PI: Wendy Glenn

Team Members:

Ricki Ginsberg, UConn PhD graduate in Curriculum and Instruction

Danielle King, UConn PhD candidate in Curriculum and Instruction

Arianna Drossopoulos, Teacher at East Hartford High School and UConn graduate

Tala Adawiya, UConn undergraduate in English Education

Asfia Qutub, UConn undergraduate in English Education

Kate Capshaw, UConn Professor of English

Victoria Ford Smith, UConn Associate Professor of English

Project Title: Exploring and Expanding Understandings of Islam Through Young Adult Literature

This project engaged freshmen students at East Hartford High School in reading and conversation around young adult (YA) literature with Islam-related content and Muslim protagonists to help them build more complex understandings of a less familiar (and too often misrepresented) religion and culture. Students worked in small groups and as a class to read and discuss YA fiction, focusing specifically on content related to Islam and Muslim culture. At the end of the reading and discussion experience, students participated in an inquiry project that asked them to select a research question growing from their reading and classroom discussions, gather information, and design a product that shares their findings and educates their intended audience. These products were presented during a project celebration on the UConn campus on May 15, 2017 that included a panel featuring the authors of the YA novels read.

 Co-Investigator:

Michael Orwicz, Associate Professor, Department of Art & Art History

This project seeks to explore the effectiveness of the Sheff Movement Design Challenge process in advancing public understanding of and engagement with the contentious issues involved in school integration in the Hartford region and the role of scholars and practitioners in supporting such a process.

Beginning in the summer of 2016, the Sheff Movement Coalition embarked on a process to promote meaningful public discourse and engagement in developing a community-informed plan to advance the goal of quality integrated education in the Hartford region over the next three to five years.  Important components of the process include a community-wide design challenge event held at the Hartford Public Library in October 2016 and an ongoing large-scale information gathering effort. The current phase involves continued deliberation on selecting and implementing critical initiatives that build on, respond to, or actualize the learning from the community engagement process.

PI: Jeremy Pressman

Co-Investigator:

Dr. Matthew Leep, Social Sciences Department, Western Governors University

How does the national source of criticism affect views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? We ran two survey experiments using multiple versions of news stories about Israeli settlement construction and the conduct of the Israeli military toward Palestinians. The idea was to measure whether people’s opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were differentially affected by different foreign and domestic cues. We also considered the role of domestic partisanship and personality traits, including openness to new information.

PI: Ryan Watson

Faculty webpage: http://familystudies.uconn.edu/person/ryan-j-watson/

Project Title: Transgender erasure and exclusion: Next steps in the discourses at the nexus of gender identity, policy, and health

In contemporary discourse, we cannot go long without learning of new restrictions, proposed or passed, that limit the rights of gender minorities (i.e., transgender individuals). This project arranges a team of scholars and stakeholders to reduce and eliminate barriers that exist in relation to transgender rights. A major part of the project involves a special collection of empirical papers for the International Journal of Transgenderism aimed at reducing divisiveness in discourses related to transgender health — 14 papers from 7 countries are being considered. Another aspect of this project involves development of knowledge with community stakeholders via multiple partnerships to communicate the existing barriers that prohibit the understanding of issues related to gender minority health and well-being, at both UConn and in the larger community. This one-day meeting is scheduled to take place in the Fall of 2017. Both projects are made possible by the Public Discourse Project. 

Research Team:

Robert Capers, Herbarium Manager, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Margaret Rubega, Associate Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Jae-Eun Joo, Associate Professor-in-Residence, Educational Psychology

PI:  David Yalof

Research and a proposed symposium in early spring 2018 assessing the current state of dialogue that surrounds the appointment of Supreme Court Justices.   A database of commentary on the process will be generated, and scholars from a variety of disciplines (law professors, social scientists, etc) will analyze how changes in the confirmation process during the past 30 years have reduced the confirmation process to a meaningless charade, devoid of substantive discussion about our constitutional landscape.