Pressure from encroaching modernization is threatening traditional patterns of migration and collaboration in Inner Mongolia.
Tag » Social Science
February 2, 2013
A Place of Belonging
Once a child immigrant, Susana Rivera-Mills’ past became her future
It was tragic enough that Susana Rivera-Mills’ girlhood was visited by war. It was frightening enough to flee her hometown of San Salvador on a dark night bundled in the backseat of the family Fiat with her little brother Fabio. And yet, as improbable as it seems, the hardest part was still ahead.
February 2, 2013
Words to Live By
Language and culture meet identity
The early findings from Independence reveal a community that is holding onto Spanish for five and six generations.
January 23, 2013
Sex in Play
From dolls to sports, sexualized culture affects youth
It takes media savvy and strong role models to promote healthy development in the face of what the American Psychological Association calls “the massive exposure to portrayals that sexualize women and girls and teach girls that women are sexual objects.”
October 31, 2011
Bridging the Nuclear Divide
Historian connects scientists and Navajo people
Nothing could have prepared Linda Richards for her visit to the Navajo Nation in 1986. The landscape was littered with piles of uranium debris. Signs warning of radioactive contamination were hung on playgrounds and living areas. The water wasn’t safe to drink. Families were living in homes made of radioactive materials. “Many of the people [...]
December 1, 2010
A Name for Home: King Island
If identity is linked to places on the landscape, names for those places become part of shared culture. An OSU research project has helped to document the culture of King Island, Alaska.
July 23, 2010
A World Apart
Jennifer Kue was just a little girl when she began assisting Portland’s Hmong community.
April 23, 2010
Who Pays More?
OSU economist B. Starr McMullen honored for her analysis
Nothing gets a conversation started like a proposal for a new tax or a user fee. OSU economist B. Starr McMullen discovered that when she gave public presentations about vehicle mileage fees. “This is the one topic I’ve done in my career where everyone has an opinion,” says McMullen, an expert in transportation economics. In [...]
April 23, 2010
The Saliva Diaries
You’ve heard of scout camp, church camp, even fat camp. But spit camp? That’s where scientists like Sarina Rodrigues go to study the practical applications of using saliva in the lab. A company called Salimetrics, a spin-off from Pennsylvania State University, offers workshops on using oral fluids as biological specimens for the behavioral, social and [...]
February 24, 2010
The Stress Paradox
Carolyn Aldwin has been privy to countless untold secrets, heartbreaking stories from war zones, hospital wards and prisoner-of-war camps. People from all walks of life have confided their everyday problems and their worst nightmares to her. “I talked to someone who was a lawyer at the Nuremberg Trials,” she says. “I’ve talked to people who’ve [...]
February 22, 2010
“Freakishly Excited To Learn”
Kids grasp English skills and subject-area content in tandem
Something about César Chávez grabbed Gabriel’s imagination and wouldn’t let go.
February 22, 2010
Struggling Toward Health
“Our research suggests that learning to find benefits in even the worst problems, to gain perspective and to avoid distress over minor problems – even chronic ones – can help protect health and promote optimal aging,” says OSU researcher Carolyn Aldwin. Drawing on a lifetime of ups and downs and knowing that overreacting is not [...]
February 22, 2010
The Stress Paradox
Coping with trauma can strengthen us over time
Carolyn Aldwin has been privy to countless untold secrets, heartbreaking stories from war zones, hospital wards and prisoner-of-war camps. People from all walks of life have confided their everyday problems and their worst nightmares to her. “I talked to someone who was a lawyer at the Nuremberg Trials,” she says. “I’ve talked to people who’ve [...]
February 22, 2010
Girl GIRL Boy Boy
Women’s stories reveal the dark side of an age-old tradition
At the “Shahargaon” community clinic near Delhi in 2008, Sunil Khanna worked with doctors and community workers to learn about women’s reproductive heath-care needs and their views on son preference. Khanna’s interviews helped him develop community-based intervention programs. (Photo: Lakshman Anand)
November 23, 2009
The Littlest Among Us
Research points the way to high-quality childcare
Clutching a book about Clifford the Big Red Dog, 4-year-old Allexis clambers onto a sofa in the Library Corner. Her mom, Tiffani Bowen, jots the child’s name on a sign-in sheet at the Child Development Laboratory in OSU’s Hallie Ford Center and then sits down beside her. Bowen’s sheltering arm, sun-bronzed and tattooed with a [...]
October 22, 2009
A Bracero’s Story
Farm labor is a family affair
It started with Salvador, the patriarch. In 1959, he left his wife and children near Guadalajara, Mexico, to work the fields of California.
June 23, 2009
Summer of Opportunity
Students plug into research
experiences at home and abroad
Ah, summer vacation. Time to kick back, right? Not so much for OSU students who are discovering opportunities to expand their horizons. They’re modeling blood flow, studying wildlife conservation in Africa, surveying Oregon’s old-growth forests and teaching entrepreneurship.
June 23, 2009
Determined To Succeed
Mario Magaña inspires young Latinos to make a difference
When Mario Magaña was 15, he made a tough decision: quit middle school and return to his family’s farm so his younger siblings had a chance for an education. Magaña loved school, which was 30 miles from his home in Los Horcones, Michoacán, Mexico, but he sacrificed anyway. His father could no longer afford the [...]
June 23, 2009
Camps Build Confidence and Sharpen Minds
Kids engage their brains in cool ways —
and get empowered at the same time
From Corvallis labs to Newport tidepools to Salem campgrounds, OSU experts are challenging K-12 kids to stretch their thinking and deepen their understanding of the natural and built environments. This summer, hundreds of Oregon children are limbering up their synapses in subjects as diverse as math and fine arts, engineering and journalism. They’re building brain [...]
April 24, 2009
On the Trail of America’s First People
Along the Oregon coast, in Idaho’s Salmon River canyon and in Baja California, Loren Davis has searched for signs of North America’s earliest inhabitants. His work along the southern Oregon coast has pushed back documented occupation of this area by 1,500 years. Now, the OSU archaeologist will take a deeper look into the inland and [...]
February 24, 2009
Oregon’s Linguistic Landscape
In the year of statehood, Oregonians spoke many languages
What became the state of Oregon, an area stretching south from the Columbia Gorge to the Siskiyous, and east from the Pacific over the Coastal Range and Cascades to the High Desert, was a land of many languages, each one encoding information about the land and how to survive on it.
January 24, 2009
Was Nature Ever Wild?
The human face in
environmental restoration
When Spanish expeditions explored what is now the Santa Barbara, California, region in the 16th and 17th centuries, they found thriving native communities.
September 23, 2008
Strong Medicine
In 2005, the Terri Schiavo drama riveted the nation with a cast of thousands: a feuding family, legions of lawyers and judges, dueling neurologists, irate clergymen and rowdy picketers. Politicians plotted and offered legislation, and President George W. Bush flew from Crawford, Texas, to Washington, D.C., in the middle of the night to sign emergency [...]
July 19, 2008
From Risk to Relationship
Youth development focuses on the positive, but the most vulnerable still face long odds
Youth development focuses on the positive, but the most vulnerable still face long odds In 1998, Michelle Inderbitzin decided to conduct a study of youth in a detention center for violent offenders. Almost every Saturday morning for 15 months, the University of Washington graduate student in sociology made the 90-minute drive from Seattle to an [...]
July 19, 2008
From Risk to Relationship
Youth development focuses on the positive, but the most vulnerable still face long odds
In 1998, Michelle Inderbitzin decided to conduct a study of youth in a detention center for violent offenders. Almost every Saturday morning for 15 months, the University of Washington graduate student in sociology made the 90-minute drive from Seattle to an “end-of-the-line training school” for boys convicted of multiple property crimes, armed robberies, violent and/or [...]
May 23, 2008
Sacred Landscape
Tribes confront the cultural risks of contaminant exposure
The traditions of native cultures — making reed baskets, eating wild foods, participating in sweat lodges — sustained people for centuries. Now those cultures are threatened by contamination. Researchers from the Umatilla reservation and OSU show why.
April 23, 2008
From Oppression to Religious Freedom
By Renée Roman Nose
It took centuries for religious practices of American Indians to receive full protection under U.S. law. Until 1994, when President Clinton signed legislation granting Native Americans the right to use peyote for ceremonies without fear of losing their jobs, tribes suffered oppression and even death for their spiritual beliefs. Most notorious was the massacre at [...]
April 23, 2008
Baskets of Concern
Food is only the most obvious way contaminants enter the human body. Poisons also come in through the pores of the skin and the lobes of the lungs. Living in intimate contact with the landscape, as many indigenous peoples do, raises the risks of exposure. Traditional practices of the Umatilla members of the Columbia Basin [...]
July 23, 2007
Vital Signs
In late April, lush vegetation hems the Coquille Valley in hues of emerald and chartreuse and the forest-greens of Douglas fir. The fertile earth, alive with new growth, suggests vitality and prosperity. On Main Street, the truth is more complicated than that. Like so many rural Oregon communities, the small towns snuggled against timbered hills [...]
April 1, 2007
Young Immigrants
Growing up in a strange land
Coming of age in a new land is an American story. Children who bridge two cultures — their parents’ homeland and their adopted country — struggle to find a transnational identity and to succeed. In a child’s mind, memories of friends, familiar play places and sounds compete with a strange world and unintelligible language. In [...]
