Interdisciplinary – Page 49 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Interdisciplinary

The Role of Socioeconomic Status in Medical School Admissions

Occupational diversity is an area that has increasingly received attention. Lack of diversity in professional careers is a problem because it encourages a system of inequality and discrimination within society. Lack of diversity is especially problematic in health professions (Frazer, 2005). While many articles on occupational diversity focus on racial/ethnic or gender diversity, other types of diversity, such as socioeconomic status are less frequently mentioned. Socioeconomic status plays a very influential role in determining who enters professional careers (Cooter et al., 2004). Persons with higher socioeconomic status are much more likely to be accepted into medical school, resulting in an underrepresentation of medical students of lower socioeconomic status.

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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 Beyoncรฉ 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 Beyoncรฉ 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 Beyoncรฉ 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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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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Museums and Publics: Engaging Detroit, Berlin, and the Future of the City

The Museums and Publics project seeks to answer this question through the creation of short films analyzing an aspect of how the Cultural Campus and Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) renovation and integration projects connect with everyday Detroit citizens. Zeroing in on the topic of transportation, I seek to answer the question, what is the effect of current public transportation infrastructure in Detroit on equitable access to the Detroit Square project? Analysis and interviews done for the film shows that there is a disconnect between transportation provided and transportation desired, a major hurdle in creating equitable access to the Cultural Campus. As part of the interviews, I hope to seek out people that use the DDOT or SMART transportation systems regularly, or those who want to but face logistical hurdles. The interviews put real voices to the problems often mumbled about in the Southeast Michigan political sphere – the lack of a regional governing transit authority, and therefore a lack of a true regional public transportation system. In order for the Detroit Square and DIA project to be accessible and a community oriented cultural campus, these discrepancies must be addressed in some manner.

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Genetic Impact on Low Diversity Microbiomes in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), a term that is used to generalize Ulcerative Colitis (UC) and Crohn’s Disease, is a disorder that involves chronic inflammation in the digestive tracts. UC is restricted to the colon, while Crohn’s disease can involve all segments of the GI tract. The pathogenesis of IBD is still unclear but several proposed mechanisms are being investigated which lead to a loss of homeostatic host-microbe interaction in the GI tract. Our study focuses on one of those mechanisms whereby a mutation in a gene that encodes an NADPH oxidase called Duox2 might lead to a loss of host-microbe homeostasis in the gut. In addition, we aim to better understand the possible environmental and hereditary factors that may contribute to IBD. Our study aimed to recruit 100 sibling pairs to take a survey that asked questions about diet, sleep, exercise, and their living environment. One of the siblings had IBD while the other was a control subject. Each sibling pair had a first degree relative with IBD, indicating a possible genetic component (e.g., Duox2 mutation). There was a parallel study conducted in Taiwan to also compare differences in ethnicity. Through our survey, we predicted that results will show trends among families who have IBD. The second phase of the study, identified patients who may be more likely to have a mutation in the Duox2 gene by screening for congenital hypothyroidism known to share a common genetic risk gene in Duox2. By collecting a blood and stool sample from families, we predict that we will be able to better understand the determinants of genetics, environment, and gut microbiota in the pathogenesis of IBD.

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The effect of statins on the progression of Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is characterized by the accumulation of fat in the liver due to causes unrelated to excessive alcohol consumption. Around 25% of the global population is affected by NAFLD, with some countries having even higher rates.[1] However, most people with this condition are just suggested to change their lifestyle.[2] Often associated with these underlying causes are cardiovascular disease (CVD) and high cholesterol levels, which the class of drugs known as statins are often prescribed to help treat. Statins have been shown to lead to some liver injury and therefore they have not been a popular medication physicians consider for NAFLD.[3] Thus, the aim of this study will be to explore the impact of statins on treating the progression of NAFLD. While some studies have been performed on the effects of statins on liver disease associated with varying causes,[4] it is not well-known what effect these medications have on the progression of NAFLD. Some have suggested that there is a beneficial effect in reducing the time it takes the disease to progress[5,6] and generally improving liver blood tests,[7] but there are not many systematic reviews synthesizing all recent data. Our goal is to conduct an updated systematic review and meta-analysis of the current literature investigating the effects of statins on NAFLD to determine the consensus on whether these medications do have a beneficial effect in disease progression. To investigate this relationship, we used Cochrane Library, PubMed, and EMBASE to gather all the references, utilizing the Boolean search method to collect the past research studies using all keywords relating to NAFLD and statins. The relevant, qualified studies were then compiled into EndNote X9, and Microsoft Excel and R statistical software were used to conduct a formal meta-analysis (i.e., inclusion of forest plot, funnel plot, etc.). The data is expected to show that statins do help improve the condition of NAFLD patients due to decreasing the build-up of fat and improving NAFLD test scores. The implications of this study will allow for physicians to more easily reject or approve of the use of statins in NAFLD treatment.

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The effect of statins on the progression of Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is characterized by the accumulation of fat in the liver due to causes unrelated to excessive alcohol consumption. Around 25% of the global population is affected by NAFLD, with some countries having even higher rates. However, most people with this condition are just suggested to change their lifestyle. Often associated with these underlying causes are Cardiovascular disease (CVD) and high cholesterol levels, which the class of drugs known as statins are often prescribed to help treat. Statins have been shown to lead to some liver injury in extreme cirrhotic cases and therefore they have not been a popular medication physicians consider for NAFLD. Thus, the aim of this study will be to explore the impact of statins on treating the progression of NAFLD.

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