For her capstone project, Nicole Gonzales '16 wrote a digital marketing plan for a Chicana/o and Latina/o community arts center in Los Angeles.
The Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies encourages students to seek opportunities to grow as scholars through faculty-mentored research. Our students often attend national conferences, such as NACCS (National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies) to present their original research. In addition, our faculty regularly employ students as research assistants—a part-time job that is also a mentoring and research skills training program.
University-wide research opportunities include:
- Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP): A grant program that supports individualized or collaborative research projects under the guidance of a faculty mentor. These grants provide students with a stipend to help cover their housing and food costs.
- Undergraduate Research Symposium: An annual showcase of student research projects from around LMU.
- Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies Capstone Seminar (CLST 5000): All Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies majors and minors engage in an original, in-depth research project in our Senior Research Seminar. The work done in this course often serves as a writing sample in applications to graduate and professional programs, and is evidence to employers of our students’ abilities to conduct effective research, evaluate and synthesize information, and work on real-world problems.
Recent Senior research projects have included:
Class of 2016
- Minorities as Majority: A Critical Examination of the Disproportionate Number of Latino and Black Children Referred to the Juvenile Justice System
- Claiming Angeleno Identity: The Difference Immigration Makes
- Marketing Los Muertos: Self Help Graphics and Chicana/o Art Activism
- Disparities in Mental Health and Academic Success for Latin@ High School Students: Exploring the Social Inequalities and Systematic Injustices
- The Human Cost of the Militarized U.S.-Mexico Border: A Call to Demilitarize the U.S.-Mexico Border and Decolonize the Mind
- ¿Where are the Latin@ Librarians?
- Chicana Feminist Takeover of Public Art Museums: Decolonizing Pedagogies of Knowledge Construction
- Femicide in Juarez: Economic, Structural, and Cultural Factors.
Class of 2015
- Latina/o Immigration in Los Angeles: Public Perception, Policy, and Activism
- ‘Migration is Beautiful’: Mariposas, Migration, and Chicana/o Cultural Production
- Revising the Narrative: Experimental Poetry in the Spirit of El Movimiento
- An approach to the Planning of Redevelopment through Latino Urbanism
- Mythic Reservations: A Decolonial Take on the Dawes Act, Gendered Assimilation, and Federal Indian Policy (1850-1900)