Voting Rights in the United States with Lisa Tetrault

Did you know that American citizens have no right to vote? None. The United States is one of the only constitutional democracies in the world that does not enshrine this right in its founding charter. Not only did the nation’s founders punt on creating one, social movements have also never succeeded in creating one. Yet we hear all the time about how different groups won the vote: Black men in 1870; women in 1920; everyone else in 1965. Again, nope. So what, then, have voting rights activists won over the centuries? And how and why has an affirmative right to vote never been achieved? This book project looks to answer those questions, starting with the U.S. Constitution and working forward to the present.

I’ll happily train all students on the skills needed. Work will be largely in digital sources. Class requires your commitment to work independently, as a lot is work you have to find time do on your own — to get in your weekly hours. In truth, that’s the hardest part of the class, the self-discipline. If you have that, or want to practice it, come join me in sorting out this history.

Open to up to two students. Interested students should send an email to Professor Tetrault and include information about your interests in this project.

Environmental Justice and Human Rights in Latin America with John Soluri

For information about the content and requirements of this research training course, email John Soluri.

About Research Trainining Courses:

This course is part of a set of 100-level courses offered by Dietrich College departments as independent studies for second-semester freshmen and first- or second-semester sophomores in the college. In general, these courses are designed to give students some real research experience through work on a faculty project in ways that might stimulate and nurture subsequent interest in research participation. Faculty and students devise a personal and regularized meeting and task schedule. Each Research Training course is worth 9 units, which generally means a minimum for students of about 9 work-hours per week.

Prerequisites/restrictions:

• For Dietrich College students only;
• minimum cumulative QPA of 3.0 (at the time of registration) required for approved entry;
• additional prerequisites (e.g., language proficiency) may arise out of the particular demands of the research project in question.

By permission of the relevant professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Students sign up for these courses through both the History Department and the Dean's Office.

 Mapping Segregated Medicine with Ezelle Sanford

As part of a larger project tracing how African Americans used St. Louis’s Homer G. Phillips Hospital (1937-1979) to engage in political, social and economic struggles for equality and full citizenship in the United States, “Mapping Segregated Medicine” is a digital history project designed to chart the greater record of what historian Vanessa Northington Gamble calls the “Black Hospital Movement” across the twentieth century. Using GIS technology, it maps important health institutions that served Black communities in the Jim Crow era and overlays them with demographic data from the US census.

In visual form, my project reveals the impact of American healthcare desegregation in the 1960s. Analyzing the effects of hospital closures and mergers amid an increasingly privatized hospital system, my project attempts to answer the following questions: What did the network of healthcare institutions available to African Americans during the period of racial segregation look like across the United States over time? To what extent did the network of African-American-established and Black-serving institutions spread across the United States? What happened to this network of health institutions after American hospitals were desegregated in the 1960s?

“Mapping Segregated Medicine” is intended to be used as a teaching tool to complement my more extensive project. Mapping this institutional network will provide new insights into an extensive African American health network in the Jim Crow era. It illustrates the extent to which segregation impacted where African Americans could obtain healthcare and enhances our understanding of how shifting African American populations themselves played a role in shaping the development of American healthcare.

For more information, email Ezelle Sanford.

The Art and Science of Making Medieval Manuscripts with Alexandra Garnhart-Bushakra

Making medieval manuscripts involves a type of alchemy, which bridges techniques associated today with fine artistry and scientific experimentation. Even the word "manuscript" emphasizes our ability to create through a physical act, where manus (“hand”) and scriptus (“written”) must come together to commit one’s ideas to the page and, eventually, posterity. Indeed, a manuscript served multiple purposes: Its text not only revealed hidden truths to its intended readers, but its illustrations, miniatures, marginalia and also lettering represented a set of skills that scribes passed down from one to another over many generations. In the pre-modern era (i.e., before the 1500s C.E.), books emerged as objects of prestige, and both their display and circulation became priorities to those fortunate enough to possess them.

In this course, students will have the opportunity to study — and ultimately, make — their own manuscripts, all while learning more about medieval attitudes towards natural history, reading cultures across the Mediterranean world, and “bestsellers” that long predated the printing press. This project will introduce students to the hands-on process of creating a manuscript from beginning to end: Students will be expected to review primary and secondary sources; to prepare materials such as historical inks, pigments, dyes, waxes and foils; to practice calligraphy and illumination design; and to learn about the history of scripts through a brief primer of paleography. Participants can also assist in the development of teaching materials for the course. Knowledge of the Greek alphabet, Latin abbreviations and/or French may be helpful, but such expertise is not necessary to succeed in this class.

Open to one or two students.

Interested students should send an email to Dr. Garnhart-Bushakra to discuss the possibility of participation and their goals within this project.

Phonetics/Phonology Interface & Typology (Ph2IT) with Christina Bjorndahl 

The Phonetics/Phonology Interface & Typology (Ph2IT) Lab conducts production and perception experiments on human speech to better understand cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the speech systems of the world's languages. Research assistants can be involved in running research participants and analyzing phonetic data. Prior experience with linguistics and/or speech analysis is beneficial, but highly motivated students can be trained within the lab.

If interested, please email Dr. Christina Bjorndahl.

Latin American Comics Archive with Felipe Gomez

This project involves research of Latin American comics. The course will teach the basics of Comic Book Markup Language (CBML, a TEI-based XML vocabulary) for encoding and analyzing the structural, textual, visual and bibliographic complexity of digitized comic books and related documents. Student researchers will assist in:

• editing, marking up and structuring digitized Latin American comics;
• reading and subjecting these texts to interpretation, making inferences and embarking in theoretical explorations of issues according to given criteria.

Long-term results of this project entail possible inclusion of encoded materials in the Latin American Comics Archive (LACA), an award-winning Digital Humanities project; collaboration with national and international students and researchers; and perhaps a published work (for which student participants would be acknowledged as contributors).

Open to one or more students with at least low-intermediate level reading skills in Spanish.

Interested students should send an email to Prof. Gomez and include information about your interests in this project.

The Language of Pain with Seth Wiener

This interdisciplinary research looks at the exciting intersection of linguistics and medicine. Specifically, how we use language to express the severity of physical pain. The student will join a collaborative research team, which includes a linguist and pain doctor. The student will work with the team to help with the literature review on language and bodily pain. The student will also work to improve and develop questionnaires aimed at describing pain using simple pictures and words. Finally, the student will help carry out small pilot studies to test basic hypotheses related to language and pain. The ideal candidate is interested in medicine, language, and/or psychology.

Open to one or two students.

Interested students should contact Professor Seth Wiener.

Promoting Equity in Mental Health Through Language Access for Immigrants with Kiyono Fujinaga-Gordon

Mental health services rely on language as the principal medium of diagnosis and treatment; patient-provider conversational alignment is consequential for immigrant health and wellbeing. Our project investigates multiple and specific facets of language assistance to inform best-practice guidelines and policy surrounding language access and interpreter services. Three key questions target:

1. assessment of patient-provider-interpreter concordance in emotional communication,
2. comparison of patient-provider concordance in language characteristics during multilingual medical conversations, and
3. evaluation of conversation characteristics and modality of interpreter services that yield best patient satisfaction, patient-provider alliance and psychological health outcomes for immigrant families. F

or the RTC program, students will work on literature review regarding multilingual language service in mental health practice.

Open to more than one student.

Interested students can send an email to Dr. Kiyono Fujinaga-Gordon to schedule an interview.

Radlab – Radical Pedagogy Lab with Candace Skibba

Traditional educational models often perpetuate systemic inequalities and limit critical engagement. Radical pedagogy, drawing from the works of Paulo Freire, bell hooks and Henry Giroux, seeks to dismantle these barriers by promoting participatory, student-centered learning experiences.

The Radical Pedagogy Lab (RadLab) is a research lab dedicated to advancing the theory and practice of radical pedagogy, with a focus on empirical research, curriculum development and community engagement. The RadLab explores methods that are being carried out in higher ed classrooms with the goal of being inclusive. Preliminary research suggests that there is very little in the way of student voices regarding how they feel the classroom (documentation, space, instructor, assignments, assessments, rubrics, feedback, etc.) contributes or does not contribute to their feeling of safety and belonging. For this reason, in the RadLab students and faculty work together to collate a robust bibliography referencing other research that has been carried out. This initial research then informs the design and implementation of peer-to-peer surveys, interviews and focus groups that aim to understand the student experience of inclusivity in the classroom. Students shape the Lab's understanding of current bibliography, topics that invite conflict and assignments that seem oppressive. This RadLab serves as a hub for transformative educational practices that empower marginalized communities and promote equity in learning environments.

Contact Candace Skibba for more information.

 Coups D'etat, Mercenaries, and U.S. Military Exercises with John Chin 

John Chin is seeking research assistants for one or more political science research projects. One set of projects involves investigating, writing historical narratives and coding data on:

1. the sordid post-World War II history of coup plots (conspiracies to depose leaders that are not actually attempted, perhaps because the regime discovered and thwarted them);
2. the pre-World War II history of coup attempts; or
3. the post-World War II history of mercenary attacks.

A second project involves coding data on U.S. joint military exercises since the 1970s to understand the evolution of U.S. military diplomacy and deterrence priorities. Other projects related to sharp power, democratic backsliding, and/or civil resistance and nonviolent revolutions may be available upon inquiry.

Interested students can email Professor John Chin.

Research Training with Paulo Carvalho and Kenneth Koedinger

Email Paulo Carvallo and Kenneth Koedinger for more information on this course.

Research Training with Kasey Creswell

Projects:

1. Drinking in Young Adult Duos (DYAD) Study: The purpose of this research study is to gain a better understanding of alcohol use in couples. Young adult couples will be asked to come into the lab to fill out surveys and drink an alcoholic beverage together.
2. Empathetic Connections: The purpose of this research study is to create a new lab-based interactive paradigm to assess empathy.

Open to multiple students? Yes, but we want to have a strong GPA from high school or first semester at CMU (i.e., 3.5 or above).

Contact: Please email Dr. Creswell's lab manager Greta Lyons.

Raising Anti-Racist Youth with Catarina Vales

Millions of children around the world grow up in racialized societies – societies organized along racial lines historically, politically and economically. It is well known that children growing up in racialized societies develop racialized thinking patterns – they come to represent the socially constructed notion of race as a relevant category for making predictions about individuals, interpreting ambiguous evidence, and making friendship choices. These racialized thinking patterns persist beyond childhood and cause harms to individuals and communities. In this project, we try to understand not only how racialized thinking develops during childhood, but also how it can be changed with experience and learning. Towards this goal, we study:

1. how racial diversity in picture books children are exposed to may change racial biases in preschool-age children; and
2. how conversations about historic roots and present-day manifestations of systemic racism may help challenge racialized thinking patterns in school-age children.

Open to more than one student.

Questions should be sent to Dr. Catarina Vales.

The Role of Metacognition in the Development of Reading and Comprehension with Erik Thiessen

Children’s cognitive skills develop rapidly from toddlerhood to primary school. Between ages three and six, children’s communication, problem solving skills, formal reasoning abilities and social behavior all make rapid strides toward maturity. One of the key components of this developmental process is the ability to monitor one’s own thinking, referred to as “metacognition”: thinking about thinking. This skill continues to be used throughout the lifespan, and individual differences in metacognition are predictive of outcomes in a wide variety of domains. Our goal in this project is to examine when and how children use metacognition, in particular in relation to feedback during problem solving, and comprehension of stories and conversations. This project involves a wide variety of different tasks, including creation of stimuli, interacting with children, collecting and analyzing data, and communicating results with other members of the lab and the university community.

Contact Professor Thiessen by email and include information about your interest in this project.

Research Training with Michael Tarr

Email Michael Tarr for more information on this course. 

Research Training with Simon Cullen

Email Emilie O'Leary for more information on this course. 

Navigating Social Identities in Social Interactions with Michael Trujillo

Students will be introduced to the development and formation of social interactions amongst marginalized communities. The research examines how stigma contributes to health outcomes and social functioning and the underlying mechanisms that link stigma to these outcomes, with a focus on physiological, affective, behavioral and cognitive domains. Students will read articles on the topic, develop technical skills through the use of psychophysiology equipment, and have hands-on experience assisting with research studies related to this topic. There will also be opportunities to examine, collect and interact with data throughout the experimental process.

Interested students should contact Professor Trujillo.

Auditory Perception with Laurie Heller

This course provides students with research experience in the area of auditory perception. Students will assist with research projects in the Auditory Perception Laboratory, obtaining hands-on experience with various aspects of conducting research. Students will gain experience in study design, participant recruitment and scheduling, working as an experimenter, data collection and data management/analysis including acoustic analysis and possibly sound recording and sound synthesis. For example, students may conduct an analysis of the acoustics of sounds which have similar perceptual qualities, or they may run an experiment in which listeners judge the causes of sounds, or listeners may do tasks seemingly unrelated to the sounds they hear and show evidence of unconscious priming when sounds and words (or gestures) are related.

Open to more than one student.

Contact Professor Heller by email, and include information about your interest in this project. Students with a special interest in sound synthesis and/or matlab programming should bring attention to that interest.

Research Training with J. David Cresswell

Email J. David Creswell for more information on this course. 

Research Training with Julie Downs

This course provides students with research training and experience in the area of decision science. Students will get training with commonly used tools including Qualtrics for building online surveys, spreadsheets for managing data, producing basic statistical output, and an introduction to the statistical package R for data visualization and reports. Most training will happen through self-paced tutorials, with the opportunity to put these skills to work helping with ongoing projects or creating a sample project of their own. Motivated students can turn this training experience into ongoing independent research in future semesters with relevant faculty.

For more information, contact Julie Downs.

Research Training with Danny Oppenheimer

With permission of instructor only, this is a one-on-one research apprenticeship in which students get hands-on experience working in an active behavioral research lab. Students will be trained in various experimental protocols and are expected to act and perform at professional standards while engaging in cutting edge research that will ultimately be published in peer-reviewed journals to contribute to the scientific literature on human behavior.

For more information, contact Danny Oppenheimer.