Zachery Valdez
As paradoxical as it may sounds, the deportation of American Veterans is a phenomenon that continues to affect our non-Citizen Veterans. My research will analyze and document the deportation and United States Veterans, in order to understand why these Americans are getting deported.
Emma Yataco
This year, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon Church, announced a worldwide membership of more than 16 million followers and growing. Their proselytizing efforts can be seen by the thousands of young men and women between the ages of 18 and 25 that devote 1.5 to 2 years of missionary service all over the world. These missionary efforts provoke a change in belief in many people which leads them to renounce old religious or secular beliefs, along with some personal freedoms in exchange […]
Cecelia Di Mino
Indigenous language revitalization (LR) work comes from the heart. Whether done by a documentary linguist or an indigenous community member, LR is a labor of love, usually done in someones spare time, with little to no financial compensation. While their linguistic and/or cultural knowledge may be vast, such individuals usually lack pedagogy training and experience. As the nature of LR work is already immense and taxing, providing its practitioners with a structured but adaptable program detailing how best to implement the pedagogical aspects of LR would be a major innovation. […]
Duc Nguyen
Decision-making is a core aspect of the human experience, yet the mechanism underlying this process has not yet been fully understood, despite a long history of research in this field. There are many factors that play important roles in decision-making, such as outcomes, risk (probability of undesired outcomes), emotions, and interpersonal context. Early studies tended to focus on the effect of one specific factor on the process of decision-making, and disregarded others. Because of these studies, we have some understanding of how these factors affect decision-making. However, decisions in life […]
Franklyn Odhiambo
Matatus (matatu singular) are privately owned minibuses and buses that navigate within Kenyas major cities, mostly transporting passengers into, around, and out of towns such as Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu. They are an integral sociocultural and economic mobilizer in Kenya, transporting thousands daily. The late 90s in Kenya saw a proliferation of graffiti writings and painting on these vehicles as they were decorated (mostly with hip hop figures) to attract more passengers. Today, a picture of Nairobi is incomplete without the flashy graffitied matatu in the background. Using Critical Discourse […]
Liona Muchenje
The uses of social media in developing countries particularly in Africa are generally under-researched. The few studies that have been conducted emphasized the impact of such digital tools on democracy, civic participation and other largely socio-political implications, leaving out the economic implications. After identifying this information gap, I formulated my research to study the emergent ways in which social media use and the informal economy intersect particularly in Zimbabwe, a country which has been struggling with rampant unemployment and consequently an increasing informal sector made up of self-entrepreneurial street vendors. […]
Sabrina Lu
Empirical studies have revealed a wide range of racial and gender disparities in the American criminal justice system. People of color, specifically Black males, make up the majority of our prison population, but incarceration is vastly influenced by historical and societal ills that negatively impact minority groups. Through racial profiling and other forms of explicit and implicit biases, society creates and perpetuates stereotypes of people of color as deviant, dangerous, and criminal. Gender stereotypes also impact perceptions of criminality. Aggression in males aligns with masculinity and is consistent with the […]
Gregory Devine
Musics ability to evoke and communicate emotion seems intuitive and universal, but the cognitive and psychological processes that underlie musics emotive inductance still remain largely a mystery. Investigating how people perceive and engage with music ultimately reveals the complexities of emotion regulation. In this study, I compose music that targets various emotions and have participants evaluate changes in their mood state upon listening. By targeting and inducing emotions such as happiness, sadness, or anger in a lab setting, I can assess how effectively music either augments or diminishes the experience […]
Nicholas Pingitore
On October 24, 1648, Europe signed The Peace of Westphalia. This marked the end of the Thirty Years War, one of Europes bloodiest conflicts, which claimed the lives of more than eight million people. But perhaps more importantly, The Peace of Westphalia is remembered as the birth of what political scientists, politicians, and even your morning paper would come to know as modern international relations: a system of states, in which sovereign and independent nations exist in a chaotic realm of constant competition, locked in a balance of power in […]
Keren Lev
We propose to conduct research exploring potential cognitive adaptations in children who come from less wealthy and/or educated homes (low socioeconomic status, SES). Previous research indicates that lower-SES environments expose children to stressors including neighborhood crime and loud, crowded home environments. Such stress has been associated with academic struggles and poor health. We explore whether children coming from low SES households may, in fact, have particular strengths; specifically, adaptive auditory abilities allowing them to learn from multiple stimuli at once. In the study, we will have both low- and high-SES […]