Building Racial Literacy: The Joyce D. Bickerstaff Black Girls’ Lives Matter Collection and the Bechtel Lecture Series

This summer I assisted Professor Colette Cann with the expansion of the Education Department’s children’s book library, taking on the distinct task of enlarging and enriching the department’s collection of literature for and about youth of color. For our project, Professor Cann and I focused in particular on collecting literature about Black girls and young women. With the assistance of professor emerita Joyce Bickerstaff, I also helped plan the next installment of Vassar’s Bechtel Lecture Series, to be given this fall by celebrated children’s book author Andrea Davis Pinkney. In honor of her continued commitment to the study of children’s literature at Vassar and beyond, we decided to name the new book collection—the opening of which will be officially announced at the time of the Bechtel Lecture—the Joyce D. Bickerstaff Black Girls’ Lives Matter Collection.

Much of my time this summer was spent researching and cataloging a list of books that center on, celebrate, or complicate narratives about Black girls and young women to be adopted into the library. I also assisted Professor Bickerstaff with the retrieval of several hundred books from storage which now form a significant portion of the library’s overall collection; many of these books have been incorporated into the Black Girls’ Lives Matter Collection as well. With the help of the staff at Poughkeepsie’s Three Arts Bookstore, even more books were purchased for the Black Girls’ Lives Matter Collection, which now totals at nearly 400 titles.

Beginning in November, the Black Girls’ Lives Matter Collection will serve as the booklist for the inaugural season of the department’s new Pop-Up Library Program. Subdivided into groupings of 30 books organized around different themes, it will visit and live with participating Poughkeepsie elementary school classrooms for month-long periods at a time, to be used by teachers and students as they wish. Through this program, we hope the collection—and all future collections adopted as Pop-Up Library booklists—will function as an exciting and readily accessible resource for the development of literacy skills and racial awareness in local youth.

The Dome Room in the Maria Mitchell Observatory has been completely reorganized to make way for the growing collection, and all the titles that make up the newly expanded library will be easily searchable through an online catalog that will launch this fall—along with the opening of the library and the commencement of the Pop-Up Library Program—to coincide with Andrea Davis Pinkney’s delivery of the Bechtel Lecture on November 3rd. The Bechtel Lecture Series, which was established in 1990 to honor prominent figures in the field of children’s literature, is open to the entire Vassar community and the larger Poughkeepsie community of which we are a part. We hope you will all attend!

Along with Professor Cann and Professor Bickerstaff, the work I completed this summer would not have been possible without the guidance and assistance of Gretchen Lieb, Heidy Berthoud, Dayle Rebelein, Julie Riess, Andrea Davis Pinkney, Scottie Bowditch, and Walter Effron. Thank you!

Education Policy and Students in Special Education: An Institutional Ethnography

A major change is coming to public education in the USA. President Obama and Congress finally replaced the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). NCLB, which has been shaping national education policy for over 15 years, is often regarded as a major failure. Many parents, students, and teachers across the country are unhappy with the increased standardization and intensive testing regime that it brought about. NCLB failed to actually live up to its name. As the extensive test results NCLB has accumulated prove, millions of students in the United States are let down by our schools yearly. Students, especially racial minorities and those facing disabilities, are often left to flounder. And since NCLB and its successor are both inherently Civil Rights laws, this failure feels especially poignant.

The signing of ESSA in December, 2015.

Professor Erin McCloskey and I began research following the implementation of NCLB’s successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). This new bill returns most of the control over education to the individual states, and disempowers the Department of Education for the first time since 1965. Little is known about how the bill will be implemented due to its recency, but major change is coming. Thus, now is the perfect moment to begin gathering data. Our longterm goal is to follow the implementation of ESSA to uncover how the law impacts special education teachers and students with disability classifications. Will every student, including those with disabilities, truly achieve, as the law’s name claims?

Because the law has not yet been implemented, our research has thus far mostly been preparatory—reviewing literature, news, and preliminary interviews with teachers. I spent the summer coding, transcribing, and writing an extensive literature review. My work should provide a foundation upon which Professor McCloskey can build her research as she continues her work.

Japanese Fiction and Film: The Narrative Tradition

This summer, I had the wonderful opportunity to work with Professor Peipei Qiu on examining Japanese narratives in literature and cinema, with the results of the project being used for the Spring 2017 course, “The Narratives of Japan: Fiction and Film.” In looking at films adapted from literature or connected through common themes, we examined the aesthetic choices of the directors and authors, and the ways in which the narratives interact with their social contexts. This project covers a broad range of Japanese storytelling, from the oldest extant collection known as the Kojiki to the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki.

For this project, I researched, evaluated, and collected relevant secondary and theoretical materials on Japanese film and literature (notably Rashomon, Ugetsu Monogatari, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, The Makioka Sisters and Fires on the Plain) for the course syllabus, which I compiled into an annotated bibliography for Professor Qiu’s review. I compiled lists of Japanese films based on the literature of contemporary authors like Banana Yoshimoto, Haruki Murakami, and Natsuo Kirino, and gathered required films and readings from Vassar’s library and through loan systems. Once the syllabus was finalized, I digitized the readings, and learned to “rip” DVDs to create video files using HandBrake and Final Cut Pro. As I assisted Professor Qiu in preparing course materials, I conducted my own research on Hayao Miyazaki’s films Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away to create a visual presentation on “Environmentalism in Miyazaki’s Animation,” which will be shown to Professor Qiu’s class as part of the course material. This presentation explores how these particular films not only reflect Miyazaki’s personal view of environmentalism, but also embody different aspects of an ancient Japanese philosophy towards nature, ultimately connecting ancient Japanese literature with contemporary cinematic storytelling.

I am grateful to have been a part of this project this summer. I had the amazing experience of working with Professor Qiu and conducting intensive research that not only built on my academic skills, but also allowed me to gain some insight into the logistics of creating courses here at Vassar. I enjoyed exploring the richness of Japan’s literary and cinematic storytelling tradition, and I am incredibly excited for my work to be a part of Vassar’s curriculum in the spring.

The Assaulting Caribbean Sea: Climate Change Resilience and the Region’s Endangered Cities

This summer Prof. Lisa Paravisini and I conducted research on climate change, rising sea levels, and the environmental efforts that bring attention to these impending dangers across the Caribbean. She is currently working on a book that describes and expands upon the discourses put forth by artists and activists who denounce or realize the contemporary tension between growing cities and infrastructures, and their unsustainability in a world that is responding to the myriad ways in which we have harmed it.

Lisa chose key locations in the Caribbean that are estimated to be significantly underwater by the year 2050.

Throughout our travels to Cuba, Miami, and Puerto Rico, we contacted artists, journalists, environmental engineers and documented our conversations which continuously magnified the web of associations between their works and efforts to speak to environmental pressures, and their threats to survival. Lisa’s vision of the book fluidly embraces the spectrum of experiences we got to share and learn from, taking shape with every new finding.

We spoke to Alejandro Durán, Mexican and Brooklyn-based artist who has made the Sian Ka’an peninsula the focus of his latest work. He gathers, documents, and later on modifies, the trash that washes up on the shores of this UNESCO World Heritage site. His installations and photographs are also in conversation with previous earthworks such as Smithson’s. The manifestations of this project are many-fold, making community involvement and awareness an integral part of his work.

In Havana, we headed to galleries, workshops, artist’s studios; then travelled to Trinidad (also a UNESCO World Heritage Site) and Casilda. As coastal cities, they are affected by tourism, rising sea levels, fluctuating biodiversity, and the factors that fuel the impact of these phenomena. However, these are one of the few places where tangible changes are being made in order to reach sustainability in the face of rapid environmental shifts. Among the conversations we had, we met with an environmental engineer and journalist who described the Cuban government’s intervention of the coast in restoring it to have less environmentally harmful structures/edifices. She shared with us documents from the archives of these actions, statistics and reports.

In Miami, we surveyed galleries, museums, and met with Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié. His latest series is in conversation with the Hudson River School’s crafting of American landscapes, by reimagining these spaces as ridden with the unspoken and the invisible. He perceives these depictions as nuanced versions of ghostly or hidden histories of the colonizing project. He applies glitter and select colors to a metallic surface and delivers these interwoven narratives, using both their association to landscape painting in the American imagination and the unearthing of all that was strategically removed from those depictions. This description of the colonizing forces entering the Caribbean landscape inevitably quotes the seizing of the physical land and its potential for production as the beginnings of exploitative practices at the expense of its inhabitants, damaging ecosystems, causing erosion, exacerbating soil depletion, deforestation, and basically rendering a geographical space unfit to sustain any sort of life.

Finally, in Puerto Rico, we spoke to artists Teo Freytes, MariMater O’Neill, and Dhara Rivera. They shared perspectives and speculations about environmental issues in the Caribbean, invited us to their studios, and gave us more materials to work with and people to be in touch with.

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.