Honors Projects
Showing 531 - 540 of 564 Items
Minor, Ugly, and Meta: Feelings in Contemporary Korean American Literature
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Kyubin Kim
Access: Open access
- In 2019, Korean American writer Cathy Park Hong published her memoir Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning in the midst of a turning point in Asian American politics. Hong describes minor feelings as “emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” Used as a concept to summate the Asian American experience in white America as living in a country where one’s reality is constantly questioned and made invisible, minor feelings forges an affective framework to study minoritized, diasporic literature. My project enriches Hong’s “minor feelings” by studying Korean American literature through a transnational and multimedia lens, considering how Korea’s colonial history and nation-building play roles in emoting Korean American self-realities. I structurally model my project after Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, split into four chapters, each focusing on one affect: shame, anger, han, and love. My project follows and documents the contemporary shifts occurring in Korean Americana, in how they perceive collective racial and diasporic identity, the intersectionality of layered identities, and the younger generations’ call for coalition. Since Korean American affects often are studied as an afterthought to Korean affects, my project retains a focus on the Korean American experience, recentering members of a diaspora whose globalizing homeland’s triumphs may eclipse their minor, invisible realities in America.
Nuevas posibilidades para la subjetividad feminista en la literatura del Cono Sur
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Kate Elizabeth Tapscott
Access: Open access
- ¿Cómo es que se puede escapar verdaderamente de la opresión patriarcal? Esta investigación aborda a través de un análisis de la literatura de escritoras del Cono Sur el asunto complicado de la liberación bajo un sistema en constante mutación. En el primer capítulo, a partir de aportes teóricos de Freud, Josefina Ludmer y Homi Bhabha entre otros, analizo cuentos de Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, y Clarice Lispector cuyas protagonistas intentan resistir su condición de víctima con diversos grados de éxito. En el capítulo que sigue, exploro una tendencia reciente en la literatura de escritoras del Cono Sur que incorpora elementos del horror y lo gótico para desestabilizar una cosmovisión humanista y patriarcal. Incorporando la teoría de Gabriel Giorgi, Rosi Braidotti, y Julieta Yelin, investigo los efectos que los animales, los cuerpos, y la materia tienen en la expansión de la agencia feminista y discuto si ofrecen o no nuevas e inesperadas posibilidades para resistir el sistema.
LE VAL ET LE CADRE : ESPACES MORTIVITAUX DE RIMBAUD ET DE MOUAWAD Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Dylan J. Bess
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
A Comprehensive Survey on Functional Approximation
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Yucheng Hua
Access: Open access
- The theory of functional approximation has numerous applications in sciences and industry. This thesis focuses on the possible approaches to approximate a continuous function on a compact subset of R2 using a variety of constructions. The results are presented from the following four general topics: polynomials, Fourier series, wavelets, and neural networks. Approximation with polynomials on subsets of R leads to the discussion of the Stone-Weierstrass theorem. Convergence of Fourier series is characterized on the unit circle. Wavelets are introduced following the Fourier transform, and their construction as well as ability to approximate functions in L2(R) is discussed. At the end, the universal approximation theorem for artificial neural networks is presented, and the function representation and approximation with single- and multilayer neural networks on R2 is constructed.
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.
Building Home in Diaspora: New York’s Jewish Left and the History of the Bronx Housing Cooperatives
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Micah Benjamin Wilson
Access: Open access
- This thesis investigates three predominantly Jewish housing cooperatives that emerged in the Bronx in the late 1920s. The Amalgamated Housing Cooperative, the United Workers Cooperative Colony (the “Coops”), and the Sholem Aleichem Houses offered garment workers utopian retreats from the drudgery of Lower East Side tenements where Jewish immigrants arrived in droves between 1890-1920. With each cooperative housing a distinct faction of the Jewish Left––from socialists to communists to Yiddish nationalists––the Bronx housing cooperatives, more than experiments in communal living, were the site of a highly contested battle over competing Jewish cultural and political worldviews across the 1930s and 1940s. Transcending the era that is typically considered the movement’s “peak” in the 1910s, this thesis demonstrates that the era of the Bronx cooperatives must be central to any study of the Jewish labor movement by revealing the ways radical Jews attempted to maintain and negotiate their various worldviews against the backdrop of the threats posed by the capitalist housing market, assimilation, and sectarian struggles. I reconsider the disproportionate attention the “success story” of the Amalgamated Cooperative has received, situating its politics as but one of many responses to the contradictions embedded in the housing cooperative model. Finally, I analyze the role of nostalgia present across resident recollections of the cooperatives and situate it in the contexts of 1970s neoliberal urban reform and suburbanization, while considering the discursive power of this emotion to obscure the persistent legacy of anti-black racism entangled in the cooperative housing movement despite its progressive reputation.
Identification of genes involved in Helicobacter pylori glycolipid and glycoprotein biosynthesis Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Adedunmola Praise Adewale
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Bacterial Coat of Armor: Probing how Glycan Biosynthesis in Helicobacter pylori Modulates Host Immune Recognition Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Francis Jacob Kassama
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Growing Pains: Toward a Coalition-Based Theory of State Land Use Policy
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Patrick Rochford
Access: Open access
- In the decades following World War II, mass suburbanization remade the American landscape. While suburbs accounted for 83% of the nation’s growth between 1950 and 1970, cities bled their populations and natural resources dwindled. Treating the postwar era as a critical juncture, this thesis examines the political history of twentieth-century state land use policy to illuminate how competing interests have shaped policy outcomes across the United States. Specifically, the paper seeks to explain the passage of statewide growth management and smart growth programs. After providing a history of American suburbanization, the paper considers an emergent challenge to the postwar growth paradigm as manifested through resistance to urban renewal, open space loss, and diverse anti-freeway coalitions that combined actors from each movement. Thereafter, I detail the development of statewide growth management and smart growth programs before employing a set of case studies to discern causal factors associated with the success or failure of such legislation. Testing the theory that broad-based coalitions were essential to the passage of state growth management legislation, I perform a controlled comparison of two pairs of states, Maryland and Virginia and Oregon and Washington, employing additional within-case analysis for Washington. In so doing, I find evidence that diverse coalitions—from environmentalists and housing advocates to farmers and historic preservationists—were essential to the passage of state growth management programs. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings and the relevance of state land use policy to contemporary issues such as affordable housing and climate change.
The effect of early life adversity on basolateral amygdala projections to the prefrontal cortex in male and female rats during development Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Khushali N Patel
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community