Xitlaly Olivera
Over the past decade, the demand for mezcal has increased causing Indigenous communities in Oaxaca to accelerate the levels of production. The global mezcal industry in 2022 it was valued at $338 million USD and it is expected to to increase to $2.1 billion USD by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 22.6% (Straits 2022). The consequences of the globalization of mezcal has manifested in the loss of ecosystems, traditional ecological knowledge, and the increase use of pesticides, which are ultimately accelerating the loss of Indigenous cultures in […]
Nicole Ling
Children turn to their parents for security, affection, and guidance. Parenting styles – ways parents interact with their children – directly impact children’s emotional welfare and their future decision-making, work, social interactions, and habits. Authoritative Parenting (AT) means setting limits in a nurturing way. Authoritarian Parenting (AR) means strictly reinforcing obedience. It is essential to assess the psychological factors that influence parenting style, for earlier identification and intervention of adverse child mental health outcomes associated with poor parenting. Parental depression increases the risk of maladaptive parenting styles, which in turn […]
Patrick Kelly
This research aims to test whether an alternative measure of consensus scoring, called Cultural Consensus Theory, provides a better aggregate of participant responses for emotional stimuli than traditional averaging in an emotion perception experiment. I hypothesize that the Cultural Consensus Model will yield higher correlations between subjects individual ratings of emotion than when correlated with the traditional consensus rating. Thus, allowing for a more accurate “correct” answer for emotion perception tasks when investigating individual differences across subjects. In addition to providing a more accurate measure of the true emotional rating […]
Diego Andres Hamernik
The ongoing climate crisis has highlighted the pressing need to revisit contemporary approaches to resource management and usage. Through the analysis of archaeological assemblages, my research aims to gain a deeper understanding of how coastal resources were used and managed by Indigenous communities in California over the past two thousand years. The objective of this study is to gain insight from indigenous resource stewardship practices, towards the end of developing more sustainable resource management approaches in the present. Through methods such as stable isotope analysis, I seek to assess resource […]
Will Gerardo
There has been increasing concern about the ethics of using human skeletal remains from historical and archaeological contexts in research and teaching. While emphasis on the unethical practice of taking and holding archaeological Native American and African American ancestral remains is an important focus, the origins and use of South Asian skeletons in anthropology and biomedicine have yet to be thoroughly explored. This project asks: Who are the skeletons that North American biological anthropology and biomedicine students utilize for study, and where were they taken from? What is the relationship […]
Peter Flo Grinde-Hollevik
The advent of satellite-based geospatial embedding data has allowed for a new opportunity to explore an unforeseen set of capabilities in environmental predictive tasks. In this project, I first establish the predictive relationship between census block-level in-situ measurements of median NO2 concentrations derived from the Google Street View Car and geospatial embeddings sourced from the Sentinel-2 satellite and the Earth Genome Project. This hypothesized relationship is then extended into the construction of a generalizable and robust predictive modeling framework. I then hope to deploy this framework on 4 counties of […]
Hanna Cox
How might one experience selfhood within a Benedictine, Trappist monastic tradition? How might a cloistered religious life cultivate subjectivity? What constitutes healing within Catholic ontologies, and how might monasticism bear on processes of healing? How might experiences of selfhood and of healing interplay? How might one engage their experience with theology? I am so fortunate and grateful to be able to immerse myself in a community of Cistercian women monastics during the course of my research. While these questions follow anthropological considerations of religion as it intersects with subjectivity and […]
Zahra Baxi
The number of Multiplayer Online Game (MPOG) players steeply increased during the lockdowns and social distancing of the COVID-19 pandemic. My research will address the question: What factors enhance social connection and build virtual communities in MPOG players? My study is informed by the Self-Determination Theory which states that three basic psychological needs promote well-being: competence (mastery over one’s environment), autonomy (feeling of control over one’s life), and relatedness (sense of belonging and connection). Ethnographic observation on Discord, an online communication platform popular with gamers, will enable me to explore […]
Marissa Batchelor
Point Molate Beach is the archaeological remains of a shrimp camp that operated from 1870-1912. The San Francisco Bay had an influx of Chinese migrants that moved from the Guangdong Province for the promise of economic opportunities. By 1880, Chinese migrants had established a $250,000 fishing business that exported 3,000 tons of dried shrimp, while it provided fresh fish for the California market. Despite their contribution to America’s economy, they were not able to work in peace because of anti-Chinese sentiment. As a result, Point Molate Shrimp Camp was abandoned […]
Kriti Achyutuni
The brain is a dynamic system of interconnected regions that work together to support behavior. We can look at the brain as a snapshot in time by taking 3D images using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). A brain measure collected at a specific time, like when a participant does a task, is a “state measure” of the brain. Many papers analyze brain measures during resting state, which are treated as immutable “trait measures”. In reality, however, the brain is dynamic, and the resting state is just one possible state of […]