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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Orgullo Crítico: An Anti-Capitalist Approach To Pride In Spain And The United States
(2021-05)Every June, many people around the world come together to celebrate queer identities at various state-sponsored Pride events. However, given the infiltration of rainbow capitalism in mainstream Pride movements, many radical leftists within the queer community have begun to organize anti-capitalist "Critical Pride" protests. In this thesis, I trace ... -
The Impacts of Concrete on pH and Calcium Concentration in Houston’s Bayous
(2021-05)As the human population grows, so does the percentage of people living in urban areas. This means that an increasing amount of landmass must be used for urban infrastructure and housing to accommodate a greater number of people. The environmental impacts of urbanization are not completely understood. However, one important aspect that may be impacted ... -
Affection: Essays on Affect, Empathy, and the Politics of Feeling
(2021-05)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 ... -
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 Amy Allen’s position of metanormative contextualism as described in her 2016 work, "The End of Progress." I first consider Allen’s ... -
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 Ross Sea and the adjacent West Antarctic Ice Sheet exert significant influence on global climate through their roles in carbon cycle ... -
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 formal property in 2006. Some politicians, particularly members of Spain’s Socialist party, the PSOE, dispute the law that allowed ... -
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 luck to expose the inadequacy of standard intuitions about what's required to blame another. Proposed solutions to these issues, ... -
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 public libraries in flooding recovery -
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, they showed a shift: the refugee crisis was initially described as a humanitarian issue that transcended boundaries; by the ... -
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 voting has been questioned in the literature. EIP voting has, however, changed the way in which campaigns are run (Burden et al 2014; ... -
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 seminal texts, I will contextualize the disagreement between Heidegger and Levinas to Irene McMullin’s Time and the Shared World: ... -
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 regarded as a function of party politics. Existing frameworks of Euroscepticism, which have regarded it as a fringe political belief, ... -
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 are attempting to repay patriotic indebtedness that is enabled by perceptions of soldierly sacrifice, that forces conformity to ... -
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 to truly understand Nigeria’s complex landscapes, one has to understand the evolution of complex national identities. As modern ... -
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 in time period from the late ninth century to the late twentieth century and are also representative of different modes of thought, ...
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