Award Winners

Ryan Mealiffe

Faculty Advisor: Charity Urbanski

Estey Chen

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Anand Yang

Hope Morris

Faculty Advisor: James Gregory

Makenna Reaves

Faculty Advisor: Kimberlee Gillis-Bridge

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Gabriel Lau

Faculty Advisor: Elaine Faustman

Carrie Lin

Faculty Advisor: Mary-Colleen Jenkins

Sustainable Science: Recycling Disposable Gloves in Research

Scientific research generates extensive sources of plastic waste. While bio-contaminated gloves must be disposed of according to environmental, health, and safety guidelines, many gloves are simply sent to landfills which poses the question of whether there are alternatives to single-use plastic gloves. Currently, glove recycling programs led by large glove manufacturers offer an attainable solution to this issue.

This poster intended for high school STEM students addresses the challenges of glove disposal and recycling by introducing the topic, questioning and answering the necessity and viability of glove recycling, and ends with actionable future steps. Moreover, the poster introduces scientific issues to initiate scientific conversations.

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Rahoul Banerjee Ghosh

Faculty Advisor: Emily Giangiulio

Mazzie Nowkicki

Faculty Advisor: Beatrice Arduini

Claudia Modarelli

Faculty Advisor: Laurie Marhoefer

Wendi Zhou

Faculty Advisor: Laurie Marhoefer

Simon Ferry

Faculty Advisor: Kyle Haddad-Fonda

Melinda Whalen

Faculty Advisor: Glennys Young

Jiachen LIn

Faculty Advisor: Sarah Ghasedi

Hannah Sullivan

Faculty Advisor: Angélica Amezcua

James Caliber

Faculty Advisor: Sarah Ghasedi

Sarah Fink

Faculty Advisor: Sarah Ghasedi

Maia Serenity Sullivan

Faculty Advisor: Stephanie Smallwood

Fal Iyoab

Faculty Advisor: Henry Christopher

Marcus Conde

Faculty Advisor: Kathleen (Kate) West

Gabriel Lau

Faculty Advisor: Elaine Faustman

Aarti Vinod Tandon

Faculty advisor: Kit Galvin

David Blynov

Faculty Advisors: Rebecca Thorpe

Washington State Food Banks Amid a Global Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected nearly every facet of life, most alarmingly that of food security. Scholars suggests that food security is one of the most important indicators of physical and financial wellbeing. This study examines the success rate of various food pantries across Washington State in their addressing of local food insecurities. “Success” is measured by how many households each food bank served. In order to collect this data, I individually contacted food banks across Washington State requesting them for the number of households that their pantries served between January and August of 2020. A multivariate regression model is employed in order to examine whether locality population size has a statistically significant relationship with the number of households served, controlling for other variables.

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Conor Benjamin Geiman

Faculty Advisor: Jospeh Garbini

For my Mechanical Engineering senior capstone, I developed and experimented with a 40-liter Chlorella vulgaris algae photobioreactor testbed for carbon dioxide removal. It responds to elevated levels of carbon dioxide, while reducing energy consumption during nominal operation. Energy efficiency is important for future space missions but must be achieved without sacrificing mission safety. In my photobioreactor, the LED lighting and circulation pump account for nearly all of the system energy consumption, at 75% and 23% respectively. I reduced energy consumption by controlling the bioreactor light levels in response to varying carbon dioxide levels. Experimental results indicated that the controlled photobioreactor responds effectively to a step increase in carbon dioxide, while using up to 57% less energy on lighting than an uncontrolled photobioreactor over the course of the response. The development of a photobioreactor that responds dynamically to carbon dioxide levels is an important step to reduce overall space mission cost.

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Wendi Zhou

Faculty Advisor: Laurie Marhoefer

After the end of Japanese American internment, many Japanese Americans returned to their homes in LA’s “Little Tokyo” to find it nicknamed “Bronzeville.” The area had been settled by African-American migrants who moved west during the Great Migration. This podcast explores the racial tensions and multi-cultural alliances that emerged in this LA neighborhood.

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Maxwell Forman

Faculty Advisor: Kristen Laidre

Inuit food insecurity in the Arctic has become a chronic issue due to colonial processes and, increasingly, climate change. While food security approaches by external forces have fallen short, Inuit peoples are finding innovative ways to reclaim their right to self-determined food. This paper argues that addressing Inuit food insecurity requires a shift away from a food security model that maintains external dependency and towards a food sovereignty model, which recognizes the historical and cultural context of food insecurity and centers Inuit autonomy. I first provide an overview of the Arctic food crisis and the current food security model operated on by non-Indigenous Arctic actors, then contrast these with Inuit-led efforts to rebuild local food systems. The last section addresses climate change and how it may influence Inuit and Western governmental negotiation of key food resources.

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Nanditha Shivakumar

Faculty Advisor: Purnima Dhavan

Royal Mughal women have played an immense role in consolidating the success and power of the Timurid-Mughal Empire. They have made significant contributions to, and influenced, several key sectors such as the Political, Commercial, and Architectural sectors, propagating the strength of the empire to great heights. They are, however, not well documented in archived sources, lending to a commonly assumed perspective of their invisibility in the empire, specifically during Emperor Akbar’s rule. This paper challenges this perceived narrative by analyzing and examining royal women’s inclusion and depiction in several primary sources, both written and visual, and evaluating the purpose and biases of such sources. This paper uses illustrations and paintings to understand the socio-cultural attitudes towards women as well as works by Akbar’s court historian Abul Fazl to understand the intricacies of documenting women to offer a new perspective on the visibility of women in the Timurid-Mughal Empire.

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Yuqing Deng

Faculty Advisor: Sarah Ghasedi

This website explores the pathology of parasite Varroa destructor, a mite that preys on Eastern and Western honey bees, inflicting especially harmful effects in the latter host. This medium functions as a short, yet credible guidebook for beekeepers in an accessible format that will (1) introduce the V. destructor organism, (2) describe its debilitating effects on honey bees, (3) explain why this parasite is a serious problem, (4) introduce methods that are effective in controlling Varroa mites, and (5) clear up confusing or inaccurate information popular sources may echo. Explanations of beekeeping terminology are not included for conciseness as the intended audience is likely already familiar with such knowledge. However, there are those who do not take action to monitor, prevent, and/or control for mite populations in their colonies. As such, this website aims to not only inform, but also persuade beekeepers or aspiring beekeepers that V. destructor is of high-threat to honey bee welfare.

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Nicole Privat

Faculty Advisor: Sarah Ghasedi

Dams are a staple in many areas, providing drinking water and hydropower to billions. But as history has shown, major alterations to the environment such as these can have unexpected results on local wildlife. This issue is presenting itself in the Salish Sea, with no other species feeling the full force of it quite like the Chinook salmon and the Southern Resident Killer Whales. Both populations have shown alarming rates of decline, with both being listed as threatened and endangered under the Endangered Species Act, respectively. This podcast explores the effects of dams on Chinook salmon and killer whales, along with the measures that can be taken to reverse the damage done to these vulnerable populations.

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Alexandra Kravchuck

Faculty Advisor: Sarah Ghasedi

The biological basis of memory formation and the molecular processes which regulate it is a rapidly developing, modern topic of neuroscience research. Though many questions remain unanswered, locally synthesized proteins have been identified as a mechanism of interest. These proteins, manufactured directly in the dendrites of neurons, present the unique advantage of rapid decentralized stimulus response. As such, a proposed link exists between locally synthesized proteins and synaptic plasticity. With biophysical changes at neuronal synapses hypothesized to facilitate memory encoding, a rough biological pathway forms by which locally synthesized proteins mediate memory formation.

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Keely Angela Hall

Faculty Advisor: Gabrielle Rocap

Climate change is impacting marine ecosystems in a multitude of ways. Consequences of greenhouse gas emissions, due to anthropogenic factors, include ocean acidification and warming. Under these conditions, corals are experiencing a reduction in calcification, loss of productivity, and bleaching due to expulsion of their symbiotic zooxanthellae. Coral degradation can collapse the entire reef ecosystem as reef fishes and invertebrates rely on reefs for habitat and food sources. Corals show variable responses and adaptation methods to bleaching. Over the past decade there has been an increase in the sea surface temperature required to initiate bleaching which implies that corals are likely already in the process of adapting to global warming. Reduction in coral coverage and diversity causes a subsequent loss of species richness, abundance, and diversity of reef fishes. These dynamic ecosystems could experience irreversible consequences if greenhouse gas emissions are not mitigated.

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Sophie Carter

Faculty Advisor: Adam Warrin

After the degradation of labor union power throughout the postwar era, a new politics took hold among young Americans, and its academic roots and appeal to student demographics established the university as the new institutional mediator for left-wing activism in the 1960s. The university provided the infrastructure for college students to promote antiwar, civil rights, and civil liberties campaigns both on and off campus. Years before the major events that are tied to the New Left in American collective memory, however, Bay Area college students’ protests against the House Un-American Activities Committee garnered national media attention for their perceived radicalism in the face of repression from the federal government. Student protesters’ altercation with police at San Francisco City Hall in May of 1960 became a turning point at which the Old Left, New Left, and McCarthyism converged, providing valuable insight into the transition of broad left-wing activism from union-based to direct action protest. These student protests prompted outrage from the public and the federal government, and students across the nation soon adopted not only their protest strategy, but also the structure of the student organizations that promoted the demonstration. These protests, the first of their kind and a major precedent for what would become the student New Left movement, complicate the historical understanding of the university as the postwar institutional mediator for left-wing protest, revealing the disparities and power relations between students, professors, and administrators in the pursuit of their respective political agendas.

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Frances Johnson

Faculty Advisor: James Gregory

From 1918 to 1932, the five female directors of the Woman Patriot Publishing Company published _The Woman Patriot_ in the wake of the Progressive Era and the First Red Scare. The newspaper emerged as an active voice in the countermovement against women’s suffrage. Despite the anti-suffragists’ efforts, the 19th Amendment’s enfranchisement of women moved women from the private to the public sphere. _The Woman Patriot_ adapted and continued their conspiratorial association of feminism and radicalism. This paper applies resource mobilization theory and political opportunity theory to the strategies of _The Woman Patriot_. While the Woman Patriot Publishing Company ultimately fell out of alignment with its political coalition, its accomplishments complicate the historical understanding of the waning of maternalist reform and the Equal Rights Amendment, and the waxing of female conservatism.

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Juan Granados Borreguero

Faculty Advisor: Ann C. Huppert

Through the juxtaposition of two key 16th-century architectural landmarks: the Monastery of El Escorial and the Basilica of Saint Peter, I examine the conditions under which the building projects were managed. Architectural history studies the evolution of design canons, while construction history focuses on materials and on technological advancements. In this project, I bridge the gap between the two disciplines, and investigate the procurement of labor and materials, the project management practices of the time (such as types of contracts, organizational hierarchy, worker’s schedules), and how the geopolitical contexts of both buildings affected the course of construction and the lives of workers.

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Finn Mander

Faculty Advisor: Kristen Laidre

Arctic seabird populations have been on the decline in recent decades, yet a clear cause has not been identified. The Arctic tern (Sterna paradisaea) provides a unique opportunity for evaluating the potential of climate-related changes in causing seabird declines due to its 50,000 km annual migration between the northern and southern poles. This paper discusses climate change as it relates to five predominant areas of the Arctic tern life history (habitat, migration, diet, reproduction, and predation) in order to ascertain the future of Arctic seabirds.

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Celest Zinmon-Htet

Faculty Advisor: Michael Reagan

This paper aims to explain the significant educational achievement disparities between white people and those of minority racial groups in the Othello neighborhood. I argue that these racial achievement disparities are a result of social othering caused by the psychological threat of stigmatization, which arises from the presence of racial biases in educational systems. While the establishment of communities with collective identities centered around cultural similarity can be an effective short-term solution to mitigating the effects of racial biases and white privilege on minority students’ academic performance, it is insufficient as a long-term solution because of such institutions’ indirect avoidance of these issues. I examine an educational service offered by the East African Community Services, located in Othello, employing Critical Race Theory, and theories regarding cultural homogeneity, social otherness, and the social wage of whiteness, to guide my analysis of the experiential and academic evidence I have gathered.

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Emma Finkel

Faculty Advisor: Sarah Ghasedi

Climate change is a pressing issue that affects every organism on the planet. This essay and book define and explore the effects of climate change and seaweed's ability to help mitigate the problem. The research essay expands on seaweed’s capacity to become a biofuel, sequester carbon dioxide, reduce livestock methane emission, be used in pharmaceuticals, and produce oxygen. The essay also mentions the underutilization of seaweed's benefits in domestic and international governmental policies. The picture book is aimed at children 5-8 years old and their parents. The book follows young Maureen as she discovers sea levels rising and displacing her from her home. Maureen is also on a mission to learn what she, and every other young child, can do to resist climate change. If children understand climate change and the positive impacts of seaweed early, they can apply this information throughout adulthood and implement it into society.

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Masen Westling

Faculty advisor: Hollis Miller

The modern environmental justice movement has stemmed from the activism that took place in Warren County, North Carolina following the decision to construct a toxic waste landfill in a majority black and low-income community. This contributed to the historically unjust political decisions and lack of regulation that has targeted vulnerable populations and forced them to suffer the detrimental health impacts as a result of private and federal company’s actions. The activism that took place in the 1980s-90s influenced social and political reform by drawing national attention to the issue of environmental racism. While the United States has come a long way since Warren County, there is still injustice and discrimination that must be addressed in order to protect the health and wellbeing of unprotected and underrepresented communities.

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Lauren Holbrook

Faculty advisor: Megan Mcloskey

People with disabilities (PWD) constitute the largest minority group in the United States. An estimated 1 in 4 adults live with a disability. As the population of PWD grows, medical staff must meet their unique needs and provide the equitable, accessible, quality care afforded by their rights. To inform the development of disability-inclusive medical training standards, this review highlights physician bias as a profound barrier to healthcare for PWD. The vague cultural competency standards set by The United States Liaison Committee on Medical Education lead to inconsistent, inadequate, and, sometimes, nonexistent disability awareness training. Consequently, physicians are ill-equipped to recognize prejudice or systemic bias that views disability as an individual tragedy to be fixed or cured. Ultimately, healthcare disparities for PWD and evidence of physicians' and students' negative attitudes reveal the state of medical education in the United States, demonstrating the crucial role medical training plays in promoting equitable healthcare.

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David Blynov

Faculty Advisor: Rebecca Thorpe

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected nearly every facet of life, most alarmingly that of food security. Scholars suggests that food security is one of the most important indicators of physical and financial wellbeing. This study examines the success rate of various food pantries across Washington State in their addressing of local food insecurities. “Success” is measured by how many households each food bank served. In order to collect this data, I individually contacted food banks across Washington State requesting them for the number of households that their pantries served between January and August of 2020. A multivariate regression model is employed in order to examine whether locality population size has a statistically significant relationship with the number of households served, controlling for other variables.

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Dutton Crowley

Faculty Advisors: Charity Urbanski and Arbella Bet-Shlimon

Peace for Apartheid: The Oslo Accords and Orientalism in Liberal American Foreign Policy, 1991-1996

My paper looks at the Oslo Accords, the "peace process" between the Palestinians and Israel. However, I argue that Oslo was never a peace process, and this is largely because the United States was never the neutral arbiter it purported to be. The United States sees the conflict through the lens of Orientalism, which precludes their objectivity. I ground this position in original analysis of the memoirs of two policy planners in the Clinton administration, Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk. As I show, they solely criticized the Palestinians for resorting to violence and terrorism while ignoring the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territory, which are designed to extend Israeli sovereignty and render the creation of a Palestinian state implausible. I review the history of the conflict to show that this policy is antithetical to the terms of peace, specifically UN Security Council Resolution 242, which Israel nominally supports.

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Alex Fletcher

Faculty Advisor: Rebecca Thorpe

Epidemic of Violations Abroad: Prosecutorial Control of Exculpatory Evidence and Plea Bargaining Rates

Over the last few decades, plea bargaining rates have skyrocketed in the United States. Most efforts taken by states to halt the surge of plea bargaining have not addressed prosecutorial discretion in the court, and no literature has conducted an empirical study analyzing the impact of prosecutorial handling of exculpatory evidence. I hypothesize there will be lower rates of plea bargains in states that have adopted the American Bar Association's Model Rule 3.8 (g) and (h) addressing ethical handling of exculpatory evidence. To test this, I ran a bivariate and a multivariate analysis at the county-level of 17 states, 10 with the model rule and 7 without. The existence of Model Rule 3.8 (g) and (h) has a statistically significant effect on the rate of plea bargains and there is a substantially lower predicted rate of plea bargaining within model rule states.

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Kathryn Karcher

Faculty Advisor: Scott Lemieux

Pursuing Social Justice: How Might a Universal Basic Income or Federal Jobs Guarantee Help Women?

Welfare policies in the United States reinforce sexism, racism, and classism, and thereby oppress women. When discussing alternative policies, scholars and political players should not just consider economic consequences. They should also emphasize the social consequences of potential policies, namely how effectively they would combat women’s oppression. In this paper I consider two proposed policies, federal jobs guarantees (FJG) and universal basic income (UBI). I use the framework established in ​Justice and the Politics of Difference​ by Iris Marion Young and her explanation of the five faces of oppression to evaluate how FJG and UBI may help or harm women. I also analyze recent public opinion polling and FJG and UBI pilot programs to determine the likelihood of the U.S. implementing similar policies. This paper answers the following questions: Which policy, FJG or UBI, would more effectively lessen women’s oppression? Which is more likely to be implemented? Should those concerned with women’s oppression favor UBI, FJG, or a combination of the two? My theoretical analysis shows that UBI would more effectively combat women’s oppression, but public opinion polling and international pilot programs suggest that FJG is more likely to be implemented. This presents a dilemma for advocates who wish to prioritize vulnerable groups’ needs while focusing on realistic goals. The social justice framework I adopt in this paper helps to resolve these conflicts. Using this framework, I conclude that UBI should remain a long-term goal in our transition to a more just society because it more effectively combats women’s oppression. Still, political advocates should take seriously other policies such as FJG which still account for women’s needs and reduce harm done to them. These conclusions contribute to ongoing debate over these policies and demonstrate how researchers and advocates can analyze policies within a social justice framework that prioritizes the needs of our most vulnerable populations.

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Caroline Kasman

Faculty Advisor: Melissa Knox

Development Assistance for Noncommunicable Diseases: Political, Socioeconomic, and Health Indicators of Foreign Aid for an Emerging Global Crisis (paper not available)

As a result of global economic development, noncommunicable diseases, also known as NCDs, have become an emerging pandemic and widescale economic burden that is not being adequately addressed. However, there is a lack of alignment between NCDs burden and funding by donor groups to low- and middle-income countries. Currently, there is limited quantitative research on how states choose to allocate foreign aid for global health issues, especially for NCDs. This report focuses on bilateral aid and models the correlations between economic, political, social, and epidemiological indicators of recipient countries and the level of DAH for NCDs given by donor countries. I predict that bilateral aid positively correlates with economic indicators such as foreign direct investment and trade openness of the recipient country. I conclude that there is evidence of political and economic ties and that donor countries may view highly democratic recipients as requiring external funding for NCDs.

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Jeani Atlas

Faculty Advisor: Rebecca Thorpe

In the Jailhouse, Not the Statehouse: Racialized Felon Disenfranchisement and Black Descriptive Representation (paper not available)

In recent decades, scholars have shown that laws restricting or eliminating the voting rights of convicted felons disproportionately prevent Black people from voting. Scholars have also found that Black voters are more likely to vote for Black political candidates than are voters of other races. However, researchers have yet to link felon disenfranchisement with political representation or access to political power. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap, analyzing how disenfranchisement laws affect Black descriptive representation in state legislatures. To do this, I employ multiple regression analysis to systematically examine whether the harshness of felon disenfranchisement laws reduces the percentage of Black state legislators in each state. While my findings show that the harshness of felon disenfranchisement laws does not meaningfully affect Black descriptive representation, the results suggest avenues for future research on whether the existence of disenfranchisement laws is itself a response to Black electoral power.

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Danielle Carrasquero

Faculty Advisor: Jordana Bailkin

Civil Rights and their Limitations: On Redress for Japanese Latin Americans

My research project explores the incarceration of Japanese Peruvians and Japanese Latin Americans during World War II. Further, my paper looks at the fact that these individuals were then excluded from the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. The overarching questions explored in my research are: What are the consequences of taking a civil and constitutional rights framework when considering what are actually human rights abuses? How is it that Japanese Peruvians were excluded from the Civil Liberties act, and what are the consequences of that fact?

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Kalina Stork

Faculty Advisor: Jenny Stern

Reproduction, distribution, and feeding ecology of the Greenland shark (Sominosus microcephalus) in relation to climate change and human activities in the Arctic

My submission is a research paper on the ecological role of the species the Greenland shark (Sominosus microcephalus). Very few research studies have been conducted on this species, so this paper is a review on over 30 various studies that have been completed. This paper offers a comprehensive view on the Greenland shark's feeding ecology, distribution, and reproduction as well as a discussion on the potential effects climate change and increasing human activity in the Arctic could have on this species.

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Wells Stromberg

Faculty Advisor: Jenny Stern

Benthic-pelagic decoupling and walrus responses to a warming Arctic

A walrus diet typically consists of invertebrates that live on the seafloor, consumed in large quantities with the help of special morphological traits. In addition to the threats posed by diminishing sea ice in their Arctic habitat, global climate change is causing a major shift in the Pacific Arctic ecosystem and food web, reducing the food supply for the large mammals. A combination of distributional and dietary changes among Pacific walrus populations has helped them to survive so far, but the future of the species is uncertain as their ecosystem and environment continue to warm and change.

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Wing Yun Au

Faculty Advisor: Sarah Ghasedi

The Story Behind An East Asian's Name Change

There’s a lot of reasons why one might decide to change their name—maybe it holds bad memories or there’s another name that holds more meaning. For a certain demographic, specifically East Asians who come to an English speaking country, the reasons begin to relate more to a connection with culture. This video explores the experiences of East Asian students who are at different relationships with their name. While some have openly adopted an English name, others have decided to continue with their ethnic name in a new country. A focus is placed on a name’s connection with family and ties with personal culture and identity. Catered to those who are experiencing the decision of whether or not to adopt an English name, the video helps present different perspectives to help with this decision.

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Sophia Carey

Faculty Advisor: Michael Reagan

Educational Excellence and the Economics of Immigration: Undocumented Latin American Youth and the Neoliberal Knowledge Economy

This paper examines the ideological superstructure of the Seattle-based Youth Tutoring Program in the context of racial politics in urban design and education. Institutional restrictions to eligibility for public housing against undocumented immigrants prevent many Latinx youth from receiving adequate educational support. Such restrictions are ultimately enforced by the neoliberal ideal of a knowledge economy in which educational institutions serve to advance American dominance in the global economic framework. This ideal of a knowledge economy excludes undocumented immigrants, particularly those of Latin American descent, on the grounds of maintaining an economically self-sufficient American community in which educational and housing services are provided only to those who are presumed to have the potential to later significantly contribute to the American economy. Behind the economic-political justifications for this discrimination are racially exclusive definitions of community that play into frameworks of American exceptionalism and ideological constructions of exclusive national and local communities.

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Cleone Abrams

Faculty Advisor: John Findlay

"We Wear Our Boots Just Like the Men": Women's Roles in Pacific Northwest Mountains and Society, 1890-1939

Women challenged traditional roles and expectations in both the mountains and politics of the 20th-century Pacific Northwest. Though women continued to struggle for equality and retained separate spheres from men, they argued that their unique perspectives as women earned them more equal standing. Comparing the participants of these two activities reveals parallel elements of women’s continuing struggle for equality. Specifically, they shared common identities - only a wealthy minority were able to participate. They also had unique values and self-perceptions as women, finding satisfaction and camaraderie in both front- and backcountry spheres; at the same time many did perpetuate social biases. Finally, these women developed strategies to confront a variety of perceptions held by men in a male-dominated society. Ultimately, by World War II, women had gained social capital in the front country but continued to fight for equal status in the mountains.

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Brian Dang

Faculty Advisor: Karen Hartman

RATSKIN, Refracting and Reflecting Upon the Dispossession of Immigrant Families (project not available)

Three generations of immigrant history have led up to my personhood. I’ve inherited the struggle of my mother and my grandmother before her, who have worked themselves to the bone to provide me security. This inheritance is the driving question in my research project RATSKIN, a theatrical play that is in development. How does one honor one’s immigrant history but also break free from the ideologies that were made to trap immigrants within a cycle of destruction? RATSKIN is my intervention. Incorporating literary and theatrical traditions with historical, archival research, the play is an exploration in how to weave together personal experience, genre, cultural theory, and history into a narrative that can be shared to a community in a productive, discussion generating way. The plot and construction of the story itself is an attempt to physically manifest racialization, assimilation, and the trappings of harmful ideology.

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Hannah Nguyen

Faculty Advisor: Robert Abrams

Cyclicity in Landscape: Its Reality in Nature and Clash with Human Civilizational Progress

Seeking to understand how landscape’s dualities serve as the basis for its inherently natural cyclicity in Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod brings us to a clearer recognition of its odds with the American ideal of unidirectional progression. The natural landscape’s discontinuous cyclicity and its connection to human civilization’s cyclical theory of history lead us to a discussion of its conceptual clash with Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism. Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire paintings show how the landscape’s natural cycle is linked to the rise and fall of human civilizations built atop it. This paper, through analysis of Thoreau and Cole’s works, will examine how the environmental landscape’s natural cycle is irrevocably linked to that of human civilization. In doing so, we enter a more detailed discussion of how natural cyclicity in the landscape serves as a source of American fear of disruption to their nation’s ongoing progress.

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Delaney Lawson

Faculty Advisor: Jenny Stern

Increased prevalence of human activity in the Arctic as a result of climate change, and the impacts on the Arctic ecosystem from resulting increases of introduced species

Arctic sea ice levels have been steadily decreasing since the end of the 20th century, and there is no evidence of this trend disappearing in the coming years. As a result of this, shipping routes are opening up within Arctic seas, and ships have begun traversing through these waters with increasing consistency. These ships are bringing with them countless hull fouling organisms and ballast waters filled with invasive species. With increasingly temperate conditions in the Arctic, the ecosystem is becoming more and more susceptible to adverse effects of invasive species. This paper discusses specific invasive species in the Arctic, the impacts that these organisms may have on the carefully balanced Arctic ecosystem, and policies that may help combat the adverse effects of a steadily increasing prevalence of invasive species within the area.

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Liam Albright

Faculty Advisor: Negin Dahya

A novel three-tiered approach to bridging the mental health treatment gap

One of the most pressing issues in the world is Mental Illness. Mental illness is a large part of population health and can have large effects on society with many people experiencing it in some form or another. While mental health is a vast problem current treatment plans by States, Intergovernmental Organizations, and Non- Governmental organizations are not meeting the needs of populations around the world, particularly in low resources low-income areas. To close the treatment gap in mental health care in low resource low-income areas a novel Intervention model that combines mobile phones, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Lay-Health workers should be implemented. It is certainly difficult to treat mental illnesses in rural areas and developing states due to lack of resources and infrastructure, but it is still possible with lay health workers, mobile health, and cognitive behavioral therapy combined. Lay health workers are health workers that have quick but effective training and the needed cultural and language knowledge. The mobile health platform provides an effective delivery method.

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Aleenah Ansari

Faculty advisor: Daniela Rosner

Gentrification, Displacement, and the Question of Responsibility

In 1865, Seattle’s First City Council banned Native Americans from living in the city – but restricting people’s right to a home hasn’t stopped there. Redlining, or policies that make it harder for people of color to obtain a mortgage or buy a property in certain neighborhoods, have existed in Seattle since the 20th century. The continued growth and expansion of Seattle and its skyrocketing rent prices has displaced people of color who have historically lived in the Central District. My guiding question is, “how can we use storytelling to empower the stories and experiences of the Black community in the Central District, all while acknowledging the city’s history?”

Moreover, there are stories of resilience in communities that have been displaced by gentrification but aren’t not showcased in media outlets. Through interviews with community members, I hope to share stories about how the CD community have responded to gentrification with resilience.

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Jazmin Moreno Candia

Faculty advisor: Beth Traxler

Antibiotic Resistance and Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is highly dangerous pathogen that is very prone to multiple drug resistance. As the microbe is very slow growing, culturing methods of diagnosing antibiotic resistance can take several months, making the treatment often ineffective. Faster methods of diagnosing antibiotic resistance are being developed that will help make the treatments more accurate and tailored to the strain infecting the patient.

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Caroline Kasman

Faculty Advisor: Melissa Knox

Development Assistance for Noncommunicable Diseases: Political, Socioeconomic, and Health Indicators of Foreign Aid for an Emerging Global Crisis (paper not available)

As a result of global economic development, noncommunicable diseases, also known as NCDs, have become an emerging pandemic and widescale economic burden that is not being adequately addressed. However, there is a lack of alignment between NCDs burden and funding by donor groups to low- and middle-income countries. Currently, there is limited quantitative research on how states choose to allocate foreign aid for global health issues, especially for NCDs. This report focuses on bilateral aid and models the correlations between economic, political, social, and epidemiological indicators of recipient countries and the level of DAH for NCDs given by donor countries. I predict that bilateral aid positively correlates with economic indicators such as foreign direct investment and trade openness of the recipient country. I conclude that there is evidence of political and economic ties and that donor countries may view highly democratic recipients as requiring external funding for NCDs.

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Elaine Synn Yie Khoo

Faculty Advisor: Dong-Jae Eun

The Impact of The Government-Linked Companies Transformation Program (GLCTP) on The Performances of Government-Linked Companies (GLCs) in Malaysia

This paper examines the impact of the 10-year long Government-Linked Companies Transformation Program (GLCTP) on the performances of the Government-Linked Companies (GLCs) and non-Government-Linked Companies (non-GLCs) in Malaysia introduced in 2005. The performance of GLCs and matching non-GLCs are compared using difference-in-differences estimation techniques. Financial performance is measured using Returns on Asset (ROA) and Returns on Equity (ROE) while Tobin’s Q ratio is used as a measure of a firm's value. Results show that the GLCTP have a statistically significant negative effect on GLCs’ financial performance. Difference-in-difference estimation also shows that the GLCTP has a negative effect on firms’ market value relative to firms’ assets as measured by Tobin’s Q ratio.

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Annie Lewis

Faculty Advisor: Devin Naar

Precarious Whiteness: Reimagining the Seattle Sephardic Origin Story

“Precarious Whiteness: Reimagining the Seattle Sephardic Origin Story” seeks to investigate narrative formation around Sephardic Jewish identity from the early twentieth century to the present. While Sephardim are commonly positioned as American and white in academic and non-academic texts, I demonstrate that these classifications do not account for the multifaceted Ottoman, Spanish, and Jewish nature of Sephardic identity, nor acknowledge Sephardic reluctance to become permanently part of the United States. I subsequently disassociate Sephardic Jews from the white-washing pioneer narrative of the American West to recognize the non-Western and non-white elements of Sephardic identity. Finally, I recount the many instances in which non-Jews and already-established, Ashkenazic Jews operated according to a black-white dichotomy to discriminate against Sephardic Jews to ensure their own societal privilege.

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Melissa Morgan

Faculty Advisor: Moon-ho Jung

Vice & Visibility: Changing Attitudes toward Prostitution and Sexual Behavior in Victorian Britain

This essay explores the story of the Contagious Diseases Acts, a series of bills from Britain in the 1860s which subjected female prostitutes to forced medical examinations. Early feminist activists, largely middle-class women, campaigned furiously against these Acts, which were successfully repealed by the mid-1880s. The fervor generated by this activism also led to the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which increased the powers of the state in policing brothels as well as, bizarrely, the further criminalization of male-male sexual behavior. In this essay, I argue that the activism that defeated the oppressive Contagious Diseases Acts directly led to the passage of the repressive Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 by creating a moral panic over “immoral” aristocratic male sexual behavior, leading to an increase in state power to enforce monogamous, heterosexual, and therefore moral sexual behavior.

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Tianli Song

Faculty Advisor: Matthew Mosca

The Emerging Mediator of Diplomacy: The Zongli Yamen and The Margary Affair Of 1875 (paper not available)

Although the foundation of Zongli Yamen, Qing's de facto Foreign Ministry, in 1861 immediately attracted favorable opinion among Western delegates and Chinese reformers, its domestic and international strategies remained largely unsurveyed, and its hierarchical relation within Qing's diplomatic machinery stayed ambiguous to Qing historians. This thesis explores the Zongli Yamen's strategy to success during a single episode of diplomatic confrontation: the Margary Affair of 1875. This thesis demonstrates that the Yamen's strategy consisted in mediating subordinate local institutions, which carried out the essential task of information gathering and strategy execution. It was through its role as the mediator, the Yamen established and retained its supremacy in Qing's foreign affair hierarchy, emerging from the Tongzhi Restoration ending in 1875. However, such strategy entailed risked that would fully unmask in the 20th century when Qing Dynasty was in twilight.

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Sarah Duncan

Faculty Advisor: Jennifer Balkus

An Overview of Brazil's HIV Epidemic: From Past Challenges to Future Directions

This research project aims to investigate the course of the HIV epidemic in Brazil. After exploring the history of HIV/AIDS and the current state of the epidemic, this paper explores the current challenges that Brazil faces in combating the spread of HIV. This research encompass a broad range of economic, social, and political challenges related to HIV testing, prevention, and treatment, especially as it pertains to populations that have been disproportionately impacted. Based on this information and several recent studies that speak to Brazil’s current HIV mitigation strategies, this project then seeks to provide recommendations to local and regional organizations that will help improve the current situation of the HIV epidemic.

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Katelyn Graham

Faculty Advisor: Megan Ming Francis

Accommodating Public Space to Uphold Rape Myths: The Danger of Using Environmental Design to Prevent Sexual Violence

This paper investigates the ways environmental design perpetuates rape myths through critiquing of the use Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design strategies as a preventative measure against sexual assault in public spaces. This is done through analyzing media language around sexual violence, site specific case studies, and applying feminist theory to current urban design trends.

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Bum Mook (Chris) Oh

Faculty Advisor: Jevin West

Automatically Classifying Art Images Using Computer Vision

Millions of art images have been digitized over the last several decades. This has created new opportunities for art scholars and historians. However, searching and navigating these art images is difficult because of the sparsity of the metadata and contextual information used to describe these images. Unless one knows the exact title and artist, finding related paintings is a difficult task without the metadata. The research in this project addresses this challenge by developing unsupervised computer vision methods that will extract metadata automatically from paintings. Our dataset will include more than 2 million art images from Artstor, a non-profit organization that distributes art images to libraries and universities. If successful, we plan to build an interactive interface for exploring the extracted features and for developing a recommender system that could be used on platforms such as Artstor.

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Allison Dumitriu Carcoana

Faculty Advisor: Beatrice Arduini

Dal Principe di Machiavelli a Trump: Somiglianze in Politica Basate sulla Natura Umana

I wrote this paper as the final project for my independent study in Italian 499. It discusses the similarities between the tactics that worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and the recommendations of 16th century political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli. Machiavelli’s most famous book, The Prince, focused on the ways that a ruler could maintain power. He based his observations on human nature, and although he did not see much success in his time, his work has been celebrated by later generations. Since human nature ought to remain relatively unchanged throughout the decades, it is sensible that the same political advice could apply today, even in a drastically different social environment. My project focuses on the choice to exploit the human ego to obtain maximum political benefits, the use of an antagonistic elite, and the necessity of a stabilizing reaction to the clashes between them and the collective.

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Hannah Farrell

Faculty Advisor: John Wilkerson

Rehabilitation in Washington’s Juvenile Justice System: How Longer Sentences may be Well-Intentioned yet Ineffective

This research aims to determine whether sentence length affects the rate of re-offending after release (called recidivism) for children who are incarcerated at juvenile rehabilitation facilities in Washington State. Some juvenile justice reform proponents argue that longer sentences are necessary so that rehabilitative services can work most effectively. Others contend that longer periods of incarceration are not conducive to positive post-release outcomes. I will explore the recidivism rates of juveniles who are housed in youth versus adult prisons in Washington State. Unfortunately there is no data for Washington that examines the relationship between sentence lengths and juvenile recidivism. Thus, I will outline the data on sentence lengths and recidivism in three other states – Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Florida – and compare those juvenile systems to Washington’s. Although their juvenile systems are not identical to Washington’s in terms of offender differences, composition demographics, and stipulations of detainment, similar conclusions are being found in other jurisdictions: long-term juvenile incarceration does not decrease, and sometimes even increases, recidivism. We hope to discover if this research is conclusive when specific to Washington. Children’s lives are at stake.

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Muhen Huang

Faculty Advisor: Radhika Govindrajan

Animal Agriculture and Antibiotic Resistant Disease

What social, economic, or political factors affect the way antibiotic use is regulated in the US? In the United States, farmers feed their animals antibiotics at low doses to prevent disease and promote their growth. Because the low doses do not kill all the bacteria, the bacteria that survive will then reproduce, and the strain eventually becomes resistant. These antibiotic resistant diseases that emerge from farms pose a health problem to the people who work with these animals and the people who consume them, as well as to wild animals that live nearby. Byproducts of animal farming, such as manure or runoff from farms, can carry with it antibiotic resistant diseases that can change the microbial dynamics of an ecosystem. However, the interests of pharmaceutical companies and farmers, especially large monopolizing farm corporations, means the practice of recklessly using antibiotics for non medical purposes has continued.

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Yulenni Venegas

Faculty Advisor: Sophia Jordan Wallace

Respeta mí Existencia o Espera Resistencia: Mobilization and Political Participation of the Latino Immigrant Rights Movement Under Threat

Current immigration law in the United States is amongst the harshest in our nation’s history, where for an immigrant, all roads come with the threat of deportation. This paper examines how the threat of deportation in Washington State and Arizona affects the Latino community. This paper measures levels of threat via local immigration law and the levels of cooperation between law enforcement and ICE. Utilizing interview data, I find that under increasing levels of threat, the community responds with heightened levels of political engagement. Additionally, under lower levels of threat of deportation, the community primarily engages in collective mobility services and local campaigns, whereas under high threat, the community additionally utilizes preemptive organization, alert networks, and national campaigns. I argue that due to both the drastic ways which the threat of deportation affects mobilization and fear amongst the Latino community, the threat of deportation is an act of state violence.

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Melissa Estabrook

Faculty Advisor: Liz Haight

Implications and Limitations of Ireland’s Abortion Law

In this research paper I explore the implications and limitations of Ireland’s abortion law. I specifically address the issue with a human right’s framework. In this paper, I argue that mounting historical court cases and the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar that sparked worldwide attention resulted in the passing of the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act of 2013. I concluded that while the act did improve Irish women’s right to life, it did not translate into improved access to abortion and continues to violate these women’s rights, such as the right to autonomy and the right to privacy.

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Sam Wooley

Faculty Advisor: Stephanie Clare

Are We Living in the Racial Capitalocene?: Anthropocene Discourse, Racial Capitalism, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ "Between the World and Me"

As global temperatures continue to increase, it becomes clear that we are living in an era of human-induced climate shift. This era has commonly been labelled the “Anthropocene” in both the sciences and the humanities, a name that invokes the “human” as the force of geological change. In my project, I investigate the question, “How does Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me problematize the conception of the ‘human’ in ‘Anthropocene’ narratives?” This “Anthropocene” discourse, I suggest, posits the “human” as a universal geological force, therein distorting our understandings of how capitalism and racism are linked in the history of “modernity” and precluding our ability to recognize differential responsibility for climate shift. Literature like Coates’ Between the World and Me, I suggest, can problematize these dominant, universalizing understandings through a simultaneous critical attunement to histories of domination and oppression and an artistic mediation of daily, lived experience of climate change.

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Bill Cheung-Daihe

Faculty Advisor: Katarzyna Dziwirek

New Foundations: Emotional Acculturation of Ethnic Chinese Abroad

My research paper, “New Foundations: Emotional Acculturation of Ethnic Chinese Abroad”, was written as a Term Paper for Honors 211/Slavic 426. In 11 pages, I argue that Chinese-American emotion is at the intersection of China and the US and forms a new framework in its own right after discussing acculturation and bilingualism's effects on emotions amongst expatriates in general.

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Carly Sprague

Faculty Advisor: Richard Watts

Une Voix prématurée: La Féminisme d’Olympe de Gouges en Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne

This is my final research paper from my 18th-21st century history/literature French class discussing the importance and ramifications of Olympe de Gouges's 1791 pamphlet Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, which was a feminist response to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. I argue that although contemporary and modern-day critics have denounced Olympe de Gouges's writing was (at worst) "uncultured" or (at best) "proto-feminist," I see the Déclaration des droits de la femme as having been written with exaggeration and emotion to directly appeal and relate to the day-to-day lives of 18th century women. I believe she was a feminist not "before her time" but necessary for her time, and that the real reason she was tried and executed by capital punishment was that she dared to ask for equal rights for women.

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Collin Gill

Faculty Advisor: Ralina L. Joseph

“It Gets Better”: Towards a Deeper Analysis of Pan-Queer Identity

In this thesis I interrogate the “It Gets Better” (IGB) video project by Dan Savage, using an intersectional analysis to reveal the ways in which it reinforces politics of respectability, neoliberalism, and lacks an intersectional approach to the process of coming out across lines of gender identity, race/ethnicity, class, nationality, religion, and ability. I chose to research this topic because as a genderqueer and queer person there have been instances that my life has not gotten better since coming out. By the same token, I have several friends who have had particularly difficult experiences because of coming out due to their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status (SES), contending with gender dysphoria, nationality, religion, and inaccessibility to resources (e.g.- healthcare, education, housing) within the capitalist structures of the United States (U.S.). My goal in this thesis is to interrupt neoliberal notions of “getting better” and instead turn our attention to the structures in society that do not allow life to get better for all LGBTQ people after coming out.

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Anna Mikkelborg

Faculty Advisor: Michael McCann

Reframing Reform: Evaluating and Challenging Conversations Around Campaign Finance in the United States (paper not available)

For over a century, the Supreme Court has persisted in framing campaign finance regulation as a question of balancing First Amendment free speech rights and the need to prevent corruption, a paradigm which elides an equally important concern for equitable political representation across socioeconomic status. I argue that reframing campaign finance as an issue of Fourteenth Amendment equal protection is a politically compelling and legally defensible strategy that will promote campaign finance regulations that more holistically reflect and balance constitutional values. In addition to building theoretical support for this framework, this paper presents original empirical findings that greater regulation of campaign finance in the states is associated with more progressive income tax schemes. These findings provide additional support for framing conversations around campaign finance in terms of policy alignment and, by extension, the constitutional interest of equal protection of the law.

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Hannah Fumiko Russ

Faculty Advisor: Moon-Ho Jung

“It Must be Odd to be a Minority”: Multiracial  Japanese Americans, Racial Segregation, and the U.S. Empire

Multiracial Japanese families posed a problem for the U.S. government during the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. The Mixed Marriage policy was an attempt to reconcile the question: Who did the U.S. government and the Japanese American community consider Japanese? Japanese Americans emigrated with the transpacific identity of both Japanese and American. In contrast, the U.S. government rejected the possibility of dual identities by arguing that racial identity was based on biology alone. The existence of mixed race individuals in Japanese mass incarceration camps upset the U.S.’s racial logic that emphasized segregator biology over the possibility of cultural assimilation. The Mixed Marriage policy built upon segregation policies to determine who could integrate into the American identity. Those who passed the appeal process of the Mixed Marriage policy were welcomed back into the categories of Japanese and American. These individuals became symbols for the U.S. government to project an image of benevolence and racial tolerance in the post-war empire.

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Jocelyn Beausire

Faculty Advisor: Ann c. Huppert

The Emancipation of Urban Noise: John Cage’s Music as Acoustic Ecology

The built environment frequently under-emphasizes the role of auditory perceptions in shaping experience. In an urban planning context, this disregard can impact the whole of society. Raymond Murray Schafer proposed psychoacoustic ecology as a framework for shaping the large-scale urban acoustic environment. He defined it as the "study of the relationship between humans and sounds in a given environment," and stated that the holistic acoustic environment, or “soundscape,” is a “musical composition to which we necessarily contribute and must take responsibility.” My research applies this comparison to critique the idea of absolute silence and its repercussions on urban populations. I apply the theories of mid-century music composer John Cage as an extension of Schafer’s similitude, and through combining it with the theories of several prominent figures in the urban planning community, I propose a framework for creating urban acoustic ecologies that encourage egalitarian, cooperative, and inclusive urban spaces.

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Laura Christman

Faculty Advisor: George K. Behlmer

Four Papers Exploring Victorian Scientific Culture: Mock Turtle Soup, Cosmetics, Bicycles, and Psychical Study

This collection of four papers was written for a History 498 Senior Seminar. This particular class was unusual because instead of writing one long paper we wrote four shorter papers. The subject of the class was Science and Popular Culture in the Victorian Period. Each of these papers focuses on a different aspect of Victorian scientific views through one specific example. The research topics had to connect to the theme of that weeks reading, and needed to be based primarily on primary sources. I wrote about animal rights through examining cookbooks, cleanliness and hygiene through cosmetics, women’s reproductive health through bicycles, and psychical research through a skeptical member of the leading paranormal society of the Victorian era. Each of these papers focuses on a different aspect of Victorian science, but they should be understood as one project representative of a quarter long process of developing research and writing skills.

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Hohjin Im

Faculty Advisor: Ann Culligan

Cultural Differences in Feedback Interpretation and Mindset: Implications for Intervention

Growth mindset literature suggests that an emphasis the ability to improve yields positive learning outcomes for many American institutions, where a fixed mindset philosophy is common. Growth mindset interventions, however, have not been widely conducted on populations from East Asian cultures. Results and findings from both cultural and developmental scholarships suggest that there may be similarities between the growth mindset and East Asian cultural values, but individuals from East Asian cultures may still be underperforming due to exposure from American institutional fixed mindedness. This literature review proposes that 1) the phenomenon of high-achievement observed in East Asian populations is a manifestation of inherent key growth mindset concepts in their cultural way of being, and that 2) the implementation of growth mindset interventions can serve as a tool for addressing institutional mismatches in cultural expressions of feedback and growth, while narrowing achievement gaps.

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Ethan Walkley

Faculty Advisor: Geoffrey Turnovsky

La Censure sous le Second Empire: la Condamnation des Fleurs du Mal et l’Innocence de Madame Bovary

My research focused on literary censorship during the Second Empire France by examining two  censorship trials: the 1856 trial of Gustave Flaubert’s realist novel Madame Bovary and the 1857 trial of Charles Baudelaire's anthology of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal. Both works were tried by the same prosecutor and both dealt with similar themes including that of adultery and outrage of good morals. Why then was Flaubert found innocent while Baudelaire was found guilty despite a weaker and lackluster indictment by the prosecutor? The objective of my research was to carefully examine each trial with its involved literary works in order to discover the reasons for these unusual outcomes.

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Malak Shalabi

Faculty Advisor: Bruce Kochis

Spiritual Humiliation: Sectarian Torture Tactics in Assad’s Prisons

Using an Islamic lens, this paper will explore spiritual humiliation, a method of torture used by guards in Syria’s government torture facilities to violate religious boundaries and demean the spiritual identity of detainees. Spiritual humiliation will be categorized into two forms; the first being forced sin. This is committed in verbal and physical blasphemy and false confessions. The second form of spiritual humiliation is the restriction of religious practice, apparent both directly, by forbidding prayer, fasting, the call to prayer, growing of a beard, and indirectly, by preventing them from seeing the time of day, necessary for fasting and praying, and by imposing a state of religious impurity upon the detainee. Labeling the sectarian abuse that takes place on a smaller scale in torture facilities provides a deeper understanding the religious dimension to the genocide in Syria.

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Ian Bellows

Faculty Advisor: David Citrin

Seeing Red: Maoist Rumors, Hidden Transcripts, and the End of the 2014 Mount Everest Climbing Season

Himalayan adventure travel is a burgeoning industry in some mountainous regions of Nepal, but with its rapid, uneven, and largely unregulated growth have come the creation of new economic and social arrangements and renewed questions of equity and safety. On April 18, 2014, a serac collapsed on Mt. Everest’s Khumbu Icefall and killed 16 Nepali high altitude workers. After several contentious days of deliberation and protests at Base Camp, the climbing season effectively ended when rumors began to circulate that attempts to continue climbing would be met with violence by individuals purportedly associated with Nepal’s Maoists. I combine the theoretical framework of Scott’s transcript theory with the interpretive frame of Birrell’s treatment of Everest as a text to be read and analyzed to show how rumors of Maoist involvement, though unsubstantiated, encapsulated specific anxieties and dominant preconceived notions about the structure and function of the Himalayan adventure travel industry.

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Martin Horst

Faculty Advisor: Richard H. Watts

L’identité et la Francophonie: Examining the Interplay of Language Attitudes and Identity Construction in Moroccan Students

Today, the continuing presence of French as the language of higher education and economic opportunity in Morocco illustrates the widespread influence that France still exercises over her former protectorate. French has also been shown to play a crucial role in extra-professional sites. This complexity of linguistic usage predicts a multifaceted understanding of French by its users in Morocco; how then can we characterize younger speakers’ attitudes towards the French language, and their own sense of self? Through sociolinguistic, qualitative analysis of conversational data collected in the spring of 2015, I show how the personal identities of Moroccan students intersect with their command of and nostalgia for French, yielding positive and negative alignments with the language. By examining the different values assigned overtly to French by its speakers, we can expand our understanding of how this interaction may influence linguistic and social hierarchies in this region.

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Andres Quiroga Roldan

Faculty Advisor: Christine Ingebritsen

The Challenges of Recent Migrations to Scandinavia

Despite having nearly identical historical, ethnic, and social backgrounds, Sweden and Denmark have taken fairly different approaches to the issue of immigration over the last half-century. While Denmark surrendered to some extent its reputation as a humanitarian superpower by advocating for aggressive anti-immigration and anti-refugee policies, Sweden took in perhaps more refugees than they were able to accommodate. Both cases ultimately led to a severe marginalization of immigrant communities – especially of immigrants of Middle Eastern background. This marginalization, in turn, has led to some disturbances and even terror attacks in Copenhagen and Stockholm, and has been fueling anti-immigration sentiments amongst Scandinavian voters at an increasing pace. While Sweden remains politically moderate relative to the rest of Europe, Denmark has seen an incredible surge of its far-right, populist Folkeparti in its last few elections.

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Anna Bridston

Faculty Advisor: Halvor A. Undem

Viability of Fulfilling the Nuclear-Nonproliferation Treaty in a Post-Cold War World

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty has an end goal of complete disarmament.  Despite the creation of successful programs - such as Megatons to Megawatts between the United States and Russia - which have aimed at the gradual reduction of surplus nuclear stockpiles, the prospect of the total elimination of nuclear weapons now seems fleeting as it is no longer a bilateral issue between two hegemonic powers, but one that is widespread among states with varying interests.  This paper examines why we are struggling to successfully fulfill the NPT by stressing the issues of deterrence, modernization, and noncompliance in our current political climate, which has seen increases in proliferation as opposed to gradual disarmament. I also address potential solutions, such as the creation of an international fuel bank, the use of irreversible safeguards agreements, and a program dedicated to the global recycling nuclear fuel for clean energy rather than using it for further proliferation.

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Rian Chandra

Faculty Advisor: Aaron Hossack

Improvements to the Ion Doppler Spectrometer Diagnostic on the HIT-SI Experiments

An Ion Doppler Spectrometer diagnostic system has been constructed to measure impurity ion temperature and velocity on the HIT-SI and HIT-SI3 spheromak devices with improved spatiotemporal resolution and lower error. Hardware and software improvements have resulted in a record 6.9 µs temporal and ≤ 2.8 cm spatial resolution in the midplane of the devices. With these, C III and O II flow, displacement, and temperature profiles can be simultaneously observed. In other words, we describe analysis and hardware improvements made to a spectrometer which significantly expand the measurement possibilities, for plasma physics applications. This paper has been submitted to the journal, Review of Scientific Instruments.

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Maddie Spencer

Faculty Advisor: Frank Wendler

What Are the Implications of Increasing Euroscepticism in Politically Confused France?

This research paper attempts to make sense of the current political situation in France by analyzing France’s interactions with the European Union, French citizens’ opinions of those interactions, and potential consequences of those opinions. The paper begins with a historical rundown of France’s role in the European Union and then uses that to explain the French political scene today.

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Ruby Davis

Faculty Advisor: Kathryn Topper

Visual Representations of Male Couples in Ancient Greek Art and Shonen’ai: A Comparative Essay (paper not available)

This essay explores visual depictions of paederastic male couples in ancient Greek art and shōnen’ai couples in modern Japanese manga and anime. While both shōnen’ai and paederastia literally translate to “boy love” and share many similarities, the way that androphilic men are characterized in visual depictions differs greatly and can reveal nuances of gender and same-gender attraction in modern and ancient culture. For example, same-sex couples in Greek art enjoyed a more equal balance of power and more physical autonomy in their relationships than shōnen’ai couples. In ancient Greece, paederastic relationships were considered “part of the ideal life for elite men”, and depictions were typically created by men, for men. However, shōnen’ai is typically created by women, for women, and does not attempt to bolster the standing of androphilic males in society—rather, it continues to perpetuate harmful stereotypes to increase erotic thrill through the supposed transgression of same-sex relationships.

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Ian Tracy Gwin

Faculty Advisor: Edith C. Aldridge

Focus Structure in Modern Standard Estonian

Discourse configurational languages show a bewildering variety of word orders dictated less by word class or case than by the pragmatic roles of information in the sentence. Within the field of generative syntax Kiss (1995) models this order through the use of a focus phrase (FP) which takes as its specifier a focused constituent that undergoes movement from its base generated position.  Ehala (2006) argues that the underlying word order of Modern Standard Estonian -- a discourse configurational language -- is SIOV, but does not present evidence for a complete picture of the necessary movement within a generative theory.  Considering further data presented by Mati (1993) I argue that languages such as Estonian use the FP, generated under the CP, to code wide focus through transformational movement. Other phenomena such as a prevalent V2 ordering and sentence final narrow focus can be described using the FP.

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Katherine Jacobsen

Faculty Advisor: James Pfeiffer

Female Genital Cutting in Sudan

Female genital cutting (FGC) is a hot topic in anthropological and public health. My paper strives to identify the culture around FGC in Sudan. I looked at the pros and cons of medicalization of FGC, and how different organizations such as the WHO and UNICEF are currently dealing with and trying to stop this from occurring. Since this topic is so intertwined with culture and tradition, it was very difficult to write about. I see this as a female and human rights issue, and wanted to look at it from that standpoint while still respecting the values of this culture. I want to know how to uphold their traditions while still keeping women and girls safe.

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Heather Lopes

Faculty Advisor: Chelsea Wood

Battle of the Filter Feeders: Bacterial Transmission in the Presence of Ascidians

Marine diseases are a major cost to fisheries and aquaculture industries, and as we continuously rely on marine organisms for protein, we increase our interaction with illnesses like gastroenteritis from undercooked oysters. An additional danger to aquaculture industries are the infestation of invasive ascidian species that can compete for space and food thus creating smaller harvest yields.  For this proposal, the goal is to take two existing problems in aquaculture and discover if invasive can filter feedings ascidians can alter the transmission of Vibrios bacteria in the water column. If the benefits of using ascidians as biofilters outweighs the risks, then the management of marine diseases can be viewed from a new perspective.

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Chelsea Clayton (Political Science & Communications)

Faculty Advisor: Mark Smith

The Forest for the Trees: A Comparative Analysis of Urban Forestry Regimes in Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon

This research project examines the development and implementation of municipal-level urban forestry policy in the cities of Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. The research examines the issue-specific context in which both developed, both broadly as an emerging area of scientific research and in the context of each state. Next, through a synthesis of interviews and analysis, it traces the development of each city’s approach and examines both its efficacy and the significant factors that emerged through the course of research as having made a significant impact on overall outcomes.

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Daniel Keum (Political Science & Law, Societies, & Justice)

Faculty Advisors: James Caporaso and Jamie Mayerfeld

Wavering into Capitalism: The Politics of Sustenance in North Korea

In the 1990s, a catastrophic famine engrossed North Korea. The famine not only claimed thousands of innocent lives but also the social, economic and political principles which had governed the nation since its founding. This paper contends that the famine engendered the rise of a rights-consciousness among North Korean working class citizens. In particular, the famine compelled the rise of bottom-up markets among common North Koreans, as the state failed to uphold its end of caloric compact, which then radically shifted the moral frameworks of the people. The nature in which these frameworks shifted is the focus of my paper. Chronicling the market protests which transpired during the late 2000s, this paper unveils the emergence of a novel constellation of power between the private citizen and the state in consequence of the markets engendering a rights-consciousness.

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Rhoya Selden (History & Drama)

Faculty Advisor: Lynn Thomas

Women and the Moral Politics of Dress in Twentieth-Century Tehran

This research examines the politicization of women’s clothing under the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republican of Iran from the 1930s-1990s. I distinctively focus on the governments’ use of women’s clothing to define their idea of Iranian nationalism and how their sumptuary policies affected women’s lives. I assess the motives behind the sumptuary laws for each regime, and argue that both governments situated women as symbols of national health and honor, and used them as visualizations for the success of their platforms. Despite different interpretations of morality, my research suggests that both governments created these laws to “purify” their “corrupt” nation, using the same rhetoric. Paradoxically, this led to a sexualized culture that exists today in Tehran. I analyze a wealth of primary sources including women’s magazines, political cartoons, poetry, newspapers, extant clothing, photographs, legislation, autobiographies, speeches, passports, Revolutionary-era books written by Iranian intellectuals, and oral interviews that I conducted.

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Kela Wong (International Studies)

Faculty Advisor: Deborah Porter

Interrogation of Gender Identity: Aesthetic Consumption of Korean Dramas by Young Women in China

Given the popularity of Korean television dramas among various age groups in other countries, one would expect to see a similar pattern of consumption across different ages in China. Instead, we see high levels of consumption of Korean dramas by a very specific demographic. Why do young Chinese females consume Korean dramas at such high levels? I argue that young Chinese women’s heavy consumption of Korean dramas that portray a particular aesthetic of self and familial resolution may be explained by a need to redress contemporary psychological issues related to gendered self-identity. I posit that the identity formation processes of this particular demographic has been shaped by changes in family dynamics that stem from social and political restructuring in the 1980s, particularly the one-child policy. Thus, this thesis explores how the consumption of Korean dramas by young females in China may be understood as an implicit interrogation of gendered identity.

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Yoojeong Cho (Vocal Performance & Italian)

Faculty Advisor: Judy Tsou

The Gaze and the Circumvention of Power in Richard Strauss’ Salome

Richard Strauss’ opera “Salome” is a musical discourse of the uneven power dynamics between male and female with the idea of the gaze as its central narrative. Under the patriarchal premise of the male gaze, the men emerge as the gazers, while the women are relegated to the role of submissive objectification. This paper examines the way Salome manipulates this patriarchal notion of the gaze for her own gain, voluntarily offering herself as the object of the male gaze. I further postulated that Salome strategically oscillates between the stereotypical image of femme fatale and femme fragile, intentionally succumbing to the masculine-constructed demonization and idealization of female power. Consequently, this paper traces how Strauss’ music realizes those gender portrayals and Salome’s resistance against the male order, reflecting the use of musical analyses as a tool in understanding gender roles and power in operas.

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Jennifer Smith (History & Comparative History of Ideas)

Faculty Advisor: María Elena García

‘All of this Belongs to Us’: Land, Horses, and Indigenous Resistance on the Yakama Indian Reservation, 1900-1950

In the early 1900s, the Yakima Indian Agency welcomed non-Native ranching operations onto Yakama tribal lands, taxing rangelands, and resulting in widespread overgrazing. By the 1920s, agency concern for the welfare of ranchers facilitated a need to gain access to tribal grazing lands sustaining Yakama horses. As a result, agency officials launched systematic assaults on Yakama horse herds, citing horses as culprits of overgrazing and land degradation. However, Yakamas showed little interest in removing their horses, and instead actively opposed settler encroachment on tribal grazing lands. Through analyzing archival sources, conducting interviews, and reviewing scholarly sources, I argue that Yakamas and settlers used horses as a terrain of struggle, whereby they asserted competing claims to Indigenous lands and resources. Examining horses as a tool of resistance provides a useful lens for understanding forms of Native opposition to colonial hegemony, while interrogating problematic tropes settlers utilized to justify divesting Native communities.

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Rachel Hantman (Neurobiology)

Faculty Advisor: Amy Piedalue

Albanian Sworn Virgins: A Visual Representation of their Transformation

This piece of art is a flipbook, analogous to the ones children play with as they make cartoon balls bounce with the quick flipping of pages between their thumb and index finger. However, instead of a playful scene, this flipbook is a commentary on Albanian Sworn Virgins. These are women from Northern Albania who, in their youth, swear to celibacy in order to gain the societal power that is exclusive to men in their culture. This flipbook demonstrates this cultural male-to-female shift and comments on its inability to ever be fully realized. This commentary is inspired by the words of Albanian Sworn Virgins in Elvira Dones’ documentary, Sworn Virgins, who feel betrayed by their biological need to menstruate and who view their reproductive system as a permanent obstacle in completing their societal shift. Just as a child’s flipbook tells a story, this flipbook illustrates the Albanian Sworn Virgins’ forever-unfinished transformation.

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Caitlin Nold (Law, Societies, & Justice)

Faculty Advisor: Meredith Loken

Commodification of Black Bodies: Convict Leasing and Prison Privatization in the United States of America

The United States is home to a private prison industry, which allows for the detention of human beings to be transformed into a multi-billion dollar industry. This paper traces the parallels between the post-civil war convict leasing system and the current system of prison privatization, which encourages the commodification of black bodies in order to maintain a racial hierarchy. It analyzes the incompatibility of prison privatization with the US Constitution. Private prisons, which hold African American men at a higher rate that state-run prisons, take cost-cutting measures in order to increase profit, which expose prisoners to higher rates of abuse and increased recidivism rates. Private prisons have significant political power to determine crime control legislation, which has led to harsh laws which increase the number of men of color behind bars. This paper provides a three-phase plan for abolishing private prisons and reducing overall incarceration rates in the United States.

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Cathleen Buzan (History)

Faculty Advisor: George Behlmer

All the President's Women: Barbara Hackman Franklin's Women Power in the Nixon White House 1971-1973

In April 1971, President Richard M. Nixon appointed Barbara Hackman Franklin, the first ever White House women’s recruiter, as Staff Assistant to the President in the White House Personnel Office. Her recruiting efforts were unprecedented as Franklin secured the appointments of more women to full-time policy-making positions in the federal government than ever before. Despite these advancements, Franklin encountered a formidable environment of chauvinism which consistently thwarted her program. Regardless, an in-depth analysis of Franklin’s previously unstudied White House papers, housed at the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, reveals her as a juggernaut for the burgeoning women’s movement. Furthermore, studying interactions between Franklin and her male colleagues, both cooperative and adversarial, exposes how she flexed political muscle outside of her immediate job description and, by increasing her own visibility in the White House, shaped new attitudes regarding women in government.

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Sara Leonetti (History & Philosophy)

Faculty Advisor: Shirley Yee

Rape and the Law: An Examination of the Relationship between Sexist Cultural Attitudes and Washington State's 1975 Rape Law Revision

In 1975, Washington State’s legislature approved a complete overhaul the state’s rape statutes. As was the case in many states, societal assumptions about sex and gender roles were embedded in Washington’s rape law prior to 1975. An emerging Anti-Rape Movement in Washington State pushed for the recognition of these gendered assumptions and advocated for the 1975 comprehensive rape law revision. Though the revision sought to alter many of the gender-biased aspects of Washington’s rape statutes, sexist cultural attitudes hindered the successful application of the revised statutes. This paper examines Washington’s law before 1975 and argues that sexist societal opinions underpinned it. It then turns to discuss the 1975 comprehensive reform. Finally it concludes by asserting that, due to the pervasiveness of sexist attitudes in society, the redrafted law could not successfully remedy all of the problems that lawmakers had intended it to address.

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Sophia Winkler-Schor (Environmental Science and Research Management & Environmental Studies)

Faculty Advisor: Kristiina Vogt

How Eco-Drone Monitoring and Successful Conservation Methodology can Mitigate Deforestation

Forest cover is declining at an unsustainable rate as development frontiers expand. Though the amount of conservation science being conducted and policy being implemented is ever increasing, forests continue to decline faster than ever before. The conservation science being conducted and policy being implemented is often ineffective and inadequate for conserving forests. To address the issues surrounding forest conservation science and policy, I conducted a literature review, and participated in conservation fieldwork, which lead to me identified four main areas of improvement: (1) diversity of stakeholders in the policy development process; (2) increased communication between conservation scientists and policymakers; (3) integration of multiple current conservation science methods and technology; and (4) utilizing place-based analyses to increase data. Additionally, scientists developing policy may benefit from integrating current science and technologies such as drones which can strengthen and expedite the process of data collection and forest monitoring. Through integrating these approaches the policy developed and implemented will be more effective in conserving forests.

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Arista Burwell-Chen (English, Communications, & Political Science)

Faculty Advisor: Rachel Sanders

How to be a Good Ally: a Guide to Dismantling Colorblindness, White Normativity and Everyday Racism without Erasing Oppressed Voices

In light of the Black Lives Matter movement and increasing racialized police brutality, I have encountered many friends and colleagues who feel too paralyzed to talk about racial inequality, or engage in problematic ways. The question arises: how does one speak speak out against discrimination without erasing oppressed voices? I argue that while speaking for others may contribute to erasure, it is far worse not to speak up, and there are more effective ways to be an ally. Using critical race theory and feminist theory, as well as social justice media run by Women of Color, I fashioned a theoretical toolkit to provide potential responses to common mistakes that even well-meaning allies make. Ultimately, my project seeks to interrogate colorblindness, facilitate respectful interactions when addressing systematic oppression, and encourage those in dominant social groups to venture outside spheres of privilege to engage thoughtfully in conversations with members of oppressed groups.

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Nora Gunning (Piano Performance & History)

Faculty Advisor: James Felak

A Musical Collaboration: the Orchestras of Auschwitz

In the historiography of the Holocaust, the subject of music is often disregarded in favor of politics, and when it is mentioned it is done so in passing. This paper seeks to understand how Nazis used music as a tool to degrade prisoners and, focusing on Auschwitz, how in one case prisoners used that music as a source of renewed dignity. The research draws mainly on memoirs and interviews from musicians who survived Auschwitz, and includes an overview of the small amount of literature surrounding the topic. Using the voices of the musicians themselves, this project aims to shatter the common misconception that all instances of music in concentration camps were positive experiences for prisoners, while highlighting one instance of rebellion and survival through musical excellence. Due to the scant and misleading literature surrounding the topic, this project recommends further research into this “other side” of music in the Holocaust.

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Benjamin Ransom (Classical Studies & French)

Faculty Advisor: Catherine Connors

Bringing the Gods Onstage: Anthropomorphic Deities in Plautus' Amphitruo and Molière's Amphitryon

Plautus’ "Amphitruo" and Molière’s adaptation are divine burlesque plays that depict surreal scenes of divine cuckoldry and mistaken identity. In these plays a highly comic figure of reverse-anthropomorphism is employed, by which gods are seen in the image of contemporary humans. The gods of Plautus’ play are presented as members of the ancient Roman theatre troupe through the violation of dramatic illusion; the Roman comedian uses his powers as a god-like creator of the comic spectacle to mock the self-important general Amphitryon in a festival atmosphere. In Molière’s adaptation, the god Jupiter is a transparent symbol for Louis XIV, who has the power to engage in sexual affairs regardless of moral consequences due to his god-like status. Thus, in both plays, anthropomorphism is a comic figure which sees humans of the contemporary social world as god-like in order to engage in comic social critique and class-oriented humor.

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Mona Sangesland (Flute performance)

Faculty Advisor: Judy Tsou

Gender in Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess"

George Gershwin’s opera “Porgy and Bess” depicts 1930s African-American life in the slums of South Carolina through the romance between the crippled beggar Porgy and the licentious “bad” woman Bess. Bess’ depravity causes much conflict throughout the opera, and she is often perceived negatively as being weak and adhering to gender stereotypes. I, however, viewed Bess as an unfortunate victim of the era in which she lived, a character struggling to balance juxtaposing gender roles. Consequently, this project focuses on the realization of gender portrayals through music, specifically as they pertain to Bess and how she promotes and conversely denies these prescribed roles. My research considers the social expectations for 1930s women, African American culture, as well as analyses in music history and theory in order to demonstrate the use of music as a tool in further understanding gender roles and life for 1930s American women.

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Reem Sabha (Economics, UW Bothell)

Faculty Advisor: Karam Dana

The Impact of September 11th on Arab-American Youth

The events of September 11th deeply shook the American psyche, leading to a shift in political and social realities that impacted every citizen. Overwhelmingly divisive, the response to September 11th drew a clear boundary between the concept of being an Arab and being an American. The post-9/11 landscape therefore presented a unique challenge to Arab-American youth in terms of forming their identity: within a divisive atmosphere, Arab-American youth had to cultivate an identity that incorporated both cultures simultaneously, with varying rates of success. This study seeks to understand how the post 9/11 atmosphere impacted the identity formation of Arab-American youth. I examine patterns of identity among Arab-American students at the University of Washington, and how factors such as politics, religion, and gender work in an environment of fear that inhibit Arab-American youth from feeling completely accepted in mainstream society.

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Hal Schrieve (History)

Faculty Advisor: Purnima Dhavan

Gulbadan and Nur Jahan: The Role of Women in the Creation of the Mughal Court and Imperial Policy

Using translated primary sources (principally Gulbadan Begum's biography of Humayun) and secondary sources, I analyze the position of women in the early Mughal court and how Akbar's new institutions altered their position. I propose that institutions cloistering and regulating imperial elite women paralleled those which regulated the nobility at large under the new land revenue system, and that early Timurid traditions of women's power within the court changed but did not diminish. I propose that the scale of the power of women in court was rather magnified and institutionalized.

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Stefanie Jackson (History)

Faculty Advisor: Sandra Joshel

Retelling Exodus: Cultural Negotiation Among Pennsylvanian Acadians

“Retelling Exodus” focuses on one group amongst thousands of French Canadians expelled from Acadia, modern-day Nova Scotia, by the British in 1755 as the French and Indian War intensified. By 1790, many of the Acadians exiled during this “Grand Dérangement” had reunited and formed strong communities in New Brunswick and Louisiana, where they would become the Cajuns. However, relatively understudied in the expanse of the Acadian diaspora is the decade-long period after exile and before relocation to Louisiana when Acadians were resettled in American colonies: often harsh, inhospitable environments for Acadian culture. Pennsylvania in the mid-eighteenth century presents an interesting focus for questions of cultural adaptation because the colony contained a diverse demography of ethnic and religious groups. This research considers how the cultural, political, and religious landscape of 1750’s Pennsylvania contributed to diverse and fragmented patterns of resettlement and a practice of cultural negotiation among the colony’s Acadian refugees.

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Malia Piper (Classics)
Faculty Advisor: Catherine Connors, Classics

“Bad Girls”: The Role of the “Mala” in Ancient Greek and Roman Literature

The figure of the mala or “bad woman” is present in much of Ancient Greek and Latin literature. In this context, being a mala means being a woman who participates in the process where an older woman advises a younger woman about how to profit from men who will pay to sleep with her. In this paper, I define the characteristics of the mala and document the ways in which the language of power and control is used with malae in Plautus’ Casina; the elegies of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid; and Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans. The characteristics of the mala that are present in all of these genres highlight the fact that this character is an important vehicle for expressing cultural anxieties surrounding women. Even though the mala is so pervasive in classical literature, this paper is the first to look specifically at her as a distinct character type.

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Steph Swanson (Swedish & Linguistics)
Faculty Advisor: Karen Zagona, Linguistics

Swedish –s-passives and Object Shift: Reference in the Syntax

In this project I attempt to shed light on an array of interacting syntactic phenomena relating to the so-called morphological passive in Swedish. Its morpheme, -s, has been assumed to be a voice morpheme, but in reality it has many of the interpretational characteristics of a verb argument. I argue that a remnant movement analysis of Swedish verb movement can accommodate for this morpheme’s distribution and interpretations as a verb argument. This analysis offers an interesting perspective on the nature of Object Shift in Scandinavian, which there has been practically no consensus on. I will suggest that the distribution of Object Shift and -s are a part of a syntactic process that apparently can access some reference properties of nominals.

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Wanda Bertram (International Studies)
Faculty Advisor: Christine Ingebritsen, Jackson School

Educate Yourselves: Three Cases of Civic Education In King County Environmental Initiatives

The state of Washington, and King County in particular, have a reputation for vocal public concern over issues of the environment, and a quick look at popular ballot initiatives in the state over the last half-century supports the stereotype. But most recent initiatives to the people concerning environmental issues have not fared on the ballot in a way that reflected support for conservationist policy. The inquiry driving this paper arose from the failure of one such ballot initiative, and the claim that citizens who voted “wrongly” could easily have “educated themselves” about the issue and voted otherwise. This paper argues that the people of King County have repeatedly received inadequate educational resources about the ecological issues at stake in local politics. The lack of such resources may have helped special or regional interests overpower collective interests in decisions on these measures.

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Garrett Knoll (Aquatic and Fishery Sciences)
Faculty Advisor: Gabrielle Rocap, School of Oceanography

A Giant in a Changing Ocean: Unveiling the Mysteries of the Greenland Shark

The Arctic is a changing ecosystem that supports a wide diversity of organisms. Multi-year ice in the Arctic is declining due to warming temperatures and being replaced by thinner first year ice. This change in sea ice will have drastic effects on ice-dependent animals and sea ice algae. It is thus extremely important to get baseline data on the organisms that inhabit the Arctic waters and their food web dynamics. The Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) is one particular inhabitant that has garnered an increasing amount of attention. This shark is the largest fish in the Arctic and it is the only shark that can withstand the cold Arctic waters year-round. It plays an important role in the Arctic ecosystem and could have an advantage over most Arctic predators because it is more of a generalist feeder rather than the specialist feeders like the narwhal.

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Samuel Pizelo (English Literature)
Faculty Advisor: Eva Cherniavsky, English Literature

“Born Dying:” Cultural Futures, Social Space, and the Reproductive Economy in Southern African AIDS

This essay reads several of the pieces in a Southern African AIDS narrative anthology, and attempts to uncover a space of possibility for representing HIV, which, as Brown reminds us, is a prerequisite to fighting it, or at the very least living with it. I hope to suggest that questions of representing, fighting, and living with HIV are also always questions of culture, and that therefore developing a cultural imaginary of and response to HIV is essential to the longer-term human objective of “becoming with” HIV as a species. This cultural imaginary includes not only semiotic representability, but also the capacity to understand futures, and to transform spatial locales into inhabitable place.

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Ian Bellows (JSIS & Geography)
Faculty Advisor: Victoria Lawson, Geography

Crossroads of the World: Intersections of Power and Privilege in the Khumbu

The Khumbu region of Nepal, home to Mt. Everest, has served as crossroads of cultures for centuries. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a system of international expedition mountaineering became firmly entrenched in the region, creating economic opportunities but perpetuating hierarchies of power and privilege between foreigners, Sherpas, and other Nepalis. This case study examines the work of the nonprofit Khumbu Climbing Center (KCC) and its disruptive effects on the both traditional economic and social structures and the expedition mountaineering paradigm. In ways both intentional and unintentional, it is rewriting the rules of who can climb the highest mountains on earth and profit from Nepal’s lucrative tourist industry. This exploration helps to illuminate the complex and colliding social, environmental, economic factors surrounding adventure travel and development.

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William Tsang (Public Health)
Faculty Advisor: Luke Bergmann, Geography

Viral Myths and Biopolitical Disruptions Amidst the Emergence of a Novel Coronavirus

Since 2012, a novel coronavirus named Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus, or MERS-CoV, has infected 491 people and killed 147 in 18 countries— a case fatality rate of almost 30%—twice as high as the 2003 SARS pandemics. An incomplete understanding of its epidemiological and ecological nature has left scientists racing against the clock—but is that all to the story of emerging infectious diseases? This analysis seeks to investigate the hidden narratives amid the dominant epidemiological discourses—of human interdependence rather than of biological susceptibility—through the counter-authoritative framework of “viral myths”. I will explore discourses in obscuring viral nomenclatures, the biopolitics of insecurity, the commodification of intellectual property rights, and their respective public health implications, which hurtles us toward an embodiment of both molecularized and globalized precarity. This heterogeneous collection of “viral myths” amid the MERS outbreaks serves as a microcosm for past, present, and future infectious diseases

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Sarah Boone (International Studies)
Faculty Advisor: Sara Curran, Jackson School of International Studies and Public Affairs

Substance and Symbol: The Ethics of Water Use and Development in Oman

This thesis explores the varying ethical perceptions of water use in Oman. For many populations living in the hyper-arid Arabian Peninsula, cultural and religious values require that people strictly limit their water use. Today after one generation of intense urbanization, Omanis still maintain these values of conservation, however they have also come to glorify water-intensive, urban lifestyles. I argue that people do not change their water usage based on actual scarcity or ability to consume, but rather based on the symbolism that their surrounding community attaches to their resource use. In urban and rural Oman competing symbols have been introduced that support two very different water ethics. To reduce cognitive dissonance, Omanis compartmentalize each ethic in relation to different community settings and go through a process of switching their ethical codes when traveling between the countryside and urban centers.

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Hannah Giese (History)
Faculty Advisor: George Behlmer, History

Giants, Dwarfs, and Skeletons on Display: Created Identity and the Commodified Abnormal Body in Georgian and Victorian Britain

The compulsion to collect, view and medicalize curious anatomy was evident in the proliferation of popular anatomy museums, the formation of institutional collections of pathology and the particular of freakshows in the nineteenth-century. For living freak performers and dead pathology specimens the most lucrative and valued examples of abnormal anatomy utilized narrative literature as a marketing tool to maximize their worth as commodified display objects. Both of these exhibitory stages capitalized on the rare, “unique” nature of physical oddity, and the visceral reaction they inspired in viewers. Freakshows and pathology collections each utilized the “personal histories” of human oddities to bolster the commercial worth of collected anatomy on display. Investigation and comparison of this connection, however, has been largely overlooked by historical scholarship. My project addresses a neglected aspect of medical/freak dialogue: how created or portrayed personal “case histories” accelerated the desirability of the commodified abnormal body, living or deceased.

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Ashley Lindsey (History & Political Science)
Faculty Advisor: James N. Gregory, History

Working Together: Waterfront Politics, Peace and Solidarity during the 1948 West Coast Maritime Strike

In 1948, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and a coalition of other maritime unions went on strike, bringing the United States’ West Coast Ports to a standstill for 95 days.  Despite facing increasing criticism for its radicalism in the face of the emerging Cold War, the union was able to win concessions in their new contract and establish an industry peace with a once obstinate employers’ association.  The ILWU’s strong participatory democracy and workplace culture enabled it to maintain solidarity and militancy during a period when American labor was purging its radical elements and facing growing political conservatism.

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Leo Baunach (International Studies)
Faculty Advisor: James N. Gregory, History 

Organizing Precarious Workers in the CIO Era: The International Fishermen and Allied Workers of America

This paper examines the history of the International Fishermen and Allied Workers of America (IFAWA) in the Puget Sound and Alaska from its roots in the early 1930s until dissolution in 1952. Many fishermen were misclassified by cannery companies as independent entrepreneurs, denying them collective bargaining rights and access to social services. IFAWA made significant progress by challenging the precarious position of workers in the industry, and at its height the Seattle-based union represented more than 25,000 West Coast fishermen and cannery workers. In 1950, it became one of the eleven left-led unions purged from the CIO and subsequently collapsed due to anti-trust lawsuits that criminalized the ability of ‘independent’ fishermen to unionize. The essay is based on a rare set of records housed by the Labor Archives at the University of Washington.

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Rena Kawasaki (IAS: Community Psychology)
Faculty Advisor: Kristin Gustafson, Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, UW Bothell

How Language Use Indicates Acculturation and Enculturation Processes of Native Japanese Americans: Examples from the 1946 Issues of Hokubei Hochi

My research examines literature on immigrant adaptation processes, and how language use in the 1946 Hokubei Hochi, Japanese immigrant newspaper in Seattle, indicates the dialogue of acculturation and enculturation in the Japanese American community and in Japan. I analyzed four issues from the 1946 Hokubei Hochi newspaper because this time frame corresponded with when the Language Reform Policy was implemented in Japan. The policy led to the simplification and reduction of commonly used Kanji characters. This resulted in eliminating the slight nuances of the Japanese language. This paper demonstrates language as an indicator of (1) acculturation or adaptation to the host culture, and/or (2) enculturation or maintaining of ties to their heritage culture. My findings elucidate the tensions between acculturation and enculturation processes. It highlights that adaptation is not a unilinear process but is time and value-laden that requires a holistic perspective to understand.

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Helen Olsen & Samuel Nowak (Geography)
Faculty Advisor: Sarah Elwood, Geography

Why Delridge? Narratives of Neighborhood Fragility and Economic Liability in Seattle

This paper examines the contradictions of neighborhood level visions of development in Delridge, Seattle contradictions — how they work discursively to produce a geographic imaginary of Delridge that molds itself to the ontology and epistemology of urbanism under neoliberalism while still subject to the ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’ across geographic scales of the City of Seattle and Delridge neighborhood. Through primary research rooted in participant observation, archival work and geovisualization, we demonstrate the ways in which neighborhood-level organizations navigate the politics, discourse, and economics of those contradictions offers a critical insight into the ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’ produced in neighborhoods.

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Kylie Lanthorn (IAS: Arts, Media and Culture)
Faculty Advisor: Ellen E. Moore, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Tacoma

The Subversion of Free Play: A Study of the Impacts of Parental Philosophies and Socioeconomic Factors on Television Usage of Children

An area less studied in examining the relationship between children and television is how parents understand and (potentially) mitigate their children’s exposure to media. This study examines how parental philosophies regarding media use as well as socioeconomic factors impact how much television their children consume. The current research evaluates responses from 100 parents of children (18 and under) through an anonymous, ten question online survey. This research applies Marshall McLuhan’s substantive theory, which holds that it is not the content on the television screen that is important, but rather the act of watching TV itself. The survey found that households with a high income or a single parent are more likely to have children who engage more heavily with media, and that children with parents who do not believe they are capable of entertaining themselves are more likely to be heavy television users.

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Margaret Shaw (Community, Environment and Planning)
Faculty Advisor: Arista-Maria Cirtautas, Jackson School of International Studies

An Unsuccessful EU Policy for Combating Corruption in Romania

In this essay I argue that the European Union's flawed anti-corruption policy and its lack of understanding of the local elite have failed to eradicate corruption in Romania. First, I give a brief overview of Romania's deep-seated corruption problems. I then argue that the EU's lack of any decisive or single-minded blueprint for administrative reform made its anti-corruption measures ineffective. I explain how the EU profoundly underestimated the lengths to which Romania's corrupt politicians are willing to go to preserve the status quo, and end exploring the efficacy of top-down democratization for instituting meaningful democratic reform.

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Elizabeth Hasseler (History)
Faculty Advisor: Ileana Rodriguez-Silva, History
Thesis Advisor: Bob Stacey, History
"He is hope for the wretched, the salvation of the desperate": Miracles of Justice in Reginald of Durham's Libellus de admirandis beati Cuthberti virtutibus

In twelfth-century northern England, the historical imagination was dominated by the region's most powerful and most popular saint. Both the bishops of Durham and the priors of the Benedictine convent attached to Durham cathedral drew on St. Cuthbert's renowned history and well-established authority to underline their own spiritual legitimacy. Involvement with the saint's cult was not limited to the ecclesiastical elite or the monks of the cathedral convent, however. Throughout the twelfth century, lay interest in the religious life dramatically increased, and saints' cults were a popular focus of lay religious energy. Reginald of Durham's Libellus de admirandis beati Cuthberti virtutibus, complied in the 1160s and 70s, provides a richly detailed glimpse of this period when the saint's miracle working powers were claimed by religious and laity alike. Much scholarly attention has already been paid to the increasing prevalence of pilgrimage to Cuthbert's shrine in the twelfth century. Pilgrims who visited Durham generally sought miraculous cures for illnesses or injuries, and as we would expect there is a higher proportion of stories about healing miracles in the Libellus than in earlier works of Cuthbertine hagiography. But pilgrims were not the only laity who became involved in St. Cuthbert's cult in the twelfth century. In addition to stories of miraculous healing, Reginald's Libellus contains accounts of the saint arbitrating the conflicts of lay inhabitants of the bishopric of Durham. My research examines these often overlooked "miracles of justice" in order to provide a fuller picture of lay interaction with St. Cuthbert in twelfth-century Durham. I analyze miracle stories involving freeing from false imprisonment; protection of lay interests; and punishment of immoral behavior in order to explore how and why members of every social strata increasingly claimed the patronage of the saint in order to mediate secular conflict. What emerges is a clearer portrait of a distinctive local political and social culture underlined by communal association with St. Cuthbert.

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Margaret Hellis (Comparative History of Ideas)
Faculty Advisor: Naraelle Hohensee, Comparative History of Ideas
Strangely Familiar: A Visual Dialogue

How we see defines what we see: vision is organized by the conditions of our existence, by history and by context. For myself, my journeys in and through photography are in some ways liberated by this knowledge, in the sense that if I bring an awareness of this conditioning and relationality to my work I can aim to disrupt the ways the camera can extend privilege, power and objectification. This project is situated as an artistic intervention in practices of looking particularly while traveling, an intervention driven by the acknowledgement of these structures of power and regimes of seeing and the incorporation of such back into photographs taken while traveling. Building upon the intellectual work of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jonathan Crary and Elizabeth Edwards, this paper examines the potentiality of photography as both technology and as artistic tool, as well as the implications of its uses in either regard. This paper is accompanied by an installation of images-not of 'photographs' but of 'artworks,' where the term 'artwork' is deployed to name these pieces' explicitly conceptual rather than perceptual nature. Through the melding of images from Bangalore and from Seattle as the first part of the exhibition, and through the 'opening up' of images from Sierra Leone as the second part of the installation, this exhibit aims to provoke a remaking of memory and a foregrounding of photographer as author and organizer of vision. This installation encourages viewers to reconsider the uncomplicated consumption and digestion of visual cultural information. These images do not aim to erase or elide the unease of seeing and cataloging of difference, but rather in foregrounding these practices and the regimes of cultural knowledge that scaffold them, they gesture toward a more ethical attending to the politics of looking and the experience of subjectivity. Ultimately, this project aims to pry open greater possibilities for ethical action in this building of a space for visual dialogue.

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Claire Palay (History & Communication)
Faculty Advisor: Margaret O'Mara, History
The Loud Liberation: Family, Feminism, and the First Reality Television Show

My research examines the popular reactions to the 1973 PBS series An American Family, the first reality television show, as a lens to explore the prevailing attitudes of family and gender in 1973. The 1970s were a particularly tumultuous period in American politics and culture. Historical works on the period have focused primarily on the political conservatism which emerged in this decade. Thus, An American Family has most frequently been used to illustrate the pervasive fear of American decline viewed by many as the source of rising conservatism. I challenge this particular interpretation of the significance of An American Family. Rather than focusing, as the majority of historians have, on the negative reactions to the show, I argue that responses to the show's main character, Pat Loud, were generally positive and reflected a growing acceptance of feminism and the possibility of alternative family structures.

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Angela Corwin (French)
Faculty Advisor: Timothy Wright, History
"We Have Shared the Incommunicable Experience of War": Recognizing Seattle's Involvement in the Civil War

A written history of the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery located in Seattle, WA and an inquiry of the significance of the cemetery in modern times.

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Lisa Lester (Spanish & International Studies)
Faculty Advisor: Cabeiri Robinson, Jackson School of International Studies
Religion, Outreach, and Legitimacy: Women and Islamic Healthcare in Egypt

With the rise of Islamist parties to power in Egypt, the question of how women will be affected by the Islamist agenda has gained new urgency. This research examines the rise of Islamic health services as well as the Islamist movement in Egypt in order to assess how women are affected by these phenomena. Governmental Egyptian health services have declined in both quality and quantity since the establishment of the Nasserist welfare state during the 1960s. Services affecting women, in particular, have varied in coincidence with the state's pattern of repression, supervision and cooption of healthcare organizations in the Parallel Islamic Sector. Islamic hospitals and clinics, some affiliated with Islamist political organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, have grown in popularity and influence during the past several decades. Research indicates that Islamic and Islamist health clinics consistently out-perform the state in the provision of health services to many Egyptians, and generally provide high quality, modern and Western medical care. Analyzing the popularity of these parallel Islamic organizations will illuminate how these services substituted for and subsequently challenged the legitimacy of the state in providing healthcare to Egyptian women.

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Paulina Przystupa (Anthropology & History)
Faculty Advisor: Shaun Lopez, History
Unveiling the Ancient in the Modern: A historical examination of gender, nationalism, and Pharaonism in selected works by Mahmoud Mohktar, in the 1920s, and Muhammad Nagi, in 1922 and 1937

The nationalist movement in Egypt of the late 19th century and early 20th century introduced ancient history into everyday discourse through public displays of monumental sculpture and art. These works brought Pharaonic themes into contact with another major issue of the time, the "woman question" or early Egyptian feminism. The juxtaposition of Pharaonic themes and women, especially in the art of Mahmoud Mohktar and Muhammad Nagi, accented the ways in which new Egyptian art could combine feminist discourse with nationalist rhetoric relating to Ancient Egypt. By historicizing the Pharaonic and gendered art of Mahmoud Mokhtar and Muhammad Nagi I will show that these new Egyptian artists used their work to explore progressive portrayals of women. I do this by answering two important questions, namely how did this "first generation of Egyptian artists" depict women and how did their art intersect with the feminist movement.

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Alexandria Ferguson (International Studies)
Faculty Advisor: Tish Lopez, Geography
White Demon Sophistry: the Gates Foundation's Control over the Production of Knowledge of Women of the Global South

In this paper I conduct a discourse analysis of the Development paradigm to understand how aid workers control the production of knowledge around women of the Global South. In exploring how the development apparatus depicts women, I analyze the representations of women in real marketing materials from the Seattle-based NGO, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This paper draws on critical development theory and post-colonial feminism to deconstruct how the discourse of the Gates Foundation functions as an important factor defining the relationship between the Global South and the Global North. I argue that the Gates Foundation constructs reductive images of women through their roles as mother and farmers, without specificity, credible evidence or historical context, thereby reducing the agency and the complexity of the everyday lives of women from the Global South. These simplistic interpretations have real effects by informing the policy of development workers on the ground

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Margaret Lundberg (IAS - Self & Society)
Faculty Advisors: Cynthia Howson, Politics, Philosophy and Economics, UW Tacoma
Bollywood Images: The illusions and realities of arranged marriages, weddings, dowries, and attitudes toward the girl child in the lives of women in India.

My intent is to explore three Bollywood films and the depictions of Indian life that they offer, especially as they relate to attitudes toward women and girls. The ideals held up within each film will be discussed side by side with the images that each presents, then compared and contrasted with the current realities of life for these women and their daughters-looking especially at those involving the abilities of women to choose their husbands, the high cost of weddings and/or dowries, and the all-too-frequent violence inflicted on women and girls in India in the way of dowry-related cruelty, torture and sometimes death.

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Matthew King (Latin & History)
Faculty Advisor: Purnima Dhavan, History
We’re on a Mission from God: A Translation, Commentary, and Essay Concerning The Hierosolymita

This project is a translation, essay, and commentary about the Hierosolymita by Ekkehard of Aura. Written in the early 12th century, the Hierosolymita is a First Crusade chronicle that has been largely ignored by historians. The translation portion of my thesis provides an entire Latin to English translation of the Hierosolymita, a text that has never been professionally published in its entirety. The commentary analyzes Ekkehard's thematic tendencies and contextualizes the Hierosolymita by comparing its narrative to other crusading chronicles. The essay component explores Ekkehard's place in crusading thought and historiography. I discuss how this chronicle can be seen as Ekkehard's attempt to reconcile his belief that crusading is a God-ordained enterprise with the failure of the Crusade of 1101. I also explain how Ekkehard's critique of the Crusade of 1101 and glorification of the First Crusade allow the Hierosolymita to be read as a manual for proper crusading.

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Geoffrey Morgan (International Studies & Engineering)
Faculty Advisor: Stevan Harrell, Anthropology
A Critique of Developing Through the Analysis of Potable Water Projects in Rural China

Over the last decade there has been a push from NGOs to reach a larger number of people and to reach them in more isolated and impoverished regions. However, the success rates of these projects, particularly drinking-water projects, is quite low and in some cases can leave the people they were designed to help in worse conditions than before. In the 2007-2008 academic year and again in the summer of 2010, I conducted an independent research project in the mountains of southwest China to gain insight into why these success rates are so low. Findings suggest that the primary reason for the “failures” of the water projects is due to the project evaluation criteria coming from the development institution itself and not from the people it is intended to help. This discrepancy is the fundamental flaw in many forms of development work, not just in NGO water projects.

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Zachary Smith (History)
Faculty Advisor: Purnima Dhavan, History
Radical Politics and Emotional Liberation: Thane Summers’ Road to the Spanish Civil War

This paper is a case study that looks at what mobilized one volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Thane Summers, who did not have the kind of social experiences associated with members of the Brigade and why they volunteered. It shows how leftist political activism, was associated by Thane with an alternative, and more affirming, set of emotional standards than he had previously internalized, and that this drew him to the left and invigorated his political commitments.

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Steffani Bennett (Art History)
Faculty Advisor: Cynthea Bogel, Art History
The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting: A Reevaluation of the First Edition

The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, first published in 1679, has been hailed as the most influential guide to painting ever produced in China, yet there is little evidence in support of this assertion. A close examination of the aesthetic qualities of extant prints from early editions of the manual, the social environment of the early Qing (1644-1911), and the nature of commercial book publications in this period clarifies the significance of this publication in contemporary society. In exploring each of these facets, I argue that the manual functioned as a luxury commodity, a symbol of elite status in a changing social order. For wealthy and socially ambitious members of the early Qing a high-quality, beautifully produced publication like the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting was not only a physical embodiment of elite culture, but was also a means of cultivating oneself for entrance into high society.

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Adam Farley (Psychology & English)
Faculty Advisor: Alex Morrow, History
"There Were Years of Neglect": The Ship Scalers Union and Seattle Progressivism in the 20th Century

The present research presents a case history of the Ship Scalers, Dry Dock, and Miscellaneous Boatyard Workers Union, Local 541, through the use of archival material including correspondences, newsletters, and Seattle Times articles about the union. During its brief existence (ca. 1935-1986) Local 541 served as an activist organization and presents a critique of Seattle’s near folk adoration as a “blue” city. From WWII on, the Ship Scalers Union played an active and integrated role in Seattle’s social history, and especially Seattle’s black community in their fight for equality. By allying itself with Seattle civil rights organizations, using its union hall as a meeting place for activism, and allowing both communists and African Americans to be freely admitted to its ranks, Local 541 effected some of the most significant civil rights reform in the city and causes a re-imagining of Seattle’s progressivism during the past century.

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Elizabeth Poole (History)
Faculty Advisor: Alex Morrow, History
Pushed Ashore: Coast Guard Screening on the Seattle Waterfront

In the 1950s, the United States Coast Guard operated under security regulations which vested them with absolute power in determining what laborers had access to maritime employment in national ports. At the end of World War II the economic and strategic importance of Seattle as a port city intersected with the growing fear that West Coast maritime labor unions were infiltrated by Communism. The 1951 Coast Guard regulations created an elaborate screening program, designed to eliminate subversive workers from maritime employment. This paper examines the lives of Seattle dockworkers and seamen who were disenfranchised by the Port Security Program in the 1950s. I argue that, while the Port Security Program was created as a deliberate effort to sift out Communist and radical laborers from the West Coast maritime economy, pre-existing ethnic, racial, ideological, and inter-union struggles in Seattle were played out through the mechanisms of the Federal screening program.

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Peter Wu (Biology)
Faculty Advisor: Billie Swalla, Biology
Molgulid Ascidians Share a Unique Gene Complex

Typical chordate features found in ascidian tadpole larvae have been evolutionarily lost several times independently within the Molgulidae family. While tailed molgulids retain a tail with muscle cells, a notochord, and a dorsal neural tube, they have been lost within the tail-less species. A locus containing an unusual gene arrangement of the Bobcat gene within the first intron of the Manx gene has been shown to be essential for the development of chordate features in molgulid larvae. Sequencing and closer examination of ascidian genomes shows that there is a unique gene rearrangement of the NA-14 gene adjacent upstream to Manx and Bobcat only within the Molgulidae. Expression of these key genes could be affected by one another’s close proximity, disturbing normal larval development and may be responsible for the numerous instances of the evolution of tail-lessness found in the Molgulidae larvae.

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Brian Hardison (English)
Faculty Advisor: Thomas Foster, English
Coding Gender: Performance and Gender Identity in a Synthetic World

Building on Lisa Nakamura’s exploration of race and racial performance in her essay, “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet,” my project is an examination of the depiction of gender and its performance within the context of the contemporary massively multiplayer online role-playing game, EverQuest II.

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Helen Elizabeth Olsen (Geography & International Studies)
Faculty Advisors: Tish Lopez, Geography; Victoria Lawson, Geography
Creating Systems of Care: Integrated Health Delivery Programs and the Work of PATH

In "Creating Systems of Care", I critique vertical and horizontal health deliver systems using a framework of relational poverty knowledge and care ethics. This paper looks critically at PATH’s Andhra Pradesh Immunization Initiative (APII) as an example of a successful melding of vertical and horizontal systems into an integrated approach to providing care. I begin with a discussion of care ethics and the evolution of a feminist ethic of care. From there, I contextualize the work of PATH through an analysis of the dominant discourses on Neoliberalism; the geography of development; the concept of care as the work of social justice; and a discussion of the evolution of global health delivery strategies. From there, I delve into an analysis of PATH’s APII as an example of a successful integrated health delivery program.

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Reed Buchanan (History)
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Adam Warren, History
Hydrologic Regimes: Notions of Flooding in the Puyallup River Valley

Through a careful examination of floods in the Puyallup Valley in 1933 and 1977, and the social, cultural, and economic changes that connect them, this essay traces a gradual progression from completely anthropocentric conceptions of man pitted against nature to a more holistic understanding of the natural world and humanity’s place within it. While this holistic notion remained wrought with misconceptions and guided by an anthropocentric conception of nature, it demonstrated Pierce County residents’ increasing acknowledgment of the limits to their ability to control nature. This process which occurred in the Puyallup Valley mirrored broader shifts in environmental views at the regional and national levels.

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Luke McKinley (International Studies)
Faculty Advisor: Kathie Friedman, International Studies
YES TO POLENTA, NO TO COUSCOUS! Constructed Identities and Contested Boundaries Between Local and Gobal in Northern Italy's Gastronomic Landscape

This thesis examines the underlying assumptions of two small but influential movements in Northern Italy: the conservative political party called the Northern League and the Slow Food movement. They Lega Nord and the Slow Food movement have both revealed their own ethno-regionalist and “authentic” claims to Italian identity. These claims have produced an intersection between the notions of place, cuisine, and identity in a way that fundamentally excludes foreign immigrants. This thesis incorporates a significant literature review of secondary sources in order to situate it within the relevant scholarship about the topic. My argument is constructed by analyzing data collected by employing ethnographic field methods during a research trip to Piedmont, Northern Italy in August and September of 2009. Additionally, my data analysis incorporates primary source interviews from Italian news publications and official publications from the Slow Food movement, which I read as primary sources.

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Laura Pierson (International Studies, Spanish)
Faculty Advisor: Jonathan Warren, Latin American Studies
Kings of Bachata: Aventura, Migration and Dominican Nationalism in a Transnational Context

Since the 1960’s, Dominican bachata music has been associated with the poorest, blackest sectors of Dominican society.  Recently, however, young Dominican music groups in New York City, most famously Aventura, have popularized the genre and made it a symbol of Dominican national pride. While the change in attitudes towards bachata music might initially suggest a move away from classist and racist nationalist ideologies, this paper argues that Aventura’s bachata articulates traditional racist ideas of Dominican nationalism that have circulated since the founding of the nation in the 19th century and reveal the nation’s colonial legacy.  In particular, articulations of machismo and modernity in the music echo longstanding white supremacist ideals, which emphasize Spanish heritage and attempt to disguise or deny African traditions. The analysis draws on interviews with young adults in the Dominican Republic concerning Dominican music and migration, lyrics from popular Aventura songs, and Internet discussion posts about Aventura’s music.

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Garrett Strain (Economics, International Studies, Mathematics)
Faculty Advisor: Matthew Sparke, Geography and International Studies
Neighborhood and Nation in Neoliberal Times: Urban Upheaval, Resistance, and National Identity in Buenos Aires, Argentina

In the wake of the 2001 Argentine economic crisis, Buenos Aires has undergone the largest real estate boom in the city’s history. In the midst of a whirlwind of urban development, several middle class neighborhood activist groups have emerged to contest the effects of this real estate boom on the identity of their neighborhoods and city. In particular, one of these neighborhood activist groups called Palermo Despierta has begun a campaign in the Palermo district to prevent the construction of mega-residential towers that have become central icons of neoliberal urban development since the crisis. My thesis argues that underlying recent Buenos Aires middle class neighborhood activism is a desire to defend historically imagined national narratives of middle-classness and Europeanness inscribed in the urban space of the city from the forces of neoliberal urbanism that are fundamentally reconfiguring the urban landscape to make Buenos Aires more globally competitive.

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Jaime Barker (History, Political Science)

Faculty Advisor: Linda Nash, History
Yellowstone: Consuming “Natural” Landscapes

This paper was written for the History 498 course, Consumerism in the United States. It examines the ways in which the natural landscape of Yellowstone National Park was reshaped between 1900 and World War II to meet the consumptive needs of various groups of individuals. During these years, America’s first National Park experienced a marked and dramatic shift in the demographics of its visitors. The earliest visitors were America’s elite, who were wealthy, well-accustomed to international travel, luxurious accommodations and planned itineraries. However, this group eventually gave way to an influx of visitors from America’s middle class who favored personal mobility, economical lodging and a communal spirit. I explore factors both within and outside of Yellowstone which influenced this shift, including the popularization of the automobile, the proliferation of vacation time for Americans, and the personal beliefs of the National Park Services’ first director, Stephen T. Mather.

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Katie Schmidt (Political Science, Communication: Journalism)
Faculty Advisor: Peter May, Political Science
Global Warming Policy in the United States: A Climate of Confusion

The purpose of this paper is to investigate why climate change policy progress in the U.S. has been slow relative to other parts of the world. By tracking congressional, presidential, media and public attention to climate change since 1990, I show that climate change in an increasingly salient issue in the U.S. Why, then, has the U.S. failed to implement domestic climate change policy and participate in binding international agreements? I argue that U.S. state-centric political structure discourages a coherent national approach to climate change policy, leading to congressional confusion over the seriousness of global warming and what should be done about it. This, combined with a presidential tendency to mention climate change only when it aligns with other administration priorities, has prevented constituency-forming ideas from taking root. The result has been fragmented state and local government action on climate change at the expense of a federal-level strategy.

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Gennie Gebhart (Honors)
Faculty Advisor: Paul Boynton, Physics
Convinced by Comparison: Lutheran Doctrine and Neoplatonic Conviction in Kepler’s Theory of Light

Johanne Kepler’s investigation of the epistemology and ontology surrounding the nature of light bridged the gap between his Lutheran and Neoplatonic foundations and his revolutionary idea of a physical, causal astronomy. Kepler sought to find logically the “true cause” behind the virtus motrix (“motive power”) that moved the planets and determined their organization. He employed Lutheran regressus reasoning and merged Plotinian-Neoplatonic emanationism with his own empirical observations to form a theory of light, which he legitimized with analogy and exemplum reasoning. Though his observations forced him to reject the Neoplatonic idea of light as a virtus motrix, he demonstrated that light and the virtus motrix were two species of the genus of forces that attenuate with distance. These conclusions allowed Kepler to theologically, mystically, and empirically confirm the motion of the planets as the effects of a universal, physical law.

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Ana Lottis (International Studies)
Faculty Advisor: Angelina Godoy, Law, Societies & Justice
The Sourmetal Smell: A Study of Structural Violence in Brazil/Angelina Godoy- Law, Societies and Justice

In The Sourmetal Smell I use the biography of Sandro de Nascimento, a former street child who infamously hijacked a Rio city bus in 2001 and was killed by the police officers who arrested him, to analyze structural violence at work in Brazil. I begin, at an international level, by examining the effects on poverty and, partly in consequence, crime rates, of the international economic situation and neoliberal strategies for coping with economic crisis. From there, I move on to a hybrid local-international level in which attitudes within the police and criminal/juvenile justice systems towards people in Sandro’s social group are examined. Finally at the local-bystander level I analyze portrayals of Sandro and his social group in the media.

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Jennifer Robinson-Jahns (Community, Environment, and Planning)
Faculty Advisor: Manish Chalana, Urban Design and Planning
Rainier Brewery: Landmark of Our Industrial History

The Rainier Brewery has been a Seattle institution for over a hundred years. As a keystone of Seattle’s pre-Prohibition Brewing Industry and home of Emil Sick’s Rainier Beer, the Rainier Brewery complex at 3100 Airport Way has been a longstanding and beloved Seattle icon, as well as an important piece of the larger patterns of brewing history. In spite of recent modifications, the property retains many original architectural details and, as a working site until the 1990’s, provides a unique insight into the evolution of the brewing industry over the last hundred years. Because of this important role in history, the Rainier Brewery deserves status as a Registered Washington Heritage Register Landmark, although it is questionable if it would qualify due to issues of historic context and integrity. This sample nomination is meant to serve as a history of the site and a foundation for future preservation or nomination efforts.

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Erina Aoyama (International Studies)
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Lynn Thomas
Marginalization and Veneration: The Contradictions in Perceptions of Japanese Biracial Celebrities

This research seeks to examine the unique position of Japanese biracial celebrities as both objects veneration and distancing in contemporary Japanese society.  Understanding how biracial celebrities, and biracial individuals as a whole, are viewed as either Japanese or non-Japanese can provide a sense for the potential for future immigration into Japanese society.  These issues of openness to immigration, and integration of immigrants, are particularly critical given Japan’s declining birth rate and rapidly aging population.  These two trends will result in an inability to support this elderly population without massive immigration flows in the very near future.  My research addresses the possibility for such large-scale immigration to occur, through the lens of the simultaneous veneration and marginalization of biracial celebrities.

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Christine Lindell (International Studies)
Professor Daniel Chirot
The Young and the Restless: Serbian Youth, EU Visas and the Consequences of Conditionality

In this thesis, I investigate the historical roots of why for Serbians the freedom to travel has come to serve as a symbol of personal success, an indicator of political normalcy and a source of national pride and exceptionalism.  Serbia’s decade of isolation under Milošević added new layers of painful meaning to the notion of travel – and the protests which overthrew him in 2000 were in some ways a triumph of internationalism.  Given this historical background, I then analyze the current political factors which prevent Serbians from traveling.  Focusing in particular on the relationship between Serbia and the EU, I investigate the origins of the EU’s strict visa regime towards Serbia in the wars of the 1990s, and explore how, due to the creation and expansion of the Schengen passport-free zone, this restrictive visa regime came to long outlive its original purpose – transforming from a means of controlling  the wave of Yugoslav refugees which entered Europe during the nineties into both the basis of a buffer zone at the periphery of the EU and a tool of conditionality in the EU-Serbia bilateral relationship.  Finally, I use original research to demonstrate that the EU’s continued closed-door policy, as it limits what Serbians perceive as a basic right and source of pride, has produced strong feelings of unfairness and resentment towards the EU among young people and students, with serious consequences for the future of Serbia-EU relations.

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Cameron Robert Rule (Slavic Languages and Literatures)
Dr. Katarzyna Dziwirek
Morphological Integration of Foreign Elements in Russian: A Comparison of Bilingual Speakers in Lithuania and Estonia

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, isolated Russian communities in the Baltic States transitioned from monolingualism to bilingualism. Prolonged language contact resulted in the restructuring of the Russian language, providing multiple opportunities to examine language change in a dynamic and evolving environment. My research analyzes disparities in the morphological integration of Estonian and Lithuanian morphemes used by Russian speakers by examining the phonetic/phonological structures of the contact languages. I argue that the crucial factor determining integration are linguistic similarities shared between a speaker’s L1 (Russian) and L2 (Lithuanian or Estonian). Data was retrieved from online forums, blogs, as well as radio and television broadcasts. In depth analysis revealed several patterns in the integration of Lithuanian and Estonian morphemes by Russian speakers. There is a consistent trend of non-integration for Estonian words ending in vowels or that are morphologically complex. Conversely, Lithuanian words and morphemes demonstrate little restriction in integration.

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Luke Caldwell (Comparative History of Ideas)
Dr. Maria Elena Garcia
The Changing Winds of Civilization: The Aboriginal and Sovereignty Between the Desert and the State

The antagonistic relationship between the Australian state and the Aborigines has deep and problematic roots. Beginning with the racist doctrine of terra nullius, I look at how over two hundred years of legal policies have consistently constructed the Aborigine as a problem that required a state solution. I argue that these policies are predicated on a complete denial of native sovereignty and have increasingly alienated native communities. By refusing to engage with the source of these problems, the state has created significant barriers to native rehabilitation and has hijacked reconciliation efforts to strengthen its hegemony instead of native groups. Rather than solving the “Aboriginal problem”, these state policies have created it by placing Aborigines in an ambiguous political space that functions as a medium for civilizing the native—a process through which the native is killed and reborn in a form that is unproblematic for the state.

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Laura Adrienne Brady (International Studies)
Faculty Advisor: Professor Deborah Porter
Resisting the National Narrative: Charisma and the Venezuelan Cooperative Movement in the Context of the Bolivarian Revolution

Rigorous state-promotion of cooperatives as part of the Bolivarian Revolution has increased the number of cooperatives in Venezuela from 762 in 1998, before President Hugo Chavez came to power, to 108,000 in 2006. However, in July 2007, Chavez declared the program a failure, a surprise given his break from a past of exclusionary national rhetoric and his popular support. By examining CECOSESOLA, one of the most successful cooperatives worldwide, I argue that a cooperative's success is tied to its effectiveness in generating agency and a group narrative of resistance. Unlike CECOSESOLA, which has maintained autonomy and developed its own alternative narrative of belonging, Chavez's program provided cooperatives with a politicized and state-centric narrative of cooperative identity reliant on his charisma. My research ultimately suggests that though Chavez discursively encourages citizen mobilization, the Bolivarian narrative perpetuates patterns of exclusion and may consequently undermine the creation of a strong civil society.

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Jessica Frederick (English)
Professor Charles LaPorte
Clad in Plaid: Finding the Nation in Sir Walter Scott's Waverley

With the growing tide of Scottish national sentiment stemming from the Scottish National Party's (SNP) bid for independence from England since the late seventies the contemporary polemics of Scottish national identity begs for historical grounding. With two centuries worth of historiography concerning the Scottish nation and its often-cited colonial past under England's supremacy, it is worthwhile to pursue a definition of the nation under a more auspicious lens. Sir Walter Scott is the de facto national author of the Scots, writing from the early 19th century and still sending significant ripples across contemporary society despite modernity and globalization being issued from the bi-centennial gap. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the meticulous lengths Scott took in reproducing the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion--a moment in history crucial to the understanding of Scotland's nation-making--and investigate the unique national identities that divide his cast of characters from one another.

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Kalila Gloria Jackson-Spieker (International Studies)
Professor Sabine Long
The Right to be Different: Film, French Identity, and the National Space of French North Africans

"The Right to be Different: Film, French Identity, and the National Space of French North Africans" asks two questions: Why do French North Africans continue to face high levels of prejudice and social marginalization even as they attempt to fulfill all the requirements of Republican French identity? How do film portrayals of North Africans provide an explanation for such issues of marginalization? Specifically, it analyzes depictions from four different films of French North African conceptions of personal identity, their interactions with native white French, and the legacy of the colonial period. My thesis discusses these films within the context of broader scholarship on how the concept of Republicanism contributes to French national identity and the challenges it is facing in the new millenium, and how collective memory of the Algerian War of Independance continues to affect the treatment French North Africans receive.

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Jing-lan Lee (International Studies)
Professors Deborah Porter and Chris Hamm
Wuxia Film: A Qualitative Perspective of Chinese Legal Consciousness

This thesis offers a qualitative perspective on whether an increase in Chinese litigiousness—indicated by the passage of hundreds of new laws, the rise in the number of legal professionals and a statistical increase in the use of courts—that many scholars identify is truly indicative of a transformation of Chinese legal consciousness, or that the Chinese have faith in the law as a vehicle for eventual social and political reform. I conduct a close reading of wuxia film, a source neglected in discussions about legal consciousness despite expressing implicit commentary on the issue, by analyzing shifts between the 1980/1990s and post-2001 in the characterization of the protagonist and the visual composition of the films. I argue that changes in the contemporary films suggest Chinese skepticism of the transformative power of current legal reforms that is deeply rooted in the country's historical experience of being objectified by the West.

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Jeff Bowman (Oceanography)
Professor Julian P. Sachs
Chemical and Physical Properties of Some Saline Lakes in Alberta and Saskatchewan

The Northern Great Plains of Canada are home to numerous permanent and ephemeral athalassohaline lakes. These lakes display a wide range of ion compositions, salinities, stratification patterns, and ecosystems. Many of these lakes are ecologically and economically significant to the Great Plains Region. A survey of the physical characteristics and chemistry of 19 lakes was carried out to assess their suitability for testing new tools for determining past salinity from the sediment record. Data on total dissolved solids (TDS), specific conductivity, temperature, dissolved oxygen (DO), and pH were measured in June, 2007. A comparison of these data with past measurements indicates that salinity is declining at Little Manitou and Big Quill Lakes in the province of Saskatchewan. However salinity is rising at other lakes in the region, including Redberry and Manito Lakes. The wide range of salinities found across a small geographic area makes the Canadian saline lakes region ideal for testing salinity proxies. In addition the nonlinear increase in salinity at Redberry Lake is likely influenced by the morphometry of the basin. This acceleration has ecological implications for the migratory bird species found within the Redberry Important Bird Area.

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Gabriel Chrisman (History)
Professor Alexandra Harmon

“If anyone lays a hand on that net they are going to get shot.” Uncompromising Activism: The Fish-In Protests at Frank’s Landing

This paper provides a narrative history of the Native American fishing rights protests which occurred during the 1960s and 1970s at and around Frank's Landing, Washington. These highly visible and frequently dramatic protests were instrumental in securing special treaty rights for Native Americans, and were also highly influential in altering public opinion of the Pacific Northwest tribes during this turbulent period. After a background summary covering the century following the signing of the original treaties, I primarily focus on the organization known as the Survival of the American Indian Society, also describing the ways in which the eventual success of this organization was in large part due to assistance from many outside individuals and other participating groups. This cooperation was fundamentally important in linking the Native Americans' cause to the broader civil rights movements of the period.

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Gwendolyn Slote (History)
Professor George Behlmer

A Series of Papers on Utopia...

These papers were written for a History 498 class, the Senior Seminar. This particular 498 was "non-traditional" because we wrote four shorter papers rather than a single longer paper. The class was based on Utopian and Dystopian novels from the Industrial Age: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia. For each paper, the initial research topic was to originate from a theme from the novel, staying within the contemporary time of the novel and using primarily primary resources. I wrote on electricity at the close of the nineteenth century, birth control in the early twentieth century, behaviorism and its critics in the 1920s, and The (Updated) Last Whole Earth Catalog in comparison to Ecotopia, both from the 1970s. Even though the four papers focus on very different themes and time periods, they constitute one project as they represent a quarter long process of research on themes found in Utopian and Dystopian literature.

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Gabriel Chrisman (History)
Professor James Gregory

The Port Madison Area in the 1870s and the 1880s: An Integrated Community

This paper examines the nature of the interactions between the Native American community living on the Port Madison Indian Reservation and the settler community directly across the bay, known as Port Madison, Bainbridge Island. I particularly focus on the period of the 1870s and 1880s, and I argue that the two groups were less driven by idealized and preconceived images of each other during this period when compared to the decades preceding and following it. This openness led to a complex social and economic environment which differed markedly from equivalent interactions of the 1850s and 1860s, and also from the 1890s and 1900s, but which resulted in a successfully integrated community during the 1870s and 1880s. This conclusion is presented with accompanying evidence from various sources, including a wide variety of archival evidence.

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Liam Joseph McGivern (UW Bothell)
Professor Julie Shayne

Justice Denied: Impunity During and After the Salvadoran War

Justice Denied: Impunity During and After the Salvadoran Civil War is an examination of three infamous atrocities of the Salvadoran civil war and attempts to bring the those responsible to justice. The Salvadoran civil war lasted twelve years, from 1980-1992, and resulted in the deaths of approximately 75,000 civilians. The first case is the March 1980 assassination of Archbishop Romero, a highly revered and outspoken critic of the Salvadoran government. The second case is the December 1980 rape and murder by a government death squad of four American churchwomen. The final case discussed is the November 1989 murder by Salvadoran military personnel of six Jesuit priests/professors and their two domestic servants on the University of Central America campus where they taught. The Salvadoran justice system, the international justice system vis-vis a United Nations Truth Commission, and the United States civil courts attempted to hold those responsible for the human rights atrocities accountable for their crimes. The Salvadoran justice system, however, tried only to accountable hold those individuals who actually committed murders, not the military officials who ordered the killings. I argue that ultimately justice was never served due to four factors: corruption within the government of El Salvador, a lack of power given to the United Nations Truth Commission, United States Cold War politics, and the inability of the United States civil courts to create meaningful accountability for former members of the Salvadoran military responsible for human rights violations. In addition to secondary research, this paper is based on first-hand accounts from the memoirs of Robert White, who was United States Ambassador to El Salvador during the time the atrocities were committed, and James Burgenthal, who was a member of the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador.

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