Editor’s Note (Issue 4)

Welcome to Issue 4 of Deerfield! This journal contains exceptional projects created by undergraduate students in Boston University Writing Program courses from 2025, selected by an Editorial Committee of faculty and students. This year’s selection of publications draws from a wide range of WR courses and highlights the interdisciplinary and multiple genres our students are writing in. 

Across this issue, a set of shared concerns emerges: questions of identity and belonging, the ethical dimensions of representation and technology, and the ways power operates through institutions, media, and personal narrative. Whether through academic analysis, multimodal design, exploratory research, poetry, or public-facing genres like op-eds and TED talks, these writers consistently return to how lived experience intersects with larger systems—cultural, political, environmental, and technological. The result is a collection that is deeply attentive to voice and form, and equally invested in asking how writing can intervene in the worlds it describes.

From WR 120, Mason Dols’ academic essay “Keeping Knowledge or Face?: Activated Spectatorship, Site Specificity, and Performativity” is a nuanced analysis of Alan Michelson’s MFA installation that uses theories of site specificity and activated spectatorship to examine how art, place, and viewer engagement reveal the museum’s complex relationship to Indigenous visibility and its colonial legacy.

WR 120 alternative genre projects include the following projects: *Betelihiem Tecleab’s “So American,” our 2026 Tony Wallace Award for Writing Excellence Winner, is a compelling personal narrative that examines racism and xenophobia in the United States through her experience as an immigrant child, centering on a Fourth of July classroom scene that powerfully illustrates her rejection of a socially imposed racial identity. Robert Rodriguez II’s “Split in Two” narrative essay powerfully intertwines the excitement of leaving for college with the quiet fear that immigration enforcement could disrupt his family’s life at any moment, showing how abstract labels and policies cut into deeply personal, everyday experiences. Darlene K. Adusei’s “Carrying the Weight of Legacy: The Mental Health Toll on First-Gen Daughters” is a compelling op-ed that centralizes the author’s experience as an eldest daughter in a Ghanaian immigrant family to expose the emotional weight of expectation and argue that mental health in diasporic communities must be confronted rather than silenced. Eddy Liulin transforms an academic essay on the ethics of generative AI into an interactive, decision-driven website “GenAI: Author or Plagiarist?” that turns readers into participants while modeling transparent, ethically reflective use of AI in the creative and design process.

Also in this issue, we’re pleased to publish a range of writing from our WR 15x curriculum, including a number of fascinating and interdisciplinary research essays.

From WR 151: *Chloe Avilés’ “The Silent Teacher: The Unspoken Impact of Code-Switching on Second-Generation Latinos in the United States” is a thoughtful, mixed-methods study that combines personal experience and sociological analysis to examine how parental code-switching shapes the identities and experiences of second-generation Latino immigrants within a racially stratified society. MaKenzie Elliott’s “Enhancing the Student Experience Through Teaching and Learning Internal Quality Assurance: Development and Pilot of the SIITE Method Faculty Survey at Boston University’s STEM Department” combines original survey design and sociological analysis to propose practical, evidence-based strategies for improving university teaching effectiveness while critically engaging with broader questions about the purpose and impact of higher education. Jacob Hise’s essay “You’re Born Naked, and the Rest is Capitalism: The RuPaul’s Drag Race Franchise’s Effect on the Politics of Drag Artistry through the Dissemination of Gay Assimilationism” argues that contemporary drag culture—exemplified by RuPaul’s Drag Race—has shifted from its activist roots toward commercialization and assimilation, raising concerns about the dilution and appropriation of queer cultural practices. Madeleine Lam’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Gothic Lesbianism in ‘My Visitation’” is a research project that analyzes Rose Terry Cooke’s “My Visitation” to argue that its Gothic elements create space for representing suppressed queer desire, connecting 19th-century literary strategies to ongoing questions of visibility in contemporary queer media. Jose Ramirez’s “The Changing Path to Pop Stardom: Reconsidering The Role of Institutionally Controlled Success And The New Growing Independent Decentralized Pathway to Mainstream Success” argues that social media platforms like TikTok are reshaping the music industry by prioritizing authenticity and direct artist–fan connections, challenging traditional record label promotion and redefining pathways to success in pop music.

From WR 152: Adi Jalan’s “The Cost of Looking: The Ethics of Photographing Familial Trauma in Margaret Bourke-White’s The Great Migration (1947)” critically examines Bourke-White’s photo-essay to question the ethics of depicting vulnerable families, arguing that while such images powerfully document trauma, they risk erasing individual voices and require viewers to confront their own responsibility in responding.

Two authors transform their WR 152 research into new rhetorical genres for new audiences: *Mairead Peel’s “The Wood Wide Webb” is a multimodal website project that uses research on fungal networks and Suzanne Simard’s “Mother Trees” to argue that forests operate as deeply cooperative systems, challenging human-centered, competitive models of nature and urging a shift toward understanding humans as embedded within ecological interdependence. Brianna Perales’ “Trust in the Machine: Between the Lab Bench and the Algorithm” is an exploratory reflection on AI in medical research that uses lab experience to probe the tension between innovation and responsibility, ultimately arguing that there are no fixed answers: only an ongoing struggle to keep human judgment at the center of technological decision-making.

From WR 153, we have a selection of deeply personal and political creative writing: *Lana Ghazale’s “Learning to Live” is an emotionally courageous creative nonfiction essay about a homeland under siege, arguing that “body voice” writing rooted in grief and sensory detail fosters empathy and resists the dehumanization of others by connecting writer and reader through shared human experience. Two noteworthy collections of poetry: Alexandra Cross’ “To my brother, To me, To the world.” explores her brother’s death to consider the complex, enduring nature of grief, highlighting its personal and social dimensions while emphasizing how poetry can bear witness to both individual loss and the broader impact of the opioid epidemic and Emma Mullay’s “They Will Simply Continue to Sing” is a politically engaged collection that blends personal inquiry with a critique of censorship and systemic failures, ultimately affirming the resilience of free expression and the enduring power of collective voice.

And finally, from WR 318, Aanya Chauhan’s TED-style talk “Sorry For Your Loss… and Other Awkward Things We Say” is a profoundly impactful and transformative speech in which, drawing on her own recent loss, she powerfully demonstrates how personal experience can offer unmatched insight into supporting those who are grieving.

This issue showcases not only a range of genres our students are working in, but also the intellectual flexibility our curriculum prioritizes. Across these pieces, writing emerges as both inquiry and intervention: a way of making sense of our complex world while also reshaping how we see and engage with it. We are proud to share this issue with you and we hope you enjoy it.

Our cover illustration was created by Rania Shah, a sophomore at Boston University double majoring in Neuroscience and Biology with Specialization in Cell Biology, Molecular Biology & Genetics in the College of Arts and Sciences. She explores artistic expression through creating visual art, creative nonfiction writing, and discovering new music, with an emphasis on the emotional and cultural dimensions of lived experience.

Gavin Benke and Courtney Pina Miller

*The Editorial Committee selected these authors as our 2026 Deerfield Award winners.