Projects

Political efficacy refers to citizens' trust in their ability to change the government and their belief that they can understand and influence political affairs. Previous studies in political science suggested that those Americans with the most resources tended to possess higher levels of efficacy. However, more recent evidence suggests that this may be changing; nowadays, even Americans with many social privileges feel they cannot neither change the government nor influence its affairs. Efficacy spurs political action, yet most political science literature neglects the topic. Thus we have a very limited understanding of the personal and environmental conditions that cultivate an increased sense of efficacy and whether some political issues are especially ripe for efficacy's expression. This project seeks to reinvigorate our understanding of political efficacy by drawing on research from political science, sociology, psychology, and communication studies.

Stress and intonation patterns (or prosody) have been associated with grammatical mood in Korean and can help to disambiguate for listeners whether an utterance (in Korean) is a statement, an open question (e.g., 'Who did you meet yesterday?'), or a polar question (e.g., 'Did you meet anyone yesterday?'). That is, in Korean, the single spoken utterance, 'You met someone yesterday' can be interpreted as such (i.e., as a statement), or as either one of the previous question types, depending on where the speaker places the stress and manipulates their intonation. Given the different possible readings, and the importance of prosody in discriminating between the three, this project investigates specifically the role of pitch expansion in Korean (which we argue to be a key factor).

This project aims to understand how friendship choices are influenced by culture and relational mobility—a characteristic of social contexts that describes the relative ease or difficulty or forming new and ending existing relationships. We are interested in how certain features of social contexts make it easy or difficult to form friendships. We are also interested in how friendships may be more or less similar in different contexts. We will use a field method to collect data from naturally occurring pairs of people in public spaces.

Bad Bunny is a reggaetón artist from Puerto Rico who has been the most streamed artist globally for three years in a row, and has had the first Spanish-language albums to debut at number one on the charts. The Bad Bunny Syllabus is an online resource for educators and fans who would like more information to help contextualize Bad Bunny's rise to fame. We provide academic readings, popular sources, podcasts, and other multimedia materials. Topics include reggaetón history, race in Puerto Rico, Puerto Rican/US relations (e.g. debt crisis, ELA status, Hurricane María), gender politics in reggaetón, and LGBTQ rights in Puerto Rico.

Activists at the forefront of the movement to abolish the carceral state are engaged in real-time debates over what role, if any, the state should play in abolitionist futures. These debates grow out of Black radical, decolonial, anti-capitalist, and anarchist traditions that ask whether states rooted in histories of colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism can be transformed to support all people.

The first project designs a field experiment to assess the role social media plays in academic careers, aiming to measure the positive effects associated with access to scholarly networks where one can promote own research from the negative effects of being active on social media. The second project explores who gets believed when sharing information on social media platforms, focusing on gender differences. The third project investigates whether people are likely to believe certain kinds of lies more than others. Finally, the work may include curricular work in behavioral economics.

I will mainly be working on three projects (as implied in the Project Title) this school year and would love to work with a student to advance the research. Students will help with literature reviews, data collection, and quantitative analysis. Knapp fellows will also help craft some materials related to coursework. The role will be roughly 50/50 split between assistance with research and with teaching.

The goal of this project is to explore theoretical distinctions between pretending and imagining experimentally. The behavioral and physiological differentiation of these two activities has been suggested as an interesting distinction in human cognition. How do pretending and imagining “feel” different as different mental states? Can they be distinguished either by behavior measures, such as reaction time, or physiological measures? Exploring these mental states in adults will facilitate our understanding of how they emerge in development when children engage in role play versus interact with an imaginary companion.

There has been very little academic work on the women behind the power in African governments beyond focusing on their fashion choices and corruption. I will argue in the book that some of the First Ladies have been very influential in policy making. I will study six first ladies, Grace Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Sarah Kyoloba Amin of Uganda, Bobi Ladawa Mobutu of Zaire, now DRC, Leïla Ben Ali of Tunisia, Maryam Abacha of Nigeria, and Simone Gbagbo of Ivory Coast.

For the past few years, I have interviewed preservice teachers (individuals enrolled in a teacher preparation program) to learn about their attitudes, beliefs, and experiences engaging students' families. Within the field of family engagement research, ideas about practice are largely guided by the experiences of elementary school teachers. There is little research about the experiences of high school teachers. I would like to work with a research assistant who can assist with this new phase of the project - interviewing research participants, transcribing interview data, and analyzing interview data. I also expect that the student will assist with relevant review of the literature.

Prof. Aditi Sahasrabuddhe and the Knapp Fellow examine the politics of crisis management and central bank swap extensions to manage financial pressures.

Yoolim Kim and the Knapp Fellow evaluates ways in which second-language (L2) learners resolve conflicting linguistic input during language processing.

Prof. Beth DeSombre and the Knapp Fellow investigate environmental governance measures adopted or enforced by the busiest 200+ ports around the world, during the period from 2005-2020.

Prof. Kelly Rutherford and the Knapp Fellow trace the global circulation of items intended for children, such as picture books, toys, music, and media to more broadly evaluate the institutional and aesthetic criteria influencing which cultural items travel globally.

Dr. Jenny Grossman and the Knapp Fellow utilize qualitative methods to analyze how fathers, mothers and high-school aged teens perceive father-teen communication about sex and relationships.

Prof. Elizabeth Minor and the Knapp Fellow connect communities as they engage with their pasts and explore their futures through archaeology.

Prof. Julia Gutierrez and the Knapp Fellow considers how poverty can be measured multidimensionally, particularly if healthcare, education, housing, and food deprivation are considered. 

Prof. Rosanna Hertz and the Knapp Fellow explore the relationship between aging, new reproductive technologies, and the pursuit of and reluctance to give up genetic ties to an imagined child.

The two major frameworks in the U.S. that inform sex education policy are a comprehensive and abstinence sex education. These overlap with, or map onto, liberal and conservative approaches to sex education. Mostly, these formal curriculums at various ages assume heterosexual practices and are oriented toward cisgender individuals. Moreover, young people also learn about sex and sexuality outside of schools from family, friends and organizations and through popular culture and the Internet. The shift to finding out information on the Internet is not well-understood, even though arguably the most important informal ways that people learn about sex and sexuality is outside of schools.

A group of college students have already been interviewed on their sexual education histories- what they learned, where they learn it, and how they assess the material/or other sources they used. For this project, the fellow will: a. to work on coding the interviews in order to look for patterns across interviews and b. synthesize existing literature.

Preference will be given to students who have some knowledge of methodology and coding, and who is interested in working on assessing literature (scholarly and not) on these topics.

The Last Seed is a book in progress on the histories and practices that motivate scientists, administrators, artists, and government officials to act together for the common aim of conserving biodiversity by seed banking- a process generally done by placing seeds in freezers. There are many kinds of seed banks that vary in size, scope, location, and method. At the same time, all seed banking projects have been profoundly involved with state and industry interests, not just the protection of life in the future.

This project centers on ascertaining two crucial parts of the greater inquiry of the book; how knowledge about plants changes when they are moved and how the varied interests (political, agricultural, conservationist, etc.) of the scientists affect seed-banking practices.

The Fellow will be trained and help to transcribe and code interviews, images from the archives, and field-notes from participant observation, that have already been gathered during eighteen months at four seed-banks in the UK, US, Norway, and India.

Requirements: Fellow should have an interest in the environment.

Ports have come to play an important role in governing shipping. They are frequently where national or international rules can be enforced on ships, and ports occasionally impose rules beyond those required by their states, including those relating to sustainability. This study examines environmental governance measures adopted or enforced by the busiest 200+ ports around the world, during the period from 2005-2020, characterizing which greening measures ports take on (or do not) and when. The Fellow will research green measures and characteristics of different ports around the world, contributing the final details to a major database project.

Requirements: Fellow should have some social science research experience, including through classwork, and be detail oriented.

In the United States and the United Kingdom, translations make up only about 3 percent of all publications; fiction accounts for only one percent of that number. Writers lucky enough to get translated tend to be already established authors. French is the language most often translated, followed by German. Likewise, few books written in non-Western languages have ever won the Nobel Prize. Since 1901 to 2017, 29 Nobel Laureates wrote in English, 14 in French, 13 in German, and 11 in Spanish compared to two in Chinese, one in Bengali, one in Russian, and one in Arabic.

This can be attributed to the economics and politics of the global publishing industry work against these non-European language authors. Professor Levitt is currently working alongside Professor Rutherford on this cultural and intellectual inequality pipeline. One aspect of the study explores how readers learn about literature produced outside the West and how plot, writing style, and aesthetics shape readers' experiences. To get a sense of this, reviews from Goodreads are analyzed to gague how readers engage with these books. Through this project, the Fellow will work on data scraping, content analysis, and coding various sociological data.

Requirements: Familiarity with qualitative and quantitative social science methods, as well as literature reviews.

This study is rooted in in-depth interviews with undergraduate students enrolled in a teacher education program. Interviews are conducted over the course of each participant's participation in the program and explore the ideas and beliefs that new teachers carry into their practice about working with students' families. Data from the interviews then shape the development of a series of workshops for participants, which introduce them to the theories and practices of engaging families during their program year. The last interview is conducted with each participant a year after their completion of the teacher education program to explore their experiences connecting with students' families as classroom teachers.

The Fellow will work with Professor Hong to analyze the data collected during the 2020-2021 and 2021-22 academic years. They will review literature, prepare, analyze, and code interview and workshop data, and engage in regular research team meetings to discuss findings.

Requirements: Coursework in education is preferred but not required. Interest in narrative-based qualitative research and strong writing skills are desired.

This is an ongoing project which develops three original datasets: 1. the Media Perspectives on Policing (MPOP) dataset, a comprehensive archive of every news article from the 25 largest newspapers in circulation that addresses policing and police-related protests, 2. State Legislative Action on Policing (SLAP), which is a comprehensive archive of every policing-related bill proposed and passed by all 50 state legislatures between 2013 and 2020, and 3. the Black Lives Matter # Twitter Dataset, which includes all tweets that include at least one of 37 Black Lives Matter movement related hashtags from 2013 to 2020.

These data assess the relationship between media attention and framing and state policy responsiveness to police brutality and BLM activity. It will help us understand: (1) nodes of conversation between BLM activists and supporters, (2) framing used by activists to communicate the goals of the movement, and (3) strategies used and communicated by BLM activists and social movement organizations, as well as how these strategies communicated over social media correspond with the on-the-ground tactics used by movement activists and supporters.

Requirements: The Fellow should be familiar with or interested in learning web-scraping, automated text analysis and have basic statistical skills.

Professor Chudy's book examines racial sympathy, defined as White distress over Black suffering, is an influential, but understudied, force in American politics. Many white racial justice activist Americans are unusually, deeply, and genuinely invested in eradicating Black suffering. Moreover, they have financial and educational resources that provide them with an outsized influence in politics.

Professor Chudy's series of interviews discovered that almost all the activists recognized the systemic and institutionalized dimensions of racial injustice. However, curiously, many activists proposed individual-level solutions, such as tolerance classes, eliminating prejudice at home, and empathizing with individual Black people, rather than political or structural ones. This mismatch may help explain why it has been so difficult to achieve political progress on these issues.

The Knapp Fellow will assist on two projects related to this finding: 1) Outreach to anti-racist organizations. Many anti-racist groups/workshops culminate in "action plans" -- whereby participants identify the ways in which they will fight racism. The Fellow will conduct outreach to anti-racist groups to collect white participants' action plans and catalog whether these plans are more individually-oriented or politically oriented. 2) Review anti-racist books. Activists repeatedly referenced certain books that influenced their development as anti-racists. The Fellow will read these books and note the extent to which they emphasize individual-level solutions to racism vs. political/structural.

Requirements: The Fellow should have previous coursework in American politics or social psychology.

The purpose of this project is to understand how COVID-19 and mobilizations to address structural racism, and related social, economic, and political disruptions in the past eighteen months have impacted the anti-trafficking field. It will analyze programs and efforts to identify, assist and/or advocate on behalf of sex trade-involved youth and adults in the United States in particular. This project also explores how individuals and groups whose work includes some focus on anti-trafficking activities – for instance, groups who work with sex workers and others impacted by criminalization and incarceration – are responding to these intersecting crises alongside their work to address exploitation.

Required Qualifications: Completion of at least one course in WGST, Sociology, American Studies or another course with a focus on gender, race, sexuality and/or intersectional theory. Fellow must work independently and to meet agreed upon deadlines. They must also commit to research/data ethics, able to maintain confidentiality about project data, and review material onn complex topics related to human trafficking, exploitation, and violence. Fellow must also have online/library research experience (whether from courses with a research paper component or other RA positions).

Additional Ideal Qualifications: In addition to the above required qualifications, ideal qualifications include experience with qualitative data analysis OR completion of qualitative methods course(s) at Wellesley in Political Science, Sociology, WGST, or Peace & Justice Studies, as well as experience working with ATLAS.ti (or comparable qualitative data analysis program) and Zotero (or comparable bibliographic management program)

Inspired by writers such as William Defoe and Orhan Pamuk who kept daily diaries during pandemics, students in ANTH/PEAC 220 have kept similar diaries. Coming from different backgrounds, the diaries give students a unique platform to express their feelings, their fears, their anxieties and their hope. Through these entries, students were able to reflect on how past pandemic experiences compare with our current coronavirus pandemic. They also researched topics such as pandemic denial, conspiracy theories, metaphorical ways of thinking, socio-economic and racial disparities in incidence and deaths, as well as how American individualism was not sacrificed for the good of the community. In this project, the Fellow will help organize, analyze, and enter selected diary entries.

Requirements: Fellow should have taken at least one anthropology course, preferably ANTH 220 / PEAC 220. Note that this is a project only for the fall of 2021.

Professor Candland is organizing a collaboration of researchers and practitioners, from each country of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and through the ASEAN University Network, to identify root causes of extreme and everyday human insecurity, including psychological and environmental insecurities, across Southeast Asia. He envisions papers being published in three special issues of a peer-reviewed journal in 2022-23.

Professor Candland will begin consultations with the health professionals and environmental studies scholars named in the full proposal. He will invite them, and colleagues whom they suggest, to submit papers to be discussed at three full-day workshops, to be held by video-conference (and in person where possible) in 2021-22. He will seek external funding to permit honoraria to the authors.

Aya's work is split between project coordination and review of Japanese scholarship. She is helping to plan the project – e.g., compose a project timeline, keep track of colleagues' initial replies and recommendations, track deadlines and requirements for funding opportunities – and read and report on Japanese language scholarship on human security in Southeast Asia.

With the rapid transition to online and at-home learning, the absence of family and community engagement (FCE) training have left educators with the inability to accommodate their students and families during these uncertain times. This project explores a series of interviews conducted by parents of color who have experienced the challenges in learning through COVID-19, as well as the beliefs and experiences of preservice teachers as they engage families. The study highlights the necessity for FCE practices in the classroom and create appropriate FCE workshops for preservice teachers. 

There is no place on the American map that is both more haunted or more haunting than Wounded Knee, South Dakota—the site of the notorious massacre of more than 350 Lakota men, women, and children on December 29, 1890 by soldiers in the notorious U.S. Army's Seventh Cavalry. What happened at Wounded Knee remains largely forgotten by most Americans but is remembered with great clarity by those who lost relatives there or are the direct descendants of its survivors.

In 1986, 19 riders retraced the trail undertaken by Chief Big Foot and his people as they fled from Sitting Bull's camp to Wounded Knee. These original riders traveled at night, prayed, fasted, had no support vehicles, cooks, or pre-arranged camp sites. For some, the purpose of this Ride was completed in 1990 when the Lakota marked the 100 year anniversary of the 1890 massacre and held a long overdue Wiping of the Tears ceremony. The Ride proved to be so powerful in bringing together people from the communities of Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, and Pine Ridge (and beyond) that it was started up again in 1992 and renamed the Oomaka Tokatakiya (Future Generations Ride). It has been held every year since then.

Since 2015, Professor Creef has been privileged to participate as a supporter and a rider on the Oomaka Tokatakiya (Future Generations) Ride. Her work in the Lakota horse communities is dedicated to understanding how the horse has been instrumental for the process of healing and decolonization. In Spring 2021, she looks forward to transcribing, organizing, and assembling the archive of materials she has been gathering for this project on the Lakota Horse Nation.

The Wellesley College community garden project supports the development of a student-run, yearly, and on-campus community garden. Beginning Wintersession 2020, a food pantry was started to assist the needs of students remaining on-campus during breaks. The student fellow is working with the Wellesley College community garden and its food pantry initiative. This provides students with access to produce throughout the academic year, and more importantly, enables members of the Wellesley community to help one another.

This project revolves around assistance in online academic research. The student fellow is fact checking databases such as the Vogue Magazine archives, Women's Wear Daily Archives, and the National Archives of the United States. In addition, the fellow is also editing documents, citations, and generating bibliographies. 

Professors Peggy Levitt and Kelly Rutherford are working on a project about cultural and intellectual inequality. Each week, educated people of a certain age are likely to hear about one or two of the same new books from multiple sources—The New York Times, National Public Radio, The PBS NewsHour. That is because readers of a certain class, race, education, and interests look to these places to curate how they spend their cultural leisure time. There is so much to read and look at, they turn to centralizers and influencers to cut through the noise. We are exposed to and consume culture in pigeonholes curated by influential critics and, increasingly, algorithms. We don’t encounter materials that challenge our views—a major source of the political polarization we see through the world. 

Professor Levitt and Professor Rutherford are analyzing how readers and viewers get exposed to things outside their comfort zones. They specifically are working to learn about art and literature produced outside the West— and how they encounter literature in translation and art works made by artists in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The student fellow helps analyze the content of websites that draw readers to “international” works, the role of art fairs in exposing viewers to a more global set of art works, and how art and literary prizes help creators gain international recognition.  

Ports have come to play an important role in governing shipping. They are frequently the location where national or international rules can be enforced on ships, and ports occasionally impose rules beyond those required by their states, including those relating to sustainability. Ports have also, for their own reasons, decided to provide incentives to ships that adopt various private governance measures and some ports have taken measures to make their own options more environmentally sustainable.

This study examines environmental governance measures adopted or enforced by the busiest 200+ ports around the world, during the period from 2005-2018, characterizing which greening measures ports take on (or do not) and when. The ultimate goal is to examine a variety of characteristics of ports and their contexts to determine what leads ports to adopt which types of greening measures.

Children of the same sperm or egg donor and their families, with the help of the Internet, can now locate each other and have contact. Professor Hertz is working on a qualitative paper that discusses how the spot of the donor varies within networks and within nuclear families. She is currently studying the differences between teens raised in single mom, two-mom or a mom-and-dad family around ideas about being donor conceived (such as the importance of both donors and other donor-linked relatives). What kinds of intimate relationships develop? What is the spot of the donor? And how do siblings who live together and share the same parents versus others who only share the same donor (donor siblings) matter to ideas about kinship? 

She is most interested in how family type intersects with these questions. Professor Hertz and her student fellow are also looking at the legal positions around donors in various countries as part of the framing. Finally, the paper is scheduled to be presented at a socio-legal studies conference in Australia. Professor Hertz has collected in-depth interviews with donor conceived children, their parents and sperm and egg donors. Her student fellow is helping with completing data analysis and writing up findings.

Professor Chudy studies the political behavior of racially sympathetic whites, defined as those white Americans who feel distress over black suffering. To date, she has collected over 25 in-depth interviews with white racial justice activists in the Boston area. This summer, her research assistant, Sasha Blachman, coded these interviews using ATLAS.ti, a qualitative data analysis program. Now, her new student fellow is comfirming Sasha's coding by re-evaluating the transcripts. This analysis allows Professor Chudy to calculate intercoder reliability, a measure on the extent to which two or more independent coders agree on the coding of the content. According to Lavrakas (2008), intercoder reliability is “a critical component…without which the interpretation of the content cannot be considered objective and valid.” Singletary (1993) makes this point more dramatically: “if the coding is not reliable, the analysis cannot be trusted.”

The interviews are meant to complement her quantitative research on the role of racial sympathy in American politics and public opinion. The broader book project involves survey data and experiments; these interviews contribute rich narrative that will help Professor Chudy better understand her quantitative results. Before the interviews can play this important role, she has to be confident in their interpretation, which is why this component of the project is so critical. Her student researcher is learning ATLAS.ti and also coding a series of 25 long form interviews. 

This research project explores how COVID-19, national and cross-border mobilizations to address structural racism, and related social, economic, and political disruptions in 2020 have impacted the anti-trafficking field in general and programs and efforts to identify, assist and/or advocate on behalf of sex trade-involved youth and adults in the United States in particular. It also explores how individuals and groups whose work includes some focus on anti-trafficking activities – for instance, groups who work with sex workers and others impacted by criminalization and incarceration – are responding to these intersecting crises alongside their work to address exploitation.

For this portion of the book project Professor Dendere and her research assistant will study the impact of the HIV crisis on democratic consolidation in Southern Africa with a special focus on Zimbabwe.

The recent rise in explicitly prejudicial campaign messaging, along with the complementary rise in rhetorical appeals to pro-minority sentiments, have not been fully explained by current scholarship. This project develops a comprehensive theory to understand the use of, and response to, political messaging that targets racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups. Research assistants will work on two areas of this research project. (1) They will examine Presidential speeches throughout the 20th century as part of a historical analysis into the use of racial appeals. When and how do Presidents talk about these groups and what social and political phenomena help us understand this rhetoric? (2) Find instances of prejudicial and pro-minority political messages by contemporary politicians. Which politicians are using these messages and why?

In this project, Professor Metaxas and his research assistant will examine the effects of social media agitation on online polarization by quantifying the effect of "main actor" nodes in a Twitter polarization network. His study seeks to answer the following two research questions:
RQ1: Can social media actors affect the degree of social media polarization (or consensus) independently of offline events?
RQ2: Do different types of agitators (i.e. individuals and organizations) produce different degrees of social media polarization?
The work develops an experimental methodology – the polarization graph – using data visualization tools that produce a quantitative representation of social media polarization. In answering the research questions above, Professor Metaxas and his research assistant will provide benchmarks to measure online political polarization on a sustained, context-specific basis, and construct the polarization graph drawing from Twitter data. 

This project builds on previous work studying gender differences in how women and men respond to noisy feedback. In a previous paper, “Luck or Skill: How Women and Men React to Noisy Feedback,” we conducted a lab experiment online and found that women are more likely to attribute negative feedback (even when due to luck) to their own ability on a male-stereotyped task, relative to men. Women then choose not to compete in a subsequent task, even though it would pay more. In future work, we are planning to study the impact of noisy feedback on gender differences in choosing a male or female-stereotyped task. Students working with me will either assist on this project or a similar project.

In late June every year, several events simultaneously take place on the historic grounds of The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Park in Montana. The privately run U.S. Cavalry School assembles a group of historical re-enactors who spend one week immersed in the world of General George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry that culminates in a historical re-enactment of their famous defeat at The Battle of Little Bighorn. At the same time, a multi-generational group of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho riders conclude a weeklong journey on horseback that formally ends with a powerful ceremonial charge to the top of what is known as “Last Stand Hill” in order to remember their historic victory over the U.S. Army on June 25, 1876.

One event is a historical re-enactment performed as a public spectacle. The other is a Native ceremony of remembrance that takes place in the form of a Prayer Ride.

Professor Creef's research project bridges these two worlds of Re-enactment and Indigenous Remembering that take place within a few miles of one another and yet never meet.

Professor Creef is looking for a research assistant to help her set up and design a website (on Squarespace) to document how the Battle of Little Bighorn is remembered, help with the process of obtaining tribal IRB (review board) permission, and transcribe and edit taped interviews that reflect the diversity of voices, experiences, and perspectives that characterize these two different cultural events based on the meaning and remembrances of The Battle of Greasy Grass—or Little Bighorn. 

Ports have come to play an important role in governing shipping. They are frequently the location where national or international rules can be enforced on ships, and ports occasionally impose rules beyond those required by their states, including those relating to sustainability. Ports have also, for their own reasons, decided to provide incentives to ships that adopt various private governance measures and some ports have taken measures to make their own options more environmentally sustainable. This study examines environmental governance measures adopted or enforced by the busiest 200+ ports around the world, during the period from 2005-2018, characterizing which greening measures ports take on (or do not) and when. The ultimate goal is to examine a variety of characteristics of ports and their contexts to determine what leads ports to adopt which types of greening measures.

While the sociological inquiry into family-school relationships is longstanding and explores the impact of language, culture, and social class, there has been little attention given to the experiences of novice educators who form their own ideas about their work with families. In my current research project, I take on this very contradiction. How and what are preservice and novice teachers learning about family engagement and how do they describe their experiences with families? What are the enduring dilemmas as well as their aspirations in partnering with families? In this project, I explore the beliefs and experiences of preservice teachers as they enter the classroom for the first time to understand the views and perspectives that they bring into their work as educators, the questions and challenges they may encounter, and the early experiences with students’ families that may shape and influence their evolving practice as teachers. This two-year interview study will examine the experiences of 30 preservice teachers during a critical point of their early career. Interviews will be conducted in three rounds of data collection: at the start of the preservice program, at the conclusion of the preservice program, and at the conclusion of the first-year of teaching.

Hana is assisting Professor Burns in coordinating data from the excavations he co-directs in Greece. The work involves the reorganization of digital images, transcribing written records, and correcting database entries. All of this information will be linked with three-dimensional data in the form of architectural drawings and digital models. If things progress quickly, Professor Burns and Hana will explore the options for improving the website that hosts excavation reports and digital imagery.

Professor Chudy plans is conducting a series of qualitative in-depth interviews on topics of race, ethnicity, and American politics in the Boston area. Specifically, she is interested in understanding why racially sympathetic whites, defined as those white Americans who feel distress over black suffering, engage in political behavior that advances African American interests. She hopes to identify whether these white Americans have common backgrounds or experiences that influence their perspectives with respect to racial politics. Additionally, Professor Chudy would like to understand whether certain networks or institutions are especially influential in mobilizing their unique political behavior. For the last year, she has been developing an interview questionnaire and surveying strategy – the next step is to conduct the interviews and collect the qualitative data.

The interviews are meant to complement Prof. Chudy's quantitative research on the role of racial sympathy in American politics and public opinion. The broader book project involves survey data and experiments; these interviews would contribute rich narrative that will help her better understand her quantitative results. Sasha is assisting Professor Chudy by: scheduling the interviews with respondents, co-conducting the interviews with her, organizing the data and preparing it for analysis.

The global rise of ethno-nationalist rhetoric and policies has led to decreasing protection and access to services for the 70 million refugees in the world today (UNHCR). This problem is especially acute for Palestinian refugees amid America’s defunding of UNRWA in August of 2018. In short, refugee communities live in what international aid agencies term, "protection gaps” where neither host state nor humanitarian organizations can fulfill basic needs and protections promised in the Geneva Convention. Can Internet Communication Technologies (ICTs) facilitate refugee community building and access to resources amidst intractable violence? On the one hand, technology pessimists dismiss the power of ICTs and suggest that the internet leads to apathy and "slacktivism." On the other hand, information ecologists indicate that the Internet is a low cost panacea for sharing information and triggering political action. These perspectives have not been extended to the Palestinian refugee political landscape. Using a combination of Internet data scraping techniques (Selenium WebDriver and Google API), dozens of interviews with Palestinian refugees living in camps across Lebanon, and surveys with the Palestinian diaspora, Professor Hajj finds that ICTs empower refugees to share information and access resources, especially when patterned on pre-crisis community networks of the “ahl” or family and “hamula” or village. Using the example of death rituals performed and broadcasted on “hamula” Facebook pages, she finds that beyond facilitating transnational digital connections with their fractured villages; ICTs help harness the power of the diaspora and generate real world social and economic remittances, or the bonds of loyalty and financial flows, necessary to foment a thriving community.

Professor Joseph has been teaching a seminar on comparative revolutions since he came to Wellesley in 1980-81. Although the structure and content of the course has changed quite a bit over the decades, one of its main purposes has always been, as good comparativists do, to explore, similarities and differences in the wide range of cases that encountered during the semester.

One of the things that most revolutions have in common is the effort by the regime in power to stave off mounting political, economic, and social tensions by implementing reforms, sometimes quite radical, in order to preserve itself by addressing sources of mass frustration and widespread anger that provide fertile ground for revolutionary movements to take root and gather popular support. To note just two examples.

• Russia: The emancipation of serfs in 1861 by Czar Alexander II and the establishment of a parliament (the Duma) in 1905 by Czar Nicholas III;
• China: The abolition of the 2000-year old imperial examination system by the Qing dynasty and the creation of a provincial representative assemblies in 1905.

In each of the above cases, the reform effort not only failed to stem the tide of revolution but actually backfired by alienating many of the regimes most crucial supports and further radicalizing the opposition.

Professor Joseph's project looks at not only the Russian and Chinese cases, but also earlier an earlier one, the French Revolution, and more modern instances such as Iran (late 1970s) and South Africa (1970s-1980s) and will be informed by some of the leading social science theories on the causes of revolutions.

Firms and individuals that invest in foreign assets receive income. The income flows from foreign direct investment (FDI) are heavily concentrated among a relatively small number of advanced economies, such as the U.S. and Japan, which are the home countries for the multinational firms that engage in FDI. These countries differ in how they finance their foreign asset holdings. France and the U.S., both net debtors, issue debt with a relatively low rate of return but own equity assets with higher rates of return, and therefore have positive net investment income flows. Germany and Japan, on the other hand, are net creditors and own more assets than liabilities, which earns them positive income flows.

The host countries for the investments are often emerging markets such as India and Mexico, and they record negative investment income flows. But they earn income from transfers in the form of remittances from their nationals who work abroad. Consequently, investment income and transfer payments, which both appear in the current account, largely balance each other.

This research investigates these flows of income amongst nations. Professor Joyce and his research assistant, Mary, are initially looking at the recipients of investment income to investigate the characteristics of these economies. They will then analyze the patterns of investment income and transfer payments among nations, and the implications for the balance of payments and macroeconomic stability, as well as income distribution.

This project studies the long-term impact of the Green Revolution in India on adult health outcomes. The Green Revolution in India began in the 1960s when advances in agricultural technology led to the introduction of high-yield varieties of various staple crops, particularly wheat. Using a household survey from 2005, Professor Shastry and her research assistant, Jackie, study health outcomes for individuals who were born right after the introduction of these crops in districts with the highest increases in crop yields. They compare these individuals to those born before the Green Revolution and to individuals born in districts with smaller increases in crop yields. Preliminary results suggest that men with more exposure to increased crop yields in early childhood are more likely to report having heart disease and diabetes later in life (no effects have been found for women). The researchers explore whether this unexpected result is explained by differential survival, differential migration, or changes in dietary habits that might lead to these diseases.

Alex is assisting Dr. Williams with data analysis (qualitative and quantitative) from a study of policies related to the investigation and adjudication of sexual assault on college campuses. The research is funded by the National Institute of Justice and designed to provide useful information on the variety of policies in place across colleges and universities and the challenges confronted in policy implementation. The WCW are completing telephone interviews with 100 Title IX coordinators and other key campus stakeholders with knowledge of their institution’s policies and procedures in action. The interviews identify what colleges see as successful approaches as well as current barriers to effective investigation and adjudication of sexual assault. Interviewees provide recommendations for improving responses to sexual assault on campus. Because new guidelines are being released by the Department of Education, this research can provide an important input. Timing is critical and the student will be asked to play a key role in making sure we assemble timely research results to inform policies on this topic.