On June 19, 2021, a mural was unveiled in Galveston, TX titled Absolute Equality. It depicts several scenes representative of enslavement and freedom and it is located at the former site of the Union Army Headquarters and where U.S. Gen. Granger read the orders that abolished America’s last vestige of slavery. The mural was unveiled with effervescent ...

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 ...

The mechanisms of deep-focus earthquakes (DFEQs)—those between 350 and 700 km depth—remain poorly understood due to our inability to directly measure their fault properties in situ. One potential explanation for DFEQ nucleation is the transformational faulting hypothesis, which theorizes mineral transformations initiate the faults. To analyze these ...

Drone technology and the high resolution datasets it enables stand to revolutionize our understanding of the Earth’s surface. This research is Houston specific, and studies how drones can be used to systematically collect photogrammic data to detect environmental changes, and how that data is valuable for flood planning purposes. This data is the ...

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 ...

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

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 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 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: ...