Rice Undergraduate Theses
This collection features undergraduate theses written by undergraduates at Rice University. Copyright remains with the author.
If you are interested in making your honors thesis available through RDSA, please see Open Invitation to Undergraduates and talk with your adviser. Please contact Lisa Spiro, Executive Director, Digital Scholarship Services, at lspiro[at]rice[dot]edu with any questions.
Recent Submissions
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Critical Theory, Normativity, and Catastrophe: A Critique of Amy Allen’s Metanormative Contextualism
(2020-05)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 ... -
Glacially-controlled variations in the biological pump of the Ross Sea in the Mid-to-Late Pliocene
(2020-05)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 ... -
Competing Claims: An Analysis of References to the Past Made to Justify Ownership of the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba
(2019-05)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 ... -
Empathetic Blame: Moral Evaluation in the Face of Luck
(2020-05)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 ... -
Public Libraries as Social Infrastructure in Disaster Resilience and Recovery: Houston Libraries and Hurricane Harvey
(2020-05)Current work in the social sciences highlights social infrastructure and its role in communities, especially in cases of disaster resilience and recovery. This study furthers that body of work by examining the role of ... -
A Crisis of People or Politics? : Revisiting the Impact of Narrative Framing of Immigration in German Newspapers in 2018
(2019-05)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, ... -
Early Campaign Contact and Voter Turnout in the 2018 Texas State Senate District 6 Special Election
(2019-04)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 ... -
A Phenomenological Critique of Irene McMullin's Formulation of Heideggerian Temporality
(2019)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 ... -
The Long Brexit: Postwar British Euroscepticism
(2018)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 ... -
The Call of Higher Duty: How the Economy of Patriotism Extends from Real Civilians to Virtual Soldiers
(2017)This project explores how military first-person shooter videogames serve as cultural artifacts grounded within the economy of patriotism. Essentially, the economy of patriotism is the system of exchange in which civilians ... -
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
(2015)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 ... -
Mercy through the Ages: A Glance into the Window of Paradise - A Study of Surah al-Rahman with Six Exegeses, Dating from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century
(2011)This paper explores the distinctions in interpretation of surah al-Rahman of the Holy Qur’an based on the exegeses of al-Tabari, al-Huwwari, al-Qushayri, al-Qurtubi, al-Jalalayn, and al-Maraghi. These commentaries range ...
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