NOTE: This is an intermittent feature highlighting CSUSB faculty who are mentioned in the news. Faculty, if you are interviewed and quoted by news media, or if your work has been cited, and you have an online link to the article or video, please let us know. Contact us at news@csusb.edu.

“The Dialogues on the Experience of War,” a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded program facilitated by Cal State San Bernardino English professor Jennifer Andersen, and San Bernardino Valley College English professors Edward Jones and Joe Notarangelo, is helping military veterans cope with their combat experiences as they reintegrate with their communities, the Inland Empire Community Newspapers reported.

The program uses literature and book discussions — the San Bernardino project is titled “From Ancient Greece to the Contemporary Middle East: Dialogues on the Experience of War” — to help create a “circle of trust” where veterans are able to express themselves without judgment.

“Fictional or nonfictional narratives about war help evoke the very complex and intense particular situations and different norms of military culture that soldiers act under during deployment,” Andersen said. “These stories acknowledge the human need to adapt emotionally and in other ways to situations of physical deprivation, prolonged exposure to risk and danger, and grief for fallen comrades.”

The article, published Nov. 28, 2016, may be read at “Literary dialogue helping veterans cope with war experiences, reintegration.”

With the one-year mark since the Dec. 2, 2015, mass shooting at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino approaching, news media are publishing retrospective articles. In one of them, Manijeh Badiee, assistant professor of psychology at CSUSB, and Brian Levin, a criminal justice professor and director of CSUSB’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, discussed community’s state of mind.

Badiee, who also is a psychological assistant at Dr. Tanika Gayle and Clinical Associates in Riverside, said the attack, which killed 14 — five of them CSUSB alumni — and wounded 22, deeply affected inland residents.

“It has taken a while, I think, to heal, and especially for the survivors,” Badiee said. The attack has had a far-reaching impact on the entire Inland region, but one largely in proportion to how close one’s work or home is to the Hospitality Lane district where the attack occurred, Badiee said.

“It’s almost like a ripple effect,” she said. “In the center, it’s really big.'

Added Levin: “The sense that this is something that happens somewhere else is now absent.… Terrorism is a very low-risk event nationally. But when it strikes, it is devastating. Statistics get thrown out the window.”

That article, published Nov. 27, 2016, in The Orange County Register and other Southern California News Group newspapers, may be read at “‘Things are never going to be the same.'”

Levin was also quoted in several articles related to the latest FBI crime statistics in which the focus was on hate crimes.

In the Los Angeles Times, in reference to president-elect Donald Trump, the apparent support he receives from the alt-right, and the post-election hate incidents in which Trump’s name was invoked, Levin said, ““We would like to see a speech (from Trump) addressing this specifically, not just saying the words ‘Stop it.’” The complete article, published Nov. 28, 2016, may be read at “Cops are going undercover and watching social media to combat hate crimes.”

In Mother Jones, Levin discussed the complexities and difficulties prosecutors have in trying hate crimes in court. Many incidents that are recorded as hate crimes by police are not ultimately prosecuted that way, Levin says. Prosecuting hate crime charges sends a symbolic message, but the charges are added to another offense, and prosecutors sometimes have to make a careful calculation as to whether they are worth bringing up at all. 'There may be instances where a prosecutor—using their discretion—may determine that the additional elements of a hate crime will be too difficult to prove and [might] risk confusing the jury, and possibly risk the whole case,' he says. Similarly, in situations where the punishment for the base offense is already severe—as with murder—a prosecutor might decide not to pursue additional charges when a conviction would have little to no impact on the final sentence. That article was published Nov. 25, 2016, and may be read at “Hate crimes are rising but don't expect them to be prosecuted.”

And, along with other criminologists, Levin called for uniform reporting of hate crimes from state to state. Such data is used in the FBI’s annual crime report. In an article for NJ.com, Levin said New Jersey is one of the best states in the country for reporting hate crime data, but within a system that is graded on a heavy curve. 'It's all very relative,' Levin said. 'If all 50 states reported like New Jersey, I'd quit my job. But if you look at the FBI data now, you'd think New Jersey was this bubbling cauldron of hate.'

The article, published Nov. 26, 2016, may be read at “Hate crimes in N.J.? Why the data is borderline useless.”

And Levin's expertise in the history of racism in the United States, and its current state, was the topic of a question-and-answer interview with the news website Inverse. “Levin urges people to engage with the new political reality, but not to take the risks he embraces,” the article said in its introduction. “He doesn’t suggest sympathizing with racists, but he does believe that understanding where their ideologies come from is the first step toward dismantling them. One must look directly at the monster to understand its true form.”

The article was published Nov. 28, 2016, and may be read at “America's ragtag racists are fighting both diversity and death.”