Author: brownet

Rachel Goldstein

BA ’17, Sociology

Each year, the Muslim Jewish Interfaith Dialogue Group, also known as MuJew, collaborates with the Ginsberg Center to organize an Alternative Spring Break Trip. This service learning experience functions as a way to give back to the broader community while strengthening bonds between the two religious communities. This year, we will be returning to the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, a refugee resettlement center in Utica, New York.

During the week of spring break, we will be doing a variety of jobs at the center, including setting up apartments for newly arrived refugees, working with refugee children, and other general housekeeping projects. We will also be attending talks and classes to help us learn more about the resettlement process and the experiences of immigrants in the United States.

The MuJew Alternative Spring Break also has a religious component. We’ll be observing the dietary laws of both religions, attending Jumma and Shabbat services at a local Mosque and Synagogue, and engaging in nightly dialogues about the differences and similarities between the two faiths.

Library Mentor: Sue Wortman

Linda Grace Fisher

BA ’16, Organizational Studies

This project will provide resources for tutors in Proyecto Avance: Latino Mentoring Association, a free tutoring program for members of Washtenaw County’s Latino community. The purpose of this project is to find and provide access to academic, ESL, and culturally-specific resources for our tutors. Our tutors have demonstrated the need for more resources by making many requests for support relating to questions such as how to tutor students learning Common Core Math (because our generation of tutors never learned Common Core). Since our organization serves around 100 Latino students and has more than 50 tutors, this project will provide a huge benefit by enabling us to make valuable resources available to everyone in our organization. This project is unique in that it will provide students not only with basic tutoring resources but will also focus on helping tutors understand multicultural tutoring strategies they can apply when working with Latino students. Our tutoring program operates at the Ann Arbor District Library, so this program will allow us to collaborate with and combine the resources of both AADL and U-M Libraries in order to provide tutors with access to the greatest possible number of resources.

Library Mentor: Angie Oehrli

Maxwell DeNies

PhD ’19, Cell and Molecular Biology/Mechanical Engineering

Cells are composed of highly interconnect complex networks of proteins, nucleic acids and metabolites. Within these networks, proteins are largely responsible for cellular function. To better understand which proteins are involved in specific pathways and how they modulate cell function, we use mass spectrometry based proteomics to identify proteins and quantify their abundance. However due to cellular complexity, traditional proteomic data can be difficult to interpret and is fundamentally limited by temporal resolution.

In this proposal, we will build upon recent technological advancements in spatially resolved proteomics and use our knowledge of chemical isotopes to design novel compounds to add temporal resolution to mass spectrometry based proteomics experiments. Similarly to live cell imaging, the addition of temporal resolution to our experiments will allow us to study how protein dynamics change overtime—without the visual constraints associated with microscopy.

In collaboration with the chemistry department, we will develop a synthesis strategy to create structurally identical chemical compounds with different masses that we can distinguish by mass spectrometry. Consequently, by enzymatically tagging proteins with differentially massed compounds we will add temporal resolution to mass spectrometry based proteomics. We believe that our new technology will be widely applicable in cell biology research.

Library Mentor: Ye Li

Lauren Darnell

PhD ’20, Romance Languages & Literatures

In 2003, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru released a final report on investigations of internal conflicts from 1980 to 2000. Although gender-based violence was recognized, the report excluded testimonies of the forced/coerced sterilization of approximately 300,000 women and 20,000 men—largely from rural, poor, and indigenous communities. This omission granted impunity to Alberto Fujimori’s regime, evading their responsibility for perpetuating systemic violence. In 2014, the Quipu Project was founded in collaboration with victims of forced/coerced sterilization, providing an alternative platform where these victims’ oral testimony could be heard.

The Quipu Project raises awareness of impunity and institutionalized violence in global and neoliberal frameworks, and needs the help of volunteers to translate collected testimonies, making them accessible in English, Spanish, and Quechua. As a form of expressing transnational solidarity with the victims in Peru and other parts of the world, in January of 2016 we will screen the interactive documentary developed by the Quipu Project and present a multimedia exhibition, which will display in Shapiro Library. In early February, to assist the Quipu Project with the testimonies, we will sponsor a weekend translation-solidarity event at the Language Resource Center through which we hope to connect with various locally-based solidarity networks.

Library Mentor: Gabriel Duque

Rebecca Chung

MSI ’16, Information

What does it mean to see a rare book online, but not touch it? Why not reconsider the book as a made object and edit for significant physical properties? These questions drive the Wolverine Press’s edition of a famous sheet of paper: Hamlet’s “to be or not to be speech,” as printed in the Second “Good” Quarto (1604). The sheet, called the “G” gathering, contains eight pages of the third act when folded. Unlike a digital image, our sheet is meant to be handled by readers so they can experience the design and material features of handpress books. The letterpress work is done by University students, who learn printing as emerging creative writers, artists, librarians, and researchers.

The University of Michigan 2016 Shakespeare Exhibit coincides with the Folger Shakespeare Library First Folio 2016 tour. In addition to the Hamlet edition, the Press will print a keepsake for the gala dinner. Both projects include printer’s ornaments reproduced using the MLibrary Design Lab’s 3-d printers. This use of 3D printing is experimental, and further presses on the boundaries of editing and surrogacy for works of high intrinsic value, by bringing together both the preservation and the makerspace resources of the library.

Library Mentor: Sigrid Cordell

Ruth Burke

MFA ’17, Art

This socially-engaged art project explores acts of storytelling and mark-making through the experiences of marginalized women in Detroit. I will collaborate with 20 women who utilize the YWCA, the only domestic abuse shelter in Metropolitan Detroit, and record anonymous video narratives that illustrate a memory in or at a specific location in Detroit. We will create a mark from powdered pigment at the specific places and, through photographic documentation, record its evolution over a four-week period. The YWCA does not currently have arts planning. As we engage in this collaborative creative gesture, this work allows women and their stories to be heard, respected and acknowledged as active and valuable members of the community.

Library Mentor: Meredith Kahn

Michael Budros

MPH/MPP ’17, Health Management and Policy

Students Engaged in Global Health (SEGH) and the Health Policy Student Association (HPSA), student organizations sponsored by the School of Public Health, are hosting the first annual Global Health Case Competition. The purpose of this event is to highlight global health at the University and engage students in a multidisciplinary, real-world exercise. The case scenario will require the use of creative thinking across different disciplines. Teams of three to four students from different schools and disciplines will work over the course of a week to develop an innovative solution to a pre-designed scenario. The teams will then present to a panel of experts from within and outside the University, competing for cash prizes and the opportunity to represent the University of Michigan at a virtual case competition hosted by Emory University later in the semester. Winners will not only receive cash prizes, but also gain valuable experience working to tackle a complex problem with limited time and resources. We hope to see students learn more about the topic area and develop skills that will translate well into their careers in the future.

Library Mentor: Preet Rana

Tarlise Townsend

PhD & MPP ’21, Department of Health Management and Policy (PhD) & Ford School of Public Policy

Many communities in Detroit lack access to affordable, safe, and reliable transportation. Yet without adequate transportation, an individual is less able to arrive at work or school on time, shop at grocery stores that supply healthy foods, use social services and programs, access health care, and maintain social connections. The emergence of ridesharing and car-sharing services like Uber and ZipCar has created alternative modes of transportation for some groups. However, preliminary research by our team of Dow Fellows and public health PhD students has found that these new models (together termed “shared-use mobility”) may actually reinforce the challenges faced by already disadvantaged communities. Building on this initial, more informal investigation, we hope to conduct rigorous qualitative research examining three unstudied but important questions regarding mobility among underserved communities in Detroit. (1) In what ways is shared-use mobility creating opportunities and/or new barriers to mobility? (2) How do these opportunities and barriers vary by subgroup (age, racial and ethnic identity, gender, and so on)? (3) What policies or programs have potential to overcome any identified barriers? Our project is built on the premise that shared-use mobility could disparately impact more versus less advantaged communities, and that—because of their rapid emergence in recent years—these issues have received insufficient attention from researchers, government, and industry. We aim to help fill this gap.

Library Mentors: Darlene Nichols and Judy Smith

Moira Saltzman

PhD ’20, Linguistics

Talking dictionaries are online tools for language acquisition and revitalization, which feature audio and video materials along with words and definitions. Jejueo is a critically endangered language spoken by 5,000-10,000 people on Jeju Island, South Korea, and in a diasporic enclave in Osaka, Japan. Under contact pressure from Korean, Jejueo has undergone rapid attrition (Kang 2005, Kang 2007), and most fluent speakers of Jejueo are now over 75 years old (UNESCO 2010). The present situation in Jeju is one of language shift, where fewer than 10,000 people out of a population of 600,000 are fluent in Jejueo, and Jejueo rapidly shifting structurally to Korean (Kang 2005). The Jejueo Talking Dictionary features audio clips of Jejueo words, and video clips of natural language use to allow Jejueo learners to see each word within the context of its cultural and historical significance, as well as in Jejueo grammatical constructions. The dictionary compiles existing annotated video corpora of Jejueo songs, conversational genres and regional mythology (Kim, Yang, Rositano, Tran) into a multimedia database, supplemented by original annotated video recordings. Words and definitions are accompanied by audio files of their pronunciation and occasional photos, in the case of items native to Jeju. The audio and video data is tagged in Jejueo, Korean, Japanese and English so that users may search or browse the dictionary in any of these languages. Our intention for the Jejueo Talking Dictionary is to create a language revitalization tool suited to the needs of diverse user groups, such as elder speakers within the community, young semi-speakers in schools, and the international scientific community.

Library Mentors: Yunah Sung and Jennifer Nason-Davis

Shima Sadaghiyani

BA ’19, Psychology

Culture is often considered in psychology as a monolithic construct, but that does not accurately represent the ways multicultural individuals experience their cultural identities. Multicultural individuals, as I define them for this project, include biracial individuals, migrants, and those holding hyphenated identities (i.e. Muslim-Americans). Beyond a simple measurement of the degree to which one identifies with each cultural group, we are interested in the relationship between these multiple identities. In this project, we seek to shed light on some factors that might contribute to an individual’s sense of Bicultural Identity Integration. Photovoice methodology (https://photovoice.org/) will allow us to achieve our research goals while putting power into the hands of the participants. After our participants have taken their photographs and created captions, we will have them engage in debriefing focus groups where they will have a chance to discuss their photographs. The photographs, captions, and the focus group discussions will be coded to identify common themes that may arise for participants, answering our research questions. These photos will be displayed in the form of an exhibit to help educate the public, and based on the findings and the directives of the community group, we will write a report for policy makers, university officials, or some other institution of power, informing them of our results and encouraging social change in a way that our participants suggest.

Library Mentor: Rebecca Price