Four teams of researchers, including five professors from The University of Iowa and four visiting scholars, won Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants for collaborative projects carried out this summer. The program, which this year ran from late May through June, is supported by the Office of the Vice President for Research, the Graduate College, and the C. Esco and Avalon L. Obermann Fund.
This year’s projects and researchers are:
America’s New Slavery: Public and Private Responses to Involuntary Servitude and Human Trafficking, by Kenneth Cmiel, professor of history and director of the UI Center for Human Rights, and Mark Sidel, associate professor of law. Contemporary cases of slavery in the United States involve farm workers, garment workers, domestic workers, nursing home employees, hotel workers, and others, contend Cmiel and Sidel, who examined their idea as part of larger individual and joint projects on slavery, trafficking, and involuntary servitude in the Untied States. Cmiel and Sidel engaged in joint readings and discussions leading to writing and action-oriented projects on: 1) the development of legal policy, statutes, and case law to combat new forms of slavery, trafficking, and involuntary servitude; 2) the diverse legal strategies employed by public interest attorneys and private attorneys for trafficking and slavery victims to assert their rights, in addition to criminal prosecutions by the U.S. Department of Justice; and 3) the strategies of prosecution and alliance undertaken by the Justice Department and allied agencies.
India Calling: Accents, Identities, and Aliases in the Indian Call Center Industry, by Aimee Carrillo Rowe, assistant professor of rhetoric, and Sheena Malhotra, assistant professor of women’s studies at California State University, Northridge. Rowe and Malhotra studied the phenomenon that has produced an estimated one million call center agents in India who go through “accent neutralization training” and receive aliases and assumed U.S.-based identities in order to make their U.S. customers feel more “comfortable.” Rowe and Malhotra investigated the cultural implications of an enormous workforce that sleeps during the day, works at night, and interacts mostly with customers at the other end of the world on the basis of a false identity. Through their joint project, they explored how the inequities of global power relations between India and the United States are manifested and performed through the daily “migration of the mind” among these agents.
Ultra-Local Governance in China’s Cities and Villages: Bringing Together Perspectives from Political Science and Sociology, by Benjamin Read, assistant professor of political science, and Ethan Michelson, assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University. They examined China’s hundreds of thousands of rural village committees and urban residents’ committees, ultra-local governance institutions that raise many questions lying at the intersection of political science and sociology. In particular, Read and Michelson were interested in learning: 1) how the community-level context of these administrative bodies—deeply embedded as they are in local society—affect their performance; and 2) how different types of constituents perceive them and interact with them. The project brought together in-depth qualitative interviews and on-site observational study, along with an original pair of matched urban-rural survey datasets.
Computer Visualization and Identification of DNA Knots and Links, by Isabel Darcy, assistant professor of mathematics, Stephen Levene, associate professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Texas at Dallas, and Robert Schareino, a computer scientist from Vancouver. The group worked to develop a new technique to easily and rapidly identify DNA knots and links formed by proteins such as recombinases and topoisomerases. DNA is tightly packed into genes and chromosomes; for replication or transcription to take place, DNA must first unpack itself. DNA packing can be visualized as two very long strands that have been intertwined millions of times, tied into knots, and subjected to successive coiling. However, replication and transcription, the first steps in cellular division, are much easier to accomplish if the DNA is neatly arranged rather than tangled up. The only current method for uniquely identifying DNA knots and links is technically demanding, tedious, and error-prone. The collaborators worked on developing software to reconstruct a knotted or linked DNA from an atomic-force micrograph of the molecule and generate a three-dimensional graphical representation of the DNA’s conformation.
Jay Semel, director of the Obermann Center, says the Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants, with their distinctive emphasis on collaborative work, were the first of their kind in the nation. Since the program’s establishment more than a decade ago, UI projects funded by these grants have resulted in numerous jointly-authored articles and books, as well as federal and foundations grants totaling more than $6 million.
by Jennifer New |
