Current Fellows
Cohort 23:
Genesis Bui ’14 is from Pomona, CA and is a Spanish Major. She will be researching the literature of Migration and Immigration in Latin and Hispanic literature. She will be interning this summer with Haverford’s CPGC Partnership Program. She will be working in Mexico City with the Casa de los amigos, a Quaker guesthouse for refugees from Central and South America, and other places around the world. There she will focus her studies on the Central and South American perspective. While on the other hand, Genesis also plans to study abroad in Granada, Spain in order to focus her studies on the African and Asian perspective. Her mentor and major advisor is Professor Maria Cristina Quintero.
Krystal Caban '14 is an English major from Brooklyn, New York. She is interested in learning about the formation of Mixed-race identities and how they are represented and in turn misrepresented throughout contemporary works of Creative Writing; her focus on but not limited to memoir, short fiction and poetry. She is also interested in how popular culture and media choose to define Mixed-race and the repercussions of these portrayals. Krystal will be conducting her project under the guidance of Professor Professor Linda Susan Beard of the English department. This summer she will be based in New York, researching critical race theory.
Archana Kaku is an English and Political Science double major at Bryn Mawr College, with a specific interest in postcolonial studies in the Middle East and South Asia. Her research is focused on how the digital humanities can provide new platforms for minority scholars and the ways in which digital texts create new opportunities for creating and understanding literature from the margins. She is researching ways in which the contemporary concept of the bound book limits minority author's potential for expression with the hopes that the growing world of digital literature can provide a means of redressing these limitations. Her mentor is Dr. Jennifer Harford Vargas, Professor of English at Bryn Mawr.
Karina Siu ’14 is from Wichita Falls, Texas and is a Political Science major and Economics minor. She is interested in political economy and public policy formation. Karina’s research will focus on ways in which capitalism informs a state’s political structure and its effect on public policies and citizens. While attempting to have a broad comparative look at different states and regions, the majority of her research will focus on the United States, Germany, China, and Russia. With help from her mentor, Professor Carol Hager, Karina hopes to address the following questions: How are those marginalized in society affected by public policies and how much is this effect attributed to the role of capitalism in society? Ultimately, she hopes her research will shed more light on the shortcomings of public policies, possible areas for development, and more discussion for the increased effectiveness of policies and protection for these subjugated groups.
Cohort 22:
Sakina Abdus-Shakur, '13 is from Philadelphia, PA and is a Philosophy major and a Creative Writing minor. Her mentor is Professor Robert Dostal. She is interested in exploring the ideologies of self-esteem through the lense of education. Self-esteem is a psychological appraisal of self worth, which is comprised of a correlating beliefs and emotions. In the consideration of belief from the lense of education, she will consider statements such as “I am intelligent”, “I am worthy” and their converses, “I am stupid” and “I am unworthy”. Through philosophical and psychological readings, anthropological ethnography and sociological studies, she intends to explore the implications of positive of negative foundational beliefs of self. The second component of self-esteem is emotions. Emotions that may be felt in relation to education are pride, shame, triumph or despair. How do these positive or negative emotions interact with belief, and affect academic ability? How do people's beliefs and emotions create ideologies of academic affirmation or of academic inadequacies? Can education affect personal ideologies? What roles do beliefs and emotions play in the development of intellect? In order to develop her research on this subject matter, Sakina plans to attend the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Training Program at the University of Chicago this summer.
Rachel Kutten, '13 is from Montgomery Village, Maryland and is majoring in sociology with an English minor. Her mentor, Profesor Robert Washington, will assist her in exploring “cyber racism” and how it is manifested on the internet. She will examine how cyber racism can be found on some internet communities, and the implications it has for the way Americans in particular talk about race offline. Rachel will argue that cyber racism within internet communities that are catered towards Americans can expose and help acknowledge the inadequate discourse about race offline in the United States, which includes using the terms “post-racial” or “colorblind.” Internet communities can provide social support and venues of expression for people who are frustrated about inadequate race talk offline. In addition, the internet as a structure that can resemble life offline allows the mindset of colorblindness and post-racialism to permeate it. Rachel will do a content analysis of internet comments on news stories about the 2009 BART police shooting of Oscar Grant from three different news blogs: dailykos.com, CNN.com, and freerepublic.com. With her methodology she will decipher if these comments about the event come across as racist. By “racist,” it means that these comments would have to include the covert form of colorblind racism or post racialism, concepts that have been accepted offline by some Americans and have proven to belittle the plight of people of color. In the summer of 2011 Rachel attended a research training program at the University of Chicago and created a proposal for her Mellon project. Those who have inquires about Rachel’s research project can send her an email at rkutten@brynmawr.edu.
Jomaira Salas, '13 is a sophomore from Lynn, Massachusetts majoring in sociology with an education minor. Her interests lie on the intersection of immigration and education in the United States and France. She is primarily interested in how public perception of immigration and immigration policy affect educational aspirations among first-generation immigrants. For her Mellon research project she will compare how immigration has defined the educational aspirations of students in Philadelphia and Paris. She is planning on studying abroad in spring 2012 in Paris, France. Jomaira will be conducting this project under the guidance of Professor David Karen in the Sociology department.
Jacinda Tran,'13of Newark, Delaware is majoring in Growth and Structure of Cities with minors in Environmental Studies and Chinese. Her freshman year, Jacinda was assigned to Professor Gary McDonogh, who has now become her major advisor and Mellon Mays mentor. In her research, she hopes to investigate public spaces and their social implications in addition to the issues of accessibility and disparities associated with them. This summer, Jacinda will be undertaking Mandarin language study in Shanghai, China for eight weeks through the Critical Language Scholarship. While there, she hopes to make observations that will direct her research towards a more specific focus. In the spring, Jacinda aspires to carry on her research in Buenos Aires, Argentina or Quito, Ecuador where she will tentatively be studying abroad.