Come to URCAD on Wednesday, April 26. Rosa Rada will present her research "Information Flows and Food Assistance: Challenges to SNAP Program Provision in Baltimore City".

In an effort to modernize and streamline service programs, governments are increasingly looking for ways to alter program delivery. Since 2015, there were two major changes implemented regarding the provision of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in the State of Maryland: the launch of an online platform to automate SNAP enrollment and a new issuance schedule for benefits.

Read more the rest of her abstract here...

Meet Maniraj,

He is an Interdisciplinary Studies major and an URA Scholar. He also received the La Noue Scholarship to attend the 2016 Association of Interdisciplinary Studies (AIS) conference in University of Ottawa, where he presented his interdisciplinary research; a board game that teaches cardiovascular health. His future interests includes medical anthropology and social entrepreneurship, his final goal is to become a physician.

Maniraj's research will explore the leading cause of death worldwide, cardiovascular disease. Understanding the sociocultural construction of this non-communicable disease would advance our knowledge of how to improve care to vulnerable populations. Focused on a specific district in India, the purpose this study is to identify cultural beliefs and attitudes towards cardiovascular health among adolescents. His project was an organic transformation of his extracurricular project in educational health games.

Read more about his research here…

Meet Sarah,
She is an Interdisciplinary Studies major, an URA Scholar and a Linehan Scholar. Her future pursuits would include working alongside anthropologists as they complete research and photograph their work to be included in ethnographies, articles, and other publications as a means of providing a more concrete way for the reader to connect to the material they are reading about. She also thinks that photography coupled with anthropology -or any form of research- can also benefit the public because photographs can often speak to a wider demographic range than can scientific writing.

Her research will assist in documenting the ecological disaster that occurred on November 5th, 2015 in Mariana, Brazil. She photographed the effects of this disaster on the communities of the Rio Doce Valley (in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais). She is currently editing the photos as well as transcribing and translating interviews with her partner Andrés Camacho '15. She is also collaborating with Dr. Bryan McCann, a Professor at Georgetown University who is gathering an international group of scholars to study the historical background of the area and the disaster’s current environmental and social repercussions on the Rio Doce valley. This November, both Sarah and Andrés will be presenting their work at a conference (Dr.McCann & others) are organizing at Georgetown titled "Brazil’s Rio Doce Disaster: the History and Consequences of a Man-made Environmental Disaster".

Read more about her research project here...

The INDS Photo Contest is a monthly competition that aims to create a collection of images illustrating the diverse activities of our program. This collection will be used to promote the INDS program at future events and published materials, including various web-based platforms.

Prize: Each month the winning photo will receive a prize of $25 placed on the campus card of the student who submitted that entry.

Judging: Judging will take place during the first week of every month as INDS staff gather to review each photo submitted during the previous calendar month. The judges will be looking for a photo that illustrates something within the broad range of activities covered by the INDS program. These activities include coursework, fieldwork, research, independent study, internships, INDS events, and anything else that relates to your degree/the program in general. In future months, we may announce a “theme of the month” (e.g. Foreign Travel) but for now (and until posted otherwise) we invite pictures from any and all aspects of INDS. Remember, our primary aim is to create a large body of up-to-date images that we can go on to use in our promotion and outreach materials: we are looking for images that engage their viewer in a deeper sense of the rich opportunities afforded by INDS.

Rules:

• Submit images through Instagram* with at least 3 tags (e.g. research, field work…) as well as #INDSumbc
• Provide a caption of 25 words or less (what, where, how it relates to INDS)
• The competition is open to INDS majors and non-majors – it is only the subject matter that must relate directly to the INDS program
• Each month’s winner will be contacted at the beginning of the next month – i.e. our first winner, for October’s photos, will be announced in the first week of November.
• The purpose of the contest is to build a library of images to promote INDS. We therefore ask that each entry is made available for our later use for brochures, posters, reports etc. For this reasonby submitting an image you are agreeing to UMBC’s Terms and Permissions.

* You will need an Instagram account. It is an easy and free app to download on your smartphone. Contact us if you need further help