2018 Winners
Senior Thesis Division
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Elaine Synn Yie KhooFaculty Advisor: Dong-Jae Eun This paper examines the impact of the 10-year long Government-Linked Companies Transformation Program (GLCTP) on the performances of the Government-Linked Companies (GLCs) and non-Government-Linked Companies (non-GLCs) in Malaysia introduced in 2005. The performance of GLCs and matching non-GLCs are compared using difference-in-differences estimation techniques. Financial performance is measured using Returns on Asset (ROA) and Returns on Equity (ROE) while Tobin’s Q ratio is used as a measure of a firm's value. Results show that the GLCTP have a statistically significant negative effect on GLCs’ financial performance. Difference-in-difference estimation also shows that the GLCTP has a negative effect on firms’ market value relative to firms’ assets as measured by Tobin’s Q ratio. ©Reproduction of this award project in part or in whole without permission of the author is expressly prohibited.
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Annie LewisFaculty Advisor: Devin Naar Precarious Whiteness: Reimagining the Seattle Sephardic Origin Story “Precarious Whiteness: Reimagining the Seattle Sephardic Origin Story” seeks to investigate narrative formation around Sephardic Jewish identity from the early twentieth century to the present. While Sephardim are commonly positioned as American and white in academic and non-academic texts, I demonstrate that these classifications do not account for the multifaceted Ottoman, Spanish, and Jewish nature of Sephardic identity, nor acknowledge Sephardic reluctance to become permanently part of the United States. I subsequently disassociate Sephardic Jews from the white-washing pioneer narrative of the American West to recognize the non-Western and non-white elements of Sephardic identity. Finally, I recount the many instances in which non-Jews and already-established, Ashkenazic Jews operated according to a black-white dichotomy to discriminate against Sephardic Jews to ensure their own societal privilege.
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Melissa MorganFaculty Advisor: Moon-ho Jung Vice & Visibility: Changing Attitudes toward Prostitution and Sexual Behavior in Victorian Britain This essay explores the story of the Contagious Diseases Acts, a series of bills from Britain in the 1860s which subjected female prostitutes to forced medical examinations. Early feminist activists, largely middle-class women, campaigned furiously against these Acts, which were successfully repealed by the mid-1880s. The fervor generated by this activism also led to the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which increased the powers of the state in policing brothels as well as, bizarrely, the further criminalization of male-male sexual behavior. In this essay, I argue that the activism that defeated the oppressive Contagious Diseases Acts directly led to the passage of the repressive Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 by creating a moral panic over “immoral” aristocratic male sexual behavior, leading to an increase in state power to enforce monogamous, heterosexual, and therefore moral sexual behavior.
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Tianli SongFaculty Advisor: Matthew Mosca The Emerging Mediator of Diplomacy: The Zongli Yamen and The Margary Affair Of 1875 (paper not available) Although the foundation of Zongli Yamen, Qing's de facto Foreign Ministry, in 1861 immediately attracted favorable opinion among Western delegates and Chinese reformers, its domestic and international strategies remained largely unsurveyed, and its hierarchical relation within Qing's diplomatic machinery stayed ambiguous to Qing historians. This thesis explores the Zongli Yamen's strategy to success during a single episode of diplomatic confrontation: the Margary Affair of 1875. This thesis demonstrates that the Yamen's strategy consisted in mediating subordinate local institutions, which carried out the essential task of information gathering and strategy execution. It was through its role as the mediator, the Yamen established and retained its supremacy in Qing's foreign affair hierarchy, emerging from the Tongzhi Restoration ending in 1875. However, such strategy entailed risked that would fully unmask in the 20th century when Qing Dynasty was in twilight.
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Senior Non-Thesis Division
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Sarah DuncanFaculty Advisor: Jennifer Balkus An Overview of Brazil's HIV Epidemic: From Past Challenges to Future Directions This research project aims to investigate the course of the HIV epidemic in Brazil. After exploring the history of HIV/AIDS and the current state of the epidemic, this paper explores the current challenges that Brazil faces in combating the spread of HIV. This research encompass a broad range of economic, social, and political challenges related to HIV testing, prevention, and treatment, especially as it pertains to populations that have been disproportionately impacted. Based on this information and several recent studies that speak to Brazil’s current HIV mitigation strategies, this project then seeks to provide recommendations to local and regional organizations that will help improve the current situation of the HIV epidemic.
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Katelyn GrahamFaculty Advisor: Megan Ming Francis This paper investigates the ways environmental design perpetuates rape myths through critiquing of the use Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design strategies as a preventative measure against sexual assault in public spaces. This is done through analyzing media language around sexual violence, site specific case studies, and applying feminist theory to current urban design trends.
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Bum Mook (Chris) OhFaculty Advisor: Jevin West Automatically Classifying Art Images Using Computer Vision Millions of art images have been digitized over the last several decades. This has created new opportunities for art scholars and historians. However, searching and navigating these art images is difficult because of the sparsity of the metadata and contextual information used to describe these images. Unless one knows the exact title and artist, finding related paintings is a difficult task without the metadata. The research in this project addresses this challenge by developing unsupervised computer vision methods that will extract metadata automatically from paintings. Our dataset will include more than 2 million art images from Artstor, a non-profit organization that distributes art images to libraries and universities. If successful, we plan to build an interactive interface for exploring the extracted features and for developing a recommender system that could be used on platforms such as Artstor.
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Non-senior Division
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Allison Dumitriu CarcoanaFaculty Advisor: Beatrice Arduini Dal Principe di Machiavelli a Trump: Somiglianze in Politica Basate sulla Natura Umana I wrote this paper as the final project for my independent study in Italian 499. It discusses the similarities between the tactics that worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and the recommendations of 16th century political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli. Machiavelli’s most famous book, The Prince, focused on the ways that a ruler could maintain power. He based his observations on human nature, and although he did not see much success in his time, his work has been celebrated by later generations. Since human nature ought to remain relatively unchanged throughout the decades, it is sensible that the same political advice could apply today, even in a drastically different social environment. My project focuses on the choice to exploit the human ego to obtain maximum political benefits, the use of an antagonistic elite, and the necessity of a stabilizing reaction to the clashes between them and the collective.
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Hannah FarrellFaculty Advisor: John Wilkerson This research aims to determine whether sentence length affects the rate of re-offending after release (called recidivism) for children who are incarcerated at juvenile rehabilitation facilities in Washington State. Some juvenile justice reform proponents argue that longer sentences are necessary so that rehabilitative services can work most effectively. Others contend that longer periods of incarceration are not conducive to positive post-release outcomes. I will explore the recidivism rates of juveniles who are housed in youth versus adult prisons in Washington State. Unfortunately there is no data for Washington that examines the relationship between sentence lengths and juvenile recidivism. Thus, I will outline the data on sentence lengths and recidivism in three other states – Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Florida – and compare those juvenile systems to Washington’s. Although their juvenile systems are not identical to Washington’s in terms of offender differences, composition demographics, and stipulations of detainment, similar conclusions are being found in other jurisdictions: long-term juvenile incarceration does not decrease, and sometimes even increases, recidivism. We hope to discover if this research is conclusive when specific to Washington. Children’s lives are at stake. ©Reproduction of this award project in part or in whole without permission of the author is expressly prohibited. |
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Muhen HuangFaculty Advisor: Radhika Govindrajan Animal Agriculture and Antibiotic Resistant Disease What social, economic, or political factors affect the way antibiotic use is regulated in the US? In the United States, farmers feed their animals antibiotics at low doses to prevent disease and promote their growth. Because the low doses do not kill all the bacteria, the bacteria that survive will then reproduce, and the strain eventually becomes resistant. These antibiotic resistant diseases that emerge from farms pose a health problem to the people who work with these animals and the people who consume them, as well as to wild animals that live nearby. Byproducts of animal farming, such as manure or runoff from farms, can carry with it antibiotic resistant diseases that can change the microbial dynamics of an ecosystem. However, the interests of pharmaceutical companies and farmers, especially large monopolizing farm corporations, means the practice of recklessly using antibiotics for non medical purposes has continued. ©Reproduction of this award project in part or in whole without permission of the author is expressly prohibited. |
Honorable Mention: Senior Thesis Division
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Yulenni VenegasFaculty Advisor: Sophia Jordan Wallace Current immigration law in the United States is amongst the harshest in our nation’s history, where for an immigrant, all roads come with the threat of deportation. This paper examines how the threat of deportation in Washington State and Arizona affects the Latino community. This paper measures levels of threat via local immigration law and the levels of cooperation between law enforcement and ICE. Utilizing interview data, I find that under increasing levels of threat, the community responds with heightened levels of political engagement. Additionally, under lower levels of threat of deportation, the community primarily engages in collective mobility services and local campaigns, whereas under high threat, the community additionally utilizes preemptive organization, alert networks, and national campaigns. I argue that due to both the drastic ways which the threat of deportation affects mobilization and fear amongst the Latino community, the threat of deportation is an act of state violence.
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Honorable Mention: Senior Non-Thesis Division
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Melissa Estabrook
Faculty Advisor: Liz Haight Implications and Limitations of Ireland’s Abortion Law In this research paper I explore the implications and limitations of Ireland’s abortion law. I specifically address the issue with a human right’s framework. In this paper, I argue that mounting historical court cases and the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar that sparked worldwide attention resulted in the passing of the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act of 2013. I concluded that while the act did improve Irish women’s right to life, it did not translate into improved access to abortion and continues to violate these women’s rights, such as the right to autonomy and the right to privacy.
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Sam WooleyFaculty Advisor: Stephanie Clare As global temperatures continue to increase, it becomes clear that we are living in an era of human-induced climate shift. This era has commonly been labelled the “Anthropocene” in both the sciences and the humanities, a name that invokes the “human” as the force of geological change. In my project, I investigate the question, “How does Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me problematize the conception of the ‘human’ in ‘Anthropocene’ narratives?” This “Anthropocene” discourse, I suggest, posits the “human” as a universal geological force, therein distorting our understandings of how capitalism and racism are linked in the history of “modernity” and precluding our ability to recognize differential responsibility for climate shift. Literature like Coates’ Between the World and Me, I suggest, can problematize these dominant, universalizing understandings through a simultaneous critical attunement to histories of domination and oppression and an artistic mediation of daily, lived experience of climate change.
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Honorable Mention: Non-senior Division
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Bill Cheung-DaiheFaculty Advisor: Katarzyna Dziwirek New Foundations: Emotional Acculturation of Ethnic Chinese Abroad My research paper, “New Foundations: Emotional Acculturation of Ethnic Chinese Abroad”, was written as a Term Paper for Honors 211/Slavic 426. In 11 pages, I argue that Chinese-American emotion is at the intersection of China and the US and forms a new framework in its own right after discussing acculturation and bilingualism's effects on emotions amongst expatriates in general.
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Carly SpragueFaculty Advisor: Richard Watts This is my final research paper from my 18th-21st century history/literature French class discussing the importance and ramifications of Olympe de Gouges's 1791 pamphlet Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, which was a feminist response to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. I argue that although contemporary and modern-day critics have denounced Olympe de Gouges's writing was (at worst) "uncultured" or (at best) "proto-feminist," I see the Déclaration des droits de la femme as having been written with exaggeration and emotion to directly appeal and relate to the day-to-day lives of 18th century women. I believe she was a feminist not "before her time" but necessary for her time, and that the real reason she was tried and executed by capital punishment was that she dared to ask for equal rights for women.
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