Caroline Akiko Yamamoto
The Sannai Maruyama site, located in Aomori Prefecture, Japan, is currently considered to be the largest Jomon Period settlement in Japan. While ongoing excavations have significantly contributed to our understanding of Jomon hunter-gatherer lifeways, there is still much to learn about Sannai Maruyamas functionality. My research will focus on analyzing the charred seed remains gathered from soil samples collected during an excavation of a Middle Jomon pit-dwelling this summer. This will allow for a preliminary assessment of the pit-dwellings functions, depositional sequences, and activity areas. More importantly, a comparison of […]
Samma Ishaq
My particular interest for this summer is to explore whether the ongoing violence in Kashmir have inspired women to lead movements or organize petitions against the government in the last decade. I wish to study specific examples of resistance that have been attempted in the past, and to analyze the types of initiatives organized particularly by females, who seldom receive any acknowledgement for their efforts. Women in Kashmir are generally written into history as submissive and marginalized figures, who due to their social suffering, cannot bring themselves to oppose either […]
Rosella Bearden
In Spring of 2011, prisoners inside Pelican Bay State Prison contacted prisoner-rights and anti-prison activist organizations announcing prisoners would be beginning a rolling hunger strike and that they needed support making sure their voices and demands were heard and acted on outside prison walls. The Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition (PHSS)- originating in the Bay Area and made up of grassroots organizations, family members, formerly incarcerated people, lawyers, and individuals- to amplify the voices of CA prisoners on hunger strike was formed. Though the hunger strike has ended, the demands […]
Edward Mogck
In the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. started to change the ways in which states engaged with those with mental illness and developmental disabilities. Broadly, these changes were part of a phenomena known as deinstitutionalization, where states sought to care for fewer mental patients and work towards incorporating them back into the community. California was at the forefront of this movement, ending many of its services for the mentally ill with the intention of shifting care to the communities. As a result, the early 1970s saw many of California’s mental […]
Audrey Seetho
Trina Walker
Matthew Lockshin
Satyugjit Virk
Marina Blum
Measles was once a nearly ubiquitous childhood plague, a rite of passage with sometimes deadly outcomes. However, the disease has all but disappeared in the vaccination era – few people cross paths with the measles, few know anyone who has been infected. The veritable erasure of the disease from public life stems from widespread use of the measles vaccine, whose success effectively revolutionized societys relationship with measles from one of grudging resignation, to a near ignorance. It is the nature and details of this change in perception that I will […]
Hoa Francisco Ngo
Wherever religion is, its Siamese twin secularism follows closely behind it. The border between the two concepts is not so clear, though, particularly among practicing Catholics who hold to orthodox Church views in modern democratic nations. These borders are not inherent to either religion or secularism; instead, they are drawn by the modern state in order to regulate religious groups for political ends. My project explores the boundaries of religion and secularism in modern in Japan in the context of the Catholic institution of Opus Dei. The Opus Dei center […]