The TC2 team is thrilled to congratulate our first grand prize-winning team of interdisciplinary scholars: Zi Yang and Myeong Cho with "A Mixed Method Study on Menopausal Experience among the East Asian Migrants in the United States."
Our judges delberated long and hard to determine which of the two research presetnations should take home the $10,000 prize, and the TC2 team was delighted to be able to award the runners up with a cash prize as well!
Grand Prize-Winning Presentation:
A Mixed Method Study on Menopausal Experience among the East Asian Migrants in the United States
- Zixuan Yang, MA1,2, Myeong-ga Cho, MSN, RN 1,3 1University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 2Department of Anthropology, 3School of Nursing
This project draws on interdisciplinary knowledge of nursing and anthropology to examine menopausal experience among East Asian migrants in the United States. Women live in menopausal status more than one third of their lifetime yet there is a lack of attention on women’s lived experience of menopause concentrating on East Asian migrants.
Despite different disciplinary focuses, both anthropology and nursing aim to promote well-being and health equity; both agree that menopause is experienced differently depending on health conditions, lifestyles, migration statuses, cultural background, and socioeconomic resources. Therefore, combining theoretical and methodological strengths from both disciplines, this project takes a critical stand towards the very notion of menopause, broadening its definition by incorporating women’s lived experience and cultural perceptions of aging and womanhood at the end of menstruation. Placing women’s psychological wellbeing under the background of the emerging discourses of “successful aging" and heightened biomedicalization in the United States, this project seeks to investigate how East Asian migrants with different socioeconomic statuses, exhibit diverse psychological responses throughout.
Team Faculty Mentors: Catherine Bender, Nicole Constable
Runner Up Presentation:
Traversing the social media terrain as “produsers”
- Khushboo Bhutani, Beth Ann Eberle, Juwon Adenuga
Narration can convey historical memories, current social-political struggles, and argue for promising futures. Social media platforms bridge cultural, spatial, and temporal gaps with narratives encoded to be widely comprehensible that can spark further discussions. Our project will inspect the varied dimensions associated with such narrativization. To facilitate this, we will examine the human dynamics regarding the creation and transmission of stories by citizens who are both producing content on social media and using these platforms (produser) in three different socio-political contexts.
The universality and human response to such stories is the focus of our project. A part of this project will examine how social media platforms revive endangered artistic and cultural practices of the Yoruba society, a tribe in the southwestern part of Nigeria. This section focuses on resuscitating memories by revitalizing the prehistoric narratives of Yoruba society via music and poetry and reading the ways in which social media platforms undertake cultural endeavors. Subsequently, this project examines how digital platforms are utilized by Palestinians to reanimate cultural lives that have been negated under the Occupational regime since 1948 and simultaneously redirect the Palestinian archive toward political purposes. With data collected from different social media platforms, we will examine the political rhetoric deployed by citizen journalists and study motivational elements within the shared virtual content to identify the catalysts to protest participation. Social media platforms make legible environmental contexts in which people of Pittsburgh are experiencing acid mine drainage issues and futures that may come to pass without interjection. This section will quantify the extent of this narrative dissemination and the exertion of environmental protection. Analyzing the social media bridge to the past, present, and future stories, we will read the revivalist, resistive, and nostalgic aspects associated with such story-telling.
Team Faculty Mentors: Rika Asai, Neepa Majumdar, and Patrick Shirey