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Scintilla Spei: A Spark of Hope
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/f8f91271-7ff5-4524-b9d0-66b8abc9fd2d/thumb/128.jpgArt has long utilized color and shade to portray emotion. However, based on different cultural backgrounds, artist will exhibit different understandings of meaning behind different hues. Religious paintings such as Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, utilize the common Eurocentric duality of white or lighter tones having a hierarchy above the dark, with light being the “right way” and the deeper colors being more earthly and thus sinful. In my work, I look to replicate the divine through highly saturated colors and connection while also subverting the common trope of dark being evil and white being good. Furthermore, through my thesis I plan to participate in social practices by selling my work and donating the proceedings to Outside the Frame: an organization that trains homeless and marginalized youth to be directors of their own films and lives. They have given many people the stability and space to be creative (Outside the Frame). Through my thesis I would like to support their movement
Taking a Lichen-ing to Heavy Metals: A Comparison of the Biosorption Efficacies of Two Lichen Species Towards Heavy Metals
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/29f60cb7-fb75-439c-8bb9-8d650db76628/thumb/128.jpgAquatic metal pollution is a prevalent issue in waterways worldwide. Heavy metals such as mercury and lead are toxic to both aquatic life and humans. However, some lichens have shown potential as bioremediatory of aqueous metal ions. In this study, the lichens Evernia prunastri and Lobaria pulmonaria were compared in their potentials as bioremediators in solutions of copper(II) and lead(II) ions. Findings suggest that L. pulmonaria and E. prunastri produced similar results, with E. prunastri potentially adsorbing more lead than L. pulmonaria. Future studies should further investigate the potential of L. pulmonaria and E. prunastri as remediators of lead and copper, respectively
Jesus People and Environmentalism in 1960s and 1970s Berkeley, California
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/75908d94-a72a-4b13-9551-4ba60495240c/thumb/128.jpgToday there is a strong connection between anti-environmentalism and Christian conservatism in the United States, but in the 1960s and 1970s there was a much more complicated relationship between American Christianity and environmental issues. For a time, across political and religious boundaries, widely different people and organizations acknowledged the existence of an unsustainable relationship between American society and the earth’s wellbeing, although they understood this issue in different ways. This can be seen in two protestant groups active in Berkeley, California in the late 1960s and early 1970s: the Berkeley Free Church and the Christian World Liberation Front. To the Free Church, the problems with the human treatment of nature were inseparable with how humans mistreated other humans, especially problems like racism and imperialism. The CWLF advocated a conservative model of environmental stewardship as the proper relationship between Christians and nature. In a period of political and social instability, both organizations viewed themselves as intermediaries between hippies, political activists, and established churches. The organizations’ approaches to their shared context provide insight into the different ways that Christians addressed environmental issues in the 1960s and 1970s
A Funny Thing Happened the Other Day: a comparative study of stand-up comedy in times of generational trauma among American Muslims and Jews
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/7b74c99e-baaa-459f-995e-49b8987e36b4/thumb/128.jpgBoth Muslims and Jews have found themselves the subject of racioreligious othering in America during times of historical crisis. While the history of discrimination against American Muslims and Jews cannot be boiled down to one or two dramatic moments, this paper looks at the rise of Islamophobia post 9/11 and the rapidly shifting identity of American Jews after WWII and the Holocaust as backgrounds for humor as political speech. Using the theories of derision humor and incongruity humor, both of which are taken from humor studies in sociology, this paper treats Muslim-American and Jewish-American comedians as creators of identity, and their craft as a way to attack the ludicrousness and evil of Islamophobia and antisemitism, respectively
Dollars and Saints: Mormon Articulations of Shifting Economic Ideology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/5ae66fe6-8e5b-4219-9bf3-95ab3e10f9b7/thumb/128.jpgThroughout the 19th century since its founding in 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church, LDS Church) was eagerly engaged in a wide variety of economic activities at a profound level, gaining a striking degree of dominance as a guiding hand in the Utah economy in particular. The LDS Church’s pursuit of economic power was part of a distinctive sociopolitical vision stemming from a belief in the urgent need to prepare human society for Jesus Christ’s imminent Second Coming; the Mormons saw themselves as building the germs of Christ’s earthly kingdom (“Zion”) in not only a spiritual, but also a political and economic sense. This vision was challenged in the 1890s, when the church entered a period of severe financial crisis, in part brought on by punitive federal legislation which confiscated much of its property in an attempt to coerce the church into abandoning polygamy. The LDS Church responded to this financial strain, and the shifting sands of an urbanizing Utah increasingly interconnected with the American and world economies, with a variety of adaptive improvisations on its old economic model. To boost Mormon employment in tough economic times, the church increasingly pooled its capital with non-Mormon investors in public works projects. To help Mormon farmers use their land more profitably, the church made long-term strategic investments in the beet sugar industry. To fill the church coffers, Mormon leadership put new doctrinal emphasis on previously relaxed rules for tithing. With a variety of strategies—some more successful than others—the LDS Church eased itself and the Mormon community into a 20th century increasingly defined by interdependence, opening the Mormon economy to the world at the same time it preserved its own, much-changed form of economic power
“The 73ʼ Chevy Impala of Rivers”: Ruin, Restoration, and Indigenous Futures along Johnson Creek
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/367c58b5-d463-45cd-93af-3834d99eb48e/thumb/128.jpgFor many in Portland, restoration ecology is a cornerstone practice for managing land in a way that aligns with civic visions of Portland as a “green city” with a special relationship to the rural space that surrounds it. But for many Indigenous groups that engage in restoration projects, the conventions and legal structures that define restoration ecology in the Pacific Northwest run counter to commonly held goals including developing community food sovereignty, maintaining tending-based cultural practices, and linking ecosystem and tribal health in urban contexts. The Johnson Creek Watershed, which encompasses most of Southeast Portland and its largest suburbs, is an example of this phenomenon. There are more than 500 restoration sites along the creek’s 25-mile span and its management structures have been studied as an international gold standard of community-based watershed government. But nowhere along the creek, nor in the watershed, is municipally sanctioned Indigenous-led restoration taking place, and the agenda for restoration has been set primarily by the wealthiest neighborhoods along the creek’s first three miles. This agenda prioritizes the creation of park-like green spaces that reinforce a notion of “restored” ecosystems rooted in settler-colonial views of ecology while allowing the modern settler state to re-enclose and establish control over lands that had, prior to their refashioning as “restoration sites” been largely ungoverned and ignored. I argue that this agenda has emerged from the history of restoration in the Northwest as a management practice championed by the settler state and often conducted at odds with the interest of Tribal communities, as well as the histories of race and class-based community disinvestment have shaped communities upstream of the wealthy and white lower reaches of Johnson Creek. While Indigenous individuals, nations, and groups continue to develop their own techniques and cultures of Indigenized restoration on some public, but mostly private and tribally held lands, the municipal restoration agenda that has influenced the Johnson Creek Watershed forecloses Indigenous futures of land management and community health
The Boundaries of Being: Limitations of Gender, Class, and Geography in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/4547adf0-6823-4536-a8cc-2b33e75035b4/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis concerns limitations in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. By examining historical fiction with historiography, I uncover an alternate mode of history that focuses on personal, ordinary lives of women. The novels’ protagonists, Elena and Lila, attempt to understand and alter their identities and social roles throughout the narrative. However, despite attempts at improvement, the women ultimately fail to overcome their gendered limitations. The subjugation of these women emulates the fate of Naples, a similarly “Othered” body that is inhibited from realizing its full potential. The first chapter discusses Lila’s psychological condition of “dissolving boundaries,” which she experiences at points of irresolvable conflict, and which correspond with moments of changed, and inhibited, social identity in relation to others. I analyze these moments in relation to objects that physically convey her altered symptoms. The second chapter focuses on Elena, who attempts to escape her conditions by inhabiting other social roles that lead her out of Naples and enhance her class status, but she ultimately fails as her gendered roles continue to limit her professional goals. The third chapter conflates the experiences of the women with the history of Naples, especially in respect to the emphasized alterity of Southern Italy by the North, as well as the cyclic shifts between urban growth and decay evident in the physical city. The ways in which the South has been “Othered” and limited in its advancement, and the imagery of the constrained, dismissed city, are projected through the women characters’ experiences in the Neapolitan Quartet
Between Order and Anarchy: Constructing Police Legitimacy During the Portland George Floyd Uprising of 2020
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/6c1bc4bc-e0a8-4e02-bcc6-a9298f78909b/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis explores how police use discourse to pacify social movements. Drawing on research on protest policing strategies, soft repression, and media framing, I adopt the following research questions: when policing protests that challenge police legitimacy, what are the main ways in which police respond? What discursive frames do police, and their supporters, use to legitimate the actions of officers and marginalize protesters? Using quantitative and qualitative content analyses, I explore how the Portland Police Bureau and the Oregonian, a prominent local newspaper, frame the 2020 George Floyd Uprising in Portland, Oregon
Towards Constructing the Affine Partition Algebra
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/85664fca-02af-42ab-b125-c0ac0607cc8a/thumb/128.jpgThe partition algebra is part of a family of algebras known as diagram algebras. This thesis explores the construction of an extension, called the affine partition algebra. We obtain this algebra by introducing a family of commuting elements, called Jucys-Murphy elements, whose eigenvalues determine the representation theory of the partition algebra. We unpack recent literature on both algebras with examples and describe central elements and irreducible representations combinatorially. We conclude by exploring a categorical perspective which yields, which yields an alternative affine partition algebra
The Effects of Gender and Refusal Strategy on Perception of Refusers
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/a4010866-746e-46db-a0d0-725e2433e977/thumb/128.jpgThis paper investigates the effect of the gender of a person refusing and the complexity of the refusal they use on listener perceptions of that refuser. It expands upon the existing conversation of operationalizing gender identity - as opposed to acoustic or other signals associated with gender - as an independent variable in a perception study. A single speaker’s voice was paired with three different explicitly gendered written primes. In this matched guise study, listeners were presented with one of the three gender primes and heard a short conversation that ended with one of three refusals and were then asked to rate the speakers on Likert scales for friendliness, confidence, attractiveness, rudeness, unreasonableness, and uncooperativeness. ANOVA tests revealed that for my complete sample gender was not significantly correlated with any of the attributes; refusal type however significantly affected all except confidence. The attributes affected by the independent variables differed between listeners of different genders. Patterns in average ratings across gender might be a result of a resistance or push back against sexist expectations but may also be a product of them. A high exclusion rate based on potentially unsuccessful priming - likely a result of some ambiguity in the stimulus and the particular voice that was used - makes it difficult to determine whether this methodology is a promising option for future perceptual research that attempts to investigate gender in a way that moves beyond the cis-normative and binary work of the past