G.R.O.U.P. Apprenticeships Summer 2005

The Emma Goldman Papers

Faculty Sponsor: Edwin M. Epstein (Chair, Peace and Conflict Studies) with Candace Falk (Director, Emma Goldman Papers)
Student Apprentice: Heidi Little

The apprentice will specifically study civil liberties in wartime — with a special focus on the history of the Industrial Workers of the World in California (the Wobblies), 1917- 1919. In this period, Emma Goldman was on trial for her anti-conscription stance, in jail, and deported to Bolshevik Russia. It was a turbulent period in America's history, as the U.S. entered the first world war and the issues of patriotism and civil liberties began to clash in ways that are sadly all-too-familiar today. The work of the volume necessitates an understanding not only of the consequences of this period of repression for Emma Goldman, but for others in and around her circle of war resisters, radicals, and labor activists. Among the many points of interest in filling out the picture of the time is the history and role of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), an underresearched group whose trajectory has significance beyond itself. And, during this period, the horrific fate of conscientious objectors to the war has yet to be fully explored. These threads are part of the texture of Goldman's story--and span disciplines of history, literature, and art, as expressions of the quest for social justice in an unjust world. The student will travel to the archival collections of the University of Michigan's Labadie Collection, the Wayne State Labor Archives, and the Sacramento State Historical archive--as well as draw upon the extensive collection of the University of California Berkeley Library. An individualized analysis of their findings along with suggestions for further searches will follow. Then the research will branch away from the purely factual to the conceptual, with bi-weekly discussions of the results and of the direction of the work. The work will form part of volume four, The War Years, 1917-1919, of the series: Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years.

The End of Impunity? Crimes Against Humanity and International Justice in the 21st Century

Faculty Sponsors: David Cohen (Rhetoric; Director, War Crimes Studies Center) and Eric Stover (School of Public Health; Director, Human Rights Center)
Student Apprentice: Sun Lee

Through a series of journal articles and a major book, The End of Impunity? will provide the most in-depth evaluation to date of the international community’s efforts through judicial means to end impunity for massive state-sponsored crimes. The book will address a broad range of issues of concern to humanists, scholars in a variety of other disciplines, and the general public. The book will undertake a critical examination of the largely Western assumption that confronting impunity through criminal trials leads to the “healing” of fractured individuals and societies. Using data gleaned from extensive interviews and the examination of primary sources and population-based surveys and ethnographic studies, the authors will attempt to answer the following questions: What is the nature of the justice dispensed by international tribunals that are often geographically remote from the countries of the victims and limited to a very small number of perpetrators? Can “symbolic” justice alone justify the allocation of very significant resources to these international courts? What role, if any, does justice play in the formation of collective memory? What kind of “justice” can have meaning for communities, typically poverty-stricken, as they seek to rebuild their lives and live again with the neighbors who may have just a few years before been their persecutors or enemies? The book will argue that while criminal trials are a critical component of social reconstruction in many post-war societies, they are only one part of a more comprehensive set of approaches involving education, economic development, governance, and respect for basic human, civil, and cultural rights. The student sponsored by GROUP will specifically research the Gacaca Courts in Rwanda: An assessment of the first trials conducted before Gacaca courts. This position will require at least one month of research in Rwanda.

Exploration and Development of New Media applications as part of the archaeological research project at Çatalhöyük, Turkey

Faculty Sponsor: Ruth Tringham (Anthropology)
Student Apprentice: Elizabeth Lee

Digital technologies are now an integral part of the archaeological process, as shown by the switch from 35mm film to digital cameras to record not only what the archaeologist digs up but also the process of excavation, discourse and interpretation. The integration of these digital technologies is critical to the livelihood of the site and the field of archaeology as a whole. Nowhere is this transformation more evident than the archaeological project to excavate the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, in central Turkey. Çatalhöyük has had an established protocol for digital media since 1998 and is therefore the perfect location to train a new generation of scholars on the process of using new media within archaeology as well as explore new directions in their application. An important theme of the use of digital technology and New Media in general at Çatalhöyük is to enrich the wider public’s access to the archaeological process. The research apprentice would return to Çatalhöyük as excavating digital documenter. The student will be contributing to the primary database of the Çatalhöyük Archaeological Research Project. This is the database that forms the basis for publications emanating from the project. Once we return from the field, the research apprentice will continue to refine their contributions to the Çatalhöyük database, at the same time as disseminating their own projects created in various media formats through the MACTiA website. The summer research and the continued research throughout the year will culminate in the production of a senior honors thesis for the apprentice in May 2006.

Gifted and Talented Programs in Public Schools
and No Child Left Behind

Faculty Sponsor: Sue Schweik (English)
Student Apprentice: Kristin Birdsong

This study will establish a working definition of what it is to be a "gifted" child. By researching the development of testing methods used to identify and categorize "gifted" children, both exploring their medicinal background and discussing the social stigmas placed on the children fitting the tests' definition, the nature of the relationship between the medical categorization and the stigma will be clarified.

Guatemalan/Mayan Migrations

Faculty Sponsor: Beatriz Manz (Geography, Ethnic Studies)
Student Apprentice: Rebecca Lindsay

Tens of thousands of undocumented Central Americans live in the San Francisco Bay Area. The most invisible of these groups are the Guatemalans, especially the Mayan migrants. This project would involve the undergraduate student with the faculty in documenting the working and living conditions among this population. The student will accompany the faculty to meetings and data collection through the key institutions in the Bay Area that provide support to these particular migrants: churches, legal NGOs, Medical clinics, support groups, cultural venues, appropriate state government offices. In the process the project will assess the effectiveness and success of these organizations and hopefully be able to provide some suggestions for improvements. The student will gain invaluable experience: meeting poor Guatemalans and gaining insights into the monumental hardships—the economic difficulties, the cultural shock and adjustment, as well as the psychological burden, endured by these new arrivals. The student will also be exposed to faculty research and learn about field methods. The data collected will contribute to the ongoing research by the faculty member as well as provide a solid documentation and guidance for a very focused internship placement for students enrolled in the fall semester course, “Violence, Genocide, and Social Suffering: Perspectives from Medicine and the Humanities.”

Historic Portrayal of National Park “friends”

Faculty Sponsor: Sally K. Fairfax (College of Natural Resources)
Student Apprentice: Justin Laue

The proposed research explores the history of National Park “friends” groups (concessionaires and natural history associations), how they participated in the formation and early management of the parks, and how they and their role in the parks were portrayed in periodicals and posters promoting the National Parks. This inquiry will provide background for a larger research project exploring the control over park management exercised by the friends groups, in comparison to (and in competition with, perhaps) other less officially involved public groups and the National Park Service itself. The portion that would involve an undergraduate is a history project that will require interpretation of text and graphic arts.

The Huaves, a Contemporary Expression in Music

Faculty Sponsors: David Wessel (CNMAT) and Greg Niemeyer (Art Practice)
Student Apprentice: Edvis Shahbazian

The music of the Huaves people of Mexico is perhaps one of the most interesting indigenous living cultures and the least documented. Their language and origin still remains a mystery, as well as how their music is formally structured. The impressive sonorities of the instruments used by this ethnic group - such as turtle carapaces, reed flutes and batteries of cowbells causes in its music an exceptional and powerful result. The Huaves’ rites, although associated with the catholic festive calendar, are a way to adore the real protagonists of their surroundings: winds, sea, rain and thunders. Huaves also are known like mareños or huazantecos. The term huave was coined by the zapotecos to talk about to the "people who rot in humidity". At the moment this group inhabits the coast of the Gulf of Tehuantepec and occupies the two third parts of a bar of 40 km and separates the Pacific Ocean from two great lagoons, known as Superior Sea and Inferior Sea. The main huaves populations are located in San Mateo del Mar, San Francisco del Mar and San Dionisio del Mar which are municipalities politically depend from the district of Tehuantepec and economically on the oil path of Salina Cruz; this one has been the city with greater index of growth of the state of Oaxaca in the last decades. The goals in this project are: the recording and filming of Huave music and dances for preservation, continued music analysis and future artistic uses in new media projects. The mentoring for an undergraduate student will consist in assisting in the digitizing process, musicological classification of data, and presentation of the data online through UC Berkeley servers.

Narrative Culture in Spain c. 1500

Faculty Sponsor: Ignacio Navarrete (Spanish and Portuguese)
Student Apprentice: Sergio Delgado

This project examines the impact of the introduction of print on narrative culture in Spain at the turn of the 15th century. For a number of well-known reasons, this was a crucial moment in Spanish history: it saw the consolidation of several kingdoms into the first modern nation-state; the expulsion of heterogeneous populations (Jews, Muslims) from the Iberian Peninsula; and the beginning of the trans-Atlantic empire. But at least as significant, on the cultural level, was the explosion in the number of printing presses and printed books produced in Spain. While the first printed books were generally of a religious or legal nature, printers soon discovered the public appetite for narratives. The project studies how printing created a culture of narratives to satisfy a market that did not distinguish between old texts and new ones. The undergraduate intern would investigate the basic data, and assist in identifying and obtaining the original texts. The student intern would gain hands-on experience in traditional scholarly areas such as descriptive bibliography and the history of the book, but also in contemporary critical approaches that view literature both as text and as material object, and as part of the larger historical study of culture.

Producing a Nonviolence Website: Resources for Students, Citizens, the Media, Educators, and Oppressed Peoples

Faculty Sponsor: Michael Nagler (Peace and Conflict Studies)
Student Apprentice: Matthew Taylor

Nonviolence, which can be defined as “the successful conversion of a negative drive” is an active, positive force that seeks to both facilitate social change and reconcile relationships, inviting both oppressor and oppressed to see each other’s humanity. In a world where people are increasingly treated as objects and dehumanized by a paradigm of violence, competition, and materialism, we need to articulate a new kind of power that can be harnessed to transform our conflicts. Nonviolence is that power – but it cannot be used if it is not understood. We propose to create a website with a wealth of information and content about nonviolence in accessible formats for various key audiences: students, citizens unfamiliar with nonviolence, the media, educators, and oppressed peoples. The website will offer generalized documents that will serve as an educational resource for anyone interested in organizing a nonviolent process to obtain reconciliation and human rights. The apprentice will research a specific case study on Israel/Palestine, where there is much interest in nonviolence at present on both sides of the conflict.

Sexual Rights as Human Rights

Faculty Sponsor: Kristin Luker (Sociology, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program)
Student Apprentice: Agnes Malinowska

This proposal is for a working group to begin to explore the social, legal, and institution components of beginning a discussion on sexual rights as human rights. The project will put together a map of individuals, institutions, funders, and discourses surrounding sexual rights, and to articulate how—and if—these elements intersect with the larger human rights world. We see this as a preliminary breaking of ground to permit a more thoughtful set of research and teaching experiences to blossom.

To Quell the Raging Wastes: The American Response to Industrial Pollution, 1840-1930

Faculty Sponsor: Christine Rosen (Haas School of Business)
Student Apprentice: Swetha Doraiswamy

The project will develop the first book-length work to provide an in-depth analysis of how Americans dealt with the air, water, and noise pollution associated with industrial development prior to the advent of strict federal pollution regulation in the 1970s. Utilizing case law records and a wide variety of other materials, it analyzes the evolution of popular American beliefs regarding the nature and effects of industrial pollution and the need for pollution abatement from the 1840s through the 1930s. It also explores the development of scientific understandings of the impacts of industrial air, water, and noise pollution, as well as developments in the technology of pollution abatement and changes in public policies for dealing with industrial pollution as they are reflected in the common law and state and local pollution regulations. The apprentice will learn how to identify, collect, analyze, and summarize case law reports meaningful to the research.

Visualizing Processes of Theoretical Biology

Faculty Sponsors: Greg Niemeyer (Art Practice) and Terry Deacon (Anthropology)
Student Apprentice: Ian Cheng

A short computer graphics animation “Autocell” describes Terry Deacon’s theory of primal cell formation as a process of molecular self-assembly. The theory is so far very successful and has far-reaching implications, but has one challenge: it is very hard to describe with words. As the movie shows, computer graphics offer the dynamic vocabulary necessary to make the theory salient, and to further refine some of the dynamic aspects of the theory. This and many similar cases call for a true interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropologists and artists. The project will involve undergraduates who have truly integrated the scientific and creative thought as well as the corresponding toolsets in producing computer graphic simulations. The sponsors hope to eventually form a Summer Program for Undergraduates in Scientific Visualization.