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Solidarity with Grieving Farmers in India: An Ethical and Pastoral Approach in the Context of Increasing Suicides Among the Farmers
Get PDFThesis advisor: James F. KeenanThesis advisor: Melissa KelleyThis thesis examines the diverse challenges that confront Indian farmers and delves into the biblical and ethical resources at our disposal for recognizing and responding as disciples of Christ. Additionally, it provides recommendations and suggestions based on successful modes and best practices from various regions for bringing hope, healing, and transformation to the lives of farmers in India.Thesis (STL) — Boston College, 2023.Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry.Discipline: Sacred Theology
TheFootloose Labor System: Work and Migration in the Pacific Northwest, 1850–1940
No full textThesis advisor: Heather Cox RichardsonBetween the 1850s and World War II, millions of workers participated in a system of continuous labor migration that drove the development of the Pacific Northwest. Western industries relied on short-term workers because of their seasonal and economic cycles. These industries were often located far from urban centers and thus relied on a highly mobile pool of North American, European, and Asian workers to turn the Northwest’s abundant natural resources into wealth, an arrangement I call the footloose labor system. In order to manage workers’ movement within and across United States borders, employers turned to immigrant labor contractors and employment agencies to bring order to this chaotic labor market. But those agencies did little to settle the high labor turnover, and instead, exerted increasing control over migrant workers. By the mid-twentieth century, white workers had largely risen out of the system, leaving migrant labor to Asian, and increasingly, Latinx workers who have come to represent “migrant workers” in today’s America.This dissertation argues that the presence of both hobos and Asian workers in the footloose labor system dynamically shaped the conditions of the labor market, and together, cemented a racialized migrant labor system in the Pacific Northwest that would come to be dominated by Latinx workers in the second half of the twentieth century. Placing labor migration—and the labor brokers who engineered the footloose labor system—at the center of the story shifts our perspective to see that hobos and Asian immigrant workers existed in the
same labor market dominated by employers who relied on footloose workers. From the point of Northwestern employers and labor brokers, migrant workers, whether they were born in Kansas, Greece, China, or the Philippines, proved useful only if they made a business profitable.
Employers continued to hire both white and Asian workers through labor brokers into the 1920s. But white migrant workers increasingly sought jobs outside of the footloose labor system as new technology in agriculture reduced the number of available jobs and post-World War I politics put a greater emphasis on homeownership and conformity. White workers' departure left the most precarious and exploitative jobs to Japanese, Filipinx and eventually Latinx workers. The footloose labor system always depended upon a highly mobile pool of workers who were kept on the fringes of society to do the difficult, cheapened, and necessary work of turning natural resources into wealth.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: History
Learning About Love: The Presence, Nature & Influence of Love Mentoring Relationships
Get PDFThesis advisor: Jacqueline V. LernerConsiderable scholarly attention has been dedicated toward the role of peers in adolescents’ romantic lives (Brown, 1999; Collins, 2003; Connolly & McIsaac, 2009, Korobov & Thorne, 2006). However, when it comes to the developmental significance of adults in promoting the healthy romantic functioning of adolescents, there has been comparably little research. For college students in particular, navigating romantic experiences can be a stressful and complex endeavor (Hurst et al., 2013) - one that may be aided by supportive relationships with adults who can listen, ask questions, and offer a distinct perspective. Indeed, recent literature has indicated that late adolescents (18-25 years of age) want more guidance from the adults in their lives about romantic relationships (Weissbourd et al., 2017). The present study introduces the concept and term love mentoring - opportunities to think, learn, and/or talk about romantic experiences with someone who is older or more experienced in this domain. Through the theoretical framework of Relational Cultural Theory, the study investigates the presence, nature, quality, and influence of love mentoring relationships in the lives of college women enrolled in a university-based mentoring program. Through reflexive thematic analysis of survey data and 12 in-depth follow-up interviews, the study’s results are distilled into six integrative findings: love mentoring is prevalent in families and universities, love mentors (LMs) are trustworthy, love mentoring supports self-worth, conversations around sex complicate love mentoring relationships, LMs are distinct from friends, and LMs promote healthy romantic development through conversation and modeling. These foundational findings on the phenomenon of love mentoring provide an important contribution to existing bodies of literature on college students’ romantic relationships and mentoring. Implications for research and practice are discussed in the context of study limitations.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology
Collaborative worldbuilding: Examining identities, ideologies, and literacy practices in a youth role-playing community
Get PDFThesis advisor: Jon M. WargoRole-playing games (RPGs) are storytelling games that employ character generation, improvisational acting, and rule-based interactions to build worlds and coauthor narratives. Contemporary education research identifies RPGs as robust examples of school-based and extra- academic literacy practices. As sites of narrative possibility and precarity, RPGs are political projects that can resist and reify hegemonic ideologies of race, gender, and power. In this three- paper dissertation, I build upon game studies and literacy scholarship to nuance the ways six youth participants coauthored worlds, negotiated storytelling practices, and (re)produced Whiteness. In Paper 1, I highlight a phenomenon I call “liminal play” – moments of gameplay wherein the boundaries between players, characters, and texts converge. My findings illustrate how liminal moments of play forward social and compositional dimensions of collaborative storytelling. In Paper 2, I leverage conversation analysis to detail how participants’ play-based talk oscillated across two participation frames: the game (i.e., their character roles) and the metagame (i.e., their player roles). My analysis examines the nested and contested processes of narrative negotiation inherent in RPG interactions. Finally, in Paper 3, I interrogate how participants’ worldbuilding practices resisted and reified White racialized ideology. Oriented by critical Whiteness studies, I unmask how participants and I privileged Whiteness despite our efforts to resist hegemonic Dungeons & Dragons lore.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction
Forming Agents, Forming Families: Moral Agency in the Context of Procreation
No full textThesis advisor: Lisa S. CahillWeaving qualitative interview analysis together with ethical inquiry, this project traces the trajectories of Catholic women and couples who hope to form families but contend with infertility and consider whether and how to treat it. Motivating this study is the challenge of balancing individual agency with the role of powerful social forces that shape agency. Examining and critiquing the social forces that shape the circumstances in which Catholic women and couples in the U.S. contend with infertility, this dissertation demonstrates how agential freedom is conditioned by familial, clinical, and ecclesial cultures and structures. It harnesses sociological tools and theological resources to argue for an account of agency that prioritizes critical engagement of contextual factors and suggests that the Church as a moral teacher ought to support the cultivation of this agency. Chapter one challenges the model of moral agency found in magisterial teachings that oppose the use of contraception and reproductive technologies, which suggests that lay Catholics ought to obey magisterially prescribed norms regardless of context. The chapter argues that the magisterial model of moral agency does not adequately account for the role of context in shaping agency, and it instead proposes an account of contextually situated agency that resonates with Pope Francis’ prioritization of contextual realties in his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia.
The second chapter demonstrates how various social forces, including structures supporting heterosexual marriage, cultural ideals related to biological childbearing, and ecclesial structures of marital formation all contribute to U.S. Catholic couples’ family formation choices and can intensify burdens of infertility. The chapter proposes a reorientation of Catholic support for families centered on justice in relationships and Christian discipleship instead of family structure.
The third chapter examines how cultural ideals related to childbearing, the medicalization of infertility, and social location all contribute to shaping how Catholic women in the U.S. make sense of infertility. Contesting the cultural notion that women are responsible for infertility with reference to a criterion of justice, it describes infertility as a kind of biological bad luck also shaped by systemic forces. Structural injustices related to sexism and racism in healthcare function to distribute the bad luck of infertility unjustly based on societal vulnerabilities, which constitutes a kind of social sin.
The fourth chapter considers how two different understandings of Catholic identity shape treatment trajectories of Catholics contending with infertility toward either secular fertility clinics or Catholic clinics. It then examines these two clinical settings, demonstrating how contextual pressures shape how Catholics make treatment choices and underscoring how Catholic moral commitments can support moral agents’ resistance to these pressures. Its final section considers the social forces at work in adoption and fostering.
The final chapter turns to the role of the Church in supporting the moral agency of Catholics making decisions regarding family formation and infertility treatment. After analyzing and critiquing the dominant ideals found in Catholic and secular support group settings, it suggests that synodal commitments of mutual listening and inclusive dialogue can support the development of new structures of moral discernment in the Church. It concludes by considering how the social witness of the Church can contribute to the transformation of sinful social forces that constrain the freedom of women and couples contending with infertility.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Theology
Essays in Applied Economics:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Theodore PapageorgiouChapter 1 examines whether moral hazard in unemployment insurance (UI) varies with the job-finding rate (JFR) and the job-losing rate (JLR). A search model allowing exogenous separation predicts that the JLR and the JFR depending on the tightness of the labor market could affect moral hazard differently. Consistent with the predictions, this chapter finds empirical evidence that moral hazard becomes smaller if JLR is higher while not varying with tightness. Policy makers should focus on JLR, which is a main driver of local unemployment rates, to adjust UI benefits according to labor market conditions. Chapter 2 estimates the impact of patient cost sharing on utilization over time by difference-in-discontinuities with population data. This chapter exploits the difference in coinsurance by cohort, 10\% vs 20\%, during ages 70-74. This chapter finds that the impact after five years on total spending is similar to the immediate impact, while heterogeneity by type of care exists. The reduction of discretionary care gets larger over time and remains persistent after age 75, possibly due to habit formation. In contrast, the impact on less discretionary care remains unchanged over time, diluting the strengthening impact of discretionary care and stabilizing the response dynamics of total spending as observed. Chapter 3 develops a theoretical framework to analyze the impact of social norms on the marriage-market outcome. Social norms have a husband work outside the home and a wife take care of children, irrespective of their comparative advantages. Social norms generate larger inefficiency if a high-skill wife has comparative advantages in working than a low-skill husband, making marriages less beneficial for high-skill women, hindering their match, and inducing them to leave the marriage market when outsourcing childcare is difficult. This effect decreases the aggregated surplus in an economy. At the same time, the decrease in the competitiveness of high-skill women could improve others in the marriage market, high-skill men or low-skill women.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Economics
" Disorganized Hypocrisy”: Climate-Related Financial Disclosure and Net-Zero Commitments Among Financial Corporations in Singapore
Get PDFThesis advisor: Sarah BabbThe years since the Paris Agreement have seen intensifying efforts to decarbonize the financial system. Disclosure frameworks, notably the Taskforce for Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD), and Net-Zero targets, are fast becoming institutionalized globally to incentivize financial institutions to divert capital into low-carbon activities and away from carbon-heavy ones. I examine the implementation of these frameworks among financial corporations (FCs) in Singapore. 15 semi-structured interviews with professionals in the industry at the forefront of TCFD and Net-Zero suggest that FCs’ “talk” often does not match with their “actions”. Organizations ceremonially comply with new global standards as well as local regulations on TCFD and Net-Zero while they continue to finance carbon-intensive economic activities. Yet this apparent “hypocrisy” may not be so much a result of coordinated efforts for organizational buffering, as it is a consequence of disorganization and discoordination. Informants suggest that different parts within FCs independently perceived and responded differently, at a different pace, to the novel challenges that climate change has brought. I contribute to the environmental sociology literature on “organized hypocrisy” by examining how commonly perceived “hypocrisy” is or is not, in fact, “organized”. In doing so, I suggest that we should not assume “hypocrisy” to be an intentional organizational project. Furthermore, rather than seeing “hypocrisy” as effort to keep an organization “stable”, I argue that hypocrisy may be indicative of slow and potentially discordant organizational change, with ongoing internal efforts by insiders to match “actions” with “talk”.Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2023.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Sociology
Caring for the Commonwealth: Domestic Work and the New Labor Activism in Boston, 1960-2015
No full textThesis advisor: Marilynn S. JohnsonThis dissertation explores the labor and collective organization of domestic workers in metropolitan Boston to uncover the new labor activism of the last half century. In 2014, Massachusetts became the fourth state in the U.S. to pass a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. The law, the nation’s most comprehensive at the time, signaled a remarkable triumph for household employees whose collective activism anchored in Boston over four years achieved basic labor protections for tens of thousands. While the tale of this recent success has been captured by journalists and a handful of scholars, my study uncovers a multi-generational history of domestic workers’ fight for dignity and economic justice. I locate the origins of the 2014 victory in the grassroots organizing of pioneering Black, Caribbean, and Latinx women decades earlier. Local domestic workers and their allies sustained three separate waves of collective action during a half century marked by growing economic inequality, a decline in trade unionism, and mounting xenophobia. As I demonstrate, they developed a savvy repertoire of strategies that transformed household employment from a seemingly private, hidden affair into a societal concern requiring government intervention. Ultimately, my dissertation explains the emergence of a powerful and unexpected form of labor organizing--the new labor activism--that is community-based, multi-issue oriented, and propelled by working-class women of color. In directing critical attention to the relatively obscure history of domestic worker organizing, my study joins scholarship that expands analysis beyond the realm of the white male industrial worker to reconsider what constituted work, who comprised organized labor, and how we characterize recent labor history. By examining this particular workers’ movement, I present new insights into the groundswell of labor mobilization that erupted in American cities during the later twentieth century. Historians have accurately cast the period as one of organized labor’s weakness, dormancy, and decline. Even so, by prioritizing community-based campaigns anchored by immigrant and non-white women employed as domestic workers, I demonstrate that they also made it a time of hope and agitation, of rebirth and revival rather than repose. With appreciation for complexity, I gauge their activism not merely in terms of wins and losses, but also in regard to workers’ evolving sense of empowerment alongside their ability to spark larger public policy conversations concerning labor standards, the care economy, and the role of government.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: History
Discovering Peptide Inhibitors of the Spike Protein and Human ACE2 Receptor Interaction via Competitive Elution in Phage Display
No full textThesis advisor: Jianman GaoThe interaction between the spike (S) protein of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (hACE2) receptor is an advantageous target for the development of therapies for COVID-19. We used an anti spike receptor binding domain (S RBD) antibody (AM122) to competitively elute phage binding to the S RBD in phage display screening to identify a novel peptide that binds the S protein and hACE2 interaction. We identified a peptide sequence (P1: CPLEYHTC) as a possible hit, and the KD was determined to be 2.667 μM, indicating the potential of this peptide sequence as a therapeutic agent. However, we found no inhibition of the spike protein and hACE2 receptor interaction, suggesting that the peptide may not directly bind to the hACE2 binding site on S RBD. Although further studies are needed, the competitive elution method in phage display screening appears to be an effective method for elucidating onsite peptide sequences that target protein-protein interactions (PPIs).Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2023.Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Departmental Honors.Discipline: Chemistry
Vulnerability and Virtues in the Spritual Exercises: Exploring the Dynamics of the Spiritual Exercises through the Lens of Virtue Ethics
No full textThesis advisor: James F. KeenanThesis advisor: Daniel J. DalyThis thesis investigates the morality stemming from the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola through the lens of virtue ethics. It argues that if the Exercises are conducted according to Ignatius’ intention, they can lead exercitants to develop moral character in their relationship with God. This thesis is structured around four main chapters: bridging spirituality and morality, vulnerability as a key to understanding the dynamic between exercitants and God in the Exercises, freedom of conscience for being vulnerable to God and others, and the development of virtues rooted in vulnerability, especially humility, prudence, charity, and mercy, through the Exercises. This thesis emphasizes that vulnerability serves as the basis for morality in the Exercises, and virtues provide practical guidance for moral action and reasoning. Through the Exercises, exercitants can recognize their own vulnerability by encountering God’s vulnerability and cultivate virtues in their vulnerability. The Exercises lead them from individual conscience to a realm of interconnectedness with others. The bridge between the Spiritual Exercises and virtue ethics holds significant implications for the formation of Christian character because it fosters the cultivation of virtues consistent with the biblical narrative.Thesis (STL) — Boston College, 2023.Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry.Discipline: Sacred Theology