Honors Projects
Showing 241 - 250 of 298 Items
"I Deny Your Authority to Try My Conscience:" Conscription and Conscientious Objectors In Britain During the Great War
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Albert William Wetter
Access: Open access
- During the Great War, the Military Service Act was introduced on January 27, 1916 and redefined British citizenship. Moreover, some men objected to the state’s military service mandate, adamant that compliance violated their conscience. This thesis investigates how the introduction of conscription reshaped British society, dismantled the “sacred principle” of volunteerism, and replaced it with conscription, resulting in political and popular debates, which altered the individual’s relationship with the state. British society transformed from a polity defined by the tenets of Liberalism and a free-will social contract to a society where citizenship was correlated to duty to the state. Building off Lois Bibbings’ research on conscientious objectors, this thesis nuances the analysis with the case studies of David Blelloch and Norman Gaudie. Framed by two theories—Benedict Anderson’s imagined community and Barbara Rosenwein’s emotional community—these case studies demonstrate how conscientious objectors exposed the incongruence of the British imagined and emotional community, and the redefinition of citizenship. By weaving these theories into the British Great War tapestry, this thesis contends that the British nation was imagined differently before the war than it was after the war because of the introduction of conscription. Drawing from parliamentary debate transcripts, newspaper articles, and archival material from the Imperial War Museum in London, and the Liddle Personal Collection at the University of Leeds, Blelloch’s and Gaudie’s respective case studies ultimately bait the question: “What does it mean to be British?”
GEM-PSO: Particle Swarm Optimization Guided by Enhanced Memory
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Kevin Fakai Chen
Access: Open access
- Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a widely-used nature-inspired optimization technique in which a swarm of virtual particles work together with limited communication to find a global minimum or optimum. PSO has has been successfully applied to a wide variety of practical problems, such as optimization in engineering fields, hybridization with other nature-inspired algorithms, or even general optimization problems. However, PSO suffers from a phenomenon known as premature convergence, in which the algorithm's particles all converge on a local optimum instead of the global optimum, and cannot improve their solution any further. We seek to improve upon the standard Particle Swarm PSO algorithm by fixing this premature convergence behavior. We do so by storing and exploiting increased information in the form of past bests, which we deem enhanced memory. We introduce three types of modifications to each new algorithm (which we call a GEM-PSO: Particle Swarm Optimization, Guided by Enhanced Memory, because our modifications all deal with enhancing the memory of each particle). These are procedures for saving a found best, for removing a best from memory when a new one is to be added, and for selecting one (or more) bests to be used from those saved in memory. By using different combinations of these modifications, we can create many different variants of GEM-PSO that have a wide variety of behaviors and qualities. We analyze the performance of GEM-PSO, discuss the impact of PSO's parameters on the algorithms' performances, isolate different modifications in order to closely study their impact on the performance of any given GEM-PSO variant, and finally look at how multiple modifications perform. Finally, we draw conclusions about the efficacy and potential of GEM-PSO variants, and provide ideas for further exploration in this area of study. Many GEM-PSO variants are able to consistently outperform standard PSO on specific functions, and GEM-PSO variants can be shown to be promising, with both general and specific use cases.
Placemaking and Community-Building among Lesbian, Bisexual, and Queer (LBQ) Women and Non-Binary People during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Gabby Unipan
Access: Open access
- This paper draws on data collected through in-depth interviews with multi-generational participants recruited from various online sites to explore the place-making strategies among lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women and trans- and gender-non-conforming people (tgncp) during the Covid-19 pandemic. Historically denied public space, placemaking in immaterial space (i.e., digital spaces) has been essential to the production and maintenance of communities for LBQ women and tgncp. Because these populations rely on non-traditional placemaking strategies that are not always instantiated in material space, sociologists often overlook their efforts to create place for themselves. This paper corrects this omission by exploring how communities create place through the deployment of subcultural capital onto immaterial space. Introducing four main strategies of community placemaking, material-constant communities, material-transient communities, immaterial-constant communities, and immaterial-transient communities, this article expands sociological conceptions of space to accommodate the placemaking strategies of marginalized communities who might lack the economic and political resources to foster communities in material spaces. Beyond the investigation of lesbian-queer placemaking, this research contributes to the growing sociological literature exploring the multifaceted, fluid, contested, and ephemeral nature of place and placemaking in the context of increasing Internet use.
Promises Unfulfilled: Integration and Segregation in Metropolitan Philadelphia Public Schools, 1954-2009
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Nina Nayiri McKay
Access: Open access
- Even though Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregation in public schools in 1954, many American children still attend schools that are racially and, increasingly, socioeconomically segregated. Philadelphia, a northern city that did not have an explicit policy of segregating children on the basis of race when Brown was decided, nevertheless still has entrenched residential segregation that replicates in public schools. The metropolitan area became a segregated space in the years around World War II, when housing discrimination, employment discrimination, lending discrimination, suburbanization, and urban renewal started the years-long trajectory of growing white suburbs surrounding an increasingly non-white and under-resourced urban core. These patterns had profound implications for school segregation, which city organizers began trying to fight shortly after Brown v. Board. However, the first court case to take on segregation in Philadelphia schools—Chisholm v. The Board of Education—was largely unsuccessful, with overburdened NAACP and ally lawyers struggling to meet the judge’s expectations of concrete proof of an intent to segregate on the School District of Philadelphia’s part. In the early 1960s, though, the state’s Human Relations Commission obtained a legislative mandate to take on school desegregation. It won its first integration victory in the Pennsylvania port city of Chester before moving to Philadelphia, where it pushed for school integration from 1968 to 2009. The city’s political and ideological battles over those decades reflect national trends around the rise of conservatism and neoliberalism in suburban politics and school reform, limiting the possibilities for change.
When is Change Possible? Presidential Power as Shaped by Political Context, Constitutional Tools, and Legislative Skills
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Ryan Telingator
Access: Open access
- Many Americans believe that the president is an omnipotent figure who can achieve any political or policy objective if they try hard enough. On the contrary, the presidency was intentionally crafted by the Framers of the Constitution to have limited legislative powers to mitigate the risk of despotism. Thus, this paper seeks to answer the question, when is change possible?, to try to bridge the gap between popular belief and Constitutional powers. Three questions guide this research: 1) What conditions are conducive for change? 2) What Constitutional tools help a president facilitate change? And 3) What skills can a president bring to office to help create change? This thesis seeks to answer these questions by reviewing the existing literature on political context, tools, and legislative skills. Case study analyses of the Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan presidencies are then presented to assess their legislative successes and failures, and the factors behind them. Finally, the thesis concludes by evaluating President Joseph Biden’s first 100 days in office and uses the theory and findings from the cases to predict Biden’s ability to affect change. This research reveals that the political context is the most important factor in determining the possibility of change – successful change relies on open policy windows, resilient ideological commitments, and a mandate to stimulate congressional action. Within the constraints of the case studies, Constitutional tools were not important. Legislative skills helped to pass legislation, however, they were not potent enough to overcome a bad political context.
Sexual Knowledge in Late-Colonial Bombay: Contested Authority, Politicized Sciences
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Rahul Prabhu
Access: Open access
- Sexuality was at the fulcrum of various issues facing late-colonial India from social reform projects such as child marriage, women’s rights and birth control to concerns of socioeconomic, physical and sexual weakening. The question of sexual modernity became implicated in imaginations of the modern post-colonial nation, setting the stage for a period of energized, linguistically plural projects of sexual knowledge production. While science was used to authorize such projects in the West, where could authority be located in a context where science held plural meaning and authority itself was highly contested? This paper asks how scientific authority was understood, deployed and shaped by the eugenics project of Narayan Sitaram Phadke (1894-1978) and the sexology project of A.P. Pillay (1890-1956). This thesis argues that the mechanics of each figures’ utilization of science captures how the interaction between scientific authority and society was understood by Phadke and Pillay in different ways. While both figures subscribed to the idea that science was universally authoritative in the making of sexual modernity, Phadke’s and Pillay’s projects show the plurality in how science was understood by social reformers. Furthermore, the thesis presents the differences between Phadke’s and Pillay’s projects as a product of the larger movements – British-era birth control advocacy, Hindu nationalism, upper-caste marriage reform and global sexology – that Phadke and Pillay were distinctly invested in or separated from. Scientific authority and the mechanics of its use is proposed as a vivid lens into the complex dynamics of modernization in late-colonial India.
Narration, Nation et Nationalisme dans les récits d’enfance de Mouloud Feraoun et Mohammed Dib
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Reed Foehl
Access: Open access
- During the mid-20th century, a new form of Algerian literature emerged, thematically detached yet linguistically tied to France. Novelists aligned with this littérature algérienne de langue française used their narrative power to expose the atrocities of the colonial period, while emphasizing the rising nationalist spirit throughout the country. A peculiar aspect of this national literature is the presence of a child protagonist. Many of Algeria’s most prominent authors centered their first novels on a young boy. This leads to my central question: does the récit d’enfance (childhood narrative) possess certain qualities that lend it useful for representing ubiquitous suffering, as well as an imminent national awakening. My research focuses on two Algerian novelists, Mouloud Feraoun and Mohammed Dib, who employ the récit d’enfance for different aims. In this paper, I first define the récit d’enfance and show how Feraoun and Dib implement this literary style. Secondly, I argue that Mohammed Dib’s trilogy is distinctly political. Employing the critical theories of Frantz Fanon and Benedict Anderson, I contend that Dib’s trilogy, published between 1952-1957, is a littérature de combat (combat literature). Although Feraoun’s publication of Le Fils du Pauvre in 1950 inaugurated Franco-Algerian literature, his work is more reflective than political. Comparing Feraoun and Dib’s early work, allows me to expose the disparate narratives arising in the decade prior to Algerian independence. Their portrayal of colonial oppression, as well as the courage and ambition of an exploited people, remains useful when studying models of colonial and post-colonial nationalism and nation-state.
Benchmarking Ab Initio Computational Methods for the Quantitative Prediction of Sunlight-Driven Pollutant Degradation in Aquatic Environments
Date: 2016-05-01
Creator: Kasidet Trerayapiwat
Access: Open access
- Understanding the changes in molecular electronic structure following the absorption of light is a fundamental challenge for the goal of predicting photochemical rates and mechanisms. Proposed here is a systematic benchmarking method to evaluate accuracy of a model to quantitatively predict photo-degradation of small organic molecules in aquatic environments. An overview of underlying com- putational theories relevant to understanding sunlight-driven electronic processes in organic pollutants is presented. To evaluate the optimum size of solvent sphere, molecular Dynamics and Time Dependent Density Functional Theory (MD-TD-DFT) calculations of an aniline molecule in di↵erent numbers of water molecules using CAM-B3LYP functional yielded excited state energy and oscillator strength values, which were compared with data from experimental absorption spectra. For the first time, a statistical method of comparing experimental and theoretical data is proposed. Underlying Gaussian functions of absorption spectra were deconvoluted and integrated to calculate experimental oscillator strengths. A Matlab code written by Soren Eustis was utilized to decluster MD-TD-DFT results. The model with 256 water molecules was decided to give the most accurate results with optimized com- putational cost and accuracy. MD-TD-DFT calculations were then performed on aniline, 3-F-aniline, 4-F-aniline, 3-Cl-aniline, 4-MeOacetophenone, and (1,3)-dimethoxybenzophenone with CAM-B3LYP, PBE0, M06-2X, LCBLYP, and BP86 functionals. BP86 functional was determined to be the best functional. Github repository: https://github.com/eustislab/MD_Scripts
Visions of Unity, Memories of Violence: American Civil Religion and the Japanese American Incarceration
Date: 2018-05-01
Creator: Brigitte Helene McFarland
Access: Open access
Fact vs. Faction: Polarization in the Information Age
Date: 2016-05-01
Creator: Noah Finberg
Access: Open access
- How can individuals in the contemporary media and political environment form better political beliefs? In chapter one, this thesis considers what it means to say American politics is polarized. It evaluates the extent of polarization in American politics. And it presents original evidence that suggests that just as the public and members of Congress have polarized, so too has American political discourse. Through the lens of political psychology, chapter two investigates how America’s polarized politics has influenced the quality of individuals’ beliefs. Chapter three explores the role that the media plays in encouraging or minimizing the biased information processing practices identified in chapter two. Finally, I conclude by arguing that individuals need to fundamentally rethink how they consume political information; advocate for the creation of a completely new social media platform specifically designed to encourage political deliberation; and outline what such a platform might look like.