SS3090: Undergraduate Program for Exploration and Research in Social Sciences (UPERSS)

The UPERSS program provides opportunities for undergraduate Social Sciences students to work closely with faculty (or an advanced graduate student) to do research, creative work, or a community-based project.

How UPERSS Works

Students enroll in SS 3090 Exploring Undergrad Research in Social Sciences for between 1-3 credits. Students earn 1 unit of academic credit for every 3 hours worked per week (limited to a total of 3 credits per semester). UPERSS is open to all Social Sciences undergraduate majors who have a GPA of 2.5 or higher. Still, in order to be placed on a project, students must apply and be accepted by the respective faculty mentor.

UPERSS students share an overview of their research experiences at the annual Social Sciences Undergraduate Research Symposium (date TBD). Alternatively, students can fulfill this requirement by creating a well-developed poster, website, or visual representation of the project, or sharing a 4-5 minute recorded presentation of the project. Other options, such as co-authoring an article in a journal, presenting to a class, or presenting at a conference could also work. All decisions on this requirement should be made with the faculty mentor.

Learning Objectives

• Communicate effectively through writing, speech, and visual information
• Develop critical thinking skills
• Develop teamwork and accountability skills
• Practice presenting results and conclusions of the research

Getting Started

The first step is to review the project descriptions below and weigh decisions on time commitments and how well the opportunities match your interests. You might also approach a faculty member you know is doing research that interests you, even if they don't have a project listed here, to inquire whether they would be open to doing a UPERSS project with you. You’re encouraged to reach out to mentors for any projects that you are interested in to learn more.

Application Process

To ensure consideration, the application deadline for Spring 2025 courses is Friday, Nov. 8, 2024.

Applications should be emailed directly to the faculty mentor. They should include: Resume and a Cover Letter. Letter should be a professionally-written statement that includes: academic, personal, and/or career interests, any research experiences or courses to date; and how participation in this UPERSS project aligns with interests and goals.

The faculty mentor will review and contact you. They may wish to schedule an interview. If you are accepted/approved, your faculty mentor will contact the Social Sciences administrator to sign you up for the course.

Research Project Descriptions

Historic Cemeteries: Mapping, Management, and Memory (Spring 2025)

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Tim Scarlett

Project Description

Help Copper Country community organizations with their legacy cemeteries. Community organizations have asked us to help with mapping and remote sensing, geospatial visualization, planning for sustainable management, enhanced protection, and potential public interpretation of neglected cemeteries. Students might use tools like Ground Penetrating Radar and other remote sensing and mapping technologies, or perhaps focus on archival and/or oral history research. Each project helps digitize inventories of burial grounds and build management tools. Through a review of published literature on cemetery archaeology and management, provide recommendations on best practices for community organizations and municipalities for a problem facing many rural towns in the United States. Help to build connections between the cemetery inventory and online geospatial research tools, like FindAGrave.com and Ancestry.com, with an eye to building a robust management tool, facilitating heritage building/place making among local and the online communities of the "Copper Country Diaspora," creating useful interpretive material, and enhancing heritage tourism development in these communities.

Potential Benefits

• Student team members can choose which parts of the project to undertake, so commitments of time and tasks can vary. Projects will dovetail with other student classes, individual skill learning choices, and career plans. They may therefore place more emphasis on remote sensing and geospatial technologies; community-engaged or collaborative study; development of web resources, tools, or data structures; archival and/or oral history work; or heritage tourism, policy and management planning, or educational program development.

Student Time and Commitment

• Option to take for 1-3 credits, with hours corresponding 3-9 hours/week

Contact

Timothy Scarlett

• Associate Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology

• scarlett@mtu.edu
• 906-487-2359

Energy Infrastructure in Post Mining Communities (Spring 2025)

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Tim Scarlett

Project Description

Individuals or groups working in this UPERSS course will fill a critical role in the PUSH research collaborations: talking to people in post-mining communities around the country about the energy transition. Building on work by previous student teams that mapped out energy infrastructure and mining heritage in different geographic areas, the goal is to find potential community collaborators in different types of places: Urban and rural, arid vs. temperate vs. subtropical, mountains vs. lowlands, places of economic growth vs. poverty or stagnation, private vs. public vs. Tribal lands, low vs. high environmental contamination, and so on. Team members will research potential sites, contact community partners in these regions, and make initial assessments about their suitability and interest in collaborations.

Potential Benefits

• Students will get experience researching in both "big data" and focused, ethnographic-style studies, although the specific skills will derive from specific studies in each location. Students then start at the "ground floor" co-designing participatory studies of past and present energy infrastructure in a place in order to form inclusive and just plans for energy futures. planning, or educational program development.

Student Time and Commitment

• Option to take for 1-3 credits, with hours corresponding 3-9 hours/week

Contact

Timothy Scarlett

• Associate Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology

• scarlett@mtu.edu
• 906-487-2359

Public Value in the Global South (Spring 2025) 

Mentors: Drs. Adam Wellstead, Anat Gofen (Hebrew University - Jerusalem), Saba Hinrichs-Krapels (Delft University of Technology)

Project Description

Over the past decade, policy innovation labs (PILs) have become important policy actors. This is the case in the Global South. PILs play an important role in creating public value.

See: Wellstead, A.M., Ottenhof, N., Evans, B. and Gofen, A., 2023. What's going on in there? Canadian government policy labs and public value management. Canadian Public Administration, 66(4), pp.514-532. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/capa.12548

This project will investigate how Global South based PILs contribute to public value.

Potential Benefits

• Develop career-oriented research skills

• Work with faculty members outside of Michigan Tech

• Learn about policymaking in the Global South

• Be included as an author on a peer-reviewed article

Student Time and Commitment

• Negotiable

Contact

Adam Wellstead

• Professor of Public Policy, Social Sciences

• awellste@mtu.edu
• 906-487-2115

Treasure in the trash? Aluminum, landfills, and communities in America (Spring 2025)

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Jonathan Robins

Project Description

This project is part of a Depart of Energy-sponsored investigation of the feasibility recovering aluminum through landfill (https://www.netl.doe.gov/project-information?p=FE0032236). Join an interdisciplinary team working on uncovering how aluminum got into consumer products, how those products wound up in landfills, how much might be buried, and what we might be able to do about it. Student research opportunities include historical investigations of the aluminum industry and landfill sites, studies of policy at local, state, and federal levels, and evaluations of landfill-adjacent communities with an emphasis on environmental justice issues. All majors welcome to apply.

Potential Benefits

• Learn how to identify, access, and interpret records from business, government, and other sources

• Practice communication and collaboration skills with an interdisciplinary team
• Contribute to published research
• Further opportunities with MTU Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Senior Capstone Projects or Senior Design Team, and paid summer research positions.

Student Time and Commitment

• Option to take for 1-3 credits, with hours corresponding 3-9 hours/week

Contact

Jonathan Robins

• Associate Professor of History

• jrobins@mtu.edu
• 906-487-3080

Financing Local Food: the Keweenaw Coop and Community Capital (Spring 2025)

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Jonathan Robins

Project Description

In 2024, the Keweenaw Co-op will be moving to a new building, thanks to a campaign to raise more than $1 million in investment from the community the Co-op serves. Since its founding in 1973, the Co-op has relied on investment from community members to provide grocery services, including a growing effort to sell more locally-grown food. Students working on this project will develop a case study of the Co-op and its fundraising campaign for the National Coalition for Community Capital (NC3), an organization that promotes local investment in local businesses.

Potential Benefits

• Experience in: archival research; oral history and interviewing; business history; writing for broad audiences. Learn more about: national, regional, and community food systems; sustainable business practices

Student Time and Commitment

• Option to take for 2-3 credits, with hours corresponding 6-9 hours/week

Contact

Jonathan Robins

• Associate Professor of History

• jrobins@mtu.edu
• 906-487-3080

Refugee Integration in Greater Detroit (Spring 2024)

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Kathryn Hannum

Project Description

What are the critical factors for successful refugee integration? How are refugee integration services and policies working in the greater metro Detroit area? Students will work on a multi-method, team science project that aims to answer some of these questions. Students will assist with coding qualitative data collected from interviews with refugee populations in SE Michigan. Coding will be done in NVivo software with the assistance of a pre-determined codebook. We will then analyze themes and patterns while comparing findings to refugee integration literature.

Potential Benefits

• Learn the qualitative interview coding process.
• Learn how to use NVivo software.
• Learn about key theories related to refugee integration.
• Learn key aspects of participatory action research

Student Time and Commitment

• 1 - 3 credits (equal to 3 to 9 hours per week)

Contact

Kathryn Hannum

• Assistant Teaching Professor
• Coordinator of Student Programs
• Policy and Community Development Program Advisor

• khannum@mtu.edu
• 906-487-2824

Museum Kiosk Modules for Eagle Harbor Light Station Museum (Spring 2025)

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Steven Walton

Project Description

Help the Keweenaw County Historical Society (KCHS) with kiosk content development for touchscreen computers at the Eagle Harbor Lighthouse and other KCHS museums.  The work is primarily historical research and writing to develop content for modules that enhance current Light Station Museum exhibits and present information in an interesting, interactive and accessible format on museum touchscreen kiosks. 

Students would research history on a module topic and collect information, including pictures and multi-media to draft content for a module in a storyboard-type format.  There will be opportunities to partner with a KCHS volunteer to have actual museum exhibit experience.

Module topic ideas suggested by KCHS:

• Keweenaw Shipwrecks focusing on wrecks near Eagle Harbor Lighthouse.  Research ships’ histories, actual shipwreck details, including rescues of crew and current locations and conditions of dive sites.
• Eagle Harbor Fog Signal Building focusing on its unique building structure and the fog signal equipment used through its years of operation (1895-1978)
• A 4^th Order Fresnel Lens is on display so an engaging, informative module is needed to provide the history and technical explanation for this revolutionary design.  The module needs to gain the interest of all ages to look at the Fresnel lens 
• History of the Eagle Harbor Community from its establishment as a village in1845, when the Eagle Harbor Mining Company began exploring and digging shallow mine shafts, to its growth in the1860s and 70s as an important shipping port and supply town for inland mines.  Unlike other Keweenaw communities, Eagle Harbor continued to thrive by transforming itself from a rowdy shipping port to a summer resort town.
• Topic proposed by student which relates to the history of the Eagle Harbor Lighthouse or other museums at the Eagle Harbor Light Station (Maritime Museum, Keweenaw History Museum, and Commercial Fishing Museum).

Benefits to students

• Students can choose which parts of the project to undertake, so commitments of time and tasks can vary.
• Projects may dovetail with other student classes, individual skill learning choices, and career plans.
• Skillsets may include: archival work for historical research, preparation of multi-media files, such as audio, video, animation and interactive activities, graphic design of modules, websites for display kiosks, or educational program development. 

Credits and Time Commitment

• Option to take for 1-3 credits, with hours corresponding 3-9 hours/week

Contact

Steven Walton

• Associate Professor of History

• sawalton@mtu.edu
• 906-487-3272

Poverty and Law: Legal Services for Northern Michigan (Spring 2025)

Faculty Mentor: Susanna Peters

Project Description

Northern Michigan Legal Services has an office in Houghton and serves only low income residents seeking help with evictions, custody, guardianships, unlawful termination, medical insurance, and wide array of critical services. Selected students will be working with Legal Services Attorney and the faculty mentor to assist the staff and clients in a variety of ways and will also go to court hearings when available. It is difficult for low income residents to obtain legal help locally as the UP is considered a "legal desert", and lawyers are both scarce and expensive. Therefore finding ways for non- attorneys to effectively assist residents is one of the goals of this projects. Students in the project will be on the front lines of helping to determine what is possible for the future. 

Benefits to students

For students who are interested in issues surrounding rural poverty and law working with this clientelle will give them both experience and practical understanding of the issues facing the rural poor. 

Credits and Time Commitment

2 or 3 credits: 4 or 6 hours in Legal Services Office space per week during the weekdays. (Times tba with staff attorney and mentor), meetings and written work can be done off site. Weekly reflections and short paper at the culmination of the semester to be agreed with by faculty mentor. Meetings every other week or every week as needed. 

Susanna Peters

• Associate Teaching Professor
• Social Sciences Program Advisor
• University Ombuds

• speters@mtu.edu
• 906-487-2391

MTU Campus Food Access Assessment (Spring 2025)

Faculty Mentor: Angie Carter

Project Description

This UPERSS project will collaborate with the Husky Food Access Network (HuskyFAN), MTU staff, and aligned campus groups to design a campus food assessment. A campus-wide study of food access at MTU has not taken place since before the pandemic. Be a part of improving food access for your fellow students

Project Benefits

• Gain experience in reviewing literature
• Gain experience in data collection and analysis including conducting focus groups and survey development and distribution
• Inform next steps for the Husky Food Access Network (HuskyFAN) and other campus food access initiatives
• Contribute to strengthening food access on your campus

Student Time & Commitment

• Option to take for 1-3 credits, with hours corresponding 3-9 hours/week

Angie Carter (she/her)

• Associate Professor, Environmental/Energy Justice

• ancarter@mtu.edu
• 906-487-1431

Program Contact

Steven Walton

• Associate Professor of History

• sawalton@mtu.edu
• 906-487-3272

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