent), making false promises (males 7.8 percent vs. females: 2.6 percent), attempting to interest a partner through touching (males: 39.9 percent vs. females: 22.7), persistent begging (males: 23 percent vs. females: 10 percent) and the intoxication of the partner (males: 12.6 percent vs. females: 4.3 percent).
• Women scored higher, albeit marginally, than men in one just of the 14 tactics: “threatening to use force” (3.5 percent vs. 3.2 percent).
• Nearly 40 percent of the study subjects reported using at least one of the 14 tactics; the outcomes ranged from kissing to fondling to intercourse.

In her analysis, Joosten focused on four items, scored from mild to severe:

• Gender Ideology, which measures participants’ agreement or disagreement with statements relating to traditional gender roles (i.e., “A true man knows how to command others.) This item was shown to have an insignificant effect on whether respondents reported perpetrating sexual coercion.
• The Interpersonal Control Scale, which assesses participants’ perceived control over a romantic partner. Respondents with higher (more severe) scores were found to be significantly more likely to report perpetrating sexual coercion and were statistically more likely to report intoxicating a partner with alcohol or drugs, making false promises and telling lies.
• The Alcohol Expectancy scale, which assesses participants’ perception of how alcohol affects their behavior. This item also was shown to have an insignificant effect on whether respondents reported perpetrating sexual coercion.
• The Sexual Coercion Inventory, in which participants are asked to indicate the most extreme sexual behavior they had with an intimate partner after they coerced that partner into sexual activity – consisting of kissing, fondling and intercourse. Participants who responded “yes” to at least one of the 14 coercion tactics were categorized as a perpetrator.

Editor’s note: Kylee Joosten’s research was funded in part by a Young Scholars grant.

While some individuals hold racist views, white supremacists actively pursue policies that would seriously undermine the civil rights of minorities, women, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and some religious minorities including Jews. Neo-Nazis, skinheads, and the Ku Klux Klan are all examples of white-supremacy groups. Beyond differences in appearance, there is a great deal of diversity both within and between these groups with divisions based on religion, ideology, tactics and even what they should call themselves. For example, some reject “supremacist” in favor of “separatist,” as they have the goal of creating a whites-only state, while others prefer “white nationalist” or even “white power.” All of these ideological differences create conflicts as well as motivate attempts to create alliances.

Discomfiting though it may be, understanding the goals and ideologies of white supremacists is crucial for countering the security threat posed by some of these groups. In the late 1990s, my adviser and mentor, Dr. Betty Dobratz of Iowa State University, co-authored a book on white supremacists called White Power, WhitePride! Interested in her research, I began to accompany her as she conducted interviews with both leaders and rank-and-file members of white-supremacist groups, and I even attended some events, including a neo-Nazi book burning held in a St. Paul park in 2007. As a result, we have quantitative and qualitative data from both interviews and questionnaires received from more than 150 white supremacists.

After Betty and I, along with another colleague, wrote a textbook for political sociology students that included a chapter on terrorism, we became interested in the potential threat of domestic terrorism posed by some white supremacists, so we examined ourinterview and questionnaire data to see what we could illuminate regarding the perceptions, ideologies and beliefs of white supremacists. Specifically, we are interested in views toward the use of violence and leaderless resistance to achieve the goal of a whites-only state. We have traveled to three international conferences held in Sweden, Turkey and Greece to present our findings and recommendations for law enforcement and policymakers.1

Lone-Wolf Terrorists

Domestic terrorism experts fear lone-wolf terrorists because they are difficult to detect until after a tragedy occurs. One of the most infamous examples is the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. None of the conspirators was affiliated with a terrorist group, although Timothy McVeigh had ties to militia groups and was angry with the federal government for its handling of the standoff with the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and the shootout with federal agents on Ruby Ridge that killed three people, including two members of Randy Weaver’s family. While there is no evidence that McVeigh was allied with racist groups, he shared with white supremacists both a distrust of the federal government and a belief that both Waco and Ruby Ridge are tragic examples of federal government overstepping.

Our interview data confirm that white supremacists consider Ruby Ridge and Waco as “trigger” events that reinforced perceptions of government persecution and resulted in greater advocacy for the use of leaderless resistance.

One interviewee described how his experience at Ruby Ridge was a turning point for him: “I didn’t really understand … until then the kind of fight we are up against – the kind of people we were dealing with and how true it really was that our government was corrupt to the point of no return. That changed my life completely.”

Waco and Ruby Ridge are powerful trigger events for white supremacists not only because of the loss of life, but because women and children also were victims. A former member of Aryan Nations told us, “The government proves its tyrannical reign by incidents such as [the] Randy Weaver incident – where the government sieged the man’s family, murdered his wife and his son … incidents … like Waco where they burned women, children and men.”

Interviewees suggest that incidents like these also help them recruit more members. One declared, “It sounds terrible to say but when the federal government goes in and kills Randy Weaver’s wife and son and when they kill these people in Waco and so forth – I mean, you can’t have a better salesman for our cause than the federal government.” Because of these events, some white supremacists have advocated for a two-pronged approach that maintains traditional white-power organizations alongside leaderless resistance.

Leaderless resistance is a lone-wolf strategy that relies on a small group of individuals who share the ideology of an unaffiliated above-ground organization and commit acts of violence that advance organizational goals. Because these individuals do not have formal ties to the organization, it is almost impossible to hold organizations accountable when lone wolves commit crimes. It is also more difficult for law enforcement to infiltrate these groups or coerce individuals into becoming informants.

Leaderless resistance has been popularized by influential white supremacists as a way to deal with the success of the anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center. SPLC pioneered the use of lawsuits and civil penalties to hold several white-supremacist organizations liable for criminal actions committed by members. The resulting civil penalties accompanied by bankruptcy have weakened or ruined several prominent white-supremacist organizations.

Despite increasing calls for using leaderless resistance, some white supremacists question its effectiveness. One interviewee expressed this view when discussing the Oklahoma City bombing: “The stupid leaderless resistance tactics and acts of terrorism that have occurred have, I believe, hurt our struggle. White revolution may be the only solution, but the time has not yet arrived for that kind of struggle. Isolated attacks on our enemies or the government is (sic) fruitless at this point in time. … The U.S. has the best army in the world, [and] a 1,000 or so skinheads and other fanatics are not going to overthrow the government and take over.”

Although support for leaderless resistance seems to be increasing, white supremacists do not support relying exclusively on leaderless resistance at the expense of above-ground organizations, and recognize the value of organizations in providing ideology and potential recruits for leaderless-resistance cells. Our data suggest that the majority of white supremacists prefer pursuing their goals using both leader-led organizations and leaderless resistance.

Benjamin Smith is an example of the potential danger when both strategies are pursued. Smith was a one-time member of the World Church of the Creator. He wrote a letter resigning from WCOTC before going on a killing spree and committing suicide. Smith shot 11 people and killed two, targeting African-Americans, Jews and Asian-Americans. His resignation from WCOTC prevented the type of civil suits that have bankrupted organizations in the past.

We also asked white supremacists about their views toward using violence more generally to advance the cause. Most supported the use of violence under certain circumstances, such as self-defense combined with more conventional strategies including running prowhite candidates for political office. While there is some support forusing violence, this does not mean that all respondents advocate terrorism, but the potential for violence is a concern for both law enforcement and potential targets of these groups.

We believe our findings lend themselves to some recommendations for crafting constructive responses that proactively deal with security threats without further alienating these individuals by reinforcing perceptions of persecution and even higher levels of government distrust.

Our Recommendations

First, we recommend not overestimating the sustainability of leaderless resistance as a strategy. Sociologists note that groups with low levels of hierarchy are difficult to sustain and that leaders are needed to provide direction and coordination. Second, “one size fits all” approaches should be avoided when dealing with these groups. Among all white-supremacist groups, those linked to militias or anti-government groups are most dangerous and deserve extra scrutiny and attention. Because not all members support leaderless resistance, intelligence resources should be strategically used. Third, treating every organization as a militia group with plans to overthrow the government will only legitimize perceptions of oppression, which increases the likelihood of leaderless resistance. While there are some advantages to forcing a group to go underground, too much repression forces groups to adapt, which renders them even more unpredictable. Repression also increases alienation and anti-government sentiments.

Finally, both local and federal law enforcement need to act in ways that reinforce respect for the constitutionally protected rights of all citizens by not using questionable tactics on groups that have abhorrent messages but have broken no laws. A 2010 Department of Justice report criticizes the FBI for its lax oversight and “inappropriate” practices while gathering intelligence under the provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. Some of these practices resulted in the downloading of thousands of telephone records that were never certified as relevant to investigating terrorism. This type of behavior does not increase trust in government and reinforces the perceived need for extreme responses, including leaderless resistance.

Any encroachment on civil liberties may push some groups that are not racist toward alliances with white-supremacist groups. Nonracist groups may tolerate racism in exchange for support on guns rights or related issues, which may increase the legitimacy of whitepower groups.

We plan to continue our research by collecting data on white supremacists’ perceptions of the PATRIOT Act and whether they believe it is a tool used by government to repress their movement. We also hope to assess any evolving views on leaderless resistance in order to determine whether these groups are abandoning more conventional strategies in favor of violence.

Stereotypes and Reality of White Supremacists

My interactions with white supremacists combined with interview and questionnaire data suggest a far more complicated picture than what one might assume, given popular stereotypes of these folks as stupid and poorly educated. The reality is that while some white supremacists fit this stereotype, others are articulate and intelligent and can be quite personally engaging. For example, in Toronto I met one individual, despite never having gone to college, who had a better understanding of the finer points of various sociological theories than many sociology Ph.D. students.

Certainly some are attracted to white-power groups because they blame minorities for taking away “their” jobs or are frustrated with the many economic changes taking place because of globalization. Yet, white-power adherents do come from all kinds of different backgrounds and some are highly educated with good-paying jobs.

It is this disconnect between the stereotype and reality that can be uncomfortable for the researcher. Because I disagree with whitesupremacists’ views on race and many other issues, it would be easier for me if I could also dislike them. When not discussing their views toward minorities or Jews, these folks sound like average Americans with the same struggles and worries around raising a family, keeping a job and saving for the future. In that respect, we are more alike than different. Having common concerns does help connect me to those we interviewed, which is important for collecting data.

Yet, in acknowledging this, there is a real danger of sugarcoating their views, when in reality it is exactly those views that mean white supremacists pose a threat to those who are not white, gentile or heterosexual. It is sometimes hard to grasp this fact when you have been in the company of white supremacists for several hours engaged inconversations, not all of which are racial in nature, and have witnessed civil and sometimes even cordial interactions between white supremacists and minorities who work as cashiers at coffee shops or maids in hotels where interviews often took place.

Another source of discomfort is being mistaken for a white supremacist. After I went to a neo-Nazi-sponsored book burning in a St. Paul park, Betty and I drove to a white-power concert that was to take place in the basement of the Roseville VFW. Once VFWmanagers realized what they were hosting, they called the Roseville police, who asked the concert attendees to leave. All of us were marched single file past a line of police officers and their dogs. I was mortified that the police assumed I was a white supremacist. Yet it would have been inappropriate for me to have done anything to correct their perception. I was a guest of the concert hosts and needed to be respectful despite my disagreement with their views.

Finally, while I have felt relatively secure while collecting data, there have been occasions when I was uncertain, including the time I got into a car with Wolfgang Droege of the Heritage Front and his companions who proceeded to take Betty and me on a tour of Toronto. And, in St. Paul, Betty and I spent an entire day with white supremacists, including several hours in a hotel room interviewing a movement leader. We went to dinner with a group at a local Perkins restaurant, attended the book burning, and then the aborted white-power concert. While at a gas station, regrouping after being forced to leave the VFW, one young man suddenly challenged me by asking who I was and who had given me permission to attend. I was stunned because I had been around him all day and he had seemed fine. We quickly calmed the situation, but I was nervous until we finally left.

I would never have gotten involved with this research if it had not been for the encouragement and generosity of my former professor who took me with her and shared her previously collected data. As a professor, the most enduring lesson for me is the importance of mentorship and providing research opportunities for students.

While I have never taken students with me to interviews or white-supremacist events, I have found safer ways for students to be involved in this work and other research, including an analysis of rhetoric that gay skinheads use to justify their involvement in white-supremacist groups.2 The diversity of white supremacists never ceases to surprise me and why some gays are drawn to racist groups that abhor homosexuality is another research question that I hope to pursue.

Notes

1 The results are reported in three papers co-authored by Dobratz and Waldner: “Terrorism and White Separatists in the U.S.A.: A Look at Leaderless Resistance” presented at the World Congress of Sociology (2010); “Domestic Terrorism: White Separatist Views on Violence and Leaderless Resistance” presented at the International Political Science Association Armed Forces and Society Conference (2011); and “Ballots and/or Bullets: Strategies of the White Separatist Movement” presented at the International Politics Conference (2011). All papers are under review for publication in professional journals.

2 Lisa Waldner and former students Heather Martin and Lyndsay Capeder published “Ideology of Gay Racialist Skinheads and Stigma Management Techniques” in the Journal of Political and Military Sociology (2006).

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Lisa, I know you moved among many different disciplines (theater, sociology, creative writing) during your years at St. Thomas, and right now you’re writing plays by day and doing collaborative poetry with jazz musicians by night. Can you talk a little about the way your work moves among these disciplines?

Where to begin? When I entered college I was convinced I was going to become a writer. I thought I’d write fiction, though I’ve never completed any of the stories I’ve started. My first semester, I was really engaged in my sociology class. It was an opening up of worlds I wasn’t yet familiar with: cities, populations and environments with conditions I’d never experienced. This is a lot like literature, really. Or better yet, this is literature we sometimes read to find each other, rather than reading to find ourselves.

I persisted with sociology and English literature in tandem and eventually received a degree in sociology. I attended Midwest Sociological Society Conferences (in Chicago and St. Louis) presenting research papers with other undergrads. When it came time to think about graduate school, I was convinced I was going to be a sociology professor. I was one of those people who took sociology as a safe and practical gesture toward both academia and self. Didn’t get into graduate school. Didn’t go. This forced me to do some re-evaluation. I worked for a while post-grad as a personal advocate for an insurance company. I hated it. I would sit in my cube and feel that I was not actually helping people, and it became a bit injurious. I found myself reading in my time off and writing into the wee hours. It was really draining. I had been bitten by the poetry bug late in my college career – most specifically in your class, Leslie, Intermediate Poetry Writing. It was a time when I was beginning to find my voice and style and the architecture of my thought, all the while trying to find the way I fit into the world as a human being.

The summer after I graduated from St. Thomas, I went to work with the poets Dara Wier and Terrance Hayes at the Juniper Institute in Amherst, Mass. I felt like I didn’t know exactly what I was doing on the page. Certainly I was acting up, breaking rules and all that. Not only was I enjoying it, I was like a kid with a yo-yo learning how to “walk the dog” and make the “Eiffel Tower.” I was creating, and I wanted to show off. Later that year, when I was a Givens Fellow, writer Laurie Carlos told me that I had to stop apologizing in my work, and if I was going to continue apologizing I needed to at least understand why. Carlos’ advice was a breakthrough for me. The writing I was doing was very character driven, more like monologues and dialogues than a simple poetic rendering of experience. Ishmael Reed and Carlos both pushed me to write for the stage, so I applied for the Playwrights’ Center Many Voices Fellowship and got it!

I also began collaboration with jazz group Lulu’s Playground. Adam Meckler and I spoke early last year about collaborating to synthesize some of my spoken word into an avant-garde jazz/classical ensemble he was creating. They were doing everything from Shostakovich to Hank Williams. The first time I sat down with them it felt incredible. I’ve also worked with the Fantastic Merlins and Nathan Hanson, Brian Roessler and Rahjta Renn. These guys are so intuitive and free. When I play with them it is like all of that sadness, all of that grief is accessed, but with a palpable whimsy that adds a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

Jazz music and the jazz community in general have allowed my work a foot in the door to public performance. It took me out of the often isolating place writing can put one. Now my biggest struggle is balancing the public self I’ve created and the private writer. It takes discipline I’m still learning.

What advice would you give current St. Thomas students in creative writing?

Keep writing and keep reading and learn how to be your best editor. As we grow as writers and also into our own adulthood, there won’t always be a workshop or a mentoring writer to use as a reference point. It’s important to learn about others’ work so you can recognize the magic of your own.

You’ve done such a good job of making connections in the Twin Cities community of artists and writers. Can you give current St. Thomas students some advice about how and why moving beyond the campus might enrich their years here?

I think as a student you can tend to become really restricted to the offerings of campus life. You can limit yourself. Here in the Twin Cities there is such a vibrant community of artists and writers that if you start going to a few things, you begin to see familiar faces. Minnesota artists (even our transplants) are very friendly, warm and willing to talk to young artists.

I know you maintain a blog, and I wonder if you could talk about the pleasures and pitfalls of blogging for a writer-artist.

This is a great question. I started the blog [http://2speakeaseblog.wordpress.com/ ] in 2009 as a manner of holding myself accountable. It was to be an online response to the things I was interacting with musically, in literature and on stage. Originally very inwardly focused, over the last year it has begun to morph into something more like an entertainment blog. Now I try to support some of my friends and artists by advertising for their shows. There are a lot of things about the old blog, when I had no notoriety, that I miss. I am no longer able to be as socially political as I’d like to be. But I can put that in my work. And I do, or I try to. For now I’m trying to observe and learn as much as I can every moment I’m lucky enough to be producing work people are hearing.

What is next for you in the best of all possible worlds?

Well, I am hoping to go back inside myself and write. I’ll begin to amalgamate a larger body of work. I have a few play concepts that I need to finish up and workshop before they will be ready for production, and I hope to commit more fully to the writing of plays and to continue writing poetry. In the best of all possible worlds, I will find a balance between the two forms. And a little balance between writing and performing.

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What’s it like to patrol St. Paul streets from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m.? You have to think on your feet. I love when life comes at you unscripted. When I go to work, I have no idea what I’ll encounter. Some of the things we come across are suicides, car accidents, shooting victims, domestic assaults, burglaries, barking dogs.

The most gratifying thing is to go into a situation where there’s obvious dysfunction and try to better the situation.

On calls, it usually helps to be calm, soft spoken and compassionate. I’m a big guy and when I need to, I can have a booming voice. My attitude is that I’m not there to bust somebody. I need to view the situation from their point of view.

Do you get burned out? No. I have perspective. I know that people can get through most things.

Like last night, there was a horrible crash, but because [as an officer] you see it so much, you learn to deal with pressure. A woman who was eight-months pregnant was pinned in a car. Her mother arrived on the crash scene, and I knew she was going to collapse when she saw the sight, so I held her hand as she collapsed and I talked to her calmly. [The pregnant woman delivered a healthy baby girl the next day.]

One of your life-saving awards was for pulling a 300-pound engine off a crash victim. Describe the scene. In warm weather, groups of kids gather in souped-up cars. When we see them gather, we try to be there. If they sit there too long, they set up races (by texting their friends to show up). We turn on our lights as a sign for them to disperse. They understand that.

A large group gathered on State Street near Plato Boulevard. I turned on my lights and expected them to leave. One young man decided to drive away in the oncoming-traffic lane and turn right on Plato. I wove through all the parked cars that had gathered and followed him. When I turned on Plato, the driver was already down to Robert Street and I could see him go through a red light.

A nurse in an SUV, who was coming home from her shift, was driving through the light and tried to stop. The man’s car swerved and made it through. But it must have thrown his car out of balance, and he lost control. As I got to Robert Street, I didn’t see anything. On the right, there was a pile of debris stacked against a tree. It didn’t look like a vehicle at all. I ran to the tree with a sick feeling. It was very dark: No flames. No smoke. No dust. I saw a steering wheel on the grass. Twenty yards away I could see the other half of the mangled car. I saw legs under an engine and heard distressed breathing. I put on gloves and pulled the engine off him and called for medics. I think it was mostly adrenaline that helped me lift the engine.

His life has been changed irrevocably. His femur and arm and some ribs were broken; he had collapsed lungs and a mess of injuries. Firefighters were arriving on the scene because they had never seen an accident like that where someone actually survived.

It was humbling to receive the award. I was being praised for someone else’s tragedy. I thought, “He’s had his life changed horribly, and I’m wearing a medal.”

Your father, Michael G. McGinn, the U.S. marshal for Minnesota, is a retired St. Paul police officer. What did you think of his job when you were a kid? I thought his job was the coolest thing in the world. I thought that being an officer was my destiny. I was surrounded by officers and police culture. Through Boy Scouts, I was a St. Paul Police Explorer, in which teens get to explore the job.

But in college, I didn’t want anything to do with cops. I didn’t think the lifestyle and culture were healthy.

Years later, the city posted a job for police officers and the requirements were a four-year degree and life experience. I thought, “I have that!” I compared pensions, and they’re great for firefighters and police officers. I called my dad and asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

What do your children think of your job? My youngest son, Dominic, is somewhat impressed. He’s 10. My older son, Kyle, goes to Hill-Murray High School; he wants to be a writer.

Has studying sociology influenced your police work? I started out very ambitiously. I wanted to major in sociology and political science with a business minor and a teaching certificate. I transferred from Lakewood Community College to St. Thomas. I didn’t come to St. Thomas to get a job; I came to learn how to think. But I already was married and had a child, so I had to narrow my focus.

Meg Wilkes Karraker was very important to me. She was wonderful and very supportive. She became my adviser when John Gessner died. John’s death hit me hard. He was an extremely important influence on me. It’s affected how I deal with people. I learned to have an open view of what this world’s all about and not to limit myself. He did everything he could to make subject matter come to life. He said to get out and experience everything, and “Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know and don’t understand.”

Why do you prefer to work the night shift? I avoided the afternoon shift because I wanted to see my wife, Amy, and kids. I sleep while they’re at school. I can coach and attend events during the day and evening. I get to be a dad.

What’s next? I’ve been working for the city since I was 15. I want to be a Renaissance man. I’m not a label. A police officer is what I am doing now. I like what I do. I have 14 years left to work, and then I can retire and live life more on my terms.

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