Social Sciences – Page 22 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Social Sciences

The Nubian Earth Odyssey

Many students in the world are unfamiliar with the Nubian Empire: a complex and intelligent empire with flourishing individuals whose heritage, tradition, and culture are still carried on today. It is important that students learn about this society, culture, history, and people in order to have empathy for people who are different from them. As a result, the Nubian Odyssey project aims to create a robust learning experience in which to present Nubian history and culture in a way that is engaging and accessible to middle school and high school students and teachers worldwide. This is obtained through a mentored, online website that allows for “correspondents” to share their experience with students to provide a window into their lives and a mirror for the students to relate this knowledge back to their own lives. In order to assemble this website and achieve the Odyssey’s goals it is necessary to compile educational resources that would support teachers as they embark on the Odyssey with their students. It is also necessary to communicate with correspondents and put reports together for students to engage with and read. As a result of this work students will be provided with a website that helps them learn about Nubian society, relate and connect with others, and develop empathy toward those who have different life experiences. Teachers will also be provided with many resources that can be used in conjunction with the “correspondents'” reports to expand one’s view of Nubia. The Nubian Odyssey will be a part of a larger university wide Humanities Collaboratory Grant that seeks to decolonize archaeology and invites others to join in learning about Nubia.

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Better Air Quality Outcomes in Southwest Detroit

Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision (SDEV) works to fulfill the needs of the community by empowering its residents to engage and by providing a connection to important resources. SDEV works with industrial corporations, businesses, and residents to address environmental pressures and concerns, specifically air pollution. Residents of Southwest Detroit live in the middle of industry and are exposed to bad air quality that leads to asthma, lead poisoning, strokes, heart attacks, and more. Even more significantly, these high impact areas correlate to more COVID fatalities as a result of these pre-existing conditions. SDEV recognizes that these high impact areas are primarily urban areas of color and that environmental and racial justice go hand in hand. To combat this issue, SDEV is working to propose a revised truck route to reduce truck traffic on residential streets and to increase enforcement of Detroit’s Anti-Idling Ordinance. SDEV has compiled a list of community members willing to host cameras and air-quality monitors at their residences collecting data relating to pollution levels. This data will be used in the proposal to revise the truck routes in order to better protect the health and wellbeing of the community. SDEV also fosters civic engagement and advocates for environmental policy. This is done by organizing residents to talk to their representatives who vote on the policies that affect them. Through these efforts, SDEV is able to engage the community and make deep and impactful changes that lessen environmental pressures. SDEV works to ensure that the residents come first and their concerns are being heard and met.

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Better Air Quality Outcomes in Southwest Detroit

Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision (SDEV) works to fulfill the needs of the community by empowering its residents to engage and by providing a connection to important resources. SDEV works with industrial corporations, businesses, and residents to address environmental pressures and concerns, specifically air pollution. Residents of Southwest Detroit live in the middle of industry and are exposed to bad air quality that leads to asthma, lead poisoning, strokes, heart attacks, and more. Even more significantly, these high impact areas correlate to more COVID fatalities as a result of these pre-existing conditions. SDEV recognizes that these high impact areas are primarily urban areas of color and that environmental and racial justice go hand in hand. To combat this issue, SDEV is working to propose a revised truck route to reduce truck traffic on residential streets and to increase enforcement of Detroit’s Anti-Idling Ordinance. SDEV has compiled a list of community members willing to host cameras and air-quality monitors at their residences collecting data relating to pollution levels. This data will be used in the proposal to revise the truck routes in order to better protect the health and wellbeing of the community. SDEV also fosters civic engagement and advocates for environmental policy. This is done by organizing residents to talk to their representatives who vote on the policies that affect them. Through these efforts, SDEV is able to engage the community and make deep and impactful changes that lessen environmental pressures. SDEV works to ensure that the residents come first and their concerns are being heard and met.

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Documenting Criminalization and Confinement

Documenting Criminalization and Confinement (DCC) is a sub-focus of the Carceral State Project, which is a University of Michigan research initiative. DCC is a multifaceted humanistic study of the historical and contemporary processes of criminalization, policing, incarceration, immigrant detention, and other forms of carceral control in the United States. The agenda of this project targets the policies and approaches that have advanced incarceration, especially in insecure communities. We are collaborating with a number of academic researchers, including faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduates from the organization to manage and create comprehensive research strategies. We have successfully constructed multiple intricate metadata spreadsheets that document prison education and arts, policing and social justice, and confronting conditions of confinement, as well as examined a continuous collection of personal written testimonies about the experiences of incarcerated individuals.

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Online Resources for Start-Up Cooperatives

A co-op is an entity designed to meet the common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations of its members. They are jointly owned and operated by their members who also benefit from the returns. In Detroit, the Detroit Community Wealth Fund has worked toward educating people who are interested in starting a co-op and providing them loans. In the past, it has been difficult for this organization to successfully have students come out of education programs and start a working co-op. Because of the pandemic’s limitations on face to face interaction, it has become difficult to hold these sessions in person, so one of the objectives of this study is to create a concise and informative educational guide that is easily accessible online. In this context, easy to follow worksheets and content that addresses each aspect of a co-op will be the best tools to teach the program. To see if this hypothesis that engaging materials will work best in the packet, I reviewed past curriculum materials and in-depth resources that cover all aspects of successful co-ops. The results showed that these materials would fill in any gaps of understanding and give the students a chance to practice engaging with the ideas. The final product showed that materials that focused on confusing topics such as business feasibility and marketing by using examples and templates are beneficial.

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HOPE Village Storytelling

HOPE Village Revitalization (HVR) is a non-profit community-development corporation with a long history of success serving the HOPE Village neighborhood in Detroit. Using a community-driven approach to mitigate disparities in wealth, privilege and educational opportunities within the neighborhood, HVR is dedicated to being part of the collective working toward equitable and sustainable development in Detroit and to being known as a model of excellence, integrity, and community decision making. This past year, I worked closely with my mentor to develop informational material highlighting the La Salle Eco-Demonstration Home, the organization’s LEED-certified sustainable-living model based on the philosophy that energy efficiency, renewable energy, and sustainable living should be available to everyone regardless of income. Toward this end, I created both written and visual resources that describe and explain various features and sustainable, forward-thinking innovations of the home, as well as covering sustainable goals of the organization achieved with the rehabilitation of the house. By doing research on various eco-friendly efforts currently in progress in Detroit as well as other parts of the world, and particularly seeing the development and work done within the HOPE Village community, I was greatly informed and inspired by the work that is being done in the area of sustainability. I am grateful to my mentor and HOPE Village for this amazing opportunity to be part of the collective effort toward their mission and to experience firsthand the inner-workings of a nonprofit organization.

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Geographic Differences in Faculty Attitudes on the Inclusion of Content on Oppression in Social Work Curriculum

Faculty in graduate schools of social work have a critical role in shaping the future of social work through their role in training and teaching new social workers. This study aims to examine how, if at all, the American geographical regions in which social work educators teach affects their views on the importance of including content on racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia/cissexism, ageism and classism. Using several one-way ANOVAs, this study investigates whether a faculty’s geographical location contributes to a difference in how strongly they believe content on a specific type of oppression should be included in the curriculum they teach. Findings revealed that faculty attitudes on what content of oppression to include were not homogenous throughout the country. Further investigation showed that there is not one topic that any social work educator would deem not important to include in their teaching. Given that MSW students believe that the social work profession calls for them to challenge all forms of oppression (Goode et. al, 2020), it is critical that their instructors educate them on these systems. Faculty attitudes on the importance of including content on oppression in their curriculum can impact not only what they teach, but how prepared future social workers feel to do what the profession calls for them to do. Therefore, it’s important to analyze potential factors that would shape how important social work educators feel it is to include content on different forms of oppression.

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Solidarity Not Charity’: Thematic Analysis of Definitions of Mutual Aid Activism in the COVID-19 Pandemic

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues in the US, many individuals have been unable to receive necessary resources due to economic struggles, concerns over contact with the virus, or a lack of governmental support in connecting with essential services. Mutual aid groups, who have played an active role in helping their communities for decades, have played an integral role in providing needed services with the knowledge that current systems and institutions have failed to provide these resources to Americans. This study analyzes the role of mutual aid and how different organizations have defined themselves during the pandemic. We examined and discussed academic literature on past and current mutual aid efforts and collected data, such as location, target populations, services, and self-definitions, about mutual aid organizations in 20 of the most populous metropolitan areas in the US. Data was collected through online research on organizations’ websites, social media pages, and newspaper articles and through thematic analysis. The analysis focuses on the definitions and agendas of mutual aid groups and how they differ from one another. By mapping the efforts of mutual aid groups and determining how they present themselves this study will increase discussions on community-level activism, inequalities within American society, and the flaws of established governance and institutions.

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The origins of human culture: tool use in wild chimpanzees

Over the last 50 years, there has been extensive research on the wide range of complex tool use behaviors exhibited by chimpanzees (Pan troglodyte) living in different locations across Africa. At some sites, like Gombe in Tanzania and Goualougo in Republic of Congo, chimpanzees exhibit elaborate tool sets. At other locations, chimpanzees exhibit fewer tool-related behaviors. This variation constitutes key evidence for potentially cultural behavior in nonhumans. To understand cultural differences in chimpanzees and the roots of individual variation in tool use, this study will examine multiple years of observational data of wild chimpanzees from the Kanyawara community at Kibale National Park, Uganda. Prior records of this community indicate that they have relatively simple tool use behaviors, but there has been little recent work on examining tool sets or more detailed information about individual variation. We will look for the types of tool use behaviors that exist in this population, and at what frequency these behaviors are exhibited. We will also investigate possible individual differences within this population, such as whether some chimpanzees tend to use certain tools more than others. Our findings will produce information on tool use in Ugandan chimpanzees, and the distribution of these behaviors across this community, to understand the roots of behavioral flexibility and human-like culture.

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Legal Features of Intergovernmental Organizations

International diplomacy and cooperation have never been a hallmark of authoritarian governments, yet these states routinely participate in the establishment and continued operation of Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs). However, the extent to which IGOs systematically differ based on the authoritarian or democratic character of their member states remains unexplored. This study utilizes previously compiled lists of IGOs to compile a massive excel dataset comparing the legal features of each organization. For each organization, the foundational documents are searched for before attributes are entered into the dataset. Specified features are marked as either present or absent and unusual characteristics are noted. As the dataset is developed, the variables across the IGOs will be compared, along with different rankings of their member states’ authoritarianism. The study currently continues to compile data from the different IGOs, however, some analysis has begun. Expectations from anecdotal evidence and previous qualitative research on IGOs leads us to anticipate that organizations with more authoritarian member states will enjoy significantly less autonomy than those with more democratic member states. From the findings, the study will analyze how these different IGOs work and help governments understand what features of these intergovernmental organizations are associated with authoritarian and democratic IGOs. This research will help legal scholars and government officials to better understand why states establish IGOs and evaluate whether IGOs actually have enough in common to be treated as a single category for purposes of analysis and the development of legal rules.

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