UCSB Professor To Help With Trauma Victims

Education and psychology professor Larry Beutler will provide training next week for American Red Cross workers who will counsel survivors of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington D.C. and families who suffered a loss.

Beutler’s technique has been researched and developed with Bruce Bongar a colleague from Stanford medical school. His treatment includes emphasizing personal strengths and increasing interaction with family and friends instead of seeking professional help.

Past approaches often assume that the trauma victims are suffering from an illness rather than a normal reaction to a traumatic experience, Beutler said. Beutler uses an educational approach to help trauma victims psychologically distance themselves from their experiences.

“The more popular methods call for survivors and victims to be encouraged to revisit their trauma, and experience all of the grief and anger they are feeling,” he said. “But new research has shown that these approaches rarely produce lasting benefits.”

Beutler will begin training in Washington D.C. on Oct. 20 to the 24.

Five CCS Students Awarded

The College of Creative Studies awarded several of its students on Oct. 11 in the CCS Gallery. The CCS is a college within UCSB that puts an emphasis on advanced and independent work for its approximately 300 students.

Students received prizes across several disciplines. Incoming student David Baker received $25,000 from the Thomas J. Iberti Memorial Fellowship created in honor of UCSB alumnus Thomas J. Iberti.

CCS literature majors Melissa Valdez and Larisa Hale won the Brancart Fiction prize and the Richardson Poetry Prize, respectively.

CCS Provost William J. Ashby presided over he ceremony.

New Book Shows Women’s Commonalties

UCSB lecturer Jane Duran has recently published World of Knowing: Global Feminist Epistemologies, a book that studies ways women in eight different cultures obtain knowledge.

Duran believes women can unite to pursue a feminist agenda once they are convinced of more commonalties than differences between women of different cultures.

“A lot of reporting that came out of the United Nations Year of the Women a few years back seemed to stress women’s differences,” Duran said. “Women are different because their lives are led in vastly different cultures. But I don’t think we have a meaningful global women’s movement unless we look for at least some areas of congruence.”

Women often have more in common when they share similar languages, Duran said. She has also found that women in most of the cultures try to show they can perform traditions formerly thought of as masculine.

“The patterns of organization seem to be very much affected by whether things are passed down through oral tradition or whether there is written tradition,” she said.

Duran teaches classes for the Black Studies Dept. and in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education.