JMC Senior Honors Thesis Presentations
Fri, April 28, 2023 9:30 AM at JMC Library (332 Case Hall)
Please join us as JMC seniors who are completing an honors thesis will present their research as the capstone to their project. Refreshments will be provided.
Noah Doederlein, Social Relations & Policy
9:30 AM | JMC Library
"Mobilizing Culture in Response to Development: Re/commoning and the Potentials of Pluriverse along the Ing River"
Faculty Advisor: Professor Amanda Flaim
Abstract:
In riparian communities throughout Southeast Asia, hydropower dam development on the Mekong River has triggered a cascade of rapid and vast social, cultural, economic, and ecological changes over the past thirty years. Communities along the Ing River – a main tributary of the Mekong in Chiang Rai Province, Thailand – have experienced and continue to confront ruptures from their land, water, culture, and livelihoods as damming disrupts the once predictable patterns and natural cycles of the river’s flood pulse. Many of these communities were built around increasingly threatened seasonally flooded forests that rely on this surge in water levels to transform the land into spawning grounds for the Mekong’s migratory fish. Under national and international development projects, this land that once served as a commons for communities has since been appropriated and cleared to make way for cash crop monocultures. While at the same time, the downstream impacts of dams have disrupted the floods that the remaining forests rely upon. These changes threaten not only local ecosystems but the socio-cultural environments that they sustain. Thus, this research seeks to explore how local communities along the Ing River are responding to ruptures caused by dam development in their cultural and ecological contexts. How are communities resisting or adapting to the transformation of once collectively-held commons? And how do conventional approaches to the impacts of dam development reinforce narratives of loss and overlook the alternative world-building potentials of (imperfect) resistance and culturally driven responses? Using ethnographic data collected from formal and informal interviews, this research examines the ways in which one community along the Ing River is re/commoning their connected land and water systems by mobilizing the community to protect cultural practices. I argue that place-based responses to rupture caused by the commodification of land and water under the development paradigm not only serve as a potential, but are necessary for realizing the multiple ways of being, knowing, and doing embodied by a pluriverse.
Joy Cullen, International Relations
11:30 AM | JMC Library
"US Intelligence Networks on Human Trafficking"
Faculty Advisor: Professor Matt Zierler
Abstract:
This thesis examines the facet of the national United States intelligence network that deals with human trafficking and focuses on the differences between these organizations’ intelligence processes, asking, what paradigms exist in the United States for assessing and applying intelligence on human trafficking? The paper establishes patterns among the organizations and the networks in which they function, looking at three factors in particular: how do the groups, their organizational network, and the strategies that direct them explain these intelligence processes? Through a comprehensive map of the relationships among government agencies, private corporations, and NGOS, the TIP intelligence network is displayed in a concrete way conducive to comparative analysis. Important findings include that most networks fail to collect and employ effectively the human intelligence that victims offer; that groups that self-identify as victim oriented are less likely to have direct connections with law-enforcement agencies, though they collect useful intelligence; and that industry-led groups have access to relevant data but often lack direct information-sharing relationships with government agencies. These findings suggest that, though TIP organizations are closely interrelated, their network structure, their lack of coordination with victims, and the types of relationships they share limit the possibilities of coordination and their effectiveness in combatting trafficking.
Jack Carlson, Political Theory & Constitutional Democracy
1:30 PM | JMC Library
"Rousseau and the Moral Worth of Compassion"
Faculty Advisor: Professor Ben Lorch
Abstact:
This thesis is a study of the place of compassion in Rousseau’s Emile. More specifically, it explores the potential moral worth of Rousseau’s conception of compassion and whether or not it constitutes genuine moral conduct. In the first chapter, this thesis examines the role of compassion in Emile’s education and concludes that while compassion offers a superior alternative to self-interest and law as a foundation for his moral conduct, it provides only a partial foundation on its own. The second chapter discusses two additional motives for moral conduct that emerge from compassion, gratitude and justice, and how these motives correct some of the deficiencies of compassion, first, by forming notions of obligation to our benefactors that compel us to pursue our duties to them, and second, by universalizing our compassion to humanity such that it accords with justice. In the third chapter, this thesis examines the political implications of compassion in the context of democracy and citizenship and argues that, for Rousseau, compassion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for democratic citizenship. This thesis concludes by examining the possibility that Rousseau primarily intends for compassion to serve Emile’s own good, or his happiness, and that compassion is an important but ultimately insufficient solution to the moral problem.
Aditi Kulkarni, Comparative Cultures & Politics
3:30 PM | JMC Library
"The Instant Noodle Effect: Why Food-insecure College Campuses are Hungry for Change"
Faculty Advisor: Professor Daniel Ahlquist
Abstract:
College students face dire levels of food insecurity nationwide, affecting their educational successes and perpetuating systemic inequalities. This paper explores how food insecurity affects college students using a top-down analysis: observing national food insecurity effects and narrowing down to James Madison College at Michigan State University as a case study. The paper will additionally explore the Instant Noodle Effect, a self-coined phenomenon that relates the ‘broke college student’ stereotype to societal ignorance of systemic food insecurity.