4^th 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 2^nd 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!

The Ohio State Anthropology Department hosted a guest lecturer, Dr. Kelley Sams, who discussed a brief history of Medical Anthropology, particularly the history of global health policy. She discussed the improvements in the idea of pandemic preparedness around the world and the World Health Organization’s inclusion of a Disease X on the list of its Priority Diseases to combat in 2018. Disease X is intended to represent a placeholder for any upcoming pandemic disease outbreaks in the future and serves as a reminder and a preventative measure for controlling and being able to prevent disease outbreaks as they arise in the future. Dr. Sams then discussed the Internet’s reaction to the existence of Disease X, which were particularly negative and offensive in many ways as many people seemed to believe that Disease X was created in a lab by the WHO and was going to be used in the future to sell vaccines created by pharmaceutical companies. There were racist reactions as well, as some believed that Disease X was being used as a potential tool of genocide in sub-Saharan Africa, which has already faced many disease outbreaks, because of their large population growth. Based on the recent Coronavirus outbreaks in China, news media outlets speculated that the Coronavirus was Disease X, which is somewhat true is Disease X presents any future disease outbreak.  As an Economics and Math major, I don’t know much about Medical Anthropology, so this lecture was very informative for me and especially relevant given the recent Coronavirus outbreaks and the xenophobic hysteria this outbreak is currently causing in our society. Through this discussion, I learned more about the global efforts that are being put by organizations such as the WHO to treat and prevent both current and future disease outbreaks, along with the failures and successes these groups have faced in treating and even eradicating various diseases through public health awareness.

The Global Water Institute (GWI) at Ohio State gave a presentation to IA Scholars about lack of water access faced by people around the world. At Ohio State, GWI researches sustainable measures to provide people around the world with access to water with the guidance from researchers across all fields, whether they be engineers, economists or environmental scientists.

Water insecurity is multi-faceted issue which creates various consequences for communities around the world. Through this presentation, I learned that 2.1 billion people around the world lack access to safe drinking water and these people spend nearly 23,000 years trying to access water.  This excessive amount of time spent getting water, primarily by women, prevents them from doing other productive activities, such as getting an education or getting a job to get themselves out of poverty, which creates negative consequences of the overall economic well-being of the nations they reside in, as more people in countries with improper water infrastructure are likely to remain in poverty.

GWI spoke about their efforts to improve water infrastructure in Tanzania, where nearly 51% of the children under 5 are stunted due to chronic malnutrition. They understood that in order to create a sustainable water system in Tanzania, it was necessary to understand the communities they were working so that people residing in these communities could assimilate with those coming in with the technology and could actually use the technology after those who installed it had left.

I learned that GWI focuses on providing communities with 6 things to improve water infrastructure. First, they focused on improving the general water and power infrastructure of communities. Then, they provided education and training to communities. They also focused on improving sanitation and hygiene in the communities they worked in, promoting women-owned small businesses, supporting improved agricultural methods that would use more efficient irrigation methods and the placement of private operator models so that businesses could flourish in the places GWI worked in that also provided employment as well as welfare to the community as a whole.

Prior to this presentation, I knew that many people around the world lacked access to clean water, and that water crises had led to poor health issues and even wars around the world. However, before this presentation I didn’t fully realize how lack of access to clean water prevented countries from overall economic prosperity, as women and other people in many nations spend so much excessive time getting water that they don’t have the ability to go to school, become well-educated and obtain higher-skilled jobs that can lift their families out of poverty. As an Economics major, it was really interesting for me to see that the problems faced by developing nations such as improper infrastructure and water insecurity, were both a cause and a result of the higher levels of poverty and economic instability in these nations.