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Research and Scholarly Work

1/13/20

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In 1834, a 22-year-old Yoruba man who would come to be known as Manuel Vidau was captured as a prisoner of war and sold to slave traders in Lagos, today the largest city in Nigeria. A Spanish ship transported him to Cuba, where he was sold to a white man who forced him to roll 400 cigars a day (if his pace slowed, he recalled, he would be “stripped, tied down and flogged with the cow hide”). A decade later, however, Vidau secured permission from a new owner to hire himself out, and with his earnings he bought a share in a lottery ticket—and won. That allowed him finally to buy his freedom. He married a fellow former slave, Maria Picard, and they adopted a young relative whose parents had died of cholera. Vidau supported his wife and son by continuing to roll cigars, eventually making enough money to cover their passage to England.

Vidau’s stroke of fortune is known today only because he had a chance encounter with a representative of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. The organization recorded his story in its journal, which was later shelved in a university library, digitized and eventually collected in an online database called “Freedom Narratives.” Enslaved people like Vidau—torn away from their communities of origin, deprived of the ability to write about themselves and treated as cargo or property in official documents—often left little of themselves to the historic record. Still, even a few facts can shape the outline of a life of sorrow, adversity, perseverance and triumph.

“One of the biggest challenges in slave studies is this idea that people were unknowable, that the slave trade destroyed individuality,” says Daryle Williams, a historian at the University of Maryland. “But the slave trade didn’t erase people. We have all kinds of information that’s knowable—property records, records related to births, deaths and marriages. There are billions of records. It just takes a lot of time to go look at them, and to trace the arc of an individual life.”

1767 slave inventory

A detail from a page in a 1767 slave inventory from Maranhao, Brazil. It lists the household slaves belonging to a judge in the city, including their ages and birthplaces. (Walter Hawthorne III)

Williams, a specialist in the African diaspora of Brazil, is one of the principal investigators of a massive new online database called “Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade,” which will launch in 2020. It aims to serve as a clearinghouse for information about enslaved people and their captors. Headquartered at Matrix, the Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University, and funded by a founding $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, Enslaved will serve as a hub for many smaller digitization projects, Freedom Narratives among them. For the first time, says Williams, anyone from academic historians to amateur genealogists will be able trace individuals, families, ethnic groups and populations through dozens, hundreds or even thousands of archives, making connections that will enrich our understanding of slavery.

“This tool,” Williams says, “will have the potential to show that even in the context of this horrible crime, there are still threads that hold people’s lives together.”

Click here to read the full article.

The University of Maryland has been invited to nominate early-career humanities faculty for the 2021-22 cycle of the Whiting Public Engagement Programs. These programs aim to celebrate and empower early-career humanities faculty who undertake ambitious projects to infuse the depth, historical richness, and nuance of the humanities into public life. In brief, the two programs are:

  • Fellowship of $50,000 for projects far enough into development or execution to present specific, compelling evidence that they will successfully engage the intended public.
  • Seed Grant of $10,000 for projects at a somewhat earlier stage of development, where more modest resources are needed to test or pilot a project or to collaborate with partners to finalize the planning for a larger project and begin work.

The College of Arts and Humanities will be nominating a full-time, early-career faculty candidate for either program or one for each. If you are interested in submitting an application and wish to be considered as the College nominee for this program, please submit all required application materials except the collaborators documentation to Linda Aldoory by March 6, 2020.  The link here is to the revised guidelines and eligibility criteria for the 2021-22 cycle, which contain more details. 

 

11/21/19

By Nathaniel Underland 

ocal communication for chimpanzees, our closest relatives on the evolutionary tree, consists of a few simple signals. By contrast, human language has many thousands of words that can be combined into an infinite number of sentences. 

Broad University of Maryland expertise on the gap between these two—how human language developed from a limited set of vocal actions to the incredibly complex systems of meaning we use today—is strongly featured in a new special edition of the august British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

The issue, “What Can Animal Communication Teach Us About Human Language?” includes contributions from five researchers in the colleges of Arts and Humanities (ARHU); Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSOS); and Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS); from disciplines including biology, psychology, neuroscience and linguistics.

One of the UMD authors, BSOS Dean Gregory F. Ball, said scholars from the various disciplines have been laying a foundation for new thinking and research on the topic both in the U.S. and globally, after a global surge of interest in the 1970s had abated.

“The campus combines people with expertise in both the production of signals in animal communication and the complex processes underlying this ability, along with people who have expertise in the processes governing how those signals are received,” he said. In all, UMD is contributing “ideas and new data leading to an understanding of how human language evolved.”

The journal issue was co-edited by biology Professor Gerald “Jerry” Wilkinson, the associate dean for faculty affairs in CMNS, William Idsardi, professor and chair of the Department of Linguistics; and Jonathan Fritz, a visiting scholar at New York University. The special issue first took shape at a conference organized by UMD’s Brain and Behavior Initiative in September 2017, and was published Monday.

The nature and origin of human language have been intensely debated for centuries. However, the special issue of Phil Trans B—the life sciences imprint of the oldest scientific journal in the English-speaking world—makes an original contribution through its emphasis on comparative methodologies. While authors across the journal disagree on such topics as the definition of vocal learning and what species possess it or how syntax evolved and whether any other species use it, they agree on the fundamental importance of an interdisciplinary approach to advancing our understanding around age-old questions of human language. The comparative approach introduces new perspectives to debates such as how we learn to speak, how the brain processes words and what component parts constitute language. 

Both for the interdisciplinary group on campus and beyond, Idsardi said, “it’s been an attempt to have a meeting of the minds to determine what the differences between animal and human communication are. For the linguists, the point is to be clearer about what they thought was special about human language, and for the animal researchers, to try to show that animals have communications systems that are as expressive as language.”

In the article “Behaviour, Biology and Evolution of Vocal Learning in Bats,” Wilkinson and co-author Sonja Vernes of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics argue that researchers in previous debates about vocal learning have overlooked how bats’ biological makeup has significant neurological implications. Scientists previously focused on bats’ echolocation system, which does not involve vocal learning, to the detriment of more recently discovered learning abilities in bats to modify their vocalizations. Vernes and Wilkinson argue that the study of bats has a significant upside: The diversity of bats’ genetic makeup—they possess many variants of a gene implicated in human language evolution—renders them useful for studies of the neural circuity of vocal learning. 

In another research article, Adam Fishbein, a doctoral candidate in UMD’s Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, and co-authors Idsardi, Ball and Robert Dooling, professor emeritus in psychology, challenge the boundaries of existing animal models. Birdsong has long been a popular means for studying human speech production, since birds produce songs according to sequential rules like humans do in speech. Many experiments with birdsong involve testing these sequential rules, with experiments that involve, for example, switching the order of sounds in a sequence. However, the researchers found that zebra finches, and perhaps most birds, are more sensitive to the acoustic properties of individual song elements than to the sequential properties. Fishbein and his colleagues argue that birdsong might be an altogether different form of communication than human language. The implications could disrupt many studies that use bird models.

Other articles in the special issue suggest fundamental similarities between animal communication and human language. One provides evidence that human and animal brains share an ancient, conserved brainstem circuitry that provides a general platform for vocal production. Another examines the shared genetic underpinnings of humans and songbirds—not only with regard to genes related to vocal communication but also those that influence social cognition and intelligence. Still others ponder difficult issues related to intentionality and cognition—for example, the problem of assessing whether non-human primates who exhibit nominally similar communication behaviors as humans actually intend to communicate the same thing.

"You can identify common features, from syntax to various ways in which the brain is configured to combine elements ... and there are undoubtedly shared features that go back in time to our common ancestors,” Wilkinson said. “That's sort of what the issue's all about."

11/19/19

By Jessica Weiss ’05 

Cutting across more than 2,000 miles of prairie, wetland and other rural landscapes from Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma, the Keystone Pipeline is a powerful symbol of human dependence on fossil fuels and its impact on people and habitats.

While much of the discussion and debate over the project have focused on the land it passes through, what about the area where the pipeline begins — the source of all that crude oil?

Shannon Collis, associate professor of art at the University of Maryland, is on a mission to tell the story of the lesser known Athabasca Oil Sands. That’s where millions of barrels of oil are dredged up each day from beneath thousands of miles of boreal forest.

“I want to capture the environmental effects of the industry … the abandoned open-pit mines, waste ponds and refineries,” said Collis, who teaches digital media and sound at UMD. “I want people to know what it’s like there.”

Collis, who is from Canada and now lives in Baltimore, was recently awarded a $10,000 Rubys Artist Grant through the Baltimore-based Robert W. Deutsch Foundation to travel to the oil sands in western Canada early next year to capture digital video, drone cinematography and sound recordings of the area. The resulting project, called “Strata,” will bring Canada’s immense oil fields to a gallery installation through immersive digital media. “Strata” is a reference to layers in the ground, or what happens when earth is being excavated.

“I create a space that envelopes people and surrounds them in sound and moving image,” she said. “So, you’re actually hearing this mechanical machinery, roaring off the landscape.”

Collis first learned of Canada’s massive oil sands 14 years ago. After graduating with an M.F.A. in printmaking from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, she moved to the boomtown of Fort McMurray to teach printmaking and art history at Keyano College. The area was cold and isolated but beautiful, and Collis loved to take in the natural landscape on long runs or drives. She often brought her film camera.

She found the oil sands on one of those adventures.

“I remember sitting on what felt like a crater in the earth, on the ledge, taking pictures and really thinking about how powerful it was to see the landscape altered in that way,” she said.

Alberta has the third-largest oil reserves in the world, after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.

Collis’ work has since evolved from film photography and printmaking into a more interdisciplinary, technology-driven form. Combining her two-dimensional work with a background in computer science, she now creates installations and interactive environments with audio and visuals that allow people to immerse themselves deeply.

Collis’ work has been exhibited widely across North America as well as in Europe, Asia, Australia and Brazil.

“Strata” comes after a similar project, called “Kiewa,” in which Collis documented the ways a hydroelectric project has transformed Australia’s Alpine Valley. For that project, Collis spent two weeks in residence at the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture in the Australian Alps, absorbed in the terrain. The resulting work came in the form of six large right triangles that screened video collages depicting Australia’s Alpine National Park and the neighboring Kiewa hydroelectric complex. It was exhibited at the artist collective Grizzly Grizzly in Philadelphia earlier this year.

Collis’ art also focuses on urban architectural sites. “Singular Space,” a collaboration with Baltimore-based artist Liz Donadio, uses immersive video and sound to provide a portrait of Forum Fountain, a public sculpture in East Baltimore. It’s currently on view at the Arlington Arts Gallery.

For “Strata,” Collis tentatively plans to exhibit large-scale video projections and surround-sound audio. She’ll travel to Canada in March — when the temperature may still be around -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit) — to begin her research and exploration.

“Calling it ‘research’ is appropriate because it’s something I’m investigating from all sides of this complex issue,” she said. “Things could shift depending on what I see and experience there. I’ll react to what I capture as data and then decide how to best execute it.”

11/7/19

By Richard Bell 

Richard Bell is an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland and the author of “Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home.”

Though the heroic stories of African American freedom-seekers have been the subject of television shows, museums, walking tours and a whole catalog of books, it took until this month for Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad, to get top billing in a movie. But the release of “Harriet” doesn’t complete the story of the journeys that slaves made between the North and South.

We’re still missing out on vital cultural depictions of the Reverse Underground Railroad, the criminal network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away tens of thousands of free African Americans from the Northern states to sell them into slavery in the Deep South. Without that half of the story, we can’t possibly understand what life was like in the North for ostensibly free black people — and how tenuous their liberation could be.

The free black people these traffickers kidnapped could fetch up to $15,000 in today’s economy in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The settlers swarming into that region required a nearly bottomless supply of forced labor to cut sugar cane and pick cotton. But Congress had outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, and the legal interstate trafficking of enslaved people within the United States had not been able to keep up with ever-rising demand. The more that new planters were willing to pay, the more tempting and profitable it became for anyone sufficiently cold-blooded to try to abduct free people from Northern cities, smuggle them into the legal supply chain, and sell them in this vast new slave market.

These incentives left the North’s large and dynamic black communities dangerously exposed. Free black men, women and children went about their business, keenly aware that the threat of abduction and coerced migration into slavery lay around every corner.

Although it’s true that the most famous rider on this Reverse Underground Railroad — Solomon Northup — recently received the Hollywood treatment in Steve McQueen’s 2013 adaptation of his memoir, “Twelve Years a Slave,” Northup’s experiences were far from typical.

Most kidnappings were committed not by smartly dressed con artists, but by poorer people. These human traffickers generally avoided approaching highly literate, middle-age men such as Northup, preferring instead to lure away poor street children who could not read or write, boys and girls they hoped would be easier to dupe and control. Their prisoners rarely ended up in showrooms or on the auction block; rather, they were generally sold off in ones and twos on dusty roads and driveways deep in the Southern interior.

This is almost exactly what happened to 10-year-old Cornelius Sinclair, one of five free black boys kidnapped from central Philadelphia over a single day in August 1825. His captors hustled him onto a ship just outside the city. They warehoused him for a time in a pair of safe houses on the Delmarva Peninsula. Then they marched him and four other boys to the Deep South — a journey of 2 million steps — to be sold as slaves.

There are reasons, of course, why stories such as Sinclair’s have been buried for so long. Most prisoner-passengers on the Reverse Underground Railroad did not return to freedom to tell their tales. Their captors kept deliberately low profiles; the identities of all but a handful still remain a secret. Only rarely do their names and crimes appear in surviving police files or trial transcripts, their low profiles the result of the years they spent in the shadows, protected by bribes, avarice and indifference. These outlaws did not bequeath their papers to Southern colleges or historical societies, and left no business records or bundles of private letters for historians to examine. They did not write memoirs or pose for paintings or photographs. Their homes and warehouses no longer stand.

Yet these professional kidnappers left their mark everywhere and spirited into slavery roughly as many African Americans as Tubman and her comrades and collaborators ever assisted in escaping from it. They, too, looked to exploit, as the operators of the Underground Railroad did, major differences in the legal status of slavery in the North and the South. They, too, were loosely organized and opportunistic. And they, too, ran on secrecy and relied on small circles of trusted participants, forged documents, false identities and disguises. And though the direction of travel was different, the routes taken by northbound freedom seekers helped by Tubman and by southbound victims of kidnapping such as Cornelius Sinclair were largely the same.

Thanks in large part, now, to “Harriet,” Tubman’s achievements are at the forefront of the United States’ imagination. But Cornelius Sinclair deserves his moment, too.

 

6/11/19

By Sala Levin ’10

Stand at the corner of 14th Street and Constitution Avenue in downtown D.C. long enough—trust us, it won’t be long at all—and you’ll notice tourist after tourist, phone camera at the ready, walking up a little path outside the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Their destination: a giant mushroom sculpture made of slabs from five kinds of trees.

Foon Sham headshotCreated by UMD art Professor Foon Sham, "Mushroom," with its varying colors and textures, isn’t just a distinctive photo op backdrop. It’s a prominent part of a new Smithsonian Gardens exhibition with installations at 14 sites across the Mall running from last month through December 2020. Sham has three pieces in the “Habitat” exhibit, which highlights how protecting habitats is crucial to protecting the flora and fauna that rely on them.

When the Smithsonian approached Sham two years ago to be part of the exhibit, he settled on the mushroom form to emphasize how fungi, trees and soil share a symbiotic relationship, relying on one another for nutrients and other life essentials. He also appreciated mushrooms’ underground networks of “thousands of interlocking strands … They’re communicating to each other and supplying nutrients. They symbolize what we are doing today, that we connect to each other with phone and Internet.”

"Arches of Life" sculptureThe trees that became Sham’s mushroom—felled by lightning, age or disease—came from the grounds of the Smithsonian, and are a mix of birch, oak, elm, cypress and Katsura, native to Japan.

Sham’s other two pieces in the exhibit are "Arches of Life," a series of hollow, arched wood structures meant to symbolize how dead wood can become a critical habitat for animals and insects, and "Vascular Form XI, Unbound," a towering vessel that occupies a small island in a fountain-centric garden to represent how water also contains life.

His work has been displayed at galleries and spaces in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Norway, Hungary and elsewhere around the world. “For all the physicality of Sham’s work—its size, look and even smell—the essential escape he offers is into the imagination,” The Washington Post once wrote of him.

"Vascular Form XI, Unbound" sculptureSham began his artistic career nearly 40 years ago working with materials like steel, concrete and Plexiglass, but soon moved to wood, drawn to the material for the way in which each slab is unique. “Each individual piece has an individual identity,” he says, likening the differences between pieces of wood to the differences between people.

Wood sculptures also honor the lives of the trees that died for them to exist, Sham says. “Trees have to go sometimes, but I give them a second life and a second identity.”

 

 

 

 

11/6/19

By Kate Spanos ’16 Ph.D. theatre and performance studies

At 7 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, two lines of six dancers stand facing one another in the rotunda of the math building. They wear T-shirts that read “fear the kilt” and black soft-soled shoes called “ghillies,” often used in Scottish dance. 

Amid the dancers is linguistics professor Howard Lasnik. He’ll be shouting out instructions tonight, for UMD’s weekly Scottish Country Dance Club meeting. 

The dancers bow and curtsy, and suddenly they’re moving at dizzying speeds. “Advance! Retire!,” Lasnik says, directing them through the Loon Mountain Reel, a Scottish country dance. “Slip left! Slip right! Skip change around!” 

Lasnik is a highly regarded linguist, recognized worldwide for his contributions to the study of syntax and semantics. In the ’70s, he studied under famous linguist and activist Noam Chomsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), whom he continued to work and publish with for several decades. But he can also be found every Wednesday evening on campus moving to traditional Scottish jigs and reels and instructing students to do the same. Lasnik says his passions fit together well. 

“Dance is far from a distraction from my professional work,” he says. “It’s what keeps me from getting burned out.”

Lasnik’s dancing roots go back over 50 years. He started dancing when he was an undergraduate mathematics major at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon), when a professor introduced him to the recorder for English country dancing, which in turn led him to try the dancing himself. From there, he branched out to other folk dances, like Balkan, Greek and Scottish dance. He danced throughout his graduate career at Harvard University, where he received a master’s degree in English literature, and at MIT, where he completed his doctorate and found his career path in linguistics, the scientific study of language and its structure.

He says he can find elements of his passions for both math and language in dance. 

“Linguistics is an analytical, almost mathematical approach to the study of language,” he says. “The geometric patterns of the figures contribute to semantic meaning-making in the dance community.” 

Lasnik says he can sometimes even use dance to explain complex concepts, like “minimalist syntax theory,” a “bare bones” approach to linguistic theory developed by Chomsky in the ’90s.  Scottish country dances are organized into sets of long lines in which partners face each other and “progress” to a new position, moving up or down the set to start the dance again. That same concept can be applied to language formation. 

Now-retired UMD senior media relations associate Ellen Ternes, another Scottish country dance enthusiast, formed the UMD Scottish Country Dance Club 11 years ago. She and Lasnik ran the club together for several years, and they created an active Scottish country dancing community on campus, bringing together students and members of the local community. 

And his love of dance isn’t lost on his colleagues—in 2000, a group of linguists published a collection of essays in honor of his work on minimalist syntax called “Step by Step,” a subtle nod to his lifelong passion.

Lasnik says his teaching philosophy is the same in both dance and the classroom: “If students don’t understand it, it’s not their fault. It’s mine.”

The club meets every Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the rotunda of the Mathematics building.

Photo by David Andrews.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conference Grants:

Tess Korobkin - ARTH
Sixth Biennial Symposium of the Association of Historians of American Art, 10/8/2020

Patrick Warfield - MUSC
Florence Price Festival, 8/20/2020

Leigh Wilson Smiley - TDPS
2020 Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, 1/14/2020

Innovation Grants:

John Ruppert - ARTT
High Arctic Residency 

Jessica Enoch - ENGL
Remembering Suffrage: Feminist Memory and Activist at the Centennial of the 19th Amendment 

Jan Padios - AMST  
How to Build a Home 

Eric Zakim - SLLC
Israel’s Dirty Little Secret

Nancy Mirabal - AMST
Building a Visual Archive of Community of Color in Washington D.C.: The Historic Photographs of Nancy Shia project 

Subvention Funds:

Hester Baer - SLLC
German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism: A New Film History

Joseph Grimmer - MUSC
Paris Conservatoire’s Solo de Concours de Basson Vols 1 & 2: 1898-1938

La Marr Bruce - AMST
How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity

 

Click here for a list of previous award winners.

Applications are now being accepted for Andrew Carnegie Fellows 2020, which supports high-caliber scholarship in the humanities and social sciences via $200,000 fellowships. This year's research topics include:

  • Global connections and global ruptures
  • Strengthening U.S. democracy and exploring new narratives
  • Environments, natural and human
  • Technological and cultural creativity—potential and perils

UMD can nominate one senior scholar and one junior scholar (defined as receiving the PhD/other terminal degree within the last 10 years) for consideration. Nominees must be full-time faculty members who are US citizens or permanent residents. Faculty members interested in being considered for nomination should submit a single PDF that includes the following via the limited submission portal by Thursday, November 7, at 5pm:

  1. Draft nomination letter - Written as if from President Wallace Loh to the Carnegie Fellows competition, the letter should describe your accomplishments and potential, and detail how your contributions "will address pressing issues and cultural shifts affecting us at home and abroad." 
  2. Prospectus (3 to 5 pages, double-spaced, 12 point font) - Describe your project, including a projected work plan and time frame (fellowships can be for one or two years).
  3. Current CV

Contact Amanda Dykema, adykema@umd.edu with any questions or if you would like to request a review of your materials before the limited submission deadline. 

10/23/19

Whether or not they enter a voting booth next year, a cross section of about 20,000 people from across the country will get a chance to share their views on race, immigration and politics in the context of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

That’s among the goals of a new project led in part by UMD American studies Professor Janelle Wong that will collect data accurately reflecting the country's complex blend of languages, ethnicities, religions and races.

The National Science Foundation awarded a nearly $1 million grant to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to host the project, called the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS). It will survey Black, Latino, Asian, white and Muslim American people; those of Native American, Native Hawaiian, black African and black Caribbean descent; and a group of LGBTQ respondents, in six languages. It will focus on issues around identity, immigration and political engagement and civic participation, and allow for the analysis of an individual group or comparative analysis across groups. 

The CMPS will “capture the voices of groups not surveyed very much but who are deeply affected by U.S. policies,” said Wong, who joins Lorrie Frasure-Yokley and Matt Barreto of UCLA and Edward Vargas from Arizona State University in leading the effort. The four professors worked together as co-principal investigators of a study in 2016; the current project builds on that effort. 

“We want to hear from people directly affected—perhaps because they’re excluded from the political system or impacted by its derogatory rhetoric,” Wong said, “or simply affected by the policies that impact immigrants and racial minorities.”  

This is the fourth, and most ambitious, installment of the CMPS, after the self-funded 2016 effort. Smaller studies were conducted in 2008 and 2012.

The CMPS is also unique because it engages researchers from across the country, including first-generation, minority and early-career scholars who might not have the means to field such a large survey on their own.  In 2016, 86 social scientists and researchers from 55 institutions worked collaboratively to help design the questionnaire and analyze the dataset. That resulted in multiple research projects, or what Wong called a “publication boom.”

“A lot of survey data is collected by large Research I institutions, and that can sometimes leave scholars working at HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions or tribal colleges out of the opportunities to collect data relevant to their communities or research,” Wong said. 

This time, Wong expects around 150 collaborators from political science and the social sciences. That wide-ranging participation is especially crucial, she said, amid contentious national discussions around topics like race and ethnicity, immigration and nationalism. The survey will capture both voters’ and non-voters’ opinions beginning after the 2020 elections and until early 2021.

With the CMPS, “we’ll have diverse researchers at every stage of their careers,” she said. “Suddenly they’ll have data to write papers and start building their research portfolios.”

By Jessica Weiss '05

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