21978 research outputs found
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Latin American Newspaper Coverage of Climate Change or Global Warming, 2005-2024 - December 2024
No full textThe Media and Climate Change Observatory Data monitors 131 sources (across newspapers, radio and TV) in 59 countries in seven different regions around the world. Data is assembled by accessing archives through the Lexis Nexis, Proquest and Factiva databases via the University of Colorado libraries. More information may be found at: http://mecco.colorado.edu.</p
"The Boys Are At It Again!": A Cultural Analysis of Masculinity in Sports Films
Get PDFMasculine representation in media products often follows media trends that focus on a perceived identity crisis as a way to assert the social power of hegemonic masculinity. Fictional narratives can be a way of legitimizing those behaviors.When films portray sporting events, they create representations of professional leagues that occupy a large economic and social space within American culture. Sports as an industry has historically been a place where masculine representations flourish, specifically in response to societal pressures that threatened to upend power relations (Messner, 1990, p. 204). The veneer of ultimate invulnerability and heroism, based on a well-muscled and strong physical appearance, often defines a male character and undergoes a troubling transformation as he must contend with a cultural establishment that no longer prioritizes the ways he can express power over others; the winner-loser dichotomy offers a rich arena for exploring power relations in an easily disseminated medium such as film. Media audiences internalize this messaging and the reinforcement of dominant societal ideals, which in turn informs their own critical interpretations (Scheufele, 1999, pg. 105). Analyzing certain media content with a specific social facet in mind, such as masculinity within sports films, allows scholars to further grasp the ways popular discourse interacts with cultural context. This analysis is not meant to validate or criticize gender expressions through time; rather, I aim to place four different film depictions of masculinity – Rocky (Avildson, 1976), The Bad News Bears (Ritchie, 1976), Moneyball (Miller, 2011), and Warrior (O’Connor, 2011) – in conversation with their specific cultural contexts and draw comparisons between gender performance in two historical eras.</p
Is School Cool?: Quantifying the Relationship Between Student Society and Academic Resistance
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Academic resistance has been observed across various education settings, culminating in behaviors that are either passive, active, or educational identity resistance. Prior research has focused heavily on the compulsory education sector, but as students in higher education have been found to display academic resistance within the classroom and educational identity resistance outside of it, there is a need to understand how higher education student society prizes academic resistance. As such, this study surveys 97 students enrolled in The University of Colorado Boulder to compare their levels of social self-efficacy, personal social capital, and academic resistance. The data from this survey was analyzed to understand the correlations or lack thereof between variables. It was found that academic resistance is correlated to social self-efficacy, indicating a possibility that student society places positive social value on academic resistance. It was also found that passive and active resistance were correlated, indicating that students who are resisting in one way may be more likely to resist in more than one way. Finally, there were gender differences found across multiple variables. This research points to the possibility that academic resistance is tied to student society, specifically within compulsory education, and indicates a necessity for future resistance to further examine this relationship.</p
NEPC Review: The Persistence of Religious Discrimination in Publicly Funded Pre-K Programs (Manhattan Institute, January 2025)
Get PDFA Manhattan Institute report claims that many religious pre-K providers are being excluded from public education programs open to other private schools, despite Supreme Court rulings prohibiting such exclusion. Using online searches, the report points to written state and district policies that allegedly discriminate based on religious status or use of funds. However, these policies may simply be outdated rather than intentionally discriminatory. The report offers no evidence of enforcement or input from religious providers or school officials. While highlighting supposed bias against religious pre-K schools—which serve less than 1% of pre-K students—it ignores the discriminatory practices of many religious K–12 schools, an issue that could become more pressing if the Court mandates acceptance of religious charter schools.</p
Ai and Painting Thesis
Get PDFThis thesis investigates the evolving role of painting in the age of artificial intelligence through a collaborative, iterative process between human and machine. Grounded in personal experiences of dissociation and dyslexia, my work positions painting as a tactile, emotional counterpoint to AI's disembodied logic. I explore how AI—trained on vast image datasets—acts not as a tool but as a co-creator, prompting new visual dialogues that challenge authorship, originality, and perception. Using a method of generating AI images, physically painting over printed outputs, and reintroducing those images into AI systems, I develop a feedback loop that reveals the tension between control and surrender, memory and data, the human body and machine cognition.
Through triptychs that document these exchanges, I examine how meaning is constructed and fragmented across iterations. The work engages with themes of artificial realism, remix culture, digital mediation, and visual literacy—drawing on thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Donna Haraway, Ruha Benjamin, and Hito Steyerl to contextualize this interdisciplinary practice. Symbolic motifs such as handprints, feet, tattoos, and distorted figures underscore my investigation of embodied presence, mortality, and identity in contrast to AI's synthetic and generalized vision.
By framing painting as a living dialogue with non-human intelligence, I argue that AI is not the end of painting but a provocation that reanimates its urgency. This thesis reflects on what it means to be human in a time of algorithmic authorship and proposes a future for art that embraces hybridity, imperfection, and the irreducible value of lived experience.</p
Guiding to Have Performance With Activism Not Feel Like Performative Activism: A Guide of Belonging For the Program Side by Side
Get PDFHuman experience is the backbone of theatre and performance. Without the experience, how would we have the stories that are told today? Popular theatre focuses on the white, cis, heteronormative experience as a direct consequence of empire. As a consequence of this colonization, stories of the global majority have been explicitly destroyed, forgotten to time, or ignored. Furthermore, popular narratives focus on human life, as if our own perspectives are the only explorable options. Rarely do non-human characters have the same focus and effort put into them, leaving their stories untold. In educational settings, students are conditioned to learn and use frameworks made by people who fit those same identities. While colonizers would like you to believe that white cis identities have always been seen as the status quo, this dominance emerged only in the last hundred years. Our stories have been passed down for centuries, our people have occupied the land for centuries, and we will reclaim these spaces. As we look towards the future it is important to study and respect all identities and intersectionalities in the world, both human and non-human, to push forward innovation. The inclusion of diverse identities and perspectives encourages students to pursue their passions and see themselves and their future in those fields. Both the arts and sciences fail to rely on ingenuity from those in the global majority, excluding those who are not white, cis, male, or heteronormative, prioritizing colonial thought over human ingenuity and progress. This status quo has been perpetuated across disciplines because of white supremacy and capitalism. The institution of education uses this harmful system to create thoughtless workers, suppressing innovation and furthering the supremacist status quo where the ideas of people of color are not highlighted. Connecting these ideas through nontraditional education and the exploration of vulnerability, I wish for students of the global majority to see themselves in the fields they want to pursue. I will be exploring non-traditional education through theatrical exercises and pedagogy to not only connect more students with their own career paths but with one another creating a community. Theatrical pedagogy would be performance-based activities that open up students to their own vulnerability in regards to feeling excluded and proper ideas of belonging.</p
The Effects of Zinc Availability on the Cell Cycle and Proliferation in MCF-7 and T-47D Breast Cancer Cells
Get PDFZn2+ is an essential trace element that plays a major role in numerous biological processessuch as genome stability, gene expression, and intracellular cell signaling. Most notably, Zn2+ isinvolved in key checkpoints in the cell cycle. Dysregulation of Zn2+ homeostasis is affected incancer, a disease in which cellular proliferation is altered, one of the most prevalent malignanciesin the world. This study aims to investigate the impact of Zn2+ availability on cell cycleregulation and proliferation in two breast cancer cell lines, MCF-7 and T-47D. The twoexperimental approaches used to investigate this question were a resazurin viability assay andlive-cell imaging with fluorescent reporters. Cells were exposed to a Zn2+ gradient consisting ofmedia supplemented with Zn2+ deficient (ZD) and Zn2+ rich (ZR) conditions. The resazurin assayrevealed that moderate Zn2+ conditions (MM and 30ZR) supported the highest amount ofproliferation, whereas both ZD and higher concentrations of ZR were associated with decreasedmetabolic activity and thus proliferation. Live-cell imaging of MCF-7 cells expressingH2B-mTurquoise and DHB-mCherry reporters further found that moderate Zn2+ conditionsfavored proliferation, while Zn2+ deficiency induced either quiescence or cell cycle arrest. Thesefindings serve to highlight the dual role of Zn2+ in breast cancer cells. There is a necessity forproliferation while also emphasizing the cytotoxic potential of its excess. This work not onlycontributes to our understanding of micronutrient regulation in cancer, but it also provides theframework for future studies evaluating. Zn2+ as a potential therapeutic target in cancertreatment.</p
Navigating Shifting Identities: Taiwan’s Political Landscape Over the Past Twenty Years
Get PDFThe issue of the China and Taiwan conflict has become increasingly more important to the state of peace both within the East-Asia region and across the world. In recent years, studies have shown an increasing amount of support for a distinct Taiwanese national identity and for Taiwan’s sovereignty and autonomy from China. The rise of Taiwan nationalist parties, activist movements, and anti-China policies indicates a shift in how Taiwanese people identify in their relationship with China. This thesis intends to explore this idea of shifting support for China via a thematic analysis of proposed ballot measures legislating China-Taiwan relations, and the level of approval these measures received in public votes. This research finds that there is a growing sense of unique Taiwanese culture and desire for separation from China among the public to the point that a majority advocate for autonomy and independence for Taiwan. </p
Influence of Gender and Identity Factors on Perceptions of Chronic Pain
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Women often seek medical care for chronic pain but tend to receive more inadequate treatments than men. This is at least in part because of cultural norms that may promote patriarchal stereotypes that can bleed into how people perceive someone's pain (Hoffmann & Tarzian, 2001). Personal information like name, age, and background may disrupt instinctive biases when recognizing pain (Mei et al., 2024). My project specifically investigates the role of identity factors in order to improve the quality of treatment for both men and women. Undergraduates (N=266) read a blog post of either a man, woman, or ambiguous individual experiencing chronic pain in a condition that either included or omitted identity factors and were then asked to rate their perceptions of the blogger's pain in a survey. I predict that perceptions of pain will be recognized as more severe and believable for women when identity factors are provided and comparable to men's scores with identity factors. A lack of identity factors will result in lower perceptions of pain and believability. </p
Insights into Microbialite Mineralization from Microbialite Clasts in Great Salt Lake
Get PDFThe study of microbialites and the process in which they are mineralized is an important part of understanding Earth’s paleoenvironment and geobiological history. Great Salt Lake, Utah, is favorable for microbialite growth and can act as a modern analog for paleoenvironments that ancient microbialites formed in. Previous research provides a microbialite mineralization model in which extra-cellular organic matrix in the biofilm is first permineralized by a poorly-crystalline Mg-Si phase before being replaced by aragonite, which is itself later partially replaced by dolomite. To expand upon these findings and understand how this model may apply to mobile microbialite grain morphologies, this study characterized two cores of sediments dominated by mobile microbialites clasts from Great Salt Lake using light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and X-ray diffractometry. Radiocarbon ages were also measured in order to define the timescale over which the mineralization process occurs. The microbialite grains analyzed were found to be significantly permineralized by Mg-Si, as described in the model, in under ~230 years, and grains were nearly completely mineralized by aragonite after ~2150 years. Authigenic dolomite, as described in the model, was not observed in these samples. This could be due to a lack of intense microbial activity during the mineralization of these grains. Additionally, mobile grains may be unfavorable to the nucleation of dolomite because their higher exposure to lake water flow reduces the capacity of microbial processes to heavily influence the local water chemistry. These findings help expand the current model by adding to our understanding of how long microbialite mineralization takes to complete and how the mineralization process varies between different morphologies.</p
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