How should we understand New York City’s treatment of people experiencing houselessness? 

Thank you to my professor Fields Harrington and my friends for making this project possible.

How was sexual and gender identity structured and articulated in 19th century New York City?

This was originally created for the Return of the Queer Page class taught by Miller Oberman.

I would like to thank Miller Oberman, my mother, and my friend Violet Nichols for their support.

Is policing reform through social work plausible or ethical?

Lang Social Science Fellowship

Special thanks: my mother, my friends, my mentors, my privilege, and my trauma.

Why the MTA isn’t treated like the public utility it is - And how to change that.

This project was originally created in Andrea Marpillero-Colomina’s class, City in Motion: Transportation (UURB 3301). 

Thank you to Professors Miller Oberman and Andrea Marpillero-Colomina, and everyone who has listened to me talk unendingly about public transit.

How does the increased use of algorithms in policing impact social equality in the community?

Thank you to my family for supporting me and my education, and thank you to my professors for helping me consistently feel inspired!

A Look at the Data from NYPD’s Stop & Frisk Program 

This interactive data project investigates the violence embedded in systems of policing and the injustice executed by agents of justice in the contemporary urban society of New York City.

Nancy Wei will share analysis from a currently ongoing project that reports a journalistic piece through a video game format. Nancy asks whether it is possible to present a news story as a game, and in doing so asks how the field of journalism may grapple with new technologies going forward. It is a slightly broader version of this question that cuts across all these talks, to ask how we as humans, and our technologies are always in a co-constitutive process of mutual shaping and formation.

What does it mean to have and be a body? How can we define a body without relying on archetypes set by biology and science?

This project began as a final essay for Professor Deborah Levitt’s Science/Fiction: Technoculture, Embodiment, and Power class from the Fall of 2021. 

Thank you to Professor Levitt for your guidance throughout this project and for creating an amazing Sci/Fi class, and to my dear Island Time friends for keeping me afloat.

Why have California’s fire seasons become increasingly unpredictable and detrimental? What responsibilities do the government and individuals bear in prevention efforts?

My project, “Burning Too Close to Home: California’s War on Wildfires,” began as a final presentation for Professor Sarah Slobin’s Visualizing Data class from the Fall of 2021. 

Thank you to Sarah Slobin for your kind encouragement throughout this project, and to my dear friends & family who continuously show me that “home” is more than just a physical location.

Are law, custom, and tradition contradictory to human nature or integral to it?

I seek to put current debates in philosophy between constructivism and essentialism in dialogue with a debate in ancient Greek ethics between nomos and physis, explicitly drawing on the relationship between the ethical thought of Protagoras and Hegel.

This presentation stems from ideas discussed in Prof. Cinzia Arruzza’s class “Plato and the Sophists”.

Thank you to Cinzia Arruzza for your continual insight and support throughout this project, and to Noa, whose love is what makes philosophy possible for me.

How can we bridge the gap between two valid forms of medicine - Western psychotherapy and Traditional Chinese Medicine - and why should we? How can we restructure the approach to mental health to be able to provide the most effective form of therapeutic treatment?

WTEII: The Problem of the Body by Helen Rubinstein- this project was my final for their class.

Thank you to Helen Rubinstein for your unconditional support and encouragement for this project. It would not be where it is today without your assistance and guidance.

How can we rethink and mend social patterns through a material dimension? 

Nancy Wei will share analysis from a currently ongoing project that reports a journalistic piece through a video game format. Nancy asks whether it is possible to present a news story as a game, and in doing so asks how the field of journalism may grapple with new technologies going forward. It is a slightly broader version of this question that cuts across all these talks, to ask how we as humans, and our technologies are always in a co-constitutive process of mutual shaping and formation.

How could one of the largest military bases in the Pacific (Pearl Harbor) also be home to Hawai‘i’s most popular tourist destination? This project examines the mutually beneficial relationship between the U.S. Military and the tourism industry in Hawai‘i, and how their ability to thrive is based upon narratives that remove and replace Native Hawaiian sovereignty with U.S. patriotism and security. 

Part of Global Economies (Fall 2021).

Thank you to Professor Laura Liu. Thank you to my mother for always supporting me. Mahalo nui loa no ka lāhui Hawai‘i.

Le Mie Voci is a collection of essays that deals with the topic of language and translation. As a native Italian speaker and bilingual writer, I am interested in what language  offers, what is lost in its absence, and what is added or removed when a language is substituted with another one. 

Part of my writing courses at Lang, from Writing The Essay to the Capstone (2020-2023)

Thank you to all my Writing Professors at Lang for supporting this project from the very beginning.

This project focuses on discourses of normalcy/abnormalcy and how they determine fear when Russian queer people seek asylum in the United States. I focus on the connections between law and culture in both countries, the fixed identities attributed to the queer body, and the resulting fear of these attributions. 

Part of Immigration and the Politics of Fear (Spring 2022).

Thank you to Valentina Ramia for all of your guidance, and thank you to my parents for all their support. My deepest gratitude goes to Dr. Cubas, who ignited my passion and believed in me.

KAKI TANGAN (or ACCOMPLICE) is a short essay film that explores the distorted histories surrounding the event known as the Indonesian communist purge (1965-66). By chronicling discrepancies in individual recollections of the massacre, through interviews with my parents and mixed-media archives, this film marks the beginning of a personal interrogation of contemporary Indonesian history. 

Part of Consciousness & Crisis: Cinema in Times of Radical Change (Spring 2022).

Thank you to Suneil Sanzgiri for your instruction, and thank you to Ibu and Abaji for lending your voice to the film.

My project is a critique of the “American Dream” and the lasting effects of tremendous intergenerational and societal pressure to achieve capitalist success. I want to leave you with doubts concerning a neoliberal society that applauds foreigners for performing exploitative labor and facing uncertain legal status in a new country.

Acknowledgments:  I would like to express a special thank you to my family and ancestors who have supported me throughout this entire process of healing and processing. Me gustaría expresar un agradecimiento especial a mi familia y a mis antepasados que me han apoyado durante todo este proceso de curación y procesamiento.

What is the categorical status of loneliness as it exists within twenty-first century quarantine? 

My assertion is that loneliness within quarantine is a new type within the taxonomy of loneliness. Due to facets of digital communication and the collective experience of the pandemic, our current loneliness is  a new one. 

Thank you to Professor Helen Rubinstein in the First-Year Writing Program, along with everyone in  Writing the Essay 3 during Spring 2021.

Nancy Wei will share analysis from a currently ongoing project that reports a journalistic piece through a video game format. Nancy asks whether it is possible to present a news story as a game, and in doing so asks how the field of journalism may grapple with new technologies going forward. It is a slightly broader version of this question that cuts across all these talks, to ask how we as humans, and our technologies are always in a co-constitutive process of mutual shaping and formation.

How can we use theory to help us identify real-world cultural phenomena and how structural violence is created? 

Lee Brando & Amol Patel - Thank you both for supporting and inspiring me to do this work!

In the face of rising food inequality driven by volatile financial markets, unequal development, and lags in global supply chains, how can food sovereignty serve as a foundational stepping stone towards an alternative, democratic food system?

The point of this presentation is to consider why it is so necessary to consider the role food sovereignty plays in our future and examine ways to dismantle our reliance on the capital marketplaces through expanding food autonomy in our immediate areas. My goal with this project is to re-define self-sufficiency and collectivity using local food production and distribution systems.

Thank you to Debasmita, Prof. Ying Chen & Clara Mattei for their encouragement and suggestions, my friends in the Lang and NSSR community who earnestly listened and gave me insightful feedback. 

What are the economic circumstances that lead to disproportionately high rates of military enlistment for American Samoans?

Course: UGLB 2110: [Dis]Order and [In]Justice 

Thank you to Professor Corinna Mullin for helping me develop this research and to my beautiful family for inspiring me.  

How do multiracial Asian Americans (MRAAs) create identity, community, and belonging?

Special thanks to Anna Musser and Cynthia Meyersburg, for believing in and encouraging my academic potential as a student and researcher. Dedicated with love to the multiracial Asian American community.

Oftentimes, academia is considered to be the gold standard of objectivity, with published works influencing the perception and understanding of what is culture (and therefore uncultured) of the world of published articles and global society at large. Through dissecting how the culture and people of Somalia are portrayed from early anthropology till now, we can connect modern misconceptions and stereotypes that condition cultural anthropology to narrativize Somalis in a colonial framework as well as highlight Somali anthropologists and artists actively taking part in the narration of our own history.

Thank yous to the Somali community both diasporic and at homeland

Nancy Wei will share analysis from a currently ongoing project that reports a journalistic piece through a video game format. Nancy asks whether it is possible to present a news story as a game, and in doing so asks how the field of journalism may grapple with new technologies going forward. It is a slightly broader version of this question that cuts across all these talks, to ask how we as humans, and our technologies are always in a co-constitutive process of mutual shaping and formation.