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Growing Holiday Magic: Nature, Labor, and Meaning in Christmas Trees in the Mid-Twentieth Century Pacific Northwest
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/7b9a96ac-722e-4f52-83b3-0a0e218aebef/thumb/128.jpgIn this thesis, I explore the history of American Christmas trees between 1940 and 1970, with a particular focus on the Pacific Northwest. I consider how these trees were produced, consumed, and represented in media in order to understand their place at the intersection of nature, labor, and meaning in the minds and lives of midcentury Americans. To do so, I use government agriculture and planning documents, newspaper articles and ads, films, and television specials. These documents reveal shifts in understandings of Christmas trees that occurred alongside the cultural changes that shook postwar America. As farmland became suburb, growers had to find ever more complex ways to perfect their crop into aesthetically ideal trees. These changes did not occur unbeknownst to consumers. Rather, buyers often sought out these perfected trees over their imperfect counterparts and even, in some cases, aspired to take on their cultivation. In addition, harvest became a pastoral family activity that enabled suburban families to connect with each other, the landscape around them, and the nostalgic Christmases of yore that they imagined to be behind them. Contemporary national media suggest parallel shifts in ideas about the relationships between landscape, work, connection, and nostalgia, indicating that these ideas extended beyond the borders of Oregon and Washington. Ultimately, these findings emphasize the importance of considering labor in and with nature not only as a source of practical knowledge about the natural world but also as acts of deliberate creation of meaning
“Lean in, Engage, and Maybe Die”: A Critical Analysis of the Haunting World of Horror Theatre
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/63172c79-ad68-4768-8b16-f7145d4ca8e5/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis explores the world of horror theatre. Horror as a genre is meant to provoke fear and terror within those who engage with it. Horror theatre more specifically engages with this ideology through exposing an actual audience to terrors before their very eyes. This thesis digs into this form proposing a definition of the genre, exploring the history of the genre, and unpacking how the genre works in a theatrical setting. To assist my research on this subject, I directed Francesca Paznoikas’ play The Wild Boar of Chernobyl as a part of the Reed College Theatre Department’s 2023 season. This thesis features a close analysis of this text, describing how the play fits within the canon of horror theatre. Additionally, my final chapter talks about the production and rehearsal process. This thesis attempts to draw attention to this form as an avenue of valid social commentary
Representation Theory, Schur-Weyl Duality, and the Partition Algebra
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/b5c6ba1b-00a6-4c9d-9c55-f1b01c0bdf89/thumb/128.jpgThis expository paper examines the phenomenon of Schur-Weyl duality, specifically in the case of the commuting actions of the symmetric group and the partition algebra on a common tensor space. It begins by building up the language and tools of representation theory for finite-dimensional complex algebras and finite groups. It then proceeds to prove the central result of Artin-Wedderburn theory, which characterizes the structure of semisimple algebras. Finally, it constructs the partition algebra as a centralizer of the symmetric group and applies Artin-Wedderburn theory to derive its semisimplicity
The Lineage of Nationalism in the Philippines from 1896 to 1916
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/fccf4c14-fecd-4648-8188-12bf8d5157c1/thumb/128.jpgThe history of Philippine Nationalism has a politicized past based on the works of nationalism's inception in the 1880s-1890s by the Propagandist movements and the Katipunan. By putting them in dialogue with each other it becomes clear that the Katipunan was in direct relationship, as well as the leaders and inheritors, of nationalist ideals. After the Katipunan's first revolution and Emilio Aguinaldo's usurpation of power, the First Republic assumes leadership. While the First Republic defeated the Spanish colonial power of the time, Americans bought and paid for ownership of the Philippine colonies. This is the first point for cooperation. The following generations follow a similar inheritance as the spirit of nationalism evolves and is led by popular movements geared toward independence. This thesis explores how nationalism in the Philippines was a defensive mechanism, and how it endured the changes from Spanish to American colonial rule
Two Novel Green Syntheses of Silver Nanoparticles; Mock Strawberry Leaf AgNPs and Sword Fern Extract AgNPs
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/63a1691e-12e3-4425-b786-745811a400ff/thumb/128.jpgSynthesis of silver nanoparticles has become a booming field of research, as silver nanoparticles have many different industrial applications. In this thesis, the reaction conditions for two novel green silver nanoparticle (AgNP) syntheses are established (Thimbleberry Leaf Extract AgNPs and Sword Fern Extract AgNPs) and optimized for desired color, reaction speed, and UV-Vis spectra. Morphology of two optimized AgNPs from each plant extract synthesis was evaluated through UV-Vis and TEM in conversation with one another. Antibacterial efficacy of each optimized AgNPs was conducted via Kirby-Bauer Disk-Disk diffusion assays
rhizophora
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/3895e1a3-4c2b-45fc-8030-498eb2486738/thumb/128.jpgInspired by the poetry of Édouard Glissant and philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, my thesis explores the mangrove as a rhizomatic mode of both thinking and being–– a reformation to thought under Western expansion and colonization. The mangrove is the rhizophora–– roots which carry. This thesis carries the poetry of several different writers from the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean: Glissant, Aimé Césaire, and Derek Walcott specifically.In my first chapter, I take a close look at Glissant’s first published book of essays, Sun of Consciousness. Over thirty years later in his book Poetics of Relation, Glissant cites his first book as a first draft almost–– his first iteration of everything he had wished to say. This makes Sun a perfect vortex in embodying the philosophies of Glissant: antillanité, the archipelago, and the gravity of poetry. Motions and movements explored include stillness, tremblings, and eruptions.My second chapter applies the philosophies of Glissant to poems by two different writers: Moi, laminaire by Césaire and Omeros by Walcott. The philosophy we look at with a microscope is that of errantry, as a reformation to the odyssey. Situating ourselves entirely within the Caribbean, more often than not within the mangrove, I discover linguistic errantries in the poems of Césaire and errantries of lineage in the poems of Walcott
The Battle for Political Autonomy: War and National Identity in the Writings of Heinrich von Kleist
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/53aa0962-cffd-4e0b-b813-7fd5cf8ea055/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis examines the relationship between war and an emergent concept of nationalism, primarily in the early nineteenth century German context, through the analysis of two works written by German writer Heinrich von Kleist. These works are his 1809 play, Die Hermannsschlacht, and his 1811 novella, Die Verlobung in Santo Domingo. In his exploration of nationalism and its intersection with war, Kleist conceives of radical leader figures, designed, especially in the case of Die Hermannschlacht, to mobilize a disunified populace to rebellion. The first chapter investigates the implications of Kleist’s use of a mythic Germanic hero story, while the second explores the consequences inherent to defining a nation, especially when this is done along an ethnonationalist current
Perceptions of the City Under the City, A Literary and Material Phenomenology of the Urban Underground
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/1baa01ce-6fb5-4893-aa6f-1376198d2a65/thumb/128.jpgThe thesis explores the urban undergrounds of Paris and London by fusing descriptions found in literature with material culture studies. It explains how invisibility and unique materiality generate a "subscape" that embraces imagination and complicates traditional ideas about perception in art history. The act of perception is of critical importance, as both physical encounters and mental imaginaries play a role in shaping the environment from the perspective of the perceiver. The thesis uses a phenomenological approach which focuses on subjective experience, allowing for a more nuanced and complex understanding of the underground, moving beyond traditional historical or architectural analyses. Through the mapping of imaginaries onto material objects, this thesis aims to uncover the various aspects of the subterrain which make it a magnet for juxtaposing conceptions—a vernacular space whose borders and contents can only be defined by the depths of the imagination
Linguistic Encoding of Gender and Gender Self-Concept in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/dea302a9-f12a-40e2-b867-ae3435438950/thumb/128.jpgCultural differences aside, gender is consistently a core tenet of people’s identities. However, all individual alignments within the gender binary are different, as is how strongly a person aligns with one binary gender or the other. Within cultures, languages have a special role in upholding the gender binary because some linguistic features—grammatical, lexical, and distributional—have gendered concepts embedded within them. In this study, 186 participants from around the world who were native speakers of 21 different languages completed a Gender Self-Concept Implicit Association Test and an explicit gender self-concept self-report measure. It was hypothesized that speakers of languages with more binary gender encoding would have stronger binary gender self-concepts than speakers of languages with less binary gender encoding. While some significant relationships were found, speakers of languages with more binary gender encoding actually appeared to have weaker binary gender self-concepts than speakers of languages with less binary gender encoding. This suggests that other cultural factors may play a more important role in binary gender self-concept strength than language. An exploratory analysis of gender parity by country did not reveal such a relationship, but future research would benefit from investigating whether cross-cultural differences in gender essentialist beliefs predict the strength of binary gender self-concepts
NMDA Receptors and the Complexity of Single Neurons
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/08b45c14-4f89-4726-8b4f-dc83b1b02332/thumb/128.jpgNeurons are deeply complex computational systems. Recent work shows that NMDA receptors play a critical role in this complexity; however, the details on how these receptors do this remain unclear. To try and tackle this question, we construct a phenomenological model of a neuron that focuses on the voltage dependence of NMDA receptors. We then use an information theoretic framework to design a sensitivity test for the model that quantifies how much new information is transmitted when the input is changed. Repeating this test for different NMDA conductances shows that increasing the conductance makes the model less sensitive (i.e. it transmits less new information) for small changes. This result suggests that NMDA receptors increase the importance of information stored in the structure of the neuron’s dendritic tree. Further testing is necessary to explore this idea