All Abstracts

The purpose of this study is to explore creative education (focusing on art education) and its impact on children’s development. There is a documented need for quality art education, as art has been used as a means to engage students in the learning process. As young children require hands-on acti...

In our culture, black women are not seen as important entities to help preserve and protect the African American culture, but are seen and treated as sexualized objects. Negative stereotypes govern the black woman. Strong public disinterest in uplifting black women has detached them from their true ...

This study seeks to explore the politics of Afro-Cuban identity after the triumph of the 1959 Cuban revolution. I answer three main questions: What role, if any, have the tools of nation-state building played on how Cubans identify themselves? Does a distinction between racial identity and national ...

Kidney transplantation is a surgical procedure using a donor kidney to treat an individual with end stage renal disease (ESRD). Common causes of ESRD are diabetes and high blood pressure. Approximately 29 million people in America have diabetes, causing a high demand for kidney transplants. Over 100...

Increasing gentrification and homelessness have coincided with neighborhoods, communities, cities, and states undergoing transformation and reconstruction. A negative outcome of gentrification is cultural displacement experienced when a group is forced out of the neighborhood due to changes in prope...

Biologically relevant odors, including those related to predators, produce unconditioned fear and anxiety-like behaviors, such as risk assessment, avoidance and freezing as well as conditioned place avoidance. In addition to predator odors, social stress can promote anxiety-like behaviors. When a ma...

Research demonstrates that Black women are the strongest supporters of black female candidates. However, despite strong electoral support for candidates, few gains have been made in electoral success, as compared to other minority groups. What is missing in the literature is how this support impacts...

Most political research is concerned with Presidential elections. However, congressional elections are more relevant to the interests of citizens. Research about congressional elections in specific districts such as majority-minority districts is scarce. Examining voting in majority-minority distric...

In “Blogging while Black,” Catherine Knight Steele invites us to consider blogs as “sites where black women interrogate the intersectionality of race and gender from a black feminist perspective” (2). Because my project is rooted in English-language literature, I analyze the role of a blog ...

For the first time in history, the aggregate student loan debt in the United States has surpassed the total credit card debt. Furthermore, the amount of federal tax dollars allocated towards funding postsecondary education has remained the same over the last thirty years. Research has shown that the...

Media is a socializing institution which produces and reproduces culture by circulating images. Unfortunately, many images that respresent Black Women are "controlling images" (Collins 200:85). Examples of controlling images of Black Women are the Mammie, Jezebel, and the welfare queen. These monoli...

The Brazilian film This Love that Consumes Us, directed by Allan Ribeiro (2012), portrays an Afro-Brazilian dance company and its struggle for sustainable artistic creation. The group is striving to secure the house where they live and rehearse in Rio de Janeiro. In my presentation, I analyze how th...

Multiple myeloma (MM) currently accounts for less than 1% of total cancer occurrence worldwide. Despite decades of research and design of therapeutics, clinical responses to molecular-targeted drugs tend to vary and are often unsuccessful. This hematological malignancy originates in the plasma cells...

Research has found that voter identification requirements do not significantly impact voting. These studies have focused on short-term rather than long-term impact. Past analysis has failed to test if voter identification laws implemented in the 1960s continue to impact voter participation among min...

Music plays a vital role in the way a film is perceived and accepted by its audience. In this study, film, music and melody are approached from a musical, psychological, and emotional point of view. This project seeks to understand the psyche and emotions of a listener/viewer. I will analyze the mel...

This project is inspired by a poem by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. His work, “Borges y Yo” was written in prose and focuses on the conflict of identity between Borges the individual and Borges the author. Critics such as Roland Barthes, who wrote “The Death of an Author”, believe ...

Maternal adaptation to physiological shifts during pregnancy is essential for both successful pregnancy, parturition and newborn health. The physiological changes that occur during pregnancy could be detected at the transcriptional level. However, little research has been conducted on gene regulatio...

African-American respectability politics are founded in ideals of whiteness, yet they are reinforced within the homes, social spaces, and institutions of the black community. HBCUs have long served as hubs of black intellectualism and racial uplift, but have not escaped the consequences of conformit...

Black Lesbian Fiction emerged as a literary genre out of the cultural work of Black feminists of the 1970’s and 1980’s. The genre’s formal beginning was marked in 1974 by the publication of the novel, Loving Her. Despite its cultural significance, Black Lesbian Fiction and the writers who work...

While the importance of herbivorous fishes in supporting the health of coral reefs has been established globally, the role of herbivorous invertebrates has only been evaluated in the Caribbean, where urchins were found to have compensated for a long history of overfishing when a catastrophic decline...