Institute for Policy, Ethics, and Culture (IPEC) News Blog

Tag: graduate student

Spring 2024 IPEC Seed Grant Awards Announced

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The Institute for Policy, Ethics, and Culture (IPEC) announces the Spring 2024 Research Seed Grant award recipients. Congratulations to each of the awardees.

The principal investigators of the awarded projects include:

Faculty Small Seed Research Grants:

  • Erika Vye (GLRC)
  • Mark Lounibos (HU)
  • Dana Van Kooy (HU)
  • Mary Cyr (VPA)
  • Chuck Wallace (CS)
  • Alexandra Morrison (HU)
  • Rich Canevez (HU)
  • Mark Rouleau (SS)

Graduate Student Research Grants:

  • Kyle Parker McGlynn, Ph.D. student — Industrial Heritage and Archaeology
  • Aritra Chakrabarty, Ph.D. student — Environmental and Energy Policy
  • Kendall Belopavlovich, Ph.D. candidate — Rhetoric, Theory and Culture
  • James Akinola, Ph.D. student — Rhetoric, Theory and Culture
  • Emma Johnson, Ph.D. student — Rhetoric, Theory and Culture
  • Rachael Hathcoat, M.S. student — Rhetoric, Theory and Culture
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Reminder: Seed Funding Applications Close April 12

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IPEC’s seed funding applications for both faculty and graduate students close on April 12, 2024.

Description: Small Grants are available to Michigan Tech Graduate Students to conduct preliminary research in areas that intersect with Policy, Ethics, and Culture, including but not limited to (1) Social Media and Society; (2) Human Machine Culture; (3) Justice and Security in Energy Transitions; (4) Ethics in STEM; and (5) Algorithmic Culture. Funds can be used for hourly pay, conference travel, or travel to collect data and access primary sources.

Contact: If you have any questions about whether or not your research project fits with IPEC’s research scope, reach out to IPEC’s Associate Director Soonkwan Hong at shong2@mtu.edu.

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This Week’s IPEC Programming

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Cayuse Training, 11/14 9-10:00 AM, Library Room 242

Join us tomorrow from 9-10:00 AM in Library Room 242 for Cayuse Training! Register for the session to attend.

Research Proposal Writing Workshop, 11/16 6:30-7:30 PM, Walker 107

On Thursday, we’re collaborating with the Graduate Student Government and Ecosystem Science Center for a Research Proposal Writing Workshop, geared toward Graduate Students. Visit GSG’s website for more information about the event.

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Social Media and Society Research Area Updates

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Photo by ALEXANDRE DINAUT on Unsplash

With a new year (and semester) on the horizon, the Social Media and Society research area lead Rich Canevez has envisioned an exciting research agenda that you can be a part of! Applying to join the research area is easy, with our new google form.

New Research Activities

Rich Canevez (research area lead) just conducted field research at the Toronto Ukraine Festival in September, collecting data and recruiting participants to share their thoughts on the use of religious iconography to support Ukraine’s resistance. 

This project will continue throughout the year until the summer of 2024, and will include coordinated work across Ukrainian communities in St. Louis MO and Cleveland OH in the United States.

Research Area Scope

The penetration of social and digital media into almost every facet of social and political life has come with it the re-construction and re-imagining of those processes and practices. Peace and conflict, truth and fiction, and the material and discursive aspects of life find new practices and conceptions within these spaces. Although built within the cyber-spaces of the Internet, the impact of social and digital media information is equally about the physical lived realities of our world as it is about the digital lives we lead.


The Social Media and Society research area sets an inclusive lens on the impact that trans-national exchanges of information have on political, social, cultural, and personal life. The evolution of political life alongside the Internet has created not just novel modes of engagement of these processes, but also created new dimensions of conflict and war that challenge our previous conceptions of how these phenomena play out. The evolution of social and personal life alongside the Internet has provided new spaces for communities to construct meanings and world-views relevant to groups and the self, for better or for worse. 

The types of projects we consider are how information and cyber-spaces interact with war and conflict, how disinformation and misinformation manifests and spreads through social media platforms, and more generally the range of emergent topics concerning the impact of trans-national information exchange on societies world-wide.

Vision for 2024

We will be continuing our current projects looking at cyber activism and resistance in the Ukrainian defense against Russian aggression, and exploring the discourses around COVID-19 disinformation while continuing to grow our research area and overall presence at Michigan Tech University.

It is our goal in 2024 to extend our reach even further throughout MTU’s departments and divisions given the broad and wide ranging contributions from different perspectives on campus that could help grow this area through collaborations across research, events, and pursuing funding opportunities.

We also are intending to more closely communicate the research support we can offer to both undergraduate and graduate students alike who could be interested in contributing to ongoing research efforts, or even starting their own. It is our hope that, in accomplishing these objectives, we can move towards establishing ourselves as a research and collaboration lab under the IPEC umbrella.

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Join an IPEC Research Area: New Form

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IPEC has five research areas

  1. Social Media and Society
  2. Human Machine Culture
  3. Justice and Security in Energy Transitions
  4. Ethics in STEM
  5. Algorithmic Culture

All of our research areas invite graduate students and faculty to join by filling out our new interest form. More information about each research area can be found on IPEC’s website.

The institute brings together a diversity of knowledge holders–faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, staff, and community members–to collaborate on and engage in research and scholarship that responds to the emerging techno-social environment.

The institute supports members through activities, such as, but not limited to, identifying funding opportunities, helping researchers develop externally funded research proposals, assisting in the creation and management of multiple investigator proposals and project teams, assisting with post-award project management and compliance, providing seed funding to support research development, supporting research activities with awards, and providing opportunities to promote collaboration internally and externally.

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