René Flores

Increasingly, Latino immigrants are steering away from large metropolitan areas, traditional immigration magnets, in favor of smaller, often rural communities. As Small Town USA is transformed by migration, the specter of xenophobia seems to lurk nearby. In recent months, dozens of towns have considered passing laws against undocumented immigrants ranging from criminalizing their labor (Escondido, CA) or penalizing their landlords (Hazleton, PA) to prohibiting their presence in public spaces (Springfield, TN). René will try to discover the factors that motivate the rise of xenophobic sentiments in small U.S. communities. He […]

Vi Do

Vi will investigate the nature of state led health care reform in America, focusing on the instrumental political actors that shape the debate. As federal level attempts to solve the problem of the uninsured have failed time and time again, policy innovations to address America’s broken health care delivery system have emerged from the states. The two critical examples are Hawaii’s Prepaid Health Care Act of 1974, which established an employer mandate for health insurance provision and Massachusetts’s newest reform, Chapter 58 of the Acts of 2006, which introduced an […]

Ziza Delgado

My research analyzes the education reform that took place at UC Berkeley at the end of the 1960s to determine whether social movements such as the Free Speech Movement and Third World Liberation Front affected University curricula and pedagogy. Imperative to the research is a critical discussion of the power dynamic between students and the UC administration. I analyze the effect that the FSM had on curriculum reform, through the creation of a Free University and other experimental programs. The second component of my research looks at the historical context […]

Allene Cottier

Allene Cottier will conduct a comparative study of the various interpretations of the terms Sovereignty, Self-determination and Indigenous in discussions of American Indian politics. These are critical terms in current discussions of social justice. She anticipates that there will be a fundamental fracture in the use and understanding of these terms among governments and the legal and policy establishments on the one hand, and grassroots Native American communities on the other hand. She will compare the use of these terms (and the meaning behind them), in international legal forums, U.S. […]

Chad Vogler

Chad will travel to New York and New Haven to perform research on the unusual interracial collaborations and intercultural exchanges which occurred during the Harlem Renaissance, and this material will be used to compose a series of 25-30 poems. Inspired by recent critical discourses that redescribe modernism as a set of interracial dynamics, these poems will be composed from the perspective of a contemporary author imagining a bicultural past in modernity that potentially effaces the concreteness of the authors racial identity through his anonymity as the poetic speaker. The primary […]

Sabrina Carletti

Sabrina Carletti’s project will inquire into Japanese postwar calligraphy within the Zen’ei bijutsu (avant-garde) movement while focusing on the calligraphy of Morita Shiry_ (1926-1999), who brought radical changes to calligraphy practice by leading the bokujin-kai, or the Human Ink Society. Sabrina intends to depart from the familiar influence model of Japanese and Western avant-gardes by arguing for a more complex understanding of Zen in Japanese modern calligraphy. Sabrina will travel to Japan to study works by Morita at the Museums of Modern Art, Tokyo and Kyoto, and to New York […]

Jordan Troeller

This History of Art thesis project will examine how the contemporary participatory art of Rirkrit Tiravanija overlaps with and departs from the work of Hlio Oiticica in 1960s Brazil. Rather than creating discrete objects, these artists engender interactive situations. Recently dubbed relational art, such installations involve the viewer in various social activities, such as cooking or dancing, thereby challenging the distinction between art and everyday life. While Oiticica’s work emphasizes the relationship between participation and political agency, Tiravanija’s art examines the interface between artifice and leisure activities. Examining the relationship […]

Joshua Arribere

Alternative splicing of pre-mRNA is critical to development and differentiation, allowing metazoans to generate a large amount of protein diversity from a single gene. Despite its importance, our understanding of the factors that influence this process is limited. The objective of Joshs project is to investigate the role of the Fox family of proteins, which have been implicated as splicing regulators. Through experiments with zebrafish he will asses the effect that Fox has on a library of alternatively spliced exons in the hope of better understanding this protein familys role. […]

Samuel Pittman

In recent decades, artists and writers have created self-narrations that deliberately thwart the conventions of autobiography and question even the most contemporary conceptions of the self and self-representation. Inspired by these works, as his ISF honors thesis Sam will create an autobiographical installation entitled Parthenogenesis, a term meaning asexual reproduction, which refers here to effectively creating oneself due to the difficulty of remembering ones past in light of both having very few photographic mnemonics, as well as having faced numerous hardships during childhood which may have caused memory-blocks. In his […]

Javier Aros

America 2020, a creative vision of the political and social realities of the United States in the year 2020, will be an artistic presentation of Javier Aros. Utilizing room sculpture, six large silkscreen poster prints and assorted smaller prints, two wall paintings, ceramic busts, original flags and interactive historical documents and presentations, Javier will carefully design and create a future museum dedicated to the revolutionary and evolutionary events of the teen years of the 21st century. By thoroughly investigating and evaluating revolutionary methodology and methods — from independence from non-renewable […]