Honors Projects
Showing 281 - 290 of 298 Items
Hermeneutic Encounters: Hans-Georg Gadamer in North America, 1968-1986
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Ian Ward
Access: Open access
- Hans-Georg Gadamer’s myriad contributions to the continental philosophical tradition have been well documented, but his influence on North American intellectual life has gone largely gone unrecognized. This paper attempts to fill that gap, using primary and secondary source material to document Gadamer’s scholarly activities in the United States and Canada between 1968 and 1986. The paper also evaluates Gadamer’s influence using detailed accounts of “hermeneutic encounters” that occurred between Gadamer and four notable North American philosophers: Richard Palmer, Paul de Man, Charles Taylor, and Richard Rorty. Through these accounts, this paper argues that Gadamer made lasting contributions to ongoing debates in the humanities about the nature of literary interpretation, the social sciences, and analytic philosophy. Finally, the paper explores the philosophical and historiological possibilities that Gadamer’s hermeneutics opens up for intellectual history more broadly, especially in the field of reception history. Building on Gadamer’s own hermeneutics and Hans-Robert Jauss’s reception aesthetics, it develops the concept of the “encounter” as the starting point of a more hermeneutically-sensitive approach to intellectual history.
A "Peculiarly American" Enthusiasm: George Bellows, Traditional Masculinity, and The Big Dory
Date: 2014-01-01
Creator: James W. Denison, IV
Access: Open access
- A “Peculiarly American” Enthusiasm: George Bellows, Traditional Masculinity, and The Big Dory investigates the portrayal of masculinity in the oeuvre of the much-lauded yet enigmatic American painter George Bellows (1882-1925). Rather than relying on Bellows’ urban works for source material, a significant portion of this investigation is conducted via a case study of Bellows’ 1913 panel The Big Dory, a scene of fishermen pushing a boat into the North Atlantic off Monhegan Island, Maine that the artist painted during a sojourn on the island in the months after his involvement in the landmark Armory Show in New York. The paper situates The Big Dory within the greater context of the history of the depiction of Maine through the lens of the heroic fisherman. Bellows achieved a heroic effect by forcing the viewer to focus on the labor of the fishermen via their positioning in the near middleground and by echoing the hues and forms of the men elsewhere in the painting, giving the work a sense of visual unity. I argue that these strategies highlight Bellows’ interest in tradition rather than modernism. Armed with this knowledge, Bellows’ other works come more sharply into focus. I reveal that the traditional heterosexual mode of white male identity Bellows represented in The Big Dory was not simply echoed in Bellows’ personal comportment, but in fact pervaded his oeuvre; such masculinity was a reaction by patriarchal American society against the perceived growth of other influences in the early twentieth century. The portrayal of such masculinity is then established as the key underlying feature of the sense of “Americanism” which has traditionally dominated reception of Bellows’ art.
The Future Regained: Toward a Modernist Ethics of Time
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Jack Rodgers
Access: Open access
- This project explores the convergence of futurity and ethics through an examination of key figures in modernist literature. It studies works by Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce in order to conceptualize an encounter with the future which goes beyond a traditionally linear and teleological model of time, setting out to reimagine the role of both temporality and ethics in novels including Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, In Search of Lost Time, and Ulysses. Key facets of this exploration, which is metaphorized and guided by the image of a window, include temporal otherness, transgression and fracturing of the self (primarily understood through the paradoxical experience of dying), and the arrival of the future into the present. Major theoretical influences include queer theory, poststructuralism, and anti-dialectics. Ultimately, the project makes the case that it is possible to construct a modernist ethics which embraces the messianic potential of absences, blanks, and blind spots, a proposition made possible by our encounter with an incomprehensible yet imminent fragment of the future out of place in the present. At the close, it suggests an ethical imperative towards “affirmative negation”—a messianic, annunciatory, affirmation of that which is missing or omitted.
The Role of Competition and Patient Travel in Hospital Profits: Why Health Insurers Should Subsidize Patient Travel
Date: 2013-05-01
Creator: Joseph S Durgin
Access: Open access
- This paper explores the effects of patient travel distance on hospital profit margins, with consideration to the effects of travel subsidies on hospital pricing. We develop a model in which hospital agglomeration leads to a negative relationship between profit margins and patient travel distance, challenging the standard IO theory that profit margins are higher for firms with greater distances of customer travel. Using data on patient visits and hospital finances from the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD), we test our theory and confirm that a hospital tends to have less pricing power if it draws patients from beyond its local cluster. We then consider how our results might justify the subsidizing of patient travel by insurers and government payers. Lastly, we present an argument for why the ubiquitous Hirschman-Herfindahl index of market concentration can be robust to owner and system-level hospital cooperation.
Que vivan los estudiantes: Cycles of Contention and the Chilean Student Movement (1906-present)
Date: 2018-01-01
Creator: Jonah Watt
Access: Open access
- [No abstract]
Ecotourism Reconsidered: Chinese and Western Participation in the Thai Elephant Industry
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Miao (Jasmine) Long
Access: Open access
"This is N.Y.C. Not Little Rock": The Battle to Integrate New York City's Public Schools
Date: 2019-01-01
Creator: Anne Fraser Gregory
Access: Open access
- The landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954, and its subsequent implementation, offer an essential question: Are segregated schools inherently evil, and is integration the only solution to unequal education? The statistics that illustrate the effects of segregated schooling are indeed staggering. According to a 2016 Government Accountability Office study, the number of schools segregated along racial and economic lines doubled between 2000 and 2013. In New York City, the achievement gap between Black and white students has continued to grow. In 2018, the National Assessment of Achievement Progress reported that 48 percent of white fourth-graders were proficient in math, while only 16 percent of black students met the standard. With a gap of 32 percentage points—growing 5 points since 2015—Black children in New York are consistently behind their white peers in academics. Sixty years ago, New York's Black and Latino parents parents grappled with this same issue as they fought to desegregate the city’s schools. This Honors Project will discuss segregated schooling in New York City during the 1950s and 60s, and the actors who fought to disrupt the system. Throughout this work, I will attempt to illustrate the power of community in New York City, for both good and evil, for equality and bigotry. Parents—Black, white, and Puerto Rican—function as key players in this story, as they continually fought local and state Boards to access the education they believed to be rightfully theirs and their children’s. I will also assert the notion that segregation was not solely a Southern issue: the similarities between the fight for school integration in both North and South are striking, and highlight the far reaches of prejudice in the nation both then and now. Most importantly, I argue that unequal education may not be solved by integration alone, and that believing in integration as the only viable option perpetuates the incorrect notion that children of color require proximity to white students in order to be academically successful.
Superhero Ecologies: An Environmental Reading of Contemporary Superhero Cinema
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Andrew McGowan
Access: Open access
“I’m Going to Help You Become a Better You”: Teacher-Student Dynamics in Special Education
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Sophie Sadovnikoff
Access: Open access
- This study explores teachers’ roles in special education in terms of how they interact with students with disabilities. In the struggle against oppression and disempowerment, teachers can play a crucial role in employing education as the great equalizer, or else not. The question this research seeks to answer is: how do special education teachers interact with their students with disabilities, and how does this teacher role fit within a society that seeks to marginalize these students? I argue that special education teachers reproduce ableism by disciplining, normalizing, and controlling their students, but teachers express a deep sense of caring for and about their students, and understand their work as being their best effort at helping their students. The ableist actions that they perform are, ironically, an effort to help their students create fulfilling lives within an ableist society.
The Price of Carbon: Politics and Equity of Carbon Taxes in the Middle Income Countries of South Africa and Mexico
Date: 2015-05-01
Creator: Bridgett C McCoy
Access: Open access
- This study provides the first analysis of the politics and ethics behind carbon taxation in South Africa and Mexico. Using the preexisting scholarly frameworks of climate change policy, tax policy, and Robert Putnam’s two level games, I determine that in both cases, international pressures from multilateral negotiations and international development funding sources initiated the carbon tax policymaking process within the environment and treasury ministries of both countries. Once environment ministry bureaucrats initiated the carbon tax a lack of politicization of climate change (both countries) and an additional gain of raising revenue (Mexico) allowed the taxes to become law. I then turn to the laws themselves, analyzing their implications for climate justice. In both cases, the government did not adopt any proposals made interest groups representing environmental concerns and poverty groups, and instead shaped the bills so as to tailor to the interests of heavy manufacturing. This policy decision had the main effect of weakening the climate change mitigation impact of the carbon tax, and exacerbating issues of regressivity by not recycling revenues towards projects aimed at poverty reductions. I conclude this paper with an analysis of the ethics of such a carbon tax in developing countries. The carbon taxes, as they currently exist, sacrifice the rights and needs of the present poor for those of the future generation while an ideal policy that addresses poverty betters the condition of both groups. In order to ensure climate justice and for all groups and prevent political backlash, policy makers in middle-income countries must make carbon reduction policies with the unique challenges of poverty and climate change mitigation in mind.