Showing 291 - 300 of 2100 Items
"Unexpected Gifts: Life With MS During a Pandemic" by Nora Pierson (Class of 2000)
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Nora Pierson
Access: Open access
- How having Multiple Sclerosis has prepared me for life in the time of Covid-19. The author is an alumna from the class of 2000.
Poem by Mac Brower (Class of 2018)
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Mac Brower
Access: Open access
- This is a poem I composed while stay-at-home orders were being issued nationwide. I wrote it shortly after leaving my home in Washington, DC to live with my parents in North Carolina. The author is an alumnus from the class of 2018.
Reflections questionnaire response by Anonymous on March 23, 2021
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Anonymous
Access: Open access
- This is a response to the Documenting Bowdoin & COVID-19 Reflections Questionnaire. The questionnaire was created in March 2021 by staff of Bowdoin's George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives. The author is a member of Bowdoin's faculty.
Interview with Alvin Hall (Class of 1974) by Marcus Williams
Date: 2019-11-10
Creator: Alvin Hall
Access: Open access
- Alvin Hall ’74 begins with a brief anecdote on how he helped bring together Geoffrey Canada and Stanley Druckenmiller to collaborate on the Harlem’s Children Zone. Druckenmiller was a friend of Hall’s roommate at Bowdoin, and Canada a member of the Afro-American Society. A couple years after graduation, Hall ran into Canada on the streets of New York and shared that Druckenmiller had recently come into good fortune. The rest is history. Hall remembers fondly how close the Bowdoin community was when he was a student. He spent many nights in the John B. Russwurm Center, where black students could come together for community. Hall recounts his involvement with the Society during his four years as a student. He took part in several protests, including a silent strike, where black students advocated for more people of color in the faculty and student body.
Interview with Saira Toppin (Class of 2009) by Nate DeMoranville
Date: 2019-11-09
Creator: Saira Toppin
Access: Open access
- Saira Toppin ’09 discusses her upbringing in Brooklyn, New York, and how that made for a challenging transition to Brunswick, Maine. She shares how a few juniors mentored her during her first year, which helped Toppin adjust to Bowdoin. She credits this mentorship with encouraging her to carve out space for herself on campus as an Afro-Latina and also to look out for others once she became an upperclassman. She shares stories from her time on the boards of both the African American Society and the Latin American Students Organization (LASO). As co-president of LASO during her junior and senior year, Toppin helped the organization have an impact on campus by organizing Latin American Heritage Month event Fall. She made sure to mentor underclassman so that they could run the club in her absence and considers LASO to be her legacy.
The role of behavioral diversity in determining the extent to which the cardiac ganglion is modulated in three species of crab
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Grace Bukowski-Thall
Access: Open access
- Central pattern generators (CPGs) are neural networks that generate the rhythmic outputs that control behaviors such as locomotion, respiration, and chewing. The stomatogastric nervous system (STNS), which contains the CPGs that control foregut movement, and the cardiac ganglion (CG), which is a CPG that controls heartbeat, are two commonly studied systems in decapod crustaceans. Neuromodulators are locally or hormonally released neuropeptides and amines that change the output patterns of CPGs like the STNS and CG to allow behavioral flexibility. We have hypothesized that neuromodulation provides a substrate for the evolution of behavioral flexibility, and as a result, systems exhibiting more behavioral flexibility are modulated to a greater degree. To examine this hypothesis, we evaluated the extent to which the STNS and the CG are modulated in the majoid crab species Chionoecetes opilio, Libinia emarginata, and Pugettia producta. C. opilio and L. emarginata are opportunistic feeders, whereas P. producta has a highly specialized kelp diet. We predicted that opportunistic feeding crabs that chew and process a wide variety of food types would exhibit greater STNS neuromodulatory capacity than those with a specialized diet. The STNS of L. emarginata and C. opilio responded to the seven endogenous neuromodulators oxotremorine, dopamine, CabTrp Ia, CCAP, myosuppressin, proctolin, and RPCH, whereas the STNS of P. producta only responded to proctolin, oxotremorine, myosuppressin, RPCH (25% of the time), variably to dopamine, and not at all to CabTrp and CCAP. Because P. producta, L. emarginata, and C. opilio all belong to the Majoidea superfamily, their primary distinctions are their feeding habits. For this reason, we further predicted that there would be no relationship between diet and modulatory capacity in the cardiac ganglion (CG) of the neurogenic heart. This would suggest that a lack of STNS modulatory capacity in P. producta relative to L. emarginata and C. opilio is specific to evolved foregut function. Whole-heart recordings from P. producta indicated that, unlike the STNS, the CG responds to CabTrp and CCAP. P. producta hearts also responded to oxotremorine and inconsistently to dopamine and proctolin. The CG of C. opilio was modulated by CabTrp, CCAP, dopamine, proctolin, myosuppressin, and oxotremorine, but not RPCH. The CG of L. emarginata responded to CCAP, and inconsistently to CabTrp, dopamine, and proctolin, but not to myosuppressin, RPCH, and surprisingly oxotremorine. Although cardiac responses were not identical between species, opportunistic and specialist feeders responded more similarly to the modulators tested in the heart than in the STNS. Notably, P. producta responded to each modulator in a similar manner to C. opilio and/or L. emarginata. However, L. emarginata’s surprising lack of cardiac response to oxotremorine suggests that phylogenetic closeness may not control for differences in CG and STNS function between species. Nevertheless, sample sizes of all three species were quite small, and individual differences lead to inconsistencies in the data. As a result, sample size must be enlarged to draw firm conclusions.
“I felt so untrustworthy of my ability to get pregnant”: Women’s Embodied Uncertainties and Decisions to Become Pregnant
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Theodora K. Hurley
Access: Open access
- This paper identifies “embodied uncertainties”—possibilities of aging and infertility lodged within the body—as informing women’s conceptualizations of their reproductive bodies and their decisions about and approaches to getting pregnant. Using data from semi-structured interviews with a small sample of highly educated, professional, white women who had given birth within 18 months prior, this paper argues that (bio)medicalized risk discourses and neoliberal logics of responsible choice-making lodge uncertainty and the possibility of failure within women’s reproductive bodies. As they attempt to reconcile childbearing with professional and financial constraints, women may identify their bodies as laden with embodied uncertainties and may subsequently adopt strategies for becoming pregnant that seek to mitigate those embodied uncertainties, such as by trying to conceive before feeling completely ready for a pregnancy. Ultimately, (bio)medicalization and neoliberalism have transformed reproductive aging and infertility into individualized concerns and foreclosed recognition of the institutional failures that create conflicts of aging, careers, and childbearing in women’s lives.