Dr. Stephanie Krusemark has been appointed as the first Postdoctoral Fellow in the College of Architecture and Planning, thanks to Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Support Fellowship Funds. She will be engaged with the students and faculty of the Environmental Design program during academic year 2010-11, as a visiting lecturer in classes related to her research expertise, serving on the advisory board of Designers Without Boundaries and assisting the group with special projects, and conducting research that explores how students of color experience the university campus. She will also prepare journal articles and conference presentations to share her research with wider scholarly communities.
Dr. Krusemark holds a degree in Higher Education from the University of Denver, a master’s in Arts Administration from Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, and a bachelor’s degree in Art History from the University of St. Thomas. As a recent graduate of DU, she has immersed herself in studying the dynamics that occur between communities of color and the built environment of the campus. Her dissertation, Walking on the Red Brick Path: A Portrait of African-American Women’s Experiences with the Built Environment of a Predominantly White Institution, discovered a multi-faceted and multi-dimensional reclaiming process that occurred through the women’s psychological interactions with the campus environment based upon their racial and gender identity. Her work is founded in the tenets of equal access policy, inclusive excellence, and organizational culture transmission. Stephanie utilizes a critical race feminist lens in her research inquiry to understand the historical, social, cultural, and political nature of built environments and their role in perpetuating dominant ideologies of identity. She aspires to discover and document the experiences of communities of color within the educational environment, with specific interest in predominantly white colleges and universities. She is committed to developing an inclusive design ethos to inform future design practices that are centered upon our notion of psychological equal access with regard to our multiple identities of race, ethnicity, culture, and gender.
Stephanie is affiliated with the American Educational Research Association and its Critical Race Study SIG, the Association for the Study of Higher Education, and the specialized topic area groups of Critical Race Studies in Education and Critical Race and Gender Studies. Contact Stephanie at stephanie.krusemark@colorado.edu.