EXCEPTIONAL RECOGNITION
Laurence Steinberg (Psychology) has received the 2022 James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS).
The APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award recognizes APS members for a lifetime of outstanding contributions to the area of applied psychological research. A leading authority on adolescence, Dr. Steinberg’s breadth of youth research includes developmental psychopathology; links between the brain and behavior; the impact of employment, puberty, and familial relationships; and juvenile crime and justice.
Dr. Steinberg joins fellow Psychology faculty and previously named awardees Lauren Alloy and Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek in receiving this honor.
Ryan Omizo, Assistant Professor, Department of English
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My research focuses on merging methods of rhetorical analysis with computational tools and workflows. I began my scholarly career in rhetoric interested in how forms of digital media could enhance writing instruction and how platforms such as YouTube generate new genres of identity performance. I immersed myself in digital media composing techniques such as website development, video editing, and 3D animation, aspiring to conduct analysis that incorporated theoretical and practitioner insights. Underlying this work, however, was a tension between traditional modes of rhetorical inquiry and digital production—a tension between writing about digital technologies and writing through digital technologies and a wish to get “closer to the metal” to borrow a phrase from critical code scholar, Annette Vee.
At the same time, the field of digital humanities was growing in prominence, inviting humanities scholars to consider the numeric dimensions of texts. My colleagues and I at Michigan State University’s (MSU) MATRIX: Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences and MSU’s Writing, Information, and Digital Experience (WIDE) research center began speculating on the potential of a computational rhetoric branch of digital humanities, asking, “What if robots could do rhetoric?” To answer this question, I have led build teams for web applications that conduct automated rhetorical such as the Faciloscope, which resulted from an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant (principal investigator, Jeff Grabill). Most recently, I have been developing computational rhetorical methods for the analysis of 70+ million, Covid-19-related Tweets. This project traces the circulation of anti-Asian propaganda on Twitter and how political entities exploit these seams of racism and xenophobia for anti-democratic ends. For more information, click here.
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FEATURED PUBLICATION
~Liz Gunderson (Psychology) and Lindsey Hildebrand
Decades of research have established that spatial skills correlate with numerical skills. However, because both spatial and numerical skills are multidimensional, we sought to determine how specific spatial skills relate to specific numeracy skills. We found unique patterns of relations between spatial skills and numeracy. The results indicate that there is specificity in the time-invariant relations between spatial skills and numeracy, and they suggest that researchers and educators should treat spatial skills and numeracy as multidimensional constructs with complex and unique interrelations.
During my 9 years at Temple, my research has focused on understanding the cognitive, social, and motivational foundations of mathematics learning. Cognitive skills, like the spatial and numerical skills we investigated in this article, are crucial, but are also only one piece of a broader perspective on children's development. These cognitive skills are influenced by children's home and school environments, and by the motivations, stereotypes, and anxieties that children, parents, and teachers bring to the table. Ultimately, my goal is to shed light on the interactions among these factors and to help set children onto positive trajectories in mathematics.
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AWARD OF THE MONTH
Dr. Kimberley Thomas, Assistant Professor of Geography and Urban Studies, has been awarded a Fulbright U.S. Scholar fellowship entitled, “Unsettling Deltas: Climate change, migration, and livelihoods in Vietnam.” The award will enable her to spend five months studying demographic change in the Mekong Delta.
Recent studies estimate that extreme environmental shocks may displace over 1 billion people globally by 2050. However, such alarming statistics obscure both the proximal and distal drivers of relocation. Determining whether people decide to move primarily for economic, family, or environmental reasons is a notoriously difficult task, making it nearly impossible to label someone as a “climate migrant.” Furthermore, while worldwide attention on climate change is necessary, focusing on present and future climate impacts can risk missing important historical and developmental factors that shape decisions to migrate. Concerns about massive climate displacement also often miss the fact that people have been on the move for millennia, while most relocations are temporary and occur within state borders. This Fulbright project will investigate recent patterns of large-scale outmigration from the Mekong Delta, a mega-delta with nearly 19 million inhabitants. This flat, riverine landscape is one of the most vulnerable places in the world to climate change. Accordingly, analysts increasingly interpret demographic changes in the Mekong Delta as a response to climate impacts such as sea-level rise, drought, and coastal erosion. This project critically evaluates such conclusions by situating recent patterns of outmigration within a broader historical and geographical context that considers land-use changes, upstream hydropower development, and water management infrastructure over a 20-year period. In so doing, it aims to recenter non-climatic contributors to displacement that are often sidelined in climate doomsday scenarios.
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