and art history, for instance, an art history major is required to take a yearlong senior seminar that will produce not only a research paper of 25 pages or more, but also present an oral presentation of their findings. A studio art major, meanwhile, is required to produce an exhibit of their own art accompanied by a written artist’s statement. “Each department defines what that level of mastery is and what the organization of that mastery will be,” Lyford says. “Departments increasingly see student research as being central to their comprehensive experience, and part of doing that is communicating that research to people outside of yourself.”
TOBY ELLENTUCK ’17
FANTASTICAL HOMES & DEREGULATORY REALITIES
Inspired by an Oxy class called Sustainable Justice, the media arts and culture major from New York City studied how reality TV shows like “House Hunters” and “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” contributed to the subprime mortgage and housing crisis—and how the demise of the Sears Catalog’s “Modern Home” kits (sold from 1908 until 1940) dovetailed with the Great Depression.
It’s not uncommon for students’ work to find an audience outside Oxy. Benjamin Weiss ’16, who is studying for a Ph.D. in sociology at USC, received distinction for his comp, “Patterns of Interaction in Webcam Sex Work: A Comparative Analysis of Female and Male Broadcasters.” A reworked draft will be published in the journal Deviant Behavior. Mackenzie Israel-Trummel ’09’s comp turned into “The Double-Edged Sword of Disaster Volunteerism: A Study of New Orleans Rebirth Movement Participants,” copublished with associate professor of politics Caroline Heldman in the Journal of Political Science Education in 2012. Heldman also shepherded Rebecca Cooper ’13’s comp into ART AS POWER IN AN “Hidden Corporate Profits in the U.S. Prison INDIGENOUS CONTEXT System: The Unorthodox Policy-Making of the American Legislative Exchange Council,” which was published in Contemporary Justice Review. listened to more than 30 hours of oral testimonies from Geology major Robert Bogue ’17 of Eagle Rock pre- the USC Shoah Foundation, and read different literary sented his senior comps project (on high carbon dioxide testimonies as part of her secondary research. flux rates at Mammoth Mountain) at the American Geo“Comps are a really cool opportunity here at Oxy,” physical Union’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco last De- she wrote in a blog for the Oxy admission website.” They cember, winning the Outstanding Student Paper Award. teach you academic independence, research skills, and Subsequently, Bogue spent a week in Costa Rica in the ability to be a scholar in your field.” March as a part of a NASA/JPL team to investigate the This spring, Denzel Tongue ’17, a sociology major and role of carbon dioxide, vegetation, and climate change. public health minor from Oakland, did a content analysis Four years ago, Raffy Cortina ’13, an art history and of New York Times articles from the 1980s—at the height the visual arts major from the Bronx, N.Y., won a Student of the “war on drugs”—to better understand how the Academy Award from the Academy of Motion Pictures media framed drug users during the crack epidemic. Arts & Sciences for his 13-minute short Bottled Up— “My initial hypothesis was that the coverage was which premiered at Oxy that spring as part at the Senior going to be more lenient than the crack epidemic, which Comprehensives Film Festival. basically turned out to be true,” says Tongue, a first-generation college student who is now working as a health For her senior comp in history, Aviva Alvarez-Zakson policy fellow with the Greenlining Institute in Oakland. ’15 studied the experiences of young women in ThereAs demanding as Tongue found comps to be, “Because sienstadt, the WWII concentration camp in German- I really cared about my project, it was cool to go through occupied Czechoslovakia, and how the circumstances the process,” he declares. “It was a culmination of everyof their imprisonment impacted their development. She thing I had been learning over the years.”
MIRIAM HAMBURGER ’17 The religious studies major from Belmont, Mass., explored how “Native American art and its subsequent marginalization reveals discrimination within the Western art world and how art is a political tool in challenging such an oppressive framework.” The music and images of the DJ collective A Tribe Called Red, shown above, can be looked to as a guide for “art as activism,” Hamburger writes.
SUMMER 2017 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE 23