In this issue, we’re pleased to announce a PWR student who published an article pre-PWR and then continued her research in her PWR course, as well as three students who published versions of their PWR RBAs.
Amber Yang is a second-year student majoring in Physics and Philosophy and literature. On campus, she is a researcher in the Stanford Galaxy Formation & Cosmology Group, an associate editor for Stanford Politics, and an opinions columnist for The Stanford Daily. In Spring of 2018, Amber enrolled in Shannon Hervey’s PWR 1, The Rhetoric of Containment: Cold War Ideology Post 9/11, to continue her research that began in a piece she wrote for Stanford Politics, the circumstances of which are described below.
In Amber’s own words:
In January of 2018, The Stanford Review published an article titled “Antifa Thugs Find a Champion and Leader in Stanford Professor,” which targeted David Palumbo-Liu, the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of Comparative Literature and the Vice President of the American Comparative Literature Association, and made claims without evidence that he was “the leader of a [terrorist group chapter] … championing violent resistance.” The attack against Palumbo-Liu was only exacerbated when he became the subject of a nationally televised Fox & Friends news segment, which resulted in self-proclaimed conservatives threatening violence against him and his family. Most recently, Palumbo-Liu, along with hundreds of individuals in academia, was added to conservative organization Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist, which seeks to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom, echoing the McCarthy blacklists of the 1960s.
I am an Associate Editor for Stanford Politics, a campus news and political publication, and when The Stanford Review first published their article on Palumbo-Liu, I countered their article with Anti-Anti-Fascism: The [Character] “Assassination of Professor David Palumbo-Liu,”, which defended Palumbo-Liu’s external political group involvements and discussed the increase in professors being smeared by conservative groups. The extensive interviews I conducted with Palumbo-Liu and Provost Persis Drell made me intensely curious in the current discussion concerning academic freedom and the blacklisting of professors and academics associated with liberalism.
A few months after I wrote my article, I enrolled in PWR 1SN, The Rhetoric of Containment: Cold War Ideology Post 9/11, and the themes of containment and McCarthy blacklistings of professors reminded me of the situation involving Palumbo-Liu. So when the time came, I decided to write my RBA on the precedent that McCarthyism set for the current limitations in academic freedom. It’s so clear that the current debates around free speech in academia are not new but are instead a resurgence of containment ideologies stemming from a neoconservative backlash that very much mirrors the political landscape of Cold War America. It was really wonderful to be able to take research I was already passionate about before PWR 1 and continue that deep dive in a classroom setting.
Other PWR Students who Recently Published Their PWR RBAs
Pedro Gallardo from Jennifer Johnson’s PWR 2 course, “The Rhetoric of Language, Identity and Power,” published his PWR 2 research paper, “Fighting” Breast Cancer Rhetoric: The Role of the War Metaphor in Breast Cancer Patient Narrative” in Stanford Journal of Public Health. His paper takes a sociolinguistic, historical and feminist lens to understand the role of the war metaphor in breast cancer patient narrative. Pedro dedicates his undergraduate career to studying Mandarin and the Chinese healthcare system. In 2017, he worked at the Zhejiang Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention where he researched chronic disease interventions. "From rural Henan’s 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic to recent advancements in fetal cell transplantation in China", Pedro explains that “he analyzes public health at the nexus of political, historical, and sociocultural contexts." Pedro currently works as a Spanish interpreter and student manager at the Pacific Free Clinic in San Jose, run by Stanford's School of Medicine. See his article here: Gallardo, P. (2018). “Fighting” Breast Cancer Rhetoric: The Role of the War Metaphor in Breast Cancer Patient Narrative, Stanford Journal of Public Health, 7 (1), 51-56.
Avi Kaye from Jennifer Johnson’s PWR 1 course, “The Rhetoric of Language and Thought,” explored his academic interest in the effects of psychological and social conditions on individuals’ physiological therapeutic process in his PWR1 research paper, “How to Promote Healing “Beyond the Scalpel”: Creating A Doctor-Patient Communication Model,” published in the most recent issue of The Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal. As a pre-med student, Avi is pursuing an interdisciplinary approach to his Stanford education, which, he says," will help him address both the physical and humanistic aspects of healing as a physician." Avi dedicates his research to his brother who miraculously survived and recovered from a horrific motor vehicle accident in February of 2017. See his article here: Kaye, A. (2018). How to Promote Healing ‘Beyond the Scalpel’: Creating A Doctor-Patient Communication Model. The Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal, 17, 20-27.
Yash Pershad, a former student of Norah Fahim, publised a revision of his PWR RBA (in collaboration with others) in The Journal of Clinical Medicine, in a special issue on technology. See his full article, "Social Medicine: Twitter in Healthcare."
Lindsey Felt's former PWR student, Anima Shrestha, recently published her PWR1 paper, "Echo: The Romanticization of Mental Illness on Tumblr" in UCLA's Undergraduate Research Journal of Psychology.
Anima's paper looked closely at representations of mental illness in Netflix's series 13 Reasons Why and Tumblr, a social media platform. She argues social media users romanticize mental illness, an attitude that highlights a striking departure from popular portrayals of mental illness that criminalize individuals as murderers or villains. She claims Tumblr encourages micro-communities of like-minded followers that propagate echo chambers, which "can have broader consequences on neurotypicals, the mental illness community, and society as a whole."
