"Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose."- Zora Neal Hurston

May 24th, 2022

Introduction

Hello! I’m Hannah, a senior at UW-Eau Claire studying Political Science Legal Studies. This is my first post in my year-long journey of research and applying for graduate school.

I am an active member and student researcher with the Menard Center for Constitutional Studies. I participate in Pi Sigma Alpha, which is the National Political Science Honor Society. Recently, I joined the Ronald E. McNair program here at UW- Eau Claire.

Presenting my research with the Menard Center at CERCA 2022

My Research

The Menard Center for Constitutional Studies is a center within the Political Science department at UW-Eau Claire. It is dedicated to researching

federal and state constitutional questions. At UW-Eau Claire, we focus on questions surrounding the 1st Amendment and tolerance. Last summer, I researched the tests that the Supreme Court applies to cases surrounding hate speech and incitement. This project was funded with a grant through the Menard Center.

I will also be conducting research this summer, which is funded by two grants. One is from the Menard Center and the other is through UW- Eau Claire’s Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP). My project is titled The Rise of Q-Anon: From a Chatroom Board to an International Movement. I anticipate this project to be challenging. I will be learning how to code which has never come up in any of my classes or research before, as well as juggling my time between doing research for two different grants. Even though these grants apply to the same project, they cover two different aspects of it. The Menard Center grant is going towards the analysis of tolerance laws and the ORSP grant is going towards learning how to code a web-scraping program, pulling tweets, and running data analysis on said tweets.