This summer, I assisted Professor Dustin Frye with his research of the Dawes Act and how it affected Native American land ownership from the years 1887-1935. The Dawes Act, which was passed in 1887, divided up Indian reservations into 160-acre plots. These plots were given to families in an effort to integrate Native Americans into traditional American society, forcing them to leave their customary tribal units and become individual farmers. My focus within this project was to track the implementation of the Dawes Act across reservations over time.First, I utilized GIS software to digitize a map of Native American reservations in the year 1888. After digitizing the map, I could see how the reservations had been broken up and changed by comparing the 1888 map to similar maps in the years 1990 and 2010.

Next, I created a complete U.S. township map and compiled land patent data from the Bureau of Land Management. By looking at the land transactions related to the Dawes Act and connecting the information to each specific township, we can observe spatial patterns of how the Dawes Act affected each reservation.

Indian agents, who were members of the Bureau of Indian Affairs that managed reservations and the schools located on them, played a key role in the implementation of the Dawes Act. I have been collecting the names of the Indian agents in order to track their movement across different reservations over time. I have examined census documents and reservation reports written by these agents from the years 1867 to 1940 to search for their names. By connecting their movement to the land patent and township data, we can see their involvement in the implementation of the Dawes Act and ultimately their impact of the relocation of reservation residents over time.

Movement of Indian agent Horton H. Miller across reservations over time

This research opportunity has allowed me to analyze a historical event using techniques of Economics and Geography. I am now more confident in my research capabilities and can manipulate data within different perspectives. I hope to translate the skills I have learned through the Ford Program into my future endeavors.

This summer Professor Gisella Kagy and I examined the impact of a Maternal and Child Health and Family Planning Program (MCH-FP) on infant mortality in Bangladesh. The MCH-FP program was started in October 1977 by the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research in Matlab, Bangladesh.  The Matlab region is a sub-district in Bangladesh, with a population of about 200,000 people, located 55 km south of Dhaka, the country’s capital.

The MCH-FP program was implemented as a randomized control trial between 1977-1988. The Matlab region was divided into a treatment and comparison area , with about half the population receiving the child health and family planning measures while the other half of Matlab only had access to these services after 1988. Some of the program services included the provision of free modern contraception, tetanus vaccinations, polio and tuberculosis immunizations, and vitamin A supplementation.  These services were provided at the home of the beneficiary by local health care professionals and this door to door delivery was unique to the treatment area.  

Our research question was to examine the first and second generation impacts of this program on infant mortality. So we were interested in analyzing the program impact on those infants born during the experimental period as well as the impact on their subsequent children. Our raw data consisted of individual level birth, death, and migration information from 1974 to 2012. I was able to bring this information together using Stata to produce a final data-set for our analysis that was unique by person, and contained variables indicating the treatment status of a person, whether a person lived in Matlab during the experimental period,  and whether someone died.

Below are some examples of our results with brief explanations:

This graph shows yearly infant deaths between 1975 and 2012. We can see that when the  program started in 1977, the treatment and comparison groups had a similar infant mortality rate. However immediately following the program, the infant mortality rate in the treatment area was much lower than the comparison area. This was true not only for the experimental period but we can see that these effects persisted beyond 1988, suggesting that the program also had strong inter-generational impact. These results are consistent with our econometric analysis which revealed that the program had a significant impact of reducing infant mortality by 1.2 percent in the treatment area as opposed to the comparison area once we controlled for differences in household characteristics and a person’s sex.

This graph shows the percent of deaths for 0 – 5 year olds by year for 1975 – 2012. We can see that the death rate for this age group was only slightly higher in the comparison area when the program started but this difference increased during the experimental period and persisted up till 2003 when we see the death rates converge again. Once again this demonstrates the strong inter-generational impact of this program. These results are also consistent with our econometric analysis which showed that the program reduced the under 5 death rate by 1.8 percent in the treatment area as opposed to the comparison area once we controlled for differences in household characteristics and a person’s sex.

This summer, I worked with Professor Hantzopoulos on her project to analyze the transition of multiple public high schools in New York City from high-stakes testing to project based assessments (PBATs). In this case, the high-stakes tests that were being replaced were the Regents Exams that students in New York are typically required to pass in order to move on to the next grade. Project based assessments, as their name suggests, are projects that allow students to show what they have learned throughout the course of the year in a way that displays skills that will be useful to them in high school and especially college.

I began my work for Professor Hantzopoulos by engaging in research. I investigated recent educational policies, specifically looking into Race to the Top and the Every Student Succeeds Act which helped me develop a better understanding of how the professor’s work on PBATS fit into the discourse that the reforms had been generating.

Evaders Child Campus, Bronx Lab is located inside.

With this context in mind, I had the opportunity to work at Lyons Community School in Brooklyn and Bronx Lab in the Bronx. Both schools are relatively new to the methods of PBATs, so their work is actually paving paths for other schools in New York and hopefully schools across the country to find alternatives to high stakes testing. My job at these schools was to be an external evaluator. I sat in on student presentations and not only evaluated them, but also interacted with the students and the teachers.

William J Gaynor Junior High, Lyons Community is located inside.

The students’ projects revolved around multiple different topics such as policing, prison reform, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Students normally began presenting their topics from a specific perspective, but they also displayed nuanced understandings when discussing the intricacies of their topics, especially when we asked them questions and challenged their ideas. This generated dynamic conversations that transformed the testing experience into an opportunity for communal learning.

At the same time, I reflected on how PBATs shape student achievement, well-being, and college preparedness, along with teacher professionalism and overall school culture. It seemed like PBATs provided students with a fairer chance to develop and display their knowledge than standardized tests do. In addition, the student/teacher dynamic was noticeably different in the way that students and teachers interacted during and after the assessments. The heavy-pressure environment that high stakes testing usually produces was actively removed and a comfortable space for learning and assessment was created instead.

As a rising senior who is passionate about education, the work that I did influenced my research for my thesis and my outlook on possible career paths. I was also able to better understand recent educational policy and how we could take steps toward searching for alternative methods of education, given the fact that PBATs demonstrate huge promise.

This summer Professor Annie Menzel and I researched disparities in infant mortality between Black and White child bearers using the lenses of epigenetics and biopolitics as our primary frameworks of analysis. This project began as an expansion of professor Menzel’s dissertation The Political Life of Black Infant Mortality and grew into a wide-reaching research project to further explore the political and theoretical implications of epigenetic lab work, as well as public health campaigns that specifically address birth rate disparities. Many of the aforementioned public health campaigns target the individual health choices and opportunities of mainly Black, pregnant child bearers to attempt to narrow birth rate disparities. Our project attempts to explain these disparities within the context of changes in the epigenome that occur due to the stress of racism over a Black child bearers’ life course. Moreover, our project aimed to explain a need to move discourse away from blaming these infant mortality disparities on the individualized actions of Black child bearers by showing the overwhelming effects of racism’s stress on the body.

One of the CDC’s campaigns that we critique in our project

Beginning the summer by contacting labs, reading methods papers, and gaining a comprehensive understanding of the somewhat discrete science of epigenetics, I spent the bulk of the summer connecting this ‘hard science’ research to the ‘social science’ framework professor Menzel and I used to conduct our research. This biopolitical framework primarily credited to the philosopher Michel Foucault, allowed us to contextualize the Black infant mortality in the transgenerational legacies of chattel slavery and begin to create a genealogy of the disparities in infant mortality that we address in our work.

Using epigenetic research to examine the effects of racism can lead toward the danger of readers thinking we are attempting to prove, or even assume, any biological truth to the concept of ‘race’. To the contrary, my ‘take-away’ from our research is that epigenetics allow us to see the impact of racism in the body without dangerously and falsely suggesting any inherent racial difference. Professor Menzel and I are excited to turn this extensive research into a conference paper that we will present to the American Political Science Association during their annual conference in early September. Thank you!