Child Studies Department senior research presentation, March 14, 2023.

Dear College Faculty and Staff,

In the spirit of the day, “top of the mornin’ to ya!” Well, we’ve made it through Week 10! I hope your courses have wrapped up nicely and your finals will follow suit. This time of year, many students are hard at work finishing their senior capstones and coursework. I had the pleasure of attending a couple of senior events highlighting their work this week, including the Environmental Studies and Sciences capstone presentations on Wednesday and the Class of 2023 Senior Celebration Luncheon for Child Studies yesterday.

I also attended the artist talk and reception for Threshold, which has been running in the Art and Art History Gallery this quarter. This was a phenomenal collaboration between artists, art historians, dancers and musicians! I do hope you all had the chance to see the exhibition before it finished this week.

Sincerely,

Daniel

Highlights

From February 15-18, members of the English department Simone Billings, David Coad, Matt Gomes, Amy Lueck, Cruz Medina, Heather Turner, Julia Voss, and Scott Wagar presented at the 2023 National Council of Teachers of English College Composition and Communication Conference (NCTE/CCCC) in Chicago, IL. Nadia Nasr from the Archives and Special Collections presented alongside Amy, and Teresa Contino '23 (English, Psychology) presented at a poster session.

Image: Matt Gomes, Amy Lueck, Julia Voss, and Cruz Medina at the Opening Session

Working with Pooja Kher '21 (Neuroscience, Psychology) and Taylor Tamashiro '22 (Psychology, Communication), Patti Simone, Lisa Whitfield & Matthew Bell (all Psychology) published a research article in the journal Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. They examined the interaction between the testing effect (i.e. testing yourself leads to better remembering) and the role of instructions recommending testing. The key finding is that participants are more likely to follow instructions during supervised in-person sessions. In other words, simply providing instructions that self-testing is beneficial to learning is insufficient to change study behavior.

Jimia Boutouba (Modern Languages & Literatures) was guest-editor for a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Nouvelles Etudes Francophones (NEF) titled "Droit de Cité: l’Autre en démocratie ou la bataille pour l’éga-liberté" ("The Right to Citizenship: The “Other” in Democracy or the Battle for Equaliberty"), published in February 2023.

In dominant discourses, migrants are mostly perceived as either victims or villains but rarely as political subjects and democratic constituents. Challenging this view, the aim of this issue is to rethink democracy with respect to migration struggles. In particular, it examines how postcolonial Francophone writers and filmmakers have addressed the so-called “migrant crisis”, the perilous journeys, and the daily human tragedies that unfold before us. How is migration redefined in the current global context? How do literature and cinema present individual and collective journeys as a political mode of existence and a form of active citizenship that transcends borders and barbed wire? Whether labeled immigrants, children of immigrants, migrants, political refugees, asylum seekers, displaced populations, their stories and sometimes deadly journeys (as evidenced by the 71 decomposing bodies abandoned on a highway in Austria in 2015 or the body of a 3-year-old boy washed ashore on a beach in Turkey), put “democracy” to the test, forcing it to question its ideal of equality and inclusion.

Jimia's article “Française, Algérienne, musulmane et lesbienne: Naissance d’une subjectivité politique chez Fatima Daas” was published in the NEF special issue she edited. This article centers on the politics of “sexual nationalism” as deployed in contemporary France, and its impact on queer Muslim women, a group largely overlooked in scholarship, politics, LGBTQ+ and religious spaces. The way LGBTQ rights are increasingly incorporated into French national discourses contributes to establish new boundaries of belonging as well as new exclusions of non-normative ethnic and religious “Others” - Muslims in particular- who are considered inimical to LGBTQ rights. Homonationalism, as defined by Jasbir Puar, not only legitimizes criticism of Islam and fuels Islamophobia across the nation, but it also places French Queer Muslims in a precarious position. The recent controversy generated by Fatima Daas, a young author who identifies as French, Algerian, lesbian and a practicing Muslim, testifies to the way sexual and ethno-religious identities are seen as mutually exclusive, thus constructing Queer Muslims as “a group to be saved” from their homophobic culture and religion. Refusing to be silenced by the imposition of a homonormative model of “visible” queer sexuality, Fatima Daas offers an oppositional gaze and a counter-narrative that disentangles the complex intersections of sexuality, religion, and ethnicity.

Tripp Strawbridge (Modern Languages & Literatures) published an article in Studies in Second Language Acquisition (SSLA), titled “The relationship between social network typology, L2 proficiency growth, and curriculum design in university study abroad.” The article analyzes the ways in which students’ language learning, during study abroad, is dependent on their social development. In particular, it identifies several types of (in-person) social networks that a group of 27 students developed while spending a semester in Spain, and describes the effects of each network type on students’ progress (or, in some cases, lack thereof) in their Spanish language proficiency.

Nancy C. Unger's (History) class on the early colonial era from her Lesbians/Gays in US History course is being repeatedly broadcast on C-SPAN2 and C-SPAN3. The class emphasizes that the colonial laws concerning same-sex sexuality were not consistent with how it was viewed in everyday life.

Recently, alumna Jenna Bagley '17 (Psychology) and Katy Bruchmann (Psychology) published an article entitled "'Are they into each other?" What drinking alcohol and leaving a party together signal to college students about sexual intent" in the Journal of American College Health. This paper, which stemmed from Jenna's senior thesis project, finds that college students perceive leaving a party together as a signal of sexual intent whether or not alcohol is involved. This research has implications for college campuses because misperceptions of sexual intent are linked to incidences of sexual assaults. After two years of data collection, and three years of pandemic-related delays in the publishing pipeline, Jenna (who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Case Western Reserve) is very excited that this important work is now published!

Assistant Professor Nico Opper (Communication) was announced as one of 2023’s Chicken & Egg Award recipients, which recognized eight groundbreaking women and non-binary documentary filmmakers from around the world in the advanced stages of their careers.
   
The award offers a $75,000 grant and tailored, year-long mentorship from some of the best minds in the field. In November, the cohort will travel to the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), where Opper and the other awardees will pitch their current film projects to industry leaders.

Read the SCU feature article on Nico and their work!

Andrea Pappas (Art and Art History) presented her new work at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Her paper, “'My Will and Pleasure': Art and Enslavement in Two Embroidered Pictures of the Chandler Family, 1756-1758” discusses two embroidered pictures that include Black servants, a highly unusual image for embroidery at the time. Both pictures share the complex visual conventions characterizing mid-18th-century colonial embroidery. The resulting visual system, coupled with their materials (fiber) and origins in the hands of women, entailed their banishment from the realm of high art—and from art history. Scholars of textiles have noted in passing that elite families in New England often enslaved others, but Andrea’s paper examines documents from the period and details from these pictorial works in order to excavate the specific connections between these two needlework pictures and slavery in British North America. She argues that the figures of the servants, while not portraits, nevertheless refer to a mother (Sylvia) and her son who were enslaved by the Chandler family. A family history records a song that Sylvia sang in public and Andrea's paper argues that, given the particular historical context, the song should be read as an act of resistance by Sylvia. This paper is part of a body of work that will contribute to her upcoming sabbatical project, one that situates women’s embroidered pictures in transatlantic history and culture.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar