Every year CURAH awards travel grants to deserving undergraduates. This year we congratulate our two award winners, Tori Dehlin (Utah State University, majoring in Global Communication and Spanish) and Madeline Hass (U of Wisconsin Oshkosh, majoring in philosophy). Tori and Madeline presented their original research at this year’s National Conference on Undergraduate Research at Kennesaw State University.

Tori Dehlin

Paper title: “#MeToo/#YoTambien: A Comparative Analysis of Sexual Harassment Discourse on Twitter.”

Dehlin examines public discourse around sexual harassment and abuse in the twittersphere. She looked at tweets in English and Spanish to construct her comparative analysis and emphasized the value and impact of #MeToo/#YoTambien on different communities of participants and users of the hashtag. As Dehlin explained, this paper is the beginning of an ongoing study that will explore the impacts of social media in creating narratives of shared experience, as well as examine how discourses such as #MeToo/#YoTambien change over time.

Madeline Hass

Paper title: “How Art Helps Us Understand: A Neo-Cognitivist Theory of the Value of Art”

Hass builds on work done by Gordon Graham. She constructs a philosophical argument about how art is able to transcend standard statements of value, advocating for a level of understanding that takes us beyond human experience and sensory perception. The audience embraced Hass’s argument with enthusiastic engagement. Speaking about her experience, Hass said, “NCUR has had an incredible impact on my undergraduate experience. It has given me the opportunity to present my work to other young academics and to improve my skills as a speaker. Most significantly, it has helped me to see that academia can be accessible, and that there is a place for people like me in academia.” Hass hopes to attend graduate school to continue her studies in the field of philosophy.