Arts and Humanities – Page 13 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Arts and Humanities

The Dream of Detroit’s Storytelling Project

Dream of Detroit’s Storytelling project is aimed at educating the public about African-American Muslim and African Muslim communities in Detroit through oral history interviews. I helped transcribe a set of these interviews to prepare them for the project’s multi-media website and permanent public archive. These interviews, carried out by a team of young people from within community, center around how members of these populations participate in community building, leadership, and the revitalization of Detroit. Through my work in the project, I deepened my understanding of how community members view the importance of Islamic education, neighborhood revitalization, and social justice. I learned about the diversity of individuals and experiences within these communities. I will benefit from this broadened perspective in both my personal and educational life. The transcriptions of these interviews and the project as a whole will increase understanding, appreciation, and respect for the history, diversity, and impact of African American Muslim and African Muslim communities in Detroit.

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Financing and Counter-Financing of Violent Non-State Actors Project

There are numerous ways to deter terrorist groups from being active, one of them being obstruction of financing of the terrorist groups. It is a very important method governments and institutions take to stop violence, yet there is only a few organized dataset on the economic counterinsurgent actions taken against terrorist groups. This project collects and organizes data of counterinsurgent actions that hinder financing of the terrorist groups. Through a database Nexis Uni, this project records relevant events through articles from 1990 to 2018. The dataset classifies the counterinsurgent incidents into specific actions, showing clearly the frequency and impact of each type of actions. The dataset aims to cover most terrorist groups in the world and the project is still in the process of collecting data. The project provides analysis on the impact and effectiveness of each action, which will be useful in fighting against terrorist groups. It also gives further insight in how the actions and attitudes towards these violent non-state actors have changed over the last 30 years.

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Human Rights and Indigenous Rights in Africa

Many indigenous peoples of Africa face violations of their rights to land and other resources. This project works to create a website that documents and archives an array of case studies concerning indigenous peoples from across the continent. Those who have long standing rights to specific land territories and who preserve their own cultural, linguistic, and social practices in the continent are considered to be “indigenous”. The research being done aims to increase public awareness of violations that otherwise can be difficult to locate as indigenous people count for approximately 5% of the global population and their concerns rarely make it into mainstream media. We divide the violations into six categories, covering conservation, agribusiness, infrastructure, refugee crises, mining, and farming conflicts. Cases are built by researching the actors involved and collecting informative sources regarding the violation, and each is paired with accompanying images/maps/and videos. A narrative outlining the violation’s causes and consequences as well as the additional media are uploaded onto the website and neatly organized with tags referencing relevant keywords. In addition, all of the bibliographic sources are archived in Zotero. From here, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are used to broadcast each case. By both building a comprehensive online resource to inform people of these violations, and then using various platforms to extend the audience of the information, it is hoped that attention will be brought to the injustices occurring.

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Human Rights and Indigenous Rights in Africa

Introduction: In this project, we cover a diverse array of both peoples and issues happening across all regions of Africa. We have nearly 70 cases, each of which were carefully researched and written up as a case study for the general public to learn about on our website . We break down cases into six different categories: Conservation, Agribusiness, Infrastructure, Refugee Crises, Mining, and Farmer Conflicts. The issues that we find in regard to the crisis’ indigenous peoples of Africa face are constantly expanding. In partnership with various NGOs, we are working hard to expose these issues for the purpose of helping to raise awareness and potentially bring change to the indigenous communities of Africa. Methods: Each member of the project is assigned a certain number of cases in which we are responsible for updating information and links on the website (maintenance for older cases), researching and finding information on developing cases, and taking turns writing a case study to be featured on the website and our social media platforms. In order to make sure citations are standard across all case studies, we import them into a system called Zotero which accurately alphabetizes each citation and puts them in the same format. To do site maintenance we use wordpress and ArcGis. The data collected is qualitative. Results and Conclusions: There are constantly new developments and updates to many cases in that these issues are prevalent and still continue today. There are no finalized results for any of the cases because none of these issues have been “solved”. There are cases that have not had any development in the last few years but because these communities still exist and in most cases still in danger, our research has not been concluded.

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Financing and Counter-Financing of Violent Non-State Actors Project

I am working on data collection for the Countering the Financing of Violent Non-State Actors Project. The goal of the project is to develop the first comprehensive database of actions that obstruct the finances of terrorist groups in hopes to measure the efficacy of these actions and whether or not certain counterinsurgent actions either harm or embolden terrorist groups. This project is one of the first of its kind. The data used for this database is obtained from newspaper and online article entries regarding the different groups from the years 1990 to 2018. The articles are accessed on NexisUni then codified by a team of coders. Different coders code the same groups in order to ensure reliability of the data. There are no results yet for the project, as it is projected to take more time to complete the database. When the database is nearing completion, statistical analysis of the data will be performed in order to determine the efficacy of certain counterinsurgent actions.

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Financing and Counter-Financing of Violent Non-State Actors Project

With the threat of terrorism constantly evolving, anti-terrorist policy is constantly in need of reevaluation. The utilization of economic means to stifle the actions of violent groups varies in prominence by region and through time, and never before has a comprehensive data set been collected detailing its employment against specific groups during particular years. “The Financing and Counter Financing of Non-Violent State Actors Project” supervised by PhD candidate Corina Simonelli intends to create such a dataset and reveal patterns in the utilization of economic counterinsurgency tactics as they vary through time and across groups. Coders have been presented a list of violent actors and tasked with utilizing an evolving list of search terms and database Nexis Uni to gather news articles dating between 1990 and 2018. By streamlining the processes by which researchers sift through large sums of articles, evaluate convoluted information, and translate qualitative data into quantitative, a thorough codebook is being developed to allow for consistency and replication. While a sufficiently large dataset has not yet been achieved, the research team expects to witness variance in the prominence of particular counterinsurgent tactics when comparing groups operating across the globe and through time. This information will yield insight into the effectiveness of economic counterinsurgency when coupled with knowledge on the persistence of violent activity. Such information is valuable for policymakers and will influence which tactics are employed to thwart violent activity on regional and global scales.

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Regional constructions still need learned after adaptation

This study investigated the extent to which American English speakers can learn the grammatically correct usages of syntactic constructions in regional dialects of standard American English (SAE) through exposure. Previous studies have been conducted on whether or not the correct formulation of regional constructions can be learned through exposure (Kaschak & Glenberg, 2004), but the results were inconclusive, as it was unclear whether participants were learning the constructions or simply adjusting to the unfamiliarity of the sentence structures. This study aimed to better evaluate participants’ learning of regional syntax through exposure. Two syntactic constructions from regional dialects were studied: double modal (“I might could do that”), and “needs V-ed” (“The dishes need washed”). Participants were undergraduate students at the University of Michigan enrolled in an introductory psychology course. Each participant completed the study online while being monitored by a researcher over Zoom. Participants in experimental groups were exposed to sentences using their respective groups’ syntactic constructions, and participants in control groups were exposed to similar sentences in SAE. Reading times were recorded to provide data on the initial training phase. All participants then read a variety of sentences, including both grammatically correct and incorrect sentences with each regional syntactic construction and in SAE, and evaluated their grammatical acceptability, serving as the generalization phase. Results indicated that participants in the experimental groups did not learn the correct usages of the constructions, rather they simply adjusted to the unfamiliarity of the sentence structures, so the null hypothesis was not rejected. These results imply that, to learn a regional dialect of one’s native language, one must use methods more engaging than mere exposure.

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Methods of exploring the effects of verb causativity on reaction time

Our research focuses on methods of studying how causativity of verbs affect our processing of them and therefore our reaction time, and how these reaction time effects can be isolated from other sentence processing effects like general lexical prediction. In a previous study conducted by Dr. Levinson, it was found that there is an added level of complexity in transitive variants of causative verbs as compared to transitive variants of non-causative, or activity, verbs. This was concluded by measuring reaction times in self-paced reading tasks of sentences with verbs of transitive and intransitive, as well as causative and non-causative variants. For example, a causative transitive verb appears in the sentence “The sun melted the ice”, whereas an example of a causative intransitive verb appears in the sentence “The ice melted”, which differs from an activity verb, such as “ate”. The complexity of causative verbs vs. non-causative verbs is something that has long been debated, and helps to better understand linguistic processing. Our research mainly focused on using different methods of studying this causativity phenomenon other than self-paced reading tasks, as well as determining the best methods for disentangling verb representations from lexical confounds.

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Methods of Exploring the Effect of Verb Causativity on Reaction Time

Our research focuses on methods of studying how causativity of verbs affect our processing of them and therefore our reaction time, and how these reaction time effects can be isolated from other sentence processing effects like general lexical prediction. In a previous study conducted by Dr. Levinson, it was found that there is an added level of complexity in transitive variants of causative verbs as compared to transitive variants of non-causative, or activity, verbs. This was concluded by measuring reaction times in self-paced reading tasks of sentences with verbs of transitive and intransitive, as well as causative and non-causative variants. For example, a causative transitive verb appears in the sentence “The sun melted the ice”, whereas an example of a causative intransitive verb appears in the sentence “The ice melted”, which differs from an activity verb, such as “ate”. The complexity of causative verbs vs. non-causative verbs is something that has long been debated, and helps to better understand linguistic processing. Our research mainly focused on using different methods of studying this causativity phenomenon other than self-paced reading tasks, as well as determining the best methods for disentangling verb representations from lexical confounds.

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Documentary Film Team

Documentaries are a way of telling stories in a visual form. Through learning about the process that goes into creating documentaries one can develop communication, research, and film-making skills as well as connect with others interested in film. In order to expand our knowledge of the documentary process, we were given tasks to explore the pre-production, production, and post-production aspects by looking at old documentaries, filming, editing, and reviewing video footage. As a result of our project, we plan to create a short documentary of our own with the combined knowledge we gained. Learning the process of documentary making allows one to discover and share stories that haven’t been explored.

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