Communication on online platforms has become one of the primary methods by which people communicate with one another. Regardless of conversation space, either online or offline, arguments can arise. Through our research, we are studying the ways in which the design of a platform influences the tenor of a conversation and the factors that lead to fights and reconciliation. We conducted in-depth in-person and phone interviews with 23 adults to understand how arguments arise online, how they end in different circumstances, and received input for possible design ideas. We followed up with the interviewees to gather demographic information about them. Through affinity diagramming, we qualitatively analyzed the 23 interview transcripts to uncover recurring themes, such as the role of time, the stages of an argument, the way people move arguments from public to private spaces, and differences between images and text in sparking arguments. Based on these themes and design suggestions from participants, we made sketches for potential design ideas that can be implemented in social media platforms to encourage constructive discourse. We are planning to use the design sketches to create prototypes to test with participants for iteration, which we will describe in a research paper to share our findings and design ideas broadly.

Beat poetry and rhythm tap are two interests I have had for several years.  Through my separated exposure to and analysis of both, I noticed a similarity in their manifestations of improvisation and rhythmic complexities.  Initially, I assumed these resemblances were due to the heavy influence of jazz music both beat poetry and rhythm tap dance underwent in their formulations.  However, when examining the jazz music more closely, it became clear that the characteristics of the specific form of jazz beat poetry emulated (bebop jazz) purposefully opposed the characteristics of the form of jazz rhythm tap was danced to (big band swing).  This research henceforth sought to find how the rhythmic complexity and improvisation in rhythm tap and beat poetry could manifest themselves so similarly despite their rootedness in fundamentally contradicting forms of jazz music.  Through analyzing the historical shift from swing jazz to bebop jazz, it was found that the contrasts between the genre were actually essential, as they allowed for a different relationship with jazz music to develop per art form: rhythm tap integrated itself into swing music, while beat poetry emulated bebop. Because of this, rhythm tap had the autonomy to add improvisation and rhythmic complexity atop mainstream swing music’s lack of both, while beat poetry could echo the improvisation and rhythmic complexity of bebop without losing its individuality. This resulted in both having sonic similarities to bebop: the unintentional musical bridge between between beat poetry and rhythm tap which resulted in the two mirroring one another.

Three generations of immigrant history have led up to my personhood. I’ve inherited the struggle of my mother and my grandmother before her, who have worked themselves to the bone to provide me security. This inheritance is the driving question in my research project RATSKIN, a theatrical play that is in development. How does one honor one’s immigrant history but also break free from the ideologies that were made to trap immigrants within a cycle of destruction? RATSKIN is my intervention. Incorporating literary and theatrical traditions with historical, archival research, the play is an exploration in how to weave together personal experience, genre, cultural theory, and history into a narrative that can be shared to a community in a productive, discussion generating way. RATSKIN draws inspiration and theoretical groundwork from Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa; One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez; Neo-Marxist theories by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Louis Althusser, Evelyn Nakano Glenn; Tacoma’s immigrant history; and my own family’s immigrant history. The plot and construction of the story itself is an attempt to physically manifest and represent racialization, assimilation, and the trappings of harmful ideology that is expanded upon in the theoretical foundations. With these lenses, RATSKIN is a presentation of immigrant history and how the theatrical and literary traditions can help reveal how families continue to be affected by immigration. How can this history be refracted within a single family? What are these effects? How have they evolved through generations? How can we make sure these effects don’t limit the growth of our families?

Students who speak English as a foreign language (EFLs) are pushed within U.S. academic settings to strive for “standard” English—an academic English heralding grammar “correctness” and adherence to rules. EFL curriculum prioritizes for “standard” English, but ignores the ways that terms like “standard” are exclusive, and rarely addresses how an EFL writer may use language in more inventive ways. How do we re-imagine the teaching of writing in ways that can not only help EFL writers in formal high-stakes writing, but also open the door to other creative uses of writing which need not adhere to such strict and increasingly hackneyed standards? My research will draw from many of the conversations focused on second-language acquisition and bilingual education, including work from scholars such as David Freeman and Sara Alvarez, to understand the most recent and effective approaches to teaching English as a second language, as well as discover what approaches to teaching creative writing hold untapped potential for EFL students to acquire new language skills. I will use The Chicago Manual of Style as a contemporary example of a style guide which prescribes “standard” grammar convention. Using an assortment of the grammar topics selected from Chicago for comparison, I will discuss examples of deviations from grammar conventions by writers from various linguistic backgrounds, including Safiya Sinclair, Ocean Vuong, and Mohsin Hamid. By investigating who makes English “standards,” how EFLs best learn, and how these standards have been broken for the better, I aim to create a subversive style guide for EFL writers which is useful for both formal and creative writing.

 As the number of American students who identify as mixed race or biracial continues to grow, the American education system still has yet to make the necessary changes that are responsive to the needs of this shifting demographic. While identifying students on their own terms is important for all students, for mixed-race students, the questions and potential disconnect between racial labelling and how one defines themselves is fundamental. This study examines the roles biracial categorization plays in today’s classrooms through lived experiences as remembered by college students. Many classrooms still struggle to incorporate the achievements of minorities, and, in some cases, the mixed identity of a historical figure is overlooked entirely. The inability to see themselves in the curriculum may be causing mixed-race students to feel invisible in the classroom and disconnected from their education (Joseph-Salisbury, 2017). Drawing on findings from survey results, focus groups, and individual interviews, this research project contributes to studies focusing on the schooling experiences of mixed-race students. Maria Root (1996) and Kristen Renn’s (2003) models of biracial categorization are used as a framework for the study, as the project re-assesses the inclusivity and adequacy of the biracial categories introduced. In the classroom, seemingly small interactions and events may be forcing students to choose one aspect of their identity, rather than celebrating both. Focusing on how the classroom setting impacts identity has the potential to make the classroom a more inclusive space that is responsive to the myriad of ways biracial students may or may not choose to identify.

The works of authors who blur the academic and the personal are often called genre-busting. Conferred that radical title, these authors occupy a liminal space in form and method. This is where I see a pivot to chart a course between recent discourses on queer affect and the potential of positionality in academic research. I will approach and put into dialogue Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue to analyze the link between methodology and form, and attend to the places where scholarship oozes personhood. My own method will be partly autoethnographic, coupled with textual analysis that mobiliizes queer and ecofeminist discourses. I will explore how genre-busting writers navigate autographic and academic writing to package and represent experience, thinking nimbly about how they communicate interiority. What kind of vulnerability does this mode of writing perform? This dialogue will be extended to the cultivation of an environmental ethics, in which I propose that writers who write between genres have mapped modes of vulnerability and rupture that are vital to a sustainable discourse.

Platelets seal wounds in blood vessels in order to prevent blood loss. When there is an exposed vascular matrix, platelets bind at the wound site through the glycoprotein (GP) Ib-IX-V complex. Glycoprotein receptors allow platelets to initiate homeostasis by forming attachments to the damaged tissue. Platelets use their glycoprotein receptors to form bridges between other platelets and the surrounding proteins that form the clot within the blood vessel. Aspirin, a common household medication, produces its effects through inhibition of thromboxane production which prevents the formation of these blood clots by meddling with platelet aggregation. Standard doses of aspirin for an adult are 81mg, 325mg, and 500mg. However, there could be differences between male and female platelets, indicating that there may be different amounts of glycoprotein receptors between males and females. Here, we evaluated the force of single platelets without aspirin in males and females and single platelets with aspirin in males and females by using a reference-free traction force microscopy (TFM) platform. This TFM platform contained a grid of a fluorescent protein at known locations and was coated with von Willebrand Factor (VWF) to mediate platelet binding. Immunofluorescent staining and fluorescent imaging was conducted to visualize to platelet f-actin, a cytoskeletal component, and GPIb. Platelet binding, spreading, and contraction is observed on these substrates. By placing the platelets on the substrate, we are able to measure the deflection of the grid and determine the force a single platelet generates. In the future, we hope to measure the force of platelets at 0mg, 81mg, 325mg, and 500mg between men and women and hope to elucidate how GPIb expression, platelet mechanics, and response to aspirin varies in males and females.

The Wrangel Island State Nature Reserve (WISNR) serves as a vital refuge for the Alaska-Chukotka (AC) population of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) during the ice-free season. In September 2017, a total of 181 polar bears were observed near a bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) carcass on the island. This gathering is the largest aggregation of polar bears ever recorded for the AC population. This study sorted, labeled, and processed photographs of the polar bear aggregation taken by a professional photographer from a boat a day before initial ground-based observations were made. Our objective was to use the photographs to evaluate characteristics of the polar bear aggregation including animal sex, age, reproductive composition (e.g., adult females that have first-year or second-year cubs), and body condition (i.e., fatness). To do this, we selected representative subsets of photos, categorized them by time and location, and labeled individual bears across multiple photographs. The resulting set of processed photographs was evaluated by multiple polar bear experts, and the results were statistically analyzed. Based on knowledge of polar bear social systems and an initial review of the photographs, we hypothesized that both feeding activity and the locations of bears in the vicinity of the carcass will be structured by sex, age, reproductive status, and time of day. This study provides a unique opportunity to collect information on a large number of polar bears and document behavioral interactions. The resulting information will help address key conservation challenges for the AC polar bear population, including the effects of sea-ice loss due to climate warming, increased industrial activity, and identifying a sustainable rate for subsistence harvest.

Alzheimer’s is a progressive, age-associated, neurodegenerative disease characterized by memory loss, deterioration in thinking and reasoning skills and gradual loss of executive function. Two well-documented biochemical hallmarks associated with disease progression are the accumulation of extracellular beta-amyloid (Aβ) plaques and intracellular neurofibrillary tangles found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. One theory of the disease holds that aggregated proteins found in these two deposits inhibit protein degradation by the 26S proteasome, a large protein that is one of the central components of the ubiquitin-proteasome clearance system. This system, of which the proteasome is a key component, executes most of the controlled protein degradation in the cell. Importantly, impairments in proteasome function are associated with multiple neurodegenerative diseases. The overall goal of this project is to determine whether proteasome stimulators can delay toxicity associated with Aβ aggregation in a C. elegans Alzheimer’s disease model. C. elegans is a powerful model organism in biomedical research due to its ease of culturing, well-described genetics, gene homology and availability of transgenic tools. My project utilizes a C. elegans strain that expresses the full-length human amyloid beta peptide (Aβ_1-42) in body wall muscle cells. These animals become paralyzed when up-shifted to a restricted temperature due to aggregation of Aβ proteins in the muscle. To test the hypothesis that proteasome stimulators delay the progression of Alzheimer’s symptoms, I will treat animals with four drugs and measure the time of paralysis. Using a high-throughput drug screening system recently developed in our lab, I will treat animals with four proteasome stimulators or vehicle controls, in triplicate, and determine the onset of paralysis for each drug. These results will help shed light on the involvement of protein aggregation clearance in treating symptoms of Alzheimer’s in this model organism, and help inform future treatments for this and other neurodegenerative disorders.