The Berkeley Center for New Media is pleased to announce four undergraduate research fellowships are open for application for spring 2025! Selected students will have the opportunity to work closely with new media graduate students on dissertation-level research. Each fellowship comes with a stipend of $1,000.
If you are interested in multiple projects, please submit separate applications for each project.
Applications are now closed. Applications will next be due March 1, 2025. Apply here! [link no longer available]
Projects for Undergraduate Research Assistance Spring 2024
Decentering Humans through Interactive Experience Design
The anthropocentric worldview, which regards humans as separate from and superior to nature while treating other environmental entities (animals, plants, water bodies, minerals, etc.) as resources for human exploitation, has significantly contributed to environmental degradation. Unlike traditional human-centered design that focuses solely on human well-being, how might we create embodied interactive experiences that encourage people to temporarily decenter from their human perspective, recognize the more-than-human world, understand the subjectivity and intrinsic value of nonhumans, and further foster a shift from an anthropocentric way of thinking towards a pluralistic one? An example of my previous project can be found below, and I am looking to design more interactive experiences like this.
Being The Creek Mobile Augmented Reality Experience: https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/news/2023/human-computer-interaction-research-de-centers-humans-give-nature-voice
I’m looking for undergraduate researcher assistants interested in exploring one or more of the following areas:
- Human-computer interaction in natural environments
- Knowledge of environmental nonhumans (e.g., animals, plants, water bodies, minerals), their unique life forms, and cohabitation with humans.
- Theories of decentering (e.g., Indigenous ecological knowledge, feminist technoscience, posthumanism, Actor-Network Theory, etc) to be transformed into design practice.
- Critical or speculative design theories and practices to explore “wicked problems.”
- Embodied cognition theories and informal learning design.
Archive of Olfactory Narratives in Cinema
Help organize, design, structure, and analyze an archive on olfaction. This project documents the evocative power of olfactory narratives in cinematography. Almost every movie mentions smells, stinks, or fragrances, often laden with assumptions, binaries, and generalizations. The films surveyed are a random selection of genres: drama, comedy, romance, thriller, action, horror, history, fantasy, sci-fi, documentary, and crime. They are summing up the era clusters in which the events of the films take place: present-day, the 90s, the 60s-80s, and the 19th century. The dominant locations where the events occur in the film are the USA, England, France, China, and Korea.
Tasks will include: help with design (moving the archive to another web platform), structure (managing a spreadsheet with quotes), and analyses (would be useful to brainstorm ways of conducting data and text analyses, potentially involving AI if undergrads are familiar with AI technologies).
Bottomlands: Mapping Black Cemeteries in the Mid-South
In the Lower Mississippi River Basin, a place colloquially known as ‘The Delta,’ enslaved, bonded, and working class Black Laborers have, alongside the River, been central forces in shaping/holding stable/making possible the past and contemporary landscape. Today, in light of of new plans for economic restructuring arriving after decades of regional depression, waves of forced migration, and structural forms of erosion, often only traces of these rich Black Agrarian life worlds remain. The aim of this project is to address pending erasures of place, memory and sites of meaning by archiving and eventually constructing a public database of traces, scattered across material, mnemonic, and digital archives. The broader project draws on themes of Black Geographies, New Media, Human-Environmental Geographies, and Geo-Spatial Methods. This project specifically concerns the digital mapping of historic yet neglected Black cemeteries in the region, which will serve as the groundwork for a central chapter of the broader dissertation project and set the stage for advocacy and further study and analysis of emerging social-spatial patterns in the region at present.
This project seeks assistance from an undergraduate researcher in scraping/organizing multiple formats of spatial information (including but not exclusive to processing/decoding scanned documents, cross-referencing place names and qualitative data, and digitally sleuthing through historic maps, written descriptions and ariel/archival imagery to assist in mapping un-referenced cemeteries and locations. Assisting to translate this information into geo-referenced waypoints, shape-files, and a singular geo-spatial database. The research assistant will work and meet remotely to help process data and documents collected in the field earlier and help produce a list of locations that need further ground-truthing in person. Assistants will also work with digital demographic data, census information, and ancestry web platforms to further cross reference information. The ideal assistant will be detail oriented, familiar with google earth, maps, excel, ancestry databases, OCR technology, basic file and data management, and preferred but not required experience with Arc-GIS and webpage development.
Sonic Blackness: Hip-Hop Poetics
I am currently writing a dissertation, Sonic Blackness: Hip-Hop Poetics, which attempts to bridge the study of Black rappers and poets through sound studies. Ultimately, this project seeks to think about the metaphysics of Black sound as they are sounded out in both poetry and Hip-Hop. I argue that humanities based scholarship tends towards a trajectory that focuses on meaning as defined by western modernity and white supremacy. I suggest that a humanistic approach to hip-hop and poetry has rendered much of the work within these forms moot and incable of complexity because these frameworks rely on logics that are logocentric and antiblack. I think about sound on and off the pages of Black poetics and the performance of sound within Hip-Hop, not just close reading of lyrics as texts, to attune frameworks capable of engaging Black sound as it exists-- at the boundaries of language, sound, and reason.
I seek a undergraduate researcher to help with copy-editing and minor research activity towards the creation of things such as literature reviews and abstracts for conference papers. This researcher will be able to practice accessing archives, compiling readings, and how to synchronise information for multiple sources and mediums. Copy-editing would be focused on ensuring chapters have the proper citations, bibliographies, and style to assist with the filing process (which I will complete in spring 2025).
Previous Undergraduate Research Fellows and Projects
2025 funded candidates and projects are here!
2024 funded candidates and projects here and here!
2023 funded candidates and projects here and here!
2022 funded candidates and projects here and here!
2021 funded candidates and projects here!
2020 funded candidates and projects here!
2019 funded candidates and projects here!
2018 funded candidates and projects here!
2017 funded candidates and projects here!