Topic: Research
Professor of Chinese Dede earns two research fellowships from Fulbright
Keith Dede, associate professor of Chinese:
Dede received a research award from the Traditional Fulbright Scholar Program, which is supported by the U.S. Department of State and administered by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES). In addition, Dede received an institutional award from the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad (FRA) program. This latter program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and provides fellowships for faculty members to conduct research overseas in the fields of modern language and area studies for three to 12 months. The terms of the awards stipulate that Dede cannot accept both fellowships, so he is in the enviable position of having to decide between the two.
Dede’s research project is titled “Contact and Change in the Chinese Dialects of Qinghai.” Four months in China will allow Dede to gather naturalistic speech samples from native speakers of Qinghai Chinese dialects, train local researchers in language-gathering and documentation techniques, and work with local scholars on the social history of northeastern Qinghai to further elucidate the historical language-contact scenario and subsequent evolution that created the mixed language phenomenon there today. Generally, this will allow for the testing of theories of language evolution.
Professor publishes article on multi-lingual learners
Ruth Shagoury, Mary Stuart Rogers professor of education:
Shagoury published an article titled “Language to Language: Nurturing Writing Development in Multilingual Classrooms” in the March 2009 issue of Young Children. In the article, Shagoury recounts her time spent in a multilingual kindergarten classroom in which six or more languages were spoken by the children. She provides examples of the process young dual-language learners engage when learning written languages in both first and second languages. “When the two written language systems that children are learning are very different, children still draw on their knowledge of their home language as well as their growing understanding of English, testing out hypotheses just as they do in their oral language,” Shagoury said.
Young Children is the journal for the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). The theme for the March issue was “Supporting All Kinds of Learners.” In the introduction to the issue, the editor states: “All the articles in this cluster are about getting to know individual children and then planning a curriculum and teaching strategies that will support every child’s development and learning.”
Professor, alum earn top honor for collaborative research
Political science professor Todd Lochner and Rhett Tatum ‘06, along with fellow researcher and political scientist Dorie Apollonio, were recognized by the editorial board of Regulation & Governance for their joint article, Wheat from Chaff: Third Party Monitoring and FEC Enforcement Actions.
Regulation & Governance, a journal devoted to the study of regulation and governance by political scientists, lawyers, historians, anthropologists, and economists, named Wheat from Chaff the best article published in the 2007-2008 volumes of the journal.
In their article, Lochner, Apollonio, and Tatum test the widely held expectation that regulators can more effectively target serious violations when they have a broader array of sanctioning options in their enforcement arsenal. To test this theoretical expectation, Lochner, Apollonio, and Tatum analyze enforcement actions at the U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) during the period when the FEC received an expansion in its sanctioning options. What they find runs counter to expectations: the FEC was not better able to focus on the most serious violations after receiving a broader array of sanctions. Lochner, Apollonio, and Tatum suggest that simply expanding sanctioning options, without also expanding monitoring resources, is not sufficient to enable regulators to prioritize their enforcement efforts toward the most serious problems.
Todd Lochner teaches undergraduate courses in constitutional law, civil liberties, and political science. He also teaches a joint undergraduate-law school course on election law at Lewis & Clark Law School, where he is a research fellow. Rhett Tatum is currently a student at the Georgetown University Law Center where he is studying election law.
Professor Proctor’s ‘ecopocalypse’ research featured in USA Today column
Jim Proctor, professor and chair of environmental studies, is featured in a USA Today column on environmentalist Americans’ fear of ecological collapse and the problems with end-times fixations. Religion and public life columnist Tom Krattenmaker questions the effectiveness of this dystopia concept and other fear-based strategies designed to motivate people to behave in a certain manner.
Proctor and a research team have been talking with Oregonians and surveying the general population about their experiences with nature and pursuit of perfecting the co-existence between humans and the environment.
“‘You find that people working for a utopian future have tremendous fear about things turning out differently,’” Proctor explains in the column. ‘Utopias are often framed against a dystopian nightmare,’ he adds, producing a kind of all-or-nothing fixation on perfection and its perfect opposite.”
Proctor’s project was also the focus of a recent article in The Oregonian, detailing the survey and citing some of its initial results.
USA Today ‘The End’ as a weapon
The Oregonian Shaping dreams—and nightmares—about natural world
Alum earns Vichrow Award for anthropological research
Selena Jorgensen ‘08 has been awarded the Rudolph Virchow Award for best undergraduate paper, given annually by the Society for Medical Anthropology. The award recognizes works that are deemed to reflect, extend or advance critical perspectives in medical anthropology. Jorgensen, a sociology/anthropology major, is now studying at Harvard Medical School.
In her senior thesis, The Little Clinic that Could: Neoliberalism, Structural Violence, and Community Resistance in Portland, Oregon, Jorgensen details the socio-economic effects of a local health clinic struggling to serve the uninsured. She writes:
“Unable to obtain sustainable funding, the clinic is in danger of being absorbed into the very system its directors had previously resisted. It must adopt bureaucratic policies to qualify for federal funding, which concomitantly entails accepting notions about patient prioritization that prevent the most vulnerable community members from accessing health care. Following the transition of this community clinic into a public entity reveals how the guidelines under which federal clinics function are in opposition to the purpose for which they are created and funded. If these federally funded clinics are unable to provide quality care for the uninsured, then what are they structured to do? How do these federal clinics represent political agendas and long‐standing historical processes which continue to reproduce inequality and enforce normalized standards upon vulnerable patient populations?”
Autumn’s gecko research extends its global reach
Kellar Autumn, associate professor of biology:
With coverage this month in Scientific American and New Scientist, as well as several international newspapers, Autumn’s research has extended its global reach. On Saturday, October 25, Autumn will be featured on an episode of Weird Connections on The Science Channel.
Autumn’s research has already crisscrossed the globe, appearing on five continents in hundreds of newspapers, journals, books, television programs, and Internet articles. Recently, Autumn’s research has been used as a stepping stone in the invention of a strong and sticky adhesive similar to a gecko’s feet, discovered by researchers at U.C. Berkeley. Explore this interactive map of some major media placements from recent years to discover the international impact of Autumn’s work.
Lochner and Scalettar publish work on neuromodulators
Dr. Robert B. Pamplin, Jr., Professor of Science and Biochemistry Janis Lochner and Professor of Physics Bethe Scalettar:
Lochner and Scalettar coauthored a study on the postsynaptic colocalization of neuromodulatory proteins with five undergraduate students (Conor Jacobs ‘09, Mariya Chavarha ‘08, Kevin McAllister ‘08, Erika Spangler ‘07, Linnaea Schuttner ‘06) that was featured on the cover of the September issue of Developmental Neurobiology. Titled “Efficient Copackaging and Cotransport Yields Postsynaptic Colocalization of Neuromodulators Associated with Synaptic Plasticity,” their collaborative work shows how the proteins studied are known to enhance synaptic communication in the hippocampus. This research was supported by grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health and by the Rogers Summer Research Program.
Developmental Neurobiology publishes research primarily on development and plasticity in the nervous system, with an emphasis on experimental work.
Read more about Lochner and Scalettar’s collaborative research in The Chronicle.
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