PRF 26-27 Engaging Portland: How to Apply to be a Student Fellow

This year, we've brought together a working group of 7 faculty from a variety of disciplines who are developing 6 projects related to our "Engaging Portland" program theme. Students can either apply to the program and have us pair you with a faculty member, or you can review the projects (below) and indicate your preference for one or multiple of them.

Review the call for student fellows as well as the projects below and then apply through Handshake by 6/1/26. Applications will be screened on a rolling basis.

Project #1: Thinking Fans: Sports and Civic Imagination
Faculty: Dr. Andrew Guest (guest@up.edu), Psychology

What happens when we take sports seriously as an object of humanistic inquiry using tools such as close reading, cultural comparison, and attention to local stories? And what might that reveal about cultivating civic imagination in places such as Portland, where a mix of local sports cultures and fan cultures create distinctive spaces for defining our communities? This project explores these types of questions through a public scholarship initiative called Thinking Fans organized around three related goals: developing and publishing accessible essays and recorded interviews with interdisciplinary scholars that model “thinking fandom”; building a small archive of teaching resources, including essays, recordings, and discussion guides, that can serve students and faculty across disciplines; and undertaking research to further explore relationships between fandom, intellectual curiosity, and civic imagination. Students will work with the project director throughout the year, using a mix of social science and humanities methodologies to explore the cultural landscape of play, games, and sports as part of civic life. In addition to gaining experience in public scholarship and developing engaged humanities resources, student fellows will have opportunities to develop skills in research, editing, and project management.

Project #2: Vibe Maps: Mapping the Felt Life of Place
Faculty: Prof. Corey Pressman (pressman@up.edu), Public Health and Wellness

Places are not only physical environments. They are also fields of feeling, memory, and meaning. In this civic humanities research project, students will collaborate to develop Vibe Maps, experimental maps that document the emotional, cultural, and sensory atmospheres of everyday places. The project asks how environments shape how people feel, relate, and move through the world, and how making these atmospheres visible might deepen understanding of shared spaces.
Students will conduct field explorations using sensory observation, reflective writing, and creative mapping to document the “vibes” of specific locations in the city. The project blends research and creative practice, drawing on approaches such as participant observation and research creation to explore how lived experience, cultural norms, and physical environments interact.

Over the course of the year, the group will collaboratively develop both the methods and the public-facing outputs of the project. Possible outcomes include a digital map, small exhibition, or other creative formats that share insights with the broader community. Students interested in public health, anthropology, urban studies, or the arts are especially encouraged to participate.

Project #3: Marketing UP’s Engaged Humanities
Faculty: Dr. Shaz Vijlee (vijlee@up.edu), Engineering

Let’s use our passion for the humanities, our problem-solving mindsets, and our skills in social science to develop and implement a comprehensive and engaging marketing campaign for the Humanities at UP. We’ll focus on our unique combination of mission and location to make a compelling case for studying the humanities at UP. Students will continue the work of the 25/26 project to further identify stories and narratives that promote the Engaged Humanities at UP.

Example Tasks:

• Surveys, focus groups, interviews of humanities students, alumni, and proponents
• Content analysis to develop a simple, engaged way of communicating the humanities to interested parties
• Developing communications materials (website, social media, videos, photos, print) to showcase the humanities at UP
• Create and implement a communications campaign using the above content and materials to promote the engaged humanities at UP

• A suite of promotional materials that describes the humanities to a teenage audience in a way that compels them to consider deepening their relationship with these fields of study

Skills You’ll Gain:

• Survey, focus group, and interview design and execution – including software tools that streamline implementation
• Content analysis techniques to distill responses into the most salient and engaging components
• Narrative development and storytelling to transform the above results into promotional materials
• Basics of storyboarding, graphic design, and script development for promotional materials

Ideal Majors/Fields:

• Most directly related – humanities, social sciences, marketing, and communication studies
• All are welcome. Each of our disciplines would benefit from communication skills designed for non-experts and non-peers; the skills you learn in developing this project for the humanities will be directly transferable to your own field.

Project #4: Engaging Dialogue Across Difference: Community Connections
Faculty: Dr. Anne Santiago (santiago@up.edu), Political Science and Global Affairs

How can we better create community connections with our UP neighbors? How does dialogue help in creating community connections? The goals of this project are 1) to help facilitate sustained relationships with our nearby community members through dialogue and storytelling, starting with Our Village Gardens and Vanport Mosaic, and 2) to establish an online magazine to showcase stories of connectivity and perspective-taking.

In the fall semester, students will engage with my Belief/Culture/Identity/Experiences research framework and the principles of constructive dialogue. In addition, students will begin recruiting and training their peers for spring engagement with our community members. In the spring semester, students facilitate peer conversations with community members and create narratives for the online magazine. Students will gain experience in community outreach and communications, skills in constructive dialogue and written narratives, and improve their technical skills.

Project #5: Neighborhood Humanities
Faculty: Dr. Molly Hiro (hiro@up.edu) and Dr. Jen McDaneld (mcdaneld@up.edu), English

How can the humanities help UP create connections with our local communities? And how can the practices of the humanities classroom—things like careful reading, open-ended conversation, and rigorous questioning—create healthier civic cultures in a time of deep divides and increased isolation? This project will attempt to explore those questions by working in three related veins of the Engaged Humanities program: first, by developing a “Neighborhood Humanities” curriculum that brings UP students together with nearby community members to learn together about a timely topic; second, by researching local community partners to house future Civic Humanities internships; and third, by creating sustainable civic humanities networks including alumni as well as faculty at other Portland-area colleges and universities. Fall semester will focus on background research, building neighborhood connections, and institutional networking; during the spring semester, we’ll turn to concrete tasks like creating program publicity documents, hosting networking events, website development, and developing network communication strategies. In addition to gaining experience in managing a large research project, student fellows will develop skills in community outreach, program marketing, and focus-group design/implementation.

Project #6: Can Propaganda Be Used for Good?
Faculty: Dr. Sruthi Rothenfluch (rothenfl@up.edu), Philosophy

Propaganda is often used to mislead and manipulate its consumers, taking the form of catchy slogans in marketing ads or provocative claims made during political campaigns. In a time when we are especially susceptible to misinformation, can propaganda be used for good? That is, can propagandistic measures inform and empower the public rather than lead them to false and unfounded beliefs? Can they be effective against the onslaught of sensationalized, exaggerated and baseless claims? Are such techniques ever ethically defensible? 

During the first semester, we will read articles and book chapters which show how propaganda has historically been deployed to mislead its audience, and others which describe the positive uses of propaganda. The goal here will be to develop a definition of propaganda and formulate conditions under which it has been used for good. In the spring semester, we will have a chance to examine the actual implications of our conclusions. We will develop a project that satisfies our conditions for positive propaganda involving the wider Portland community. We will then have a chance to reflect upon the experience, asking the same questions with which we began our project: is this an effective means to inform and empower people? Is it an ethically permissible approach?