A Religious Studies Minor, Maram Saada, won first place in the Norma J. Lang Prize for Undergraduate Information Research competition in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. She conducted this research under the guidance of Religious Studies Professor Flagg Miller.
Maram’s research paper attends to the ways in which systemic inattention by psychologists to the religious identities and multicultural backgrounds of their subjects has been reflected and sadly amplified in current health-education curricula at California State Universities. Her project is multidisciplinary at its core as Maram integrates studies of clinical psychology with analyses of the history of science, the colonial legacies of science-driven health-care, culturally variable understandings of religion and ongoing inequities and discrimination in fields of Western and American education. Especially impressive is the paper’s use of theoretical readings and research on psychology and related applied sciences to identify thirteen keywords from models of multicultural learning and then use them in a quantitative study that ranks and assesses the success of fifteen CSU masters-degree programs in helping students to understand and incorporate multicultural perspectives into their graduate research.