Honors Projects
Showing 11 - 20 of 298 Items
It’s #PrisonAbolition Until the Bad Guys Show Up: Conflicting Discourses on Twitter about Carceral Networks in 2020
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Tam Phan
Access: Open access
- “Twitter Revolutions” in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, and Moldova illustrate social media’s capacity to mobilize citizens in uprooting systems of injustice. As non-democratic regimes, these “Twitter Revolutions” offer insight into how Twitter’s microblogging, hashtags, and global user connections help broker relations between activists hoping to challenge the government. However, this thesis focuses on the democratic regime of the US and how Twitter plays a role in aiding the prison abolition movement in their effort to dismantle carceral networks that inflict racial and political violence on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and People of Color. The thesis outlines how, under the US’ classification as a democracy, the US utilizes infrastructural power to coerce American citizens into accepting carceral networks of violence as essential institutions to maintain civil society. The following sections explain the abolitionist movement’s history of attempting to dismantle the discrete formal and informal institutions of political violence, and includes the complicating development of liberal-progressive reformism that attempts to co-opt the goals of the abolition movement. The thesis focuses on the Twitter hashtag #PrisonAbolition in 2020 to explore how American Twitter users perceive the US carceral state and the prison abolition movement. The research concludes that #PrisonAbolition does not currently possess the capacity to evolve into the social mobilization seen in the “Twitter Revolutions” of non-democratic regimes because the US’ infrastructural power effectively engrained into the minds of Americans that prisons protect civil society. However, the tweets still show a promising development as American Twitter users become more engaged in abolitionist conversations.
“The Spirit of Turbulence”: East Indian Political Imaginaries in Early 20th Century British Guiana
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Faria A Nasruddin
Access: Open access
- After the abolition of slavery, the Colonial Office instituted an indentured labor scheme that lasted from 1838 to 1917, in which they brought East Indians to the plantation colonies as laborers under five year contracts. Due to the planter class’ desire for permanent sources of labor in British Guiana, the Colonial Government incentivized East Indians to permanently settle. East Indians thus dominated the British Guiana’s agricultural landscape and became the single largest ethnicity in the Colony by 1920. This thesis explores the early negotiations of the meaning of diaspora and diasporic citizenship for East Indians in British Guiana. They comprised a diverse conglomerate of different socio-economic positions: agricultural estate laborers, village residents, and middle-class business professionals. Each socioeconomic group had a different lived experience in the colony and different outlook on what it meant to be a creole-born East Indian. This thesis traces the multiple and contingent ideas of citizenship and nationality that were circulating at the time. Against a backdrop of changing imperial politics that promoted modernity and the discourse of the nation, East Indian visions centered around how to construct permanence, and negotiate belonging. By drawing on colonial documentation–local reports, commission transcripts, personal correspondence–and documentation produced by East Indians–memorandums, speeches, and books–this thesis ultimately argues that East Indians came to view culture as integral to their self-worth and definitions of place within the imperial system. Culture thus became the primary lens to negotiate the various meaning of citizenship and place in the imperial-national moment.
On the Dirichlet L-functions and the L-functions of Cusp Forms
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Nawapan Wattanawanichkul
Access: Open access
- The main objects of our study are L-functions, which are meromorphic functions on the complex plane that analytically continue from the series of the form \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{a_n}{n^s}, where {a_n} is a sequence of complex numbers. In particular, we are interested in two families of L-functions: ''The Dirichlet L-functions" and ''the L-functions of cusp forms." The former refers to the L-functions whose a_n's are determined by Dirichlet characters, whereas cusp forms determine the latter. We begin our study with the celebrated Riemann zeta function, the simplest Dirichlet L-function, and discuss some of its well-known properties: the Euler product, analytic continuation, functional equation, Riemann hypothesis, and Euler's formula for its critical values. Then, we generalize our exploration to the Dirichlet L-functions and point out some analogous properties to those of the Riemann zeta function. Moreover, we present our original work on computing the critical values of the Dirichlet L-function associated with the primitive character mod 4, or what is known as the Dirichlet beta function. Lastly, we establish some knowledge of the theory of modular forms and cusp forms, which are nicely-behaved modular forms, and discuss some properties of the L-functions of cusp forms.
Plant-mediated interactions within the milkweed insect community
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Katie J. Galletta
Access: Open access
- Induced defenses following herbivore damage can modify a plant’s chemical or physical characteristics and alter the plant’s interactions with subsequent herbivores. Common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) provides an excellent system with which to study plant response-mediated interactions given its small but highly specialized herbivorous insect community and its ability to increase toxic cardenolide concentrations and latex production throughout its tissues upon attack. I conducted observational field surveys quantifying leaf damage to examine whether the indirect plant-mediated interactions amongst the milkweed herbivore community as demonstrated in other studies also occur in situ, as well as how foliar herbivory impacts insect flower visitation on A. syriaca. I found that four-eyed milkweed beetle (Tetraopes tetrophthalmus) damage had a negative effect on subsequent monarch (Danaus plexippus) larvae and swamp milkweed leaf beetle (Labidomera clivicollis) damage. I also found that monarchs laid more eggs on milkweed with no herbivore damage. Additionally, I observed a negative relationship between A. syriaca foliar herbivory and flower visitation, which has not been previously demonstrated but illustrates the various potential costs of herbivory to plant fitness. My work’s focus on observing the effects of natural herbivore damage offers insight as to how plant-mediated interactions operate among the milkweed insect community in situ. Furthermore, this study demonstrates how plant responses to herbivory in general can modulate ecological relationships between species that do not directly interact with each other.
Dendrites of Cardiac Ganglion Regulate Heartbeat of American Lobster, Homarus americanus, Through Stretch Feedback
Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Mara R Chin-Purcell
Access: Open access
- Central pattern generators are neuronal networks that produce reliable rhythmic motor output. A simple pattern generator, known as the cardiac ganglion (CG), controls the heart of the American lobster, Homarus americanus. Previous studies have suggested that stretch feedback relays information to the cardiac ganglion about the degree of filling in the heart, and that this feedback is mediated by stretch-sensitive dendrites extending from CG neurons. I sought to determine the mechanisms behind this stretch feedback pathway. One hundred second extension pyramids were applied to each heart while amplitude and frequency of contractions were recorded; 87% of hearts responded to stretch with a significant increase in frequency of contractions. To ascertain the role of dendrites in this feedback pathway, the accessible branches along the trunk of the CG were severed, de-afferenting the CG. In de-afferented hearts, stretch sensitivity was significantly less than in intact hearts, suggesting that the dendrites extending from the CG are essential for carrying stretch feedback information. To separate the effects of active and passive forces of heart contraction on stretch sensitivity, the CG was de-efferented by severing the motor nerves that induce muscle contraction. Hearts with only anterolateral nerves cut or with all four efferents cut were significantly less stretch sensitive than controls. These results indicate that the CG is sensitive to active stretch of each contraction. Hearts with reduced stretch feedback had more irregular frequency of contractions, indicating that a role of stretch feedback in the cardiac system may be to maintain a regular heart rate.
Divinity School: A Novel
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Ella Marie Schmidt
Access: Open access
- I wrote Divinity School, an Honors Project for the Department of English, under the auspices of my project advisor, Professor Anthony Walton, and my readers, Professors Marilyn Reizbaum, Ann Kibbie, and Aaron Kitch. Divinity School is a novel whose conflicts are religious, generational, and familial. Set mostly in Hoboken, New Jersey with vignettes in Manhattan, Vienna, the west coast of Ireland, and an anonymous New England college town, it is the story of one family and the open secrets that keep them apart. Hal Macpherson is a Divinity School professor uged into premature retirement by allegations of misconduct; his wife, Annie Price, is a withdrawn would-be actress. They are parents to Amelia Macpherson, a woman in her twenties who rejects her father’s righteous claims of innocence and her mother’s exhausted but unwavering devotion to him. This project is concerned with sex and pedagogy, youth, want-it-all politcs, parenthood, getting old, Protestantism, and domestic life. Using third-person free indirect style, I traverse the public-private planes of literature. As an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, I have enjoyed the privilege of a great English education in literature, creative writing, and independent work. Divinity School is the culmination of these studies.
Transforming the Humane: Human/Animal Relationships in Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand and Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Joosep R. Vorno
Access: Open access
- In this project, I investigate Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (1915) and Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand (1963) through a magic realist interpretive strategy. I identify how, as a result of a mysterious opening premise, the two texts accomplish a human/animal transformation in the protagonists. While the transformations differ in several aspects, even at times being direct opposites, the way in which the characters navigate their new nonhuman selves poses many important questions about care and humaneness, the human condition, and social and familial structures. By drawing on discussions of magic realism – from its roots in Weimar German art criticism, its contemporary features in literature, and the inherently subversive nature of the narrative mode – I discuss how the lens of magic realism becomes a helpful tool in recognizing, exploring, and appreciating the human/animal transformations as a defamiliarization of the familiar.
The experience of crunch in the video games industry amongst current and aspiring developers
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Radu Ioan Stochita
Access: Open access
- The video games industry relies on crunch - overworking the developers, usually towards the end of the project in order to meet a required deadline. In this paper, I analyze the different relationships that aspiring and current game developers have with the games industry and how they position themselves when it comes to crunch. Passion is a major component of people's desire to join the games' industry, later being used to justify one's need of staying overtime: "Since I am passionate about video games, it did not feel like work at all." Other aspiring or current developers are more skeptical when it comes to crunch and are developing secondary plans, either to quit the industry, join labor unions or push for better working conditions.
Urban Pastures: A Computational Approach to Identify the Barriers of Segregation
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Noah Gans
Access: Open access
- Urban Sociology is concerned with identifying the relationship between the built environment and the organization of residents. In recent years, computational methods have offered new techniques to measure segregation, including using road networks to measure marginalized communities' institutional and social isolation. This paper contributes to existing computational and urban inequality scholarship by exploring how the ease of mobility along city roads determines community barriers in Atlanta, GA. I use graph partitioning to separate Atlanta’s road network into isolated chunks of intersections and residential roads, which I call urban pastures. Urban pastures are social communities contained to residential road networks because movement outside of a pasture requires the need to use larger roads. Urban pastures fences citizens into homogenous communities. The urban pastures of atlanta have little (
"Know-Nothingism, Abolitionism, and Fanaticism:" An Analysis of the Collapse of the Second Party System in Maine
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Justis Dixon
Access: Open access
- The 1850s were a tumultuous period in American politics, with a complete partisan realignment fundamentally shifting the balance of power away from the status quo and toward possibilities for change. This paper focuses on the collapse of the Second Party System in Maine, and understanding how we can explain this stunning and rapid shift. The varying factors can be placed into two broad categories First, ethnocultural issues were primarily responsible for much of the growing turmoil within and between the major parties throughout the 1840s, and accelerating greatly in the early 1850s with rising levels of immigration and the increasing draw of the temperance movement, which was then followed by the passage of highly controversial legislation concerning these issues. Second, national-level issues such as the Fugitive Slave Act and detailed reports of the violence out West in local newspapers brought the consequences of the unfettered expansion of slavery closer to home for many Mainers. Scholars of this period have expressed varying opinions as to the relative importance of local and national level issues in generating a change to the political system. Using Maine as a case study due to its position as a leader in the temperance movement and its geographical distance from the battlegrounds of national politics at the time, I conduct an in-depth examination of the political history of the state and conclude that rising tensions on both local and national levels were necessary to cause such transformational change.