Student Work Showcase
Senior Capstones
American Studies Program
Class of 2009
Maria Alexander
Honors Thesis
School Choice in Washington D.C.:
Oversight Policies and Practices for Charter Schools and Vouchers
The Washington, D.C. public schools are often ranked last on national surveys of academic achievement and graduation rates. In order to expand educational opportunities for students in D.C., policymakers on the local and federal level have implemented two school choice programs in the district: charter schools and vouchers. This paper evaluates the oversight practices of these two programs by comparing information from the regulatory organizations themselves and reports from the Government Accountability Office. I will argue that the lack of uniform standards and failure to enforce stated regulations in the voucher program have created a financially and ethically irresponsible program that must be reformed. Furthermore, the differences in the regulation and oversight of participating voucher schools as compared to charter schools and traditional public schools represent an unsubstantiated faith in the superior quality of private education that must be addressed.
Gregory Chambers
Senior Special Project
Putting (Some of) the Pieces Together: A Memoir
This project reflects the author's exploration of various aspects of his life which inform his perspectives as well as his interactions with others. The memoir ranges in chronology from ages four through twenty-one and addresses his experiences with religion, race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality in New England. Told in vignettes, the memoir concerns growing up as a queer/gay (upper) middle class Jamaican-American Catholic from Connecticut and how and when those identities function and some of the ways they overlap and intersect—as well as when they apparently don't or cannot easily do so. Essays are also included which advance the potential of artistry and disidentification as distinct from what he sees as "calcifying," religious mysticism as well as a demonstration of the tactical use of identity to propagate anti-racist and anti-heterosexist memes.
Ariel Davis
Senior Special Project
Behind English-Only Education:
Understanding and Assessing the Implications of California’s Proposition 227
For my Senior Capstone Project, I examine current education policies pertinent to language-minority immigrant students in California’s public schools. In focusing on Proposition 227, the 1998 initiative aimed at dismantling existing bilingual education and replacing it with “English Only” instruction, I suggest that the ideology underlying the two conflicting approaches to language acquisition have far-reaching implications. At the crux of the socially and politically charged debate lies fundamental differences regarding how policy makers and the public believe “outsiders” should learn what it means to be American and what constitutes success or “making it” in America. I relate these two approached to language acquisition, Bilingual/Multicultural Education vs. English-Only Instruction to concepts of acculturation and assimilation, respectively.
Drawing upon case studies, scholarly works, and personal interviews that I conducted with educators at Eliot Pearson Children’s School, I assess the effect that such policies have on immigrant students' identity. Specifically, I address how the use of English-Only instruction, the pedagogical basis of Proposition 227, shapes individual students’ self-esteem and informs upon their scholastic achievement and prospects for social mobility.
Kristen Barbara Dorsey
Honors Thesis
Keep the Fire Burning: Preserving the Chickasaw Culture and a proposal for Chickasaw Designs and the Chickasaw Culture Metal Apprentice Program
In this thesis project, I have created a Chickasaw cultural and community-based entrepreneurial venture, which can potentially aid in the transmission and preservation of Chickasaw artistic traditions. In this paper preceding my business plan, I argue for the need for a program such as the one I have developed in order to offer one solution out of many to the under-representation of Native American Southeastern Art within the Native American art market. I frame this argument by examining the history of the Chickasaw Nation and how historical events have contributed to the repression of many aspects within the Chickasaw culture for many Chickasaw citizens. My focus is on my own tribal affiliation; however, the Chickasaw Nation can function as a case study for causes leading to, and effects of, the imbalanced representation of Southwestern Native culture versus Southeastern Native culture within the Native American art market today.
Mara Gittleman
Honors Thesis
The Role of Urban Agriculture
in Environmental and Social Sustainability:
Case Study of Boston
Food is at the center of many cultures, with everything from gathering around the dinner table with friends and family, to the traditional foods of one’s heritage, to the customary dishes served at holidays. However, due to the modern-day abundances of processed and prepared foods in grocery stores and fast food restaurants, a large percentage of Americans have forgotten the art of cooking and the time-honored practice of eating a home-cooked meal at the dinner table. We are far removed from where our food comes from, and this is inflicting enormous tolls on our climate, public health, and environment. With exponential world population growth expected to reach nine billion by 2050, our current agricultural system will not be able to sustain us. Twenty percent of the fossil fuel used in the United States as a whole goes toward food production, and while the U.S. produces a surplus of food annually, over 35.5 million people in the country are food insecure (Pirog 2005 and Boston Medical Center 2008).
Community gardens mitigate many of those disparities by increasing access to nutritious fresh produce and green space. Boston has had a tumultuous history of food distribution and local food production, and a study of how that manifests itself today in the spatial distributions of community gardens and affordable, varied, fresh groceries would show how successful Boston has been at overcoming its previous glaring food gap. For this study, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software was used to map community gardens, large supermarkets, small grocery stores, specialty grocery stores, and convenience shops within the context of local socioeconomics to identify any areas of Boston that can be classified as “food insecure.” Then the numerical data from this was used to analyze significant disparities in access to food between racial and socioeconomic demographics with several remarkable and grim results, including that the top 25% communities most vulnerable to food insecurity have more community gardens than convenience stores, showing a distinct response to a lack of affordable, healthy food.
Mikey Goralnik
Honors Thesis
Live and Direct:
The Impact of Live Nation on Contemporary Popular Music Performance
The Reagan administration initiated an era of sweeping media deregulations that culminated in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, considered by many to be the most important piece of media policy in US history. In the wake of this broad legislative agenda, a handful of large corporate entities, the largest being California-based Live Nation, have come to directly own most of this country’s live music promotional apparatuses. While the existing literature on media deregulation and consolidation does not yet extend far enough to sufficiently address live popular music, the field’s dominating frameworks would suggest that by corporatizing and commodifying a media product, deregulation would have a decidedly negative impact on popular music performance. My research, the first that deals entirely with contemporary popular music performance, refutes that suggestion. Based on interviews with eight popular music performers on their experiences with Live Nation venues and promoters, my research characterizes the goals that popular musicians associate with their performances and arrives at a surprising consensus—that performers across the popular music spectrum feel that Live Nation does not compromise and actually enhances their ability to achieve their performance goals. My research expands the body of media deregulation theory to include popular performance, and my findings break from the ideologies that dominate the field, suggesting that live music requires a new framework and ultimately a new field of research.
Julie Kaviar
Senior Special Project
Discourse on Education and Sexuality
My Senior Special Project is an examination of sex education policy in the United States, particularly the current abstinence-only sex education. Sex education began in the early 20th century, out of fear of sexually transmitted diseases as a predecessor to the dominant abstinence-only sex education most commonly found in public schools. Then, as a social backlash to the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s, federal sex education legislation was passed during the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush Jr. administrations, allocating hundreds of millions toward abstinence-only education. In addition, sex education is being justified as a public health necessity rather than being promoted as a tool for achieving educational goals—democratic and academic alike. In this paper, I pose the research on sex education policy against my experiences teaching an Experimental College course to Tufts freshmen entitled, “The Socialization of Sexuality.”
Jessie Levit-Shore
Senior Special Project
Service for All: Exploring the Need for Culturally Competent,
Community-Based Approaches to Domestic Violence Work
One in four women and one in nine men in the United States will be the victim of domestic violence during their lifetime. Abuse is a problem in every sector of American society, regardless of race, class, gender, religion, or sexuality. However, studies and statistics show us that people of color and people in the LGBT community face specific obstacles and barriers to their seeking service after an experience with domestic violence. With the culturally competent inclusion of queer communities and communities of color as a guiding principle, this project examines state and federal laws regarding domestic violence, and presents a critical analysis of two domestic violence trainings in Boston and the literature available to students at Tufts University.
Vanessa Lynskey
Senior Special Project
Young Adults, Uninsurance, and Access to Care
This project explores the ways in which young adults differ from their older counterparts, with regard to factors that influence health insurance status and access to care, in order to contextualize an analysis of proposed policy solutions and specially-designed insurance plans intended to reduce the young adult uninsurance rate. It finds that several proposals and initiatives have the potential to impact young adult uninsurance in a positive way, including the extension of the age of dependency, expansion of public programs for low-income young adults, implementation of a student insurance mandate, and targeted “young adult health plans.” By highlighting the inherent complexity in attempts to address uninsurance on a group-by-group basis, this project also aims to contribute to the body of scholarship advocating for universal healthcare coverage, which would eliminate current inequities based on age, race/ethnicity, income, and other socio-demographic variables.
Jennifer McNally
Honors Thesis
Power and Privilege in Community Schools
This study is an ethnography of the complex relationship between school and community in one full-service community school. Defined broadly, full-service community schools are schools that have a particular mission of parent and community engagement, specifically employed through one or more services to the community. By analyzing the school’s perspectives of its own role and of the assumed deficits in its surrounding community, this study determines that the specific strategies the school employs for parent and community outreach are fundamentally flawed. A Critical Race Theory and LatCrit framework inform this analysis by recognizing the centrality of race to the power dynamics within this model, specifically utilizing the concepts of Whiteness as property (Harris), Latino invisibility (Perea), and Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso). Dominant White ideas of visible parent involvement, family literacy, and language are shown to be conceptualized around notions of institutionalized racism and White supremacy. Ultimately, the community school mission and model represent a privileged hierarchical relationship between the school institution and the community, raising the question of the model’s use and movement towards urban school reform.
Kimberly Moynihan
Honors Thesis
Shifting the Gaze:
The Role of Orientalist Representations Within the US Campaign for Burma
Orientalism is not an issue of the past. Often discussed as an antiquated Western gaze used to differentiate and define the East, it continues to drive and influence many present day representations of Asians and Asian Americans. Using the US Campaign for Burma’s 2008 online video campaign, “Burma: It Can’t Wait,” as a case study, I analyze Orientalist themes such as Western supremacy and an exotic, inferior East. To illustrate these themes I select and dissect three revealing videos, Tila Tequila’s “Hot for Teacher” striptease, Ellen Page’s “Hitler PSA” and Sarah Silverman’s “Foctor” video. In an autobiographical narrative, I combine personal anecdotes with Edward Said’s theoretical framework and a historical contextualization of Burma to deconstruct how this American human rights campaign chooses to represent marginalized people.
Emily Odato
Senior Special Project
Discovering Myself: A Lifelong Journey to Locate and Come to Terms With My Identity
In this memoir, I recount events at various points throughout my life that in one way or another have influenced the development of my identity. I mainly talk about my family, friends, the trends and characteristics of various social and cultural environments I have been in, and different experiences with institutionalized education that I have had. Most of all, my memoir maps my struggles, revelations, and changes to my identity location throughout my life as a person, an Asian American, and a transracial adoptee.
Alexander Paraschos
Senior Special Project
Hold On:
A Brief History and Personal Narrative of Black Spirituals and Sacred Music
This project has both a paper and creative performance component to it. The paper gives a brief history of spirituals in the United States and provides key historical events and people that helped shape the music. Along with that, there is a personal narrative of my story and how I came to love and appreciate black spirituals and sacred music, as well as the struggles I've had with my own identity, being a white person performing this deeply personal music. The creative piece is an a cappella performance that brings together S-Factor, Essence, and the Brothers and Sisters of Kuumba (from Harvard) to make the music come to life for an audience to hear and features four speakers from the groups, each of non-African American ancestry, to speak about what the music has meant to them.
Michael Snyder
Senior Special Project
The View from the Island:
How Al Jazeera English Constructs an Imagined America
In Arabic, the word “Al Jazeera” means “the island” or “the peninsula.” It’s also the name of the first international news station based out of the Middle East, rivaling media giants like CNN International and BBC World. Despite its success and its launching of an English-language news station in 2006, Al Jazeera has come under fire by US political officials for its biased reporting and “America-hating” agenda. My paper investigates these claims of anti-Americanism by applying a critical lens towards one Al Jazeera English news magazine program called “Inside USA,” launched in the run up to the 2008 US Presidential elections. Through an analysis of television media techniques, such as narration, interviews, cinematography, editing, music and sound, and graphics production, I argue that “Inside USA” crafts a simplified narrative that pits the hardworking and virtuous American people against the greedy and power-hungry elite, who are abstracted in the form of the US government, the military, and big business. Considering the binary nature of this interpretation, I argue that the label “anti-American” does not accurately reflect the journalistic agenda of “Inside USA” nor account for the alternative journalistic lens that truly distinguishes “the View from the Island.”
Morissa Sobelson
Honors Thesis
Participation, Power, and Place:
Roots of the Community Health Center Movement
The Tufts-Delta Health Center, established in the Mississippi Delta in 1965, was the forerunner of a movement that changed the way we think about health and health care. It furthered national awareness of the failure of traditional health systems to reach marginalized populations, and showed the effectiveness of bridging public health and clinical interventions at a grassroots level. It demonstrated why race, class, and power are important determinants of health, and why community is a critical locus for health care delivery and social change. The project not only managed to initiate an empowerment-based and comprehensive approach to health care, but it did so in the context of some of the most entrenched race, class, and status segregation in the country. Through analysis of the stories and archives of health and civil rights pioneers, this thesis examines the participatory approach they took to promoting health and community empowerment at one of the nation’s first health centers in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. I use an empowerment domains framework in order to understand the application of this participatory model, sources and impacts of opposition to the center, and the ways in which these dynamics can inform contemporary health equity and reform efforts.
Emily Stone
Senior Special Project
Individual and Community-Based Childhood Obesity Interventions:
A Case Study of JP Fit
The prevalence of childhood obesity in the United States has tripled in the last thirty years, particularly among low socioeconomic communities of color. The Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center, where I started interning in September 2008, recognized childhood obesity as a significant problem within its own diverse community of patients and launched an intervention called JP Fit in the summer of 2007. My experience working with the JP Fit intervention and learning the multifaceted complications in the lives of the patients has suggested that addressing the obesity epidemic in the United States will require greater community and school involvement. I conclude that the type of clinical approach used by JP Fit would work better in a well-resourced community. In low socioeconomic communities of color, the socio-ecological model must be employed to properly design an intervention.
Brittney Taylor
Honors Thesis
Invisible Power Dynamics in White Hip-Hop Fandom
White people, with their social position at the top, hold much power that non-whites do not have, including the power of access. White people almost never have to feel as though their race will hold them back from something, even accessing other cultures. They also do not have to realize the history behind their consumption of other cultures. Though any music that can be purchased is available to all who have the means to buy it, there is an inescapable relationship and history of power when white fans consume hip-hop, a decidedly non-white form of music. Usually this power relationship is ignored or invisible, which strengthens the skewed racial dynamics of America and beyond under the façade of its erasure. Through interviews with white hip-hop fans, I investigate their relationship to the music and how their race interacts with their fandom. These interviews demonstrate how white fans tend not to see the power dynamics in their interest in an “authentically” non-white experience. Nor do they understand that the way in which consumerism associates them to this non-white world is problematic, since the association does not flow both ways. This study aims to uncover in the language of the interviews the culture of invisibility and denial ingrained in white understanding of race even as the world seemingly becomes more global, tolerant, and accepting.