Social Sciences – Page 23 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Social Sciences

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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Teaching Social Justice Content: Faculty Teaching Methods and Confidence

Diversity content in the School of Social work has become more incorporated into schools and curriculum as time has gone on, and in a study conducted by researchers from the Praxis Lab at the University of Michigan, the attitudes of faculty towards teaching this diversity content was observed in the form of a survey. One aspect of this survey was looking at what topics social work instructors felt least and most confident teaching in relation to social justice content as well as questions about how these instructors teach social justice content. Based on this, a question can be raised about whether there is a correlation between methods used for teaching social justice content and the confidence faculty in the school of social work possess about teaching this content. In order to answer this question qualitative content-coding was used and the open-ended responses provided from these instructors were what was focused on. The data is still in the process of being evaluated, but based on trends that have been visible so far it can be hypothesized that there will be a significant relationship found between methods used for teaching social justice content and the confidence faculty in the school of social work possess about teaching this content.

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Navigating faith identities in college: The role of student organizations in shaping college experiences and identity development

Gayoung Yang Pronouns: she/her/hers Research Mentor(s): Krystal Laryea, PhD Student Research Mentor School/College/Department: School of Education, Stanford University Presentation Date: Thursday, April 22, 2021 Session: Session 2 (11am – 11:50am) Breakout Room: Room 4 Presenter: 4 Event Link Abstract For privacy concerns this abstract cannot be published at this time. Authors: Gayoung Yang Research Method:

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Impact of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiatives on Faculty Mentoring and Black Women’s Persistence in STEM

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are increasingly implemented in academia to promote an inclusive learning environment, but particularly fall short in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, which are commonly perceived as cold and unwelcoming (Ceglie, 2020). DEI initiatives affect how faculty members act as mentors and how minority students experience education, especially those with intersecting underrepresented identities like Black women. However, there is a gap in the literature about how DEI and faculty mentoring practices converge to impact Black women in STEM. This literature review was conducted utilizing 3 academic databases. Abstract reviews and Zotero citation manager narrowed the results from 207 sources to 43 useful scientific articles which examine how DEI initiatives impact faculty mentoring and consequently encourage Black women to pursue a career in STEM. After extracting information from the literature using virtual annotations, the results were organized in the literature review. The findings indicate that multidimensional, purposeful DEI initiatives encourage multicultural mentoring styles, allow faculty members to recognize the biases they hold, and develop mentors who can professionally and emotionally support the unique experiences of Black women. A mix of formal and informal mentoring, when guided by DEI values, best helps Black women feel more comfortable and persist in the STEM environment. The fundamental takeaway is that universities must actively implement DEI initiatives, rather than passively utilizing colorblind values, to more effectively train faculty mentors who can better encourage Black women to pursue a career in STEM.

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Documenting Criminalization and Confinement

“Documenting Criminalization and Confinement” is a project housed within the “University of Michigan Carceral State Project” and is focused on creating a comprehensive database containing different elements and evidence from within incarceration facilities and the lives of incarcerated individuals. The intent of the project is to create a space for academic researchers, legal teams, incarcerated individuals, and activists to find and utilize different sources of information about incarceration. The research for this project includes data processing and translating each research object into a line of metadata. Each object is analyzed and interpreted in terms of title, type, creator, date, source, subject, language, rights, description, and spatial coverage. All these different lenses will help future database users to quickly and easily find what they are looking for within the system. This project will help the larger process of decriminalization and hopefully will be able to spread correct and meaningful answers and information about the current state of incarceration and the criminal justice system in the United States today. Those who are currently incarcerated and those who are victims of a poorly created and maintained system will benefit from the increased exposure of the current prison conditions and the negative environment created by the criminal justice system in the United States. The increasing accessibility to the knowledge of the topic will hopefully inspire and inform many.

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Wicked Solutions Domain – Obesity

Obesity is a complex issue that has been prominent throughout the world for the past few decades. It affects all ages and is a system with multiple levels, feedback loops, and other aspects that make it difficult with which to manage. Various design interventions within local contexts globally exist, however, there is lack of access to all of these context-specific existing solutions. Technologically mediating access to existing solutions, particularly by underserved populations, can contribute to what design researcher Audrey Bennett calls a “wicked solution.” The first step to providing access is compiling information of existing design interventions derived through creative or empirical inquiry. The following review of literature discusses the general topic of design thinking and making towards addressing obesity, the many ways obesity has been addressed in the past, and, also how it is being looked at now.

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Child Priming of Syntactic Structure

Our lab investigates whether children’s interpretation of sentences with PP-attachment (prepositional phrase) ambiguities can be primed by producing sentences with unambiguous meaning. We are trying to determine if children’s description of an image or selection of an image is influenced by the kind of image they had described to them earlier. Basically, a student will have a modifier and instrument interpretation of a prepositional phrase represented in front of them in the form of images and they are supposed to choose which they think is accurate after being read the sentence. Our hypothesis is that the child will choose the image which we have primed them to choose. In order to prime the child, we will show them two images and read them a sentence with an ambiguous prepositional phrase, and one photo will be of either the instrument or modifier interpretation with the correct nouns and the other will be the other interpretation with incorrect nouns, leading the child to select the interpretation we choose because of the nouns. Then we will give them a couple of images with the correct nouns depicted, one with a modifier interpretation and one with an instrument, and read them an ambiguous sentence and see which they select. We also ask the child to say a sentence and then we select the image, being certain to select the image corresponding with the interpretation we want them to learn. We keep our data in an Excel Sheet and compile the results to see if the interpretation most commonly selected aligns with the interpretation we try to teach them. Though this semester we have mostly done control work, the lab in the past has found that children are most frequently drawn to instrument interpretations of the sentence. The main conclusions of this research are that priming is possible when sentence structure is ambiguous.

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Understanding children’s biological beliefs regarding disease transmission of COVID-19

Despite the vast scientific research by Americans on pandemics from the past, little is known about how children are impacted by these unprecedented times and uncertainty. According to Au et al. (2008), the results from their findings suggest that education has the power to foster effective health-promoting behaviors among children and provides a basis for this COVID-COLD study. As a way to understand how children process these scenarios and adapt their behaviors according to public guidelines, this study focuses on how children conceptualize this information during the present-day COVID-19 pandemic. This two-part study reveals how children conceptualize common colds and the COVID-19 virus through qualitative, self-administered studies via a virtual survey. 320 children ages 5-12 from the United States participated in this study and were asked to complete two virtual studies: The Common Cold study and the COVID-19 study. The study is administered over the video-streaming platform Zoom, and the researcher adheres to a script for the entirety of the virtual meeting. Because this study is fairly new, a formal analysis of these research findings has not yet been conducted and an analysis is to-be determined. This study adds on to a fairly underrepresented research area and is part of a growing body of cognitive-developmental research during the COVID-19 pandemic. In delving into a largely unexplored area of cognitive-developmental research, this project hopes to contribute to future research on how best to teach children about colds and viruses. Understanding how children navigate through these unprecedented times and how they conceptualize these abstract concepts allows caregivers, teachers, and adults to learn the most efficient way in educating children in the future.

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Digital Dialogue

In the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans find themselves depending on technology and virtual meeting tools more than ever. Though these resources are highly effective, their use tends to be more awkward when compared to face-to-face interaction. This project aims to evaluate the similarities and differences between in-person and virtual language processing. In order to do this, we utilized the Michigan SONA system to meet with 44 students over Zoom. We created a list of 56 yes/no audio questions (each one marked “predictable” or “unpredictable” depending on how easy or hard it would be to understand the question before it ends) and split them into two sets of 28. One set was to be played over Zoom from the experimenter to the student, while the other was to be played locally by the student. After having them answer the questions, we recorded the amount of time it took for participants to respond to each question. Data collection has been completed for this experiment, but the data is not yet fully organized. Though there are currently no reportable results, we hope to observe a significant difference in conversational flow and language comprehension depending on the medium of communication.

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