James Gabriel Eckhouse
The entertainment business dominates many people’s lives. Theorists of different stripes have been eager to understand the role it plays in modern society. However, these inquiries rarely treat entertainment as an industry. No one has thoroughly pursued the question: what kind of value is produced by the entertainment industry? Emphasizing the creation of value this project views Hollywood’s film and television industry through the lens of a Marxian Political-Economist. James’s focus will be understanding how the people who produce entertainment might create a particular type of value that is different […]
Ashwak Hauter
In the last 20 years, Yemen experienced a civil war, discontinued aid from the gulf countries, and reforms that cut spending towards health care. Ashwak’s project explores how Yemeni doctors and lay persons view foreign western medicine in comparison to Yemen’s western medicine and how they use communicative practices (Hanks 1996) to explicitly and implicitly co-construct and reproduce these views. This will give insight and space to investigate how medical discourse in Yemen influences consumption and choice of medical practices when faced with the option of local and foreign operated […]
Jenna Cavelle
The Citarum River and its drainage basin, which has been called the most polluted river in the world, spans 11,000 square kilometers, serves 378 industries, 25 million people, and supplies Jakarta with 80% of its water. With so many people and ecologies depending on this critical river, each with a different perspective and a distinct relationship to the river, there are many narratives about rights, access, and pollution being told. Jenna will travel to West Java to further explore what individual and collective claims are being made, which practices and […]
Benjamin Golder
The fact that wilderness can be literally built is a profound one, especially in this era of ecological crisis. Wild plants and animal species are rapidly being lost due to climate change and loss of habitat. What if wildlife were built into the fabric of the city? What if the city, often regarded as the antithesis of wilderness, nurtured a variety of plant and animal life in the midst of dense urban centers? Ben will produce designs for the construction of wildlife habitat at a sample urban site, incorporating Geographic […]
Kimberly Salyers
Extensive work has been done on the civic centers of Classic Maya culture. However, archaeological study of Maya commoners has been scarce until recent years. Kimberly’s research will focus on the artifacts uncovered in an excavated household at Chinikih, Mexico. Through a catchment analysis using GIS mapping, she will assess the economic resource basis for settlement. A catchment is the zone from which residents of a place drew their resources. This research will allow Kimberly to consider Chinikih within a larger context: she will look at the relation of commoner […]
Jonathan Wang
At the edge of the city, beyond the stadiums newly built to house South Africa’s 2010 World Cup, are clusters of temporary relocation areas that have come to house tens of thousands of South Africa’s internally displaced urban peoples. Jonathan will travel to South Africa to visually document and map the dialectic relationships between these distinct spaces of exception through photography, video, and open-source mapping technologies. He will also be working with Ikamva Youth to teach mapping and photography workshops designed to create open-source maps of neighborhoods of the Delft […]
Humberto Ortiz
Humbertos project will examine how Latino/a undocumented migrant youth negotiate migrant illegality in their everyday lives through relationships of love, kinship, and companionship. While a growing literature has examined how this population navigates public contexts of higher education and civic engagement, no scholarship has analyzed how these youth negotiate their undocumented status in their private, personal lives. In order to investigate how undocumented young adults develop unique attitudes, beliefs, and experiences with respect to friendships, dating, and marriage, I will interview 20 self-identified Latina/o undocumented young adults from the Bay […]
Tawny Tsang
Contrary to previously held beliefs, the cerebellum is not restricted to activities involving motor control. It participates in a variety of cognitive functions from attention to verbal working memory. This can be attributed to its connectivity with regions of the cortex that are involved in learning and memory. Previous research suggests that the cerebellum may be more involved in metric-based rather than rule-based or categorical learning. Tawny’s project will examine that hypothesis and investigate the cerebellums contribution to specific types of learning as well as the role of feedback on […]
Kristen Norman
In an effort to narrow the gap in gender equality and improve public health, microfinance institutions are increasingly creating products for women in developing countries. Experts caution against assuming that women’s empowerment is an automatic outcome of microfinance, and call for accompanying soft services such as health education, literacy training, and discussion groups on domestic violence. Organizations offering such services have had great results. However, the majority of micro lending institutions are for-profit entities uninterested in offering these expensive social services. Kristen’s project investigates the dynamics of group lending and […]
Jessica Pizzagoni
John Muir once stated, Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul. California’s National Parks, renowned for their beauty and history, draw visitors from around the world and reflect John Muirs sentiment. Yet, each person has their own ideas and perceptions about the parks and their personal definitions of wilderness. Can Bourdieu’s “cultural capital”, or preferences associated with class differences, help explain these distinctions? With the use of ethnographic interviews, Jessica will connect […]