Undergraduate Research Day Projects
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/10657/2212
Organized by the University of Houston Office of Undergraduate Research and Major Awards, Undergraduate Research Day is an annual event showcasing exceptional scholarship undertaken by the UH undergraduate community.
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Browsing Undergraduate Research Day Projects by Department "Comparative Cultural Studies, Department of"
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Item Barriers in Re-entry Faced by Formerly Incarcerated Women(2022-04-14) Moursy, SondosThis study aimed to identify how we can utilize intervention points to alleviate barriers faced by women in re-entry and shift their generational trajectories. Data analysis revealed consistent causation between low-income women and recidivism. Additionally, the largest perceived barrier by women in re-entry was reported to be a lack of educational and vocational opportunities. Based on these findings, we collaborated with SERjobs and various other partners to create an equitable integrated education and training workforce development initiative to promote environmentally responsible behavior and maximize access to economic opportunities in the green economy. This initiative will take place in nine most underprivileged neighborhoods that houses historically underrepresented populations such as female black and Latina youth. The ultimate goal of this ongoing re-entry project is to build a robust network of services to serve as a safety net for people in poverty so that they don’t fall into cycles of incarceration. Decreased rates of arresting and incarceration have historically been associated with higher economic opportunity and an overall increase in the quality of life of the community’s residents. The next steps are to collaborate with the city of Houston Mayor’s Office and Harris County’s district attorney to prioritize funding for re-entry and propose alternative solutions to incarceration.Item Buddhism and Spiritual Technologies Amid the Pandemic(2022-04-14) Nguyen, JimmyThe pandemic offers an opportunity to reflect on the place that spirituality has in contemporary life. Old religious traditions evolve and Buddhism, particularly, has become decontextualized spiritual practices. My research explores whether decontextualized Buddhist practices are appropriate and therefore assesses the pragmatic value of spirituality. It looks at several different Buddhist spiritual technologies and how and why they are used. For this project, I studied 7 primary sources that include Theravada, Mahayana, Tibetan, and Zen Buddhist texts. Additionally, I attended 2 Buddhist retreats, one focusing on insight meditation and the other on disrupting habitual reactive cycles. I argue that the reappropriations of Buddhism in the West should be celebrated because its diversity is a product of its own religious outlook, namely, its doctrine of skillful means. By acknowledging the pragmatic functions that a spiritual education has, religion could find its place in the secular world with a refreshed purpose for its existence. Religion is a humanistic endeavor responding to the human condition, aimed at increasing the quality of each living experience. Optimal mental health in the face of suffering is its goal.Item Ceramic Analysis in Atzompa: Maintaining a millennium old tradition in Zapotec utilitarian ceramics(2023-04-13) Valades, LeonThis project is focused on the topic of utilitarian ceramics at the archaeological site of Atzompa and how the contemporary potting town of Santa Maria Atzompa has maintained a ceramic tradition for over a thousand years. When talking about utilitarian ceramics, we usually refer to kitchen ware such as bowls, plates, cups, comales, pots (ollas), jugs, jars, apaxtles and casseroles. I analyzed the similarities between utilitarian ceramic pieces of prehispanic times at the archaeological site of Atzompa and the potting town of Santa Maria Atzompa, which includes the continuity of utilitarian utensils, the kilns that were used to make pottery and the economic importance behind utilitarian ceramics in the central valleys. While conducting my research, I was able to see the continuity of utilitarian ceramics at Atzompa through the types of utensils produced in prehispanic times and today, through the methods of production and how essential utilitarian ceramics is for Atzompaï's economy today.Item Collaging Identity: Poetics to "Un-One" the Filipino(2022-04-14) Morillo, JackThe Filipino identity is wrought with colonial and imperial encounters, with nationalisms, reclamations, and appropriations, with memory and history, and with precariousness. This project is an attempt to cohere the complexities of this identity, or at least understand its multiplicity, through the queer, aesthetic, and analytical framework of the collage. The collage offers an attentiveness to relationships, their quality, the visions released and generated from them, the act of construction, and the intention, lack of control, and/or violence implied in the act of assemblage. What is asserted in this lens is the precariousness of identity, the persistence of memorial and historical encounter, relational necessity, the generosity of ambiguity, and the embrace of the unsettled.Item Fatphobia as a Hinderance to Illness Diagnosis(2022-04-14) Bickel, AspenThis project seeks to isolate the effects of medical fatphobia on individual health and the effect encountering this bias has on time to diagnosis for chronically ill and disabled people. Studies as far back as 2002 have shown medical discrimination against “obeseâ€� patients to have a serious effect on patients psychologically, and a scoping review published in 2019 showed that the situation for “overweightâ€� patients remains the same. Within the Disabled community, stories of fighting biases against size, gender, and race to be diagnosed or receive treatment are extremely commonplace. Despite related fields having substantial bodies of work regarding this, Anthropology has left the subject of Weight Based Healthcare Discrimination predominantly unexplored. 6 virtual interviews were conducted with individuals between the ages of 18 and 35 who have experienced fatphobia from healthcare providers. 4 out of 6 (66.67%) reported experiencing being denied testing or treatment because of their weight. Only 1 of these 4 challenged their physician and received the test needed, they were diagnosed because of the results of the test. The longest diagnosis seeking period reported was over 7 years, primarily because the individual was repeatedly denied testing due to weight blame.Item Outing Tsara'at, the Torah's Queer Plague(2022-04-14) Hall, AudreyThe word “leper” brings to mind stigmatized images of leprous human bodies rotting, oozing, and falling to pieces. English Bibles use the word “leprosy” as a mistranslation of the mysterious ancient Hebrew concept “tsara'at.” Tsara'at is a phenomenon lying somewhere between curse, omen, disability, and infectious disease. This project pursued the question, “Why does the Torah consider tsara'at to be tum'ah (polluting)? Hebrew scripture describes a system of ritual purity, social order, and philosophical worldview in which classification is key. Priests determined whether or not to diagnose someone's skin (or fabric belongings, or house) with tsara'at. Positive diagnosis would be grounds for someone's quarantine and banishment from the communal spaces of the Hebrew nation. I cross-referenced a few dozen works in rabbinic and contemporary biblical scholarship to identify five themes which illuminate tsara'at as a threat to the priestly system. I also examined older texts from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, which describe concepts and rituals the early Hebrew religion seems to have absorbed later on. The themes I drew out of my literature review include 1) contagion, 2) ambiguity/anomaly, 3) sexuality/body fluids, and ugliness/disability. Scholarly interpretations generally indicate that tsara'at brought up concerns with who and what could be said to belong in the Israelite community. Bodies which fell outside of an accepted epistemological framework signified danger, pollution, and divine disfavor. My senior honors thesis will look at tsara'at through a queer theological lens, to make meaning of all this for LGBTQI+ readers of the Hebrew Bible.Item The Archaeology of Spatial Patterning: A Test Case from the Magnolia Quarters in Natchitoches, Louisiana(2018-10-18) Hill, PaigeIn the Gullah culture - descendants of slaves living on the Sea Islands and Carolina lowcountry - the presence of a kitchen is what makes a family a family. This links back to essentially unchanged pre-Antebellum ideas in that area that evolved from West African cultures: the kitchen was the center of a family’s interaction with the community, and what made the family a part of that community, also linked to the direction north. Historians and archaeologists argue that enslaved African Americans acculturated into European culture, and this phenomenon of African cultural ideas affecting the daily lives of the enslaved was limited to the Eastern United States, due to the frequent absence of plantation owners and associated cultural freedom.This project aims to look elsewhere in the Southern United States, to see if the same ideas of directionality and kitchens are present on other plantations. Utilizing database analyses of sub-floor artifacts from two-room cabins on the Magnolia plantation - occupied pre-Emancipation by two families, and afterwards by one family per cabin - we will determine if a consistent decision was made post-Emancipation to place the kitchen in the northernmost of the two rooms. A project of this nature has not yet been done with enslaved and tenant farmer populations in the central Southern United States, and, if found to be true, suggests that historians and archaeologists must view the culture of enslaved African Americans as having evolved from African cultural ideas, and not from a forced acculturation into European culture.Item Tourism in Wadi Rum, Jordan: An Anthropological Examination of the Bedouins’ Contemporary Cultural Adaptation(2022-04-14) Haddad, TatianaItem Tourism in Wadi Rum, Jordan: Bedouin Cultural Commercialization and Economic Agency(2023-04-13) Haddad, TatianaThis project focused on examining the extent of cultural adaptations made by the traditionally nomadic pastoral Bedouins of Wadi Rum to facilitate and encourage the growing tourism sector in Jordan. The development of a commercial tourism industry in Wadi Rum has prompted a wide range of observable cultural changes, such as the shift from sole reliance on portable goat-hair tents for shelter to the construction of sprawling resort complexes in the desert. Understanding these cultural changes and their future implications is crucial to determining the sustainability of commercial tourism in the region. This project consisted of a widespread literature review covering socio-political critique, onsite fieldwork and interviews, ethnographic records of the Wadi Rum Bedouin, and scientific assessments of the environmental status of the Wadi Rum region over time. This project found that commercial tourism, in conjunction with economic, political, and environmental factors, has resulted in the alteration of Bedouin culture and society in Wadi Rum to accommodate tourism. Large-scale commercial tourism is unsustainable in the long term for both the Bedouins' culture and their native environment. Ecotourism must be further explored as a sustainable, environmentally-friendly form of tourism that can still allow economic autonomy for groups such as the Bedouins.