Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences, we bring the best of you UMBC's social science community to you.
One of the most exciting events on UMBC campus every year is URCAD, the Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day. Each year students from all majors in all fields of study gather to present their research and creative achievements in poster sessions, oral presentations, exhibits, film screenings, and all manner of interactive experiences. This year, around 400 undergraduate students participated in the event, and the projects we saw were incredibly diverse, as well as incredibly impressive. on Episode 18, of Receiving the Social Sciences way back in 2022, we heard from Dr. April Householder, UMBC's Director of Undergraduate Research and Presitigious Scholarship, about all things URCAD. And while I would love to talk about the event itself just as much as we did on that episode, today's show features a bit of a different format.
That's because in the spirit of undergraduate achievement, our production assistant Jean was able to infiltrate URCAD with a handheld microphone to get a feel for the excitement of the event. And so today, I'm proud and excited to hand the episode over to Jean, who will wind us through the crowded chaos of the poster sessions to hear from several student researchers in the social sciences. Jean decided to center this episode on research about the social science of young people, again, totally fitting today's theme. And so now it's time for me to finally stop talking and hand it over to Jean.
Hi, Dr. Anson, yes, I got a chance to talk to some students with some really cool research projects. Okay. It is always so much fun. And there's such a great energy. As a UMBC student, I'm always really inspired by how much work my peers put into delving into questions and projects they're passionate about. And to celebrate that, as Dr. Anson said, I focus my interviews on research projects, which centered on the social science of young people. In just a bit, you'll hear from six really impressive researchers discussing their projects, all revolving around this theme of young people.
First up, we have Rachel Jaslow, a UMBC student here, majoring in psychology, let's hear about her project, entitled Racial Ethnic Socialization Facilitates Civic Engagement in Asian American adolescents through character development.
Hi, I'm Rachel. This is my project over parental racial ethnic socialization, and how that might facilitate civic engagement among Asian American youth through through character development. So this project aims to address like Asian American families and their experiences from COVID-19. So my research specifically looks at how parental racial ethnic socialization, or more specifically, like the transmissions of messages, or conversations between parents and new, and addressing and teaching their youth how to identify racism and other types of like, discrimination. So yeah, that's like one aspect, or like an aspect of my project that looks at how parents are yes, or that socialization process facilitates their youth to participate more and civic engagement or the political activities such as volunteering, protesting, and trying to address the oppressive systems in the US. So another aspect of my project is looking at the mediating role of youth character development. So that's kind of addressing kind of use moral values or moral agency. So really looking at like their individual characteristics and how that might play a role in the association between parental racial ethnic socialization and youth civic engagement. So yeah, just you know, once parents they have these conversations with their children about race, it not only facilitates their youth parish development, but as well as to facilitate their youth civic engagement further, so this research encompass like Asian American youth from Project arrived. So my research is with the CCAD Lab of the Psychology Department. And so I think one of our main takeaways from this project is to keep encouraging parents, like especially Asian American parents to have conversations with their youth, about racial discrimination and being able to encourage, encourage their children and raise their confidence and being able to participate in civic actions.
I thought that this was such an interesting research topic, and one that's super important. As an Asian American myself, I think it's really important to learn about the ways different minority groups can contribute to facilitating civic engagement, and understanding all family dynamics might come into play. It's really fascinating. So thank you, Rachel, for bringing light to this really important subject. And next, we have from the political science department, Pakeeza Awan, with a research project entitled Quantitative Analysis of Youth Incarceration in Maryland's Juvenile Justice System.
Hi, my name is Pakeeza, and I'm a senior. My major is Political Science. And my undergraduate research is on quantitative analysis of you their participation in a Maryland juvenile justice system. My whole focus of my research is pretty much understanding the racial inequalities in the US system with Maryland and how it's affecting color. So I guess the whole thing that I'm trying to see, I gathered my data from the Department of Juvenile Services, in terms of looking at how race is a huge factor, with how we youth of color are put to the juvenile justice system. And compared it to like the racial population, or the counties within Maryland, I got that data from the US Census. So the way that that data is divided, is comparing white people within the counties, and then comparing that to white youth are with the counties. So it goes by white, black, Hispanic, and other Hispanic and other is interesting, because that's all other races that are not white about black. So every other race as Hispanic, American, you know, these are all racial minorities. In Harford County, where white population is white, you are 40%, black, population 60%, within our own county, do 1% of the system. Now preparing that, for example, in Hispanic population with just 6.8% 17% are in the system. And it just shows that one county we're seeing how they are, even though they are a minority, but the population where the county where you are over represented in the system. So the big takeaway is just seeing how like, quantitative data has so much, you know, information or just race plays a huge role, because it's a systemic inequality that is affecting lots of color. And even now, in 2024, we're still dealing with race. So that's the whole takeaway.
Another really important research topic, I had no idea that in the Maryland juvenile justice system, categories of race for incarcerated youth or just white, black, Hispanic, and others, this seems to be super over generalized, learning more about the ways in which people of color are misrepresented in the juvenile justice system. And learning about these systemic issues can help us overcome barriers for youth of color. Thanks for Pakeeza for also bringing light on the super important issue. Next, we have Emanuella Osei a sophomore from the Public Health Department with her project Food Insecurity Among College Students at a Minority Serving Institution.
What's your name?
Emanuella.
And what's your research about?
Yeah, so I'm researching food insecurity among college students. So what is security is the lack of pesticide access and availability of healthy food. So this is caused by a lot of factors but mainly financial barriers, especially for college students like it is really expensive college is really expensive. To them, so they might not have the resources to access to. And I'm interested in this problem because it can really negatively impact one's health outcomes, your mental health, it can decrease academic performance. Like I know when I'm hungry, it's really hard to focus in class. So imagine students that are insecure has to endure this for longer periods of time, this can really affect their health and their academic performance. So looking at the literature, I found that food insecurity is very prevalent among minority serving institutions like HBCUs. It's also prevalent among students, I get the Pell Grant students with disabilities, minorities, like an African American students. So with UMBC being an MSI, I wanted to design a survey specifically for our school to look at the prevalence of food insecurity at UMBC. And also identify students perceptions of the best strategies to address this issue. So from my methods I designed a survey through Patrick's is going to be anonymous. So up until this point, I was getting IRB approval, and I just started today. So now I can start collecting data for this study. But yeah, so I'll be collecting data, I'll have like my flyers, flyers posted around campus. I will also like send it out to various student groups. But there are some limitations. So I'm using convenient sampling, like it might not be representative of the school. And then I'm also using a shorter food insecurity scale, because I don't want my survey to be too long, because that would deter students from filling it out. So I'm using a six item questionnaire. The survey is longer than they asked other questions like demographics information, and like resource utilization information as well. But yeah, in the future, I hope to expand this project, potentially include other institutions, but also work with UMBC. And like the trooper essentials to distribute the survey among like more students a random sample so that it can be more representative.
And what's kind of your big takeaway from doing this?
Yeah, my big takeaway is like the before I did this, I didn't really realize the prevalence of food insecurity, like among college students. I know the reason I got into this because I did an internship at my community like with a local nonprofit, and I noticed that they have a pantry and I noticed like the amount of people that were coming in, so that went to show how prevalent this issue is in my community. But looking at the stats on college students, like college students face this problem, like three times the rate of the general population. And so many institutions have students that are at issue. So if you take away is like this problem really does exist, I get overlooked. And institutions really need to think about ways to you know, address this issue.
It's so inspiring to see fellow students conducting research that will bring a positive impact to this campus. I know that many college students across the country suffer from food insecurity, and UMBC is no exception. Thank you, Emmanuella, for your work and for facilitating change, they'll help our college community. If you see one of her flyers around campus, you should definitely take the time to fill it out and help a fellow student. Up next is a research project conducted by Eileen Wang from the Global Studies Department. Let's hear about her project about slow fashion in the Washington Metropolitan Area.
My name is Lien Hoang, and my research is about the slow fashion movement and the Washington metropolitan area. So, the fast fashion industry is known for its like unsustainable business model, human rights violations or environmental degradation, exploitation of the global south and much more. In response to this we have the emergence of the slow fashion movement, and I am trying to analyze this movement in the Washington Metropolitan Area. And this movement seeks to embrace the values of a circular economy, reduce the throwaway culture and fast fashion by extending the lifecycle of use clothing. And you can see this in the chart right here, where the global commodity chain of fast fashion always ends with disposal, or as low fashion global recycling network starts with disposal and restore resorting to be selling, it goes back to the hands of the consumers. To conduct this research. I do some methods of you know, a Google search and then plugging what I found into Google Maps to create a spatial distribution. One of the most important actors in the slow fashion movement, which are local businesses focused on reselling used clothing, and I'm trying to see how certain socio economic factors influenced this movement. I'm looking at the factors of the type along with their years of opening the medium household income of the zip codes that these stores are in, along with whether they sell classify as luxury and whether they're women owned or not. And I plugged in the addresses of these stores to create a map to see how the distribution and concentration of these doors are in the DMV. My findings point to two vintage stores, nine consignment stores, 10 for stores, and then five church affiliated stores or like church outreach, to create a total of 26 stores. And then the timeline of these businesses here of opening show that there is a growth in secondhand local markets available with five stores opening after 2010 with some even dating back to 1950s. So we're looking at, you know, a projection of growth of this movement. Also, all church affiliated thrift stores there, they don't classify as luxurious we expect us as their donation base. They saw what they receive, so they can't really be as picky as consignment stores 20 out of the 26 stores are located in the coast where the median household income is more than $100,000. And this is a lot higher than the national average. So we can apply that like you know, proximity to DC, government jobs, really make this area like more recession proof. And then to suggest a heavier concentration of businesses in affluent neighborhoods, also implications of accessibility. Why don't we find these stores and lower income areas like Baltimore, why all the good quality stuff in the DMV and not elsewhere. And then six out of nine consignment stores sell classified as luxury. So businesses cater to the audience. If you have affluent customers, you're more likely to sell designer goods. Out of nine consignment stores also identify as being women owned and small businesses. So this connects to how fashion is female dominated, along with how sustainability is usually catered towards women. And then my findings point to a substantial presence of slow fashion in the Washington Metropolitan Area. And this is expected to continue to grow. And for future directions, I would like to see how 85% of use clothes that don't enter the recycling network, I want to see where they're ending up. My biggest takeaway is that there is a overall growth in the slow fashion movement to counteract fast fashion. And, of course, the slow fashion movement has a good reputation for being sustainable. But internally, there's a lot of questions regarding sustainability, gentrification, pricing, and a force like whether they're charity based or not. So we still have a lot of steps to take, and minute, only 50% of it is entering this market. So how do we improve over time, but overall, just that will take some good steps towards at least promoting slow fashion in the Washington Metropolitan Area.
Clothes, fashion, and how I choose to present myself are all aspects I keep up with, and I know many of my friends do too. However, as consumers, it's crucial that we understand the social impacts of the goods and systems we engage with. Thank you Leanne for shedding light on the slow fashion movement. As someone who has transitioned to purchasing mainly secondhand clothes, I've gained valuable insights into the social factors involved in the type of shopping I engage with. Up next we have from the woman's center, a project that might excite some fans of Greta Gerwig 's latest Barbie movie, white, pink and pretty how Barbie is feminism fails as viewers. Let's listen to Carrington Cline and Abby Claytor discuss their research
This is Carrington and Abby from the lemon center. And our research surrounds how intersectional the Barbie movie is. So our research question was how intersectional and Barbies portrayal of feminism. And we did a content analysis where we essentially watch the entirety of the movie, and we broke it down into five different categories. And we saw how well those categories relate to Kimberly Crenshaw depiction of intersectionality. So we did race and ethnicity, class disability and then gender dynamics went into how men are presented in Barbie and how women are presented. And what's at the end, we kind of took away that Barbie is not intersectional. It's very one dimensional and linear and it's feminism. There are a lot of different demographics in the present. So we have a lot of like visibly disabled Barbies. We have a lot of Barbies in Canada, we have Gloria, who was alluded to growing up in a lower class household, but then is shown as an adult having a new car high level position. So you can see that she made her way through the metaphorical class ring. But they're unique experiences within the different levels of marginalization aren't really touched on or talked about in the movie. It's kind of just there. It's stated, but it's not built upon. And it's the role of intersectionality to not only recognize these different layers of marginalization, but to talk about what it means and how it can change their experience. So yeah, that's kind of what we took away from that. And intersectionality coined by Kimberly Crenshaw, I can just give a quick definition and kind of looks at the ways in which different layers of marginalization whether it be racial gender, There's a class of physical ability anything can create an entirely different lived experience for a person and completely change the trajectory of their life. So when you take that and you apply it to the movie, you can see that while you see a bunch of different characters with different levels of marginalization, it doesn't impact them at all, they're still all the same all the Barbies thinks the same all the Barbies accuracy, and all the trends are like cookie cutter, hegemonic men. So it doesn't really have an impact, which is not what intersectionality is about. And because Barbie is such a big movie, and I think it grows over a billion dollars, and everyone knows that everyone's seen it, it's very important that it takes to intersectionality which is called the gold standard of feminism. And it communicates in a way that it's easily digestible to audiences who might not be familiar with like feminist literature from the scholars. So that's why we cared a lot about this movie because we knew about the popularity of it, but we wanted to be a little bit more critical of how we digested the feminist material.
As the highest grossing movie of 2023, I think we've all at least heard of the Barbie movie or the Barbenheimer phenomenon that took over last summer. So I believe the work of Carrington and Abby, along with their fellow collaborating researchers Ash Acuña and Tanzila Malik is crucial given that this extremely popular movie has been praised as a feminist film filled with representation, it's essential to analyze it critically. After all, if it's being hailed as the standard, it should undergo thorough analysis. And as Carrington and Abby discuss though, the movie presents a certain type of feminism, it falls short of being intersectional and therefore not fully embodying what true feminism entails. Next, we have Ziegfried Byrd from the political science department with their project Keyboard Warriors: An Analysis of Sudden Politicized Spirals within YouTube Comment Sections of Non-political Videos
What's your name?
Ziegfried Byrd but you can call me Zeke, Z-E-K-E.
And so yeah, talk about your research
Yeah. Like, specifically, I was interested in like the online kind of political spirals that I've been seeing, specifically with YouTube comments sections. And there's a lot of research into kind of the right wing get conservative angle, but there isn't really any research I could find on progressive and left this angle of discussing political spiraling. And this is specifically for YouTube video content that is considered non political. So like, beauty videos, cosmetics, like showing that off cute puppy videos, content, farm videos, like you know, millions of views, nothing apparently political about it, but the comment sections always devolve into some terrible political spiral and moral perfectionism issue. Of course, this is recorded, so you can't like see it right now. But like in the center of the poster, there's like this huge thing of moral perfectionism just like, you know, big words of that. And that's like, I feel is one of the biggest takeaways from this entire research and like, this is our research. Like, I just want to start conversations with people I want people to be not aware of this but cognizant of it, because everyone is aware of it, at least subconsciously if they're on the internet. But like, it's so common that going on your comments section, you're gonna find people just like devolving into debates. And sometimes even when you do bring it up, you get called reductive you get called like in leftist spaces, at least like it's called leftist infighting. If you bring up things and criticisms, and you're like, hey, we're devolving into unhelpful arguments with each other that always end up back at judgment of character. And that is something we just have to learn how to manage that and work with it, because it's not going away. It's part of us now.
I know I've fallen victim to a doom school session, where I've spent an embarrassing amount of time on my phone, especially on YouTube. Gen-Z was raised in the age of digital media, and we're definitely influenced by it. Therefore, understanding the social dynamics present in the media that we engage with on a regular basis is super important, especially as social media so interconnected with communicating and extremely influential on how we form political opinions. Zeke's research is definitely important and really insightful. Again, thanks to all of the students for quickly chatting with me. I definitely learned a lot. As I said before, it's inspiring to be on a campus that celebrates students and their efforts to understand dynamics present in the world that interests them. Investigating and researching these issues can facilitate change and initiate conversations that better not only are UMBC community, but society as a whole. That's it for me back to you, Dr. Anson.
What a wonderful celebration of student achievement. URCAD is a great event every year and I'm so glad that Jean was able to serve as our guide. Stay tuned for our next episode, which promises to bring you more great social science research, more Jean, and more opportunities. As always, to keep questioning.
Retrieving the Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our director is Dr. Christine Mallinson, our Associate Director is Dr. Felipe Filomeno and our undergraduate production assistant is Jean Kim. Our theme music was composed and recorded by D'Juan Moreland. Find out more about CS3 at socialscience@umbc.edu and make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent CS3 sponsored events. Until next time, keep questioning.
