SUNY Geneseo’s research-based advocacy program

In late September, SUNY Geneseo announced what directed study student-teacher groups were selected for further research at the undergraduate level, with the ultimate goal of the program being used to cause societal change through hard-hitting research. This is the college’s second-year of being involved in the program and the number of participants has only grown. The first year there were two students (Gaetan Jean Louis and Yarold ‘Yaro’ Bautista Martinez) with a different faculty advisor for each (Dr. Kodjo Adabra and Dr. Olaocha Nwabara). This year, the program has four students: Nora Whorton, Seynha Jean Coute, Arianna Whittaker, and Genesis Flores, with three different faculty advisors: Dr. Kodjo Adabra, Dr, Olaocha Nwabara, and Dr. Jessica Gilbert-Overland.

This opportunity is granted to students through the Council of Undergraduate Research (CUR). It seeks to give students the ability to further their professional development and give them real-world experience researching and advocating for their chosen topic of study. The program will commence over the course of six-months sending the participants out to Washington DC to complete workshops, meet with political leaders, and detail their research and its goals through multiple written outlets able to be conducted thanks to grants bestowed upon these undergraduate researchers through CUR. 

Genesis Flores, a junior English and communications double major, sheds some light on why she finds this type of opportunity to be so important to her. She highlights how it is research that meets her where she is, “My research focuses on the community I grew up in [the Bronx, NY], a majority black and latino demographic.” Her research seeks to combat increasing gentrification efforts through community building and trying to maintain the resources, such as public libraries, that have allowed for socio-economic movement in a region where a majority of individuals living there have only completed some high school in their educational pursuits. 

She hopes that this research and the experiences that are being provided by Scholars Transforming through Research (STR) through CUR will allow her to have the skills not only academically, but communicatively to make research that can have actual impact on the lived-level. For her, the main point of this opportunity is to propose public policy that can be utilized to address the issues she and her fellow undergraduate researchers have noticed in the communities that mean the most to them.

These undergraduates and their faculty advisors make-up a few of the larger body of participants in this program. It represents 35 different learning institutions with 41 faculty representatives leading 90 undergraduate researchers across 19 states. Through this initiative to move thought into action, the participants of this program hope to transform the way academia is viewed. 

For many, academia is nothing more than a hypothetical that only in rare and breakthrough cases has the ability to be translate into our everyday lives, but with the smaller and communal-scale of research such as Flores’s it becomes a little clearer to see how this type of research might be able to impact people’s everyday lives.