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The Two Faces of Civil Society: Islamists and Ahmadis in Pakistan
No full textThis thesis explores how democracies turn illiberal through the hijack of civil society by radicalism. Civil society, typically considered a promoter of liberal and democratic values, turns dark, hateful and violent depending on the social actors that gain salience within it. Focusing on Pakistan—a Muslim democracy—I trace the development of the Pakistani civil society from 1931, when it is part of the colonized public space, to 1974, when Pakistan obtains its first democratically elected government. I study this development through the relationship of Pakistani Muslims and their Ahmadi population - a Muslim sect considered heretical in the constitution and among the Sunni majority of Pakistan.
The Pakistani constitution declared Ahmadis non-Muslim in 1974 for rejecting the finality of Prophet Muhammad. This outcome, however, was neither inevitable nor automatic. Opposition against Ahmadis began shortly after their inception in 1889 and took 90 years to reach legal and systematic discrimination. I study how the anti-Ahmadi movement, led by the Ahrar, ulema and the Jamaat-e-Islami, perfected the use of civil space and thus succeeded in its efforts to exclude Ahmadis from the fold of Islam and Pakistani citizenship. Between 1949-1953, the anti-Ahmadi movement used the Urdu press and public meetings to penetrate hatred of Ahmadis in the Pakistani society. Until 1974, the movement gained important political alliances; and in 1974, could influence the state. The state, embedded within society and its values could not overlook country-wide protests demanding the exclusion of Ahmadis and obliged with the popular national sentiment.
Through newspapers, pamphlets, a court inquiry report, Ahmadi and anti-Ahmadi literature, in addition to secondary sources, my thesis highlights how state-led, legal persecution stemmed from a bottom-up process from within society and why majoritarian interests bifurcated civil space itself. This project also sheds light on the limits of tolerance and inclusion for heretics and minorities in democracies founded on a popular religious ideology.International Relation
Exposing Existing Environmental Morals – the Search for Action within Environmental Issues
No full textThis project seeks to understand the many ways to connect people’s preexisting
morals and interests to their involvement with different organizations and causes. This
information will then be used in order to expand their involvement to environmental
issues. Past literature focuses on the creation of morals, environmental ethics
surrounding who is responsible for tackling environmental issues, and how messages get
framed. This literature, therefore, helps to answer the question, how does one’s
preexisting values and morals, given their current participation and involvement, help us
better understand how to make people care about the environment. There are very few
pieces of literature that have studied the reasons why people join organizations or how to
make them care more about the environment, particularly at the college level. A survey
distributed to Mount Holyoke students that had 45 respondents was analyzed to find the
relationship between their organizational commitments, morality, and environmental
issues. The data shows that more exposure to environmental issues and participating in
any activities creates positive self-efficacy by which people feel like they can do more to
protect the environment.Sociology & Anthropolog
RETHINKING SHELTER DESIGN: ZAATARI REFUGEE CAMP
No full textThe issue of post-disaster housing for displaced people has become essential in international discussion due to an increase in displacement over the past decades.1 There are inadequacies in the way we design for and respond to those situations.2
The Zaatari Syrian refugee camp was established in 2012, and currently has a population of 79,559 refugees. Housing in Zaatari consists of prefabricated tents and caravans.3 The shelters are fundamentally insufficient in serving the residents’ needs, with one prominent issue being temporariness versus permanence.
This project explores the literature available on the temporary housing and the birth of the instant city. It also examines the living conditions of the Zaatari refugee camp, and proposes contextual response design elements for a shelter specific to the camp. The proposed design is shaped by specific criteria extracted from an extensive examination of proposed and implemented case studies.
1 “Syria Crisis Factsheet.” European Commission Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (2017).
2 Sultan Barakat. “Housing Reconstruction after Conflict and Disaster.” Overseas Development Institute (2003).
3 “Zaatari Refugee Camp Factsheet.” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2017). Architectural Studie
George Eliot’s Romola: A Victorian Perspective on Renaissance Florence
No full textMost of George Eliot’s novels were set in nineteenth-century England, but her vivid historical novel Romola – which places a well-educated female protagonist in Renaissance Florence – was an exception to this rule. Romola presents something of a mystery: Eliot says that she gave her “best blood” in this endeavor, though the novel has sometimes been criticized for the extent of its visual and historical detail. But why did Eliot choose to write such an unusual novel? What was she trying to accomplish in this ambitious work, and how did this large-scale experiment affect her subsequent writing?
In this thesis I will argue that the very features that make Romola so unusual furthered Eliot’s development as a novelist. Her extremely detailed focus on the cultural and geographic environment of this novel set the stage for Eliot’s groundbreaking attention to the intense interaction between character and setting, a hallmark of her later, most ambitious, and successful masterpiece, Middlemarch. The great attention to travel and movement in Romola highlights the constraints placed by the environment on Eliot’s female characters. And by placing her female protagonist in Renaissance Florence, Eliot chooses a time of burgeoning individual rights and intellectual creativity – but not for women. In bringing these limitations to light, Eliot makes a feminist statement about the restricted rights of women, and reaches beyond that feminist lens to show us the human condition, one in which autonomous action can only carry us so far. In my thesis, I argue that in Romola, Eliot situates her characters in what I will call a tethered environment, in which the person is tightly laced to society and culture. I will further argue that this close interaction between character and setting grew in part out of the Darwinian scientific culture in which Eliot participated, and that it became a platform for her later great work of Middlemarch. In both Romola and even more in Middlemarch, Eliot thus creates a new complex structure for the novel, one that carries the model of the Bildungsroman into territory that presages the modern dilemma of perceived limitations on human endeavors.Englis
Joseph Allen Skinner and the Culture of Collecting in the Gilded Age
No full textI examine the development of the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum through a critical study of Joseph Allen Skinner’s collecting habits and display strategies. I argue that while Skinner follows some Gilded Age collecting trends, he is ultimately a unique collector of his time due to his idiosyncratic display techniques and preference for objects with narrative value. I argue against previous interpretations of the Skinner Museum that mislabel it as a modern “cabinet of curiosities,” and instead offer a more nuanced perspective that contextualizes the Skinner Museum within the Gilded Age and Skinner’s life trajectory.
In the first chapter, I compare and contrast the Skinner Museum to other collectors such as J.P. Morgan, Frederick Layton, Henry Ford, and Charles Willson Peale. I explore the historical contexts, which gave rise to these collections, and the ways in which Skinner responded to and ignored these contexts.
In the second chapter, I examine the development of the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum. I study Skinner’s personal documents including his diary in order to understand how Skinner positioned himself as a collector, and how he understood his relationship to his objects. I then examine the resulting modes of display in the museum, which offer both a sense of wonder and resonance.
Lastly, I discuss my exhibition in the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum (April, 2017). This exhibition represents the historical and biographical sectors that gave rise to the Skinner Museum. Using objects from the Museum related to textile production, I explore Skinner’s personal ties to the Silk industry as well as the ways in which industrialization transformed Gilded Age society. This chapter discusses the ways in which the exhibition complicates and compliments the American art gallery’s preexisting themes.
A critical study of the Skinner Museum provides an understanding of the diverse set of circumstances that gave rise to Gilded Age collections and museums. My study demystifies the Skinner Museum and its eclectic modes of display, while examining the ways in which modern interpretations fail to capture the dynamics of the museum. Without a proper analysis, the Skinner Museum would remain a cabinet of wonder to visitors, and its original context would be lost. My interpretation reveals the motivations behind the Skinner Museum as well as the competing modes of collecting, which gave rise to a period of unprecedented museum growth in the United States.Art Histor
In But Not Of the Model Minority: Myth and Discipline in Asian American Literature
No full textIt is perhaps the worst-kept secret of race relations in the United States, that the Asian American “model minority” is, in fact, a myth. But badly kept secrets are usually more useful when revealed than hidden. As a U.S.-specific political formation, the model minority myth emerged from a crucible of mid-20th century Cold War politics abroad, burgeoning cultural nationalism of various ethnic minority groups at home, and rapid institutional shifts following the Civil Rights era. Created by and for overwhelmingly white neoliberal interests who sought not only to qualify multiculturalism but to substantiate it, over time the myth’s implicit message has come to exceed conversations between sociologists and journalists. Beyond decrying the standing of other minority groups, more often than not the myth of the model minority comprises the only disciplining identity projected onto Asian Americans in contemporary U.S. society—the first that comes to mind, and thus the most powerful.
When taken not only as a sociological phenomenon but as a disciplinary structure of cultural, psychic, and political identity and subjectivity, the model minority myth begins to constitute a generative and disciplinary force in literary productions, cultural memory, and the political-as-personal lives of Asian Americans vis-à-vis the institutions with which they contend. In this thesis I turn to narratives that the model minority discipline is arguably most concerned with and most recognizable through: works of second-generation Asian American literature; Nina Revoyr’s Southland, Don Lee’s Yellow, and Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone. The mighty complexities of mythic form and function in these works compel me to draw extensively from Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, Raymond Williams’s structures of feeling, Michel Foucault on normalizing power, and Judith Butler’s theories of identity performativity and the queered processes of racial passing.
To situate these literary portrayals of Asian American identity in but not of the myth, this thesis sifts through unplumbed genealogies of desire, deep-seated investments in heteronormative sexuality, and dimensions of belonging and debt that begin to envision alternate conceptions of model minority’s essential components: melancholia, failure, and kinship. Such is the only way we can get at the inadmissible forces that—via circulations of power and structures of feeling—attempt to fortify, conceal, and mediate the myth. By peering closely at not only what the myth does, but what life lived around, within, and beyond its alignments and breakages can reveal—this thesis advances the argument that the myth will never be entirely expendable.Englis
On The Outside Looking In
No full textImagine volunteering on Easter Island; one of the most isolated places on earth. Now imagine camping for a month and working with native youth while teaching them about their own island history. To top it all off, imagine doing this in Spanish. This daunting job description quickly transformed into one of the most rewarding experiences of my academic and personal life. The idea of my internship was intimidating at first, but almost instantly I learned that my students were masters of their own history, and that I was there to learn from them.
This panel chronicles my experiences working with Rapa Nui high school students during a two week camp focusing on archeological outreach. Rapa Nui is a part of Chile and Polynesia, but their school system is strictly based on a Chilean curriculum. The goal of the organization I worked with was to fill the cultural and geographical gaps missing in these student’s studies. The program focused on teaching non-invasive archaeological survey, as well as engineering and an introduction to sustainability. The entire camp session was spent camping outside and this gave me the privilege of truly bonding and connecting with my students.
The entire island of Rapa Nui is protected, but the influence of rampant tourism has proved to be stimulating and destructive to the local economy. Rapa Nui is more dependent now than ever on Chile, and this affects the nationalism of the locals on the island. Working closely with my students provided me with the unique opportunity of gaining and attempting to comprehend a local’s perspective on development and cultural preservation.Across the globe, two seniors and two juniors worked with local communities with a larger goal in many different ways. Community engagement was conducted in several different ways: through teaching archaeology, mapping the Civil Rights Movement, focusing laboratory research on curing the blind, and fighting for the rights of transgender youth. Both seniors remained at “home” in the states in Portland, ME, and Washington, DC. The juniors, on the other hand, experienced different time zones living in Dublin, Ireland, and Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Chile. All of our encounters have the common theme of working with groups of people and working within their culture while not necessarily being a part of it. Join us as we discuss how we channeled our outsider perspective to create positive change and growth for the communities within which we worked. More importantly come hear about the immense personal growth we gained from learning within these different communities
Prosody, Poetry and Processing: an Event Related Potential Investigation of Auditory Imagery
No full textThe aim of the current study is to understand the role of metrical structure in implicit prosody during silent reading as an attempt to draw parallels between auditory imagery and auditory perception. Implicit prosody can direct readers’ real-time linguistic interpretations of text; manipulation of implicit prosodic cues affects linguistic ambiguity resolution, thereby providing insight into the nature of auditory imagery and language processing. Event related potentials (ERPs) of nineteen participants were recorded using continuous electroencephalography as they read a series of 320 couplets derived from limericks, which had manipulated lexical stress patterns of the target word (trochaic or iambic) and metrical consistency (metrically consistent or metrically inconsistent). Using the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale (BAIS) and Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire (VISQ), we obtained measures of the participants’ levels of auditory imagery. Apart from a moderate negative correlation with the VISQ Dialogic subscale score, there was no significant relationship between evoked ERP responses and the auditory imagery scales. We found that metrically inconsistent trochaic targets elicited a negativity between 325-400ms over left and medial-frontocentral scalp regions relative to consistent trochaic targets. This result suggests that internally generated prosodic structures do, indeed, impact real-time language processing during silent reading and that, specifically, metrical structure in language creates temporal expectancies during implicit prosody.Neuroscience and Behavio
Investigating the Effect of Neuronal Tau Expression on Aggression in a Drosophila melanogaster Model of Alzheimer's Disease
No full textAlzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by the aggregation and hyperphosphorylation of the microtubule-associated protein, tau. It is characterized by a variety of cognitive and behavioral symptoms, including aggression. However, the extent to which tau pathology underlies aggression remains to be determined. This line of research explores how aggression is affected by the expression of tau in neurons in a Drosophila melanogaster model of AD. We hypothesize that the expression of human wild-type tau in adult Drosophila will result in altered aggression levels in adult, male flies. In this study, we utilized the GAL4-UAS system to exclusively express human tau protein in Drosophila neurons, and assayed aggression in fighting pairs of tau-expressing flies or control flies, without tau. A standard Drosophila aggression assay was used to record fights and quantify parameters of aggressive behavior in 2-day and 5-day old flies. In 2-day old flies, we observed no significant difference in aggressive behavior. In 5-day old flies, we observed a significant decrease in aggressive behavior in tau-expressing flies compared to control flies. These results suggest that age-dependent increases of tau protein expression in neurons alters aggression in Drosophila, but it is unclear how this effect is mediated. Future experiments utilizing cell-type specific expression of tau and other behavioral assays should further help define the relationship between tau expression and aggression in this Drosophila model of AD.Neuroscience and Behavio
Energy Consumption and Economic Growth Nexus; European Industrial Experience 1850-1950
No full textThe European industrial experience enabled Europe to enjoy a twenty-two-fold increase in per capita GDP in the last two centuries; during which time their economic development surpassed Qing China, the Mughal Empire, and other world powers. Many economic historians have attempted to explain this phenomenon but have diverse opinions as to its cause. This thesis provides an empirical analysis on the role of energy consumption in economic growth during industrialization by Granger-causality tests on never before used in an econometric analysis. The final model includes variables of energy consumption total, GDP, and population in seven European countries: England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Sweden from 1850-1950. The significance and the direction of the causality offer new historical insights to the cause of modern industrial growth. The empirical analysis confirms bidirectional causation relationships between energy consumption and GDP, GDP and population, population and energy consumption.Economic