Released Time for Research & Creative Works (RTR)

Silence or Solidarity?: Consumers’ perception of corporate response to Black Lives Matter
Min Chung Han, School of Management and Marketing

The result of this research will contribute to enacting marketing practices that ensure active interest in, and respect for, often overlooked minority consumers. The study also will help the general public to better understand what can be done to mitigate racial injustice and systemic discrimination in the marketing perspective. This research topic will be shared with the Kean Association of Marketing (Student Club) to discuss in their seminar series “Understanding cultural appropriation and inclusivity in marketing” which is co-sponsored by The Kean Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Kean students will identify actions they can take to fight against racism, stereotyping and discrimination in marketing as future business leaders. 

Revision of and Kean Student Production of my new full-length play, Dreams on Fire
Jan Balakian, English

The goal of producing my new play with Kean students is to afford me the opportunity to  revise the play and to make possible an Off-Broadway production, which makes the play eligible for publication. Dreams on Fire is the first play ever to explore college students, mental health, epigenetics (the transmission of trauma), and The Armenian Genocide, set during the election of 2016.  It is groundbreaking in the way it links mental health to historical trauma, personal in the story it tells about a grandmother and a grandson, and about the relationship between two college students.  I wrote this play for our students, and when I sent out a call for theater majors to direct and act in the play, students knocked on my door.  Although two professional directors would like to direct Dreams on Fire, I want to give the first opportunity to Kean’s David Rivera, because he plans to make a career as a high school theater director. The same is true of our Kean actors.  In addition, I will be hiring at least two professional actors to work with them.  My work is twofold: revising the play, as I hear it, and orchestrating a production with our students. 

Dead wood mycobiome: molecular and biochemical diversity
Maria Shumskaya, School of Biology

Objectives: The aim of this project is to study the diversity of species of dead wood inhabitants among managed and unmanaged forests around in New Jersey to identify critical communities and microhabitats in need of focused management and conservation. In addition, we study specific dead wood fungi for their metabolites to identify chemicals with industrial use. We are working on a database of fungal species growing on dead wood, to identify and compare various decomposes in different environments so we will be able to compare the communities and assess the species richness and the health of the ecosystems across the NJ state. The database itself is shared online at inaturalist.org (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/saproxylic-fungi-of-new-jersey) and is available for the Global Biodiversity Information Center (www.gbif.org, see the publications list) for the world research community. We upload new information constantly as we progress through identification. We also perform statistical analysis of the studied communities, and develop new techniques to assess dead wood fungi diversity in a specific area. 

Caremanag-e: Enhancing the Capacity of Care Managers
Daehan Kwak, Computer Science and Technology

Care Managers (CM) are recognized to serve a critical role to promote care services, health equity, and embrace to serve these individuals to help address their needs to increase positive health outcomes. However, the majority of care managers that deliver care management services are with minimal training and experience and there are no national standards guiding the work of this discipline. Care managers do not require formal training and often need consultation when providing g-uidance to consumers. Seeking guidance from supervisors and getting back to the consumer is a lengthy process and supervisors are not always available when guidance is needed. We seek to develop Caremanag-e, a web based interactive decision tree, that will guide CMs through a decision-making process embedded in a best practice framework enabling them to optimally address social or environmental impediments to care. Currently available technology only offers searchable resource databases. Caremanag-e will provide a means for identifying interventions based on the needs and circumstances of each individual client thereby improving client outcomes. This will promote the efficacy of Care Managers and provide solutions for easy access to resources and services to individuals living with SMI/SUD.

Mobile Sensing and Geospatial Analysis of Environmental Characteristics that Promote Mental Health
Feng Qi, School of Environmental and Sustainability Sciences

This study proposes to investigate the characteristics of therapeutic environmental settings and measure the quality of environment for promoting mental health through mobile sensing and geospatial analysis. A mobile sensing app has been developed through an SpF project directed by the applicant. The app is designed to collect data on participants’ perceptions of their surrounding environment and related psychological measures at different locations. High resolution aerial imageries collected with drone mapping will be used to construct virtual realizations of the objective environments corresponding to the perceived environments. Through geospatial analysis, key properties of the objective environment that lead to specific environmental perceptions will be identified and the extent how such properties relate to stress and its management will be quantified. Hypotheses will be generated regarding relations between stress and aspects of the environment, as well as how these are moderated by individual differences such as sociocultural backgrounds.

Bystander Incrimination, 1940s-1990s
Dennis Klein, Department of History

By framing this project historically, this inquiry argues that the bystander’s reputation deteriorated in the mid-to-late 20th century from a conventionally benign spectator–the “invisible third”–to a tacit collaborator. This transformation occurred during the Holocaust era and reached a high-water mark in the 1960s when survivors, writing their memoirs against an ascendant popular impatience with Holocaust memory, wrote defiantly about the shocking abandonment and wholesale betrayal of their compatriots when they were victims of Nazi-era brutality and destruction. As they collectively observed, their compatriots’ historical failure to intervene was rife and, indeed, normative. The intensity of their condemnation is explicable in light of European Jews’ post-emancipation zeal for social acceptance, a zeal so strong that for the most part they believed they actually did belong as compatriots.

Audio Signal Processing Design Tools for Non-Engineers: Effects Realization and Music Composition
Matthew Halper, Department of Music

This project seeks to address this “implementation boundary” by creating audio-effect development kits (analog and digital) and a software-based tool to facilitate rapid effect prototyping. Through the use of these tools, professional and student musicians need only focus on understanding the specific audio process they wish to implement and then either conceptually breadboard or code those specific elements into an existing framework (in the analog or digital domain respectively) to have those algorithms realized in a standalone hardware effect. In addition to the development of these tools, standard, as well as novel music effects processes will be realized and then demonstrated and showcased in original music compositions through live performances and recordings.

Horse: A Borrowed National Pride
Xurong Kong, Department of History

This paper project aims to answer the following questions: How did ancient Chinese elites react to this distressful and could-be-fatal plight? How did they view foreign goods and ideas in general? What were their strategies for accumulating and ensuring supply of foreign goods? How do their international strategies suggest other global exchanges across other cultures? How might their medieval strategies help us better to assess our own modern cultural exchange? Might we understand the unfolding of history as ever-morphing cultural exchanges in which international boundaries are immaterial? Just as personal identities (chosen or given) are fluid, so are cultural identities. In order to answer these questions, this project will focus on the horse, one of the important Chinese symbols; trace its immigration history from other lands to China; sort out its ways of merging to Chinese culture; and analyze the encounters and integration between Chinese and other cultures. Evidently, this project will reveal that the interrelated and interdependent are the fundamental styles and features of cross-cultural exchanges, not just between China and others but also for all.

Art Exhibition
Lewis Kachur, Department of History

My research and critical sensibility pinpoint five landmark exhibitions in three competing Manhattan institutions, to be discussed in chronological order.  They are Guggenheim Museum’s Joseph Beuys of 1979 and Maurizio Cattelan: All (2011); the Museum of Modern Art’s Artist’s Choice series from 1988 to present, their Robert Gober (2014), and the Whitney Museum biennial of 1993, bracketed by an introduction and a coda on the current situation.  This book will further the expanding field of exhibition studies, and the understanding of the trajectory of artworld institutions still understudied.