Arts and Humanities – Page 14 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Arts and Humanities

“What are you laughing at?” Cross cultural investigation into international Chinese students’ understanding of US minority group humor

Listening courses in graduate EAP curricula typically focus on academic listening, such as in lectures and seminars (Flowerdew 1995). However, much listening occurs outside of the classroom, with students frequently expressing frustration at not being able to understand or participate in peer conversations about cultural issues such as current topics and humor. To expose international students to diverse voices and content in a non-academic listening course, we utilized examples of US minority group humor, Key and Peele videos, from the Chinese media platform Bilibil. We present our first findings from small listening groups discussing one Key and Peele video, showing that students draw on home culture interpretations when encountering unfamiliar US culture and humor. Chinese students specifically are using an internet practice already familiar to them, live commenting (Danmu), as a tool to deepen their understanding of English, general US culture and minority group culture. We hope to create materials for the new culture class by evaluating students’ depth of understanding of important current aspects of US (minority) culture.

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“What are you laughing at?” Cross cultural investigation into international Chinese students’ understanding of US minority group humor

Listening courses in graduate EAP curricula typically focus on academic listening, such as in lectures and seminars (Flowerdew 1995). However, much listening occurs outside of the classroom, with students frequently expressing frustration at not being able to understand or participate in peer conversations about cultural issues such as current topics and humor. To expose international students to diverse voices and content in a non-academic listening course, we utilized examples of US minority group humor, Key and Peele videos, from the Chinese media platform Bilibil. We present our first findings from small listening groups discussing one Key and Peele video, showing that students draw on home culture interpretations when encountering unfamiliar US culture and humor. Chinese students specifically are using an internet practice already familiar to them, live commenting (Danmu), as a tool to deepen their understanding of English, general US culture and minority group culture. We hope to create materials for the new culture class by evaluating students’ depth of understanding of important current aspects of US (minority) culture.

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Khichri

Although there is abundant evidence that humans are altering the climate in drastic ways, this information is not always readily available to the general public, especially in developing countries around the world. To combat this issue, this research project focuses on studying the general perception of climate change and its impact on food scarcity in Pakistan, and it utilizes foundational design elements to create an interactive web app that would help inform Pakistani youth about the harms of climate change and its impact on food security and costs.

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Khichri

Known to our scientific community are the inevitable impacts of Climate Change – catastrophic effects on agriculture and food availability, an increase in extreme weather, and a grander spread of deadly diseases and viruses as a result of more humid and hot climates. However, there is a problem with this information: It’s not being communicated to the general public, especially educated, Urban Pakistanis. There is a large gap between research and research communication; thus, the general public – especially young students and adults – are unaware of the upcoming effects of this global change. Khichri aims to bridge that gap, to bring this information to the jury of the common citizen, and to finally create this urge among the younger generation to take control of their own future. This project focuses on Pakistan (specifically the city of Karachi), the fifth-most vulnerable country to long-term anthropogenic effects of climate change and a country unable to address their own climate concerns. We look into the students’ current understandings of climate change by means of interviews and surveys.

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Khichri

Climate change is causing destruction on our environment and in turn, affecting our daily lives. This is most widely known in the form of natural disasters that cause destruction onto our homes, extreme heat waves in summer, etc. In fact, climate change is also causing a shortage in our food and water supply. Although climate change is an issue that should be taken seriously, many people are still oblivious to the scale of its effects. This project is a non traditional look on the effects of climate change on underdeveloped countries, especially Pakistan. We experiment with different factors to create an interactive website that is fun and creative to inform users of the possible effects of climate change on our food systems. The users will take a look into the future on how the supply of ingredients will increase or decrease based on climate change. In practice, this site can be adjusted for many scenarios in other countries. This will be beneficial for the planet as a whole when users communicate and spread their knowledge.

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Documentary Film Team

Despite media being virtually everywhere, there are issues that are under covered. This project aims to create a network of filmmakers that can work together to cover important problems ignored by mainstream media and to reach out to students that hadn’t before imagined that they could go to college and inform them of their opportunities. To gain knowledge to share with the rest of the network editing techniques have been explored through countless video tutorials, databases, and skill sharing sites. After the exploration phase these techniques were put to the test by creating a sample piece. Finally the best methods were combined and detailed in step by step tutorials on how to create the previously described samples. As the repertoire of tutorials and knowledge expanded it has been noticed that there are more opportunities to assist other filmmakers with their works. It has also been noticed that as the repertoire grew other filmmakers tended to listen to your suggestions and criticism on their projects more often. This project is still ongoing and more conclusions can be drawn at a later time as soon as more data is available.

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Study of Substance Cravings Versus Ordinary Urges

While there are many studies of cravings and addiction to substances such as cigarettes, it is difficult to pinpoint one universal craving scale that is used to compare all the results on an even plane and to compare them against an “everyday” craving for something such as junk food. This study creates a standard craving scale that can be used to compare the cravings that one has for cigarettes and that one has for junk food. In this experiment, prior smokers in an online smoking quitters forum were surveyed using a questionnaire style scale adapted from the scale used for trichotillomania ,a compulsive hair picking disorder used in a prior study, the Fagerstrom Test for Nicotine Dependence, the Yale Cravings Study, the Questionnaire of Smoking Urges, the Cigarette Dependence Scale, the Fagerstrom Tolerance Questionnaire, the Minnesota Nicotine Withdrawal Scale, and the Wisconsin Smoking Withdrawal Scale. This exact scale with in depth questions about strong cravings was used to evaluate the same subject pool but instead describing their strong cravings for junk food. The means and standard deviations for both types of questions can be compared with the same exact scale, and we expect that the cravings for unhealthy junk food will be similar in ranking. We expect that the ratings on the craving scale will be around middle range. This study can be further implicated in various research studying cravings and addiction, and it can bring attention to the need for a universal craving scale to compare data across studies. This research can also prompt further research on cravings and how they are not the only driving factor when it comes to addiction. These findings can be applied to further discussions about the ability to control “everyday” cravings and what makes them socially acceptable or non-addictive.

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Study of Substance Cravings versus Ordinary Urges

Smoking addiction is one of the most widely studied phenomena, yet the characteristics of urges to smoke are not widely understood. This research project focused on comparing the severity of smoking urges to the severity of everyday cravings such as the urge to eat unhealthy foods. As these everyday cravings are experienced by most people, it offered a great mode of comparison to gain a more nuanced understanding of smoking cravings. We found participants on an online forum who experienced cigarette cravings and participants who experienced unhealthy food cravings to report their urges on a variety of different scales indicating the intensity of craving, the frequency of their cravings, and more. In our preliminary research, we found that cigarette craving strength means across a variety of studies was only a little over .5, which was not as high as we had originally predicted that urges to smoke would be. We hypothesize that results will show that the strength of smoking cravings are actually more similar to everyday cravings than one might think. These results may help clinicians understand the smoking addiction and the intensity of smoking cravings and help with treatment strategies.

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Star Switching Power in Global Bollywood

The author identifies that Bollywood movie stars have changed the perception of India as a country globally. Often, one movie star with his masterpiece is able to break into one or more foreign markets, thus becoming the soft power of India, both politically and economically. The author has collected multiple sources to prove the existence of soft power. After the information gathering stage, both qualified and quantified methods were used to analyze the data. For instance, for the China section of the research, the movie 3 idiots, directed by and starring Aamir Khan, was one quintessential example. Movie comments were scraped from the Chinese parallel of IMDb, Douban. These comments were then translated into English, and a word cloud was created to demonstrates the most common ideas associated with the movie from the Chinese audience’s perspective. Moreover, using the word cloud as a hint, the full version of comments that contained these popular ideas were being further investigated. The result shows that the hypothesis is significant, that the soft power of Bollywood movie stars indeed change the political, economic, and social image of India as they become popular in foreign countries. This research has great implications in the policy-making domain because to expand one country’s influence in the age of globalization, the increase of soft power is clearly shown to be an effective means to the traditional increase of hard power such as military and technology advancement, which might provide an alternative development path for many countries.

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Why We Write: Writing, Community, and 60 years of Creative Writing at MQR

In its 61st addition, The Michigan Quarterly Review is publishing a special edition issue of their literary journal focused on the 1947 Orwellian prompt “Why I Write.” Though writers across generations have answered this question, MQR is seeking new perspectives from both established, emerging and beginner writers, in hopes of publishing a journal dedicated to discussing “why they write” with reference to four distinct motivations: egotistical, aesthetic, historical and political. Given the current movement, MQR is interested in the latter two categories and how writers use their work as a way to provoke social change. As part of this issue, a corresponding online series will be published that focuses on individual writers and contributors to the issue. To achieve this goal, interviews will be held with several contributors, varying across discipline, genre, age and background, that highlight their motivations for writing and the ways in which it connects back to George Orwell’s original statements, as well as social and political movements and change. The expected result is that writing uncovers distinct motivations for each contributor, though they are expected to diverge from each other and be as unique as the perspective that each writer brings about in their piece. These interviews add nuance to the motivations of writing and will help readers understand how writing can be an important tool for social and political change.

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