AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM PROPOSAL FOR SUMMER 2011 RESEARCH GRANT Program Objective The core of the Summer Research Program is to employ students as research assistants for faculty scholars. These positions will match students and faculty according to research interests and will be intended to support the student’s development of an understanding of the techniques of intellectual inquiry and research. Recruitment Faculty affiliated with American Studies will be invited to take advantage of this opportunity to work with an undergraduate research assistant and interested students will be encouraged to apply. The Director of the program will facilitate matching students with appropriate mentors. The American Studies Program has offered successful Summer Research Programs since 2002 and hopes to continue making this valuable opportunity available to students and faculty. Student Responsibilities The expectation is that the student will work approximately 30 hours per week on specific tasks assigned by the faculty member, and another 10 hours per week pursuing the student’s own related academic interest with the faculty member’s guidance. For some students, this may be preliminary research for an honors thesis in American Studies. For others the exposure to faculty research may foster interest in future graduate study. Mentoring Oversight of the program is provided by the Director of American Studies, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who will be in contact with the faculty advisers, monitoring that the program guidelines are being met and that each student-faculty research team understands and are in compliance with the guidelines. Faculty will meet individually with the student assistants, meeting with them regularly and providing direction and feedback. Students who have completed summer research will be encouraged to continue doing research that culminates in an American Studies Honors Project (or in a departmental honors project, for those students from other majors). Budget We request funds for three student stipends for summer research (each @$14 per hour for 40 hours a week for 10 weeks) for a total of $16,800. October 11, 2011 Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Director of American Studies Monica Moore, Program Administrator VPUE Departmental Grant for Undergraduate Research: 2010-2011 Anthropology Department Proposal The Sea Islands Cultural Heritage Preservation Project Project Objective The Department of Anthropology's goal in developing a VPUE-funded series of field school programs is to provide research-training experience to undergraduates alongside faculty members to learn important methodological tools necessary for anthropological research. The Sea Islands field school has its field site the barrier islands and the coastal region of South Carolina and Georgia, also known as the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. The field school aims to explore the cultural and geographic past and present of the region, immersing undergraduate students into anthropological field methodology, including archival research, ethnographic interviews, surveys, mapping and GIS, data analysis, and participant-observation. Student Activities Anthropological fieldwork is unique in that it requires researchers to undertake a variety of methodologies. Collaborating with faculty on research provides a key entry into methodological and ethical aspects of Anthropology. In the Sea Islands field school, students conduct archival research on landscape history, tourism and cultural heritage, assist in the collection of historical spatial data, collaborate with staff at the Avery Research Center in Charleston, conduct ethnographic interviews, engage in participant observation, and work on small research projects that form part of the faculty's larger research. Mentoring Strategies Oversight occurs constantly in the field, as students work directly with faculty, as well as the graduate student project assistant. In the Sea Islands Field school, student work is supervised by the faculty member, an academic staff and a graduate student assistant, who will accompany them to the field. Academic staff and faculty from institutions in North and South Carolina also take an active role in mentoring the students. Student Final Products Many students are either exploring a major or learning field skills so they can go on to advanced study. The projects in this grant provide opportunities for students to develop individual research projects, honors theses, and internships. In the Sea Islands Field School, students deliver the material collected in interviews and a list of relevant archival sources, including maps, photographs, and voice recordings, as much as possible in digital format. They produce a small research paper and deliver a professional presentation of their research at the Avery Research Center, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC. Evaluation Process The main evaluation for the Anthropology Department's projects comes in the on-sight supervision of the students’ work in the field. In the Sea Islands Field School, students develop with the faculty a detailed plan for their respective projects as well as a timeline and deliverables before their departure to the field. Once in the field, students debrief in daily team meetings, provide written and oral progress reports, and discuss strategies for the subsequent steps in their research. 1. Research program goals: During 2010-2011, VPUE funding is sought for the The Sea Islands Cultural Heritage Preservation Project, led by Professor Paulla Ebron. This project is distinctive, both in the emphasis on anthropological tradition and anthropological methodologies in fieldwork, and in providing undergraduate student researchers with opportunities to explore the interconnections between anthropological, ethnographic, and ethnohistoric practices. There are currently about 60 undergraduate Anthropology majors in the department. This program is among the first of its kind proposed by the Anthropology Department to involve students first hand in faculty research projects. It will act as example of the options available for students to take part in anthropological and ethnographic field research, with the hopes that more programs of this kind will emerge in future granting cycles. The Department of Anthropology's goal in developing a department-wide VPUE-funded series of fieldwork and mentoring programs is to provide an integrated research-training experience to complement the department's substantial program efforts in independent undergraduate research. The already sizable research involvement of undergraduates in Anthropology, plus the increasing individual faculty use of VPUE funding suggest that students would further benefit from experiences that involve participating in field research alongside faculty members in order to learn important methodological tools necessary for anthropological training, such as ethnographic interviews, surveys, and participant-observation. The Department of Anthropology involves faculty who are already committed to the mentoring sub-projects comprising this proposal. The department expects that the program proposed in this grant application will both serve as a stand-alone introduction to the research process, and as part of a trajectory towards subsequent independent undergraduate research, which our program fosters through a series of grants and courses in research methods. Budget Request A total of $36,600, including $2,500 for a graduate student "field school assistant" stipend and expenses (on average, $6,000 per undergraduate student participant), is requested for the summer of 2010-2011. The Sea Islands Cultural Heritage Preservation Project This project centers around memory, landscape, the making of landscape, and political activists that are part of making the Sea Islands one of the most significant sites of African American culture. Landscape studies has become one of the most dynamic fields bridging the natural and social sciences with the humanities. A multi-dimensional field school explores post-slavery landscapes in the Sea Islands, with a focus on environmental history, science studies, and cultural geography to bring the materiality of flora and fauna into considerations of culture and history. It involves undergraduate students in many aspects of anthropological field methodology, including attending public hearings on the Gullah-Geeche corridor, visiting islands and significant landscapes and landmarks, conducting interviews and data analysis, and making use of the anthropological method of participant-observation. The Sea Islands lie at the intersection between Africa and African America. It is the site where scholars have best shown that the agency and cultural heritage of Africans made a difference in the making of the North American political economy. African American history, linguistics, folklore, photography, art, film, and literature are all focused on this small region as the site of the most authentic New World African culture. The central question in this project concerns the cosmopolitan regionalism, from its history of citizenship schools to the plant history in the Sea Islands. The contemporary Sea Islands have been organized for tourism, yet this apparently effortless tropicality rests on histories of painful naturalization and discipline—for both humans and nonhumans. It is within this layered history, then, that Sea Island regionality must be understood. The project builds on the scholarship of Sea Island-oriented historians and geographers; however,