Ep. 39: Pi Sigma Alpha Undergraduate Research Confrence

3:02PM May 9, 2023

Speakers:

Dr. Ian Anson

Dr. Carolyn Forestiere

Hannah

Katherine

Maggie

Keywords:

umbc

students

research

poster

little bit

immigrants

people

political

study

death penalty

talk

inequality

political science

schools

country

important

idea

project

pi sigma

topic

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 UMBC's social science community to you.

I don't always get to take this podcast on the road, but today I'm delighted to bring you a special episode of Retrieving the Social Sciences that was recorded live on the second floor mezzanine of the UMBC Public Policy building. The occasion? The Pi Sigma Alpha undergraduate research conference. An event sponsored by the National Pi Sigma Alpha organization and UMBC's Omicron Ada chapter. This organization is the nation's political science undergraduate honor society, and it recognizes academic excellence in this social science discipline through scholarships, research support, and conferences, just like the one I recently visited.

The co-advisors for UMBC's chapter of Pi Sigma Alpha, are Dr. Carolyn Forestiere, and as it turns out, yours truly. Because as it turns out, I wear a lot of hats on this wonderful campus. You already know plenty about me if you've been a longtime listener, so instead, I want to take a moment to talk about my wonderful colleague. Dr. Forestiere is a Professor in the Department of Political Science, and an accomplished scholar and teacher, having recently won the presidential teaching professor award at UMBC. A very big deal among many other accolades. Dr. Forestiere's passion for student research is on full display in my brief interview, which I'll bring you in just a moment. But the real fun of this episode that I was able to attend, is the fact that the entire Pi Sigma Alpha conference allowed me to feature more than a dozen micro talks of undergraduate political science research. There's so much to discuss, I had so much fun talking to all of these students, and I want to dive right in.

So today, I'm here at the Pi Sigma Alpha undergraduate research conference with the co advisor of Pi Sigma Alpha, Dr. Carolyn Forestiere. Dr. Forestiere, tell us a little bit about Pi Sigma Alpha, and what the heck is going on here on the second floor of Public Policy today?

Sure, Pi Sigma Alpha is the National Political Science Honor Society. And we are the Omicron Omicron Eta chapter here at UMBC. Our students are eligible to apply for Pi Sigma Alpha when they have high GPAs and I've taken a certain number of political science courses, and they've sort of distinguished themselves as being very advanced students. So we have I think, right now, for this cycle, we have at least 35 students that have joined Pi Sigma Alpha in the fall of 2022 and spring of 2023, so that's really great. And our main event, the main thing that we do as a chapter, is we hosted this conference. So we apply for a national grant, we get one, and we do what you see here. And so all of these students have made this very important step from being, becoming a producer of research. So they've gone from being a consumer of research to a producer of research. And so all of these projects represent the different academic activities that the students have done. And it's really exciting because as undergraduates, you know, you usually think of these experiences as being limited to graduate students and faculty. But we empower our undergraduates and say, Look, don't let that paper or report that you wrote, just sit in your computer. Bring it out, let it come alive, present it in front of people, talk about ideas, get ideas for future research endeavors, and just enjoy the day. And that's what we do. This is the 13th year we've done it. We get food, we have the posters, and we have these great conversations taking place and it's a lot of fun.

Yeah, speaking to this excitement that you mentioned, I can definitely feel some excitement around this room. I think the students are really eager to be presenting their research. Tell us a little bit about kind of your impressions of the student research. What is what are the kinds of topics that come out of it? You know, what are the students doing?

Well, what's what's exciting is that we have a we have one paper about UMBC alone, right? And it goes all the way up to the world. And you know, so we have, there's a paper here about different counties in Maryland, Maryland as a whole, the country as a whole, different states, different countries. So we see research spanning a wide variety of topics and very much so take a look at the list because you can see all these different topics. But what is really exciting for me as an instructor, is to work with the group as they're all nervous about presenting you know. They're like I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if it's advanced enough, nd I say just give it a shot, you know, just try right.

And they've create it. I mean, obviously, this is an audio medium, but if you were here in person, you'd see these beautiful posters in full color. So they create these posters somehow, right?

That's right. And we do a workshop to show them how to create a single slide in PowerPoint, with text and pictures and visuals and charts and graphs, and everything. All the all of the material that they need to help support the arguments that they're making. But it's really fun to work with them in the beginning, because they're nervous. And then at the end of this experience, they're going to be empowered. And that's I've 13 years of doing this, I see this all the time you see this look in their faces, like I have to talk about my research and my ideas, but after the first 2, 3, 4 and you can see them getting that confidence and their legs become more stable. And you know, they you can see them like using their hands more and really showing them parts of the poster that they want to emphasize. It's very exciting to watch that that process happen. And I think that that's part of the UMBC brand and part of our department's brand, that you know, we have great instruction in our classes, but we really want the students, the ones that can, to take it to the next level and be part of these conversations. And I think that that's the most important message here that from being an undergraduate doesn't mean that you don't take part in important conversations, you are absolutely empowered to take part. Do the work and be part of those conversations. And that's what's very exciting.

It's a fantastic mission. And you know, speaking of those next steps, I just wanted to ask you briefly. So what do these students end up doing after this conference is over

Oh after the conference when we roll up the posters (laughing)? Well, some of them are actually now going to go to URCAD ( Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day). And you can tell from the posters, because the ones that have used the template, they're going to do this a second time. So in some ways, this is the dry run. This is the rehearsal before the bigger audience of URCAD. So this is, we always try to do this the week or two before we have URCAD. So that's the first thing. But you know, as you as I've walked around, and I asked students what they want to do. A variety of ideas, but many want to go to either law school or graduate school. They used this as an experience to kind of get that extra step so that when they're filling out their application, they feel that much more confident. So some of them, it's the truth is some of them may not do any more research on this topic, again. But that, I'm so happy that they did this because this, this experience empowers them this, this is the first conference, right, which means that when they get to graduate school, it won't be their first conference, it'll be their second or third. And that's very, I think exciting. So that way that they don't have you know, all the get out the nerves here, like we help them when they're undergrads to, you know, kind of get over that hurdle like I can do this, like this isn't beyond, this isn't only for professors, this isn't only for graduate students. I did this when I was 20. And I think that that's really just such an important part of what we do in our instruction. It's not just about what we do in the classrooms, but encouraging them and empowering them to take their work to the next level.

Dr. Forestiere, this is such a cool initiative. You've really sold me on getting to learn a little bit about these posters from the students. And so I really can't wait to dive in and start talking to some of these really fantastic, enterprising undergraduate researchers. Thanks so much for your time.

You're very welcome. Make sure you visit everybody because they're all great.

Don't worry, we will.

All right, so I'm here with Hannah Seisenbach, who's presenting. It looks like the poster says "Is Victim Blaming Universal: Understanding the Societal Impacts of Genocidal Rape in Central and Eastern Africa." Hannah, tell us about your project.

Yeah, so the project kind of started, for me personally, as a survivor of sexual assault, seeing the American societal response in terms of victim blaming. But that's only kind of how we see it in western individualistic societies. And I wondered how that translated across the globe. So I started looking at case studies in Central and Eastern Africa, specifically, nations that have had histories of genocidal sexual violence, because it's considered kind of taboo, and there's not really a lot on it. And it's not considered victim blaming in the traditional sense that we view it in the Western world. It's more like shunning. Because in collective societies, you're kind of bringing shame to your entire family and your entire community instead of just yourself. So it kind of was interesting to look at the differences and kind of just compare the individualistic versus collective societies.

Yeah, so what's the big takeaway?

Um, so I'm actually still working through a lot of the research. It's kind of been hard to get in contact with a lot of survivors in the area, because a lot of it's ongoing. But the biggest takeaway is it, it's, it's a lot different than the way we view it, and there needs to be more research on it.

Excellent. Sounds like a really good opportunity for future research maybe by you in the near future. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

All right. So now I'm here with Katherine Gromit, who is doing a really interesting project that's called "Cosmopolitinization in Baltimore City and Montgomery County Public Schools." Katherine, would you mind telling us a little bit about this project?

Yeah. Of course, so the US has the largest immigrant population in the world. And I know that immigrants influence the US economy, and are an integral part of cultural and civic life. And I decided to study in education that one of the most noticeable effects of immigration has been the growth and proportion of immigrant students in US public school systems. And I wanted to also study the local public school systems in Maryland. So I decided to do a comparative analysis between Baltimore City Public Schools and Montgomery County Public Schools and their response to cosmopolitanism, which is the idea that human beings share a common moral dignity and are members of a global community. So how to expound our bonds of identity and solidarity while recognizing our cultural diversity.

So are there big differences between these two school systems?

Yes, so I'd say Baltimore City does a really good job celebrating diversity in terms of just people of color, but Montgomery County did a better job in integrating their immigrant students in terms of ESOL programs, hosting multiple cultural events and heritage events, and having a lot of foreign language courses offered, while Baltimore County had really great diversity and equity and inclusion policies. So both schools are doing a wonderful job, just in different ways.

Interesting. So ideally, would you think they should integrate these two approaches together maybe?

I think that would be the best approach to cosmopolitanism nation in our public school systems, for sure.

Excellent. Well, thanks so much. Sounds like a really great project and I'm glad that you were able to work on it. Yeah, thanks.

Okay, next up, I'm here with Maggie Talon, who's here to tell us a little bit about political expression at UMBC. The subtitle of the poster is " A Comparison of Party Identification and Comfort with Political Expression on Campus." That sounds pretty interesting, pretty relevant to a UMBC audience. Maggie, tell us a bit about this project.

Okay, so the research question that's actually being answered here is "Does party identification affect political expression, specifically, in UMBC?" I was actually in a class taught by Dr. Ian Anson actually (it's me, laughing) It's called public opinion and we designed something called a Paw Poll, where we sent out a series of questions asking about the political expression and the political activities that UMBC students kind of participate in. And I actually, I extracted the data of what people said about their party identification and whether they can feel like they can express politics at UMBC using what we, the results we got from the Paw Poll. It was actually really great. We ended up getting I think, 469 total responses, which is really, really great. So my, my data showed that UMBC students can mostly feel that they are able to express themselves politically on campus, but it really depends on what party they are in that determines that comfortability. So UMBC historically, is more of a liberal left leaning campus. And that is shown when you see that there is a party identification category of Democrats, and 83.4% of them do feel like they can express their political expression. And of course, it's very easy to express your political opinion when you are in the in group within a specific population. And if you look at the Republican kind of data, you see that there's 41% that feel like they can express but there's 29%, who neither agree or disagree, and there is a 29% that disagree. And while it does lean more on agree as well, just like Democrat, it is not as, it is not heavily, as heavily skewed to the left as the Democrat data.

So not a majority still saying that they can't express themselves politically, but at least some minority Republicans seem to suggest that they can't express themselves as as well as they'd like to politically, (Maggie: definitely). So you go further with this, beyond just that finding, right, so what else is going on?

I did have a very, very long discussion where I kind of talked about the implications of this kind of data. And so a lot of campuses, like I did previously mention that UMBC is a mostly Democrat, Democrat Party left-leaning campus, and a lot of universities including UMBC do advertise a liberal education, which is the pursuit of academic research, free discussion, and basically all-encompassing general education. But unfortunately, that that term "liberal education" does get a really bad rap. It gets this really it gets labeled as like you think left, you think left liberal, you think that it is a left-leaning. It is like incredibly, but it's like a different definition. And I think that's where the disconnect kind of comes from.

Maybe a conflation of terms here.

And that is kind of the reason, and that's like a basic summary of why a lot of like conservative Republican students feel like they can't necessarily express their political affiliations and their political opinions on campus.

Interesting. Well, something to really think about for the future, obviously, and maybe discussion to be had at UMBC in general. Yeah. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.

All right, next up, I'm here with oh, you Lola Luca, who's here to tell us a little bit about death penalty justification. The subtitle of this poster is explaining the impact of biological sex and religious importance on death penalty justification. Tell us a little bit about this project.

All right. So this research investigation was to talk about the relevant source in you know, the United States where we have death penalty that was has a lot of conflicting and mixed feelings regarding it. So I feel as though how we justify it isn't really sub level two important things in our life, such as how we are raised as male or female, or towards our religious importance, whether or not we have religion in our life, or we don't. And so that's towards where my research question answers, how does the effects of biological sex and the importance of religion affect us on the death penalty, my target group was young Americans aged 18.

Interesting. So we're talking about specifically younger people, obviously, those opinions are probably evolving a little bit in real time, right. So that's a very interesting population to study. It is

because the death penalty prevalence was usually around towards Order Generation. But since the Trump administration has had the most amount of death penalty execution, since the overturn of the Supreme Court, back in 1976, I felt it's important to include Gen Z and a bit of millennials in order to understand how they view the death penalty being part of that historical context. And using that, we were able to figure out a quantitative analysis using a statistical software which had a population towards 300 to 400 people. So we had a pretty good, just I wouldn't say it's 100% representative, but it gives a little bit of inclination as to how people view the death penalty, more. So we also did qualitative analysis by having individual interviews, it is a little sample through the political science course. But it's still a relevant topic, because these are people who are going to shape up how we plan to have policies and how we plan to have policies and laws implemented. And in doing so through the qualitative data, which was three students, we were asking direct questions, and I had proposed hypothesis where people who are biologically born male would have stronger views to support the death penalty. So usually on the scale is five and above. And then for my second hypotheses, I hypothesize that people who have strong religious importance in their life are more likely to support the death penalty. So this would be range one and two on the scale

of four. So what did you find? So the

quantitative unfortunately, didn't give any significance between the independent variables and the dependent variables. However, with our qualitative data, we were able to support hypothesis, one, that males would have stronger views only just because my sampling was female. So all the female candidates had proposed that death penalty was never justified or slightly justified, which is one or two on the death penalty scale. And we were able to support our religious hypothesis off of one person alone. That's because there they labeled that they didn't have a strong religious importance. And they also said that that penalty wasn't justified. However, everybody else who did have higher religious importance did say that just penalty wasn't justified. So with that, you know, it's not entirely representative of our population. And there are some gaps that were left between, you know, we can't really analyze the empathetic levels that these individuals had won the quantitative data. And, like I said before, when the Supreme Court had overturned it, you know, the execution rate in the topic about it wasn't as significant in this historical context of our target, target research population. So that probably could also explain why we were able to support our hypothesis, but overall, I think it was an interesting what because regardless of how people answered, most people were neutral about that justification, which it's better to be neutral than to have you know, a shortlist for either way without encompassing the circumstances.

Wow, so definitely a topic that's continuing to be perennially important. I think this research really does shed light on I think the complex nature of these relationships. So awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.

Okay, next up, I've got Molly Quinn Walker here. And Molly's poster is entitled, political obedience in democracies educational and conservative environments foster Trust of governments trust of governors, very interesting topic. I wanted to tell us a little bit about your project.

Yeah. So in my experience, I find that the, the values of American democracy like life, liberty, justice, equality and freedom, have instilled an independence of thought in myself. And so I wanted to ask whether those values translated the same for most Americans. And so whether or not they have an independence of thought, or the obedience to political leaders, specifically in America, and so I asked, specifically, Americans aged 18 to 35, using two surveys, the data track and World Value Survey. And through a qualitative and quantitative study, I was able to find some very significant results. And those raw results were that college educated and right leaning Americans are more likely to believe that obedience is an essential characteristic of democracy, which was exactly not what I thought it was going to be really, theories were definitely clouded my own experience. But I was able to learn a lot from that. I used descriptive statistics and multivariate linear regression to conduct the quantitative study, and then convenient sample interviews with students from UMBC. And I found that those interviews kind of gave some background to the numbers. Why most Americans were answering that way. And so it was very, very significant with a P value of 0.0000. Very, lots of zeros going this way. Yeah. Yeah. Most significant was that right? Leaning Americans or conservatives are more likely to believe that obedience is essential to democracy, and also college educated Americans, I thought that your college educated Americans would have a stronger idea of what America's democracy was supposed to be about, in my opinion, it was independence of thought. But apparently, I was wrong. And so that's not how most Americans answer that question. Yeah. We also found that there's a variability, less variability in that question among elder generation. So individuals aged 50 Plus answered with less variability, still leaning towards right, American, right leaning Americans answering the same way, but there's just a lot less variation. Whereas Americans age 18 to 35, there was a lot more difference in opinion in that question. So

why do you think that is? Why do you think there's so much more variability among the younger generation,

I mean, that requires another study that I would be happy to conduct, but I kind of theorize that their political culture that they have been born into is very different than it used to be. And so what they've been exposed to is more dramatic in many ways. We, you know, with very different opinions from everyone and very polarized climate. And also, with non college educated people, it's a group of people who are more likely to not be comfortable, not as comfortable as college educated individuals. And with that, you're more likely to have more distrust of a government because it's not technically serving you, in your opinion, or your experience. So this is just kind of a my thoughts about that.

Yeah. Really interesting ideas here. Yeah. Thank you so much for talking to me about your poster today. Definitely a really cool study. And hopefully, this will allow you to move into future directions with this research very much. Appreciate it. All right. Now I'm here with Tessa Cohn, who is here to tell us a little bit about the politics of abortion. The subtitle of this poster is a study of the pro life movement. Tessa, if you wouldn't mind telling us a little bit about this project?

Sure. Yeah. So the abortion debate is really big right now, especially with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And so I thought that it would be a good time to kind of look at one of the sides of the debate that has a lot of arguments. And so I kind of focused on a few of the main ones. You know, religion is a big one, how they define life, the dangers of the operation, you know, the other options that are available for pregnant people. And then also, you know, kind of what pregnant people are thinking when they're getting an abortion. And really just kind of looking at all the state laws really looking at kind of everything that that movement is currently doing within the country, just to kind of better understand them and to hopefully find some places where we can compromise or, you know, just kind of better understand what their goal is.

Mutual understanding that imagine that in today's political environment,

be wonderful. Yeah.

All right. Next, I'm here with Eric Verna, who's here to tell us a little bit about age and voter turnout in the UMBC. Paul poll project. So Eric, if you wouldn't mind telling us a little bit about this. ticular project?

Sure, I'd be happy to. With this poll poll we were conducted last semester, we hold the UBC campus and asked about 3000 people through email to a bunch of different questions regarding health safety, public opinion, political activism activism. And the focus of my research was specifically on voter agent voter turnout, which is important to not only judge the health of our democracy, but to see who was politically active if people are paying attention if elections are competitive.

Sure. Pretty important on a on a college campus, too, right. I mean, that seems like a pretty important community to study.

Yes, exactly. Because a lot of people nowadays get this bad rap of younger people are not being politically active, they're not paying attention, which doesn't seem to be the case. In my research that I was able to conduct. It seems that at least over half the population of UMBC, was politically active in the

last election. So we're kind of super super engaged here at UMBC, relative to the national average, right?

Yes, that seems to be what the consensus is. But yes, the other important thing is to see what is there a point of time that people become more politically active? Is it over time? Is it something that could drastically change? So the trend overall seems to be that the older you are, the more likely you are to vote, which there's a lot of other background research out there that agrees with this. However, with UMBC, specifically, it seems that between the 1819 age range and the 2021 age range, there's this drastic jump about 11% of people who participated in this last election.

So what happens there, so you turned 20, and all of a sudden, you become this political super, super participation? Paragon

would be funny if it was, but But no, some thoughts. Some of the discussions we've had on the side have all said that, it could just be that UMBC might not be this super party school, and they might be very more academically inclined, which could answer a question of if you're academically inclined, and not inside this little bubble of of college campus, it might be simply, you are paying attention to what's going on around you, you want to be able to participate with the parts of democracy that most people in their college years might skip out on.

So So what you're saying, Eric, is that interest in politics might be contagious? Yes. Awesome. Well, let's, let's hope it is, because it seems like from the posters that I've heard so far, certainly political activism and engagement is widespread on UBC campus. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, I really appreciate your time.

Great talking to you.

All right. Next up, I'm here with Grace chan Ferguson, who is telling us about inequality and homicide, a really interesting relationship. And this is according to the subtitle here, a US state level analysis. So Grace, if you wouldn't mind telling us a bit about this project.

Okay, so my study looks at the impact of inequality, on homicide rates here in the US at the state level. And it's my hope that research on this topic can contribute to inform me policy and public opinion on how to build public safety. So in my quantitative analysis, I found the inequality homicide relationship to be significant and moderate in strength. And I also did two case studies, which are Louisiana, a confirmatory case, and Alaska an outlier case.

So what's going on here? Why is inequality impacting the degree to which homicides are happening in the state?

Um, well, I have several theoretical explanations, but the inequality homicide relationship is different from the poverty homicide relationship.

Sure, right. Because that's kind of what we would assume from a very, like, if I were just walking up to this topic, I would say, Oh, well, probably poverty, and homicide rates are connected in some way. But this is not poverty, right. It's inequality. Yeah.

Right. I mean, those things are related. And we do see covariance of those variables, inequality and poverty. And inequality has, I mean, sorry, poverty has been found to be a strong predictor of violent crime. But I compensate for some of that by using multiple linear regression. And I still find that inequality is a significant predictor of homicide rates. And so with the inequality, homicide relationship, it's not just about the amount of poverty but it's about the it's about there being concentrated wealth in proximity to poverty. So, let's see. So some of my theoretical explanations talk about why we expect to see these results. And, for example, inequality has been found to be associated with lower public and interpersonal trust. Interesting. Yeah. So. So when there's lower trust, people might be quicker to perceive a threat, and they might be quicker to respond with reactive violence as a result. And I also theorize that with lower trusts that may impact some people's personal ethics. Because they're, they may have this idea of, if I can't trust other people, then why should other people be able to trust me? So that's can also affect people's willingness to use violence?

Yeah, kind of a vicious spiral maybe of sentiments, right. Yes.

Um, and another example of my explanations was that with high inequality, there is like this stark, this stark contrast between society on police responses to victimization based on who the victim is, and who is behind the victimization. So so that means that some people may be able to ascertain, like, if I, if I'm victimizing this person, there's a much lower chance of me facing certain undesired consequences, so that can affect people's willingness to use violence as well.

Great. So this is a very well thought out project. Obviously, you've done a little bit beyond just thinking about, you know, the relationship between two variables to really think about their causes. So I'm really appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Okay, next up, I'm here with Rhea pizzelle. The title of this poster is immigrant attitudes toward women's political participation. Very interesting topic, right? Why don't you tell us a bit about this study.

So I got the idea of doing this study from the acculturation theory that states that immigrants will usually maintain some of the beliefs and values from their homeland during their adaptation process in the new country. And based on this, I presented the following research question, how do homeland views on on gender roles influence perceptions immigrants have towards women in politics in the United States? In this study, I controlled for gender level of educational attainment length of stay in the US their political orientation to immigrants location of their residents in the US their religion and their age.

That's a lot of control variables. Yeah, you're really regressing this in a very structured way. Yeah, it was a really long paper.

Based on those control variables, I conducted many difference of means tests. But I found that gender, age and political orientation had the strongest influence on immigrant attitudes. Asian immigrants were Whites were more likely to hold patriarchal views and African and Latin American immigrants and African immigrants were more likely to hold patriarchal views than Latin American immigrants. I also conducted some single variable regressions and a multi linear regression. So I had the independent variable, which was the gender attitudes in the country of origin, which was a data that I gathered from the World Economic Forum's data. On the gender gap index, this was presented on a scale of one to 10, one being the most patriarchal 10, being that the country was mostly egalitarian. And then my dependent variable was an index that I created from my own data that measured the attitudes towards women in politics in the state of Maryland. And this data was also presented on a scale of one to 10. But it was flipped, for some reason, that way that I did. And I found that for each unit increase in the gender gap index, the combined index value fell by almost one. So it was a really strong, statistically significant relationship.

Yeah. Tell me about this, this r squared here. I mean, this is point 585. Right. So how would you interpret that,

that all the variables combined explained about 58.51% of the variance in the views held by immigrants concerning women in politics? Speaking as

a social scientist, I can say that an r squared like that almost made my eyeballs fall out, right? Because that's a really strong relationship that you're seeing there with these combined predictors. So you really done a great job of nailing some of the the predictors of this sentiment, right.

And that was mostly because of Dr. Phil amento, who mentored me in this study, and he was wonderful,

excellent as a podcast, right? We're always looking for plugs. So I appreciate the plug production Filomeno who is the associate producer or associate director, excuse me, FCS three, one of the great supporters of this podcast, so awesome shout out there. One last question for you is Tell me a little bit more about this survey. So you You've created a survey and it's going to emigrant adults in Maryland. Is that right? So how did you get this? This survey? This is a real survey you conducted with real people here. How did you get to these individuals?

So I sent out a lot of emails to a lot of organizations, churches, mosques, and everything that I could find that would cater towards immigrants. And then they didn't respond for a solid month,

right. As a social scientist, I can also confirm that this is how it goes right? Then I called them

and then I annoyed them a lot. But eventually, I got a solid sample size that was

workable, excellent, really impressive projects, really impressive sample size as well, for a unique survey that you've created here of a very important population. So congratulations on a great project. Thank you so much.

Okay, moving right along here. Now I'm here with Maria Keshava, who's here to tell us about video games, a topic that I'm very interested in video games as cultural artifacts, and the subtitle of this poster is how pathologic and I really liked this font here, it's a different font pathologic, communicated the trauma induced nostalgia of Russian citizens. Okay, where are you gonna have to break this down for me? What is this project about?

I'll try my best. So media has always been a way to express how people think about political situations. Now my research focuses on a video game called pathologic. pathologic is a video game made in 2006 by a Russian studio for a Russian audience. My research argues that through its gameplay elements, and storyline, pathologic serves as a relic of political culture during a very formative point of Russia's history.

So a relic Can you tell me a little bit about what you mean by cultural relic? Yes.

So now media can become a form of communicative memory, where people talk about a thing. And there's an idea surrounding that thing that now exists in of itself. Now, cultural relics are a representative symbol of a memory that can be shown through things that we see today, you can think of statues or books. Video games can also be that video games have a greater ability than most common that most things like books, because they forced a player, because the intended audience puts the player into a force perspective and a force game world so they can truly interact with that game world and gain an understanding.

Wow. So we're embodying this persona. Yes. And pathologic

has three personas have Hologic is one of the very, very few games that has an asymmetrical storytelling, where you play the same world three times, but from three different perspectives. And you play as the bachelor who was a utopian academic that ultimately decides to reject the town, the town that he was supposed to save, in order to preserve a utopian, idealistic ideal of immortality for a select few people. Then you play as the hare specs, someone who was a common person of the town, who chooses to reject the utopian idealism of those utopian academics in order to preserve the lives of everyday people. That's as compact as I can make it. Yeah,

these are, these are very interesting personas. And I think that this is obviously a very high concept kind of game, right? Did it get a lot of attention in Russia,

it got a lot of attention in Russia had actually won an award in Russia. And it's very popular for the niche that it serves. Obviously, it's not the call of duty of Russia, but it's very important to look at it and analyze, especially because of the time period it was made in what was after the fall of the Soviet Union. And before this sharp, sharp rise of autocracy in Russia under President Vladimir Putin.

Yeah, I have one last question for you, right. Just to think about this sort of piece in light of current developments in Russia, do you think that that people are revisiting this, this game and the cultural artifact that it represents? And in light of kind of the current situation,

I think it should, now there's actually been a sharp revisit to the game with the COVID 19 pandemic, because this game is about dealing with a pandemic. But interesting, it's now more important than ever that with the absence of new mediums media created in Russia because of the restriction of free speech to analyze what we have an expanded perspectives about what can be an expression of freedom of what can be an expression of free speech, not just books, not just movies, not just articles, but video games as well.

Fascinating work. Thank you so much for your presentation. I really really enjoyed this. Thank you.

Okay, next up, I'm here with Diana Monica, who is here to tell us about West African women mitigating brain drain I like the special italics here on mitigation. So tell me a little bit about this project.

Hi, guys. My name is Diana Monica Kay. I am a first generation Nigerian Italian American scholar. And the topic of brain drain first started when I went back to Nigeria In the summer of my eighth grade year, and I was sitting in a supposedly one lane highway, but they were six lanes, and there was a trailer truck on the farther two lanes, and I thought I was I thought it was gonna die.

That sounds very harrowing

was gonna die. And I remember looking to my dad and asking him like, what's going on here? I'm like, where's where the traffic cameras where the police cams, you know, when the police officers. And he laughed, and he said, Well, welcome to Nigeria. And I said, What's that supposed to me? And then he said, Well, we've kind of accepted that it is what it is. And we get by just how we get by? And I said, Well, that's not right. And as a person who likes to question every single question, and find a solution to where there should be, where there's not technically a solution, I was really fraught with this idea of why does this stick you know, because to me, it's quite frustrating to see my aunts and uncles, top lawyers, top firms, engineers, doctors, you name it. And I'm saying, Well, why is it it is what it is within your home country. I mean, when you're facing that identity, like you do come to the US, you made it to the US, your children are in the best schools, they're excelling. So at the end of the day, like why aren't you going back? The idea is to start. Well, the idea of someone recognize that you can't have the state hold itself accountable. You can't like grade your own paper.

So the idea is to have mechanisms outside of this state to propel these mechanisms of economic development, educational development, political development, and social development. And so again, coming back to this private stakeholder, the woman, I want to be able to get them to start influencing their countries. So that they established these firms have whether that be economics, analyst mentorship, education, always education, and providing the professional development so that these countries are ensuring the capitals that they are having in all of these developed countries, because the bounce is about, okay. So, through my method, I use the interview and survey method. I sent out a survey, and the survey encompass questions that recognize that they knew what the push factors were, and asked if they would also be open to coming back. I hadn't introduced the policy at all, it was just very, and I found that sitting through those interviews was really hard. I didn't think really, really hard at that the transcribing was going to be the worst part, like sitting through those interviews and hearing these women's stories and their testimonies of how much they've overcome, and how they've been able to build so much affluence in the US and want to go back, but they can't. So um, so you know, Superwoman me, I was like, how do we fix it? So I, as I was talking through my conclusion, my conclusion is a policy recommendation, I realized, I would need a proceeding policy before I could kick off the policy that I had papers. So I believe that there should be a task force over a governmental agency to establish firms back home, whether that be schools for professional development, schools, career workshops, or how to how to propel mechanisms of economic development first, right, because the political or social will follow after. So the idea is to then establish the policy that I originally came up with, in my research, which would have a cohort of women to obtain their bachelor's and their masters and have five to 10 years to establish themselves in their fields. And then they would be given a grant to go back home for four years. And then those four years they would establish his friends, like we talked about. And the idea is, once these are established, you can go back home, but you can only do so by also the secondary policy was having the Security Council that would oversee their protection while they were there. Because I mean, I think you'd be a prime example there is a famous Nigerian woman scientist who went back to speak on climate change. She was killed within less than a mile from our being there. And it just speaks to just how dangerous this mission is, and how, how much mechanisms you do need to run parallel to each other for this to work. And I do see it working on both sides in their home countries and the US, because the US will be able to provide these task forces and these people dedicated and trained in their fields to supply the help that's needed. And so after they gone back home, because they have given that capital, to their home countries, they're able to train people who are there. And they're able to develop their wealth, develop their knowledge, create create this domino effect. So not It's not only the children giving the giving the children of the women are going and incentives to go back. But it's also giving the community a chance to be respected on the stage of we can vote capital to write, and it's not, and I think a lot of the frustration comes from the fact that Africa has been looked at as this resource might have never been seated at the table to, to hold positions of power, where they can, they can come in and negotiate just as much as any other country. So this twofold effect, hopefully will propel more women to join these cohorts, these cohorts would definitely be over sections of time. And so this idea would alleviate not only the economic pressures, the status facing in their home countries, but also the economic pressures of these immigrants who come to the US because what happens is your communities think you're a trillionaire, a billionaire, and you're paying a lot of remittances to your family, your cousins, your cousins, cousins, family. And so if their idea was to come to the US and alleviate economic pressure and live a better life, you can't do that, if you're trying to fall is holding the community behind you. So why not build a community so they can stand on their own? And you can stand as an advocate for them? And

say, No, this is really rich research, I'm really impressed with the degree to which you've kind of gone through this thought process all the way from kind of the source of the problem, all the way through to policy implications. And I can certainly speak personally that I really appreciate the applied nature of this research is really, hopefully going to have a major impact in the future. So thanks so much for your presentation. So much. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, I have seen a lot of great posters in my perusal of the poster session so far. And now it's time to finally get down to the very last poster, but certainly not the least, here with Adrienne by Jonas, who is here to tell me a bit about racial gerrymandering and educational success. That sounds like a really interesting project. Would you tell me about it?

Yes, of course. So for my project, I really wanted to investigate the achievement gap between minority students and non minority students than before, unfortunately exists. I think, historically, we've seen that the way that we play students in schools can have a very large impact on how well they're able to succeed. Schools Matter a lot, exactly in their academic life. But sometimes we kind of think about that as a thing of the past. So I kind of wanted to bring it to the current Maryland and see how big of that I'm sorry, how much of that was an issue, and how it was all impacting our students. So I investigated the minority enrollment levels in schools versus how successful the students were in school. And that the success was measured by how many students were able to perform more students in a given school was able to pass some exams that are geared towards college readiness. And all in all, I had found that as college readiness went up, minority enrollment went down with a pretty strong negative correlation between the two. I was able to investigate two of the schools from my case study further and I was actually able to go to the high school and talk to teachers, and they talked a lot about how teacher pay was an impact. In teacher turnover rate was an impact. So and those in that particular school their rate of like teachers that were very experienced was just not there. And the teachers didn't stay for very long so that as you can imagine, those students are then lacking a presence that would really push them towards being academically successful. Whereas Severna Park, which is another school in the city, which had pretty high college readiness, but very low minority enrollment, which is the opposite of meet in exactly the same county, by the way, didn't seem to have those kinds of issues pop up at all. So it just kind of review revealed more variables that the study could look into further that might impact the overall achievement gap that we're seeing in students. Initially, I had wanted to investigate the presence of racial gerrymandering by comparing the rate of students that are, are in minority in a school versus their the diversity level of the city that it was situated in to see if there was a strong correlation, then maybe there wasn't, you know, any racial gerrymandering present. But there was a correlation. It wasn't super strong. But that might suggest that I need to do further research on that aspect. Maybe in some cases, the districts are not drawn so well. And in other cases, it's not. Regardless, I think that the study reveals that there's still lots of issues with how we are treating our students. And there's probably a lot that we could do in Maryland to benefit all of our students to create more successful adults.

Yeah, it certainly sounds like the qualitative case studies in this project, really were pivotal to allowing you to further understand the theory behind this. So So you're telling me that it's a lot of a lot of this has to do with the experience of teachers won't say any more about that?

Um, yeah, so when I went over to meet high school, just as January actually, which is some time after I initially did the study, the teachers I mean,

they were, they were really, they were really upset.

They're like, Oh, my gosh, this guy has never been in the classroom before. But he's having to teach these students, I also found that there is an idea that we should look at middle school students, or elementary school students, to kind of better understand this kind of thing, because that's really starting out. And if you are behind already, at the elementary level, you're not going to do so well, probably the high school level. So I would want to investigate the quality of teachers on the middle and elementary school level as well in a further study. But definitely, they were saying that lots of teachers there, where you would probably want a teacher that's quite experienced to deal with somebody who's maybe starting behind. If that's the case, and and some of students at school like need, it seemed like that was not we didn't actually have very experienced teachers who could really be that rock for students that students need.

Audrey, thank you so much for this really interesting presentation. It seems like a very urgent topic of study, especially given these distributions of college readiness scores. So thanks very much,

Thank you so much, Dr. Anson. I appreciate all your help. Absolutely (Dr. Anson).

I hope you had fun visiting the vibrant and engaging world of Political Science Research at the Pi Sigma Alpha undergraduate research conference at UMBC. Hopefully, all these great poster presentations gave you a taste for more scholarship in the field, and as always, and insatiable desire to keep questioning.

Retrieving the Social Sciences is the production of UMBC's Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our director is Dr. Christine Mallinson. Our associate director is Dr. Felipe Filomeno, and our production intern is Alex Andrews. 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 events. Until next time, keep questioning