The Trail, 2024-02-02

https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/the_trail_2023-24/1004/thumbnail.jp

The Trail, 2024-03-01

https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/the_trail_2023-24/1005/thumbnail.jp

The Trail, 2024-03-29

https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/the_trail_2023-24/1006/thumbnail.jp

Becoming a Co-Conspirator: Strategies for Anti-Racism through Human Rights Education

This paper seeks to provide introductory knowledge and strategies for individuals who are new to the academic study of race, and to serve as a charge to move beyond simple allyship to become effective co-conspirators in the fight against racism. This is achieved through a literature review of race, anti-racism, human rights education, and then a concluding section detailing how to integrate human rights education into co-conspiratorship. Ultimately, this paper contends that human rights education provides the necessary academic background and the practical framework to help individuals move beyond performative allyship towards co-conspiratorship

Beyond the Pale: Pedagogical Strategies for Analyzing Race and Whiteness

The roots of American sociology of race and ethnicity run deep, but a focus on whiteness has matured in recent decades. This body of research is diverse: Whiteness is understood as simultaneously omnipresent, ubiquitous, rigid and flexible. Moreover, students enrolled in courses on race and ethnicity have difficulty grasping the conflicting and ambiguous character of whiteness that is exacerbated by their own misconceptions and ideological baggage they carry into the classroom. To empirically identify common student misconceptions, and to illuminate effective pedagogical interventions, I analyze two different sociology of race and ethnicity courses, offered twelve times over an eight-year span, at two different University institutions. Based on in- and out-of-classroom exercises and assignments completed by students in these classes (N = 406), I outline four patterned interpretative dilemmas and concomitant pedagogical interventions to aid students’ understanding of whiteness. Results indicate that these four intervention exercises found overall success amidst a variety of classroom sizes, disparately ranked public universities, different US regions, and amongst classroom contexts high in racial diversity to majority-white student course enrollment

Student Ethnographic Research Experiences at the University of Puget Sound

This brief essay describes programming at the University of Puget Sound that allows undergraduate students to pursue independent ethnographic research projects. This programming undergirds all three of the subsequent student essays included in this issue. The mission of this programming is to encourage “experiential learning”—an objective that is aligned (and perhaps derivative) of the methodological toolkit long deployed by anthropological ethnographers. The essay describes the pedagogic goals that I have been able to integrate into the supervision of this experiential programming, and also discusses how we have sought to balance independently-derived student research interests with the broader research agendas codified in the Ethnographic Survey of Rural Cascadia (ESRC). The essay seeks to make useful observations about how one might teach ethnography, and about how, via collaboration and in the context of teaching this research method, undergraduate ethnographic novices might usefully contribute to our collective scholarly understanding of the human condition

For an intercultural education aimed at social justice

This article attempts to critically analyze the current political situation in the world, highlighting the role that intercultural education for social justice can play. Over the last thirty years or so, political parties and movements around the globe have managed to impose their agenda on the public debate and contribute to an increase in racism, classism, sexism, nativism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, transphobia, anti-environmentalism, anti-indigeneity, as well as anti-intellectualism, irrationality, and belief in conspiracy theories in many countries. Intercultural Education for Social Justice opposes to these directions and fights against the ways schools contribute to maintain social inequities and unequal distribution of power. It also challenges injustice that “different” or “other” students experience in school and society and fights for the equality of all students not only in access to educational structures, but also in educational outcomes, with the ultimate goal of a better society

Understanding Neuron Dynamics With the FitzHugh-Nagumo Model

Nerve pulses are caused by flows of sodium and potassium through the membrane of a neuron axon. This phenomena can be modelled by the Hodgkin-Huxley model, but the equations of this model are quite difficult to solve. The Fitzhugh-Nagumo model is a simplification of the Hodgkin-Huxley model. In this paper, I provide a complete mathematical construction for a set of differential equations that govern the physics of neural activity. This system of equations is based on the 2D FitzHugh-Nagumo (FN) model