Abigail Greenfield

I spent the summer of 2024 working as a Fulbright Canada-Mitacs Globalink Research Intern at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia. This prestigious internship allowed me to work on a project researching Canadian constitutional culture with a political historian, specifically examining cultural attitudes toward the Canadian Constitution debates of 1980-82 as expressed in editorial cartoons. In three months, I was able to identify and curate a dataset of over three hundred editorial cartoons and perform a qualitative content analysis to produce a report examining over one hundred cartoons within the 1980-82 time period. In addition to the opportunity to explore beautiful British Columbia and connect with interns from all over the world, I gained valuable experience in legal and cultural history, which I hope to study further in graduate school. 

Prior to this experience, I did not know how useful editorial cartoons could be as cultural documents and was not expecting to spend almost the entire summer working with them. My role in the project was originally conceptualized by my supervisor as being one of identifying and researching potential primary sources of a variety of types, but we quickly realized how much potential there was in producing an in-depth analysis of solely editorial cartoons. My analysis of the editorial cartoons is going to form the basis of a forthcoming collaborative paper between myself and my supervisor at the University of Victoria. Additionally, the research I did in Victoria helped to form the groundwork of my thesis, which examines comparative American and Canadian “unwritten” rights development and implementation from the 1950s to the 1980s.