Category: Oral Presentation

Antagonistic River: Reading Nature through Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion

Presenter(s): Scott Zeigler

Faculty Mentor(s): Gordon Sayre & Stephanie LeMenager

Oral Session 1 SW

This research evaluates the representation of the fictional Wakonda Auga River as a character in Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel Sometimes a Great Notion. By investigating Kesey’s personal journals and correspondence, I show how Kesey took his native Oregon, the natural world in which he lived, and wrote it into his story. Rivers are traditionally viewed in English literature as a component of setting or as a metaphorical representation of some human dilemma. Occasionally, a fantastical work gives nature agency by applying human characteristics like speech or movement or some combination thereof. Yet, a river is a force unto itself, and it interacts with the human animal in its own ways, both positively and negatively. Ecocriticism offers a method for exploring how rivers can be given agency without adding anthropocentric characteristics. Through the ecocritical theoretical lens, readers can evaluate the natural components of a text, understand the figurative or metaphoric meanings, and still read nature for its powerful literal meaning. I will use this lens to evaluate the text and show how Kesey represented the Wakonda Auga River in the novel as both a fictive place, one based on the actual Siuslaw River, and as an antagonistic character in conflict with other characters in the story. By reading Sometimes a Great Notion in this way, readers gain access to the historical world of Kesey’s Oregon and the fictive world of an Oregon mill town in the 1960s, and they are encouraged to explore today the natural places associated with both.

Low Level Control of a Quadrotor with Deep Model-Based Reinforcement learning 

Presenter(s): Joseph Yaconelli

Oral Session 2 C

Generating low-level robot controllers often requires manual parameters tuning and significant system knowledge, which can result in long design times for highly specialized controllers. With the growth of automation, the need for such controllers might grow faster than the number of expert designers. To address the problem of rapidly generating low-level controllers without domain knowledge, we propose using model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) trained on few minutes of automatically generated data. In this paper, we explore the capabilities of MBRL on a Crazyflie quadrotor with rapid dynamics where existing classical control schemes offer a baseline against the new method’s performance. To our knowledge, this is the first use of MBRL for low-level controlled hover of a quadrotor using only on-board sensors, direct motor input signals, and no initial dynamics knowledge. Our forward dynamics model for prediction is a neural network tuned to predict the state variables at the next time step, with a regularization term on the variance of predictions. The model predictive controller then transmits best actions from a GPU-enabled base station to the quadrotor firmware via radio. In our experiments, the quadrotor achieved hovering capability of up to 6 seconds with 3 minutes of experimental training data.

Challenges to Democratic Inclusion and Contestation of Space: Contemporary Student Activism in Transforming South Africa

Presenter(s): Anna-Magdalena Wilms-Crowe

Faculty Mentor(s): Janine Hicks & Dan Tichenor

Oral Session 3 RA

Twenty-four years into democracy, in a time marked by stark inequality and rising levels of political disillusionment, student activists are key players in the pursuit of a more just, more equitable, and more democratic South Africa. Using universities as spaces to contest, disrupt, and challenge the status quo, student activists challenge narratives of youth political apathy and act as agents of change, encouraging society to meet the goals established in the 1996 Constitution, the document enshrining the very promises they were born into believing would be their reality. Through mobilization and organizing, student actors boldly engage in questions of substantive equality and reveal the limits of South African democracy, highlighting especially how a hegemonic neoliberal framework has coopted radical transformation and maintained exclusionary principles. Yet, while #FeesMustFall protests in 2015-2016 temporarily garnered international media awareness and scholarly recognition, prolonged attention to student activism is lacking in the field of democratization and youth are often popularly conceived as apathetic or disengaged from politics. This study aims to correct this epistemological oversight by focusing on students as political agents and their contributions to the process of social transformation. This focus is especially important in Africa, the youngest continent on earth, demographically speaking, where youth hold a key role in the process of development and democratization, but has global relevance. Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews and focus groups with student activists at the University of KwaZulu Natal (UKZN) and a review of secondary literature, this project reflects on the role that student activists and institutions of higher learning play in the larger project of transforming post-94 society and deepening South African democracy. Informed by the voices of student activists involved in #FeesMustFall and more recent campaigns against gender-based violence, this study considers how student activists operate within and beyond the university to influence social change. Ultimately, I focus on how student activists conceptualize their role in creating a new social order and how that ideal translates into action. As student activists are often misunderstood, misrepresented or overlooked all together, this work fills a critical space and has important implications for our understanding of transformation in post-1994 South Africa. Moreover, examining students and universities has critical significance to the larger field of democratization and international affairs as the parallels between the state and the university reveal compromised experiences of citizenship and the urgency in addressing democratic deficit at a global scale in all spheres of society.

Environmental Education: Restoring A Sense of Place

Presenter(s): Eleanor Williams

Co Presenter(s): Brittany Calabria, Chloe Johnson, Hannah Schmidt, Cameron Wallenfels, Savannah Winchell

Faculty Mentor(s): Katie Lynch

Oral Session 4 C

Interactive environmental education has proven to enhance emotional health, academic success, and physical development. By cultivating a sense of place early on, kids can apply critical thinking through unique teaching techniques to discover the importance of conservation efforts. The Restoring Connections team is a part of the Environmental Leadership Program at the University of Oregon that collaborates with Mt. Pisgah Arboretum and Adams Elementary School to develop an outdoor field trip curriculum for elementary students. Our mission is to engage students with nature through a place-based environmental education approach incorporating pre-trip lessons and outdoor field trip experiences three times a year. Our curriculum focuses on woodland, wetland, and riparian habitats with three different local focal species for each grade. Goals that are central to our curriculum include discussion of the effects and impact of seasonal changes, habitat restoration through stewardship projects and developing a general respect and appreciation for the environment. Through completion of this program we intend to create a classroom culture that incorporates DEI (Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion) and engaged pedagogy principles; enabling students to connect to the environment at Mt. Pisgah and empower the students to use their learned knowledge to create a long-lasting, meaningful connection to the world around them. We will be exposing 15 K-4th grade classrooms, a total of 450 students, to the wonders of Mt. Pisgah’s natural ecosystems. At the end of this program students will be well versed in environmental problems and apply knowledge to investigate, plan, and create a sustainable future.

Caliban Yisrael: Constructing Caliban as the Jewish Other in Shakespeare’s the Tempest

Presenter(s): Deforest Wihtol

Faculty Mentor(s): Kate Myers

Oral Session 1 SW

This paper seeks to introduce new data into the centuries-long discussion of William Shakespeare’s portrayal of Jewish people through intertextual and close reading of Shakespeare’s plays The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice, sections from the Geneva Bible, and primary documents discussing Anglo-Jewish life in the Elizabethan era.

Shakespeare’s relationship to and purported views of Jewish people have been scrutinized for centuries. However, almost all conclusions put forth by scholars about Shakespeare and his ties to Elizabethan Jewish communities and anti-Semitism have been drawn from one work, The Merchant of Venice. Merchant contains Shakespeare’s only explicitly Jewish characters, Shylock and his daughter, Jessica, although she happily converts to Christianity. In this paper, I propose that Shakespeare has an implicitly Jewish character lurking in The Tempest: Caliban, the play’s main antagonist, a native to the island, and Prospero and Miranda’s slave. I will support the interpretation of Caliban as a Jewish-coded figure through cross-reading The Tempest with The Merchant of Venice, sections of the Geneva Bible, and non-fiction testimonials from English residents during and before the Elizabethan era. Using both these plays alongside other scholarly and historical texts, I will bring cultural and historical context to these portrayals in order to explore a deeper understanding of the complicated and nuanced portrayals of Judaism in Shakespeare’s work and the dynamics of modern scholarship on Shakespeare’s relationship to Judaism.

The Hollows of the Heart

Presenter(s): Sarah Weishaupt

Faculty Mentor(s): Mark Hennion

Oral Session 4 DL

Creative writing is unique in its ability to give form to our immersive inner worlds: it is the only art form that can give a direct voice to thought. In “The Hollows of the Heart,” I explore my experiences with mental illness and relationships through metaphor. When I conceptualized this piece, I endeavored to incorporate several themes, such as addiction, loneliness, and self- control; I constructed narrative elements in the vein of speculative fiction, also known as fantasy, to represent those themes within the story. However, through the revision process, I found that these themes and metaphors got muddled together, and that the story improved when I constrained it to one or two metaphors and ensured the plot was cohesive. In the end, the act of transforming my feelings though metaphor and sharing the product with others helped me clarify them and find closure.

Portraits of Fans: Sports Fandom in Women’s Professional Basketball

Presenter(s): Sierra Webster

Faculty Mentor(s): Lori Shontz

Oral Session 2 O

Male sports reporters produce nearly 90 percent of sports media coverage (The Status of Women in the U.S. Media, Women’s Media Center). Just 13 percent of sports staff are white women, while 5 percent are women of color. Further, men predominately hold decision-making roles in sports media, making up 90 percent of sports editors (2018 AP Sports Editors Report Card). Thus, the underrepresentation of women and women of color in sports media necessarily produces misrepresentations of female athletes and female athletes of color. In the very nature of how journalism works and the role of journalists as agenda-setters, reporters and editors decide which and how narratives around women are told.
For my School of Journalism and Communication honors thesis, I have produced a long-form feature story focused on fans of the Seattle Storm, the 2018 WNBA champion, and their relationship to a professional team that is not centered around masculinity and whiteness. The Storm seems to sit at the forefront of a movement that is giving more prestige and attention towards professional sportswomen.

My project has combined extensive sports media coverage research and knowledge with journalistic storytelling, interviewing and reporting to tell the story of Storm fans and why their stories matter through the accessible medium of journalism. I traveled to Seattle to interview sources and gather information, scene and a sense for the city’s support of its WNBA franchise. The information gathered on reporting trips paired with information gathered through research culminates in a product that is more than a research article but is a compelling story that demonstrates the value of women’s professional sports. Using my research and my experience as a woman in sports media, I have produced a narrative that is dignifying, nuanced and representative of the women on the court and in the stands.

American, Societal Structures Inhibiting Empathy for Criminals

Presenter(s): Zoe Wassman

Faculty Mentor(s): Caoimhin OFearghail

Oral Session 3 SW

When American incarceration rates were at their peak in 2008, 1 out of every 100 adults were in prison or jail1. If prisons were successful at keeping criminals off the street, punishing offenders cost-effectively, preparing them for re-entry, and deterring future offenders, that figure would not be so troubling. Research, however, indicates that incarceration fails to fulfill any of its promised results; the current system is both unsustainable and arguably increases crime rates. In this study, I use an interdisciplinary approach to explore how elements of American culture such as the “American Dream” ideal, capitalism, chronic individualism, founding morals, and even our use of language inhibit our ability to feel empathy for criminals, and thus support the existing structures of institutional corrections. The tentative results suggest that the roots of the current failure of U.S. corrections are cultural, and that solving them will require a reassessment of our fundamental values and the courage to make bold decisions before they reach crisis levels. For my research, I used text from “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive” by Jarod Diamond, anthropologist, ecologist, and Professor of Geography at UCLA; “From the Native’s Point of View,” a paper by Clifford Geertz, world-renowned anthropologist and philosopher; research presented by Lena Boroditsky on “How Language Shapes Thought”; and reputable online resources for various facts and figures, including the Civil Rights Journal and The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Alexander, Elizabeth (Fall 1998). “A Troubling Response To Overcrowded Prisons”, Civil Rights Journal.

Empathy in Fiction as Shown Through the Second Person Point-of-View

Presenter(s): Madeline Walters

Faculty Mentor(s): Mark Hennion

Oral Session 2 DL

My project explores the various methods authors use to tell stories in the second person point of view, and how these methods portray a powerful empathetic effect in the reader. This particular point of view is not often used in traditional narratives. Rather than using I, he, she, or we, some authors choose to use “you” in a stylistic manner. In analyzing multiple stories, I’ve found many different methods of using the second person in various stories over more than one genre. I’ve analyzed these methods in order to answer this question: How is the second person point of view told to make the readers more empathetic towards different narratives? As a writer myself, my goal is to share the art of reading and writing stories that portray an in-depth experience of emotion.

Reconceptualizing Feminist Utopias: Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time and Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone

Presenter(s): Bethan Tyler

Faculty Mentor(s): Elizabeth Raisanen

Oral Session 3 O

Theories of feminist utopia tend to focus on its presence within science/speculative fiction, upholding works like Marge Piercy’s 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time as exemplars of the genre. Literary critics typically designate this novel’s vision of the future, the community of Mattapoisett, as a source of radical, mobilizing inspiration for feminists. I will argue against this reading by attesting that Mattapoisett presents a regressive model of feminism in its failure to permit women the choice of (traditional) maternity and, moreover, does not sufficiently distance itself from that which is condemned in the novel’s dystopian present – the stripping of women’s reproductive agency. Mattapoisett thus fails to fulfill half of Sally Miller Gearhart’s essential criteria for the identification of feminist utopia. By contrast, I argue that Margaret Drabble’s 1965 novel, The Millstone, presents a radical vision of maternity, as divorced from patriarchy, that aligns with threads of the feminist movement yet to come at the time of its publication, and that this, under Gearhart’s framework, strongly suggests the presence of a feminist utopia. This is striking in that the novel is categorized as a work of realism, rather than science fiction. By revealing the vision of feminism within a speculative fiction novel to be retrograde in comparison with that of a realistic novel, I argue that feminism unyokes realism from the present, thus collapsing boundaries between genres, and making a case for the study of the feminist utopia in realms beyond science fiction.