Ladislao Rodriguez
Have you ever heard of Joe Kapp? Aside from being a NCAA Men’s Basketball champion, the last Cal QB to play in the Rose Bowl and the head coach during “The Play” Kapp was a Latinx student-athlete. Joe Kapp and Latinx student-athletes, are easy to recognize anywhere they go because of the value placed upon athletics in society. For this reason, their ability to succeed or not in higher education impacts how people from Latinx communities view the potential of higher education. While Latinx student-athlete graduation rate is below the […]
Daniela Muoz Lopez
Previous research has identified reinforcement learning (RL) as a cognitive process that uses rewards to help us learn which actions will yield better results over time. This process is influenced by decision making which allows us to maximize our rewards and minimize our punishments. The neural aspects of RL are well studied and can be linked to various brain regions such as the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortex. Currently, it is unknown whether RL is impacted by impulsivity. Impulsivity plays a major role in the understanding of personality traits and refers […]
Anthony Dunn
Our lives are defined by the ability to make decisions. This fundamental function hinges on complex computations emerging from the integration of sensory, motor, and value information. Decision-making computations are thought to be strongly modulated by dopamine in the dorsomedial striatum. I will measure dopamine release in the dorsomedial striatum during decision making and test if it follows predictions made by two reinforcement learning models. The first model, Temporal Difference (TD) theory, predicts that dopamine activity in mice will be a function of reward prediction error, which is greatest when […]
Erika Page
How does a modern social movement, dedicated to land reform in one of the worlds most inequitable societies, put its ecological and socialist ideology into practice in the Brazilian countryside? Through agroecology, the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement Movimento Sem Terra (MST) offers an alternative to conventional agro-industrial farming strategies that have marginalized rural workers; created dependencies upon cash crops and agro-chemicals with extensive ecological costs; and failed to solve the issue of global hunger. Agroecological farming systems operate in accordance with ecological principles in ways that are socially, environmentally and […]
Jacqueline Phuong Nguyen
Understanding linguistic subjectivity means recognizing that two speakers of a language can disagree about what counts as beautiful, or tall.” Adults can understand and easily accept when people disagree on subjective properties of the world; however, children seem to fail to do so until much later. On the other hand, when exposed to two subjective opinions, children often assert that only one opinion could be correct. In turn, my research question asks whether or not bilingual children are more likely to be able to understand and acknowledge that two people […]
Abel Fernando Vallejo Galindo
My project utilizes both qualitative and archival methods to assess and interpret how undocumented people challenge the criminal injustice and immigration system. The devaluing of undocumented people has increased the uncertainty associated with their social value. Specifically, by engaging with scholars, professionals, and community members, this project amplifies their critical insight regarding future social and political integration. Moreover, public discourse is increasingly creating awareness and assessing the policing of criminalized populations, specifically as it relates to the carceral apparatus. In my research, I present the carceral apparatus as including multiple […]
Skylar Clark
My research project will probe how the relationship between the protagonist and their society as illustrated within the 19th century realist novel functions as a reflective allegory for idealized national identity. I posit that the consolidation of recognizable cultural markers ,including language idiosyncrasies, geographic landmarks, and social traditions, connects character and setting in a unique way which sheds light on the idea of a singular national persona in literature; further, literary realism inevitably embodies a sense of cultural consolidation through the construction of a limited fictional setting, so as to […]
Shreya Kareti
My project focuses on the French colonial presence in South Asia, focusing on the coastal town of Pondicherry, which was established as a French trading post (factory) in 1674 and relinquished to the Indian government only in 1954. Studies on French India are notably sparse in comparison with the significant scholarly attention that has been paid to British India and to French colonial holdings elsewhere. Because of this, I aim to complicate the narrative of a monolithic colonialism in India. I contend that the architecture and urban form of a […]
Angela Yin
Anthony Principe-Contreras
My research focuses on Ocean Vuong’s 2019 novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” Vuong incorporates the epistolary form–narrated by his protagonist, Little Dog, to his mother–to elucidate how Little Dog explores his identity in 21st-century New England as the son of a Vietnamese immigrant. My research will consider how Vuong’s novel integrates scholarship from post-colonial studies, queer and gender studies, and most notably, studies of the novel form. By examining the novel through this diversified lens, I will argue that its contents mimics the social conditions we see in America […]