Important: To maintain the safety of our community and help prevent the spread of the COVID-19 Coronavirus, this event has been canceled.
Abstracts
Tara Carr-Lemke
Public Affairs (PhD)
Title of Project: Taking Care of Business: Urban Immigration Policy Choices in a Broken Federal Immigration Regime
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Maureen Donaghy
Graduate Conference Travel or Research Grant Recipient
Many immigrant communities today live under a punitive federal immigration regime: unauthorized immigrants fear deportation, while some authorized immigrants are concerned about racial profiling, the criminalization of their co-ethnics, and the breakup of family and community networks. In this policy environment, an increasing number of localities have adopted their own policies and practices—some accommodating and others exclusionary–related to immigration.
The purpose of this presentation is to discuss the sub-federal immigration policy choices of urban jurisdictions. What have been some of the effects of these choices on the socioeconomic well-being of community members? What are some of the political impacts of the policy decisions? How have community development practitioners responded to both accommodating and exclusionary regimes? What have been the programming and advocacy responses of other entities, such as religious institutions and schools?
Kacey Doran
Childhood Studies (PhD)
Title of Project: An Update to Your Link to the Past: Girlhood and the Zelda Franchise
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Meredith Bak
Graduate Conference Travel or Research Grant Recipient
An avid childhood player of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda video game series and a scholar of children’s literature and childhood studies, Kacey Doran has personal and academic investments in uncovering the separations and connections between childhood nostalgia, character attachment, and the embodiment experience during gameplay. Doran believes that player’s connections (and lack thereof) with the main character, Link, deserve a close look through transmedia, intertextuality, and play theories because of the popular Nintendo series’ ubiquity in video game and material culture. While scholars have previously interrogated the relations between players and their customized avatars, the body of work on relations between players and famous characters is sparser. Examining previous work on The Legend of Zelda series and the gameplay experience more broadly, Doran seeks to explore the potential impact of inhabiting a character known to thousands on the children, or young adults, holding the controller. Additionally, Doran will detail a qualitative pilot study for collecting the oral histories of adults and young adults who played and experienced the steady popularity of The Legend of Zelda series over the last thirty-two years. Moreover, Doran will also interview those whose families were not able to afford the games but have encountered series through other means. Further considerations for these oral histories include the effects of nostalgia, the re-release of the characters (particularly the hero, Link), and the proven inaccuracy of memory. Ultimately, Doran intends to develop methods for negotiating the relations created by video game encounters with famous characters and their pervasive presence in popular culture.
Joseph Giunta
Childhood Studies (PhD)
Title of Project: “Is This Real Or Is It a Game?” : Metamorphic Constructions of Childhood Agency On-Screen from ‘WarGames’ to ‘The Florida Project’
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Meredith Bak
Graduate Conference Travel or Research Grant Recipient
Popular culture representations and social constructions of childhood too often neglect the role of children in society. Their actions, peer cultures, and ability to make conscious moral decisions, frequently invisible to or excluded by adults whose viewpoints shape both the ideologies of childhood and youth representations in cinema, must be accentuated in order to advance the status of childhood within our social hierarchies. The figure of the child onscreen deserves an agency that genuinely reflects accounts of their own lived experiences, far removed from their employment as passive vessels of innocence and nostalgia. Historically, much of the children’s film genre has denoted the subjectivities of their protagonists as inconsequential, circumscribed by the film’s conclusion for a greater moral edification prescribed by adult sensibilities. My research will focus on the evolution of cinematic representations of childhood agency and the dwindling levels of fantasy circumscription employed to assuage adult moral compasses, modernizing constructions of childhood. My presentation examines the young protagonists of WarGames (1983), Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), and The Florida Project (2017), specifically how their particular experiences with manifold forms of play assist in narrative closure and display the potential for childhood narratives that celebrate their unique subjectivities and social status, the insignificance of childhood agency due to adult-imposed pedagogy and moral edification, and the potential for fully realized child narratives in which youthful imagination alone can resolve the narrative’s conflict. I believe sociocultural constructions of agentic children should not be merely permissible; they should be indispensable in contemporary society.
Jazmyne McNeese, Anetha Perry, Lili Razi
Public Affairs (PhD)
Title of Project: Ethnographic Methods in Disasters and Emergencies
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Stephen Danley
Graduate Conference Travel or Research Grant Recipient
Ethnographic methods have been central to the study of disasters in sociology, anthropology, human geography and related disciplines for decades. Increasingly, ethnography is also being employed in applied work in disasters and emergencies. Ethnography is defined by its insistence on an open-ended and exploratory research design, a holistic approach to social and cultural life, as well as an emic and relativistic understanding of how individuals and groups make sense of the world, including how they make sense of disasters. This presentation focuses on three aspects of how ethnographic methods are invaluable to the applied study of disasters and emergencies. First, the presentation describes how conducting in situ participant observation in disaster contexts can provide insights that are difficult to gain through other methods. Second, the presentation describes how a holistic, emic and historically-sensitive analysis of ethnographic data in disasters and emergencies offers a contextually rich approach to understanding vulnerability and resilience. Third, the presentation outlines how auto ethnographic accounts in which the researcher’s own experiences of the disaster or emergency event is in focus affords unique insights into the unfolding of crises. For each of the three aspects, case examples and methodical guidelines are included.
Mary Louise Mitsdarffer
Childhood Studies (PhD)
Title of Project: The Impacts of Immigration Enforcement Policies on Latinx Children’s Health And Well-Being: A Literature Review.
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Daniel Hart
Graduate Conference Travel or Research Grant Recipient
The Latinx population of the United States is its youngest, largest, and fastest growing demographic, making up approximately 32% of individuals under the age of 18 in the country, irrespective of legal status (Patten, 2016). Immigration enforcement policy at both federal and local levels grew significantly between 2003 and 2013. Since this time scholarly work has begun to unpack the impacts that restrictive immigration enforcement policies have on Latinx children and their families. This study reviews relevant literature that addresses the effect that immigration enforcement policies have on Latinx children who reside in households with one or more unauthorized parents (also known as mixed status families), the broader spillover effects to the United States Latinx child population as a whole, and a brief review of immigration enforcement policies that happened at federal, state, and local levels between 1996-2016. Overall, these studies reveal a relationship between restrictive immigration enforcement policies and growing disparities in Latinx children’s access to healthcare, economic position, and educational outcomes. These findings illustrate the negative effects that immigration enforcement policies have on Latinx children’s access to educational opportunities and healthcare, suggest the implications that such policies have on Latinx child health, and elucidate the need for culturally sensitive intervention strategies to prohibit long-term negative consequences to Latinx life course development.
Halle Singh
Childhood Studies (PhD)
Title of Project: Panoptic Gaze – Girl Visibility in Social Media Cyberspace
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Kate Cairns
Graduate Conference Travel or Research Grant Recipient
Panopticism (Foucault, 1977) represents the totality of effect from a mechanistic exertion of power, characterized by complete visibility on subjects and complete invisibility of authority, efficiently maintained by exhaustive surveillance and discipline of the self and others into order. When conjoined with the neoliberal, postfeminist ideology of “girl power,” social media acts in ways parallel; its effect characterized by the individualized state of being, one that is unquestionable, unseen, and unknowable to the beings under complete and real subjection. The fabrication of individuality within the Panopticon is analogous with the neoliberal, postfeminist girl subject as she negotiates her identity toward empowerment on a platform mediated by unconscious contradictions on what individuality truly means.
This paper aims to explore panopticism as it relates to girls’ social media presence within a neoliberal, postfeminist cultural context. In the current neoliberal landscape, Foucauldian notions of discipline and surveillance illuminate how the individualistic, discursive context of social media affects identity development within an ideologically constructed postfeminist (cyber)space. While there has been much commentary on the positive effects of online spaces for identity formation and understanding for girls specifically, panopticism as a critical lens allows for an interrogation into the ideological power mechanism embedded within the space itself. While it’s crucial to talk with girls in how they interpret and use this mediated space, this paper aspires to make space to dually excavate and deconstruct both the inner working of the postfeminist, neoliberal discourse of “girl power” and social media as its disciplining tool.
Lidong Xiang
Childhood Studies (PhD)
Title of Project: Home and Landscape: Representations of Yugur Minority in the Contemporary Chinese Ethnic Children’s Film River Road (2014)
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Sarada Balagopalan
Graduate Conference Travel or Research Grant Recipient
This paper aims to critically analyze the politics of representation in a Chinese film featuring children from the ethnic minority Yugur: River Road (2014) filmed by Li Ruijun. The film is situated within Yugur minority’s cultures and features distinguished representations of the inhabitants where they currently live. As a fictional film that was written and filmed by the dominant Han director, it mainly uses the indigenous language and documentary narration. In River Road, the story focuses on the going-back-home journey of two brothers Bartel and Adikeer, from Yugur ethnic minority. In this paper, I take the paradigm of postcolonial literary studies to “focus on the local and the particular.” Due to the inaccessibility of Yugur’s history narrated from the indigenous lens by the language barrier, I aim to do more politicized readings by investigating how Yugur, as one of the Chinese minorities, is othered and culturally violated in River Road as well as in state-level policies by unfolding the examination through two keywords of home and landscape. The theoretical rationale is mainly based on Rob Nixon’s conceptualization of slow violence, Clare Bradford’s spatio-temporal scheme, and James Scott’s demonstration of statecraft’s simplification process. By weaving the literary and political discourses together, this paper explores the question of why and how Yugur is rendered invisible under the assumed normativity.
See past presentation abstracts:
Graduate Research and Creative Writing Presentation Abstracts | 2019
Graduate Research and Creative Writing Presentation Abstracts | 2018