Helia Bidad

Ninety percent of the world’s saffron is grown in Iran and 90% of saffron in Iran is grown in the Khorasan Province. Saffron production as a traditional farming system is developing in its relationship with climate change and with the spread of technology into agriculture. Understanding how farmers view and interact with these developments is important in understanding saffron as a traditional farming system in Iran. Through in-person interviews in Iran and secondary research, Helia will analyze the perspectives of saffron farmers in Khorasan on climate change, what impacts they […]
Leilani Hunter

Leilani’s interest in glass bracelet fragments was sparked during the summer of 2013, when she participated in the Dhiban Archeological field school overseen by Professor Benjamin Porter. While discussing the potential for different artifacts to tell us about everyday life in the region, Leilani was intrigued by the sets of glass bracelet fragments that comprised a significant percentage of the excavated assemblage. Immediately her first questions began to form: Where were these bracelets made, how did they circulate, and come to be in Dhiban? Who wore them, and were they […]
Do Khym

This research aims to examine the reasons why the Norris Colony in Americana, Brazil was the only surviving post-bellum Confederate exile colony, while all other Confederate colonies around the world failed. Through research in the archives of the city of Americana, especially its Immigration Museum, Do expects to find that small scale agriculture where settlers put in their own labor instead of slave labor, ease of transport, new technology in the form of steel plows, and the Confederados’ superior agricultural skills, were instrumental in securing the survival of the colony. […]
Michael Cerda-Jara

Michaels research investigates the role of higher education in employment prospects for people with criminal records. In 2018, Michael successfully executed an experimental audit study of job application callbacks for college-educated applicants with or without criminal records, which surprisingly, found no difference between the two. However, this still leaves unanswered whether the applicants race, or timing of the attainment of the college degree affect the number of callbacks. For Michaels Haas Scholars project, continuing to focus on college-educated men, he will add these variables to his prior audit research design. […]
Diana Lutfi

Why is causing harm ethically justifiable? Diana has always been perplexed that a rational individual would compromise his/her bodily comfort in order to prolong life and create a culture where other people are forced to do the same for the sake of health. Although patient autonomy is legally protected in western healthcare institutions, individuals that are considered minors are not afforded these same autonomy rights. They are, instead, given rights of protection of best interest. This, however, can often create a dilemma when healthcare providers and legal guardians disagree about […]
Allyn Benintendi

In 2012, the experimental label was lifted from the social freezing and banking of oocytes (oocyte cryopreservation or egg freezing), an intense procedure allowing postponement of motherhood. Two years later, major Silicon Valley based tech companies introduced egg freezing in benefits packages an addition mirroring mounting pressure in tech to hire women and the perception of motherhood as an untimely career interruption. How are women negotiating the vital promise of egg freezing, their sovereignty, the physical complications and social, moral, ethical, and political implications of the procedure? How does this […]
Wayne Jopanda

In Migrants for Export, Dr. Robyn Rodriguez describes the Philippines transformation into a Labor Brokerage State in which Filipinos are actively recruited to become Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs). Wayne’s research examines how this system of labor brokerage has impacted the increasing undocumented Filipino population in the U.S. First, he will analyze the history of U.S. labor and immigration policies that allow for the exploitation of OFWs. Second, Wayne will study the advocacy efforts of OFWs and undocumented Filipinos to examine if these cases of labor exploitation lead to workers identifying […]
Justin Dela Cruz

Kamayan, which in Tagalog means by hand, is the traditional, communal style of eating Filipino food without plates or utensils. Tusok-tusok, which translates into poke poke, are heavily-fried, Filipino street foods, usually cut into bite-sized pieces and eaten off wooden skewers and dipped in sweet and sour sauces. For Filipino immigrants, these traditional eating practices serve as sites of cultural nostalgia and recollections of a distant homeland. Utilizing ethnographies and interviews to study several Bay Area Filipino restaurants, Justin’s project explores the preservation of Filipino cultural cuisine practices through the […]
Fallon Burner

Fallon Burner will be writing a history of the Wedat Language and Wadat dialect, showing the vital role that language plays in the Indigenous community and how its history is tied to issues of erasure and survival, as well as the role that language revitalization projects have in addressing transgenerational trauma. The Wendat Confederacy, which originated in the Great Lakes region and now spans Quebec, Ontario/Michigan, Kansas, and Oklahoma, is a matricentered society where women have played heroic roles, so Fallon expects a uniquely gendered narrative. She will conduct oral […]
Heather Kornblum

Income inequality is associated with deleterious economic, social, and health outcomes. These negative effects disproportionately affect the poor, but surface across all strata of society. Regulatory focus being promotion or prevention focused is the psychological mechanism that may account for these effects. Promotion focus involves living life through a lens of what one stands to gain, while prevention focus entails living life through a lens of what one stands to lose. Heather will examine income inequalitys effect on regulatory focus, shedding light on one psychological mechanism underlying the negative effects […]