Here and Elsewhere: Perspectives on the Syrian Refugee Crisis

By Halle Hewitt and Sixing Xu, under the guidance of Professor Thomas Ellman

We were accepted as Ford scholars for Professor Ellman’s summer video game project. Professor Ellman was interested in video games’ potential as an interactive medium through which players could look at a social justice topic in a wholly new way. We decided to create a game focusing on the Syrian refugee crisis. The mass migration of refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria (due to fighting between supporters of and dissenters to the Assad regime, and with several groups, including ISIS, taking part) began in 2011 and continues today. Unlike many other ongoing refugee crises, the Syrian refugee crisis currently claims the attention of mainstream Western media. One of the main reasons for this is that the majority of Syrian refugees are Muslim; many Westerners associate practitioners of Islam with membership to ISIS. However, racism and xenophobia are also significant factors that have played a role in Western countries’ discomfort with and even animosity towards refugees and immigrants throughout history. With recent terrorist attacks by ISIS in the West, the reluctance to resettle refugees has only increased. However, the number of Syrian refugees that have resettled in Europe, Canada and the U.S. hardly compares to their vast numbers in countries neighboring Syria, namely Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.

We wanted to focus our project on the media (e.g. news videos, interviews, websites, statistics on the refugee crisis, as well as the art made by Syrian refugees and/or about Syrian refugees. For members of the Vassar community, as well as for many people around the world, there is no direct way of interacting with Syrian refugees. Consequently, we rely on media to understand this crisis. While we may agree that there is no such thing as objective media, we often choose to isolate ourselves with media that only support our already-incubated beliefs. This is true especially when the particular society we surround ourselves with reaffirms these beliefs for us, or, to put it another way, pressures us into conformity.

We divided our work: Sixing made a desert with two abandoned buildings, containing media either made by Syrian refugees, or made from close interactions with them. The primary focuses of these media are art and music. Halle made a suburban house and block containing more mainstream, and mainly Western media, as well as comments made by refugees and non-refugees on social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter. We made just one object in the suburbs that, if the player found and had enough interest in, takes them to the desert. Otherwise, they would remain in the suburbs for the duration of the game.

The project is an amalgam of perspectives — perspectives from here, from the computer and TV, from the itty bitty talks on the dinner tables, and those from elsewhere: the faraway Middle East, the real happenings in refugee camps, unseen art and music made by refugee artists and children, the raw images that are covered by those screens in our living rooms, hidden by the more accessible Western media. You can’t be two places at once in real world, but in virtual worlds, it’s easy to be here and be elsewhere.

Our final product will do its work as an educational resource on the Syrian refugee crisis, but other than that, it is about the way we see, hear, watch, perceive and understand. The explosion of media in our lives successfully gives the false impression that we learn and understand issues more quickly, effectively and deeply; but at the same time, we are too drowned in the sea of information to realize that the excess of media is obscuring us.

We hope what we made can at least expose the fact that we are in an age where we need to think critically about what we perceive through media. But critically how? Is there even a right answer to a question like that? We have been looking for that answer throughout the project, and we will always in the pursuit of it — not from here, not from elsewhere, but in between here and elsewhere.

Clerical Masculinity in Old Regime France

This summer, I worked with Professor Mita Choudhury on research for her new book on clerical masculinity in Old Regime France. As a history major, it was exciting not only to delve into the research, but also Professor Choudhury’s process. Beyond my role as researcher, I helped to organize the material through creating a timeline and compiling a bibliography and conceptual notes on a WordPress journal.

Throughout the program, I utilized the resources of the Vassar Library as I researched. At the beginning of the summer, I worked to establish context for the Catholic Church in France throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. In particular, I paid close attention to the church hierarchy, the establishment of orders and congregations, and the training and roles of priests. Over the subsequent weeks, I researched constructions of gender in early modern Europe and beyond. I worked to identify different models of masculinity, especially as defined by hierarchy in the family and the community, self-control, the body, and sexuality. By the end of the program, I returned to religious research examining deviance, like witchcraft or the convulsionnaires of Saint-Médard, and the church’s response to deviance through ecclesiastical courts. In addition, I looked at the Jesuits and the Jansenist movement.

This summer had a profound impact on me as a student, and encouraged me in the field of history as I consider pursuing a graduate degree. I gained comfort in researching and a much better understanding of how to undertake a large project, like a book. Especially as I look ahead to my senior thesis, the opportunity to work with a skilled and insightful historian like Professor Choudhury will prove invaluable to me.

Voter Education Project

The Voter Education Project (VEP) was a civil rights program that operated in the American South during the 1960s. Over the course of this summer, we focused largely on the first iteration of the Project, which registered over one million African Americans between 1962 and the 1964 election, which was a major feat one year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act. VEP was administered through the Southern Regional Council (SRC), a nonpartisan, biracial group based in Atlanta. Three private foundations–the Stern Family Fund, the Taconic Foundation and the Field Foundation–provided an overwhelming majority of the funding for VEP. Over the course of the Project, the SRC distributed almost $1 million to civil rights groups, such as SNCC, the NAACP, CORE, and the SCLC, among others, for voter education and registration. During this Ford project, we worked with documents from the Taconic Foundation, stored at the Rockefeller Archive. Additionally, we worked with microfilmed documents from the Southern Regional Council that pertained to the Voter Education Project.

Despite VEP’s remarkable results, very little has been published about it. We examined VEP from several different angles, including some of SNCC’s files, some of SCLC’s files, in addition to the SRC’s own files on VEP. In conjunction with the limited secondary source material available, we gleaned a slightly different picture of the origins than some of the published material. Stephen Currier, the President of the Taconic Foundation, seems to have in the end played a larger role in the creation of the project than he had previously been given credit for. By focusing on primary documents from both sides (the grant recipients and the grant-making organizations) we were able to see some of the tensions caused throughout the process. Smaller organizations often had problems with the reporting requirements, leading to many letters asking for documentation from the grant-makers. Being able to view this dynamic, and how it was not nearly as much of an issue for the larger organizations such as the NAACP was quite fascinating.

Working on a project about voting rights during an election year, especially one as fraught as the 2016 election, placed our research in a broader perspective. Especially in light of the recent near-gutting of the Voting Rights Act, recognizing the absurd lengths white registrars went to in Mississippi to prevent black voters from voting has rarely ever been so important.

Racism and the Marxist Struggle

Over the course of this summer, Professor Pinar Batur and I worked together to create two new syllabi for the sociology department. While one syllabi is intended to be taught as an introductory course and the second as an upper-level seminar, both courses focus on how Marxist thinkers and social theorists confront bigotry, racism, and racist war through antiracist theory, knowledge and action.

Black Lives Matter

The introductory course is called “Racism and the Marxist Struggle”. It concentrates on the classical debate by Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Oliver Cromwell Cox as theorists as well as other activists. It aims to explore how racist ideologies and discriminatory practices expanded and maintained by capitalist institutional racism and racial inequality. This class aims to show how racialized spaces globalize through capitalism and how anti-racist struggle against racism, colonialism, and postcolonial arrangements developed. It examines the intersectionality of race, class, and gender. The advanced course is titled “Dissent!: Black Lives Matter”. It explores possibilities of the total transformation of American society as advocated by the Black Lives Matter movement. It studies the grotesque level of overt and covert racism in the United States, and argues that the fight that began with antislavery has not ended. This class also studies the role of dissent in society and societal transformation.

Malcolm X

Much of my work on this project was completed in the library, where I read a vast assortment of books, essays, plays, and speeches by Karl Marx, W.E.B. DuBois, Franz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Alex Haley, bell hooks, August Wilson, and James Baldwin, among others. The more I read, the deeper my comprehension of the subject became, and with this knowledge, we adjusted the content of the course syllabi. With Professor Batur, I tailored each course to suit the specific needs of introductory and advanced students. The resulting courses confront racism by exploring antiracist discourse and antiracist action in similar ways.

W.E.B. Du Bois

My research led me to New York City libraries. I visited the New York Public Library to conduct research on Marx and Angela Davis, and I later visited the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, where I gained access to microfilm files from Malcolm X. We have incorporated copies of Malcolm X’s original work together with Du Bois’ original work, in their own handwriting, into our syllabi.

As a sociology major, this project was immensely beneficial for my own knowledge of the field. I am a far better student of social theory for having read these pieces and for being given the time and space to fully understand them. I also feel I am better prepared to write my senior thesis now that I have broader understanding of these social theorists and racial theory. As a future graduate student of sociology — and perhaps someday a scholar in the field — writing these syllabi gave me perspective on how to create courses that are comprehensive and have an orderly structure.

Where They Went: The 1887 Dawes Act, the Break-Up of Native American Reservations and the Emergence of the Urban Indian

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.

Intergenerational Mortality Effects of Improved Health and Family Planning: Evidence from a Health and Family Planing Program in Bangladesh

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.

How does the way we move our bodies influence the way we think? This summer, I worked to answer this question, specifically as it applies to education. Our bodies are a rich source of information that most people rarely attend to. By listening to our bodies and learning more about our bodies’ natural patterns, we can change the way we function, both in academia and beyond.

Central Elementary School-105

Movement can help students master new material and learn greater social-emotional skills. Through the implementation of these techniques, students will become the agent of their own learning and discovery, which in turn will allow them to better self-regulate. However, movement in the classroom does not only help students. Teachers can also reap great benefits from incorporating movement into their workday. In fact, teacher movement was one of the primary focuses of my work this summer. Through mindful movement, teachers can teach more effectively and more easily relate to their students. Further, these techniques may lessen the emotional stress inherent in a teacher’s job and may enable the teacher to feel a greater sense of self-efficacy, which in turn could decrease the rate of teacher burnout.

The goal of the work I’ve done this summer is to eventually write a book discussing how to integrate movement into primary education. This book would be addressed to teachers and have an empirical basis. Our book would draw from a variety of movement disciplines, including yoga, mindfulness training, and the Feldenkrais method. Over the course of the summer, we’ve begun the process of compiling a book proposal to submit to publishers. A complete book proposal includes a table of contents with chapter summaries, sample chapters, and a detailed cover letter. In pursuit of this goal, I researched topics ranging from the effects of playful learning to mindfulness interventions in the classroom. I also reflected on my own past movement experiences and brainstormed ways those experiences could be translated into the classroom.

Changing the Stakes: Transitioning Away from High Stakes Testing towards Project-Based Assessments in Public Schools

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.

A World of Oralities: Essays in Memory of John Miles Foley

This summer, I had the pleasure of working with Professor Amodio on editing papers for a collection of essays in memory of John Miles Foley, a titan in the study of oral tradition and a great friend to the contributing scholars. Foley was instrumental to the study of oral tradition, or the transmission of stories, histories, genealogies, etc., through not only his impressive corpus of books and articles, but also through his founding of the Oral Tradition journal, making access to scholarly articles on the subject possible to readers all around the world.

John Miles Foley in 2011

The concept of an oral tradition is especially important to keep in mind when considering texts that were originally composed orally, so that the texts can be considered in the original context in which they were created and performed. This extends to any orally-composed text, whether it is an Anglo-Saxon epic, like Beowulf, a Kirghiz epic, or a Nigerian oral poem composed in honor of a political election, spanning multiple historical periods, cultures, and geographical borders. Placing a text back into its performative context helps bring the text to life for the reader in a way that the written text often is not able to fully convey.

Thus, the core of my work this summer was to read through the essays sent in by scholars, each one detailing Foley’s study of orality as it relates to their specific field of study. Our editing process consisted of going through each essay multiple times, each time taking care to make sure that the version conformed to the proper citation style and ensuring that the necessary changes were inserted. After we had both gone through an essay enough times (which could be anywhere from three to six times) that it became sufficiently polished, the essay was sent off to its author for approval, along with any questions we may have had concerning the text, and was only then considered ready for the next phase of editing.

The stack of the essays I worked on during the project, with my face for scale

Me and the many essays I worked on during the course of the project.

Aside from copy-editing essays, I also helped with preparing other details necessary to producing a completed book, like writing short summaries of the essays for the front piece, securing the rights to reproduced images, working on the logistics of incorporating an audio component into a book, and communicating with the various contributors to get feedback on our edits and smooth out any textual uncertainties.

I have learned a considerable amount this summer, not only about editing a book, but also about oral tradition and its application to texts as a means of preserving the performative context that is lost when a text is written down. Oral tradition is alive and well today, and I am glad to have been able to help with the book dedicated to honoring Foley’s memory as a scholar and friend to all of the authors involved.

This summer, I spent my time researching repertoire for treble choirs and applying that research in a two-week choral festival for singers ages 8 to 18. Treble choir repertoire is music written for a choir of only sopranos and altos, with divisi ranging from unison to two-part (SA), three-part (SSA), and even four-part (SSAA). Treble music is used in choirs of all women (such as the Vassar College Women’s Chorus) and children’s choirs, as was the case this summer. I was tasked with selecting music to be sung by the Cappella Festiva Treble Choir for their Summer Choral Festival. The biggest challenge I faced in selecting repertoire was simply finding it- the amount of treble music in existence is shamefully small. Much of it is written by the same few composers, is fairly modern, and centers around topics like love and flowers and pretty things. It is quite difficult to find treble music with heavy subject matter and meaty musical phrases. There were some pieces that, originally for SATB choir, had been arranged for treble choir, but these almost always seemed lesser than the original. The two most difficult genres to find quality arrangements for were spiritual/gospel and pop. Most spirituals were condensed versions of SATB arrangements, and did not utilize the full potential of a treble choir. The pop songs were almost entirely the same format- the first verse is a solo, then one part takes the chorus while the other parts sing “ooh”, and the rest of it is mostly unison with an occasional uninteresting harmony. In the end, I picked music in these two genres that would be fun for the Cappella singers, and found music in other genres to offer a challenge.

The final two weeks of the project involved teaching the music I had picked to a choir of 27 girls from around the Hudson Valley. I lead sectionals, assisted in music theory, taught body percussion, demonstrated improvisational singing, and conducted a piece for the final concert. All in all, the festival ran quite smoothly, and I will use the knowledge I have gained to help pick repertoire for the Vassar College Women’s Chorus in the future.

Pictured below are some favorite moments from the Summer Choral Festival: