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Porous Perspectives: Dementia and Creativity through Communication
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/3e4a8422-465e-402d-b9a3-e8baf8523af0/thumb/128.jpgBuilding on anthropological studies of personhood, aging, and disability, in this thesis I argue for an understanding of self that is inherently fluid, changing, and incomplete. Taking dementia as a starting point, along with its accompanying interpretations in mainstream U.S. culture as something shrouded entirely in themes of loss and of death, I explore the ways in which the self, both with and without dementia, comes to exist through interpersonal relations. In doing so, I suggest that conditions like dementia do not intrinsically entail a loss of what once was -- or a loss of the “former” self -- for the self is always shifting, always in the making, and as such always incomplete. As a medium for understanding fears of a loss of identity and of control over one’s identity, dementia offers a vital glimpse into the potential for a transformation of our very understanding of personhood -- as this transformation is already taking place. In examining how relationships and dependencies are maintained and adapted following a diagnosis with dementia among those living in the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington, in examining popular, Western conceptions of dementia and of the mind-body dichotomy, and in exploring medico-cultural discussions of the self, this thesis begins to delineate the explicit manners in which personhood extends beyond any one individual. I expand upon notions of relational personhood -- specifically by incorporating aspects of communication studies that ask us to ponder what it means to be conscious and to connect with others -- and in doing so, I challenge the dichotomy between self and other
Lichen from the ashes: The effects of wildfire severity on early lichen reestablishment after the Eagle Creek Fire
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/aba160a9-d452-4696-bce6-b1ced38095ea/thumb/128.jpgChanging fire regimes because of climate change and human colonial activity have become a much more pressing issue in recent years, with the advent of large, high severity fires like the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire or the Labor Day Fires of 2020. Yet even with intensifying fires in the Pacific Northwest, relatively little is known about the specific effects of wildfire severity on slow establishing organisms like lichens. Lichens, a symbiotic relationship between a photobiont (algae and/or cyanobacteria), and a fungal mycobiont, are ubiquitous and extremely diverse throughout the Pacific Northwest, and macrolichens (foliose and fruticose growth forms) are often used as bioindicators to monitor forest stand age, health, and environmental conditions such as air quality and presence of nitrogen and sulfur pollution. This is because individual species have varying tolerances to environmental conditions, and species characteristic of old growth forests take a notoriously long time to grow and establish. But lichens have been often neglected in studies of post-fire vegetation regrowth. To this end, a series of 9 .38 ha lichen population survey plots across a gradient of burn severity were performed within the site of the Eagle Creek Fire, which burned 48,861 acres of land along the southwest edge of the Columbia River Gorge in 2017, and 41 total distinct species were collected throughout the 9 plots. NMDS analysis showed significant differences in community composition across the severity gradient (p=.009). Species richness, Shannon and Simpson diversity, and an aggregated conservation index value were calculated for all plots, and all yielded significantly higher diversity measures in the unburned and low severity areas than the high severity burn areas, except for the conservation index, which showed no significant difference between low and high severity. Future work should involve the continued collection of lichen community data across a post-fire chronosequence to determine dynamics of post-fire succession across time
The Battleground of Education: Navigating Censorship, Parental Rights, and Political Indoctrination in the Era of American Culture Wars
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/6f8f868e-863e-4484-a453-328598170bff/thumb/128.jpgIn an era known as the “American Culture Wars”, the argument over what subjects should be taught in schools has become highly controversial and contested. Waging a war over “Marxist indoctrination”, conservative parental rights organizations aim at protecting “childhood innocence” by banning liberal, progressive, or socially leftist topics. At the forefront of the movement to ban select novels and curricula subjects, LGBTQ+ issues and historical accounting of systemic racism have been directly targeted. This thesis will solely focus on the banning of queer subjects and Critical Race Theory as these are two of the most controversial topics in modern American political discourse. Labeled as devise, legislation banning these topics from public schools has spread across the country over the past five years. In recognition of enshrined legal rights of parental figures, it is important to uncover the extent to which these rights are overshadowing the First Amendment liberties of students and educators. By analyzing the rhetoric behind the justification of such widespread educational bans, I aim at uncovering the legal and moral implications of conservative parental rights advocacy groups and the justification they have used to enact their political agenda
Inequality & Education: A Case Study on Peru's Urban Dynamics
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/b7ca9d04-c20c-4e4e-8527-fbc5c169d59a/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis examines the relationship between the level of educational attainment and local inequality in urban areas in Peru. To determine this relationship, a regression examining each area’s calculated Gini coefficient and average education level was run. The regression reveals that income and education has a statistically significant relationship in Lima, Peru’s capital, as well as its less populated metropolitan areas, like Arequipa. This suggests that inequality does play a significant role in affecting education, but more socioeconomic factors, like race, ethnicity, or gender, should be considered to more precisely determine this relationship. Additionally, investment in local infrastructure and equitable policies in education can potentially deter the effects of inequality on educational attainment
Cocrystallization and Different Solid-States of Pharmaceuticals: A New Approach to Drug Development
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/7cd04196-1dde-41fa-94e4-12899c274e54/thumb/128.jpgThere are many pharmaceuticals being made and discovered, but there is also an importance in improving already existing drugs. One way to do so is in changing a drug’s solid-state form, where the pharmacokinetics of a drug can see improvement through formation of a different polymorph or formation of a salt. More recent research has specifically shown positive potential for cocrystallization, a process in which a pharmaceutical ingredient is mixed with a different ingredient, called a coformer, to form a cocrystal. This current study attempts at creating cocrystals with two pharmaceuticals, apixaban and atomoxetine. A mix of solid-state and solvent-based techniques for cocrystallization were used, primarily Liquid-Assisted Grinding and SlowEvaporation. Powders from solid-state techniques were analyzed using Powder X-Ray Diffraction and solvent-based techniques were analyzed using Single Crystal X-Ray Diffraction. All attempts at cocrystallization for apixaban and atomoxetine failed, except for formation of a solvatomorph in the attempt of apixaban + benzoic acid. Characterization by Single Crystal X-Ray Diffraction found the structure of an apixaban + acetonitrile solvatomorph, unable to be reproduced in other attempts. Results indicate potential for different solid-state formation for pharmaceutical purposes, although the conditions in achieving such are found to be likely difficult
Piecing Daughterhood: Cloth, Gender, and Memory
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/f2b2a81d-8de0-4e65-9165-986afca42e5f/thumb/128.jpgPiecing Daughterhood is an exploration of textile craft and queer identity. I examine the discourse around the American quilt as a blanket, an art object, and an expression of grief. My research then shifts to look at queer textile artists who take established conventions of sewing and garmenting and make them their own. The studio component of this thesis is a meditation on my own gender identity through wearable art that becomes performance work. The culmination of this thesis is a communal quilting bee to finish the quilt I crafted out of the discarded clothing of trans people. It is a space to mourn the people we used to be, and to transform old scraps of identity into something new
A Geodesic Journey into the Wormholes
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/e1f8fc68-b4be-4bf6-b8fd-bf0d852ea0c4/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis aims to provide an introduction to a theoretical prediction of general relativity, wormholes, which connect distinct regions of spacetime. We investigate the traversability of different types of wormholes with null and timelike geodesics. If a particle could travel through the wormhole on geodesics, we refer that the wormhole is traversable. We start with the Schwarzschild metric, a spherically symmetric solution to Einstein's Field Equation in vacuum. With the limitations of Schwarzschild coordinates, we move to the maximally-extended Schwarzschild solution in Kruskal coordinates, which gives a wormhole solution. We carefully analyze the wormhole throat dynamics, review the mathematics of embedding diagrams, and give an exact calculation of the dynamic Schwarzschild wormhole embeddings in Kruskal coordinates. Then, we apply our definition of traversability to other wormholes and show that the Ellis wormhole and the Morris-Thorne wormhole are geodesically traversable. By calculating the stress-energy tensors, we argue that those traversable wormholes require exotic matter with negative energy densities
Library of Alternative Timekeeping
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/9408debc-a002-41d3-810d-cfd0ee450297/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis is an installation that explores the interconnected themes of time, temporality, and technological advancement. The installation functions as a library where visitors engage with works on time and reflect on their own bodily and personal experiences of time. Central to the installation are notions of non-linear and non-standardized time, challenging conventional understandings of temporality that have been mediated by digital technologies. The collection of books includes personal narratives, creative works, and theoretical texts on time, some of which I have written myself and others which I have collected from others. Included works explore new ways of understanding our relationship to time, utilizing social, geographical, and cultural frameworks that depart from colonial linearity or exist alongside it. Through engagement with the installation, visitors are invited to reconsider their relationship to memory, technology, and the passage of time in the digital age
“Your riches rot, your clothes are moth-eaten”: The Letter of James’s Use of Wisdom Literature to Spur Social Upheaval
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/3e1036bc-7580-40ad-988a-1ba957c3f1ad/thumb/128.jpgThe biblical Letter of James has been the locus of much contention within Biblical Studies spanning its history. This contention has resulted in a text often ignored or overlooked when studying biblical epistles. This thesis takes a literary approach to the text of the Letter of James, analyzing it by performing a morphology of the “wisdom” genre to demonstrate how it fits within such a category. This thesis then seeks to take this understanding of genre and pair it with a variety of information gleaned from the text itself to present a reading of the letter that is well-informed and supports a vision of James as a “new” wisdom text for an early Christian audience. Ultimately, this thesis arrives at a reading of James, which frames the letter as a proletarian document that was resistant to existing material conditions in Hellenistic Rome at the time of the letter’s composition. The Letter seeks to co-opt the wisdom genre in order to imagine and produce a new social order divergent from what came before
Statistical Modeling of atoh7 in the Developing Zebrafish Retina
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/5e34ea01-fc11-4de0-9b69-ffd717af2536/thumb/128.jpgThe zebrafish paradigm allows developmental biologists to study how neurons are created as a result of cellular differentiation, revealing information about the structure of biological systems of various living organisms. In the developing zebrafish retina, cells express atoh7 (atonal-7), which is a transcription factor that promotes retinal ganglion cell differentiation. This transcription factor is important to understand how cellular structures of living organisms develop. This poses the question of how we can model atoh7 expression in zebrafish retinas that test hypotheses about cellular or molecular events that regulate this pattern? Previous research in the Cerveny Lab at Reed has suggested that the developing zebrafish retina exhibits expression in a rotational pattern originating in the ventronasal retina and a radial pattern from the dorsocentral retina. However, this research fails to produce concise answers about the presence of these patterns. We develop methods for developing zebrafish retina data from the Cerveny lab to account for an aspect of biological noise inherent in the data, which involves the inconsistent size of the retina throughout the study period. We transform the data to remain approximately the same retinal size across all time points. We also develop two different statistical models to test hypotheses of both patterns of expression. Our findings indicate that atoh7 expression seems to express primarily in a radial pattern, providing a foundation for future research regarding the developmental implications of this pattern. Our findings also offer new insight into retinal development and contribute to further understanding of cellular differentiation in zebrafish