2022 Summer Research Programs
This project is at the Youth, Media, and Wellbeing Research Lab at the Wellesley Centers for Women (youthmediawellbeing.org). The fellow co-organized and co-facilitated an intensive week-long virtual workshop on imagining positive social media spaces with up to 25 6th-8th graders from across the country. The primary goal was to create more pipelines for STEM engagement in girls of color during a key developmental period of STEM and social media identity development. Collaborating with our Youth Advisory Board to shape the curriculum and recruitment plan, the fellow co-led ice breakers and small group discussions, and assisted with archiving and coding the workshop transcripts, and will analyze workshop evaluation data. Secondary tasks included conducting literature searches, writing summary reviews for reports and manuscripts, creating tables and infographics for project findings, and providing editorial assistance for a National Science Foundation grant proposal. In addition, the intern was invited to attend a weekly writing group at WCW, potentially developing a blog, infographics, or social media posts to highlight research lab findings.
In this project, the fellow assisted in creating an ethnographic and archaeological history of ritual violence and how it has influenced and shaped society. Stemming from archaeological practice to the present, ritual violence occurs at various frequencies. The student assisted on researching various ancient societies’ and ethnographic accounts of ritual violence. They analyzed the development of social complexity in relation to how states sanctioned various forms of violence over time and space. In doing so, this project served as the scaffolding for future career interest in anthropology, sociology, psychology, humanities, and bio/chemistry. This research culminated in a visit to Professor Schaeffer's research facility in Atlanta, GA (Georgia State University and Emory University), where they obtained wet-lab experience working with archaeological sacmples and integrating critical social theory and analysis.
Covid-19 was first discovered in China in December 2019, and since then it created a pandemic that was differently by different countries and with variable failures and success. China still appears to be one of the few countries that manages the pandemic effectively, albeit with a strict protocol and a heavy hand. The fellow conducted a thorough reading and review of China's news and social media, to reveal how the strict bio-political power was exercised, analyzed what kind of compliance or resistance it created among the people, and the metaphorical ways that Chinese authorities and people discussed and managed the pandemic.
This project added to our understanding of the cultural evolution of counting systems and children’s development of natural number concept. Children, despite learning how to recite from 1 to 10 by 2.5 years -old and hearing frequent numerical input, take another two years to work out the logic of counting – i.e., that the last number counted to summarizes how many are in the set. Adults from cultures without count lists are unable to represent large numbers, and error when asked to match sets greater than 4. These findings support the claim that natural number concept, instead of being innate, is a cultural construction. A precursor to the invention of counting is the use of tallies, external symbols to represent the number. Usually, one tally stands for one object, and its users possess the understanding that two sets placed in one-to-one correspondence are numerically equivalent (aka, Hume’s Principle). An unanswered question is whether the notion of tallying is readily transparent or is yet another constructed concept en route the evolution of counting systems. Classic Piagetian conservation tasks, showing that children fail to infer equinumerosity of two one-to-one aligned rows of objects, suggest that children initially lack an understanding of Hume’s Principle and thereby the concept of tallying. However, people have the intuition that children naturally use fingers to represent number, and historically tally systems often begin with fingers. The present project explored what 3- to 6-year-old children know about tallying with novel tasks such as asking children to infer the numerical contents of a box by watching a person tallying with fingers as objects enter and exists the box.
This research project explored the experiences and narratives of preservice teachers (students enrolled in a teacher education program in preparation for K-12 public school teaching) through a series of interviews conducted over a two year period of time. This three-year study came to a close during the summer of 2022. The fellow prepared and analyzed the final round of interviews as well as exploring the data collected over the three-year study, gaining experience reviewing interviews, coding data, writing analytic memos, and reviewing the literature.
Although poverty in the United States has been defined by the federal government as the lack of income required to provide family members with basic necessities, scholars like Desmond and Western (2018) argue that poverty needs to be understood in social terms: poor people in the United States experience a lack of social integration. Desmond and Western’s argument builds on Sudhir Anand and Amartya Sen’s (1997) scholarly contribution to the field of economics, where both scholars proposed a measure of poverty that, “involve[d] not only the lack of necessities of material well-being, but also the denial of opportunities of living a tolerable life” (Anand & Sen, 1997 as quoted in Desmond, 2018). Desmond and Western further explain that the poor are denied the ability to feel fully secure and fulfilled in a community that does not recognize them as part of the community’s history and mythology. This project explored how Mexican immigrant women experience social integration and how the denial of social opportunities perpetuates hardships in their lives. This project is of importance due to the hight contestation of poverty and immigration in the U.S. Thus, this project aimed to demonstrate an inclusion of immigrant communities in understanding poverty not only as a lack of income but also as lack of social opportunities.
This project aimed to develop an intersectional understanding of the finances of programs targeting the poor, situating these programs within the larger landscape of financialization. The project considered racial and gendered capitalisms as they relate to financial systems in the United States, India and South Africa, focusing specifically on cash grant and loan programs in the late 20th century and early 21st century that target these countries’ poorest residents. In an era of widespread microfinance, cash transfer and welfare-to-work programs, how do state programs work with financial institutions to leverage racialized and gendered understandings of marginalized target group recipients in order to build sustainable businesses? How and why might these symbolic and political constructions undermine the ostensible purpose of those same programs while at the same time extracting financial value? While this project focused on 2-3 programs in each context, such as on NREGA in India, cash transfers in South Africa, and TANF in the U.S. The fellow worked on identifying beneficiaries, and how beneficiaries qualify for the programs, and learning to interpret the vast policy literatures in each of these locations from a feminist and critical race theory perspective.
The Culture and Family Development Lab examined how cultural and family processes shape development and well-being across the lifespan. The fellow participated in the Family Development Project, an ongoing study of stress and well-being in Chinese American immigrant families. The project examined how Chinese American immigrant parents pass on beliefs of race, social status, and social mobility to their adolescent children.