Apprenticeship Program

Hosting Center: Center for Mexican American Studies/Latino Studies

Project Team: Prof. Nestor Rodriguez (Sociology), Yenibel Ruiz (doctoral student, Spanish and Portuguese Department), 3-4 undergraduate students

Project Summary: The project will search for and collect information concerning mass migrations from troubled regions in Central America, Venezuela, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia to Western Europe and the United States. Student researchers will be assigned to collect data via the internet from newspapers, government and agency reports, the UN, Doctors Without Borders, etc., regarding conditions that cause migration in countries, descriptions of migrants and asylum-seekers during migration (including human rights abuses), and policies to deter or support the migration. At the end of the semester students will submit a spreadsheet of their findings and a brief summary report. The data will be used in the writing of a book on caravan migration in the current era.

Expected meeting times: Meetings will be held face-to-face or via Zoom once every two weeks. Meeting times will be flexible as student schedules permit.

Hosting Department: Spanish and Portuguese

Project Team
Faculty: Dr. Charlie Nagle, Associate Professor of Spanish and Applied Linguistics
Graduate Research Assistant: Shelby Bruun

Dr. Nagle’s research focuses on how individuals learn additional languages as adults (for instance, Spanish). He is especially interested in how adults learn the sound system of their additional language(s) and the training techniques that can be used to help learners improve their perception and production of those languages. Dr. Nagle has worked with over a dozen undergraduate research assistants. At UT Austin, he directs the Speech Learning Lab, which is funded by a research grant from the National Science Foundation’s Program in Perception, Action, and Cognition.

Shelby Bruun is a Linguistics PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She serves as Lab Manager in Dr. Nagle’s Speech Learning Lab and is the Graduate Student Coordinator for the campuswide Second Language Studies research group. Shelby’s work focuses on learner perception, production, and acquisition of speech sounds in secondary and unfamiliar languages. She is especially interested in the development of optimal training strategies for learners of all ages and cognitive skill sets. 

Project Summary

Learning another language takes a lot of effort. Learning the pronunciation of another language can be a real challenge because the new language and the native language may not have the same sounds and rhythm. Many learners may not hear the subtle sound differences that are used to distinguish words in the new language, which can lead to processing and production problems. For instance, individuals who learn English often struggle to hear the difference between the words “sheep” and “ship” because the vowels in those words do not occur in their native language. English-speaking learners of Spanish have similar problems perceiving and producing Spanish sounds. What can we do to help people learn the sounds of their new language?

One technique that we know works is high variability pronunciation training. During this type of training, the learner hears words spoken by many different talkers and is asked to identify what they hear. As they progress through the training, they begin to encode the sounds more accurately, leading to better word recognition and in some cases better production. We know that this technique works, but we still need to discover how we can make it most effective. In this URAP, we will discuss second language sound learning, high variability pronunciation training, and the factors that make training most effective. Working together, we will carry out a study on how the complexity of the training and the spacing of training sessions affect pronunciation learning in Spanish as a second language.

Format and Expectations

This URAP involves weekly student-centered meetings. At these meetings, we will discuss relevant readings and complete hands-on research training activities designed to give participants the knowledge and skills they need to engage in the research project. Participants should expect to spend up to 10 hours per week on this URAP and to complete reading and homework assignments for each meeting.

Participants will gain experience with the following research skills:

• Critical reading and synthesis of academic sources
• Experimental design and planning
• Data collection and data processing
• Acoustic analysis of speech
• Data visualization and analysis in R

Throughout the semester, participants will also complete professional development activities related to language learning so that they can reflect on their own language learning process and interests:

• Complete the Bilingual Language Profile and engage in group discussion
• Attend a Second Language Studies talk or another talk given on campus related to language learning
• Connecting with the language learning community in Austin through Think Bilingual Austin

By the end of this URAP, our goal is to produce a white paper for the Spanish Language Program on what works for pronunciation training. We will also work toward a conference presentation to be delivered at the Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching conference.

The cohort will be called “Softening the Blow of Social Rejection” and the faculty lead, graduate students, and facilities are part of the Psychology Department. Activities will take place in the SEAY building on the UT Austin Campus.

Proposed Faculty Lead

The faculty lead will be Dr. Jennifer Beer, a Full Professor in the Psychology Department with appointments at Dell Med and the Institute for Neuroscience. Her expertise is on human social interaction and she draws on psychology, communication, neuroscience, and computational modeling in her research and training.

Dr. Beer has mentored research assistant cohorts of 3-12 students each year and several undergraduate theses since joining UT Austin in 2007. The lab has a long history of outreach to students from under-represented backgrounds. Many of her previous undergraduate research assistants have gone on to pursue advanced research experiences, honor theses, and graduate degrees in research-oriented disciplines. She has also published with previous undergraduate research assistants in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Proposed Format Overview and Details

Weekly activities will consist of six hours which include a team meeting (scheduled within regular business hours on a weekday and often this is a Friday time slot), reading background literature, and data collection with human participants on a psychological study in the SEAY building.

Team meetings will include discussions about scientific design in psychology and neuroscience, the use of computational modeling and observation instead of self-report, relevant background literature in psychology and neuroscience, statistical analyses, lessons on problems with science media, and a session on graduate school selection and applications. Data collection will involve running human participants through experimental procedures in Dr. Beer’s lab.

Justification

Students who participate in this research opportunity can expect to learn a) rigorous scientific design and how to address design concerns when working with human participants (e.g., why use computational modeling rather than just asking people what they are thinking, why is random assignment important, etc.), b) the psychology and neuroscience background literature on why further research is need to understand the best way to soften the blow of social rejection, and c) how to evaluate whether media write ups of scientific research actually match what was concluded by the scientists who conducted the research (e.g., in a peer-reviewed journal article). Furthermore, data collection will require coordination among the research assistant cohort and will provide a firsthand experience of how research teams operate. Students who have acquired these types of experiences are typically highly competitive for advanced research opportunities and well prepared to take on thesis projects.

Students will also learn what to say to make social rejection in the real world less hurtful to the rejectee and less emotionally draining for them. Finally, we will hold a session on how to decide on graduate training programs, how to select schools to apply to, and the application/interview process.        

Planned Outcomes

The research assistants will develop a group presentation (poster with accompanying oral presentation) on the purpose, hypotheses, and statistical analyses of the data collection project as well as collect a data set which speaks to what people can say during social rejection to protect their own emotions and the emotions of the person they are rejecting.

Hosting department/center/unit: Humanities Institute & Initiative for Digital Humanities

Project team (faculty, grad students etc.):

Cohort Team 1: The AVAnnotate Project – Tarot and the Archives in the “Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers”
Faculty: Dr. Tanya Clement
1 graduate student facilitator: Trent Wintermeier, Rhetoric and Writing
4 undergraduate research apprentices

Cohort Team 2: The Cost of Segregation Project – The monetary and ecological costs of segregation in Austin
Faculty: Dr. Edmund Gordon
Program Manager: Anna-Lisa Plant
1 graduate student facilitator: Hannah Michael, AADS
4 undergraduate research apprentices

Cohort Team 3: The Anti-Eviction Lab Project – Mapping eviction histories and geographies in Austin
Faculty: Dr. Erin McElroy
1 graduate student facilitator: Giulia Oprea, American Studies
4 undergraduate research apprentices

Project summary:

In the Fall of 2023, we will kick off our URAP program by managing peer cohort and multi-level cluster research projects that need sustained digital development. Ted Gordon’s (AADS) work on the “The Cost of Segregation” assesses the historical accumulation of land value from the property that was stripped from Austin’s Black communities over historical periods and through various unethical practices of dispossession. Tanya Clement (English) is tackling a specifically underserved archival presence in the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa archives at the LLILAS Benson, namely audio recordings of this legendary writer and activist both giving and receiving Tarot readings, that need to be contextualized for both classroom and research use. Erin McElroy (American Studies) produces the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project that uses multiple methods (mapping, oral history, data visualization, art) to chart pathways for housing justice. Together, this cohort will require students trained in digital humanist and humanities methods and platforms to realize research outcomes that extend far beyond the academic monograph. This cohort will need students trained in oral history, dynamic site mapping software, archival digitization, data visualization, and multi-modal (text/visuals/data) outcomes for presenting their findings and projecting future plans and pedagogical uses for their research.

The Fall URAP activity will culminate in a digital symposium from the cohort in January 2024 that reflects back on their initial outcome statements and potential projects as well as their concrete outcomes from the semester. This cohort URAP will also serve as a pilot model for student cluster building and skills development for future projects.

Expected meeting times (if known, this helps students plan their schedules):

Cohort Team 1 (The AVAnnotate Project)

• Weekly meetings with graduate student mentor and other apprentices
• Workshop sessions on the AudiAnnotate Extensible Workflow
• Archival research on the “Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers” at LLILAS Benson
• Monthly meetings with faculty advisor
• Curation of digital annotations and short essays throughout the project
• Development of final AVAnnotate project

Cohort Team 2 (The Cost of Segregation Project)

• Weekly meetings with graduate student mentor and other apprentices
• Workshop sessions on the monetary and ecological costs of segregation in Austin
• Analysis and coding of historical census data into mapping database
• Monthly meetings with faculty advisor
• Archival research on environmental history at Austin History Center
• Development of Cost of Segregation website

Cohort Team 3 (The Anti-Eviction Lab Project)

• Weekly meetings with graduate student mentor and other apprentices
• Workshop sessions on the Anti-Eviction Lab Project
• Digital and local archival research on Austin eviction histories
• Monthly meetings with faculty advisor
• Transcription and coding of tenant interviews and anti-surveillance advocates
• Development of Austin eviction history map

Any other expectations or format details relevant to the UG students who will be applying:

No previous experience with DH required, but willingness for learning digital and other humanities methods.

Unit: Center for Applied Cognitive Science; PI Cristine Legare

Proposed Faculty Lead/s from Unit

Cristine Legare directs Thinkery Connect, a museum-university-community research partnership between Thinkery and The Center for Applied Cognitive Science (CACS) at UT Austin.  The objective of this partnership is to translate best practices from learning and cognitive sciences into museum operations. Our educational philosophy is grounded in play-based, inquiry-rich learning experiences. We design exhibits and curated educational resources that encourage visitors to develop STEAM “Habits of Mind” such as critical thinking, systematic exploration,resolute behavior,hypothesis-testing,experimentation, andtrouble-shooting. These process skills are critical to early STEAM learning as well as to school readiness more generally. Focusing on STEAM Habits of Mind that support school readiness skills can help communities better prepare children for school and set the foundation for lifelong learning. Please see our website for more information: https://www.centerforappliedcogsci.com/projects/thinkery-connect-a-museum-university-community-research-partnership

Proposed Format Overview and Details

Students will participate in weekly meetings with PI Legare and Brooke Turner, Director of Research at Thinkery, and other core members of the Thinkery Connect research staff to discuss exhibit development. The objective of these meetings will be to teach students how to incorporate best practices in learning sciences into exhibit design.

Students will both collect and code a variety of different kinds of data on parent-child interaction and science learning at Thinkery exhibits. These include parent-child interaction at science museum exhibits recorded with video and audio taping, eye tracking, and experimental tasks that measure STEAM learning in children.

We will schedule the weekly team meeting around the availability of URAP members. Data collection will occur at Thinkery and data processing/analysis with occur at CACS. Time spent coding and collecting data can be scheduled around students’ course schedules.

Justification

Students will have the unique opportunity to apply best practices in cognitive and learning sciences to informal learning practice in the context of a local children’s science museum. This opportunity is utterly unique in that will allow students to learn about both museum operations and cognitive and learning sciences research. Students will learn about museum exhibit design, data collection with children and families, and will master complex behavioral coding software. They will also learn about ways in which we are working in close collaboration with community partners to increase the accessibility, diversity, inclusivity and efficacy of our initiatives.

Planned Outcomes

The cohort will complete data collection and processing for the development of evidence-based bilingual signage in two exhibits at Thinkery (Farmer’s Market and Innovators’ Workshop).

Proposed Faculty Lead/s from Unit: Drs. Findley and Nielson will once again be leading the proposed cohort program. Our participation in the Pilot Program of the Cohort URAP format was a measurable success, and both professors are eager to provide students with another semester of research opportunities and mentoring. Drs. Nielson and Findley are still co-directing the Innovations for Peace and Development (IPD) lab, which is a student-focused research lab that provides mentored opportunities for interdisciplinary, policy-relevant research on global conflict and peacebuilding, foreign aid, and poverty alleviation. Our team represents multiple disciplines and will provide a diversity of perspectives to the cohort selected to join our team.

Proposed Format Overview and Details: The IPD Lab - Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program will be designed to provide on-campus experiential learning, applied training, and professional opportunities to UT students to empower them to fulfill UT’s motto, “What Starts Here Changes the World.” The cohort program will consist of 3 topical sub-modules and 3 functional approaches. The sub-modules include research approaches in social science, research ethics, and research methods, while the functional approaches include curated readings, data collection, and data analysis. The cohort program will consist of the following activities:

1. Weekly graduate student-facilitated group discussion of curated readings relevant to the sub-modules (1 hr)
2. Monthly IPD All Hands meeting (1 hr)
3. Hands-on workshop sessions on a weekly basis with research tasks to be completed by the next session (2-3 hrs of work per task)
4. Members will enroll in LA 331R and attend a biweekly URAP seminar organized by CoLA.
5. Possible window of time for group meetings: Fridays from 2-5 pm

Justification: Our proposed format is designed to nurture and challenge URAP undergraduates as they have their first experience with academic research. This format will ensure that students gain a foundational understanding of political science research, establish the importance of ethics in research, and provide hands-on experience in conducting research and analysis. We designed our approach to facilitate collaboration among the 3 URAP students while receiving individual mentorship and guidance from faculty and graduate students. Our cohort program will enable students to make meaningful contributions to a transnational investigation of bias in local and national governments, propose their own collaborative research projects, and confidently pursue research in international politics and international development among other disciplines.

Planned Outcomes: At the end of their URAP semester, our cohort members will:

1. Have a better understanding of political science research,
2. Have meaningful hands-on experience conducting research, coding, and completing analysis via data analytical software and programming languages such as R (and Python if necessary), and
3. Be in position to successfully apply to the Spring URAP program, and take these skills beyond the cohort experience.

Proposed Faculty Lead/s from Unit: Becky Pettit (Sociology). Pettit is the Barbara Pierce Bush Regents Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a sociologist, trained in demographic methods, with interests in social inequality broadly defined. She is currently the Director of the Initiative for Law, Societies, and Justice and is the PI on a research collaboration with Home2Texas which will involve 47 undergraduate students in data collection over the summer of 2023. She will have primary responsibility for program management and organization.

Michael Hames-Garcia (Mexican American and Latino Studies) studies and teaches about inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability in the criminal justice system from policing and criminal courts to incarceration and reentry. He serves on the faculty advisory board of the Initiative for Law, Societies, and Justice where he contributes significant expertise related to critically engaged teaching. From 2019 until 2022, he served as a member of the City of Eugene's Civilian Review Board (which reviews investigations into allegations of misconduct and uses of force by the Eugene Police Department). He also served on the Eugene Police Commission in 2022. He will provide strategic guidance on program development and lead two sessions related to ethics and the conduct of community-engaged research.

Talitha LeFlouria (History) is Associate Professor of History and Fellow of the Mastin Gentry White Professorship in Southern History. She is a faculty affiliate of the Initiative for Law, Societies, and Justice. Her research and teaching focus is on the history of Black incarcerated women in the post-Civil War period. In addition to her scholarly publications, LeFlouria writes for popular media outlets, including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Root. Her research has also been profiled in Ms. Magazine, New York Magazine, Huffington Post, The Nation, and in several PBS documentaries including Slavery by Another Name. She will provide strategic guidance on program development and lead two sessions related to contemporary issues in Texas and communicating research insights to broad audiences.

Proposed Format Overview and Details: This URAP will offer students the opportunity to participate in collaborative and/or supported independent research. They will be invited to conceptualize research questions; frame those questions in relation to literature; clean, code, and analyze qualitative and/or quantitative data; and communicate the findings of their research to diverse audiences. We will meet weekly for one hour, alternating training activities with research team meetings. On alternate weeks, students will spend time learning about and discussing issues including research design, methods, ethics, and communicating research insights. They will also be asked to read and discuss original research papers/chapters related to crime, law, and justice in Texas. Students will also be invited to participate in approximately monthly workshares and related working group meetings associated with the Initiative for Law, Societies, and Justice. These meetings are typically held on Fridays from 9-10am.

Students will be invited to select to participate in one of two on-going research projects and/or develop an independent project of their choosing. One option is to work with Pettit, Brent Iverson (Chemistry), and Tauheeda Yasin (ACLS/Mellon Fellow), on a project investigating exposure to the judicial system and judicial decision making in communities across Texas. Data will be gathered in summer 2023 through a partnership with Home2Texas and the fall semester will be spent analyzing those data and identifying future avenues of research. A second option is to work with the staff of the Initiative for Law, Societies, and Justice on a research-practice partnership with the City of Austin Office of Violence Prevention. The partnership aims to gather and analyze data on perceptions of safety in Austin and students will be invited to participate in all aspects of the project include the collection, analysis, and presentation of data to the OVP. With prior approval, students may also work on a related independent research project.

Justification: This program allows students to engage in policy- and practice-oriented research on issues contemporary relevance. Despite decades of reform, Texas continues to maintain the largest prison and jail system in the nation. Over 7 million Texans encounter the legal system each year through fine-only misdemeanors. The City of Austin has engaged in a series of reforms to “reimagine public safety.” All of these raise important research questions that students from the University of Texas at Austin are uniquely positioned to answer.

Engaging with a cohort of students working on related projects on topics of shared interest enhances student learning while also developing students’ research skills and capacities. Students will participate in guided learning activities and directed research activities. They will also meet weekly as a cohort to define goals, articulate individual and collective objectives, share their learnings, and celebrate progress.

Planned Outcomes: Over the semester, the cohort of students will prepare a paper resulting from their respective project(s). Students will be invited to submit the paper to an undergraduate-oriented research journal such as the Berkeley Journal of Sociology. They will also be invited to share insights from their research with community partners including the Home2Texas team and/or the City of Austin Office of Violence Prevention. If relevant, students will be invited to communicate insights from their research and the research process through University-facing outlets such as the Daily Texan.

Cohort Topic

Determining Expertise in and through Social Media: Using Computational Rhetorical Analytics to Verify Qualification

Proposed Team

• 2 faculty: Dr. Casey Boyle, Rhetoric and Writing, and Dr. Scott Graham, Rhetoric and Writing
• 1 graduate student: TBD; 1 graduate student from the DWRL
• 4-5 Undergraduate Apprentices

Drs. Boyle and Graham are widely recognized for their contributions to the fields of computational rhetoric and digital humanities. They have extensive experience with teaching and using computational technologies in Python and R to study text, language, and discourse. Drs. Boyle and Graham have published extensively in rhetoric, social science, and biomedical journals. Moreover, they also have substantial experience in graduate and undergraduate research supervision. Dr. Boyle has served as the director of the DWRL since 2017, and in that role he has facilitated professional development, pedagogical, and research supervision for over 25 graduate students. Additionally, Dr. Graham routinely supervises apprentice researchers in his lab. He has facilitated undergraduate research internships for approximately a dozen students in the Bridging Disciplines program, Undergraduate research apprenticeship program, and major-specific capstones. Given these experiences, Drs. Boyle and Graham are ideal facilitators for this inaugural URAP.

Proposed Format Overview

3 topical sub-modules: expertise; public health communication; social media

3 functional approaches: content analysis; data collection; computational text analytics

Brief Motivation

Our proposed apprenticeship will give students an introduction to and practice in using computational methods for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing how expertise is leveraged in social media. That is, students will collect and analyze hundreds of social media profiles (e.g. Twitter) for those profiles’ use of expertise to participate in public discussions of health matters.

The DWRL apprenticeship will provide a structure for students to learn basic programming (primarily R), the use of application programming interfaces (APIs) to access and curate data, data science approaches to data cleaning and wrangling, and to conduct text analytics investigations using a variety of techniques and methods.

Proposed Format Details

The URAP experience will involve weekly student-directed meetings discussing hands-on tutorials and/or relevant readings. The URAP training experience will focus on a series of self-guided and supervisor-led tutorials devoted to data science techniques and use of the R programming environment. Specific tutorials focused on:

• General orientations to the R programming environment.
• General orientations to data management packages within the R programming environment.
• Use of R to connect to the Twitter API.
• Use of R to parse textual data.
• Use of R to visualize data and results.

Students will also receive a general orientation to research design, interpretation of results, presentation of findings, and ethical consideration for investigating social media.

Research Topic and Description

Arguments for and against Ethnic and Gender Studies

Questions related to critical race theory, gender identity, and other issues of significance to ethnic and gender studies scholars continue to make the pages of news reports, the drafting tables of legislators, and the material for legal cases. Students who join this project will collect and examine such sources including speeches, news reports, court cases, and legislation to understand the contours of the arguments offered in defense of or against gender and ethnic studies content. This research is important for those interested in the projects of ethnic and gender studies because such arguments shape students’ and professors’ academic freedom, not to mention the life chances for racial, gender, and sexual minorities outside the university context.

Proposed Team

Faculty: Dr. Karma Chávez, Mexican American and Latino/a Studies, karma.chavez@utexas.edu

Graduate Research Assistant: Anahí Ponce

Dr. Chávez is the chair of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, co-chair of the College of Liberal Arts Diversity Committee, and co-convener of the GRIDS Initiative. She has supervised numerous student research projects at the doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate levels and has served as her department’s graduate advisor.

Proposed Apprenticeship Format

The first part of the semester will involve readings and discussion on content and methodology. The second part of the semester will involve document collection and analysis. The following will be required for undergraduate apprentices on a weekly basis:

• Attend a discussion of readings facilitated by the GRA (1 hour)
• Attend a workshop with Dr. Chávez (1 hour)
• Complete tasks related to the research project including source annotations, worksheets, source collection, or analysis. These tasks are designed to facilitate understanding of each aspect of the interpretive research process.
• Enroll in LA 331R and attend a biweekly URAP seminar organized by CoLA

Format Motivation

This proposed format is designed to bring students to the table near the beginning of an interpretive research project so that they may get experience with many of the parts of that process such as reading existing scholarship and crafting a literature review, designing a research 2 project, and collecting and analyzing source materials. Moreover, the format is designed to encourage students to value collaboration and to learn to work and communicate effectively across lines of power difference (i.e., between themselves and the GRA and faculty mentor).

Project Team

• Lead: Monica Martinez, Associate Professor, Department of History
• Tanya Clement, Director, Initiative for Digital Humanities
• 1 graduate student facilitator
• 3 undergraduate research apprentices

Dr. Monica Martinez works to diversify the academy by advising a new generation of scholars. This advising, in addition to her regular teaching responsibilities, is a crucial part of her contribution as a professor. As the curricular co-coordinator and faculty at the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers (IRT) at Philips Academy, which helps prepare underrepresented minorities for graduate school, she mentored no less than 180 IRT students who matriculated into graduate programs. At Brown University, she mentored a broad group of underrepresented minorities by creating paid research opportunities and advising honors thesis projects. She served as a faculty mentor for four Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows. Leading a digital research lab required that she develop new pedagogical strategies to train what Tara McPherson calls “new hybrid practitioners.”

At the University of Texas at Austin, where she has been an Associate Professor since August 2020, Martinez continues to create opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students to learn research methods and contribute to the Mapping Violence project. In the summer of 2021 Martinez hired four PhD students and two MA students to join the Mapping Violence Research Lab and in Spring 2022 she offered an undergraduate research methods class, “Mapping Violence”.

Dr. Tanya Clement has over two decades of experience running, managing, and leading digital humanities (DH) projects. Clement will work with Martinez on developing the weekly workshops and integrating the students into the DH@UT ecosystem of DH projects, speakers, and activities as part of the Initiative for Digital Humanities (IDH).

Project Overview

During the twentieth century in the United States, untold thousands of people were victims of racially motivated lynchings, homicides, police shootings, bombings, physical assault, and banishment from communities. Much of this violence was state-sanctioned. As a result, assailants rarely faced arrest and grand juries regularly failed to issue indictments. Instead, victims were often criminalized. The suffering of racial and ethnic minorities was often disavowed by journalists, historians, and justice systems alike. But the full scope of this violence and the widespread historical trauma is still unknown.

What would we learn if a record of racist violence existed? To answer that question, Mapping Violence is researching cases of racist violence in one state, Texas, during a relatively short period of time, between 1900 and 1930. Research findings will be made available to the public to help inform future research, policy, and public education. Mapping Violence will also develop methods to scale this project, geographically and temporally.

The Undergraduate Apprentices

The Undergraduate Apprentices will join a team of three COLA PhD students and and one MA student in the School of Information on the Mapping Violence research team. Our proposed format will enable students to get a sense of how collaborative projects are developed and carried out in Digital Humanities labs from the initial idea, to planning, to carrying out the project, to presenting it to the public, while offering a shepherding process–led by a graduate student facilitator–that allows the above can be achieved in the course of one semester.

Every student on the team has a role in conducting archival research, writing narratives for the platform, collecting and organizing metadata, and wireframing interactive content. Humanities students develop a facility in designing a platform to satisfy a set of project goals, and the digital developers utilize humanities research methods to inform their programming.

Proposed Format Details

Each week, the undergraduate members of the cohort will participate in the following activities:

1. Members will join a graduate student-facilitated group discussion of curated readings relevant to the sub-modules (1 hr).
2. Members will attend the Mapping Violence project meetings (1 hr).
3. Members will participate in hands-on workshop sessions on a weekly sub-module. At the end of each workshop, the students will be given homework (1-2 hrs of work) to be completed by the next session. The homework will promote student agency and engagement, and enable the participants to put their knowledge into practice.
4. Members will enroll in LA 331R and attend a biweekly URAP seminar organized by CoLA

Cohort Topic

Research in International Politics - Applying advanced research approaches, ethics, and methods in a transnational research project.

Proposed Team

• 2 faculty: Dr. Mike Findley, Government, and Dr. Daniel Neilson, Government
• 1 graduate student: TBD

Drs. Nielson and Findley are directing the Innovations for Peace and Development (IPD) lab, which is a student-focused research lab that provides mentored opportunities for interdisciplinary, policy-relevant research on global conflict and peacebuilding, foreign aid, and poverty alleviation. Since 2013, IPD has brought together over 650 undergraduate and graduate students, and over 80 students were conducting research in Fall 2021. Our goals for the URAP Cohort pilot with IPD are to provide on-campus experiential learning, applied training, and professional opportunities to UT students to empower them to fulfill UT’s motto, “What Starts Here Changes the World.” Much like the traditional lab setting in the natural sciences, our team will work together with the URAP students to produce high quality research, investigate meaningful social phenomena, and train our next generation of social scientists.

Proposed Format Overview

3 topical sub-modules: research approaches in social science; research ethics; research methods
3 functional approaches: curated readings; data collection; data analysis

Brief Motivation

Our proposed format is built specifically to nurture and challenge URAP undergraduates as they have their first experience with academic research. This format will ensure students gain foundational understanding of political science research, establish the importance of ethics in research, and provide hands-on experience in conducting research and analysis. We designed our approach to facilitate collaboration among the 3 URAP students while receiving individual mentorship and guidance from faculty and graduate students. 

In the fall of 2022, URAP students assigned to IPD will be working specifically with our team conducting a transnational investigation of bias in local and national governments. The curated assignments will introduce them to the foundations of international research, provide them with a deeper understanding of project related research methods, equip them with skills to make meaningful contributions to the project, and enable them to propose their own collaborative research projects. In order to provide more comprehensive exposure to the various topics and methodologies used in political science, we have designed monthly workshops where all IPD teams will engage with each of the 9 current projects being worked on at IPD. We believe that our approach positions each of our undergraduate students to confidently pursue research in international politics and international development among other disciplines. 

Proposed Format Details

Undergraduate members of the cohort will participate in the following activities:

1. Members will join a weekly graduate student-facilitated group discussion of curated readings relevant to the sub-modules (1 hr).
2.  Members will attend our monthly IPD All Hands meeting (1 hr).
3.  Members will participate in hands-on workshop sessions on a weekly basis. At the end of each workshop, the students will be given research tasks (2-3 hrs of work) to be completed by the next session. Each task will promote intellectual agency, student engagement, and enable the participants to put their knowledge into practice.
4.  Members will enroll in LA 331R and attend a biweekly URAP seminar organized by CoLA.

Proposed Team

• 3 faculty: Dr. Hongjoo (Joanne) Lee, Psychology; Dr. Juan Dominguez, Psychology; and Dr. Marie Monfils, Psychology
• 3 graduate students: TBD; one graduate student from each PI lab

Drs. Lee, Dominguez, and Monfils are widely recognized for their contributions to the field of behavioral neuroscience. They have an extensive and published track record in the approaches proposed for this URAP. Moreover, all three are well-known within the University community for their dedication to student training and pedagogical expertise, which have earned them repeated accolades from students and colleagues alike. Drs. Dominguez and Monfils have served as Graduate Advisors for the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Neuroscience, respectively, and Dr. Lee is the Chair of the Psychology Department’s Diversity Committee. Dr. Monfils is currently the Associate Chair for Research of the Psychology Department. Given all these factors, they are ideally suited for spearheading this inaugural URAP.

Proposed Format Overview

3 topical sub-modules: behavior; microscopy; stereology (unbiased cell counts)

3 functional approaches: curated readings; data collection; data analysis

Brief Motivation

Our proposed format will enable students to get a sense of how projects are developed and carried out in Behavioral Neuroscience labs from the initial idea, to planning, to carrying out the project, and the data analysis, while offering a shepherding process in which the above can be achieved in the course of one semester.

The area of behavioral neuroscience is vast, and can be best appreciated through the lens of multiple approaches operating in concert. This can prove challenging for one lab to offer to a cohort of undergraduate students in the course of a single semester. This is, in part, why we have decided to offer an approach in which 3 faculty members will each respectively lead one sub-module. Each sub-module offers a unique glimpse on the brain-behavior relationship, and all approaches come together into a coherent project. 

In doing-so, we also inherently showcase an aspect of our research area that has historically led to some of the most interesting advances in the field—a spirit of collaboration.

Proposed format details

Each week, the Undergraduate member of the cohort will participate in the following activities:

1. Members will join a graduate student-facilitated group discussion of curated readings relevant to the sub-modules (1 hr).
2. Members will attend the Monfils-Lee joint lab meeting, or the Dominguez lab meeting (1 hr).
3. Members will participate in hands-on workshop sessions on a weekly sub-module. At the end of each workshop, the students will be given homework (1-2 hrs of work) to be completed by the next session. The homework will promote agency and student engagement, and enable the participants to put their knowledge into practice.
4. Members will enroll in LA 331R and attend a biweekly URAP seminar organized by CoLA.

• Faculty Advisor: Jacob Cheadle, PhD, Professor, Department of Sociology
• Co-Advisor: Bridget Goosby, Professor, Department of Sociology
• Graduate Student Mentor: KJ Davidson-Turner

Who We Are

The Life in Frequencies Health Disparities (LifeHD) Research Lab focusses on the dynamics of social interaction, affect, and emotion. During the 2022-2023 academic year we will be developing and evaluating new techniques for real-time emotion tracking and comparing these metrics with dynamic new health biomarkers. Our goals are to capture the ebb and flow of positive and negative emotions more fully during daily life using wearable technologies, and to better capture the physiological processes contributing to long-term health trajectories. Understanding these dynamics is critical for characterizing how stress shapes health, including the ways that positive experiences aid recovery and support health. Central to our goals is the evaluation and assessment of new protocols and procedures that we are developing and will be implementing. Ultimately, these new procedures are being evaluated in order to better capture how racism and interpersonal discrimination both increase negative emotions and stress, and decrease opportunities for positive and restorative social experiences. 

Apprentice Responsibilities and Activities

• Apprentices will enroll in LA 331R.
• Apprentices will spend approximately 10 hours per week contributing to research tasks identified and supervised by the Graduate Student Mentor. Examples of such tasks include the preprocessing of biomarker samples, participation in data collection activities including participant consent, survey delivery, electrophysiological recording, and biomarker data collection.
• Apprentices will work closely with the Lab Manager and will attend a weekly one-hour lab meeting with the Graduate Student Mentor. This meeting will be attended at least monthly by Dr. Cheadle and/or Dr. Goosby.
• Apprentices will attend a biweekly URAP seminar organized by CoLA.
• Apprentices will complete a research project by the end of the semester. Examples include a manuscript description and evaluation of the novel biomarker data collection procedure, conference poster submissions, or other products as approved by the Faculty Advisor and Graduate Student Mentor.