Aneka
Torgrimson
Sponsor: Christyann Darwent, Ph.D. Anthropology Dolls have been an important part of Inuit culture since before Euroamerican whalers, explorers, and colonists arrived in the Arctic (Fitzhugh and Engelstad 2017; Whitridge 2023). The Department of Anthropology Museum houses the extensive Indigenous ethnographic collections of zoologist, naturalist, and physician, Dr. Clinton Hart Merriam, including a series of six female dolls dressed in Inuit-style attire. However, it was unclear when, how, or where Merriam obtained these dolls. He participated in several Arctic expeditions, traveling to Newfoundland, Labrador, and Greenland in 1883 and to Alaska in 1899. To identify the dolls' origins, I compared information and photographs from the Museum's original catalog with ethnographic reports and similar collections from other museums, finding that the dolls best resemble West Greenlandic Inuit fashion. They were identified by their "top-knot" hairstyles, cloth parkas, striped trousers, and tall hide boots, which align with West Greenlandic Inuit attire in the late 1800s. Through research on different Arctic doll-making traditions from this period, it is clear that these dolls were produced for tourism rather than for traditional use. Thus, Merriam likely obtained them via purchase or as a gift during his expedition to Greenland as a surgeon on the SS. Proteus in 1883. Social Media in Election Narratives: How College Students Make Meaning of Cultural Identity
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Aneka Torgrimson
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Young adults increasingly engage with politics through social media, which has become a central space for political discourse, identity expression, and meaning-making (Hammack, 2011). Narrative identity research suggests that sociopolitical contexts play a key role in how individuals interpret experiences related to race, gender, and national belonging, but social media remains understudied as a meaning-making space. In the present study, we analyzed written narratives about the 2024 presidential election from 430 young adults in college. Preliminary analyses indicate that social media was mentioned in a majority of political narratives. In planned analyses, we will code narratives for the presence of social media, depth of meaning-making, and whether meaning-making occurs at the individual, relational, or structural levels using established coding systems. We will determine whether narratives with mention of social media also contain higher meaning-making of race/ethnicity and gender relative to those with no mention of social media. We will also assess whether meaning-making varies across the individual, relational, and structural levels of reasoning. These findings can illuminate how social media functions as a central context in shaping understandings of political experiences. Discussion will center on the role of digital environments in shaping broader processes of identity. The Past in Practice: Interpreting the Ancient World Josue Toribio Madrigal
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UC Davis / Psychology / 2026
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Aneka Torgrimson