Arts and Humanities – Page 14 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Arts and Humanities

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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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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Black Feminist Approaches to Black Popular Culture Pedagogy – Background/Intro

Black popular culture and Black feminisms in social media have become generative pedagogical sites in previous years. With the rise of celebrities such as Beyoncé and Lizzo, and the explosion of social media as a primary means of creating cultural discourses, students are increasingly interested in how gender, race, sexuality, class, and other vectors of identity shape their entertainment experiences. Yet, few teachers feel comfortable effectively teaching Black popular culture using an intersectional lens. This project will construct a guidebook for teaching Black popular culture using Black feminist pedagogies and best practices from seasoned educators, to provide educators with a comprehensive framework and concrete strategies for teaching Black popular culture across disciplines. This project uses a variety of sources from interviews to books to educational studies in order to look at what it means to teach popular culture through the lens of Black feminism. Our research team has studied Black popular culture and Black feminism in an academic setting in order to better understand how to ask questions for our interviews we conducted for the project. The questions this guidebook will answer are: 1) What is Black feminism? 2) What methods can I use for teaching that fall under the framework of Black feminism? 3) How can I ensure these methods of teaching allow students to get the most out of their experience, academically and personally? The goal for this guidebook is to be used as a resource for educators across the country. Since Black feminism and Black popular culture have not been taught widely among classrooms, we hope this guidebook will start making these methods and ideas accessible.

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Black Feminist Approaches to Black Popular Culture Pedagogy – Methods

Black popular culture and Black feminisms in social media have become generative pedagogical sites in previous years. With the rise of celebrities such as Beyoncé and Lizzo, and the explosion of social media as a primary means of creating cultural discourses, students are increasingly interested in how gender, race, sexuality, class, and other vectors of identity shape their entertainment experiences. Yet, few teachers feel comfortable effectively teaching Black popular culture using an intersectional lens. This project will construct a guidebook for teaching Black popular culture using Black feminist pedagogies and best practices from seasoned educators, to provide educators with a comprehensive framework and concrete strategies for teaching Black popular culture across disciplines. This project uses a variety of sources from interviews to books to educational studies in order to look at what it means to teach popular culture through the lens of Black feminism. Our research team has studied Black popular culture and Black feminism in an academic setting in order to better understand how to ask questions for our interviews we conducted for the project. The questions this guidebook will answer are: 1) What is Black feminism? 2) What methods can I use for teaching that fall under the framework of Black feminism? 3) How can I ensure these methods of teaching allow students to get the most out of their experience, academically and personally? The goal for this guidebook is to be used as a resource for educators across the country. Since Black feminism and Black popular culture have not been taught widely among classrooms, we hope this guidebook will start making these methods and ideas accessible.

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Black Feminist Approaches to Black Popular Culture Pedagogy – Expected Results/Conclusions

Black popular culture and Black feminisms in social media have become generative pedagogical sites in previous years. With the rise of celebrities such as Beyoncé and Lizzo, and the explosion of social media as a primary means of creating cultural discourses, students are increasingly interested in how gender, race, sexuality, class, and other vectors of identity shape their entertainment experiences. Yet, few teachers feel comfortable effectively teaching Black popular culture using an intersectional lens. This project will construct a guidebook for teaching Black popular culture using Black feminist pedagogies and best practices from seasoned educators, to provide educators with a comprehensive framework and concrete strategies for teaching Black popular culture across disciplines. This project uses a variety of sources from interviews to books to educational studies in order to look at what it means to teach popular culture through the lens of Black feminism. Our research team has studied Black popular culture and Black feminism in an academic setting in order to better understand how to ask questions for our interviews we conducted for the project. The questions this guidebook will answer are: 1) What is Black feminism? 2) What methods can I use for teaching that fall under the framework of Black feminism? 3) How can I ensure these methods of teaching allow students to get the most out of their experience, academically and personally? The goal for this guidebook is to be used as a resource for educators across the country. Since Black feminism and Black popular culture have not been taught widely among classrooms, we hope this guidebook will start making these methods and ideas accessible.

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