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Mary Ellen Curtin
No full textTaking the Truck OUT!: Recording Lesbian Activism in the AIDS Crisis: This project begins to take on the unique challenge of researching, preserving, interpreting, and presenting to the general public the history of lesbian women’s leadership and activism during the HIV/AIDS crisis in Washington DC. Today, treating HIV/AIDS patients is viewed primarily as a medical issue that can be solved by science. But during the 1980s and 90s, activists insisted that the HIV/AIDS epidemic represented a political crisis and a lack of moral leadership. Lesbian activists converged on Washington DC, and joined with local residents and emerging public health organizations, such as Whitman Walker, to fight for the rights of AIDS patients and gay and lesbian communities. Decades later, the work of these activists to stand up to censorship laws and public scorn to fight for the lives of AIDS patients and those vulnerable to infection has receded from view. Contemporary audiences remain largely unfamiliar with the AIDS crisis, ignorant of lesbian history, and unaware of the discrimination faced by LGBTQ activists. This project brings together scholars, public historians, and activists to collaborate on recuperating and documenting the history of lesbian activist organizations in DC
The Modern Media and Our Environmental Concerns
No full textIn Laudato Si, Pope Francis wrote, "the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all. The worldwide ecological movement has already made considerable progress and led to the establishment of numerous organizations committed to raising awareness of these challenges. Regrettably, many efforts to seek concrete solutions to the environmental crisis have proved ineffective, not only because of powerful opposition but also because of a more general lack of interest. Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation or blind confidence in technical solutions. We require a new and universal solidarity." In this 2015 encyclical, Pope Francis called for Catholics to engage with the environmental movement. But, there are some who still drag their feet on environmental issues and awareness. The purpose of this project is to examine how the media can be sometimes used and manipulated to make it harder for many people to make ethical decisions about the state of the environment. It can sometimes contribute to the nonchalance and indifference that Pope Francis wrote about. This project will focus on issues such as corporate greenwashing, the practice of deceptive marketing to make companies seem environmentally friendly, and will include a visual analysis of instances such as these. The different rhetorical devices being employed in many of these cases will be thoroughly explored, and a brief history of this practice will be included. While highlighting the more negative ways the media plays into our perception of climate change, the good will also be considered. There are several media outlets, documentaries, and projects that work for the care of the environment in an ethical and truthful way. It will be interesting to compare the ways that the media can be used for both positive and negative environmental commentary. Finally, it will conclude on how in the era of Laudato Si, catholics have a moral responsibility to make ethical decisions about the environment and to be educated on these issues. If the Earth is God's creation, we must protect it.This Research Day material is made accessible to the global community via the web
Malcolm X Park: Celebrating 50 Years, Image 6
No full textNancy Shia stands inside the Humanities Truck exhibit with friends
Current mood and emotion regulation ability influence biases for negative and positive stimuli
No full textInternal, personal characteristics and external, object characteristics influence attention, biasing it towards or away from certain stimuli. These attentional biases are invoked by presence of emotional information, and are influenced by personal characteristics. For example, individuals with major depression show increased bias toward negative information. Although studies of attention biases for emotional information have been conducted in healthy populations, it is likely these biases are influenced by an individual's current mood and/or ability to regulate emotions. The role of these individual differences in changing emotional attention biases has not been studied in a healthy population. Studies of attention biases in healthy populations have inconsistent findings. Inconsistencies may partially result from common use of average reaction time towards stimuli as the measure of attention bias, which ignores many important factors in participant's response. The diffusion model, a cutting-edge analysis that statistically accounts for more response-related factors, provides a more accurate measure of information processing. The diffusion model returns several parameters, including drift rate (information processing speed) and starting point (initial expectation of a certain stimulus type). Drift rate can be used to gauge attention bias. 150 participants (ages 18-30) completed a word-based emotional flanker task to measure effects of emotional stimuli on attention biases. Flanker tasks involve responding to a "target" stimulus while ignoring task-irrelevant stimuli that flank the target. Participants identified the emotional meaning of the center, target word as positive or negative while ignoring positive, negative, or neutral "flanker" words. Participants also completed questionnaires on mood and emotion regulation ability. Analyses examined effects of target emotion (positive or negative) and flanker emotion (positive, negative, or neutral) on diffusion parameters, and influences of individual differences on these relationships.Drift rates were higher for negative than positive target stimuli, indicating that, overall, subjects had more attentional bias towards negative stimuli. Drift rates were also higher for positive and neutral flanker trials than negative flanker trials, indicating that subjects had a greater attentional bias towards negative flanker stimuli (thus impairing drift rate in those trials) than positive and neutral flanker stimuli.Increased negative mood was associated with decreased overall drift rate, suggesting that higher negative moods were associated with lower attention overall. Increased emotion regulation ability and positive mood were marginally related to a smaller difference between negative and positive target drift rates: the better the emotion regulation ability and the higher the positive mood, the lower the attentional biases for negative over positive information. Positive mood was associated with starting point: higher positive mood was associated with greater expectation of positive target words.Findings suggest current mood and emotion regulation ability influence initial and attentional biases for emotional information. While positive mood increases initial bias towards positive responses, negative mood hurts attention overall. Additionally, increased emotion regulation ability and positive mood decrease attentional biases for negative information. This study helps elucidate how mood and emotion regulation ability affect attentional biases towards emotional information in healthy populations, and may contribute to research on altered attentional biases in mood-related psychiatric disorders.This Research Day material is made accessible to the global community via the web
Eye-tracking evidence that happy faces impair verbal message comprehension: the case of health warnings in irect-to-consumer pharmaceutical television commercials
No full textAuthor manuscript, published in final edited form as: Int J Advert. 2017 ; 36(1): 82–106.Risk warning or disclosure information in advertising is only effective in correcting consumers' judgments if enough cognitive capacity is available to process that information. Hence, comprehension of verbal warnings in TV commercials may suffer if accompanied by positive visual elements. This research addresses this concern about cross-modality interference in the context of direct-to-consumer (DTC) pharmaceutical commercials in the United States by experimentally testing whether positive facial expressions reduce consumers' understanding of the mandated health warning. A content analysis of a sample of DTC commercials reveals that positive facial expressions are more prevalent during the verbal warning act of the commercials than during the other acts. An eye-tracking experiment conducted with specially produced DTC commercials, which vary the valence of characters' facial expressions during the health warning, provides evidence that happy faces reduce objective comprehension of the warning
Shepherd Park: History and Community Image 15
No full textCommunity members check out the exhibit inside the Humanities Truck
The student conference: A model of authenic assessment
No full textPublished in: International Journal of Engineering Pedagogy, Vol 4, No 2 (2014), pp. 36-46.In the global marketplace, the ability to communicate, both orally and in writing, is a skillset demanded by employers. Unfortunately, typical academic exercises that involve written and oral communication are often just that academic exercises. To provide a more authentic and robust experience, a student conference activity has been developed for use in a second-level physics course entitled Physics for a New Millennium (PNM) at American University (AU). This activity involves writing a formal research paper using professional guidelines. In addition, students present their research paper during a class event modeled after an actual professional conference. A focus of this paper is to discuss the assessment strategies developed for the conference paper activity. A major goal of the assessment strategies designed for the conference paper and the associated presentation is to better capture (and then assess) what students are actually learning in the course. This paper will provide an overview of the student conference paper activity with emphasis on its value as an alternative assessment tool. To that end, a synopsis of how the conference paper activity has been designed will be shared. This synopsis will begin with a general discussion of assessment, assessment methods, and the language of assessment. Following this synopsis a model of non-traditional assessment using the student conference paper will be highlighted. Subsequently a description of the course curriculum and the specific structure for the writing activity will be outlined as they relate to the learning outcomes for the course. Shadowing the presentation of the course-specific learning outcomes, a description of the strategies used to uncover student learning will be shared. These strategies provide an opportunity for multiple assessment â??snapshotsâ? to be made throughout various phases of the learning process. To illustrate these snapshots, examples from actual student work will be presented and discussed. The assessment strategies developed for the student conference paper can be used as an alternative, or as a supplement, to more traditional pencil and paper examinations, quizzes, and homework assignments. Whether used as a stand-alone assessment tool or coupled with more traditional measures, the model presented here can provide an enhanced and more authentic way to capture what students are actually learning while the learning is taking place
2018 Fellows
No full textProjects conducted by the 2018 Humanities Truck Fellows. The 2018-2019 Truck Fellows Projects share a theme “Dwelling and Mobility.” The truck is mobile, yet it has the capacity to create dwellings in places such parks, streets, parking lots, and sidewalks as it parks and sets up its portable tent, chairs, and tables and people gather to watch films, create art, and sit down and engage in deep reflections about their personal experiences. The initial projects focus on communities of people where the tensions between dwelling and mobility are especially poignant, including people experiencing homeless, recent immigrants to the region, residents in neighborhoods undergoing or threatened by significant transitions and dislocations