4th Year IA TA Elena Akers, a German and International Studies Major, got the amazing Fulbright Teaching Assistantship where she will have the opportunity to teach English in Germany next year to native German speakers. She shared her research presentation at the Denman Undergraduate Research Forum about how nature metaphors were being used in Germany to express anti-immigrant sentiment on social media. I knew about Germany’s open border policies that were adopted in 2015 to allow for refugees to come into the country and the backlash this caused that led to the rise of many right-wing groups, similar to the rise of the alt-right in America during the 2016 Presidential election and other right-wing governments around the world. Because of Germany’s unique hate speech censorship laws, direct statements of racism and xenophobia cannot be expressed in Germany, so these right-wing groups resort to various metaphors, especially nature-related ones, to express their messages and following on social media.
Elena got the idea of this topic from her IA 2nd year project and this idea carried along with her, leading her to write her thesis on this topic. Along with Elena’s research project, this presentation taught me a lot about the process of finding a topic, conducting research, finding a thesis advisor and the process of writing a thesis. I definitely want to write a thesis before I graduate, so all of this will certainly helpful for me because I had no idea what the thesis writing process was like. I am really glad that I was able to learn about the thesis writing process, so I can write mine in the future with more ease!