Student Scholar Spotlight – Ryan Beatty
Student Scholar Spotlight – Ryan Beatty
Featured student work during their time as a college scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Ryan Beatty
I’m a senior Haslam Leadership Scholar (formerly called the Haslam Scholars Program) and College Scholar studying “Narrative and Comparative Border Studies.” My program blends perspectives and methodologies across political science, sociology, geography, anthropology, and journalism to ponder questions like: What is a border? What are the implications of narratives on immigration and border policy decisions? How do different populations perceive and understand borders?
My senior project engages with these questions through qualitative research, where I have chosen images and videos from stories tagged with “border” or “immigration” from the top two most-viewed news sources in the United States—Fox News and MSNBC. Then, I will conduct qualitative interviews with Latino immigrants, an interview before showing the visuals, and an interview after showing the visuals. I hope to learn more about immigrant attitudes towards prevailing narratives surrounding immigration, the perceived differences across news sources, and even the research process.