SAAB recipients give their stories

SAAB continues to grant grants to students who hope to take education across the United States and beyond

By LINDSAY MULCAHY

I RECEIVED A SAAB Research Grant to spend a week in Arizona visiting archives, libraries and museums in four different cities across the state. My research will be supporting my yearlong Honors History Thesis and my presentation at the Ray Warren Ethnic Studies Symposium this fall, which examines how U.S. popular and legal rhetoric sought to define national identity and categorize race in the context of imperialist ventures at the turn of the twentieth century. My trip to Arizona allowed me to access primary sources about an African American man named Charles Smith who served in the Spanish-American War and on the United States-Mexico border just before the Mexican Revolution, who then became a vocational teacher for American Indians at the Phoenix Indian School. The diverse and heterogeneous space Smith occupied provides me the opportunity to ask larger questions about how nationalism and racism manifest in “contact zones,” where different peoples and ideologies interact and are shaped by one another. The contrasting roles that Smith occupies as a soldier, educator, and African American man is a unique opportunity to look at how different forces of oppression interact and also conflict with each other.

By EILEEN MULLER AND MAIA SAMERJAN

WE APPLIED FOR A grant to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computer Science Conference in Houston, Texas. We applied to SAAB because we felt that this conference was extremely important to attend, not only for us as individuals, but for the larger Lewis & Clark community as well. We hope to bring back the experiences and knowledge of successful women in the industry in order to help support the women in computer science at LC and inspire more female students to take interest in computer science. Currently, there is a huge gap between the number of men and women who are in the computer science field. In 2013, an NPR report stated that out of all of the United States computer science programmers, only 20 percent were women. We are planning a spring colloquium for next semester to convey what we learned at the conference and that there is a large and growing community of support for women in computer science.