About 70 students showed off their work at the Nott Memorial Thursday, the culmination of their Sophomore Research Seminars.
The poster presentations, by 37 women, and 32 men, covered topics from four sections of the required seminars. They were “Drugs and Cultures” (Prof. Joyce Madancy, History); “Japanese-American Internment in World War II” (Andrew Morris, History); “Balancing Acts: Research in Gender, Work and Family” (David Cotter, Sociology); and “The Beats and Contemporary Culture” (Jordan Smith, English).
“It proves challenging to be able to provide students with a foundation and have them accumulate significant data in a 10-week term,” said Smith.
In addition to exploring the literary and musical influences of the Beat period, students were treated to a visit from Bob Rosenthall, director of the Allen Ginsberg Trust, and former personal assistant to the poet in the 1970s and 1980s.
History major Eric Silverstein took Smith's course because many of his friends were into the Grateful Dead during high school.
“Jerry Garcia took his influence from the Beat generation,” said Silverstein. “The Dead [known at that time as the Warlocks] was a house band for Ken Kesey, a Stanford Graduate School student who held dozens of acid parties at his house.
“To the conservatives at the time, the Beats embodied immorality, revolt, insurrections and mutiny,” explained Silverstein. “But my research showed that it actually inspired further generations of the most successful people, bands and cultures.”
Samantha Beatty, who has designed her own major in public opinion and persuasion, researched the Opium Wars. Beatty found that the protestant missionaries who worked to rid China of opium addiction also played a key role in lobbying the British government to sign treaties that would end the importation of opium from British India.
Sociology major Harris Fendell researched the stigmas surrounding stay-at-home-dads. Fendell found societal prejudices and pressures resulted in many men hiding their status because it was viewed as “unmanly.” The biggest problem was isolation from male friends and many who tried to re-enter the work force found their commitment challenged. The lack of current data has led Fendell to continue the project for his senior thesis.
Beth Solomon, a European history major from Lexington, Mass., found a discrepancy between government accounts of conditions in Japanese internment camps and accounts released later by former prisoners. A 1943 newsreel quoted Dillon Myer, director of the War Relocation Authority, as saying that the prisoners enjoyed spacious 20- by 25-foot apartments. In 1946, former prisoner Yoshiko Uchida described living in a converted horse stall. “The [propaganda] made these camps look like a vacation,” she said. “It makes me wonder about some of the information [about detainees] that is released now.”
Joe Catalano is pursuing a double major in economics and geology. He became interested in Arlie Hochschild's research on the Time Bind (1977) while studying it in class. His project examined correlations between the number of working parents in a household and having children or not with the frequency of church attendance, giving and confidence in the church.
“I found that people preferred working more because their lives at work were more orderly,” explained Catalano. “With both parents working, attendance and giving was down. With churches facing financial concerns due to less giving over the last decade, I think there was a need to focus on cleaning up the scandals to improve confidence and be more flexible in their delivery of content to retain parishioners.”
Julie LaSpina, an environmental studies and Spanish major from Roslyn, N.Y., studied the educational systems in Japanese-American internment camps. She found that while they played an important role in preserving Japanese culture and traditions, most lacked the resources found at comparably-sized American schools.
Union's Sophomore Research Seminars, small courses capped at 20, are designed to help students learn research and writing skills. Like the First-Year Preceptorial courses, they are content-rich courses designed by instructors from throughout the College.