Online exclusiveFish, Li win state award

On domestic workers and handling COVID

By Philip Walzer

Here's more on Old Dominion University's two recipients of the 2021 Outstanding Faculty Awards, presented by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia:

Jennifer Fish, a professor of sociology and chair of the Department of Women's Studies, has taught at ODU for 15 years.

She has received the Humanitarian Award from the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities, a research grant from Canada's national Social Science and Humanities Research Council, and the ODU Provost's Award for Leadership in International Education. Fish also has been recognized by the American Sociological Association for outstanding contribution to scholarship.

Fish's research in labor and human rights has been cited by agencies including the United Nations' International Labour Organization. She has participated in the proceedings of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and was chosen to offer a tribute to Nobel Peace Prize recipient Desmond Tutu in 2018.

In his letter nominating Fish for the state faculty award, Kent Sandstrom, former dean of the College of Arts and Letters, described her as "an intellectual trailblazer who is creative, engaging and theoretically astute."

These are excerpts from a recent interview:

Your most recent book, "Domestic Workers of the World Unite," portrays how housekeepers and nannies mobilized to expand rights and protections across the globe. What lessons does that movement provide in 2021?

It's like the pandemic has exploded these issues we have been seeking to address. Huge proportions of the population don't have the capacity to work virtually. This labor extends from hospitals to homes, where social and economic rights are much more difficult to reinforce. But we are seeing an entirely new awareness and action plan to integrate these workers in the wider domain of human rights protections.

You've witnessed a lot of hope and despair across the world. Are you more or less optimistic about our future than you were starting out?

I've always leaned toward optimism. I don't think it's ever been more challenging than it is right now, given the barriers to human rights and our huge losses, with their disproportionate impact. But I believe after this pandemic, we will reconfigure our lives and our capacity to celebrate. I've seen that firsthand in places like Rwanda that have survived apartheid or war. I believe we will recommit to a better form of humanity.

Ling Li, Eminent Scholar, University Professor and chair of the Department of Information Technology and Decision Sciences, helped establish ODU's graduate and undergraduate programs in maritime and supply chain management.

Li has written three books and published more than 140 journal articles. She has received more than $4 million in research grants from institutions including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation. Li's work has been cited more than 10,000 times.

She has received the University's Broderick Diversity Champion Award and A. Rufus Tonelson Faculty Award, the Strome Business College's Outstanding Teaching, Research and Service Awards, and the Provost's Award for Leadership in International Education. A student called her "a phenomenal professor and role model" whose "breadth of knowledge is unparalleled."

Li also has served as president of the ODU Asian Caucus and a member of the President's Task Force on Inclusive Excellence.

These are excerpts from a recent interview:

Based on your research on hospital capacity management, how do you think hospitals are handling COVID-19?

I did my doctoral thesis on hospital capacity management and I started my career as a statistical systems programmer at a medical school in 1989. I think they are coping with a huge volume and surge of service very well. They created field hospitals and used private hospitals. The issue is, we have the beds, but we need more personnel. Calling in retired medical service people is a good option. The other is to have a flexible pool where you can borrow medical personnel from other hospitals.

How have higher education and teaching changed since you started?

We have to learn how to update our mindset with the advancement of technology. When we went to school, we had the theory, but we didn't have all of the possibilities. Now we have hundreds of different Excel templates to solve problems. Students are going to go on the Internet to find the things they want to know. That's something I try to tell our faculty, especially senior faculty: We need to advance our sense of how to teach and how to learn. It's very, very different now.