The Community and Multicultural Development Office (CaMD) and The Brace Center for Gender Studies selected students for the 2023-2024 CaMD Scholars and Brace Student Fellows programs last Spring. The Scholars and Fellows conducted intensive research over the course of the summer, working closely with their faculty advisors to create a fully developed project and research paper by the beginning of the school year.
This year’s CaMD finalists are Guilherme Lima ’24, Sarah Pan ’24, Chloe Rhee ’24, and Tam Gavenas ’25, and this year’s Brace finalists are, Max Berkenblit ’24, Nadia Choophungart ’24, Anna Du ’24, and Lilliane Villanueva ’25.
The Phillipian was unable to get an interview with Gavenas and Villanueva.
CaMD Scholars:
Gui Lima ’24
“Pedagogy of the Brazilian Favela: Fighting a Century of Oppression Inside the Classroom”
“I reached out to scholars in Brazil and internationally. I got a response. I’m trying to bring [Django Paris] to campus. He’s at the University of Washington and he has this idea of culturally sustaining pedagogies, which was very influential to my project… I also visited some favelas in my city of Salvador… Favelas are low-income communities, [or] squatter communities, [that] don’t get the right of citizenship that Brazilians do. They’re normally located in less ‘alpha’ parts of the city. In Rio specifically, there’s a lot of hillside favelas, a lot of fragile infrastructure, [and] a lot of services that aren’t provided by the government… My project was about showing how education empowers and humanizes these communities and shows the historical oppression that has really come to define them. It’s really important in building a future for them where they aren’t defined by that historical oppression.”
Sarah Pan ’24
“Now Approaching Dystopia: What the Hazy Promise of AI Alignment Means for Us”
“A while ago I read a book called ‘Data Feminism’ [and] presented it for an [Martin Lurther King Day] workshop… For this project, I actually got to interview one of the authors of the book, which was really an amazing experience because that book was one of the reasons I wanted to do this project in the first place… One of the things in particular I was interested in was this culture war between two sides of AI. One side is claiming that ‘AI is taking over and going to kill us all, [therefore] we should focus on these super abstract futuristic alignment efforts.’ There’s another side of the argument which is like ‘people are suffering from the consequences of the AI in ways that are a lot more tangible and present today.’ I wanted to critically assess both narratives and understand how they came about, [and] why certain ones are getting more media attention… Often we take technology, science, math, all those STEM things as a given: fundamental truths of the universe, if you will. But that’s simply not the case: there’s so many social, humanistic factors that really shape the way science has come about and I think that’s such an important thing to understand.”
Chloe Rhee ’24
“Knowledge Without Goodness? Phillips Academy, Abolition, and Anti-Slavery 1830-1860”
“I stayed in Andover [for] a month over the summer and commuted to the archives three days a week… My topic is about Andover’s institutional history, and how to grapple with history that may be controversial. I’m thinking about inviting a professor that I’ve been able to connect with to come [to campus] and getting student reps from other boarding schools like
[Phillips] Exeter [Academy], Loomis Chaffee, and some schools down in the south to do a panel on what it means to challenge history at secondary schools… I’m excited that my plans for the presentation include a lot more discourse and ideological discussion that won’t just be me presenting to people, but [rather] people discussing things and fostering critical discussions.”
Brace Scholars:
Max Berkenblit ’24
“An Introduction to Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies: A Series of Teach-Ins”
“I ended up developing a curriculum for a 100-level women’s gender and sexuality studies course for incoming students to supplement EBI courses. It included a lot of research I did both into the subject of women’s gender and sexuality studies and also into different pedagogical theories and how I can best teach a class. I hope students will be a little bit more open-minded after taking the course. I think that, especially for incoming students, teaching a course like the one I developed is a way to establish ground rules of being at a community that’s intentionally diverse like Andover… [My course] is all about taking a little bit of time to understand other people, and I think that’s something that’s important every day: just taking a couple of minutes to try to understand the person you’re talking to or someone you haven’t met before and trying to see them from a different perspective, and a perspective closer to their own.”
Nadia Choophungart ’24
“Reshaping Religion: Examining the Evolution of Theravada Buddhism by Women in Thailand”
“[My project] was on Buddhist Feminism and I looked at how women and people of marginalized gender identities can empower themselves within a majority patriarchal Buddhist system. I was looking at Thai Buddhism in particular because I myself am Thai, and I’ve grown up culturally Buddhist, so I understand what it means to be part of this gendered, yet religious, system. I just really hope that my research will bring a new perspective to campus and the synthesis of religion and gender will prompt other people to think about how these two factors play a role in their own lives.”
Anna Du ’24
“It Was a Pleasure to Burn: The Development of Queer Censorship in the United States”
“My project was essentially studying the censorship of queer media, primarily from the ’60s onwards. I was looking into some of the more modern stuff relating to book bannings, especially in libraries and in schools. I wanted to be able to show that, obviously, censorship is bad, but [also] in what ways is it negatively impacting the queer community. I found that there’s a lot of negative impact: not only from an informational standpoint, but there’s also misinformation and a lack of information. Also, [censorship] can oftentimes negatively impact the mental health of youth. I feel like most censorship we see nowadays is really within the education community, and so I would really love to try and work with that. I hope that people understand that this problem, even though it seems very distant, is something that does in fact affect us.”
