Showing 1 - 5 of 5 Items
Leadership from Within: Founders, advocates, and organizational networks operating in Maine's immigrant community
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Samuel Robert Kenney
Access: Open access
- Much of the discourse surrounding African immigration to Maine has centered on the provision of public services that facilitate community development and integration. This project investigates different types of leadership strategies employed by African individuals in Maine that advance community objectives. When African immigrant leaders are empowered to affect public policy, they re-frame traditional conceptions of aid-dependency and vulnerability commonly applied to African immigrants in media and popular culture. Through leadership in nonprofit and civic spheres, African immigrant community leaders translate grassroots connectivity with informal networks into meaningful influence in the realm of public policy. This project focuses on the evolution of community leadership in Maine’s Somali community, the network of immigrant-serving organizations that provide specialized public services across the state, and the capacity of one organization in particular, the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition (MIRC) to ensure accurate representation of policy initiatives to civic officials for individuals unable to participate in the electoral process. This project evaluates the political utility of ‘lived experience’ as a component of diversity in the realm of public policy.
Répresentations de la banlieue dans le cinéma français contemporain
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Yaw Owusu Sekyere
Access: Open access
- Inhabitants of the poor French banlieues are rejected and isolated from the larger French society, who refuse to acknowledge their marginalization. As a result, the cycle continues where no political change is made. The French film genre, cinéma de banlieue, seeks to explain the perspectives of the underrepresented and marginalized groups within France. This honors project analyzes the representations of the banlieue through the films of La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz), Wesh wesh qu’est-ce qui se passe ? (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche), Bande de filles (Céline Sciamma), Divines (Houda Benyamina), and Banlieusards (Kery James & Leïla Sy). These films focus on the themes of drugs, policial relations, the confinement of the banlieue, and the discrimination and stigmatisation that inhabitants of the poor banlieues face, all of which revolve around the idea of entrapment. This work intends to see if these representations of the banlieue, specifically on the periphery of Paris, perpetuate stereotypes, or propose a more complex dynamic.
Who We Are: Incarcerated Students and the New Prison Literature, 1995-2010
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.

Hunter-Gatherers: The Survival of the Foraging Practice In Modern States Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2015-05-01
Creator: Tristan C Van Kote
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Investigating the Effects of Student Debt on Career Outcomes: An Empirical Approach
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Gideon Moore
Access: Open access
- High student debt has been hypothesized to affect career choice, causing students to desire stable, high paying jobs. To test this hypothesis, I rely on plausibly exogenous variation in debt due to a federal policy shift. In the summer of 2007, the Higher Education Reconciliation Act (or HERA) expanded the cap for federally subsidized student loans. I examine how variation in debt affects career choice and eventual salary of students using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Child and Young Adult Cohort of students who were of college age during the implementation of the policy. I find that student debt has no impact on salary two years after graduation; however, it does seem to shift students’ career choices, leading some to avoid careers in public service industries such as teaching and social work.