Duncan Studios

Selected to represent Sonoma State University at the California State University Student Research Competition in April 2026.

This research examines media framing and ethical accountability in news coverage of the 2025 Eaton Fire in Altadena, California, with a focus on emergency communication and public perception during environmental crises.

This video ethnography project, created for LIBS 330, explores how everyday movement through public spaces in Sonoma County functions as a form of informal learning. Through filmed walking routes across Santa Rosa, Spring Lake Park, and Cotati, I examine how people interpret space, make navigational decisions, and develop environmental awareness in real time.

Drawing on Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory and Yosso’s concept of navigational capital, the project shows how learning is embedded in everyday mobility. Bridges, parks, sidewalks, and signage operate as cultural tools that shape how individuals understand safety, efficiency, and direction.

Using qualitative video analysis and ethnographic fieldnotes, I analyze three walking sequences to identify recurring patterns in decision-making, including route comparison, environmental comfort, and real-time problem-solving. The findings suggest that movement through public space is not just physical activity, but a continuous learning process shaped by experience, community knowledge, and environmental context.

Overall, the project argues that walking itself can be understood as an overlooked form of education, where knowledge is produced through interaction with everyday environments rather than formal instruction.

This creative nonfiction essay, created for LIBS 202, is written in the style of John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed, blending personal narrative with cultural and technological analysis. It reviews the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter jet as both an engineering milestone and a symbolic artifact of the Anthropocene, where human innovation reshapes not only the physical world but also how power and secrecy are expressed through technology.

The essay examines the F-117’s development at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works as a product of Cold War-era anxiety and technological escalation. Designed to evade radar and operate in secrecy, the aircraft reflects broader human efforts to extend control through advanced systems while simultaneously hiding the mechanisms of that control. In this sense, the jet becomes a symbol of both innovation and invisibility.

Interwoven with this analysis is a personal narrative about my grandfather, who worked in advanced aerospace programs and contributed to aircraft development during his career. His professional legacy provides a lens for reflecting on engineering, memory, and inherited forms of technological imagination. This historical thread connects large-scale systems of aerospace design to lived, personal experience across generations.

The essay also explores themes of identity, visibility, and acceptance through a personal coming-out narrative, using the metaphor of stealth versus being seen. By linking aerospace technology with family history and personal reflection, the project argues that the Anthropocene is not only defined by environmental change, but also by the emotional and cultural consequences of human invention and the ways we choose to reveal or conceal ourselves.

Created for CINE 302 – World Cinema History & Theory, this hybrid screenplay is inspired by Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World and Wicked. It explores isolation, connection, and uncertainty through parallel storytelling, where a lone penguin’s journey across Antarctica mirrors the emotional struggles of Lukas as he navigates friendship, change, and identity. Blending documentary influence with fictional narrative, the script uses layered cinematic perspectives to examine how meaning is constructed through both human experience and the natural world.