Showing 511 - 520 of 583 Items
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Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Zoë Ellis Wilson
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
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Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Owen Templeton Tuck
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
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Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Luca Ostertag-Hill
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Rohini Kurup
Access: Open access
- In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration decided that suspected terrorists and those determined to have aided terrorists would be detained and classified as “enemy combatants.” This was a largely new category of prisoners who were neither prisoners of war protected under international law nor civilians. They included noncitizens and citizens—those captured on foreign battlefields and on American soil. They would be detained by the United States, held indefinitely without charge or access to a lawyer, and subject to trial by military commission. The administration’s enemy combatant policies were based on a theory of inherent executive power—that the Constitution gave the president vast and exclusive powers, which allowed him to act unilaterally without Congressional interference or judicial review. This thesis charts the development of and challenges to the enemy combatant policies to understand how they were conceived and what their implications are to the American political system. I argue that by appealing to a theory of inherent executive power to create the policies, the administration subverted traditional checks on presidential power and undermined the rule of law. Ultimately, the dismantling of some of the enemy combatant policies, largely a result of court rulings that challenged the administration’s premise of power, signified a reining in of executive authority. Yet, many aspects of the administration’s counterterrorism apparatus remained past Bush’s years in the White House, leaving a legacy of expanded presidential power for future presidents.
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- Restriction End Date: 2025-06-01
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Boris S. Dimitrov
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Diego Rafael Grossmann
Access: Open access
- The Colombo-Venezuelan Border Through the Lens of the Colombian Press examines the dominant Colombian press coverage of crises of sovereignty at the Colombo-Venezuelan border, Venezuelan migration, and the February 2019 attempt to introduce humanitarian aid into Venezuela, as seen in El Espectador and El Tiempo’s coverage from the period of August 2018-November 2019. Through theories of nations and power, this thesis reveals the divergent editorial lines and dominant narratives within each newspaper’s construction of the relation between the Colombian and Venezuelan nations, states, and their people. The study details how both newspapers construct different “truths” through divergent constructions of similar events in a manner coherent with the ideological affinities and conceptions of Colombian national identity held by their respective audiences and editorial leadership, constrained further by economic factors. The thesis is split into three main chapters. Chapter 1 addresses the construction of Colombian nationhood rooted in militarism and the presentation of the Colombian state as a protector in El Tiempo’s coverage concerning binational tensions at the border. Chapter 2 traces the coverage regarding Venezuelan migration to Colombia within El Espectador, detailing the conception of national identity rooted in liberal-democratic values that the newspaper constructs and appeals to. Chapter 3 considers both newspaper’s coverage of the attempt to introduce humanitarian aid into Venezuela in 2019. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the discursive actor––and construction––of Venezuela permits the “imagining” of the Colombian nation, a project framed through a discussion of the Colombian conflict and official commitments to multiculturalism by the Colombian state.
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- Restriction End Date: 2026-06-01
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Kodie R Garza
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Ian Ward
Access: Open access
- Hans-Georg Gadamer’s myriad contributions to the continental philosophical tradition have been well documented, but his influence on North American intellectual life has gone largely gone unrecognized. This paper attempts to fill that gap, using primary and secondary source material to document Gadamer’s scholarly activities in the United States and Canada between 1968 and 1986. The paper also evaluates Gadamer’s influence using detailed accounts of “hermeneutic encounters” that occurred between Gadamer and four notable North American philosophers: Richard Palmer, Paul de Man, Charles Taylor, and Richard Rorty. Through these accounts, this paper argues that Gadamer made lasting contributions to ongoing debates in the humanities about the nature of literary interpretation, the social sciences, and analytic philosophy. Finally, the paper explores the philosophical and historiological possibilities that Gadamer’s hermeneutics opens up for intellectual history more broadly, especially in the field of reception history. Building on Gadamer’s own hermeneutics and Hans-Robert Jauss’s reception aesthetics, it develops the concept of the “encounter” as the starting point of a more hermeneutically-sensitive approach to intellectual history.
Date: 2019-01-01
Creator: Anne Fraser Gregory
Access: Open access
- The landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954, and its subsequent implementation, offer an essential question: Are segregated schools inherently evil, and is integration the only solution to unequal education? The statistics that illustrate the effects of segregated schooling are indeed staggering. According to a 2016 Government Accountability Office study, the number of schools segregated along racial and economic lines doubled between 2000 and 2013. In New York City, the achievement gap between Black and white students has continued to grow. In 2018, the National Assessment of Achievement Progress reported that 48 percent of white fourth-graders were proficient in math, while only 16 percent of black students met the standard. With a gap of 32 percentage points—growing 5 points since 2015—Black children in New York are consistently behind their white peers in academics. Sixty years ago, New York's Black and Latino parents parents grappled with this same issue as they fought to desegregate the city’s schools. This Honors Project will discuss segregated schooling in New York City during the 1950s and 60s, and the actors who fought to disrupt the system. Throughout this work, I will attempt to illustrate the power of community in New York City, for both good and evil, for equality and bigotry. Parents—Black, white, and Puerto Rican—function as key players in this story, as they continually fought local and state Boards to access the education they believed to be rightfully theirs and their children’s. I will also assert the notion that segregation was not solely a Southern issue: the similarities between the fight for school integration in both North and South are striking, and highlight the far reaches of prejudice in the nation both then and now. Most importantly, I argue that unequal education may not be solved by integration alone, and that believing in integration as the only viable option perpetuates the incorrect notion that children of color require proximity to white students in order to be academically successful.
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: William Allen
Access: Open access
- Central pattern generators (CPGs) are neural circuits whose component neurons possess intrinsic properties and synaptic connections that allow them to generate rhythmic motor outputs in the absence of descending inputs. The cardiac ganglion (CG) is a nine-cell CPG located in the American lobster, Homarus americanus. Stretch of the myocardium feeds back to the CG through mechano-sensitive dendrites and is thought to play a role in maintaining regularity in the beating pattern of the heart. The novel peptide AMGSEFLamide has been observed to induce irregular beating patterns when applied at high concentrations. This study investigated the interaction between stretch-related feedback and AMGSEFLamide modulation in generating irregular beating patterns in the whole heart of Homarus americanus. It was hypothesized that greater longitudinal stretch of the heart would result in greater regularity in the instantaneous beat frequency, based on previous findings that stretch-sensitive dendrites play a role in the regulation of the heartbeat. Furthermore, it was predicted that the elimination of stretch feedback via deafferentation of the heart would augment the irregularity induced by AMGSEFLamide. Data showed significantly increased irregularity in beating in response to 10-6 M AMGSEFLamide application. Longitudinal stretch did not reliably alter baseline variability in frequency, nor did it influence the modulatory effect of AMGSEFLamide. Deafferentation did not significantly alter baseline irregularity. Deafferented preparations did exhibit a trend of responding to AMGSEFLamide with a greater percent increase in irregularity compared to when afferents were intact, suggesting a potential role of stretch-stabilization in response to modulatory perturbations in the Homarus heart.