Student Work Showcase
Senior Capstones
American Studies Program
Class of 2010
Ikenna Acholonu
Honors Thesis
The Performance of Blackness in Presidential Campaigns: A Look at Jesse Jackson’s 1984 Presidential Campaign and Barack Obama’s 2008 Campaign
Advisors: Monica Ndounou, Sabina Vaught, & James Glaser
On November 4, 2008 the world witnessed a historic moment as Barack Hussein Obama was declared the 44th president of the United States of America. This occurrence seemed to many unimaginable a few years or even a few months prior to his campaign. For many this was because Barack Obama was attempting to be the first African-American president. Jesse Jackson, another African American male who ran for president, has many similarities that link the performance in his campaign to Obama’s. In this paper I will argue that Barack Obama’s performance of Blackness in the 2008 presidential campaign differed from Jesse Jackson’s in political contexts and campaign structures, racial identities and racial ideology, and their performance of race.
Lewis Bryant
Senior Special Project
Exploring Best Practices for Programs that Prepare Inner-City Urban Black Youth
for Transition into Private Independent Prep Schools
Advisors: Steve Cohen & Jean Wu
Independent private prep schools have been admitting students of color from inner city, low income, and urban backgrounds since the early 1960's. I am personally aware of this because I was a part of the first wave of students fitting this description, to attend these schools (1969). I had the benefit of attending an eight week summer preparatory program (summer 1969) before starting at Noble and Greenough School in the fall of 1969. Since then I have dedicated my professional life to working at a private school in Cambridge, Mass, as the Director of Multicultural Services, and as someone responsible for supporting students like myself. Since I benefited greatly from a prep experience before attending the Noble and Greenough, School, I conducted research to determine best practices to prepare students like myself. I spoke to teachers, administrators, students at my own school, and former prep school students of color (mostly Black). I examined an Achievement Study recently completed by an area prep school, re-read Beverly Daniel Tatum's analysis of Racial Identity Development and how it impacts students of color in predominately white and affluent academic environments, and utilized other references and data. While my conclusions were not news to me personally, I was able to provide and substantiate two critical conclusions: prep programs are important in terms of providing an academic bridge for these students, and early academic success is critical to a student's feeling comfortable and feeling that he or she belongs in his or her new environment. The second critical conclusion I came to is that these students are very concerned about how they will be perceived and received socially; therefore, it is important that any prep program of this nature do everything in its power to fortify and empower these students. At the same time, schools need to invest time and resources into creating a truly diverse and multicultural environment for these students to step into. When these things do not occur simultaneously, students tend to struggle mightily and, in disproportionate numbers, eventually fail! My paper provides some clear and identifiable strategies for prep programs to employ, as they work to support these students and make their social, cultural, and academic transition easier and successful.
Heather Buckner
Senior Special Project
Beneath the Blackening Sky: A collection of poetry, short stories, and essays
dissecting the identity of American consumer society
Advisors: Carmen Lowe & Jeanne Dillon
My project explores how major historical themes of what it means to be a successful American have shaped United States culture into the destructive, unrestricted consumerist society we live in today. Through a collection of analytical essays, poems, and short stories, I attempt to demonstrate how overarching historical themes of success and American identity have fashioned the American consumer culture and furthermore how this obsession with material wealth has been a leading cause of the destruction of the earth and the augmentation of inequalities among different groups of Americans. The project incorporates pieces about the nature and content of consumerism, historical definitions of American success, relationship between historical themes and environmental justice, and suggestions for methods to dealing with these problems. My research has centered on typical framings of American identity, including the historical and social context of the American dream, manifest destiny, and social Darwinism, and the relationship between these themes and consumption patterns. Additionally, I investigated the relationship between these themes and issues surrounding environmental justice. The concepts I critique in this project are not complicated, they are, however, extraordinarily important, but rarely contemplated or challenged. I therefore chose to attempt a project that is unique, engaging, and provoking, in the hope that readers may be inspired to affect change in their own lives and communities.
Edna Gonzalez
Senior Special Project
Counter Stories of Race, Class, Gender in Higher Education
Advisors: Jean Wu & Sabina Vaught
Every year a new class arrives to Tufts University with the hopes of exploring the endless possibilities and the diverse learning environment that Tufts prides itself on. With this in mind, Tufts University focuses on diversity recruitment to bring a diverse class to the Hill each admissions cycle. There were 123 first generation students and 24 percent of students of color admitted in the class of 2013. According to the Tufts Admissions site, “The class (of 2013) embodies the broad diversity that defines our world and this campus.” What defines diversity at Tufts? Is there a support system for these students? What challenges and struggles do these students face during their undergraduate experience versus their white counterparts? The counter stories within this project are focused on exploring and analyzing in-depth structural inequalities, challenges a student of color might face, incidents on campus and how the construction of race, class, and gender within the symbolic and discreet messages the institution and administration produce are expressed. My personal experiences—as a first generation Mexican-American female to transition into college and navigate through structural and dominant ideologies in place within Tufts—are used as memoirs and crucial examples when exploring being an undergraduate student of color at Tufts. Critical Race Theory, Cultural Ecological studies, and past diary entries are used to reflect on the social and intellectual climate of Tufts and to place a framework of social and academic spaces I occupy as a minority. The project will show that not only is there a great burden placed on me to academically succeed, but there are personal and emotional challenges, and spaces that I have been forced to cope with during my undergraduate career because there isn’t a support system that recognizes the urgency and specific needs that first generation students of color require. Systematic change and mentorship are needed in college and are imperative to the well being, success and graduation rates of first generation students of color.
Kyle Halle-Erby
Honors Thesis
“Thanks to DI my child can read:” A critical race theory analysis of Direct Instruction
Advisors: Jean Wu & Sabina Vaught
Developed in the 1960s by Siegfried Engelmann, a White man without a background in education, Direct Instruction (DI) is a curriculum developed through mostly Black test groups and currently used in elementary and middle schools nationwide. Students in DI classrooms repeat small, skill-determined tasks that eventually make up larger concepts in math and reading. Teachers in DI classrooms read from scripted lesson plans, based on Engelmann’s work from the 1960s, and the classroom is carefully regimented. Students, even in kindergarten, typically sit in individual desks, their posture is monitored and there is little variety among the materials available for the students. Drawing on the history of White-led educational initiatives of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the freedmen’s aid societies during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, I use Critical Race Theory to examine how these reforms pathologized Black people, establishing their race and culture as the source of their hardship. Using the theories of colorblindness (Gotanda, 1991; Haney Lopez, 2007), interest convergence (Bell, 1980) and Whiteness as property (Harris, 1993), I investigate how Direct Instruction follows the pattern of White-led reforms that pathologize Black students, thereby producing White supremacy.
Jesslyn Jamison
Senior Special Project
The Relationship Between HIV Medication Adherence, Access to Psychosocial Support, and Mental Health Status: A Case Study of 81 Puerto Rican HIV+ Men
Advisors: Edith Balbach &. Linda Martinez
Studies on Puerto Rican men and their experience with HIV/AIDS are limited, despite the alarming rate at which this population is being affected. “Hispanic,” a term first used in 1970s surveillance reports, is often used as a blanket term and research category to encompass diverse Spanish-speaking groups. The result is a lack of research and information on specific populations like Puerto Rican men, as well as other Hispanic subgroups. This is particularly important when we see that mortality rates have stayed steady for Latinos, while they have gone down for both African American and white populations with the introduction of HAART (Highly Active Antiretroviral Treatment). There is incredible diversity among different Hispanic groups and their experience with HIV/AIDS, and in order to tackle this disparity, it is not sufficient to study the greater Hispanic group. In my paper, I examine the ways in which Puerto Ricans may be distinct from other groups, looking at migration patterns, areas of settlement in the United States, mental health status, networks of social support, adherence to HIV medication, and overall experience with HIV/AIDS. I have looked for correlations between variables using data from the Boston Living Center (a center where I intern which served the HIV+ community), examining self ratings of 1) mental health status, 2) access to psychosocial support, and 3) adherence to HIV medication. I also examined data collected by the center in order to look at prevalence of mode of transmission. The results in this small sample highlight the central role that social support plays in the experience of Puerto Rican men and encourages further research on the topic. If we hope to reduce disparities such as the one we see with HIV/AIDS and minority populations, we have to segregate data and work to design programs and interventions to serve particular groups.
Domonique Johnson
Senior Special Project
It Is What It Is-- Or Is It!?: Literally Dreaming, Artistically Defining
Advisors: Monica Ndounou & Howard Wolf
This project is my search for the meaning of the American Dream, and African Americans' fit into this ideology. I have always heard of it, but was never sure what it was to mean for me as someone whose ancestry does not involve the text-book Ellis Island story. So looking at different leaders of Black History in America, I try to see how they felt the Dream could be attained, as well as how the definition has changed due to the cultural climate. In the end, I shape these different aspects into a definition of the Dream as I see it fit for me...and maybe my people. As an added bonus, I use creative writing as a way to further explain my understanding of the research and to keep the paper interesting and I am in the last leg of completing my documentary on African American Tufts students and how they view the Dream.
Angela Lam
Honors Thesis
Community Development and Viability of Washington D.C.’s Chinatown
Advisors: Jean Wu & Andrew Leong
Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown can trace its origins back to the 1850s, and until the 1960s, Chinatown was a place where children played in the streets and residents chatted with each other Sunday afternoons. However, when one steps into the District’s Chinatown today, one cannot help but wonder if people actually live there amongst the bright lights coming from the Verizon Center concert arena and the popular retail chain stores. People have perceptions of what a Chinatown should look like and what it should offer, such as authentic Chinese food and cheap finds. When they see the Chinatown located in downtown Washington, D.C. with its Urban Outfitters and Starbucks, they dismiss the authenticity and existence of a “real” Chinatown. This thesis analyzes the history of Chinatown in D.C. in the context of general Asian American history, and thus debunks the myths of the District’s Chinatown. Then, I define a “community” and introduce community development models, evaluating whether or not the District’s Chinatown fits those standards. I introduce different plans and strategies that have been designed to keep Chinatown alive through economic and cultural development, brought forth by different stakeholders. However, this raises the question whether or not the District’s Chinatown is still a viable community that needs saving, which is answered at the end of the thesis.
Jenny Lau
Honors Thesis
Implications of the “Visible” Vietnamese American Community
in New Orleans East: The Present and Future of the Asian American Movement
Advisors: Jean Wu, Christina Sharpe, & Andrew Leong
In the mainstream, national coverage of those who survived Hurricane Katrina, only certain narratives were told. Most of the media surrounding the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina focused on the Black and white communities in the greater New Orleans area, and areas that were drastically affected by the storm, such as the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. Images that mainstream U.S. have in their minds from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are television images of African Americans stranded on rooftops waiting to be rescued by the coast guard, and Black faces packed in the Superdome. While much of the discourse surrounding those impacted by Katrina has focused on Black communities, mostly from the city of New Orleans, it excludes the impact that the natural disaster has had on other communities, such as the Asian American communities, which make up a significant part of the population in certain areas. This thesis provides a selected view on how the Vietnamese American population in Greater New Orleans was affected in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, shedding light on certain individual experiences, and the impact the aftermath has had on the overall Vietnamese American community in New Orleans. This work is a compilation of information gathered from a series of twenty interviews and researcher observations. Since the natural disaster, the limited media coverage on Asian American communities affected by the storm has focused on the self-sufficiency and activism within the Vietnamese American community in New Orleans East. I consider what this limited and exclusive narrative means for the community of Village de l’Est (New Orleans East), the Vietnamese and Asian American communities in greater New Orleans, and the ongoing Asian American Movement.
Ariana Matias
Senior Special Project
Latinas in Higher Education and the Impact of Latina-based Sororities
on Academic Retention
In 2003 the United States Census Bureau reported that Latinos outnumbered African Americans, which made them the largest minority group in the nation, totaling 13.3% of the population. Aside from comprising the largest minority group numerically, Latinos also make up the largest group of undereducated people in this country, with an average of only 62% receiving some form of education at the high school level, compared to the national average of high school completion, which is approximately 85% of the general population. Due to the diverse nature within the Latino population, particularly with varying trends in immigration, it is difficult to point to a singular cause for this disproportionate lack of educational attainment. We can, however, attribute limited access to higher education to the historical and systematic oppression of Latinos, creating a virtually inescapable cycle that exists even today. For students who manage to break through the various obstacles and matriculate into college, the problem becomes one of retention. For Latinas with a strong cultural affiliation, the transition into college life differs from that of their male counterparts. Growing up, Latinas are socialized with gender-specific values that conflict with the general college culture: namely, an emphasis on the role of family and patriarchal views of womanhood and feminism. This paper uses existing empirical research and statistical data along with my own personal experiences to argue that Latino Greek Lettered Organizations (LGLOs), specifically Latina-based sororities, provide Latina students with a culturally and gender-specific resource that enhances their academic persistence. Feelings of isolation and the lack of a support system that recognizes their specific needs are sentiments commonly cited by Latinas in college. Latina-based sororities remedy these inclinations by supplying an outlet for Latina students who feel their needs are otherwise inadequately addressed either by school administration or by student groups on campus.
Julia Mitarotondo
Senior Special Project
The Stories of Their Lives: A More Intimate Look at American History
Advisors: Julie Dobrow & Christina Sharpe
Dave Isay, the founder of StoryCorps, a non-profit organization that records and preserves personal stories, states on the StoryCorps website that, “by listening closely to one another, we can help illuminate the true character of this nation.” Expanding upon this, I believe that, as a supplement to the textbook histories that we learn, personal narratives can provide us with a better understanding of American history and can help us to feel less removed from our nation’s past. In my American Studies SSP, I examine the topic of personal, oral histories through the use of research about two prominent American historians, Louis “Studs” Terkel and Howard Zinn, who both emphasized the value of using ordinary voices in their work, and through analyzing oral history interviews that I have recorded with five Tufts students. Throughout my analysis, I speak to the importance of family histories that tend to fall in the shadows of the dominant narratives of well-known historical figures and discuss the impact that the interviews that I conducted have had on my understanding of American history.
Duncan Pickard
Senior Special Project
Arab Americans: A resource guide for high school teachers
Advisors: Steve Cohen & David O'Leary
Scholars have called Arab Americans the “invisible minority,” the “white, but not quite,” and the “white sheep of the family.” These notions of invisibility were challenged on September 11, 2001, when, as one informant told me, “I went to sleep on September 10 an American and woke up an Arab.” This guide provides resources for high school teachers who want to include a unit on Arab Americans in their classrooms to challenge these misperceptions. The guide provides a history of Arab immigration to the United States, probes construction of racial categories, and explores relevant policy debates. It incorporates interviews with Arab Americans to help tell stories of immigration, assimilation, resistance, activism, and identity boundary configurations.
Phoebe Richman
Senior Special Project
Promise Neighborhoods Initiative:
Teacher Advisory Program (TAP) for Somerville High School
Advisors: Steve Cohen & Fran Jacobs
In 2009, the Obama administration and the U.S. Department of Education launched the Promise Neighborhoods Initiative, a competitive planning grant to encourage civic-minded groups and individuals across the nation to design programs that support children and families in low-income neighborhoods. Based on the successful Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City, these Promise Neighborhoods will create a conveyor belt of services to support children from birth through their entrance into college. The Mystic Neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts, is one of the many areas developing its own proposal for the Promise Neighborhoods Initiative funding. Through the lens of this type of proposal, I have developed a plan to implement a Teacher Advisory Program at Somerville High School. This program pairs teachers with small groups of students to provide support, guidance, and consistency throughout the four years of high school. Based on research concerning the lack of engagement students feel with their school communities, and the powerful effect a caring adult and supportive group of peers can have, I established a program that gives students a space to work through the concerns and issues they face and to form close bonds with fellow classmates and a trusted adult.
Samantha Samel
Senior Special Project
The Changing Face of American Portraiture: From Walker Evans to Josh Melnick
Advisors: Adriana Zavala & Ronna Johnson
My paper investigates shifts and continuities in modern American photographic and video portraiture. I concentrated my study on four artists: Walker Evans, who worked during and following the Great Depression; Robert Frank, who shot the portraits that became The Americans in the mid-1950’s; Andy Warhol, who filmed hundreds of video portraits called Screen Tests in the mid-1960’s; and Josh Melnick, a contemporary artist who filmed portraits on the New York City Subway for his exhibition The 8 Train in 2008. My analysis considers the ways in which changes in American culture – particularly changes in social fluidity, popular culture, available technology, and the economic and political climate – have influenced portrait art from the 1930’s to the present. I examine how portrait art in America has changed to both reflect and challenge the shifting dominant visual culture and discourse surrounding it. I also explore what social message each artist hoped to reveal through his project, and how these goals developed alongside American history and technological advances. Finally, my paper studies how each artist’s work addresses the concept of the gaze by dealing with relationships among the artist, subject, and viewer.
Laura Schultz
Senior Special Project
Breakthrough: A Small Learning Community Creating Pathways to College
Advisors: Steve Cohen & Peggy Hutaff
Breakthrough Collaborative is an enrichment program for high potential, low income students in thirty of America's cities. I examine my experience in the Cambridge site over three semesters and a summer internship in which I served as a math teacher to middle school students. The theoretical foundation of my paper is based in Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Additionally, I look at the role that small learning communities and students teaching students play in the success of the program of getting kids on the path to college.
Benjamin F. Smith
Senior Special Project
Needle Exchange in Massachusetts – Capturing the Past and Considering the Future
Advisors: Edith Balbach, Kevin Irwin, &
Joanna Berton Martinez, Cambridge Cares about AIDS Needle Exchange Program Manager
Needle exchange is a harm-reduction intervention in which sterile syringes are provided in exchange for used syringes. Needle exchange programs have been sanctioned in Massachusetts since 1994, though unsanctioned needle exchange services have been provided by activists since the 1980s. Historically, needle exchange has been a social movement of active and recovering injection drug users (IDUs) taking their health into their own hands despite political and social marginalization. This paper captures snapshots of the needle exchange movement in Massachusetts from the late 1980s to the present. Through reviewing media reports and interviewing current and former needle exchange activists and practitioners, I analyzed various barriers to effective service provision and how they responded to those barriers. Needle exchange practitioners responded creatively to barriers they faced in order to balance improving the health of IDUs with legal risks for both needle exchange providers and program participants. Sanctioned programs may offer stability, legal safety, and state support but may be limited in their ability to reach target communities. Hybrid programs which offer institutional support but can also actively reach out to marginalized IDUs may provide the best services.
Jessica Sofio
Honors Thesis
Aspirational Whiteness and the Social Construction of Black Criminality
from Slavery to the Prison Industrial Complex
Advisors: Jean Wu & Christina Sharpe
From 1980 to 2008, the rate of incarceration in the United States increased nearly 500%, with approximately 2.3 million persons in U.S. prisons and jails as of June 30, 2007. Disaggregating the numbers by race, Black Americans, though representing only 12.32% of the total adult population, account for 43.9% of the incarcerated population. Mainstream criminologists view this glaring racial disparity in a vacuum, as a casualty of ineffective or inefficient policies in an otherwise just system because the sanctity of “crime and punishment” and “law and order” remains unchallenged. My thesis argues that the racialization of mass incarceration—what Angela Davis refers to as the “Prison industrial Complex”— is neither anomaly nor side effect, but represents the most modern manifestation of a legacy of racialized punishment in the United States. This historical analysis traces “crimes” and appropriate “punishments” as they have functioned to protect and embed white supremacy and capitalist interests from the era of slavery to the modern Prison Industrial Complex. My goals in conducting such research are threefold;: 1) to complicate the sacrosanct status of “crime” and “punishment” in the United States by applying a racial lens, 2) to make visible the socially constructed, racialized nature of “criminal justice” and the gross profits it amasses as an industry, and 3) to begin thinking about how to center the Prison Industrial Complex in social justice discourse and activism, as it is inseparable from all other social issues and institutions such as education, employment, and neighborhood resource allocation.
Daniel Stone
Honors Thesis
Towards a Culturally Relevant Coaching for Young Men of Color
Advisors: Steve Cohen & Sabina Vaught
Through the ethnographic case study of an urban public high school basketball program, this paper seeks to examine the potential for high school athletics programs to contribute to an additive schooling environment that promotes academic and community success for young males of color. In my analysis I employ Critical Race Theory and the conceptual framework of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy to examine the roles that teacher and coach expectations, cultural affirmation, and community inclusion play in creating a successful schooling environment for male student-athletes of color. The findings of this paper suggest that school sanctioned sports can be a positive educational force for young male student athletes of color. Ultimately, I propose a further investigation of a comprehensive model of coaching in which there exists a cooperative, culturally relevant and consistent relationship between coaching staff, teachers, the local community, parents, and the student athletes themselves. The implications of this study are particularly important as male adolescents of color are overrepresented in exclusionary discipline, unemployment, and prisons, and under represented in higher education.
Lily Zhang
Honors Thesis
Bilingual Education and the English-Only Movement:
A Critical Race Theory Perspective
Advisors: Jean Wu & Sabina Vaught
Debates surrounding bilingual education, race, and the English-only movement are once again taking center stage with the passage of California’s Proposition 227, Arizona’s Proposition 203 and Massachusetts Question 2 – all of which virtually outlaw the use of an English language learner’s native language in the classroom in favor of a structured English immersion (SEI) model. Collectively known as the Unz Initiatives, this movement towards English-only is changing the shape of bilingual education in the U.S. This study is both a critique of the history of bilingual education policy and an ethnography of the complex relationships among language, race, and knowledge in one SEI classroom. I utilize a Critical Race Theory (CRT) framework, specifically applying the concepts of Whiteness as property (Harris), critiquing Colorblindness (Gotanda), and interest convergence (Bell). Based on ethnographic data gathered through classroom observations and interviews with students and teachers, I argue that language is tied to race and thus policy regarding language is in fact race-conscious. The case study determines that the implementation of English-only policy perpetuates and privileges dominant White ideas of language.