Each year, 12 UC Davis graduate students are selected as Mellon Public Scholars to take part in a year of community-engaged research. This has been a very different year for them due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the students, all but one from the College of Letters and Science, have had to switch gears, change projects and not be physically present in the communities they are working with. Despite this, the students have completed projects and created videos that document their work, and in some cases is their work.
Study finds that simple tags can make a difference.
Social media misinformation can negatively influence people’s attitudes about vaccine safety and effectiveness, but credible organizations — such as research universities and health institutions — can play a pivotal role in debunking myths with simple tags that link to factual information, UC Davis researchers suggest in a new study.
On the first episode of "The Backdrop," a UC Davis podcast exploring the world of ideas, historian Kathryn Olmsted discusses her work studying the history and impact of conspiracy theories on American society and politics. She also offers advice on how people can avoid falling prey to them.
Young children who have experienced compassionate love and empathy from their mothers may be more willing to turn thoughts into action by being generous to others, a UC Davis study suggests.
When Milmon Harrison, associate professor of African American and African studies, began writing a book about the Great Migration, he wondered if he could bring students into the research process as part of his teaching. Now he’s teaching students how to document the history of Sacramento’s African American community through interviews with residents and archival research, thanks to the Community Engaged Learning Faculty Fellows (CELFF) program.
The digital storytelling project Humanizing Deportation/Humanizando la Deportación sheds light on hundreds of personal migrant stories that demonstrate the effects of deportation and heightened border security. Robert Irwin, a professor of Spanish, has been working on the community-based project since 2016.
A book by UC Davis anthropology professor Alan Klima on Thai spiritual and financial practices is the winner of a 2020 Gregory Bateson Book Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology. "Ethnography #9" is one of three recipients of this year’s Bateson Prize, given for works deemed “interdisciplinary, experimental and innovative.”
When UC Davis political scientist Amber Boydstun co-founded the Women Also Know Stuff initiative in 2016, the idea went beyond amplifying the voices of her female colleagues around the world. A primary goal was to improve political science. In a major nod to the project’s success so far, the American Political Science Association recently awarded Boydstun and 11 colleagues a $25,000 grant to broaden the impact of its searchable online database of female political scientists.
Do we always want people to show empathy? Not so, said researchers from the University of California, Davis. A recently published paper suggests that although empathy is often portrayed as a virtue, people who express empathy are not necessarily viewed favorably.
Devastating wildfires raging across California this year have been perceived mostly as a destructive force. But prior to European arrival in California, Native Americans used fire as a restorative land management technique that cleared underbrush and encouraged new plant growth.
The practice of “cultural burning” is being explored at UC Davis by students and faculty in collaboration with tribes through the Native American studies course “Keepers of the Flame.”
