SECOND DEGREE: Hands on

Choosing a field of study as a graduate student means selecting a scholarly career that will occupy a considerable portion of one's life. All of the research is supposed to break new ground. But some students are studying topics that seem distant from the traditional offerings in their fields. They have made a connection or gained a perspective on the subject no one else has had before. And while at first the topics may seem off the wall, in reality students are conducting serious research seeking answers to serious questions. · Amy Trubek's studies in anthropology have not taken her to archaeological digs in South America, although she has traveled to France. What she has been uncovering in that country are clues toward solving one of the great mysteries – why does the world so revere French cuisine? Trubek says when she enrolled in a culinary school after graduating from college, she found herself asking serious intellectual questions about the history of cuisine, French in particular. Trubek said she wants to know how the world has come to regard French cooking as "fancy." Concentrating on the evolution of the culinary profession in France and its spread abroad, Trubek said her work is rewarding since so little has been done on the topic, especially by anthropologists. Trubek said when the cuisine of a certain culture has been studied, its analysis "tends to be mostly symbolic, in terms of food in ritual," she said. Finding resources on the topic was difficult, she said. Existing facilities are sparse at best. "There is no center for food study. I've had to ferret this out and go long distances in both time and thought," she said. Living in Belgium and studying at a French high school armed her with the language skills necessary to pour over the archived documents she found in France. It is a field in which few original sources, such as 18th- and 19th-century French cookbooks and culinary journals, can be found in English translation. Trubek added that her training as a professional chef has also provided her with the ability to "speak" the language of the chefs she has interviewed. On the whole, she said, her research has found among the French people an attitude toward food unequaled in America. "There is a cultural emphasis on food there?that gives people a creativity that hasn't happened in the United States," she said. "Their culture possesses a certain taste. They call it le gozt – most French think French cuisine is the best." Trubek discovered that one notable characteristic of the French which shapes their outlook on food was the value they placed on the land itself as an agricultural commodity. "The French have a very strong affinity toward the land, especially the food and wine of a region," she said. Trubek said her research has also uncovered a gender discrepancy in the culinary profession. In the 19th century, the pervading opinion was that women did not possess the physical abilities required of a chef. Even to this day, few women have worked in the profession, Trubek said, although they recently have become more involved. "There has always been an awareness that women cooked," Trubek said, "but there was a difference between working in a professional kitchen and doing it at home." Her interest in the historical and ethnographic research on the culinary profession of France is certainly unique. Trubek said, however, that she's not sure "where this is going to lead me." · Gas stations in New Jersey are nothing special. But to a regional science graduate student, they represent more than just place to stop and fill up. For her dissertation work, Diana Koros is taking a look at why certain groups block the commercial development of gas stations in New Jersey. "If you look at the building of the exact same station in two different places, some people will yell and scream, while others are happy to see it," she said. The back-and-forth arguments can become a great strain on small, local economies when residents stymie such commercial developments. "Locals will start nitpicking, and keep sending the building's plans back to the developer. If these delaying tactics don't work, they can always sue," Koros said. She says one of the complaints in New Jersey is that since the mediation process takes so long, in the long run it will be economically self-destructive to the community. The problem can defy simple demographic analysis, too, especially when groups outside the area become involved. Koros said the incorporation of local politics and economics is necessary to identify which groups will object to a particular development proposal. "All the different towns have different values and regulations; standard economics doesn't take much of that into account," she said. In the end, Koros said, she wants to be able to discover a smoother process that will enable builders to develop but does not "step on toes" or ignore citizens' concerns. Regional science research is usually more theoretical, Koros said, or when applied pertains to the national level. Koros said she hopes to take the results of her research back to New Jersey to help streamline the whole commercial development process, and eventually implement new policies covering development projects. "I plan to stay in the region. I'm trying to do something I can take back to my home state to contribute to the social good," she said. · Philadelphia and the University are rich in their number of historical firsts. In pursuing her work, one history graduate student has found out that the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania was one of the first hospitals to have in-house social workers. Their duties in the first half of the century included caring for some of the city's most unwelcome residents: unwed mothers. In her doctoral thesis, Dana Barron is examining the plight of unwed mothers in Philadelphia from the 1920s to 1960s. To describe their experiences she has received permission to use case records from Sheltering Arms, a service agency which provided social work consultation to unwed mothers. Barron has found numerous examples of unwed mothers enduring the judgments of a hostile society. "Until the '70s, if a woman was in a public school and became pregnant, she would be thrown out of school," she said. "Many women lost their jobs, some were even disowned – the family was ashamed." Barron has found that few studies actually concentrate on the women themselves. "When I began the project a year and a half ago there was nothing," she said. She also says only three books have been published recently on unwed motherhood, focusing mostly on policy-making and institutions, not the women's own experiences. Barron plans to make a book out of her 500-page dissertation. "It's hard because I'm trying to make it genuinely historical, while also keeping in mind the contemporary debates on teen pregnancy," she said. Barron's research on unwed mothers has focused on discovering coping measures that shy away from coercive methods, such as the Norplant birth control device or forced sterilization. "One of my big concerns is that a lot of contemporary policy is aimed at changing people's behavior," Barron said. "There is a history and we can learn from this history what women need to cope and get by." · How does the written word transform into a wartime horror? Warren Haffar is trying to stop wars before they happen by looking at the language that leads to such aggression. His dissertation falls under the rubric of Conflict Analysis and Peace Research, one of the University's interdisciplinary program. Applying theory and analysis to real-world situations, Haffar's research examines how language can result in conflict resolution, before it results in a war. "I've noticed that people seem to more readily accept violence over diplomacy," he said. "I want to find out why those other peaceful options get filtered out." Haffar will focus his research on the Gulf War, where he notes there was a very "quick jump" from the use of diplomatic to military solutions. His work is unusual because it attempts to link both qualitative and quantitative aspects of policy making. Merging communications and linguistics with regional science and economics, for example, is not an easy task, Haffar said. "These are areas of inquiry that traditionally are quite separate," he said. "Not much of this has been done in relation to conflict analysis." For Haffar, language is key to understanding how the development of policies will lead either to war or peace. To this end, he will use a computer program that analyzes the language of a certain policy and ranks its goals and strategies. By coupling this work with traditional quantitative analysis of economic indicators, Haffar said he hopes to discover what makes a certain policy lead to war instead of peace. The diverse nature of his work calls upon the resources of several different departments, making the University the ideal location for Haffar's research. "With the the interdisciplinary graduate groups, I can draw on the best from each department – you get the cream of the crop from across the social sciences," he said. Haffar especially sees conflict resolution as an attempt to broaden the field of alternatives to include peaceful, not military, solutions. "Political science always seemed to focus on who wins and loses – I want to find a way to get both sides to win," he said. But Haffar emphasized all this complex analysis across disciplines is useless unless he can successfully apply it to real policy-making situations. "I think this will actually do something besides producing another stack of papers that just sits and gathers dust."