Summer 2002

UROP Partnerships in discovery

by Karin Winegar

What motives and values underlie the creation of laws that bar felons from voting? Can Internet users learn to tell genuine consumer information from product propaganda? If your countryside is suddenly besieged by foreign tourists, how do you cope?

Through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), University undergraduates get a chance to pose such questions and develop research strategies to pursue the answers--and they do this in partnership with some of the U's most distinguished scholars, working side by side with them on projects ranging from media research to population studies, from curating to community service.

Behrens & Uggen: from questioning to discovery

Landing a UROP grant gives students who are "scary-smart and ask penetrating questions a chance to get more hands-on experience doing research," says associate sociology professor Christopher Uggen, an award-winning teacher and scholar, and a veteran of several UROP teams.

"It's a real win-win partnership: Students see what academic life is about. They have contact with faculty beyond the narrow time they see us in a public role, and they can see how we think, how we confront a novel problem or issue."

Uggen and Angela Behrens, a senior from Mankato, Minn., recently collaborated on a project to trace the origin of felon disenfranchisement laws--Uggen's special area of expertise. In Minnesota, as in many other states, people in prison, on probation, or on parole lose the right to vote. This intrigued Behrens, who is majoring in sociology with a focus on law, crime, and deviance. Her UROP project--"Racial Threat and Changes in Felon Disenfranchisement Law in the U.S."--gave her the sociological framework as well as the historical breadth and depth to examine the origins of laws in the state's culture. The project is a good fit with her interest in a career practicing constitutional or criminal law.

"The UROP project combined all my interests--history, law, and race--with a very important issue," says Behrens.

"Angie's project is an exciting piece of a larger project looking at the political impact of laws that don't allow felons to vote," says Uggen, noting that voting laws vary by state. "A felon in Florida can't vote for the rest of his life unless he receives a formal pardon, while in Maine and Vermont, prisoners are allowed to vote."

Together, Behrens and Uggen employed a methodology called "events history analysis" to discover how these laws developed and what social and other conditions laid the groundwork for their passage. Behrens predicted race was the key. Backtracking to 1850, their joint research proved her correct.

"Many states passed these laws during Reconstruction (the late 1860s and early 1870s), when African-American males were gaining the right to vote through the 14th and 15th amendments," says Behrens. "States were responding to the idea of racial threat--a growing minority population is perceived as a threat to majority power structure--so they tried to cut down on their resources."

The disenfranchised population in the United States is 4.7 million, Behrens notes. If felons could vote, their votes could significantly affect the outcome of elections (case in point: the close 2000 presidential election).

"Our research looked at every Senate and Presidential election to the early 1970s," says Uggen, adding that African-Americans, who are over-represented in the criminal justice system, vote Democratic by huge margins. "In a half-dozen Senate elections, felons would have overturned Republican victories. They could have shifted the balance of power for the last 20 years."

"Racism is such an important issue; you can't ignore it," adds Behrens.

Aside from its inherent educational value, the UROP experience will give Behrens an edge in the job market or in graduate school, says Uggen, who expects joint publication of the collaborative work in a sociology journal--an honor often reserved for graduate students. "The UROP and an article mean a lot, regardless of where Angie ends up," he notes.

It's also been a boon to his own teaching and research. "For me, this is a chance to get excited about teaching while giving students an apprentice-like experience," says Uggen, "and it also has pushed me in a tributary of my research."

Behrens, who minored in French and plays classical piano, is grateful for the opportunity to work with Uggen on such an important project: "It was an amazing learning process that allowed me to draw on the experience of someone who has been there, doing really important research," she says.

Rodgers, Gary, & Pierre: unpacking the media

When senior Nicole Gary was a child, her grandmother insisted she read five books from the public library each week and limited her TV watching to two hours a week.

Today, Gary--who was named one of the 25 most promising minority students in the profession by the American Advertising Federation--is completing a double major in psychology and advertising and studying the allure of the media. That dual focus brought her to a UROP partnership with Shelly Rodgers, assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications and an international expert on interactive advertising and source credibility.

An only child who is living with her grandmother while awaiting fall admission to law school, Gary says it was partly her concern for children and her desire to have "a large family and lots of kids around" that prompted her UROP project, "The Interactive Doctor: Sponsorship Disclosure in Interactive Health Web Sites."

Gary's research on medical Web sites--in particular, those concerning children's health--was grounded Rodgers' earlier findings of bias in sponsored sites. One outcome of her project was a list of site characteristics that will help Internet users examine content critically and make good, informed decisions.

"Sponsorship plays a role in what is communicated," says Gary. "In our content analysis, we looked at the authority of the writers and their sources of information. One site, kidshealth.com, practices full disclosure of sources, so you can clearly differentiate between ads, advocacy, and information. On other sites, ads are hidden in the information." Those stealth ads, Rodgers has discovered in her research, can introduce bias and significantly compromise the sites' credibility.

In a society where advertising, information, and entertainment are increasingly intertwined and indistinguishable, such research is important to consumers seeking reliable information about health and other matters, says Rodgers. The UROP grants awarded to Gary and her classmate Richelle Pierre allowed both students to untangle the media knots and learn important research skills in the process.

"For UROP projects, I look for bright, highly motivated students who are very self-disciplined, because they need to learn how to do independent research and reach their own conclusions, without biases and preconceptions," says Rodgers, who nonetheless worked very closely with Gary and Pierre, guiding them with great care from concept to content analysis. Under Rodgers' deft direction, they learned formal research strategies and honed investigative and analytical skills but also learned what to look for and how to "read" the data as they move toward an understanding that is part analysis, part synthesis, part intuition.

"My goal as an educator is to help students take advantage of opportunities to learn, and to help them find their own path to understanding," says Rodgers. "As journalism students, they are preparing for a demanding and highly competitive profession in an unpredictable world, and they will need to be independent and resourceful.

"I also want them to be able to put things on their résumés they can feel proud of, like UROP projects," she adds, smiling.

Gary was drawn to Rodgers for a teaching style that blends praise with direction and constructive criticism, structured guidance with flexibility.

"She's very nurturing, organized, open and communicative, and she wants to draw people in," says Gary. "And I'm very receptive, willing to try different things to see what interests me. This experience led me to decide on public work. I'd like to be a public defender or prosecutor or practice family law."

Like Gary, Pierre came to her UROP project from personal experience. Watching her 10-year-old sister inspired her to do research on "Advergames and the Internet."

"My sister spends a lot of time playing advergames on the Internet, where there's a reward or prize that ties in with the product or service," explains Pierre, a journalism senior from Stillwater, Minn.

"I wanted to look at the psychology of advergames: Will players be inclined to buy the products? Professor Rodgers encouraged me to begin at the beginning, to find out first what types of advergames are out there."

Among the 100 sites Pierre discovered--from the "Sesame Street" game that targets five-year-olds to the Chrysler fantasy golf game that appeals to middle-aged men--Pierre distinguished 15 categories--including cars, athletic gear, retail food, and liquor.

"Ad agency representatives who spoke to our class were clueless about advergames," she notes. "I can tell them a lot they're not aware of. It's a neat little niche I've found, thanks to UROP."

Lukkas & Gerber: an artistic alliance across continents

Alison Gerber's UROP experience took her to a new dimension as an art major--curating. A senior from Inver Grove Heights, Minn., Gerber graduated with a B.A. in psychology in 1999 and returned to school to study art--her first love--"properly."

Her project, "Photography and Performance: The Photograph as Subject, Content, and Document," grew out of a collaboration with assistant art professor Lynn Lukkas, an expert in media arts, photography, film, and video.

"I wanted to work with Lynn because I like her work and I think she's clever," says Gerber in a phone interview from Reykjavik, Iceland, where she is continuing her research thanks to an International Reciprocal Student Exchange Program Scholarship.

"I planned to write an essay to get me reading and thinking in a structured way. Lynn helped me figure out where to start, and what I should be looking at."

Gerber's curatorial proposal became an exhibition by artists from Minnesota, Iceland, and Scotland that integrates performance and photography. It will open in March 2003 at pARTS Gallery on West Lake Street in Minneapolis.

"Alison is interesting, articulate and dynamic," says Lukkas. "She came to me because my background is photography and my work includes performance; we are a good fit. Rather than do a more traditional research paper, through the process of her research she came to curate this exhibition."

"Being able to talk to Lynn is great, because you don't always know where to begin," says Gerber. "Someone who knows the history and the theory can start you off on the right track, or at least show you where the track is.

"Though it wasn't in my original plan, I decided during my UROP that to curate an exhibition was an important part of my intellectual and academic development. I'm curating other exhibitions now as well, and am starting to feel that organizational work can fit nicely into my artistic practice.

An artist by temperament, Gerber started taking pictures in ninth grade and later worked as a commercial photographer, "doing weddings, things like that." She also worked in a photo store and did freelance editorial shooting. So it was natural that, having studied psychology, she would return to art, "a way of working and producing knowledge that was more open than other disciplines, not as protocol-bound."

"A lot of the issues I am interested in are issues one would study in psychology as well--but in making art I am allowed to be ambivalent," Gerber says. "I am still interested in issues like perception and language development, but I'm not interested usually in coming up with empirically testable or quantifiable results."

If art allows Gerber to color outside the lines, curatorial work allows her to advance what she calls the "big conversation" of art. "Art moves ahead because we're all talking, with language and through our work," she says, "and we're trying to make art something in 10 years that it isn't now."
In the final analysis, she confides, "It's all related to my inherent propensity towards kicking, griping, and discontent--art work, curating, everything. I feel like it's not my place to whine about the state of things if I'm not willing to do something about it."

Langford & Sybrant: mining the narratives

Working with professor of anthropology Jean Langford, Milo Sybrant studied the rapid expansion and socio-cultural impacts of ecotourism in Dakar, Senegal. But he did more than read about it. For Sybrant, there is no substitute for being there.

"Being fully submerged in the field can give you much more perspective on the ethnographic research than reading about it or attending lectures," says Sybrant, recipient of an A.I. Johnson Scholarship in political science.

Sybrant's interest in West African economic development grew out of earlier work with anthropology professor Kathleen Barlow and geography professor Earl Scott, as well as his participation in an international volunteer program in Gambia. He saw first hand the cultural and economic disruptions wrought by tourism.

"A big part of what anthropologists do is interacting with people, either in formalized interactions, like ethnographic interviews, or in more casual ones, such as listening to people's stories or having informal conversations," says Sybrant by e-mail from Dakar (where his e-mails to Langford were sometimes interrupted by power blackouts).

"I'm looking at the pressures that ecotourism has put on people at the local level and the ways they respond."

One important lesson Sybrant has learned is that researchers "have to look at the global pressures exerted on locals--whether… the imposition of austerity measures by the World Bank and national governments, the drop in world commodity prices (say, of a local crop), or an airline bankruptcy that could spell the end of tourism in a community of Senegal--and look also at the coping strategies that the people create."

Langford, Sybrant's research partner and guide, has been there, in more ways than one. She has studied extensively and up close the impact of colonialism on African and East Indian cultures. A seasoned observer, interviewer, and interpreter of data, she was able to help Sybrant shape the data and observations he gathered from conversations with his subjects.

"We consulted over the months on the nuts and bolts of ethnography, how to ask open-ended questions, how to elicit stories," says Langford. "The ethnographic experience added dimension and nuance to Milo's understanding, showing him how particular people engage with the tourist trade in their communities.

"He came away with a less mechanical sense of cultural process and an awareness of how people negotiate and strategize ethnic affiliations in particular social and political contexts."

As in all good partnerships, the learning went both ways. Sybrant focused on the social, economic, and demographic consequences of tourism, while Langford was more interested in how tourism packages, commodifies, and markets ethnicity and cultural experience. The two worked in tandem, trading observations and insights.

"We were both enriched by our exchanges over this project and encouraged to think about how these two research emphases complement and inform one another," says Langford. "It was a great partnership."

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