The Tanner Fellowship Award Fund

This summer, I had the opportunity to conduct a literary studies analysis of the existing works of contemporary Caribbean diasporic poets, specifically on their influence in shaping the integration of Antillean identities in the Caribbean, the United States, and Great Britain. My study focuses on the influences that inspired the works of these poets and, to a greater extent, how their legacy reflects and shapes the ideological landscape of the present-day Caribbean diaspora. 

As part of my project, I'm pursuing a certification called the Single Pitch Instructor (SPI) through the American Mountain Guides Association (AMGA). This is the only nationally recognized standard for professional climbing instruction in the U.S. This certification establishes rigorous, nationally recognized benchmarks for risk management, technical rope systems, emergency procedures, and best practices in outdoor climbing environments. 

My Tanner Fellowship supported a comparative research project examining how colonial histories are remembered, represented, contested, and sometimes obscured across public spaces and cultural institutions in France and Senegal. Supervised by Professor Éloïse Brezault, the project brought together decolonial and postcolonial theory with field-based research to consider how the legacies of French empire continue to shape contemporary narratives of national identity, belonging, and collective memory.

My name is Aria Lee '27, and I am a political science and history major at St Lawrence. 

Thanks to the gracious support of the Tanner Fellowship, I designed and conducted a mixed-methods study investigating an under-researched aspect of the modern criminal justice system: the sociopolitical impact of true crime media (TCM). As both a TCM consumer and a student of critical carceral studies, I noticed a striking gap in research regarding how the modern true crime phenomenon influences perceptions of criminal justice, including policing, sentencing, incarceration, and capital punishment. 

As part of my research fellowship, I worked with a research team on a qualitative study exploring the experiences of people living with HIV. We conducted interviews with approximately 30 participants and worked to transcribe their experiences for further analysis. Through these conversations, we gained insight into the challenges, experiences, and perspectives of people navigating life with HIV.

As part of my UFellow project, I travelled with my team to Accra, Ghana, conducting fieldwork in the Ga West, Tema, and Adenta districts. We explored how Ghana’s Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) program, a cash transfer initiative targeting vulnerable households, influences women’s access to maternal and child healthcare, food security, and decision-making power.

Description

My project explores how Ghana’s Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) cash transfer program influences maternal mental health. While LEAP is designed to reduce poverty, I sought to understand whether financial assistance also helps mothers manage stress, anxiety, and other emotional challenges during pregnancy and childbirth.

This summer I began developing my research project on Japan’s investment strategies in the context of its rapidly aging population. Through my coursework in finance and economics, I became interested in how this demographic shift is influencing investment behavior and, in turn, reshaping financial markets. Older investors often become more risk-averse, shifting away from equities toward insurance, annuities, and wealth management products. 

Over the summer, I had the opportunity to work with the Ministry of Gender, Children, and Social Protection on a research project examining the effects of a national cash transfer program on maternal and child health. The program provides beneficiaries with a bi-monthly cash payment, and our goal was to evaluate whether this support enabled mothers to provide adequately for their entire families, especially in terms of food, healthcare access, and the overall well-being of themselves and their children.

My research over the summer consisted of in person interviews and discussions with people who live in either New York City Housing Authority ("NYCHA") housing or Lottery housing to illustrate the significant disparity among the affordable housing system in New York City ("NYC"). I interviewed these two specific groups because I want to determine if there is a reason why there's specific demographics that inhabit each housing, since in theory both these types of housing should have similar demographics, simply because they're meant to aid people who are low income/in poverty.

This project, is guided by the following research questions “How do relevant heritage institutions and museums portray Dutch influence and power and what are the factors contributing to this portrayal”? The project spans across heritage institutions and museums in Curaçao, The Netherlands and Ghana.

This summer, thanks to the Tanner Fellowship Award Fund, I was able to travel back to Buenos Aires and carry out a series of interviews while attending relevant events in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. This is part of my Senior Year Experience, an honors thesis in Anthropology where I will use diverse anthropological and feminist research methods to delve deeper into the reality of being a non-binary individual in Buenos Aires.

This project aimed to bring the love of hockey as well as teach the importance of physical activity to secluded and underprivileged communities in the Philippines. The project focused specifically on Tigman Village, Palawan and was organized by the Sticks Together Non-Profit. Kristina and the other volunteers spent most of the weekdays teaching hockey and running games for the school children of various ages, who were all extremely excited to learn; they also helped create environmental awareness campaigns and taught at the school.

During my 10-day Tanner Fellowship trip to Mexico City, I explored museums, landmarks, and cultural sites to learn about Mexico's pre-colonial history while reconnecting with my roots as a Mexican-American who grew up in the United States. Having attended public schools in NYC, I noticed a significant gap in the curriculum regarding pre-colonial histories of the regions conquered by Spain, where Indigenous peoples and their histories were often erased, and Spanish "accomplishments" were glorified.

During the Summer 2024, I was able to gain greater insight about my home country, Croatia, thanks to the Tanner Fellowship scholarship and guidance of Dr. Jayman Jaynatha. I wanted to explore how the people's relationship with land changed in the last five decades through content analysis of "Gospodarski List", a biweekly agricultural magazine that has been published since 1855.

This summer, I had the honor of shadowing Dr. Isabel Llano and Dr. Alain Marty, Senior Research Scientists Emeritus, at the SAINTS-PERES Paris Institute for the Neurosciences. During my time there, I joined the Cerebellar Physiology team that aimed to unravel the role of the cerebellum in sensorimotor integration, from synaptic to systems levels. Specifically, the biophysics of synaptic transmission and how it is integrated by the cerebellar cortex microcircuit during sensorimotor integration in awake-behaving animals was the main focus of the study.

While last semester I spent a course learning how to design my own research project, this summer I started doing it. I spent 8 weeks living within a commune in rural Virginia and learned what it was like to live in an income-sharing community with 75 other members. While I spent some time in the garden, cooking community meals, and packing vegetable seed packets, I also spent time doing in-depth interviews, participatory observation, and ethnography.

With the funds I received from St. Lawrence this past summer, I was able to support myself as I completed an independent research project throughout the country of Jordan, while I resided in Amman. As a Multi-Language major, I have had the opportunity to learn some of the Arabic language at St.

"Neijuan (involution)" is a popular word in China today, and it is also a social phenomenon among the modern younger generation. The word "involution" was originally used in the field of anthropology, but now it has gradually become a frequently mentioned word in the daily life of Chinese society. In Chinese society, the younger generation is even called the "involution generation".

I was born and raised in the second most dangerous city in America, Detroit, Michigan. When you are from a city full of crime and poverty, hardships become endless. As a child growing up in these conditions your options are limited. You grow up to either engage in crime, spend your life in jail, continue the low income life you were born into, lose your life as a victim of crime, become a victim to crime by losing your life, or pursue other paths. Sometimes in places like Detroit, the other paths are what changes your life in many good ways that you don’t realize until you're older.

My project focused on examining the pre-existing manifestations of bias in the game development industry and as, a Black woman game developer increasing my skills in order to boost a socially aware counternarrative. It is essential for all people to see members of their community’s accurate and empathetic portrayals, especially within interactive media. During my project, I studied various aspects of game design including the use of 2d and 3d assets, in order to create three prototypes within Unity.

STEM majors are notoriously known for being difficult, but socioeconomic conditions generate barriers that make these even more challenging for marginalized populations, limiting access to the research community.  Personally, I didn’t realize how much I loved research until I completed a summer research assistantship at CU Boulder.  Without the luck of being in the right place at the right time, I would not have gotten that same opportunity and now, it is my mission to destigmatize research and make it more accessible to students like me.

In a course on-campus, I presented a project about the ways in which spatiality is designed to uglify behavior and/or bodyminds. In the course we studied “ugly laws,” which is a term that has “become the primary way to refer to [...] laws, which targeted the overlapping categories of the poor, the homeless, vagrants, and those with visible disabilities” (Schweik & Wilson 2015).