IDA Mount Holyoke College Institutional Digital Archive
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Beyond the Prison, Beside Ourselves: Affective Abolition and the Challenges of Transformative Justice
No full textThe United States represents less than 5 percent of the world’s population yet houses 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Over 2.3 million people are currently behind bars in the US, making our political era one of mass incarceration. How can we imagine and implement alternatives to the carceral state? I will attempt to answer this questions by turning to woman of color feminist and queer of color critiques of the prison. These abolitionists imagine an end to state violence as well as interpersonal violence. Centering the abolitionist principle that no one is disposable, I will explore transformative justice initiatives that suggest we hold each other accountable within our communities rather than through the state. Neoliberal responses to interpersonal violence – carceral feminism, homonormativity, and Black respectability politics – merely proliferate structural harm. In order to avoid the seduction of carceral capitalism, we need to base our relationships with each other on different logics than exile and punishment. I argue that interdependence can be felt in moment of ecstasy, in its literal sense. Going “beside ourselves” with grief, rage, or love, helps everyone realize their investment in ending power structures. Prison abolition, and the affective shifts it requires, offers a powerful vision challenging violence beyond the state.Gender Studie
#21stCentury
No full textWorking as a Sales and Marketing/Event intern at Hamptons Magazine, I learned much about building and maintaining relationships with top clients. A free, weekly magazine, the profit came from selling ad spaces to local businesses, restaurants, and shops. A key component to such was building substantial relationships with clients that spend top dollar to be featured in the magazine. As a result, social media coverage and hosting private parties were a significant aspect of the job. This allowed for networking opportunities, as well as opened my eyes to the high demand for paper magazines, even though we live in a largely digital world. Small business owners and the Hamptons elite strive to get their names out there for people to see. I also learned the importance of professionalism in an office environment, as well as what goes into planning and hosting events, all while maintaining relationships with top clients that keep the magazine running each summer.All four of us did internships centered around utilizing social media for various organizations. We worked in bustling places across the globe, and had similar experiences. Whether it was a fashion show in New York City or Lahore, both posed last minute obstacles that had to be worked around. Unlike most desk jobs, social media puts a lot of emphasis on interpersonal relations. No amount of seminar classes could have prepared us for all the conversations we had to navigate; especially one-on-one meetings with unhappy clients. We all had to think on our feet and learn to adjust to changes on the fly. This new kind of work atmosphere also gave us a chance to reflect on our expectations versus reality. There were many things we were anticipating on our first day, and we left with something completely different. Overall, we all learned a lot of things that can’t be taught in the classroom, and came out with a whole new social network
Navigating Non-profits
No full textDuring the summer of 2016, I interned with New York City Ballet in the Membership Department. Located in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan, NYCB is a world-renown ballet company known for creating the first originally “American” style of ballet. As with all performing arts companies, a strong development department is imperative to a ballet company’s ongoing success. In my position in Membership, I trained in the Tessitura software system, which NYCB, the Metropolitan Opera and other companies use in order to keep track of donor contributions and relations. I used Tessitura regularly for my first project, where I assisted in updating donor listings for the 2017 season Playbill. Not having worked with large data systems before, I used the critical thinking abilities I developed at Mount Holyoke and the computing skills I practiced in Psychology Statistics to creatively manage this task. In addition to other administrative responsibilities, I also learned how to write appeals, which entailed online research and interviewing a Company choreographer. In this panel, I will discuss the learning curves I experienced in arts development, and how networking helped me to obtain my dream internship.This summer, each of us interned with a different non-profit organization. Non-profits are often sought after by ambitious, conscientious college students as gateways into morally-driven career paths. As we discussed our respective experiences, we each reflected that while the work itself was noble, seeing results in real time was uncommon. Non-profit work is a methodical process, where we each had to participate in forms of routine administrative work within otherwise high-energy, exciting organizations. While we were all knowledgeable going into our internships with non-profits that administrative work is requisite for most of these positions, we found that getting creative with our situations kept the work invigorating. Personal reflection, seizing opportunities for creative license over projects, and taking on writing assignments were all avenues through which we made the most out of our experiences
Lever Pressing and Nose Poking in the Rat Medial Prefrontal Cortex
No full textThe rodent medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is thought to be associated with a wide range of cognitive functions such as memory and goal-directed behavior. It can be further separated into two subregions, the prelimbic (PL) and infralimbic (IL) cortices. Common techniques employed to investigate functions of the mPFC, such as learning to nose poke or lever press for reward, are assumed to be regulated by the same brain regions and thus utilized interchangeably in research. This study questions that assumption and hypothesizes that nose poking and lever pressing are different behaviors regulated by different subregions of the mPFC. By examining and comparing acquisition of the two operant behaviors in rats trained on a fixed-ratio 1 schedule to respond to sucrose delivery by nose poking and lever pressing, respectively, the study considers the innate learning differences between the two behaviors. The study also considers effects of PL DREADD inactivation on acquisition, extinction, and reinstatement of both actions. Though receptor expression was confirmed with immunohistochemistry, PL inactivation yielded no significant behavioral effects. Inherent learning differences between the two behaviors, however, were indicated by the disparity in the number of days rats spent acquiring the respective behaviors. Although preliminary, the results of the study suggest that a larger sample size and analysis of both subregions of the mPFC may help to elucidate the role of the mPFC in different learning behaviors.Psychology & Educatio
#21stCentury
No full textThis summer, I did my internship in an international fast food restaurant company and used the social media platform as a rich and interactive platform to engage with consumers as well as celebrities regarding various issues of concern. I have liked the career because I am able to possess good communication skills that are required for people in the service business for the purposes of engaging and communicating professionally with different people. I used social media to publish our restaurant’s variety of meals and other products. I communicated with our customers regarding the upcoming events and sales promotions by offering free birthday gifts and vouchers. I reached and encouraged various celebrities to visit the restaurant and be part of its strategy of ensuring delivery of healthy foods in a serene environment. Social media provided a perfect platform to carry out survey through customers’ reviews or feedback and also answering customers’ queries regarding our products. Through the internship, I acquired immense communication and presentation skills especially when using graphics on digital media. I also gained skills in aptitude writing by improving my command of the language as well as the ability to express myself in writing based on a customer-service mindset.All four of us did internships centered around utilizing social media for various organizations. We worked in bustling places across the globe, and had similar experiences. Whether it was a fashion show in New York City or Lahore, both posed last minute obstacles that had to be worked around. Unlike most desk jobs, social media puts a lot of emphasis on interpersonal relations. No amount of seminar classes could have prepared us for all the conversations we had to navigate; especially one-on-one meetings with unhappy clients. We all had to think on our feet and learn to adjust to changes on the fly. This new kind of work atmosphere also gave us a chance to reflect on our expectations versus reality. There were many things we were anticipating on our first day, and we left with something completely different. Overall, we all learned a lot of things that can’t be taught in the classroom, and came out with a whole new social network
Variance of Female Genital Shape in Spiny Dogfish, Squalus Acanthias, a 2-D and 3-D Approach
No full textThis study aimed to investigate the presence and significance of
morphological variation in the internal female genitalia of spiny dog sharks,
Squalus acanthias. We used traditional linear morphometrics to examine the
relationship between the allometry of the vagina and the allometry of the pectoral
fin; however due to small sample size we did not detect an allometric trend. We
used traditional 2-D and relatively new 3-D geometric morphometrics (GM) to
look for variations in genital shape correlated with changing reproductive state
(Visibly Pregnant vs. reproductive but Not Visibly Pregnant). Surprisingly, only
the 2-D analysis detected significant shape variation associated with reproductive
state, however it was only significant after two sets of error replicates were
included. This information suggests that further geometric morphometric analyses
should include two sets of error models to better understand and compare the
different degrees of variation detected by 2-D and 3-D methods. The data from
both the 2-D and 3-D GM analyses did show that vaginal size is significantly
correlated with shape—supporting the idea that as vaginal size increases the shape
of the vagina becomes wider and more open, likely to accommodate for birth.Biological Science
Mer Bleue fertilization lab incubation data 2015
No full textLaboratory incubations of peat samples collected at 10 cm increments from peat surface to 40 cm below the surface of treatment plots in the Mer Bleue fertilization experiment. Peat samples were incubated with and without PK amendment.Data have been published in the following:
Juutinen, S.,T.R. Moore, J.L. Bubier, S. Arnkil, E. Humphreys, B. Marincak, C. Roy, T. Larmola. 2018. Long-term nutrient addition increased CH4 emission from a bog through direct and indirect effects. Nature Scientific Reports 8:3838; DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-22210-2.summer 201
Evolving Network Model: A Novel Approach to Disease Simulation
No full textDisease modeling is an important tool in epidemiology. Effective epidemiological models can assist public health workers and policymakers in the development of effective disease prevention strategies and the efficient deployment of resources to inhibit the spread of disease. Expanding the scope of disease modeling techniques is an area of active research in applied mathematics. The two most commonly used modeling techniques are compartmental and agent-based disease models. Infectious diseases are transmitted through human populations by either direct or indirect contact. While for some diseases transmission is possible through indirect modes like airborne transmission, contact with contaminated objects, or insect or animal vectors, the spread of many is only possible through direct human-human contact. The type of contact required to lead to transmission varies widely based on the disease itself; for example influenza can be transmitted by casual contact, whereas HIV can only be spread through exchange of infected body fluids. The underlying biology that governs differences in transmission between different diseases is important to consider when developing disease models. While compartmental models operate under the assumption of homogeneous population mixing, agent-based models can capture the important features of the epidemiological contact network underlying the disease transmission. As a result, compartmental models make more accurate predictions for highly infectious diseases that spread by casual contact, whereas agent-based models provide increased accuracy for diseases that cannot spread through casual contact. Therefore, in many cases, agent-based models are able to model the spread of infectious diseases more accurately; however, their computational intensity makes their use unrealistic for modeling large population sizes. Thus, compartmental and agent-based models offer a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency (i.e. feasibility) in disease simulations.[15]
This project is an effort to create and validate an algorithm for a generating a novel disease model that possesses the network accuracy associated with agent-based models, but maintains some of the efficiency of compartmental models. This new, evolving network model compartmentalizes the majority of the network, while creating contact networks only for infected nodes, instead of for the entire population. As the infection spreads, more of the nodes' contact networks are modeled fully, until ultimately a full agent based network is generated. This method has been shown in preliminary testing to require significantly less computation time than simulating disease spread on full agent-based network models.[10] However, this new modeling technique is not an improvement over previous methods unless it can be shown to model networks as realistically as agent-based models can. Therefore, our goal is to demonstrate the ability of the algorithm for the spread of disease on an evolving network to replicate the desired properties of a target network and thus accurately construct a network. Ultimately, the hope is that this evolving network algorithm will enable us to dynamically model the spread of a newly emerging or re-emerging disease in a human population by accurately representing salient features of the contact network in which disease transmission occurs. Such a model would help equip public health systems to study transmission scenarios and possible response strategies through the use of computer simulations in order to be able to plan for disease outbreaks and respond quickly when necessary.
There are many ways to measure how faithfully the generated network models real populations. Generally, the network properties should converge to the properties of the full network, both as the network evolves into the full agent-based network, and within any subnetwork at timesteps before that. In order to assess how well the algorithm is doing this, two main metrics, average degree and average clustering coefficient, are used. The inputs to the algorithm are a degree distribution and a clustering probability, so the model should generate a network whose properties match these input values; however we would also like it to replicate other properties of the network without explicitly having them as inputs. In order to assess this, other metrics, such as average path length and diameter, will be considered and studied as well. Finally, the algorithm will be tested using properties drawn from real social network data, in order to determine under what conditions it is able to reproduce a network similar to the true network.Mathematics & Statistic
The Effect of Increasing Minimum Wage at a City-Wide Level on the Enrollment in Public Assistance Programs
No full textThis study examines the effect of increasing minimum wage at a city-wide level
on the enrollment in means-tested public assistance programs. I exploit San
Francisco’s minimum wage increases in 2011 and 2012 and use data from
IPUMS-CPS to estimate the effect on welfare programs. Using a linear
probability model and a difference-in-difference estimation, my analysis suggests
that San Francisco’s minimum wage increases have a positive effect on the
enrollment of welfare programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
(TANF) and Medicaid and is statistically significant.Economic
How Much Can You Learn in Five Minutes?
No full textHow do women and families stay hopeful and resilient in times of tragic loss and struggle? What are the steps families must take to look forward to a safer, happier future? How can the community best support those going through traumatic abuse experiences? These are just some of the questions my internship as a family and youth advocate worked to answer at Harriet Tubman Crisis Center—an organization dedicated to supporting and serving those victims of domestic violence in Minnesota. During my internship, I focused on the unique aspects of individuals’ and their trauma as I set out to support each resident in our shelter with his/her distinct and specific needs. This part of my work was crucial because there is no cookie-cutter plan to help families get back on their feet, just like there is no typical victim of domestic violence. However, the fact that no day was the same really created what felt at first like an overwhelming situation to learn. I was thrown into a space that was in a constant state of crisis and was expected to learn quickly. Throughout this presentation, I will discuss how I was able to navigate this overwhelming experience in a way that really allowed me to learn a wide and rich array of information.Internships can sometimes be a tricky, overwhelming experience filled with new and scary responsibilities. Oftentimes students walk into a new internship opportunity either knowing little about their responsibilities or are placed in an environment that forces them to learn on the spot. This panel walks you through four unique, but rich and deeply hands-on internship experiences that were adventures just like this. All four of us were thrown into a new environment with little, if any, time to acclimate. We were all expected to perform incredibly important work and to self-manage in an area we were still trying to know more about. Each of our internship stories is unique and within our panel, there are a wide range of different, but equally challenging responsibilities to discuss, such as research in a neuroscience lab, work that blends finance and healthcare, a project that specially focus on affordable housing in Boston, and social service work at a Minnesota domestic violence shelter. With our strikingly different internship experiences, this panel seeks to demonstrate how to go about navigating a successful and rich internship within a new and demanding space