Showing 11 - 20 of 2039 Items

Interview with Symone Howard (Class of 2015), Ashley Musana (Class of 2016), Briana Cardwell (Class of 2017), and Rebkah Tesfamariam (Class of 2018) by Nate DeMoranville

Date: 2019-11-10

Creator: Symone Howard

Ashley Musana

Briana Cardwell

Rebkah Tesfamariam

Access: Open access

Symone Howard ā€™15, Ashley Musana ā€™16, Briana Cardwell ā€™17, and Rebkah Tesfamariam ā€™18 were four consecutive presidents of the African American Society. They were the last to preside over the organization before the name changed to Black Student Union. They discuss the numerous challenges each encountered during their time here, which coincided with large scale instances of cultural appropriation, including Cracksgiving, the Gangster Party, and the Tequila Party. Musana, who was president for both parties, recounts the long hours spent working with students and administrators to sustain and support community. All four presidents recognize the tremendous burden placed on them as individuals, but all express gratitude for having created such a close knit community.


Interview with Robert Johnson (Class of 1971) by Aisha Rickford

Date: 2019-11-10

Creator: Robert Johnson

Access: Open access

Robert Johnson, Class of 1971, talks about his first visit to Bowdoin in 1967 with a friend, and being involved with BUCRO, the Bowdoin Undergraduate Civil Rights Organization. There, he met Virgil Logan, president of BUCRO and an instrumental face on campus and in the Bowdoin African American Society. Johnson details how Afam came about after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr out of a desire to form community. Johnson then became the first President of the AfroAm at Bowdoin College. Johnson talks about how critical AfAm was for him and fellow black students isolated from their respective communities and drove black students to organize, and change racist systems. He shares stories of activism and resistance carried out on campus, specifically one where the black students on campus went silent and marched across campus to protest the lack of action on part of the Bowdoin administration as far as ensuring racial diversity in future classes. He also talks about racial incidents at Bowdoin and how Bowdoin shaped him in the years during and after graduation.


Interview with DeRay Mckesson (Class of 2007) by Nate DeMoranville

Date: 2019-11-09

Creator: DeRay Mckesson

Access: Open access

DeRay Mckesson ā€™08 was a two-time president of Bowdoin Student Government, and instituted many of the programming and policies that are in place today. Mckesson shares how during his tenure he transferred several powers of the presidency onto the Executive Committee. He tasked this body with selecting members for BSGā€™s General Assembly but also with selecting students for institutional committees. Mckesson reaffirms his belief in the Bowdoin community, which he considers unique for its collection of highly capable individuals who believe in the bigness of the world. He discusses how he strove always to imagine new ways to serve the community and built meaningful relationships with faculty, staff, and students.




Education Amid Stabilization: The Varied Effects of Military Intervention on Public Schooling in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Arjun S. Mehta

Access: Open access

At the intersection of international relations, comparative politics, and war consequence studies, this paper seeks to evaluate the effects of supportive foreign military intervention on education provision in three neighboring Central Sahel countries: Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. In the wake of a Tuareg insurgency and a 2012 coup dā€™eĢtat in Mali, the proliferation of jihadist violence in the tri-border Liptako-Gourma region has been met by a proliferation of foreign interveners. Does stabilizationā€” the form of intervention in the Central Sahelā€” improve education provision, as measured by diminishing jihadist attacks on schools and school closures due to violence? This paper hypothesizes that where there is a larger scale of intervention, there is more securityā€” and thus an environment more conducive to education provision. Although insecurity in the three Central Sahel countries has shared origins, each country has a distinct scale of intervention. In placing Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso on a spectrum of stabilization (from largest- to smallest-scale), this paper conducts a comparative test to determine how intervention affects education provision. Qualitative and quantitative data analyses reveal that, while a larger scale of intervention (in Mali) guarantees neither better security nor more favorable education provision, the absence of intervention (in Burkina Faso) facilitates unfavorable security and education outcomes. This paper concludes that destabilizing security-centric conceptions of stabilization may lead to more lasting peace and more accessible education in the Central Sahel and beyond.


Itā€™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

ā€œTwitter Revolutionsā€ in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, and Moldova illustrate social mediaā€™s capacity to mobilize citizens in uprooting systems of injustice. As non-democratic regimes, these ā€œTwitter Revolutionsā€ offer insight into how Twitterā€™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 USā€™ 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 movementā€™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 ā€œTwitter Revolutionsā€ of non-democratic regimes because the USā€™ 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.


ā€œThe Spirit of Turbulenceā€: 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 classā€™ desire for permanent sources of labor in British Guiana, the Colonial Government incentivized East Indians to permanently settle. East Indians thus dominated the British Guianaā€™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 documentationā€“local reports, commission transcripts, personal correspondenceā€“and documentation produced by East Indiansā€“memorandums, speeches, and booksā€“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 plantā€™s chemical or physical characteristics and alter the plantā€™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 workā€™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.