Artificial reefs, Dungeons & Dragons, healthcare management, aerial dance, and the magnetic properties of rocks were just a few of the eclectically diverse topics Concordia College students presented during the annual Celebration of Student Scholarship on Wednesday.
The annual event is a daylong research symposium designed to highlight the scholarly work of the students, whether it’s creative work, scholarship, or research conducted under the guidance of a mentor. It can mean presentations to rooms full of classmates and teachers, or the design and creation of a beautiful poster filled with meticulously-collected experimental results.
COSS is anything but a perfunctory show of academic force for the students involved, who instead seized the opportunity to dig into a topic they love and present it to the world. Whether it was hummingbird behavior, alginate bioplastics, or youth mental healthcare access, they were ready and eager to explain what they did and why it matters.
Students who earned awards for their session-based presentations were Emily Liddell ’24, with a first place award, and Jessica Howard ’24, with a second place award. Favziya Rasulova ’25 earned the honors for poster presentations.
‘The Unacknowledged Role of Women in Revitalizing Post-Conflict Societies’
Dana Al Khaldi ‘24, a political science and global studies major, originally hails from Jordan and, as someone who lived in a conflict-impacted region, she wanted to study how conflict can be halted and how societies recover after conflict.
During her research, though, she found a rather sizable gap in the existing academic literature on the topic — most often, it focuses on economic and political recovery and neglects women’s contributions. Even when women’s roles are examined, the academic focus tends to be on their role as victims, rather than as active agents of post-conflict recovery.
Women’s role in revitalizing societies following a conflict had been overlooked.
Al Khaldi decided to begin filling the gap with an analysis of her own, gathering the scant information that already existed and adding more from multiple post-conflict situations, from Vietnam, the partitioning of India, and the Rwandan genocide, to the war in Syria and the ongoing conflict in Somalia and more.
Her presentation could have been a litany of tragedies, but Al Khaldi instead focused on the work women had done to improve their communities after the conflicts. In Vietnam, women moved into the labor force and increased the nation’s economic stability. In Rwanda, women entered political and economic spaces they hadn’t been in before, and even very literally rebuilt their societies and homes, brick by brick. In some areas, women have been increasingly creating art to express their experiences and, in others, they develop their schools or begin farming in order to very literally feed their nations.
Al Khaldi hopes to become a development profile manager for an institution like the United Nations in the future so she can have a greater hand in helping post-conflict societies.
‘Armies, Battles, Cards, and Dice’
Parsley Sternhagen ’25, a multimedia journalism and English major, and Sarah Mueller ’26, an English and women’s and gender studies major, presented an ethnographic study involving a local game store, Little Big Wars.
Their research, “Armies, Battles, Cards, and Dice: Building community through collaborative play” focused on a single group of people playing through a Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying campaign. They spent more than 20 hours observing the group, whose ages ranged from 13 to mid-60s and who represented multiple genders. Sternhagen and Mueller’s observations were both in person and through their Discord chat archive, enabling them to learn about their interpersonal dynamics as well as their interactions with the staff of Little Big Wars.
“Who are the people who come in and buy stuff from Little Big Wars? Why do they choose to go there rather than another store? One of the tenets of the customer mindset is loyalty,” Mueller said, recounting an incident in which one of the gamers broke one of the pieces the store allows customers to use for free. The store insisted the gamer did not need to pay for it, and the person responded by buying something, due to their commitment to Little Big Wars.
The pair of researchers surveyed the group and found that every member of the group purchased products from the store, too, Sternhagen said.
She and Mueller both agreed they’d love to join the game now that their studies on the group are complete.
Bioplastics recipes and a tire tragedy
With more than 80 posters competing for the top honors, Rasulova earned the prize for her presentation, “Bendy Like Bioplastics: Exploring Different Recipes for New Chitosan and Alginate Bioplastics.”
Plastics can pose a threat to the environment, and in recent years concern has focused on microplastics, tiny bits of plastic so omnipresent they have been found in drinking water and human breast milk. One alternative to conventional plastic would be bioplastics made from the chitin in crustacean or insect shells, or from alginate, a naturally-occurring polymer obtained from seaweed.
During her research, Rasulova investigated new ways to make new bioplastic, testing out a number of different recipes. She was mentored by Dr. Graeme Wyllie, assistant professor of chemistry.
Other scientific inquiries were represented in the poster section too, including “Magnetic Properties of Pipestone (Catlinite) Samples” by Elijah Heyer ’25 and Rowan Nelson ’25.
Mentored by Dr. Thelma Berquó, associate professor of physics, the two men examined the mineral content of the soft, reddish-hued rock known as pipestone. Their samples came from Pipestone National Monument and were provided by a fourth-generation self-taught artist who quarries and carves pipestone there.
Heyer and Nelson used a number of different techniques to test the samples and found the iron oxide hematite in it — explaining the stone’s distinctive signature color.
For her poster, Delaney Claggett ’26 examined a notoriously catastrophic failed project off the coast of Florida in “Diving into the History of Artificial Reefs.”
The Osborne Reef was meant to support fishing activities and increase the population of fish for local fishermen, but instead, after two million tires were put into the ocean in 1972, the ropes holding them together broke apart due to the salinity of the ocean.
Pushed by waves and tides, the tires moved, damaging natural reefs as they did and ending up as yet more trash polluting the ocean.
There are still high hopes for natural reefs, though, Claggett said, provided better materials such as concrete, limestone, and steel, are used, and smaller test projects are done before massive ones.
Some projects served as project proposals, like “Lifelong Learning in Older Adulthood: A Suggestion for Concordia College” by Sydney Olson ’25, Raquel Egge ’24, Bree Sheridan ’24, and Hadlie Dahlseid ’25. Others took the shape of ethnographic reviews of various groups, developed during Dr. Karla Knutson's English 267 class, "The Ethnographic Essay," including Concordia’s Exotic Animal Care and Husbandry Club (by Olivia Daniels ’24) or the staff of FM Aerial and Movement Arts (by Briea Freeman ’27). There were projects on missionary discipleship, courtroom dramas, and chest pain treatment.
COSS 2024 was the 15th annual Undergraduate Research | Scholarship | Creative Activity Symposium at Concordia and URSCA’s 11th full-day event.
