Jorge David Mancillas
Jorge-David Mancillas will be traveling to Los Angeles to conduct research on the effectiveness of gang intervention. In Los Angeles, the so-called gang capital of the world, more than half of the yearly homicides are gang-related. Homeboy Industries, a gang intervention program located in East Los Angeles, is the most successful gang intervention program in the nation, utilized by more than 10,000 community members a year. Through an analysis of in-depth interviews with gang-members and former gang-members, Jorge will be studying how Homeboy Industries operates and how/why they are successful. […]
Emma Deboncoeur
What began as an investigation into access to health care for transgender women in Montral by way of an institutional ethnography has changed into a larger query of knowledge production, preservation and dissemination. This works seeks to clarify and problematize what is research, who is the researcher, how biomedicine and transgender women are inexorably linked and how macro questions of archiving, and the lack thereof, relate to endemic patterns of burnout and knowledge loss on the micro level.
Emma Yataco
Though the term religion is frequently used, it remains difficult to define. As a result, defining religious conversion or developing a unified theory of conversion has not yet been achieved. Emma’s research will explore religion and conversion from the perspective of the religious organizations themselves. She will examine the doctrine and organizational structure of both The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Identifying similarities and differences will help establish a foundation for understanding how religious participation/disaffiliation is affected by the religious environment and teachings as […]
Angela Laureano
Angelas research will analyze the institutional and personal barriers affecting formerly incarcerated people trying to pursue higher education. This study will highlight their personal narratives, as they attempt to overcome structural barriers. Previous qualitative research on formerly incarcerated people who participate in prison college programs reveals that having access to education support is crucial for their involvement in higher education post-release. Scholars, however, call for more research looking at the effects of these academic programs in prison and their impact on participants once released. Through qualitative interviews with formerly incarcerated […]
Alissa Stover
Elucidating how organisms are able to flexibly move about in dynamically changing environments is a fundamental problem in psychology and neuroscience. Imagine a ballerina practicing in front of warped mirrors: her brain must continually recalibrate the motor commands sent to move the body based on sensory feedback. In this context, there is a mismatch between the distorted visual feedback from the mirror and her internal sense of body position (proprioception). Alissa will conduct a series of experiments that examine how sensorimotor recalibration occurs when there is a mismatch between proprioception […]
Michelaina Johnson
The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta today has a highly modified ecosystem due to historical human modification of the landscape for agriculture and development of the states water systems. Because Cosumnes River Preserve (CRP), established in 1985, has successfully conserved and restored thousands of acres of the Deltas native habitats in a way that incorporates human needs of the landscape, CRP is nationally recognized as a model for riparian restoration. Michelaina’s project seeks to reconstruct the historical landscape of CRP to understand how past land use practices and alterations changed the Deltas […]
Anna Darzins
Many people assume that women with disabilities experience domestic violence to a lesser extent than women in general, yet research indicates that women with disabilities are up to four times more likely to be victimized than their non-disabled peers. Given that women with disabilities experience disproportionate rates of domestic violence; where do they go to access domestic violence services? How does their disability status influence their decisions seeking help, and are providers meeting their needs? Anna’s work will investigate these issues through a disability studies and social work lens. She […]
Duncan Wanless
Today, the town of Yanga, Veracruz, Mexico identifies itself as the First Free Town in the Americas because of its origins in the first successful slave revolt in the Americas. Yanga is an anomaly in Mexican culture because it has actively embraced and even mythologized the role of Africans in Mexico’s past. Duncan’s history honors thesis will combine archival research with oral histories to analyze the development of the cultural institutions through which residents of Yanga came to commemorate this history during the 20th century. By putting a local history […]
Jamie Hein
Between 1977 and 2016, the U.S. womens imprisonment rate increased over 800%. In California, while the rate of mens incarceration has decreased over the past decade, the number of prisoners who suffer from mental illness has risen significantly. It is imperative to explore these numbers as they pertain to womens institutions, and to understand why racial and ethnic minority women with mental illness and substance abuse issues are more likely to be channeled into prison and jail than treatment programming. By carrying out archival research and interviews in Chowchilla, CA […]
Brandon Shalchi
Empirically, when there is a black defendant and white victim, U.S. judges and jurors believe the defendant to be guiltier than he/she actually is. Brandon is exploring how we can manipulate the race of the defendant and victim in death-eligible cases to hinder the onset of racially charged, implicit biases within court rulings. The methodologies used are online surveys via Amazon Mechanical Turk and semi-structured interviews. This is a first step in a larger virtual reality research agenda: how virtual reality could manipulate avatarsin terms of raceof the defendant and […]