G.R.O.U.P. Apprenticeships Summer 2006

Forgotten Battlefields

Faculty Sponsor: Lydia Chavez (Graduate School of Journalism)
Student Apprentice: Rene Flores

While the United States has embarked on another war in Iraq, we have yet to take a serious look at what the country accomplished during the 1980s in Central American and the Caribbean. We spent more than $2 billion in military aid to prevent a leftist takeover in El Salvador and to unseat one in Nicaragua. U.S. troops were sent to Honduras, Grenada, Panama, and Haiti. Issues of human rights were front and center in the national debate to approve or deny military and economic aid. As we folded our tents and left, man promises were made to strengthen the judicial and social systems left behind. Countries that acted as base camps for U.S. involvement were supposed to benefit by receiving U.S. attention and economic assistance. What happened when the U.S. left? This is the central question of the project.

The project will involve collecting narratives for El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Haiti, and Grenada. These narratives will be used for a fall graduate seminar and a spring freshman seminar. The spring semester will involve writing, editing and redrafting for publication. The apprentice will be invited to continue with the project through the year and participate in the seminars.

Grounding Tradition: The Geological and Archaeological Underpinnings of Contemporary Brazilian Pilgrimage Stories

Faculty Sponsor: Candace Slater (Spanish and Portuguese)
Student Apprentice: Zachary Wiley

Centered in the arid backlands of Brazil, the present-day pilgrimage to Juazeiro do Norte is remarkable not just for its size, but also for its intensely popular quality. The great majority of pilgrims are poor Northeasterners who make the often arduous journey to honor Padre Cicero Romao Batista, a Roman Catholic priest who incurred the wrath of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in 1889. Today, the Church’s newfound eagerness to “rehabilitate” if not to actually beatify the priest has created a very different context for the unofficial rituals, miracle stories, and graphic depictions that surround the devotion. Yet, the narratives and practices that surround this journey remain deeply rooted in a dry and rocky land that was once an immense inland sea/lagoon where fossils now abound. What is the role of landscape in a culture on the move in many different ways? This question is the focus of the project.

The apprentice will assist in the recording or narratives and in organization and display of material collected by the research collective. The ideal candidate will be fluent in Portuguese, have a background in either literature or one of the social sciences, and will have at least basic computer skills. The apprentice will spend a minimum of 6 weeks in Santana do Cariri. He or she will also take the lead in development of a web page for the museum in which narrative materials could continue to be displayed.

The Khmer Rouge Tribunal and the Legacy of Genocide in Cambodia

Faculty Sponsor: David Cohen (Rhetoric; Director, War Crimes Studies Center)
Student Apprentice: Stephanie Lowe

The project will focus on a study of the perceptions of the 2006 Khmer Rouge Tribunal (KRT), of the challenges it faces, and the impact that the trials of Khmer Rouge leaders is likely to have in Cambodia.

The Khmer Rouge Tribunal will prosecute those “most responsible” for the Cambodian genocide perpetrated by the Pol Pot regime in 1975-1979. The trials of the tribunal raise a wide variety of important issues, including: the wisdom of investing so much money, so many years after the fact, in a desperately poor country; the impact of the politics of memory on the trial process; and the capacity of the trials to contribute to reconciliation in Cambodia.

The basic research plan will involve the apprentice spending two months in Phnom Penh conducting in-depth interviews with participants in and observers of the tribunal. Upon returning to Berkeley the apprentice will spend a month writing up the results of the research. This report will be placed on the web site of the War Crimes Studies Center.

Social Practices: Human and the Environment

Faculty Sponsor: Shannon Jackson (Theater, Dance and Performance Studies)
Student Apprentice: Inna Volynskaya

Social practice is one among several terms given to art practices that engage political and community concerns, often by locating themselves outside of the gallery or theatre and by engaging in long, relational processes of collaboration with citizens of a particular community, neighborhood, or region.

The research will be centrally focused on the Richmond/Berkeley community arts group, Touchable Stories – interactive installations based on the oral histories and archival history of marginalized communities.

The student will participate in oral history fieldwork; read scholarly texts that address some of the histories and social obstacles around racism, poverty, education, health care, immigration and more faced in the community of Richmond; pair with one or more artists to develop images, content of material, the arrangement of space, and the deployment of sound in order to imagine the best way to provoke reflection in the installation; assisting with logistical planning of the installation; and assist in conducting background research on the various histories that inform this practice.

The student will be expected to create a presentation about his/her summer research to the seminar, and the faculty sponsor will arrange a campus-wide symposium when the event opens to which the undergraduate researcher will contribute.

Stem Cell Apprentice Team

Faculty Sponsor: Charis Thompson (Rhetoric, Gender and Women’s Studies)
Student Apprentices: Katherine Darling, Diane Lu, Olivia Nguyen,
Randeep Singh Hothi, Julie Stamm, Joe Tayag, Evangeline Wong, Aba Yamoah

This team is a continuation of the TEAM Project that was conducted on a weekly basis in the Spring 2006. Students who participated in the semester long project were given the opportunity to continue their research in the filed during the summer. (Please see Section III of the report narrative for a description of the project and Appendix D for student papers.) The apprentices intend to produce a website showcasing the projects undertaken in the area, providing a coordinated locus for campus work in the intersection of the humanities and the burgeoning science of stem cell research.

Transnational Spanish Language Media and the Spanish language Market in the U.S.

Faculty Sponsor: Alex Saragoza (Ethnic Studies)
Student Apprentice: Bianca Cano

The intent of this project is to examine the current state and future prospects of the Spanish language media in light of new technologies, particularly the use of the internet and wireless telecommunications.

The apprentice will focus his or her research on recent developments in the access to new media by the Spanish speaking population of the U.S. The market for the Spanish language media is a “moving target,” spurred by the broadening of Latino accessibility to a proliferating array of technologies, continuing immigration, an increase in the nativeborn Spanish speaking population and its youthfulness, and the consequent differentiation of audience segmentation among this highly diverse market.

The apprentice will develop an inventory of Spanish language media in the U.S., a genealogy of those services, a classification scheme of available Spanish language media products, collect examples of those media products through their reproduction in appropriate media, and edit interview sessions. The apprentice would be trained through visits to a Univision station, the studios of Radio Bilingue (a non-profit public radio type operation that has a Spanish speaking audience on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border), and a traditional commercial radio station.

The research would be incorporated into an upper division course on the transnational Spanish language media in the Department of Ethnic Studies to be offered in spring 2007.

Voices from the Margin: Sharing the Stories of Post-Katrina
New Orleans

Faculty Sponsor: Stephen Small (African American Studies)
Student Apprentice: Hillary Lehr

The purpose of this project is to provide a forum for (and archive) voices from Hurricane Katrina-impacted New Orleans. The summer research will set the foundation for the fall course of the same name.

In June, July and August, the project members will travel to New Orleans, establish connections with local advocacy groups, identify potential sites for writing workshops, and locate elders who might be willing to share their stories. The project will include oral interviews or poetry and writing workshops.

The apprentice will conduct interviews, collect personal essays, and help create a multimedia database of the project.

Writing, Writing, Writing: The Natural History Field Journal As Literary Text and Social Tool

Faculty Sponsor: Cathryn Carson (History)
Student Apprentice: Melissa Preston

Field notes were the glue that held together one of the most ambitious programs in the narrative of North American natural history. This was Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, created in 1908 under the direction of the young ornithologist Joseph Grinnell. Grinnell articulated a vision of the museum as a literary repository, a memory tool for the future. Attuned to language, Grinnell was always “writing, writing, writing,” one of his students recalled, obsessed by field notes and other graphic forms. Out of his own diarizing experience he originated and propagated the “Grinnellian method” that is considered the origin of scientific field note practice today.

The apprentice will sample field notes for close reading for genre conventions, stylistic devices, and other aspects of literary form. From this sample the student will build a picture of the museum’s social structure. Drawing on textual perceptions of stylistic affinities, the student will contribute to the understanding of the field journals as a social tool. By the end of the summer the student will draft a paper on the field notes as literary texts.