Summer 2023 Research Groups

Memory, Community, and Justice in the Anthropocene

For the past several years I have been working on looking at memorials and how they construct community memory and identity. This started with a collaborative research project with a student—we were looking at a memorial to young women killed in Ciudad Juarez, and discovered that the memorial, which we had expected to be sacramental and truly honoring of the victims etc, was actually a slap-dash excuse to avoid really engaging with what happened. I wrote a journal article about that—”Art that Silences and Art that Speaks” (Journal of the Society for the Arts in Religion and Theological Studies, 2017)—and later did another project with a student about the new lynching memorial in Montgomery, AL.

I am working on putting together a collection of these projects. What I’d like to do this summer with students is have each of them choose a memorial related to an environmental justice issue (for example: there are memorials to lost glaciers; memorials to people killed in environmental disasters etc), and research 1) the environmental justice issue or event itself; 2) the memorial; and 3) assess how the memorial serves or doesn’t serve its community in terms of “telling the story” not just of what happened but of who the community is because of the event. Funded by the EthIC Joan Hanson Fund

Hiring 6 students working 15 hours/week for 7 weeks. In person or remote

For more information email Colleen (ccarpenter2). To apply for this position fill out this form.

Daniel Groll will be leading a research group of students who have won a Hanson Ethics Fellowship for summer research in any topic related to ethical inquiry. While students will be pursuing their own projects, they will do common readings, develop research skills, exchange ideas and present results of their research to each other over the course of the summer. The students will be doing research on the permissibility of paternalism, the nature of moral motivation, Chat GPT and plagiarism, the ethics of experimental education movements, and the nature of cults (versus religions). Funded by the EthIC Joan Hanson Fund

State-Level Emergency Welfare

The project is part of a broader study that analyzes state and local government responses to the socioeconomic impact of COVID-19 in Brazil, Colombia, and the United States, as a window into different aspects of the present and possible futures of social protection. My team of students and I will review the U.S. data compiled by the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) with an eye toward correcting its state social assistance scores. The revised data will be shared with the OxCGRT project. We will then reanalyze the overall patterns of aid expansion and retrenchment and select a small number of states to conduct qualitative case studies. These case studies will be based on online media sources and government websites and social media profiles. In addition to tracing the specific relief programs adopted in different states, the case studies will examine government officials’ narratives around aid expansion (typically employing discourses of care, public health and safety, and collective well-being) and retrenchment (which mostly revolved around discourses of work, self-reliance, reducing government overreach, and returning to normalcy). Funded by the EthIC Joan Hanson Fund

Hiring 6 students working 15 hr/wk for 6 weeks.

For more information email Juan Diego (jprieto). To apply for this position fill out this form.

Global Middle Ages

I will be teaching a new course in Winter 2024 on the Global Middle Ages. This type of course is a) relatively new to my discipline; and b) is a key way in which my discipline is responding to the need for diversity, equity, and inclusion. I would like to work with a team of students to research the theoretical basis of this type of course; discover themes, topics, and readings from a variety of world cultures; choose a coherent set of readings appropriate for a 100-level course; and begin to design discussion questions and assignments. Funded by the Humanities Center Trustee Endowed Research Fund.

Hiring 6 students working 20 hours/week for 5 weeks. In person

Students interested in working on this project should email Victoria (vmorse) for more information. To apply for this position fill out this form.