Jonathan Garcia and Dr. Susan Howe, Department of English When we studied modern American poets in Dr. Howe’s Poetry 319 class, I wondered if there were also Salvadoran-American poets out there, as both my parents immigrated to the U.S. from El Salvador in the 1980s, fleeing a bloody civil war. At the same time I […]
Search Results for: political
Millenniums and Messiahs: Literature Review in Messianic Religions in context of the Hmong Diaspora
John Whitton and Dr. Jacob Hickman, Department of Anthropology Initially, the research proposed consisted of two sections constituting the last two semesters of my undergraduate education. The first included collecting published sources regarding millenarianism and messianism within the larger global context and organizing them into a database. The second included systematically cataloging each source in the database for […]
Growth and Government Transfers
Benjamin Tengelsen and Dr. Richard Evans, Department of Economics Government transfers to households take many forms, including unemployment benefits, food stamps, social security, and cash handouts to households to stimulate consumption. Generally, these transfer programs act as “automatic stabilizers” due to the way they naturally increase (decrease) when economies are weak (strong). Often policy-makers suggest increasing these programs beyond […]
Federalism Dataset
Nicole Taylor and Dr. Joel Selway, Department of Political Science Comparative politics, the study of government structures around the world, is a relatively new field, and the study of federalism is even more recent. Studies are typically conducted by selecting two or three countries and comparing their government structures using qualitative measures or by studying a large sample […]
Credibility and Accountability: The Effect of Publication on NGO Willingness to be Evaluated
Megan Spencer and Dr. Michael Findley, Department of Political Science Abstract In today’s NGO environment, evaluations are frequent, but NGOs rarely have outsider expectations on which to base their assessments. Thus, NGOs have strong incentives to make their evaluations strictly contextual. Consequently, NGO stakeholders—donors, beneficiaries, and local government officials—have little information as to the quality of a given organization […]
Prophets, Scripts, and Nations: Hmong Religious and Ethnonational Borders in Northern Thailand
Belinda Ramirez and Dr. Jacob Hickman, Department of Anthropology As a sociocultural anthropology major, my ORCA project entailed spending three months on an ethnographic study. I chose to conduct this study in northern Thailand among the Hmong, a small hill tribe ethnic group. During my stay in a Hmong community near Pua, Nan Province, I […]
A Little Help for My Friends: Do Foreign Aid Donors Reject NGOs in Favor of their Blatantly Corrupt Allies?
Nicholas Jones and Dr. Darren Hawkins, Department of Political Science Our research examines whether donor countries care about the quality of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) when giving foreign aid to poor countries. When donor states give foreign aid to recipient states, such the US giving foreign aid to Uganda, the donor states must choose what is […]
Buzzwords without Borders: Three Field Experiments in Individual Donation Behavior
Scott Jackson and Dr. Joshua Gubler, Department of Political Science In 2009, the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that over the preceding twelve months, 67% of Americans “contributed to a charity or non-profit organization other than their place of worship” (Smith et al., 2009). The study also found that 11% of Internet users […]
To Act and Not be Acted Upon: A Look at State-building in Bosnia
Kurt Hepler and Dr. Nicholas Wheeler, Department of Political Science Troubling Times in Bosnia and Herzegovina In the wake of the brutal wars between Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks following the breakup of former Yugoslavia, many international organizations (IOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) poured into Bosnia and Herzegovina. These organizations were tasked with helping the country […]
Short-Distance Cultural Remittances of Shakti among Domestic Workers in Vizag, India
Kirk Hepburn and Dr. Charles Nuckolls, Department of Anthropology The project under question has taken turns dramatic enough to make it nearly unrecognizable and its title almost entirely inapplicable. Problems, faced early in research but insurmountable, make it necessary that the collected data be used for purposes beside my original intent. While I originally planned […]