The Women’s Studies Research Center Internship:
Student-Scholar Partnership (SSP)
Project Proposal Form Fall 2013 – BOTH New and Continuing
SCHOLAR INFORMATION
Name: Nancer Ballard
Brandeis WSRC Affiliation: Resident Scholar
E-mail: nballard@brandeis.edu or nbballard@comcast.net
Are there dates during the semester when you will be traveling/unreachable? Please specify.
None that I know of at the moment. There is a trial in which I am scheduled to play a role second
week in November, but that may be moved or the case may settle.
PROJECT INFORMATION
Title of Project: Fears Unfounded: How We are Changed by The Things That Don’t Happen-- A
Narrative Based Multi-Disciplinary Project
Please circle one:
Is this project: Continuing from the Spring 2013 SSP program
or
a brand-New Project?
Describe your research project in three sentences for advertising purposes. (More detailed description
will be given later in this app.)
Fears Unfounded is a writing/ literature/ psychology based project that examines how women
construct internal narratives, experience, and identities in response to the “thing that didn’t
happen.” The project is intended to turn inside out our conventional way of thinking about
narrative plot and conflict to examine individual learning and community changes in response
to things that don’t happen due to preparation, chance, luck, others’ actions or inaction, etc.
The project will examine differences in the ways in which men and women view the things that
don’t happen, and how the experience is integrated into a sense of agency, identity and
relationship with the world. The Fears Unfounded project will culminate in a braided essay and
development of an interactive workshop for students and adults.
STUDENT PARTNER INFORMATION
Student-Scholar Partnership
Spring 2013
Project Proposal
Have you participated in the Student-Scholar Partnership in prior years?
Yes _X____ No _____
What is your timeline for work to commence on your research project this semester? I can begin
whenever the student is ready to begin.
Scholars and faculty members participating in the SSP Program are required to meet with their
student research assistants on a weekly basis for supervision.
Please explain how you will fulfill this commitment. Where do you plan to hold supervision meetings?
How will you manage time together when one of you is traveling/vacationing?
My project description includes a rough schedule for the project and subject related interaction
between scholar and student Many things will be going on concurrently, so there is always work
that one of us can do if the other is temporarily unavailable or has a scheduling conflict. I have
no plans for extended travel this fall.
Hiring Criteria Reminder: The SSP is designed for Students and Scholars to work together for 50
hours on a project in the Scholar’s area of expertise. All candidates who apply must be considered.
Final choices should be made based on student’s background, skills and level of interest. Decisions
may not be made based solely on academic year standing.
Qualifications Needed for Student Partner: Please indicate below any Required or Desired skills
pertinent to your job description. NOTE: Year of Standing (i.e. Sophomore, Junior, Senior) may
NOT be used as a sole criterion. Please see Coordinator if you have any questions.)
Related coursework:
Technical Skills:
Student with writing interest and literature courses will find it most
interesting. Able to talk to others and take good notes or record
and transcribe notes are important for interviewing.
Good analytic skills are a plus. Willingness to experiment in visual
mediums, power point expertise would be a plus but not necessary.
Past Experience:
Similar Professional Interests: A student interested in Writing or the arts or psychology is
probably going to find this project more interesting than one not interested in these things.
Other (please indicate): Student needs to have good sense of responsibility, ability to self-reflect
(we will be talking about our own experiences as well as literature and science). Honesty is
important, but student will not be asked to plumb any personal experience with which she/he is
uncomfortable.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Please submit a curriculum vitae and a detailed explanation of the following:
1. Please give a detailed description of your project.
2. What role will the student play in the project? Please be specific regarding expected
responsibilities.
Student-Scholar Partnership
Spring 2013
Project Proposal
3. How will your project benefit from the student's participation?
4. What specific knowledge or skills will the student acquire from carrying out this work?
5. What do you foresee to be the mutual benefits of the mentoring relationship?
6. Please feel free to add any other information you feel relevant.
See attached.
Any questions? Please direct them to the Student-Scholar Partnership Coordinator, Kristen Mullin,
Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, MS 079, Waltham, MA. 02454-9110
Email: mullin@brandeis.edu
Fears Unfounded: How We Are Changed By the Things That Don’t Happen
A Narrative Based Multi-Disciplinary Project
Fears Unfounded Project Overview
Fears Unfounded is a writing/ literature/ psychology based project that examines how women
construct their internal narratives, experience, and identities around the things that don’t happen. The
Scholar’s intention is to turn our conventional way of thinking about narrative plot and conflict inside
out by examining life and community changes to the things that don’t happen. We will also be
looking at some science and neurobiology to see how the body makes things not happen (such as
inhibitory responses) and the development of consciousness as a mechanism to delay or inhibit action
as well as to take action. The project will culminate in a braided essay and development of an
interactive workshop for students and adults. Ballard and her scholar partner will also spend at least
one session attempting to understand their experience and internal process visually rather than verbally
by working with collage or making artist’s books.
Over the course of the semester, Scholar Nancer Ballard will be writing and revising a four part
braided essay examining the fruits of the research, interviews, and personal reflections on how we are
changed by things that don’t happen over the course of the semester with the student’s input. 1 (The
student may also want to do a writing project of some sort if interested). Nancer Ballard and her
student partner will also be designing a workshop to be presented to other students at Brandeis (and
potentially elsewhere) that the student will be integrally involved in designing and testing. The student
will have an opportunity to conduct interviews, participate in the research and discussions with the
scholar regarding how people perceive and view the things that don’t happen to them, review drafts of
the essay, participate in the workshop development and co-lead the workshop with the scholar.
The Question that Led to the Fears Unfounded Project:
When we are telling or listening to a story or piece of literature, we are accustomed to thinking in
terms of events that happen: “X happened, and then Y happened, and that led to event Z.” A listener,
prompting a speaker who has forgotten her place, inevitable urges her on with “Then, what
1
The student need not know what a braided essay is. But I will leave be happy to provide a couple of examples
upon request.
Student-Scholar Partnership
Spring 2013
Project Proposal
happened?” Joseph Campbell has identified a well-known pattern of narrative called the Hero’s
Journey that is generally described as the adventure of a hero person (often male) who goes out and
achieves great deeds on behalf of a group, tribe or civilization with an emphasis on the hero’s actions
and deeds in facing and overcoming obstacles.
But what about the events and deeds and consequences that don’t happen? The small unrecognized
daily diligences that avert a danger, catastrophes that don’t take place; warnings that have been heeded
to avert disaster; warnings not heeded that produce no harm; death and misfortune that passes over
your family, chance; apparent miracles; miracles that aren’t; opportunities passed up, etc. How are we
changed by these things? And how often non-events involve behind the scene efforts, forgotten or
invisible helpers, the menders and tenders, the receptives and the witnesses, rather than the actionoriented players and slayers?
We all act, witness, and are both heedless and cautious at times, and we must make sense of our
varied experience of both--- how do we incorporate the receptive moments, the gasp of witness, the
sigh of relief when our fears are not realized into our sense of agency, identity, world view? How are
we changed by the seemingly smaller or unnoticed, unimportant, passed over moments? Do we, as
women, value these moments differently than men? Do women describe these events internally or
externally differently than men? Do we invisibly change our internal perspective or point of view to
highlight happenings when the non-happenings are actually more important? How does our valuing or
devaluing or use of narrative regarding our experience of the things that don’t happen affect our
identity as women?
Fears Unfounded Project Goals and Outcomes:
The goal of the Fears Unfounded project is to examine how people (and women in particular)
experience, internally construct, and learn or ignore things that don’t happen to them. A second goal is
to try to determine what types of experiences of things not happening are deemed important to
women’s view of themselves and their sense of their life course, and how these experiences compare to
events in which they have taken action or “accomplished” things. The third goal is to look at examples
of literature by men and women for instances of transformative change that have occurred when things
did not happen and to identify differences, if any, in the way that men and women view their
experience of “things that didn’t happen.”
The project focus will be on (1) researching, writing and revising a four part “braided” essay that
incorporates: personal experience, literature, science, and the experiences of others; and (2) the
development of an interactive workshop in which students at Brandeis and others can look at how they
internally, and narratively construct what doesn’t happen and how that experience informs the rest of
their lives in a fresh way. (3) We will also experiment with visual arts expression and may incorporate
that into the workshop.
Braided Essay: literary quality for publication.
Workshop/ Presentation: Development or multi-media workshop or presentation that incudes
interactive exercises for college aged and adult audience interested in psychology, literature, writing
and/or the arts.
Student-Scholar Partnership
Spring 2013
Project Proposal
Project Components (Rough Project and Scholar/Student Partnership Structure and
Sequence):
Week 1: Joint Brainstorming (preliminary hypotheses and examples, categories)
Week 2: Develop Categories of non-happenings/ Analyze pieces of literature or events known to both
student and scholar. / Discuss psychological underpinnings of narrative.
Week 3: Sutdent and Scholar conduct independent research and discuss findings: What is the
relationship between how we think about them and how they affect us? Do we turn the non-events into
event in order to remember them? How are non-events remembered? Is their effect different than the
big “happenings” in our lives? Do we turn important moments of learning based on non-events into
events? How do we recognize and honor non-event realizations and transformations?
Week 4-6: Identify and conduct additional research in Science, Literature, Social Science
questions/information based on week 2 and 3 discussions. Discuss ways to test and tease out gender
differences, and begin discussion of interview questions on topics of interest.
Week 4-6: Prepare interview questions; discuss threads of braided essay.
Weeks 4-6: Continue research and writing (scholar) and interviews (both). Identify gender differences
Week 5: Visual Arts experiment; book making and/or power point.
Week: 7: Complete draft of Braided Essay (scholar) Discuss Refinement and revisions with scholar.
Incorporate additional research and interview ancecdotes/ data.
Week 8: Revisions / written product; prepare workshop materials and draft proposal, plan (student and
scholar)
Week 9-10: Revisions to braided essay and refine workshop/ presentation of findings; discuss
audience and publication. Write workshop description, query or letters of introduction.
Week 11: Submit for publication; schedule workshop/ presentation with student.
Student Partnership Criteria
This project is open to any student that is willing to read and analyze some pieces of literature from a
new point of view, likes writing, is interested in figuring out something about how we think and the
ways in which women are similar to and different than men and how those differences play out in our
internal narratives. Students with an interest in narrative and/or nonfiction writing and some post-high
school course work in English and/or writing will probably find the project most interesting. The
student partner need not have any artistic talent or skills, but must be willing to experiment with
making meaning without text through visual and/or audio expression. The student also need not have a
lot of science background but should not be allergic to science since we will be discussing how the
brain works and how human beings make and meaning and memory as part of the exploration of how
events and non-events get laid down in memory. If my student partner is interested and has the time,
there are numerous opportunities to explore publishing and workshop issues, as well as the braided
essay writing/ revision process. The student will be included in any Brandeis and non-Brandeis
workshop op
Student-Scholar Partnership
Spring 2013
Project Proposal