This year we awarded eight summer fellowships.

Shawna Beese (Nursing) is researching how the social determinants of health interplay with our epigenetics, biology, and health behaviors to determine increased neighborhood resilience, or overall capacity to adapt to stressors as individuals and collectively. The aim is to start to address the underlying causes of the widening rural-urban mortality gap, such as isolation, loneliness, and despair. Beese expects to create a clear operational definition of neighborhood resilience in addition to the antecedents, attributes, and consequences of that concept. The fellowship enabled a comprehensive review the literature on resilience in the neighborhood setting, which will be foundational in clarifying the understanding of key neighborhood concepts for future research .

Yin Ru Chen’s (political science) research explores the design and the implementation outcomes of the Gender Mainstreaming (GM) program in Taiwan to provide direction for program improvement and academic contribution to gender policy studies in Asia. This research employs multi methods, such as content analysis, face-to-face interviews, and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), and studies the GM program from two perspectives: macro and micro. The macro perspective examines the program design, and the micro perspective evaluates the program outcomes. The two perspectives together can help to unveil how program design impacts the program outcomes and provide indications for future improvement.

Chioma Ezeh (language, literacy, and technology) focuses her research on multilingual education, and how multilingualism and sociocultural factors interplay with power structures to shape learning and assessment practices and language education policy. Ezeh conducted a case study that explored the intersection of macro (Washington state) language policy and micro (second-grade classroom) policy enactments in positioning and bridging multilingual learners’ language practices for meaning-making during learning and assessment events.

Athar Ali Khan’s (anthropology) research examines how socially and economically marginalized agropastoralist tribes in highly fragile mountain ecosystems of Central Karakoram in Pakistan are adapting to climate change by relying on their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Worldwide, Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) is considered costly and complex as it requires tradeoffs in livelihoods and wellbeing strategies. The research aims to explore the CCA strategies of agropastoral tribes which can be useful for inclusion in climate change adaptation plans and policies for Pakistan, which is 61% mountainous.

April Kraft-Duley’s (criminal justice) research examines the School Violence Prevention Program (SVPP) that was implemented after the Parkland School shooting. She examines the intersection of who is funded and what is funded, specifically, a) the sociodemographic characteristics of the applicants; b) safety measures they request; c) whether those safety measures are supported by existing research, and if so, what types; and d) the statistical interactions between who is funded and what is funded. Kraft-Duley aims to evaluate the SVPP’s intended outcome of safer students, and whether this safety outcome is implemented equitably for all students and districts.

Erica Magaña’s (criminal justice) research focuses on females who commit sexual offenses, using police-reported and self-reported sexual victimization data to examine the following questions: a) what types of sexual offenses do females perpetrate, b) can these sex offenses be classified into distinct groups or ‘types of sex offenses,’ c) are these offense ‘types’ consistent with existing offender typologies of female sexual offenders, and d) are there observed offense differences between police-reported and self-reported sexual victimization data? She aims to provide policy suggestions to help responses to female-perpetrated sexual violence in order to prevent or reduce its prevalence.

Abbas Mammadov (political science) researches the role of political leadership in decision-making process, in particular the impact of personal qualities of leaders on foreign policy issues. His primary region of interest is Russia and its foreign policy, its role in ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and Russia’s relations with Western democracies, especially the United States. Mammadov utilizes methods such as leadership trait analysis to study the personality traits of various heads of state and government, including Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and others.

Helary Yakub (political science) studies trauma and violent extremism. She addresses the issue of what drives people to join violent extremist groups and how they are recruited. She is currently developing her own model to respond to this question, which she has coined “the social ecology of trauma.” She aims to accomplish her goal for bringing healing to people and communities around the world through her research. This study will also shed light on the flawed structures that continue to foster trauma and consequently violence on a global scale. She therefore expects that this study would illustrate the need for systemic reform.