Pardee Students Showcase Research on “Race and Radioactivity”

On April 16, 2021, two students from the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University – Cristina Rivera Morrison (’22) and Ariana Thorpe (’22) – presented to an audience of faculty, staff, family, and friends on their research as part of the CAS Social Sciences Undergraduate Internships in Social Justice and Sustainability.

During the research showcase, eight students from the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) and Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University presented their projects on a range of topics, from the availability of mental health resources for local Black women, to the rise of Christianity in Korea over four centuries, to data collection on how COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement have recently affected various urban criminal justice systems. The students discussed what interested them in the work and how it will guide them as they finish college and move into their professional careers.

Morrison and Thorpe studied uranium mining in three locations: Namibia, Niger, and New Mexico. Under this umbrella, they developed three in-depth connected case studies of mining sites to study the global nature of disenfranchisement of land and labor and the processes of that dispossession over time. Their project uncovered the political, legal, and social processes of systematic disenfranchisement of populations in those sites. Both Morrison and Thorpe developed their case studies as research interns under the guidance of Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School. 

Read more about the students and their research abstracts on the research event’s program and Social Justice and Sustainability internships webpage.