At the end of each semester, Global Affairs hosts a Research Week where majors, minors, graduate students, and students in Global Affairs courses can submit their original work.
A committee of faculty and staff in Global Affairs recognizes students who have outstanding scholarly or creative projects.
Please congratulate the awardees for Spring 2023 and those who received Honorable Mentions. We also want to acknowledge all of the hard work that all students who submitted to Research Week put into their projects.
GRADUATE STUDENTS
Awards
Lindsey Schmidt, "Mediatizing Migration: An Analysis of the Media’s Representations of Central American and Ukrainian Migrants"
Mass news media’s prevalence in advanced democracies, including the United States, has rapidly grown throughout the 21st century, allocating significant power to the media to shape public opinions and political decisions through their representations of political issues. This study compares how two mainstream U.S. broadcast news organizations (Fox News and MSNBC) portray migrants coming to the United States from Central America in 2014 and Ukraine in 2022. This research conducts a content and critical discourse analysis to examine four separate aspects of representation (subjects, characterization, context, and frame) in 108 broadcast transcripts. The results reveal that both media organizations consistently, positively represent Ukrainian migrants, but markedly differ in how they represent Central American migrants. Consequently, this study concludes that the nationality of migrants has a more significant influence than the political affiliation of the media organization on how the media represent migrants. As migration continues to be a contentious yet prominent political subject, these results provide valuable insight into how the public is informed about different populations of migrants, which may impact the public’s beliefs about and attitudes toward migrants, including their voting behaviors.
Leslie Spitz-Edson, "FPIC Processes as Participatory Democracy: A Literature Review"
Because Indigenous communities often exist at a nation’s periphery, often in “brown areas” (O’Donnell 1993), states and corporations may target their territories for extractive projects that threaten their livelihoods. Indigenous activists and international rights institutions envisioned FPIC (free, informed, prior consent) processes as a way for states and corporations to seek Indigenous consent through consultation. Thus, FPIC is a form of induced participatory democracy. However, FPIC in practice often fails to reconcile the big-picture idealism of its origins with the realities of local power relations and state capacity. What can the participatory or deliberative democracy literature bring to a critique of FPIC? This literature review examines FPIC’s context and practice through the lens of that broader literature and touch upon how FPIC is used by corporations, states, elites, and communities not only for deliberative purposes but also for broader political and discursive ends.
Honorable Mention
Nicholas Kestler, "Resurgence of Coup d’états in West Africa"
After the Cold War era, along with the rest of the world, Africa saw a considerable decline in coup d’états bringing a sense of optimism in stability on the continent. Then in 2020, Malian Armed Forces removed President Keita from office followed 9-months later with another coup removing the interim president, then a coup in Guinea, and two coups in Burkina Faso. By September of 2022, West Africa had experienced almost the same number of coups that the entire continent experienced in the decade prior. This research aims to understand what the causes are for the recent wave of coups in West Africa. I will conduct a content analysis approach and carry out interviews with policy makers in the region to build a case study on each state. Comparing my findings to the master narrative on coups, I will identify what the catalyst is for the recent successful attempts in West Africa. I believe to find shifts in the behavior of the international community which enabled coup plotters to execute their plan. This research will provide policy recommendations to the international community supporting stability in the region aiming to prevent future coups.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Awards
Delaney Soliday, "Breaking the Walls: Geospatial Patterns in the Islamic State’s Use of Strategic Soft Targeting"
This project analyzes geospatial patterns in the Islamic State’s (IS) use of strategic soft targeting (SST) over time. The Islamic State and its affiliate groups are particularly well-known for using this tactic to target vulnerable communities–a term I use to describe individuals with little to no control over their own physical mobility, including prisoners, detained individuals, internally displaced persons, and refugees. This work examines how the Islamic State’s use of strategic soft targeting has changed both diachronically and geographically and how that trend is affecting vulnerable communities across the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. This study maps trends in the IS’s attacks on prisons, detention centers, and IDP/refugee camps over the past 16 years and contextualizes this data within larger terrorism trends. In this study, I (1) use hot spot analysis to identify trends in attack distribution and (2) conduct a geographic case study of SST activity in the Lake Chad Basin countries. Using ArcGIS Pro to analyze an original dataset constructed for this study, I found that terrorist activity is likely expanding beyond the Middle East and intensifying in sub-Saharan Africa, where groups have access to terrorist safe havens in undergoverned spaces. Most strategic soft targeting activity is taking place in the quadripoint border region where Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, and Chad meet.
Salwa Zahid, "Remittances and Economic Development: A Deeper Look at the Effects of Foreign Remittances from the UAE on Kerala, India"
This article examines the importance and significance of foreign remittances in the economic development of Kerala, India. Using MAXQDA coding software, I use finding from a data set of 33 reports form the yearly Kerala Economic Reviews. I aim to make a contribution to the study of remittances and economic development by providing a nuanced and deeper understanding of the significance of remittances in the Keralite economy, as well as producing three phases of the remittances journey in the economic development of Kerala. I argue that, as shown in the Kerala State Review yearly reports, remittances played a significant and important role in the economic development of Kerala, India. The emergence and importance of remittances can be distinguished into three phase: first, the first appearance and relative importance in 1996, seven years after the Gulf Boom 1972-1983, as workers first work to settle themselves and pay for living costs before sending surplus money back home; second from 2005-present, in which remittances’ importance and key role in economic development is noticed, as remittances is mentioned with great praise; and third, during the Economic Crisis in the Gulf Countries, in which, although a disturbance in remittance could impact the economy of Kerala, the Keralite economy is still highlighted as resilient from the remittances downflow.
Honorable Mentions
Diana Fernandez, "Transit-orientated Development: Using Participatory Planning for Social Sustainability Outcomes"
This research project examined how transit-orientated development (TOD) planning can adhere to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by using participatory methods to contribute to the social pillar of sustainability. It examined urban planning documents of two TOD areas in Arlington County, Pentagon City and Rosslyn, to analyze the presence and relationship of participatory methods, like community workshops and public comments, and outcomes of social sustainability in the pre-2000s and post-2000s periods. The findings indicate that the most recent documents included more participatory methods and that participant comment and involvement contributed to the overall guiding principles relating to social sustainability, the presence of policy approaches and metrics for those principles, and some explicit mentions of community desires and wants in addressing social issues throughout the documents. This conclusion has real applications to Goal 11 (and other goals) of the SDGs by advancing the target of inclusive and sustainable participatory planning and management.
Ella Jackson, "Government Public Service Announcements Honduras and Mexico Instagram Campaigns on Direct & Indirect Violence Against Women"
Latin America and Caribbean States have recognized the prevalent issue of violence against women and gender-based violence. Public service announcements in the past addressing the violence were criticized for misrepresenting the demographic of victims as the aggressors and being unsympathetic .This paper analyzes intimate partner violence and gendered based violence public service announcements from the Mexican and Honduran government social media Instagram pages. Collecting findings for data sets from Instagram from 2022 to 2023 looking at the post visuals and its engagement levels. Data was analyzed with inductive qualitative content analysis using the diffusion of innovations theory framework looking at the five main factors: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. Also looking at the messages to see if gain-frame or loss-frame received more beneficial engagement. This paper will contribute to the study of hierarchical gender structures and social normalities in government and on action against gendered violence during the aftermath of the turbulent Covid-19 pandemic. This paper argues that government campaigns that don't empathetically address the needs of its citizens and lack data statistics will cause public opinion that intensifies cultural and social normalities in the community that support gendered-violence, increasing disdain with government leadership.
Sannai James, "Vacation Behind the Curtain: A research study of tourism of Eastern Bloc nations in a Post-Soviet era"
During the reign of the Soviet Union, tourism from Eastern & Western countries in Eastern Bloc nations brought economic and cultural leverage to residents and local communities alike behind the Iron Curtain. After the dissolvement of the Soviet Union, tourism within the Eastern Bloc rapidly changed to conform to new economic and cultural standards from both the Eastern and Western world. The study will conduct investigative research to determine how the impact of tourism during and in a Post-Soviet era has shaped tourism operations from a modern day stand point. The research information acquired from local communities within popular tourist destination Mostar, Bosnia, formerly Yugoslavia, will broadly determine how quality of life has shifted for both residents and tourists in the former Eastern Bloc.