Project Lead: Prof. Jonathan Larson (Assistant Professor of Education)
Vivero Fellow (Fall 2025): Jude Morgan
For this semester I seek a Vivero Fellow to help me with analysis of policy texts concerning how institutions of the European Union have approached the topic of inclusion over the past 75 years of the EU’s existence. I am primarily interested in exploring how topic modeling or software such as Antconc can help detect useful patterns in word usage, frequency, co-occurrence etc to complement my own qualitative research training in linguistic and sociocultural anthropology. My second interest in working with a Vivero Fellow is to explore useful visualizations (including, but not limited to word clouds or Voyant) that could help make presentations of this policy material more engaging for audiences. I expect that some time would be spent on data cleaning, such as converting pdf files to text, as well as determining the best means to organize the available text-based data for analysis. The student working on this project will be my first partner in digital humanities work, and I am looking forward to technical leadership for this endeavor. This semester’s project will help set me up for a research leave next semester that I plan to spend partly in Brussels and Vienna doing on-site research.
Although it is a project about a different global context, no knowledge of a language other than English is necessary, as I expect from my research to date that all of the published texts of interest (including possibly transcripts of publicly available video recordings) are available in English. This semester’s work may also involve some support from DASIL students. This semester’s research builds on my four previous semesters of working with a research assistant or supervising directed research for credit related to my project’s broader interest in how the European Union tries to influence how its member states educate for diversity and inclusion. This project is intended to offer alternative perspectives for the US context on how topics have been taken up in policy environments involving different scales or levels of governance, and where educational policy has been decentralized. I believe that previous students working with me in these other capacities have appreciated the mentoring that I have provided about the research process as well as expanded knowledge about international affairs. I have over twenty years of experience as a qualitative (ethnographic and historical) researcher.
