All Abstracts

 The thrust of migration from the British-colonized Caribbean to America can be dated to the early twentieth century but accelerated from 1964 with the removal of country quotas. Jamaicans represent the largest number of British Caribbean migrants to the United States and possess the most disti...

This study examines the response of the Jonathan administration to the 2014 kidnapping of 276 girls in Chibok, Nigeria. This study was designed to show the relationship between gender policy, security, and state-based patriarchy and has a time frame of between April 2014 and May 2015. This study ana...

Black music is a term that describes music that is produced or inspired by Black people. Black music, such as blues, jazz, soul, and rhythm & blues, explores Black pain. Black women singer-songwriters have shared trauma and presented their experiences of Black womanhood by presenting and politic...

Television is often used to promote dominant ideologies and to define social and cultural norms and expectations. Reality television has been has been singled out by scholars and critics because its supposedly “real” content is in fact intentionally structured and presented to emphasize ideologi...

The US has been the world leader in incarceration rates for more than four decades and continues to populate prisons with more inmates each year. As sentencing laws have become harsher and more extensive, the prison population has reached unprecedented heights with no foresight of future decline. Th...

Black women are often underrepresented and marginalized in the workplace. Black women often deal with the double edged sword of both their race and gender, which can impact their work and their ability to move up the corporate ladder. There are currently no black women CEOs among the Fortune 500 com...

Recently, Community Mental Health initiatives have been brought to the forefront due to China’s government health policies lagging on the professionalism, normalization, and effectiveness of mental health programs. The purpose of this study is to examine the current state of China’s Mental Healt...

I will contextualize my thesis collection within the literature on psycholigical responses to color, specifically the impact of color on mood. Psychological responses should not be confused with emotional responses or color symbolism. Color, along with sound and light, can be used in art as a vehicl...

Maternal mortality is a widely-used indicator of the political, social, economic and cultural landscape of a country. This project investigates the effects of selected macroeconomic drivers of maternal mortality in the time periods 2000-2001 and 2013-2014. Ordinary least squares regression is used t...

Eritreans are the third largest refugee group arriving to Europe by boat. The glaring difference in life chances, rights and privileges among Eritrean political elites and the rest of the population has triggered a ravenous desire for young Eritreans to seek better opportunities and rights in exile....

There is a significant gap in social scientific knowledge about suicide amongst black women. Existing research on this topic is limited and relegated to rigid frameworks of thought based on assumptions of pathology and trauma. This project seeks to interpret the phenomenological implications of suic...

Black women have been voting at rates above 85% in presidential elections since 1972 which begs the question: what have they seen that others have not? Building on applied standpoint epistemology theory, Black women’s acceptance of a presidential candidate is examined as a leading indicator of the...

Random matrix theory is a major branch of contemporary mathematics. With origins in nuclear physics and statistics, random matrices have numerous applications in areas as diverse as real-time signal processing, civil engineering, combinatorics and number theory. The notion of rigid motion in Euclide...

According to a 2017 Atlanta Journal Consitution article, "The Atlanta area is the 9th largest statistical area in the country. The region grew by 1.6% from 2015-2016..." This project examines the impact of that growth on the environment. The results of the a previous project showed that urbanization...

Informed by conflict theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, Peggy McIntosh’s theory of White Privilege, W.E.B. DuBois' notion of double-conciousness and William Cross’ model of racial identity development, this qualitative and quantitative research project seeks to investig...

Neisseria gonorrhoeae, a pathogenic sexually-transmitted bacterium, is becoming untreatable due to increased antibiotic resistance (AR). Related commensal Neisseria bacteria are non-pathogenic and are often found in the human oral and nasopharynx, but they are rarely studied. We seek (1) to characte...

This project explores the differences between education systems in China and the  United States, including each system's advantages and disadvantages. The materials used to carry out this study include news articles and websites. By focusing on students' daily lives, I will show how and why the...

This project examines the impact of the gender diversity on corporate boards on business performance for US S&P 500 firms. Corporate performance is measured by market capitalization, earnings per share, revenue and total return. Gender diversity is defined as the total number of women on a firm�...

Given the importance of entrepreneurship and innovation (E&I) for economic growth, the question of what stimulates them is imperative. Recent research has focused on business training programs as a main driving force. However, these programs have been shown to have mixed effectiveness. Therefore, it...

Graph theory is the study of connections. There are many applications of graph theory to other fields. In this project, we analyze different properties of graphs that imply the existence of certain sets of cycles in graphs. In particular, we investigate pairs of subgraphs that must be forbidden to i...

Patrice Brown, a curvy paraprofessional and rising Internet celebrity known as #TeacherBae, emerged in September 2016. She was both praised and chastised for her figure and her form fitting work attire. Pop culture articles about #TeacherBae opened a larger conversation about Black women’s bodies ...

As a civil rights activist, Ruby Hurley showcased her progressive thinking while with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). We call her progressive thought "radical" because women, especially black women during the forties and fifties, were encouraged to govern them...

Within this research, Computational Commutative Algebra was used to solve a common Graph Theory problem known as three colorability. A special kind of generator for the ideals of a polynomial ring in n-variables R[x1, x2, ... , xn] were studied. These generators are called Gröbner bases, which are ...

Beauty and Reason is a collection of seven mixed-media sculptures in the form of a uterus. I use the form of the uterus because of the theme of my work is women.Each uterus has its own theme and thought-provoking imagery about the decisions we make in our daily lives to achieve our desires...

Within the “Talented Tenth,” Du Bois explores the means through which issues of racism, classism, and other systems/institutions of power can be effectively addressed. Du Bois argues that it is through the cultivation and sustainment of those deemed as the top ten percent most capable and gifted...

On nearly every surface and inside almost every organism, there are millions of tiny microbes that are invisible to the naked eye. Some of these microbes, known as symbionts, live in symbiosis or within other organisms. These tiny microbes include bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Honeybees (Apis mellif...

Spectroscopy is used to investigate how matter, such as atoms and molecules, interacts with light. Spectroscopy is also one of the most effective ways to study the behavior and structure of molecules. Conventional spectroscopy is able to gather information for most simple molecules. However, some mo...

HIV is a public health problem in the United States which disproportionately impacts racial minorities. Current studies highlight the social determinants of health (SES, media, social stigma, etc.) on the spread of HIV. This study investigated media, HIV-related stigma, and perceived risk of HIV con...

In the Dominican Republic, there are remnants of oppression and atrocious discrimination which have detrimentally halted the attainment of equality for Afro-Latina women. This research explores the pattern of systemic femicide and gender violence which pre-date the 21st century as they have been per...

This research compares the Mit’a system, a communal pre-colonial migration, the exploitative colonial migration, and today’s criminalized coerced migration. I compare characteristics such as source of compulsion, ownership of labor and resources, and legality. Under the Inca Empire, conquered pe...