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About Eleanor Campbell
Hello! My name is Eleanor Campbell, and I am a 2021 Laidlaw Scholar. I am a student at Columbia University in the City of New York, and I am originally from Raleigh, NC, USA. I major in Economics, and I am particularly interested in Behavioral Economics and the intersections between Economics, Neuroscience, and Psychology.
During my first year with Laidlaw, I worked with Professor Hitendra Wadhwa of the Columbia Business School in developing a leadership fellowship for aspiring young changemakers.
For my Leadership in Action project, I will be traveling to Ghana to work on WASH (Water, Sanitation, and Health) guidelines with World Vision in partnership with Columbia University Undergraduate Global Engagement.
Recent Comments
Thank you so much for sharing this, Inkindi!
Yes, anyone with questions should feel free to contact me, and we look forward to reading your applications.
I love this beautifully designed poster and your lovely artwork!
What new ideas, challenges, or other issues have you encountered with regard to your project (this might include data collection, information that contradicts your assumptions or the assertions of others, materials that have enriched your understanding of the topic or led you to change your project, etc.)? How have these ideas or challenges shaped the bigger picture of your research? Has the scope or focus of your topic changed since you began this project? If so, how?
One challenge I have faced over the past weeks is time constraints. My project requires protocols that can sometimes take three to four days to carry out. Considering the limited timeframe of the Summer A semester, fitting in all the data collection that needs to be accomplished has proven to be challenging. This has forced me to focus the scope of my project. In addition, it has forced me to be highly organized and forward thinking about when experiments will be started and carried out. In addition, taking clear and useful images of my samples has proven to be a challenge. By the nature of the samples (often only a few microns wide) generating intact samples with correct fluorescence and morphology is arduous.
These challenges, among others, only enhance the ambitions of my project. Thinking about the bigger picture, the time constraints and technical challenges have only furthered my conviction that more work is needed on this topic. Although this is not surprising to me, I am more convinced now of how crucial it is to keep learning, working and progressing. I hope to be a part of future studies of this nature.
What research resources have proven particularly useful to you as you continue your research?
Online databases and websites devoted to academic sources have been crucial to my research. Even though my work does focus on researching databases, they have proved to be an invaluable resource. These sites give me insight into what is known in my field, what work others have done, what techniques have proven successful, among many other things. Overall, probing these websites has provided a framework by which I can begin to ask questions.
I'll second Jacqueline's agreement with your feeling time-constrained, Avi. It's hard to believe we're already 5 weeks in! I can see how the two main problems you're facing exacerbate one another. It's difficult to keep moving forward when images that you need to collect along the way don't turn out, and it's difficult to get exactly the images you need when you feel the pressure to keep moving. It's great to hear that you've been devising strategies to plan ahead, and I hope they've smoothed the somewhat hectic nature of research on a timeline. If you have any organizational and forward-thinking tips, I'd love to hear them sometime!
I plan on writing a preliminary paper by the end of this research period. I do hope to get published, but I am also considering working on this project next summer and maybe refining my essay. There are definitely more avenues that I want to explore that surround my topic, and I am not sure if that is the most conducive to writing one paper or several. Regardless, I definitely want to have at least a rough draft and sizable bibliography by the end of the six weeks.
I believe that museums serve a critical function in projecting a sense of identity and solidarity to a larger community. Through the careful preservation, study, and presentation of important cultural objects, we learn more about each other and humanity as a whole. As a result, museums retain pretty revered positions in our society and are often seen as reliable sources for academic inquiry. However, as numerous studies over the history of museology have shown, museums are much less unbiased and unproblematic than we would initially expect. Museums have actively benefitted from or perpetrated imperialism, racism, sexism, etc. Recently, calls for social justice within museums have been amplified, and I believe my research is illuminating yet another avenue that museums can improve on. Due to the aforementioned influence of museums, these institutions have a social responsibility to grapple with the ethical issues that underlie their collections.
So cool that you're likely continuing this research next year, Jacqueline! I'm interested to hear what your plans with it are and if you're planning on traveling to do fieldwork related to your repatriation work. Hopefully you'll get some on the ground experience with museums that are consciously grappling with systemic imperialism, racism, and sexism or even the opportunity to help reform those that aren't.
One ethical issue that comes up in philosophy of education is the exploitation of minority/marginalized voices as objects of study. As in, academia has a tendency to take the experiences and viewpoints of people who do not necessarily have access to power and privilege, and study it disrespectfully with the intention of personal gain. Given that my project analyzes the teaching of philosophy in difficult circumstances (e.g. prisons), it seems necessary for me to help strike a balance between effective teaching of material and seeing the imprisoned individuals as "test subjects" to be studied for my own good. To prevent dehumanization, I'm primarily focusing on the interviews and testimonials from Prof. Mercer's students, understanding that material as an authoritative source/something to teach me what happens in prisons, rather than something I personally should be "improving".
Yes, something that's come up for me a lot is the functionalist, career-focused model of education, which rejects the teaching of "soft", humanities disciplines and emphasizes the need for people to build career skills. Given that philosophy does not always directly translate into money making skills, it seems prudent for me to identify why learning and working with philosophy can produce portable skills. However, this opposing viewpoint has also compelled me to justify why it is valuable to learn things that may not always directly translate into a career; for example, certain philosophers might help someone better understand the conditions under which they've been imprisoned, while others may help build moral virtue.
Hi Joanne,
I really like how you're considering the ethical issues at play in your work. It seems like such a tricky line to walk: making sure that underrepresented communities aren't overlooked in education while also making sure that they don't simply become objects in our educational practice. On either extreme we're doing a disservice to them and to ourselves, but it's so hard to stay in between. You seem to be having all the right thoughts on this, and I hope you're able to bring them into fruition.