Honors Projects
Showing 241 - 250 of 564 Items

- Embargo End Date: 2027-05-19
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Yucheng Hua
Access: Embargoed
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Gemma Jyothika Kelton
Access: Open access
- Published narratives about adoptions have typically been told from the perspective of the adopter. In recent years, Asian American writers who are part of the transracial, transcultural, and even transcultural adoptions, have published their narratives and expanded the discourse on adoptions to include the voices of orphans and adoptees. While there are still not many published works by adoptees, more and more writers are coming forward with their own stories separate from their adoptive parents. This honors project is a memoir and a work of nonfiction that examines the author’s experiences as an adoptee from India. It explores the issues of skin color bias (or colorism) in Indian adoption, as well as Indian government policies on inter-country and in-country adoptions. This memoir also delves into the complexities of an adoptive mother-daughter relationship, particularly in the transracial context. The work of non-fiction tells the story of a single white American mother adopting a 10 year old Indian girl to the United States. Written from the adoptee’s perspective, the memoir follows the different points of transitions in both the mother’s and the daughter’s lives and the ensuing challenges, chaos, vulnerabilities, and moments of tenderness, mutual support, care, and love that blooms in their adoptive mother-daughter relationship. This work draws upon narratives of Asian American women writers including Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H-Mart, Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know, and Nishta J. Mehra’s Brown White Black to acknowledge their own voices and give credibility to the adoptee narrative.

- Restriction End Date: 2026-06-01
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Belinda C. Saint Louis
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Yuto Yagi
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Noelia Calcaño
Access: Open access
- There will be 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050 as ecological disasters precipitate mass migrations around the world. The U.S. does not legally recognize climate migrants as refugees, instead adhering to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention that limits the definition of a refugee to individuals facing political persecution. Despite failing to expand the definition of a refugee, the U.S. has accommodated migrants displaced by natural disasters through a series of ad hoc fixes, most notably “Temporary Protected Status.” In Central American countries that were granted TPS, we encounter the paradox of the U.S. employing environmental disasters to justify continued extensions of this temporary protection, while addressing chronic conditions in the region. The central question of this thesis is, has employing the environment as a catch-all tool for Temporary Protected Status protection expanded the de facto definition of a “refugee,” for Central American migrants impacted by climate catastrophes and if so, how? Though TPS fills a gap in US law by providing de facto protections to migrants fleeing environmental disasters, the environment is being used as a catch-all tool for more systemic economic and political vulnerabilities in Central America. The environment is a catch-all tool for continued protection only insofar as it is not recognized as political, yet it is getting harder to employ the environment as an apolitical driver of migration. The precarious foundation of TPS threatens the hundreds of thousands of Central Americans that depend on this program to live and work legally in the United States.
Date: 2013-05-01
Creator: Reilly Hannah N Lorastein
Access: Open access
- This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring poetry, essays, fiction, and visual art created by incarcerated students enrolled in the College Program at San Quentin State Prison. By engaging the first person perspective of the incarcerated subject, this project will reveal how incarcerated individuals describe themselves, how they maintain and create intimate relationships from behind bars, and their critiques of the criminal justice system. From these readings, the project outlines conventions of “the incarcerated experience” as a subject position, with an eye toward further research analyzing the intersection of one's “incarcerated status” with one’s race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Daniel Rohan Mayer
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Max Thrush Hukill
Access: Open access
- The standard statistical methodology for analyzing complex case-control studies in ethology is often limited by approaches that force researchers to model distinct aspects of biological processes in a piecemeal, disjointed fashion. By developing a hierarchical Bayesian model, this work demonstrates that statistical inference in this context can be done using a single coherent framework. To do this, we construct a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) to model bumblebee foraging behavior. To connect the experimental design with the CTMC, we employ a mixture model controlled by a logistic regression on the two-factor design matrix. We then show how to infer these model parameters from experimental data using Markov chain Monte Carlo and interpret the results from a motivating experiment.

Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Kim Hancock
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

- Restriction End Date: 2025-06-01
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Seneca N. Ellis
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community