Humanities Scholars' Spring 2025 Research Symposium

“With help from Professor Garcia, I mapped out some of the methods and potential interviewees for my research. We decided on the who, what, why, and how of the research. Additionally, we went over some of the important researchers for my work such as Sally Benson and Wendy Henshaw. A key aspect of ethnographic research, as I know now, is to create a narrative that captures the data as well as the stories. My narrative is focused on agency, sanctuary, and community building. All the planning in the last class helped alleviate some of the anxieties I had about starting my project from scratch. Through my discussion with my mentor, I realized that I am not in fact starting from scratch. There is a breadth of knowledge that I can turn to that comes from my own experiences.”

“What I want to get out of this project in this aspect is to see how different cultures interact and perceive HIPS (High Impact Practices) in order to ultimately shape these programs. If there is one thing that I do want to learn out of my research findings, it is how to further expand HIPS by making it more accessible to underrepresented students. As well as bringing awareness to them as well considering because on occasion, administrations from higher institutions fail to recognize or acknowledge these resources students from these communities are dependent on.”

“It is clear and evident that people who can agree on so much policy achieve nothing by being antagonistic to the opposing party. It is generally agreed upon that compromise and bipartisan support is needed to make any significant progress in Congress, so why is it that people are fueled with so much anger and distaste for those who don’t identify with their same party? Additionally, why are these issues seemingly worsening? Many of these questions can be explained, at least partially by viewing politics through a social lens.”

“During my talk with my mentor, I decided to change up my research question to better fit what I want to do. It will still remain with the disciplinary lens of literature and feminism. I may no longer be looking into “How has feminist literary criticism influenced the portrayal of women in contemporary literature?” but instead ‘How has feminist literary criticism influenced the portrayal of women in video games?’” 

“Last Friday we got to talk to our mentors. Which for me was very helpful in deciding what direction I was going with my project. I narrowed my research question down the night before in order to be able to do proper research in the time frame I have. My new research question is if University of Utah students think foreign policy is important while voting. My mentor helped narrow down where to do my survey and interviews to the University of Utah because that will be easiest. I also have mockup survey and interview questions that I have written, and just need to finalize.”

“As I have further considered the research, I will be doing this semester I have decided to shift my research question itself, however I will be sticking to a disciplinary focus on philosophy. Originally, I planned to research how social media affects views on the environment, and in that state the question is unanswerable. As I considered what niche to focus on, I kept returning to a more basic question: before social media affects our views on certain things, how does it affect just us? From there I realized a question better suited to the research I want to do is this: At what point does overuse of social media become an addiction?”