Executive Board Elections

Statement: My name is Theresa Kulbaga (or TK). I have been in FAM/AAUP leadership since 2016, when I began serving as Regional Representative (and later Secretary) of Miami University’s AAUP Advocacy Chapter. My roles in FAM have included:

• Lead organizer and member of FAM’s Core Committee during our organizing and election effort (2020-2023);
• Liaison and member of the Organizing Committee (2020-present);
• Chair of Communications, Press, and Social Media (2021-present);
• Lead Negotiator for faculty during our first contract campaign (2024-2025).

As a regional faculty member hired into the Department of English in 2006, I have experience building relationships across campuses, departments, and divisions, and I’ve been a voice for Miami students and faculty for nearly 20 years.

If elected President, I will continue to work to cultivate a radically democratic, inclusive, and member-led union that serves all faculty and librarians at Miami. Equity and social justice are my core values, whether in teaching, community, or union work. I know from my experience working alongside my colleagues in Miami AAUP and FAM that collective action and solidarity are effective and powerful—and that we badly need both at this political and institutional moment.

Bio: I am Professor of English and gender studies at Miami Regionals and a Teaching Artist at WordPlay Cincy. I am the author of numerous essays on women’s autobiography and memoir, transnational feminisms, and radical pedagogy. I am also the co-author (with Leland Spencer) of Campuses of Consent: Sexual and Social Justice in Higher Education. I spend my time engaging in sustained critique of institutions, thinking about evidence-based hope, gardening for wildlife, and hiking my dog.

No statement or biography provided.

Statement: I am running for Executive Vice President of FAM. My involvement in campus organizing has been relatively recent, but has escalated quickly as the global, national, and state pressures have come to bear on our university and the labor conditions that inform what we do as faculty and librarians. I first joined FAM in 2022 as a department liaison and member of the Contract Action Team (CAT). In that capacity, I’ve helped support the Negotiating Team as they worked their way through bargaining our first contract, and helped to raise FAM’s visibility and advocacy through events, rallies, marches, parties, and ephemeral public installations. I like to find creative and meaningful ways to highlight the aspects of our struggle, and draw inspiration both from our shared joy and our collective concerns. Currently I serve as the chair of the CAT team and member of the Organizing Committee. Through FAM, I want to continue to promote and protect democratic processes and labor protections so that we can conduct our work in dignity and with pleasure.

Bio: I came to Miami in 2008. I am a jointly appointed Full Professor in the departments of History and Global and Intercultural Studies, and I also teach a course in the Spanish department. I’m a founding member of the Network of Historians of Latin American Childhoods, and author of two books on the nation-state, empire, and historical child agency. In the classroom, I introduce students to themes of revolutions and social movements in Latin America, Cold War history and culture, capitalism and commodities, the comparative histories of childhood, and hemispheric relations. I strive to sustain a humanist, natural, and creative core in what I do. I am also an amateur actress and an avid “maker” of things.

No statement or biography provided.

Statement: As a longstanding volunteer and organizer with FAM, I have served in many roles, including planning outreach and contract actions, negotiator, and press secretary for the librarians. As your Vice President of Librarians, I will work hard to ensure that our librarians have the representation we need to ensure our concerns are addressed and to implement solutions to these issues that work for all of us. I will listen and serve in whatever ways are needed as we implement this contract. 

Bio: Rachel Makarowski is the Special Collections Librarian at Miami who has been serving FAM since 2022. In my spare time, I enjoy hiking, gaming, and reading (as many good librarians do). I love international travel and have recently traveled to Iceland and Scotland. 

No statement or biography provided.

Statement: My name is Kazue Harada, and I am an active FAM member. I have served on the Bargaining Council and while it may seem like a small role, it reflects my long-term commitment to our union. Alongside Maija Sipola, I organized Zoom meetings throughout the negotiation process of our first contract. I also grew up in a union household and experienced the benefits firsthand. My father was an active union member teaching within private high schools in Hiroshima, Japan. Without a union, I believe I would not have had access to benefits and universal health care. Because of these experiences, I am a firm believer in the power of unions to uphold fundamental human rights and improve the quality of life for everyone, especially teachers and librarians. 

If chosen to serve as secretary, I will bring a strong commitment to transparency, organization, and effective communication. I understand the importance of maintaining accurate and accessible records, and I am fully prepared to carry out those responsibilities. I will also support the president, vice-president, and other FAM officers. I will also serve as a liaison to the AAUP-AFT, and most importantly, advocate for FAM members on the issues of rights, job security, equity, and more. I am committed to advocating for the rights of international members. This role is vital to the operation and history of our union, and I am committed to fulfilling it with diligence, accuracy, and respect for our shared mission.

Bio: I am an Associate Professor of Japanese in the Department of German, Russian, Asian, and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (GRAMELAC). I teach Japanese language, literature, popular culture, media, and civilization. My research focus is contemporary Japanese speculative and science fiction with particular attention to gender and sexuality. I am the author of Sexuality, Maternity, and (Re)productive Futures: Women’s Speculative Fiction in Contemporary Japan (Brill 2021) along with several journal articles. Currently, I am working on environmental activist writings in Japan and East Asia in contemporary literature and media, especially post-Fukushima Japan. Since 2022, I have served as chair of the Midwest Japan Seminar, a network of approximately 220 interdisciplinary Japanese Studies scholars. In this role, I organize and moderate several annual workshops that provide feedback on work-in-progress papers, with a focus on supporting Midwestern and pre-tenured scholars. As noted above, I am deeply committed to supporting diverse communities through my teaching, research, and service.

No statement or biography provided.

Statement: In my prior career as a political reporter, my reporting on governmental budgets and spending, including embezzlement by city employees, has strongly influenced my view of our tax dollars — and similarly our union dues. These funds are sacred. They’re paid collectively for the benefit of everyone in the community — be it a city or a union local. As treasurer, I’ll aim for proactive transparency so all members can gauge our local’s fiscal health and be able to voice how our union dues are spent. We will need to be fiscally prudent to ensure we have ample funds both for our next contract campaign and for key services such as representing faculty and librarians in grievance procedures. However, our budget is a powerful tool that can exponentially benefit the work we do and we’ll focus our budget to magnify that goal.

As an active FAM member, I’ve served on our joint faculty-librarian Negotiating Team, Bargaining Council focused on writing articles on benefits, political liaison for our SB1 fight, and designer-admin of the FAM website. I was also active in the AFT local at my former college where I served on a contract renewal negotiating team and was librarian liaison.

Bio: Professionally, I am a web services librarian and my work focuses on user experience, web accessibility, information architecture, and data analytics. For three years, I also taught IMS 222 Interactive Design and Development as an ETBD adjunct. Overall, I have more than 20 years in academic and public libraries, including a term as library director at Montgomery County Community College where I managed a budget over $2 million and 25 staff. Prior to librarianship, I was a newspaper journalist and editor for a decade.

No statement or biography provided.

Statement: I first joined our unionization efforts in Nov. 2022, helped “Get out the Vote” in spring 2023, and proudly signed my FAM membership card as soon as it was printed. I served on the DEI Committee of the Bargaining Council, am a member of the Organizing Committee and FAM liaison in the departments of GLG/EES and GEO, and together with Kazue Harada ensured that all FAM-T and FAM-L bargaining sessions were Zoom-accessible for all faculty and librarian members. In August 2024 I participated in the AAUP Summer Institute in Detroit where I attended sessions about Title IX, the impacts of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, and the importance of diverse union leadership.

I am running for Member at Large so I can help represent the interests of all our unit members, and particularly those like myself who are non-tenure track. As a TCPL, I am deeply familiar with the immense amount of labor we do for Miami University and the relatively little amount of compensation we receive for it. We often teach the majority of students in our departments’ classes, and do the bulk of undergraduate advising and service that supports our students, yet are not deemed qualified to evaluate even the teaching and service components of tenure-track applications and interviews. Experience has shown we cannot rely on the acts of some sympathetic administrators to recognize our value or improve our working conditions; we can only do that ourselves, through united collective action to ensure strong union contracts. I can promise that if elected to this role, I will do my best to represent our members and build strength going into the next contract negotiations.

Bio: I am an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Geology & Environmental Earth Science, where I teach ~200 students per semester, serve as an undergraduate academic advisor, and am heavily involved in efforts to make our department a welcoming and affirming place to all students, staff, and faculty. I started at Miami in August 2020, following a fixed-term (VAP) position at Minnesota State University, Mankato where I was a member of the Inter Faculty Organization (IFO) union that has represented Minnesota state teaching faculty since the 1970s. (As such, my VAP salary at MSU, Mankato was actually higher than my starting TCPL salary at Miami, with a smaller teaching load.) I earned my PhD at the University of Iowa, and my BA in Geology (concentration: Archaeology) at Carleton College in Northfield, MN where I was a proud first-generation college student and peer leader in the TRIO/SSS program. Before retirement, my mother served as president of her local union chapter (AFSCME Local 395 at Ely Bloomenson Community Hospital in Ely, MN). In my free time I enjoy salsa dancing, playing pub trivia, and spending time with my cat, Norma Rae Sipola.

Statement: As a member of FAM’s negotiating team as well as our organizing committee, I have contributed to key wins on TCPL job security, compensation, benefits, and faculty evaluations. My prior experience includes chairing the Faculty Welfare Committee for six years where I took a lead role in re-envisioning, crafting and shaping TCPL policies related to promotional structure, contracts, and presumptive renewal through shared governance processes. As a member of the negotiation team, I strove to further improve these prior policy wins and to enshrine them in our contract. I also have extensive experience on Miami’s Benefits committee. If elected to FAM’s first Executive Board, I will continue to share my policy expertise and advocate for all members, especially TCPL faculty.

Bio: I’m a Teaching Professor in the Philosophy Department at Miami University. My interests, philosophical and otherwise, are wide ranging, but I do have a particular interest in early modern philosophy and the value of philosophical inquiry. I have undergraduate degrees in engineering and physics and a Ph.D. in philosophy, which reflects my inborn tendency to seek knowing in broad and foundational ways, and to repair things when they break.

Statement: My involvement in FAM thus far has focused on the bargaining process.  I joined the bargaining council in June 2023 and the negotiating team in October 2023, helping to write, analyze, and revise a variety of proposals and counterproposals.  Developing a solid foundation for our shared future by negotiating our first contract is something that I am very glad to have been a part of.  If elected to FAM’s executive board, I will work to protect the contractual rights of all faculty and librarians, defend traditional academic values, build up a strong, efficient, and democratic organization, and develop strategies for the next contract negotiation based on members’ priorities.  

Bio: I am an associate professor in the math department, hired in 2015.  My research is in mathematical logic and set theory, especially strong axioms of infinity and large cardinal numbers.  I like reading and thinking about a variety of things.  I grew up in a union household and have always been impressed by what people can accomplish when working together.