Students Range Far Afield

It can take the form of bookwork, legwork or some unique combination that gives a student a foundation for his or her own analysis and conclusion, as shown by this sampling of recent undergraduate thesis topics.

A Plague in New York, Successfully Contained

During the week ending July 11, 1868, more than 800 people died suddenly in New York City. Another 250 died on July 13 and 14, then 240 more between July 18 and 22.

It was the start of the city’s exposure to “Texas cattle disease,” a plague that had scarcely been documented since reports of dying cows began surfacing in the 1850s. And it was a seminal moment for America’s first board of health, according to Erik Erlandson, a recent Clark Honors College graduate, who double-majored in history and political science and was mentored by history professor James Mohr.

In what he calls the untold story of the Metropolitan Board of Health, Erlandson follows the emergency response of New York officials to a disease “that no one knew about.”

Erlandson casts a wide net in this exhaustive history, detailing the city’s inability to keep pace with urbanization and immigration and painting a picture of deplorable meatpacking conditions that recalls Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

In conclusion, he presents two reasons for the unparalleled interstate cooperation that successfully contained the epidemic: Lessons learned from England’s inadequate response to a similar outbreak, and a spike in diarrheal deaths that prompted the board to consider the disease as an explanation. 
 

Reduced Emissions Not Necessarily the Result of Climate Accords

Correlation does not equal causation.

That was the conclusion of political science major Hale Forster, who analyzed the effectiveness of the Helsinki and Oslo agreements in reducing sulfur emissions in the 1980s and ’90s. Dozens of European countries committed to reductions and emissions subsequently dropped. But Forster, mentored by political science professor Ron Mitchell, shows that factors other than the agreements themselves were likely responsible for the bulk of reductions.

Forster sorts the countries into smaller groups with shared circumstances and meticulously researches the influence of the treaties in each. Among nontreaty factors that reduced pollution, he notes the fall of the USSR, which sparked a political restructuring across the region during which industrial activity— and therefore emissions—slowed. Countries also decided, independent of the agreements, to reduce coal-powered electricity in favor of nuclear and natural gas sources.

At the heart of Forster’s analysis is his judgment that country-specific goals in the Oslo treaty did not prompt more reductions than would otherwise have occurred.

“The goals appear to have failed . . . because they were politically motivated, facilitating countries’ choice of goals they were already planning to meet,” Forster writes. “It will be interesting to observe how future protocols incorporate (such) goals.” 

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Reproductive Services for Teens in Chile

Jaki is a fifteen-year-old girl in Valparaíso, Chile. She is considering becoming sexually active but is worried about getting pregnant and doesn’t understand contraception. Should she risk getting pregnant or not have sex at all?

So begins the narrative for international studies major Molly Bennison’s evaluation of support services for pregnant teens and teen mothers in Chile. Bennison, mentored by Yvonne Braun, an associate professor of women’s and gender studies, developed the idea while studying abroad in 2011, after interviewing a Chilean feminist activist and midwife who runs a support organization for pregnant women.

In a country with rising teen pregnancy, Bennison explores the history of reproductive rights, cultural attitudes toward contraception and abortion and the existence of support systems for teens who keep their babies. She also provides her own recommendations for how the system might better serve teens.

Bennison conducts compelling interviews with pregnant teens and young mothers, including one who greets her with hostility but quickly softens as she tells her story.

“What became clear,” Bennison writes, “is that teen girls throughout Chile, especially those from lower social classes, are not receiving the reproductive and sexual health support that they need.” 
 

How ‘Progressive’ Policies in Sweden Have Reinforced Racism

When you’re doing research near the Arctic Circle, the first concern is the weather.

Bennett Hubbard, also an international studies major mentored by Yvonne Braun (see above), chose November for fieldwork in northern Sweden, when temperatures are not so cold as to impede travel.

Hubbard studied how “progressive” policies of the Swedish government have disenfranchised the Saami, an ethnic group living off the land in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia. He focuses in part on the Reindeer Act of 1971, touted as a protective measure for the group’s livelihood but which instead enabled the government to restrict reindeer herders like the Saami from land sought for resource extraction.

Speaking Swedish while in the field, Hubbard visited museums dedicated to the Saami to understand their plight. Among the more disturbing exhibits: tools once used to measure skulls and other body parts, relics from a campaign in the early 1900s to portray the group as “genetically inferior” and a threat to the purity of the Swedish ethnic group due to their shorter frames and smaller skull sizes.

“The events of the early twentieth century in Sweden offer a study in how nationalism and economic interests can serve as catalysts for extreme cases of institutionalized racism and prejudice against indigenous peoples,” Hubbard writes. 

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Connecting the Dots: The Tea Party and the Times

The New York Times in 2010 gave more coverage to the conservative Tea Party movement than any other activist movement.

Coincidence? Not to Kadie Manion.

Manion, a sociology major, theorized that movements with ties and similar interests to elites receive more media coverage. Using a news article database, she counted stories in the Times with terms such as “demonstration” or “protest” for a one-week period each month that year; the Tea Party received the greatest number of articles and the longest articles on average, outpacing movements for the environment, immigration, labor, gay rights and other issues.

Manion cites established sociological research to connect the dots: Right-wing and conservative movements are often funded by elites in power; elites and conservative movements often share the belief that the path to economic prosperity is privatization and deregulation; elites that own most news organizations have investments that make it more likely that news coverage will be connected to the elites’ financial success.

“Both the news media and social movements have a very important role in democratic societies,” Manion concludes. “When there is corruption in either resource—and particularly in the relationship between the two— the integrity of our democracy is jeopardized.” 
 

The Divorce Hazard Rate                

There may never be an ideal time to divorce, but waiting until kids reach adolescence could be a better time than others.

Studies have long indicated that those who experience the divorce of their parents are significantly more likely to divorce as adults themselves. Maggie Price, a sociology major mentored by assistant professor Aaron Gullickson, takes the research further, studying this “intergenerational transmission of divorce” as it relates to the age at which one experiences divorce in childhood.

Using a national survey of families conducted from 1987 to 2004, Price teased out respondents who reported a parental separation or divorce at least once in childhood. Then, using a mathematical formula that expresses the probability of an outcome, she generated a divorce “hazard rate” for younger and older children.

Children aged ten to eighteen who experienced parental divorce were 18 percent less likely to get divorced as adults compared to children age nine or younger at the time of divorce. Research suggests that younger children are more deeply affected because divorce interrupts the attachment process.

“Divorce has detrimental consequences for children that can affect their adulthood psychologically, socially and economically,” Price concludes. “Individuals concerned for their offspring’s welfare in adulthood may prefer to wait to divorce until their children are in late childhood or adolescence.”

—Matt Cooper

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