Discover how several Carleton students have applied what they’ve learned in the classroom to real-world experiences with these multi-media projects:
Monuments, Museums & Collective Memory
Students in Barbara Allen’s POSC 217 Monuments, Museums & Meaning: How Politics Shapes Memory in Artifacts, worked with artists in residence Bevin Mcnamara and Jesse Willenbring; Sarah Cluggish, Director and Curator of the Perlman Teaching Museum; and Sean Leahy of the Gould Library to create museum exhibits focused on significant events that occurred in 2019 and 2020.
The assignment asked them to consider events that would be of interest to viewers fifty years from now in 2071. They were asked to focus on the artifacts and visual representations of their chosen event, with limited captioning and text narratives. They present their work here in the form of a book meant to be viewed online.
Podcasts Examining the News Media and Politics in the U.S.
Professor Barbara Allen’s POSC 100 (Governing with the News), POSC 205/305 (News Media & Democratic Electoral Processes) and POSC 223 (Lab in Electoral Politics) classes have embarked on an original research data collection project.
Visiting artist Bevin McNamara collaborated with the students to produce podcasts and infographic elements pertaining to news coverage of the election.
Political Advertising and the 2020 Elections
Students in Barbara Allen’s POSC 204/304 and 223 classes, Media and Electoral Politics and Lab in Electoral Politics, designed and conducted original research on voters’ views of political advertising. Working in four teams, POSC 204/304 students created political ads with the help of media and design specialist Dann Hurlbert. They learned how voters understand ad tone and content by showing their ads to subjects recruited for an online asynchronous focus group survey — a methodology made necessary by the Covid-19 pandemic, which was also the backdrop to the 2020 election.
Students in the POSC 223 lab course used data from an experiment studying contrast ads with subjects randomly recruited using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics Survey Methodology. The subjects viewed contrast ads created by Barbara Allen and Dann Hurlbert for an experiment managed by Moses Jehng ’22 that varied the sex of the candidate and the voiceover artist. The students worked with data support expert Paula Lackie and presentation and visual design expert Doug Foxgrover to show their research in data graphics. They presented their research in Ted-like Talks filmed by Dan Hurlbert.
Governing with the News
Professor Barbara Allen’s POSC 100 (Governing with the News), POSC 205/305 (News Media & Democratic Electoral Processes) and POSC 223 (Lab in Electoral Politics) classes have embarked on an original research data collection project to produce podcasts and infographic elements pertaining to news coverage of the election.