Browsing Rice Undergraduate Theses by Title
Now showing items 1-20 of 26
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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 ... -
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: ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
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; ... -
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, ... -
Environmental Control in Appalachia: Politics of the Red River Gorge Dam Controversy, 1962-1975
(2022-03-30)In 1962, Congress approved the building of a dam on the Red River in Eastern Kentucky because of recurring floods affecting Powell County, Kentucky. This dam threatened a beautiful and ecologically unique part of the Red River, and, in response, in 1967 a group of environmental activists gathered together to challenge the building of this dam. After ... -
Freedom’s Archive: Slavery, Emancipation, & Reconstruction in Fort Bend County
(2022-05)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 ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
Machine Learning Detection of P-Waves in Laboratory Acoustic Emission Events to Understand Deep-Focus Earthquakes
(2022)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 ... -
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, ... -
Negotiating Mexican Foreign Policy on Cuba: Between Domestic Interests and the United States: 1959-1964
(2022-05)This thesis analyzes Mexico's foreign policy regarding Cold War era developments in Cuba and the United States' response to said policy. It finds that while Mexico oftentimes defied the anticommunist agenda the United States pushed on to Latin America during this period, it did so not as an immediate affront to the United States, but rather to keep ... -
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 ... -
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 -
Silences on the Strand: Contesting Public Memories of Slavery and Freedom in Galveston’s Civic Historical Landscape (1871-2021)
(2022-05)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 ...
