A new conference at California State University, Bakersfield brought student research out of the classroom and into public view, on how Central Valley students are studying issues ranging from surveillance and social media to political conflict and education policy.

The inaugural Political Science and Interdisciplinary Research Conference was held April 17, bringing students and faculty from across multiple disciplines to present work focused on social and political issues affecting local and national communities.

Michael Ault, a faculty member in the Department of Political Science, said the event grew out of his research methods courses centered on regional engagement.

“The idea of students here in the Central Valley, the South Central Valley, doing research in regionally important and relevant issues,” he said. 

He said research opportunities are often concentrated in larger metropolitan areas. But he said the Central Valley has had fewer spaces for that kind of work.

“The Central Valley, however, I would say there’s almost a glut of research being done on social issues, economics, and other social issues,” he said. 

The conference, he said, was designed to expand that work and encourage student scholarship across disciplines.

“So what we’re attempting to do is sort of follow in those footsteps and then also branch off even further.”

Across the event, student presentations covered media, technology, public policy and political behavior, along with broader discussions of artificial intelligence, social media and the forces shaping society.

The conference also brought together students from political science, sociology, psychology, philosophy and history across two colleges, with many projects beginning in research methods courses and developing over time.

“A number of students have begun, most of this research begins in a research methods course that students are taking either in their sophomore year or their junior year,” Ault said. “And then from those courses, cultivating, working with their faculty mentors on the research and developing it.”

Among the panels was “Power, Inequality, and Social Order,” which focused on surveillance, gender and political systems.

Joshua Anope presented research on surveillance capitalism and its influence on behavior in the digital age.

“What I found was that this is not an invasion of privacy, but a corruption of agency,” Anope said.

He explained how targeted advertising shapes consumer decisions.

“If we were to purchase tickets to this movie based on these advertisements, then I’m taking my own financial resources and allocating them towards a corporation that did not have my own best interests in mind,” he said.

His work draws on the concept of surveillance capitalism, a framework developed by Shoshana Zuboff that examines how personal data is collected and used for profit.

Another presentation by Juliana Ochoa Peralta and Jeannette Haldana explored how social media influences perceptions of women, focusing on the rise of “tradwife” content.

“We believed that consuming tradwife content would reduce self-efficacy and increase internalized misogyny,” Ochoa Peralta said.

Their study compared responses to feminist, neutral and tradwife videos. While self-efficacy remained relatively unchanged, participants reacted more negatively to tradwife content and showed higher levels of traditional feminine identity.

Haleigh Wagner presented research examining public attitudes toward a hypothetical second civil war in the United States.

“We wanted to focus on who those 11 million people are and why they would want to participate,” Wagner said, referencing survey data on Americans willing to fight.

Her research focused on social dominance orientation, a trait linked to belief in group hierarchies.

“These individuals high on this trait wanted to participate because it made them excited,” she said.

Another presentation came from Alina Prieto, who examined the impact of affirmative action bans on the University of California system.

Her research focused on the impact of affirmative action bans on the UC system.

“It was about propositions that banned the use of affirmative action within public institutions in California,” Prieto said.

She said her work measured student outcomes, particularly among minority students.

“I wanted to measure the attainment of academics that students, specifically minority students, would have in the UC system,” she said.

For Prieto, the topic is personal.

“Being able to have access to education and work, whether you’re a person of color or a woman, is just so important to me,” she said “We are seeing so much hate being spread around minorities, immigrants, sexism being prevalent.”

She added that policy decisions can directly affect opportunity.

“And making sure that these doors aren’t being closed and that they’re staying open, and we’re seeing so many of these doors being closed by policy,” she said.