Honors Projects

Showing 1 - 3 of 3 Items

“The Spirit of Turbulence”: East Indian Political Imaginaries in Early 20th Century British Guiana

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Faria A Nasruddin

Access: Open access

After the abolition of slavery, the Colonial Office instituted an indentured labor scheme that lasted from 1838 to 1917, in which they brought East Indians to the plantation colonies as laborers under five year contracts. Due to the planter class’ desire for permanent sources of labor in British Guiana, the Colonial Government incentivized East Indians to permanently settle. East Indians thus dominated the British Guiana’s agricultural landscape and became the single largest ethnicity in the Colony by 1920. This thesis explores the early negotiations of the meaning of diaspora and diasporic citizenship for East Indians in British Guiana. They comprised a diverse conglomerate of different socio-economic positions: agricultural estate laborers, village residents, and middle-class business professionals. Each socioeconomic group had a different lived experience in the colony and different outlook on what it meant to be a creole-born East Indian. This thesis traces the multiple and contingent ideas of citizenship and nationality that were circulating at the time. Against a backdrop of changing imperial politics that promoted modernity and the discourse of the nation, East Indian visions centered around how to construct permanence, and negotiate belonging. By drawing on colonial documentation–local reports, commission transcripts, personal correspondence–and documentation produced by East Indians–memorandums, speeches, and books–this thesis ultimately argues that East Indians came to view culture as integral to their self-worth and definitions of place within the imperial system. Culture thus became the primary lens to negotiate the various meaning of citizenship and place in the imperial-national moment.


The experience of crunch in the video games industry amongst current and aspiring developers

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Radu Ioan Stochita

Access: Open access

The video games industry relies on crunch - overworking the developers, usually towards the end of the project in order to meet a required deadline. In this paper, I analyze the different relationships that aspiring and current game developers have with the games industry and how they position themselves when it comes to crunch. Passion is a major component of people's desire to join the games' industry, later being used to justify one's need of staying overtime: "Since I am passionate about video games, it did not feel like work at all." Other aspiring or current developers are more skeptical when it comes to crunch and are developing secondary plans, either to quit the industry, join labor unions or push for better working conditions.


How the Caregiver Learns to Care: Institutional, Resource, and Emotional Tensions Among Sexual Assault Support Staff

Date: 2025-01-01

Creator: Hanna Cha

Access: Open access

This study examines the institutional and emotional dynamics within a multidisciplinary team that consists of law enforcement (LE), the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), and sexual assault support staff who handle child sexual abuse cases. Employees interpret trauma differently depending on the organizational framework they operate within. The way professionals construct trauma shapes caregivers’ outlook on the process and ultimately affects how they care for their children. While LE and DHHS prioritize legal compliance, the sexual assault support staff advocate for trauma-informed care. Using semi-structured interviews with seven sexual assault support staff members who identified as women or non-binary, this research explores the way they manage the gendered burden of emotional labor, the systemic undervaluation of trauma-informed practices, and the emotional challenges caregivers face in supporting child survivors. Findings show the friction between the multidisciplinary team, emphasizing the need for integrated trauma-informed training and community-based support systems for caregivers.