Blum Initiative on Global & Regional Poverty
2015-16 Recipients of the Collaborative Research Grant
Amy Allen
PhD Student | Sociology
Amy Allen is a Ph.D. student in School Psychology at the University of California Riverside Graduate School of Education. Her areas of research include early literacy skill development, and non-cognitive traits related to academic achievement and motivation. She graduated from the University of San Francisco with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in Legal Studies. After completing her undergraduate studies, Amy attended the University of Southern California where she obtained a Masters degree in Marriage and Family Therapy with a dual emphasis in School Counseling. She worked extensively in the greater Los Angeles area as a children’s therapist, working in neighborhoods historically entrenched in poverty and persistent community trauma. These experiences have served as the impetus for her research on addressing the impending unique needs of culturally diverse children and families from economically disparate regions.
The objective of this research is to address critical issues of economic hardship and cultural disparity that are pertinent to the Blum Initiative for Global and Regional Poverty. This study is primarily focused on linking the current growing body of research on non-cognitive areas of academic motivation and perseverance with the issues of academic underachievement among Southeast Asian children, examining whether these modifiable characteristics could be a potential protective factor from the adverse effects of poverty (e.g., poor academic outcomes, gang involvement) for these youth. Because academic achievement is typically the result of a collaboration of the child and the family, the amount of perseverance and the mental mindset that a child and the family adopts can have a significant impact on the child’s academic success. The study will be a psychological intervention that will attempt to change a child and parent’s implicit theory of intelligence (e.g., fixed or growth mindset). This study will essentially replicate the work of Dweck and colleagues in the area of Mindset interventions in relation to academic success, but this intervention will be home-based rather than classroom-based, focusing on the parent and child rather than the teacher and student. Based on previous research, this study should find that implicit theories can increase academic resilience among struggling Southeast Asian youth, ultimately having a positive effect in their level of innate motivation and resilience to persevere in school and decrease the current high rates of failure and dropping out of school.
Michaela Curran
PhD Student | Sociology
Michaela received her M.A. in Sociology from UC Riverside in 2013 and her B.A. in Sociology from the University of Central Arkansas in 2005. Her primary research interests include income inequality, economic development, and population health. Her dissertation is a cross-national, quantitative study of how income inequality impacts health across different levels of economic development, at the country-level and the individual-level. Her other research is focused on foreign aid allocation and efficacy, how social networks impact health outcomes, and the association between social disorganization, self-empowerment, and health. She employs quantitative methods in her research.
The Blum Initiative Grant will support Michaela’s doctoral dissertation research, which explores how the effect of income inequality on population health varies by development. Specifically, it considers how political institutions and the health infrastructure of developed countries may provide a protective effect against the negative impacts of income inequality on population health that is not available in less developed countries. It investigates how the contextual effects of development and personal resources interact to structure the impact of these pathways on an individual’s health as well.
Ron Kwon
PhD Student | Sociology
Ronald Kwon is a fifth year graduate student in sociology at UCR. His dissertation focuses on multiculturalist policies and their impact on intra-group immigrant attitudes and behaviors in terms of gender and homosexuality.
The Blum Initiative helps create opportunities for undergraduate students to engage with graduate students and faculty on joint research projects. Currently, we are examining whether linguistic multicultural policies impact residential outcomes of Asian and Hispanic or Latino immigrants in the United States using Census data. The project is at the forefront of contemporary academic debates in an age of greater immigration, and addresses how policy interacts with residential segregation, which has historically been one of the key linchpins of social control over immigrants, as well as one of the strongest predictors of concentrated poverty by way of propinquity to employment, education, health care and exposure to crime. Given the polarizing debates over multiculturalism and immigration, we seek engage prevailing policy discourses with greatly needed empirical evidence.
Carolyn Schutten
PhD Student | History
Carolyn Schutten is a Ph.D. candidate in Public History at the University of California, Riverside, and she has a master's degree in Urban and Regional Planning with an emphasis in environmental planning from Cal Poly Pomona.
Schutten's dissertation, “Flow and Obstruction: Tijuana River and Environmental Activism at the U.S.¬-Mexico Border in the 1970s¬-2010s," is a story of environmental activism in the San Diego¬-Tijuana border area; it explores networks of power around the shaping, management, and uses of the Tijuana River amidst shifting environmental, economic, and immigration policies. Schutten's research asks what the relationship is between environmentalism and international, national, and local policies at the U.S.¬-Mexico border, and it will reveal how economic status prompts very different modes of environmental activism, which has shaped the ecology of the Tijuana River. Schutten studies the degree to which American environmentalism has been closely linked with middle class values of leisure and aesthetics as well as the extent to which environmentalism in Mexico has been geared toward social and environmental justice. With this dissertation, Schutten seeks to contribute significantly to the current body of scholarship in environmental history along the United States¬-Mexico border and views this research as critical context for remediating the pollution and sanitation issues associated with poverty at the Tijuana River.