Rice Undergraduate Theses

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A Crisis of People or Politics? : Revisiting the Impact of Narrative Framing of Immigration in German Newspapers in 2018
(Rice University, 2019-05) Schumacher, Erika; Hamm, Keith
In 2017, a report (Georgiou & Zaborowski) traced the media portrayal of the 2015 refugee crisis and of immigrants in European countries. The authors reported a general negative portrayal of immigrants in the news. Additionally, they showed a shift: the refugee crisis was initially described as a humanitarian issue that transcended boundaries; by the end of 2015, each country viewed migrants as an issue of national security. My research revisits the media narrative around the migrant crisis in 2018, specifically in Germany, which accepted an exceptionally large number of refugees. My research categorizes newspaper articles written on the topic of immigration over the course of 2018, finding that the issue of immigration has shifted narratives once again. While not necessarily making value statements on immigrants themselves, German print media presents positive images of immigrants in an economic context and negative images of immigrants in a societal context. Further, immigration is overwhelmingly an issue of politics and policy. In this way, the print media talks around immigrants, showing them as an issue of electoral politics instead of societal participants.
A Phenomenological Critique of Irene McMullin's Formulation of Heideggerian Temporality
(Rice University, 2019) Barton, Jason; Crowell, Steven
This paper aims at differentiating Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology from Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological ethics on the experiential level of encountering otherness. In addition to drawing from each author’s seminal texts, I will contextualize the disagreement between Heidegger and Levinas to Irene McMullin’s Time and the Shared World: Heidegger on Social Relations. McMullin, in her response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s criticism of Heidegger’s ontology, provides a formulation of Heideggerian temporality that markedly deviates from Heideggerian ontological commitments in Being and Time. I present and develop two deviations: (a) McMullin positions Dasein’s original encounter with the Other before the establishment of Dasein’s ontological structures (i.e., Being-in-the-world and Being-with-others) and (b) McMullin attributes Dasein’s inauthenticity to the Other’s limitation of Dasein’s temporalization of Being. I contend that both deviations correspond with Levinas’s phenomenology of temporality more than Heidegger’s phenomenology of temporality. It is through McMullin’s deviations, therefore, that distinctions can be drawn between Heidegger’s ontological articulation of Being-guilty, the call of conscience, Being-towards-death, and Angst on one hand and Levinas’s metaphysical articulation of conscience, shame, and death on the other.
Affection: Essays on Affect, Empathy, and the Politics of Feeling
(Rice University, 2021-05) Li-Wang, Jennifer; Comer, Krista
Often, we view feelings as squishy—personal and subjective, therefore private and apolitical. Even within ourselves, our feelings can often seem reflexive and out of our own control. This thesis represents my attempt to hold these squishy feelings and look at them up close, from different angles. In doing so, I hope to see how our affects may not only be personal to ourselves, but also highly communal, performative, and regulated by and within communities. Affects—our feelings, emotions, and moods—are a matter of political and intellectual concern. Different political aims often mobilize our affects and manipulate them to conform to certain desirable shapes. Thus, paying attention to affects—the ways they are evoked, politicized, and ascribed (un)desirability—may help us stay close to our own needs and the needs of our community.
African Americans in Tom’s Town: Black Kansas City Negotiates the Pendergast Machine
(Rice University, 2017) Vigran, Sydney
Changes in Atlantic Tropical Cyclones and the Bermuda High: Clues from the Last Millennium to Inform the Future
(Rice University, 2023) Pitchon, Emilia; Dee, Sylvia
Current anthropogenic climate change is expected to increase hurricane intensity, with stronger winds, higher rainfall, and increased flooding, all of which pose a major threat to coastal communities. However, climate models vary in their predictions of how climate change will impact hurricane frequency and tracks, and 20th century data sources are limited given the brevity of the satellite era. To address this knowledge gap, we study the strength and position of the Bermuda High and how it has changed over the past millennium. The Bermuda High is a semipermanent high-pressure system over the Atlantic Ocean which impacts hurricane tracks and steering currents. To study its behavior, we evaluate two climate products with sea level pressure data spanning the past 1000 years: the Last Millennium Reanalysis and the Community Earth System Model. We compare various Bermuda High indices (BHI) as defined by previous studies, representing different measures of position and strength of the high-pressure system. Maps of sea level pressure anomalies and hurricane tracks are generated during years with high vs. low BHI values. This allows us to better understand the relationship between the Bermuda High and hurricane characteristics over the last 1000 years, providing important context for the future. This work is critical to better constrain hurricane risks under anthropogenic climate change and may help protect the people and environments at risk.
Competing Claims: An Analysis of References to the Past Made to Justify Ownership of the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba
(Rice University, 2019-05) Panitz, Abigail; Wildenthal, Lora; Irish, Maya Soifer
Competing claims of ownership to the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, a popular tourist site, have emerged in the twenty-first century. The Cordoban Chapter of the Catholic Church was permitted to register the space as its formal property in 2006. Some politicians, particularly members of Spain’s Socialist party, the PSOE, dispute the law that allowed this registration. In their view, the law was passed as part of the conservative People’s Party’s strategy to protect privileges afforded to the Church. The thesis analyzes two reports to demonstrate how two groups, the state and the Church, relied on distinct episodes of Spanish history to support their claims. A 2014 local Church report used nineteenth- and twentieth-century property laws to defend its claims to ownership. A 2018 local government report used the medieval legal code Las Siete Partidas to argue for restoring the space to state control. The dispute in Córdoba is a microcosm of the challenges affecting church-state relations in the post-dictatorship era of secular democracy in modern Spain.
Critical Theory, Normativity, and Catastrophe: A Critique of Amy Allen’s Metanormative Contextualism
(Rice University, 2020-05) Rehman, Bilal; Crowell, Steven
Critical theory is an approach to philosophical and cultural analysis that focuses on oppression and liberation. In this essay, I consider the prospect of moral-political progress in critical theory, focusing primarily on Amy Allen’s position of metanormative contextualism as described in her 2016 work, "The End of Progress." I first consider Allen’s arguments against Jurgen Habermas' theory of communicative action, and then explore how metanormative contextualism is rooted in the thought of Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault. Lastly, by showing how postcolonial studies reminds us of the deeply political stakes of critical theory, I argue that ideas about moral-political progress can be grounded in the urgent need to “avoid catastrophe.”
Differences between modern and ancient Martian grain size distributions may reveal different paleoatmospheric conditions and provenance
(Rice University, 2023) Preston, Sarah Lucille; Siebach, Kirsten
Grain size distributions in eolian (wind-blown) deposits encode information about the atmospheric conditions that enabled their transport and deposition, and grain shape encodes information about provenance and postdepositional processes. Gale crater is a ~3.7 Ga impact crater with a vast diversity of exposed sedimentary strata indicative of a varied depositional history during the ear ly Hesperian epochs (Banham et al., 2018). The Stimson sandstone is a ~3 Ga unit of eolian sandstone in Gale crater that appears to have a coarser grain size distribution than the nearby Bagnold Dunes, an active dune field (Banham et al., 2018; Weitz et al., 2018). In this work, I hypothesize that the Martian paleoatmosphere had a different density than Mars’ current atmosphere, and that the source of the Stimson sandstone may have been more coarse than the source of the Bagnold dunes, leading to ancient sandstones with different grain size distributions than modern active sand dunes. To approach this question, I analyze images from the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) and Remote Micro Imager cameras to determine the grain size distribution of targets. Additionally, I qualitatively describe grain shape and appearance, including roundedness, sphericity, pitting, and color, along with chemical composition where possible, to determine whether differences in grain size distributions can be attributed to provenance. From these results, I explore the role of paleoclimate and provenance in generating the grain size distribution seen in the Stimson. These results will help determine the provenance of the Stimson, as well as ancient Martian atmospheric conditions, in turn providing insights into the wet-to-dry transition and, potentially, the habitability of ancient Mars.
Early Campaign Contact and Voter Turnout in the 2018 Texas State Senate District 6 Special Election
(Rice University, 2019-04) Wilson, Chloe; Stein, Robert
The creation of early in person (EIP) voting periods has been a popular policy implemented by state legislatures seeking to increase voter turnout through decreasing the costs of going to the polls. The efficacy of EIP voting has been questioned in the literature. EIP voting has, however, changed the way in which campaigns are run (Burden et al 2014; Hamel et al 2018). Using individual-level, paid phone-bank call data from the Ana Hernandez campaign for the Texas State Senate District 6 special election held on December 11, 2018 and district-wide voter history data I examine the efficacy of campaign contact under early voting conditions. I find this contact to be ineffective, once vote history is taken into account. A history of voting in the 2018 primary election and 2018 bond elections is a much stronger predictor of turning out in the election studied. This analysis indicates that contacted voters who turned out were more likely self-motivated to vote rather than mobilized through contact, complicating Arceneaux and Nickerson’s (2009) contingency model of campaign contact, which states that high propensity voters are the most cost effective to turn out through campaign contact. These findings have important implications regarding the status quo model of campaign contact currently implemented and how it can be modified to be both more effective in turning out voters in low salience elections.
Empathetic Blame: Moral Evaluation in the Face of Luck
(Rice University, 2020-05) Tugendstein, Gabriel; Sher, George
In this thesis I offer a new interpretation of blame and criticism rooted in P.F. Strawson's distinction between the subjective and objective points of view. In Part I, I use the problems presented by circumstantial moral luck to expose the inadequacy of standard intuitions about what's required to blame another. Proposed solutions to these issues, I argue, fall into the trap of viewing blame as the outgrowth of a metaphysical status instead of an action that cannot be detached from interpersonal relationships. In Part II I generate a novel interpretation based on the projects of Hume, Strawson, and Scanlon, which posits blame as an attitude forming out of self-reflection and empathy, and criticism as a belief forming out of comparison to a rigid standard. I then elaborate on the phenomenology of such a blame act and go over the consequences my interpretation would have, including a world with substantially less blaming that would eschew vague metaphysical questions and recognize the limitations of imposing moral standards on those who have faced different circumstances.
Environmental Control in Appalachia: Politics of the Red River Gorge Dam Controversy, 1962-1975
(Rice University, 3/30/2022) Cook, Kamil; Hall, Randal
In 1962, Congress approved the building of a dam on the Red River in Eastern Kentucky because of recurring floods affecting Powell County, Kentucky. This dam threatened a beautiful and ecologically unique part of the Red River, and, in response, in 1967 a group of environmental activists gathered together to challenge the building of this dam. After a contracted battle involving the Army Corps of Engineers, environmental activists, politicians, and local people, the dam was never built. Along with chronicling this controversy, my thesis explores the changing conceptions of the environment through the 1960s and 1970s and illustrates that Appalachian environmental activism not only existed, but was contemporary with national movements. I do this with the support of newspapers, letters, legal records, bureaucratic reports and more gathered from the Red River Gorge archive at the University of Kentucky and an online newspaper database.
Exploratory Analysis of Anxiety in College Students
(Rice University, 2025) Eisinger, Jack; Hooge, Kim; Psychology
Many established predictors of anxiety (e.g., socioeconomic status, sleep, loneliness) have been studied, yet research investigating how these factors interact with anxiety, specifically in the college student population, is sorely lacking. This exploratory study surveyed Rice University undergraduates on predictors typically shown to predict anxiety in non-college student populations, including social media use, gratitude, and self-efficacy, along with anxiety levels. Together, the predicting factors of neuroticism, problematic social media use, gender, general self-efficacy, and loneliness explained 43.3% of the variance in anxiety scores. Unexpectedly, alcohol/drug use, phone use before bed, and socioeconomic measures (parental income and education) did not correlate with anxiety. These findings can help universities understand how to ease the burden of anxiety that is particular to the college student experience. Future research endeavors will incorporate other validated measures and explore how demographic differences affect the relationship between anxiety and its predictors.
Expression and purification of LiaX, an uncharacterized protein involved in daptomycin resistance in E. faecalis
(Rice University, 2015) DeBruler, Kimberly; Shamoo, Yousif
Feeding the Future: Community, Horizontal Leadership and Direct Action Through Mutual Aid in Food Not Bombs Houston’s Movement for Change
(2025-05-05) Haacke, Matthew W.; Jalili, Jaleh; Rice University
Through ethnographic fieldwork and interviews (n=13), this study examines how Food Not Bombs Houston (FNBH) operates as a social movement through mutual aid. I explore how FNBH fosters community, deploys horizontal leadership, and engages in direct action to prefigure a better world. My findings demonstrate how FNBH’s food-sharing practices and mutual aid serve as a repertoire of contention, actively disrupting capitalist structures and resisting state control through spatial occupation. By fostering community resilience through a decentralized, non-hierarchical, consensus-based organizational model, FNBH embodies prefigurative politics—creating alternative systems of care outside of traditional non-profit structures and state control. This analysis challenges traditional social movement scholarship by demonstrating how mutual aid operates not just as a direct service but as a long-term form of resistance through everyday acts of solidarity.
Final Report on Degradation of "Scholar's Way" for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
(5/2/2023) Rajan, Bavan; Siebach, Kirsten
The purpose of this project is to understand the chemical processes that contribute to the degradation of “Scholar’s Way,” a trio of heavily altered basalt sculptures at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH). They were installed at the MFAH in 2020 after their creation in 2018 by South Korean artist Byung Hoon Choi. The work sits in a shallow pond in the museum’s sculpture garden, exposed to Houston’s warm humid climate and regular HCl from treatments to prevent algae growth. After less than 3 years, fragments of the sculptures have been lost, the surfaces have altered in coloration, and salt-like minerals regularly precipitate on the sides of the sculptures. The mineralogy of the sculptures and associated precipitates can inform the MFAH of how and why “Scholar’s Way”, as well as other outdoor sculptures, might be degrading, as well as what steps they can take to preserve their artwork. Visual and Near Infrared Spectroscopy, speciation modeling from the pond’s water chemistry, Electron Dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and Electron Probe Microanalysis were used to determine 1) the chemical composition of the water features and sculptures, which reveal plausible degradation mechanisms, 2) potential ongoing mineral dissolution, and 3) the drivers of salt precipitation from the pond. These results, along with recommendations to preserve the work, have since been presented to the MFAH in the attached executive summary and technical report.
Freedom’s Archive: Slavery, Emancipation, & Reconstruction in Fort Bend County
(Rice University, 2022-05) Schachter, Ben; McDaniel, Caleb
This thesis tells the story of the Wheat family from their enslavement in Fort Bend County by Frederick Allen Rice through their experiences during emancipation, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. It studies questions of change and continuity and grapples with the inadequacies of traditional sources to try and tell a rich, colorful story of one Black family's life. The thesis finds that while there was certainly some progress from slavery, one family member's gains might be weighed down by setbacks for another. It also argues that freedom's archive is not well-suited to answering the sort of broad, overarching questions historians of this time period often ask when searching for a definitive answer to how revolutionary Reconstruction was. This thesis also asserts the importance of attempting to reconstruct just a few people's lives and their genealogies, emphasizing enslaved people's claims on the present.
Glacially-controlled variations in the biological pump of the Ross Sea in the Mid-to-Late Pliocene
(Rice University, 2020-05) Nirenberg, Jared; Ash, Jeanine; Masiello, Caroline A.
The mid-to-late Pliocene (~3.3 – 2.5 Ma) is an intriguing period for investigating Earth’s past climate dynamics as a potential analogue for future warmth due to anthropogenic climate change. In the Southern Ocean, the Ross Sea and the adjacent West Antarctic Ice Sheet exert significant influence on global climate through their roles in carbon cycle processes, deep ocean circulation, and eustatic sea level. Previous ocean drilling records have shown that the marine-based West Antarctic Ice Sheet exhibited highly dynamic behavior in the Pliocene and responded to cyclical variations in Earth’s orbital geometry. However, fundamental questions remain regarding the biogeochemical response of Southern Ocean marine productivity to changes in ice sheet dynamics and sea ice cover. The International Ocean Discovery Program’s Expedition 374 to the Ross Sea (2018) recovered multiple sediment cores, including those from Site U1524 on the continental rise. I present a 900,000 year record of the carbon and nitrogen content in bulk sediment in the Pliocene-aged cores from Hole U1524A. This record shows the response of carbon export from the Ross Sea continental shelf to orbital and longer-term forcings of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and global climate. From 3.3 to 3.0 million years ago, I observe a gradual, non-monotonic increase in organic carbon to nitrogen ratios, followed by a decrease from 3.0 to 2.8 million years ago. Sediment color reflectance measurements, implying changes in surface water productivity, are tightly anti-correlated with organic carbon to nitrogen ratios between 3.3 and 3.0 million years ago, but are positively correlated between 3.0 and 2.8 million years ago. I discuss these trends in the context of concurrent sedimentology, physical oceanography, and ice-sheet dynamics. Finally, I note that potential diagenetic effects limit interpretation of this record, and I suggest that bulk carbon and nitrogen stable isotope measurements combined with compound-specific analyses may provide more insight into carbon and nitrogen cycle dynamics during the mid-to-late Pliocene.
Interpreting Sartorial Practices Based on the Archaeological Analysis of the Buttons at Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site
(Rice University, 2022) Hwang, Elaine; Morgan, Molly; Anthropology
This archaeological work investigates the button collection from Varner-Hogg Plantation in Brazoria County, Texas to interpret the sartorial practices of the enslaved individuals that once labored on the land. This project analyzes a total of 99 buttons which were excavated at Varner-Hogg plantation as a means to interpret the clothing that the buttons might have adorned and the subsequent practices of daily self-making. The research utilizes the theoretical framework regarding identity and its construction through performance and inscription to investigate how enslaved individuals were shaped within spheres of labor, desires for upward social mobility, and threats of racialized violence. I use the archaeological evidence from the buttons to investigate how and why enslaved individuals at Varner-Hogg performed particular dress practices during the 19th century as they strived to create spaces within the most oppressive of contexts in which they desired to distinguish themselves. This project is part of a wider push for community engagement in plantation archaeology and the telling of stories of the enslaved individuals who once lived and labored on the land.
Kingship in the Age of Extraction: How British Deconstruction and Isolation of African Kingship Reshaped Identity and Spurred Nigeria’s North/South Divide, 1885-1937
(Rice University, 2015) Williamson, Hurst; Staller, Jared
To the outside observer today, Nigeria is a state whose political troubles are sunk in its oil wells. Yet in truth the difficulties facing Nigeria are reflective of colonialism’s alteration of Nigerian society, and in order to truly understand Nigeria’s complex landscapes, one has to understand the evolution of complex national identities. As modern states emerge, each of them are influenced, driven, or in some extreme cases formed entirely around ethnic, religious, and cultural histories. However within some states with sizable minority populations, a counter-cultural form of nationalism is created, whereby a specific group’s culture, beliefs, or history becomes a call for that group’s own state. Whether in the Basque region of Spain, in Iraqi and Turkish Kurdistan, in Quebec, or in Scotland, self-identity around a specific culture can directly lead to nationalist movements. These movements can either resu lt in violent struggles (Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions), prolonged postponement (Morocco’s Western Sahara region), or in independence referendums (Scotland in 2014). Yet regardless of the various effectiveness of identity-driven nationalist movements, states with large populations that share a common social cleavage eventually must deal with their identity crisis in some capacity. Nigerians, however, face an ongoing identity crisis whereby it can be difficult to conceptualize a singular Nigerian identity. Yet herein lies the value of understanding colonial influence on Nigerian identity: Islam and Modern Nationalism are so generationally ingrained that these two competing ideologies supersede all other social cleavages on a national scale. Nigeria’s north/south divide is a rift created as two supremely opposite regions were morphed into two distinct colonies and then abruptly joined together. As northerners of different ethnicities were coalesced into Northern Nigeria, Islam became the uniting identity category that grew in importance as the effects of colonial neglect grew more pronounced. On balance, the institutionalization of hundreds of groups of southerners as a result of a loss of traditional kingship placed southerners in colonial positions and institutions that would eventually lead to pan-Nigerianism. Rather than the single group counter-culture n ationalism prevalent in many states, Nigerians instead face a unique challenge as the ethnic, religious, and culture cleavages of several hundred groups have been consolidated and generalized into a north/south regional divide. As a result of direct rule through the deconstruction of kingship in the south and as a result of indirect rule and isolation of kingship in the north, Nigerians’ identities have been ideologically blended, but geographically placed into contention.
The Long Brexit: Postwar British Euroscepticism
(Rice University, 2018) Ratnoff, David; Caldwell, Peter C.
The 2016 British vote to exit the European Union (“Brexit”), was greeted with global dismay as the very project of Europe was called into question. The phenomenon of Euroscepticism in postwar European politics has been regarded as a function of party politics. Existing frameworks of Euroscepticism, which have regarded it as a fringe political belief, did not hold up in the British case. Periodicals, political speeches, party literature, and government documents were used to examine how British politicians across the ideological spectrum described the country’s role in Europe. Chronicling how new political actors honed and refined Eurosceptic arguments, the conversion of European integration from a technocratic to a domestic political issue was documented. The decision to hold the 2016 referendum resulted from the ways that political parties discussed Europe at different stages of EU integration. Similarly, contradictory arguments that activated diverse groups of voters to unite against Europe and David Cameron’s inability to move his party beyond the issue of Europe carried Eurosceptics to success in the polls.

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