Writing and Rhetoric Majors Rafaela Evans and Zachary Barlow Awarded Grants to Support International Research Projects in Tunisia and the United Kingdom

Rafaela Evans and Zachary Barlow have each been awarded an Undergraduate Summer Research Award in the amount of $2,000. Funds to support this stipend are provided by the Syracuse University Student Association, the Provost's Office, and the Office of Research at Syracuse University. Through this grant, they will be providing essential research to two international projects currently taking place in the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition.

Rafaela Evans will join a team of SU Writing and Rhetoric faculty, Tunisian High School teachers, and Tunisian NGO human rights activists in a project being developed in conjunction with the Tunisian Ministry of Education and the United Nations. The goal of the project is to research and develop cultural programming in Tunisia designed to blunt the recruitment strategies of ISIS, who have a principal route through Tunisia on their way to Syria. During this upcoming summer, Evans will work with this international team to gather research on the current political situation in Tunisia as well as the social media recruitment strategies of ISIS, specifically as it relates to young adults in southern Tunisia. In addition, Evans will begin to find responsive social media models which can be integrated into the Tunisian public school curriculum and enable students to develop and distribute a more inclusive democratically informed public rhetoric in the community. Finally these research efforts will support a collaborative effort in which Syracuse University students and Tunisian High School students will create print/multimodal pieces focused on tolerance and inclusion designed to circulate in school and neighborhood communities in Tunisian and the United States.

Zachary Barlow will join an international research team of SU, London Metropolitan University, Texas A&M, and Sheffield-Hallam faculty to support the continued development of a digital/print archive of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP). The FWWCP was a network of over eighty working-class writing groups distributed across the United Kingdom that over its thirty-year history self-published close to one million books documenting how the British working class was altered by global economics, immigration trends, and emerging identity-based politics. Barlow’s current grant research emerges directly from his role as an Assistant Editor of New City Community Press where he oversaw development of Transitions, a book project drawing from the FWWCP archive and placing it in context of a recent writing project uniting SU students and UK community writers on the topic of cultural change. Over the summer, Barlow will continue to help to build the archive, researching the best methods for digital preservation, as well as joining ongoing efforts to create an oral history of the FWWCP.

—Steve Parks