IDA Mount Holyoke College Institutional Digital Archive
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Punishment beyond Prison: Denying Housing to Formerly Incarcerated People in Greater Boston
No full textEvery year over 600,000 people are released from incarceration in the United States. Upon their return to the free world, a big portion of this population faces housing insecurity or outright homelessness. Although research shows that access to stable housing reduces recidivism, federal and state regulations deny access to public or subsidized housing to most formerly incarcerated people and fuel discriminatory practices against them in the private housing market. In Greater Boston, where affordable housing is increasingly hard to find, people with criminal histories are particularly susceptible to housing instability. This thesis therefore addresses the little-discussed housing crisis that virtually anyone who has contact with the court system faces in an expensive metropolitan area like Greater Boston.
Seeking to better understand housing instability among formerly incarcerated people, my main research question is: how do housing policies in the state of Massachusetts and at the federal level influence the housing experiences of people with a criminal record? To answer this question, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 15 formerly incarcerated people in the Greater Boston area over the summer. I also analyzed a number of secondary sources on federal and Massachusetts state policies regulating access to housing for people with a criminal history.
At the core of my research analysis is the retrenchment of the welfare state, and the consequent expansion of the penal state in response to rising social and economic insecurity under a neoliberal regime. Borrowing from Loic Wacquant’s work, I argue that the extension of penal institutions through housing policies that discriminate against people with a criminal record is a way for the state to reaffirm its power in demarking a clear border between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor. Within this punitive state, then, people in the dispossessed categories are seen as deserving of social death for moral failing to uphold neoliberal values of personal responsibility, self-sufficiency, competition, and adaptability to economic deregulation and privatization. Employing this theoretical framework, I examine how the lived experiences of formerly incarcerated related to housing fit within the parameters of the three aspects of social death proposed by Joshua M. Price: natal alienation, humiliation, and structural violence.Politic
Body Stories: On Trans-Poetics as Feminist Science Studies
No full textIn Spring 2015 I begin medical transition. The archive starts with a few empty testosterone vials that I line up along my windowsill. A few months later, I have a small wooden cigar box full of them. I begin to save receipts. I keep voicemails from my insurance company until the storage on my phone is full and it no longer takes photos. I store old prescriptions from before and after my name change process that could never reasonably be of use. I catalogue personal notes from visits, letters for flying with needles, my new birth certificate, all the medical letters it took to get the new birth certificate, emails. I record videos documenting my bodily shifts. A year later my little brown folder has started to bulge out at the sides. My project begins from the sticky place of critiquing Medicine while embodying lifelong engagement with it.
This work utilizes my medical records as a point of departure for a conversation between two archives of transition -- one that my doctors collectively produce and one that I am making through poetic and critical response to these ‘body stories’ the documents tell. Transgender healthcare has long maintained the epistemic authority of the field of Biology in its understanding of bodies. What does my trans body have to say about and to the field of Medicine? How does poetry about my experience of transition resist the silencing reductionism of Science? This work primarily draws on Karen Barad’s notion of agential realism and Donna Haraway’s attention to naturecultural entanglements to investigate the many material-semiotic
bodies trans medicine is constituted through and among. This creative piece offers interventions in my medical archive riddled with Scientific reductionism and explores what a transexual-poetics can offer as a a recuperative methodology, an instigation of conversation with and against the techno-biopolitical relations of trans medicalization. The project takes its form in three chapters. The first explores chest surgery as a site of normalization and naturalization. The second investigates the question of the ‘passive’ ingredient in testosterone, cottonseed oil, and interrogates the biomedically unseen. The third introduces the question of becoming patient both as an affective-temporal description and as a docile subject of care.Gender Studie
“Where the pillars of the earth are standing:” Centering spiritual, political, and ecological power in Uganda’s Lubigi wetland
No full textWhile most Ugandans remember that Idi Amin was ousted in a war fought by forces of the NRM led by Yoweri Museveni, the healer and python medium Sekyoka Nalubega Muzana Bemba Musota, describes a different war, fought with different forces, asking “Was this a war only of guns, not of spirits?” Her question draws attention to an expansive history of land-based mediumship and healing in the Lubigi wetland on the outskirts of Kampala. The forgotten history of this ecologically and socially marginal location reframes and redefines power in Uganda over the long term.
Nalubega’s story demonstrates the enduring role of place and particularly territorial spirits, misambwa, in the history of Buganda and Uganda. This work follows the history of the spiritual being, Bemba, who takes the shape of a python resident in Lubigi, from the mythic origins of the kingdom, through anticolonial and postcolonial conflict, to the present and the future. Sekyoya Nalubega Muzana Bemba Musota and other mediums associated with Lubigi stress the critical importance of land in spiritual practice in conversation at their homes and at their shrines. Along with this, they assert that power in the kingdom is more often than not a product of the work of spirit mediums.
Lubigi’s spiritual and ecological past emerges from ethnographic interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019 with residents of Lubigi and spirit mediums in conversation with previously published scholarship on lacustrine spirituality in and on Nalubaale. In an ecosystem that exists between land and water, interactions between individual humans, non-humans, and the landscape take on an in between, mediating quality. In its contemporary form, the Lubigi wetland is a liberatory space for those seeking to live outside the confines of a capitalism increasingly defined by shortages. In its historic form, Lubigi was a center of land-based spiritual practice and mediation that was largely forgotten in the face of Christianization, colonization, and land shortages in the Buganda Kingdom.Histor
Dipping Your Feet in Familiar and Foreign Waters: Gaining Transferable Skills Near and Far from Home
No full textThis summer I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Bert Hodges and Jeein Kang of the psychology department at Gordon College. We explored two timing effects that appear in time perception research: magnitude and valence effects. Our studies are being run this fall, and we’re hoping to find significant differences in magnitude effects for positive and negative valence contexts. Through reviewing the literature, programming a study (in SuperLab), analyzing data, and working collaboratively in a team, I learned many new skills. I was able to work with two great mentors, who helped me gain confidence and develop as a researcher.Taking positions either abroad or back home domestically, our respective internships called us to evaluate the needs of our workplaces without compromising our individual learning expectations. Navigating new and familiar environments, our panel gained new appreciation for the places in which we found ourselves learning. We came to new workplaces with fresh eyes and enriched our perspectives using previously-acquired skills learned at Mount Holyoke. Whether it was translating marketing publications in the French countryside, assisting the senior site director in resolving critical and delicate situations in the Eternal City, supporting the international office of a major Italian university, or conducting research in a psychology lab in Eastern Massachusetts, we all gained transferable skills that will contribute to our remaining time at Mount Holyoke and to our future careers. Although working with a wide range of academic interests and internships, as interns, we found commonalities in the ways that we adjusted to our work placements and acquired knowledge that transcends specific fields or locations
Optimizing a genetic reporter for RNA-protein interactions: in vivo titration of a promoter binding protein
No full textGene regulation is an essential process in all domains of life that governs which genes are expressed at a given time to control cell specialization and adaptation to environmental changes. In bacteria, non-coding small RNAs (sRNAs) regulate gene expression in response to a specific stress signal and are critical in pathways bacteria use to resist antibiotics, form biofilms, and infect other cells. sRNAs regulate gene expression, including mRNA translation and stability, by base pairing to target mRNAs through interactions with proteins, such as the bacterial RNA chaperone Hfq. However, not much is understood about the mechanism of interaction between sRNAs and proteins and new methods to study RNA-protein interactions have been developed, such as protein immunoprecipitation, to isolate proteins that interact with small RNAs. However, these approaches are limited in that purification of the protein and RNA transcript outside of the natural cellular environment may not accurately reflect in vivo interactions.
An in vivo bacterial three-hybrid (B3H) assay was developed to study sRNAs and their interactions with chaperone proteins such as Hfq. The B3H assay detects the variable RNA-protein interaction by coupling the interaction to reporter gene expression, in this case the expression of β-galactosidase. When the RNA and protein of interest interact, RNA polymerase binds to the test promoter and initiates transcription of the reporter gene, lacZ. The B3H assay successfully detects an interaction between Hfq and several sRNAs. However, there are a number of additional known sRNA-Hfq interactions the assay does not reliably detect.
My project focuses on modulating expression levels of the DNA-RNA adapter protein in the assay to increase the signal detected by the B3H assay. To alter protein expression, I designed several promoters of varying strength and demonstrated that the B3H signal can be modulated based on the strength of the promoter driving expression of the DNA-RNA adapter protein. I then conducted a forward genetic screen and identified a set of promoters that further increased the signal. With the combined approaches of site-directed and random mutagenesis, we show that a weak promoter driving expression of the protein component increases the signal detected by the B3H assay for several Hfq-sRNA interactions. With an optimized B3H assay, more could be learned about the regulatory roles sRNAs and protein chaperones play in biology.Biochemistr
Ptolemy Comes to America: Cartographic Objectivity and European Imperial Ambition, 1500-1630
No full textNote that this thesis discusses and examines offensive portrayals of indigenous Americans.This project connects the evolution of European cartography to the developing culture of objectivity in European knowledge-making communities. Just as the proto-scientists of the Renaissance revived the knowledge-making processes of ancient authors such as Aristotle, cartographers examined the work of second century Roman geographer Claudius Ptolemy, and especially his Geographia. The Geographia describes the process of creating a projection which relates physical space to its depiction on a map; it was Ptolemy’s treatise on the proper representation of space. Just as the knowledge-making community gradually reduced the authority of ancient authors, geographers largely abandoned Ptolemy after the sixteenth century. During the sixteenth century, when Ptolemy’s projection reigned supreme, European states scrambled to launch colonial projects. Editions of the Geographia began to contain maps of the so-called “New World”. These maps often contained depictions of indigenous Americans, which demonstrated imperialist European attitudes towards the people of the Americas and their land. However, the “neutral,” objective maps on which they were presented legitimized these depictions. Over the course of the sixteenth century, geography became bound up in the idea of objectivity. The mathematical, objective accuracy of maps legitimized their contents, and thus came to legitimize the colonial project itself.
The Geographia was brought to Western Europe in about 1400. During the sixteenth century, editions of the Geographia proliferated across Europe as European knowledge makers began to change their approach towards the creation of knowledge, both spatial and otherwise. I evaluate five editions of the Geographia published from 1525 to 1599, with particular focus on their maps of the Americas. I analyze the structure of these maps, as well as the atlas paratext which surround them, and I connect these elements to the maps’ depictions of indigenous Americans. I consider changes in these components over the course of the sixteenth century. Finally, I attempt to answer the question of why Europeans tried to make their maps “neutral,” and its impact on the European understanding of their own relationship with the Americas.Histor
Teaching for a Difference
No full textLanguage learning through an intercultural approach transforms the traditional classroom experience through its emphasis on using language to access a culture. Over the summer, I had the opportunity to be involved with this method of teaching through the work I did as a teaching and research intern for Home Intercultural Learning- a private language school in La Plata, Argentina. For two months, I spent time working in the classrooms with students on their conversational English skills, designing intercultural language activities, and conducting individual research on the effectiveness of digital storytelling methods versus traditional storytelling methods. These experiences deepened my understanding of how to create a dynamic, actively engaging and inclusive space in the classroom by encouraging self-reflection, cultural competence and cultural curiosity.Education is found inside and outside of the classroom, which is something the four members of this panel, Ariel, Sabrina, Rachel, and Kathryn, will discuss as part of their reflection on their summer experience. Our experiences stretch from basketball courts in Vietnam to riding arenas in Reno, management in Kenya, and teaching in Argentina. Viewers will take away from our panel a broader understanding of different cultures, self-reflection, community involvement and how one internship experience can shape future career aspirations. Reflecting on their internships this summer, these panelists gained insight into how the work they did helped to shape how they wish to proceed in their future career aspirations
Do Philosophers Dream of Electric Sheep? The Ethics of War in the Age of Technology
No full textIn 2010, Belorussian software developer Sergey Ulasen discovered a bug in several
customers’ computers that indicated something far more sinister than just a flaw in the system. The
computer worm, later christened Stuxnet, is thought to have been created through a joint effort
from the American and Israeli governments with the purpose of destabilising Iran’s nuclear
weaponry program, reportedly ruining a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. General Michael V.
Hayden, former director of the CIA and NSA, called it “the first attack of a major nature in which a
cyberattack was used to affect physical destruction.”1
As technology progresses and develops, it becomes crucial to determine how just war
principles will apply to this new realm of combat. Stuxnet is an example of how new avenues of
technology can produce attacks with unprecedented consequences. We don’t exactly know what
technology’s full capabilities are. Because much of technology’s scope and reach remains speculative,
it is difficult to envision its limits and boundaries. Nonetheless, it is definitely present, prevalent, and
only likely to increase, making it worthy and necessary of discussion. This thesis focuses on three
primary avenues of technology - cyberwarfare and drones - and how they affect the scope of the
ethics of warfare as we currently envision them.
The thesis begins with a brief overview of just war theory, covering its earliest documented
usage and comparing that to its contemporary view today. This includes the most prominent just
war theory of the 21st century, set out by Michael Walzer in Just and Unjust Wars . It is Walzer’s
conception of just war theory that I will be referring to, citing its inapplicability to modern
technological forms of warfare. Also in this chapter, I develop three criteria for an enduring,
applicable just war theory: consistency, adaptability, and defensibility. I then spend significant time
discussing the domestic analogy, a conceptual tool that philosophers use to streamline their
arguments, but arguing against it in contexts of war. After this, I discuss cyberwarfare and drones.
Both of these technological developments propose unique problems to traditional just war theory
that necessitate the development of a new framework. Finally, I introduce the concept of moral
particularism, a position most thoroughly outlined by Jonathan Dancy. I argue that moral
particularism is the best framework through which we can evaluate the ethics of war, because it
fulfills the three criteria for an adequate just war framework: consistency, adaptability, and
defensibility.Philosoph
Analyzing Social Movement Theory and Sport: Exploring the Presence of Athlete Activism in Brazil and the United States
No full textThe relationship between athletes and activism is ubiquitous in United States (US) history. I became curious as to how this relationship operates in other countries. Comparing US athlete activism to Brazil athlete activism offered an intriguing case study to explore why athlete activism occurs in some counties and not in others; my research centered on why athlete activism flourished in the US and not in Brazil.
To understand and explain why athlete activism occurs or why it does not, I studied political scientist Doug McAdam’s Political Process Model. McAdam’s political process model examines what societal elements inspire social movements. Using McAdam’s theory as framework, I determined three factors that supported the presence and absence of athlete activism in the US and Brazil. McAdam’s theory provided three dimensions of social movements: political opportunity, organizational strength, and insurgent consciousness. The three factors that I researched in an effort to explain athlete activism include state strength and nationalism, history of race relations, and sport institutions. Each of these factors correlates to the three dimensions of social movement theory offered by McAdam. McAdam’s social movement theory appropriately frames and supports my research as to why athlete activism occurs more in the US than in Brazil.
Based on my framework, I conclude that the US has more athlete activism due to increased political opportunity, stronger organizational strength, and a stronger insurgent consciousness within the country than occurs in Brazil. The US’s strong nationalism and state strength, segregated history of race relations, and specific structure of sport institutions all encourage athlete activism. Brazil has weak nationalism and state strength, a nuanced history of race relations, and sport institutions which discourage athlete activism.Politic
Environmental Research, Restoration, and Rehabilitation
No full textFor nearly two months, I spent close to twenty hours a week canoeing through scenic coves, following the directions of a Garmin GPS to close to 1,500 sampling points predetermined using GIS technology. I was in Lyme, Connecticut continuing a twenty-year-old study on the composition, distribution and abundance of different submerged plant species within the bounds of the Connecticut River estuary. I worked closely with the Roger Tory Peterson Estuary Center, a newly-formed regional center of the Connecticut Audubon Society, and had the opportunity to meet and work with a variety of individuals working in environmental science. I mostly performed data collection and research, but I also did a lot of education for the center for both children and adults, and felt honored to be sharing my work with others who were just as passionate as I am.As we learn more about the environment and our impact on it through our studies, we find it crucial to apply those concepts to the field and broaden our idea of what a classroom can be. While we range in our interests, we share the common goal of protecting and restoring the environment. Our individual internships include wildlife rehabilitation of birds in Eastern Oregon, aquatic vegetation study in Connecticut, coral research in Thailand, and wetland restoration research in New England. Though our experiences were varied, we can all agree that it is important to not only do research to understand the challenges our environment is facing, but to develop and implement a plan to address these challenges in the future