107
Julia Jensen, Chimere Ponder, Savannah Price,
Dr. Davis Houck, Communication and Information
Finding Freedom Summer: History, Oral History, and Memory
In the summer of 1964, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) initiated the Mississippi Summer Project, now known as Freedom Summer. Freedom Summer was dedicated to registering black citizens to vote, creating Freedom Schools for black teenagers, and opening community centers. Those chosen as volunteers, primarily college students, were trained and sent to Mississippi, especially the Delta region where sharecropping was a way of life. In our research, we work to find surviving volunteers, interview them and record their stories. Current research into the stories of these workers has brought detailed accounts of the volunteers’ experiences, but only a select group has been formally interviewed and published. Our research seeks to reach out to any and all surviving volunteers. Through analyzing SNCC and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) papers on microfilm, we gathered an extensive list of volunteer’s names, along with their hometowns and areas they worked in Mississippi. We also recorded colleges they attended, as well as their parents’ names. We used these lists to locate contact information for the volunteers through the Internet. We then contacted volunteers to confirm their identity as a Freedom Summer volunteer and ask if they would participate in the project. Once we have completed contacting volunteers, we will conduct interviews with those who would like to move forward with the project. Our goal is to create an online oral history archive of Freedom Summer in Mississippi and to have it available for anyone wishing to research or learn about Freedom Summer.
108
Rebekah Entralgo-Fernandez, Emilie Jones, Sean Carney
Dr. Summer Harlow, Communication
#IfTheyGunnedMeDown: Social Media Activism in Ferguson, Missouri
The study focuses on the race issues and increased police militarization in Ferguson, Missouri related to the recent murder of Michael Brown. This particular part of the study focuses on the popular trend of the hashtag “If They Gunned Me Down.†Young activists on Twitter post pictures of themselves, both positive and negative, to highlight the media’s opinion of people of color in the news. The tag is meant to show the obvious bias in media portrayal of black victims of police violence through personal images. During the study we studied these images and then complied a sample of 20 images per category (categories being aspects of their personality being highlighted). The tweets show two pictures per post, one negative and one positive, which we group together to find the most common traits presented. From these qualities we are hoping to gain an idea of the way the black community views the medias opinion of their worth. In addition to this information we are also qualitatively coding tweets related to race, black culture and marketing to find celebrities involvement and influence in the issue of police brutality of the black community.
109
McKenna L. Britton, Jamie Karnes, Lane Elizabeth Miller
Prof. Shonda Stevens English
The American Expatriate Literary Tradition
Under the mentorship of Prof. Shonda Stevens, we are researching and studying the American Expatriate Literary Tradition; creating analytical lists of displaced and expatriated American novelists, artists, and poets, and the works they have accomplished and published. Major names recognizable by the general public are Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the “Lost Generation,†but our goal is to widen the public’s view of American expatriate culture, as well as to encompass many more authors and artists who have also done incredible work, utilizing the information we find during our research. Our final goal is a university-level textbook, which will outline the American Expatriate Literary tradition, offering a definition as well as a list of authors and their literary works and travels. The text will discuss various American expatriate authors and poets, the works they have written, and what their works have said about American culture and tradition. We are currently in stage-three of our research; we are beginning to delve deeper into the literary tradition, writing up personal definitions of the movement and conducting research on specific authors and time periods. Each of us has been assigned specific authors and time periods, and we are currently gathering information on these authors the works they have written, what they have written about, where they were stationed while writing, and other appropriate information. /
110
Alyssa Coleman, Ashleigh Singleton, Cory Dowd
Dr. Carol Weissert, Political Science
The Florida Policy Agendas Project
Term limits have a direct impact on legislative behavior. Some speculate that they improve legislative efficiency, while others believe that they hurt the legislative process. By looking at bill length and rate of passage, we have found the latter to be true. Most significantly, we discovered that term limits decrease legislators’ responsiveness. They also encourage them to produce less complex bills that have very low passage rates. Overall, term limits appear to cause legislators to be less effective at their jobs. / Additionally, legislative biographical information is analyzed to examine the impact of term limits. As legislators are termed out of office, new candidates, from a variety of backgrounds, are invited to enter the legislature. It is expected that post term-limited legislatures will have an increase in the number of “non-traditional" representatives (inducing the entry of women, minorities, and other historically underrepresented groups into the candidate pool). / Through the Florida Policy Agendas Project, we hope to “explore discontinuity in legislative strategies before and after the two-stage implementation of term limits in 1992 and 2000â€. We will do this by finding a link between issue attention in the media and policy outcomes in political institutions in Florida. /
111
Michael P. Rivera, Alexandra Rincones, Inge Montoya
Dr. Robert L. Glueckauf, Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine
African-American Alzheimer's Caregiver Training and Support Project 2 (ACTS 2): Phase 2 Objectives and Data Analysis Plan
Epidemiological research estimates 5.2 million U.S. adults have Alzheimer’s disease or a related form of dementia. The prevalence of dementia is higher in African Americans than non-Hispanic Whites, with African Americans two times more likely to develop the condition. Eighty percent of older adults with dementia receive ongoing care in the home from family caregivers. Although caregiving demands are substantial across all races and ethnicities, African-American dementia caregivers spend a greater amount of time in physically demanding tasks (e.g., bathing) than non-Hispanic White dementia caregivers. Previous research has shown dementia caregivers are at high risk for depressive disorders. Although depression-reduction interventions have been effective in improving emotional and physical health, minorities have reduced access to these interventions due to transportation and financial barriers. Lack of religious concordance with these programs also has been an obstacle to uptake. However, studies of newly-emerging, faith-based interventions have shown reduced depression in persons with chronic illnesses and their family caregivers. The objectives of the present investigation are to conduct a pilot study assessing (a) the preliminary effectiveness of faith-based cognitive-behavioral intervention, (b) caregivers’ therapeutic alliance with facilitators, and (c) facilitators’ appraisals of the quality of supervision. The focus of the intervention is skills-building (e.g., problem-solving) and support. Four semi-structured interviews with both caregivers and facilitators will be conducted over the telephone across the 12-week program. Their responses are recorded, transcribed, and content analyzed to assess the overall effectiveness of the intervention, caregivers’ relationship with their facilitator, and other important treatment factors (e.g., program manuals).
