This second week has been incredible. We hit the ground running on Monday, with each of us finding 18 sources on hate crime victimization literature.
I was assigned the topic, “How do hate crimes impact victims?” and created an annotated bibliography from my references. The next day, we took our findings and divided them into four different themes. From that, we participated in a lecture on Criminology theories, and learned the differing ways in which we could write a Literature Review.
After deep diving into the literature and familiarizing ourselves with the themes and theories, we set off to write a Literature Review. I have spent the past week refining my lit review, and have really gotten a great understanding of the structure, as well as how to write concisely, clearly, and precisely.
I made sure to incorporate Islamophobia as a predominate topic within my lit review. As of now, the thesis of my lit review is that hate crimes lead to victim withdrawal from communities due to disruption of their routine activities, which in turn leads to the consequences of isolation compounding to the worsening of psychological and potential PTSD symptoms.
In addition to writing a Literature Review, we had a recent PhD graduate of the UALR Criminology program come in and speak to us about graduate school. Her talk was ridiculously motivating, and I feel refreshed just thinking about it!
For our Thursday social, we had a tour of the State Capitol. It was a blast, and extremely informative. I love exploring how different states govern themselves, and we got to go into the House and Senate chambers. One of the highlights of the tour was going into the Treasury, where they surprised us with $6,000 to hold! Arkansas has the only state capitol that allows citizens to go into the Treasury, let alone touch/hold money. As a side quest, we went to find the infamous Jim Bob Duggar’s portrait from when he served as a member of the House of Representatives of Arkansas, who has recently had a Netflix documentary highlighting his scandals.
We concluded the week by checking out a few local areas (a waffle press, cafe, bakery, and pizza place), all the while bringing our laptops to work on our lit review.
It was an incredibly rewarding week!
HSF House Blogs 