Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Fiat Money As An Empty Signifier: An Investigation On The Resemblance Between Money In Mmt And Structuralism, Xiangchong Meng

Senior Projects Spring 2024

This article investigates on the resemblance between structuralism and credit money with money creation in modern monetary theory (MMT) and post-Keynesian theories. Keynes, whom MMT takes up for its theoretical foundation, considers fiat money to be firstly a debt, a promise exchangeable for the same financial value, because it does not have any intrinsic value, but is generated only from the credit of government. The ranking of credibility of money leads to the taxonomy of money in the form of a money pyramid: the money issued by the government (fiat currency) with the most credibility, then money lent by banks, …

A Revised Socialism: Concerning Race, Colonial Violence, And Class, Gray E. Bougher

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Beyond The Bottom Line: Unionization In The Nonprofit Sector, Grace M. Brody

Senior Projects Spring 2024

My argument entails broadening the scope of the labor union model in order to apply it to nonprofits. Currently, many unions have been approaching unionization in nonprofits as if it were any other workplace. Specifically, unions are upholding the model of prioritizing monetary, short-term gains. I believe that this is not a sustainable model and will not bring about the significant, long-lasting change that nonprofit workers need to experience. Nonprofit workers experience issues that are more structural in nature, thus monetary union strategy is less effective.

Thinking Of Western Influence: Elite Chinese Women’S Response From 1880s To 1920s, Pin-Shan Lai

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Through this project, I aim to look at elite Chinese women’s work in response to Western influences. During the 1800s to 1900s, Western ideology and social customs began to spread into China. With the return of Western-educated Chinese scholars, the tension between local communities’ values and the West, a foreign value diverse from the local community, increases. By examining Chang Yu-i’s memoir, Bound Feet and Western Dress, and the work of He Yin Zhen, an anarchist feminist at the time, I will look into how the elite group in China responded to the Western influence around them. Ultimately, the paper …

The Conservative Interest In American Higher Education: From Vietnam To Palestine, Alexandra Pearl Mulvey

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Using The Trolley Dilemma And The Implications Of Anxiety To Look At How Interpersonal Relationships Impact Moral Decision-Making, Daniella Dsouza Michaeli

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Personal connections that are established with interpersonal relationships have an impact on moral decision-making. This concept will be tested when considering the trolley dilemma archetype. The trolley dilemma presents a situation where an individual is prompted to choose between a series of options that will save one party yet cause the death or injury of another. The present study will use the trolley dilemma to test whether participants are more likely to make a prosocial decision than a self-serving decision when put in a predicament that forces them to choose between their interests and the greater good of society. To …

Baseball Diplomacy: America’S Favorite Pastime As A Tool Of Soft Power In Cuba And The Dominican Republic, Michael Alexander Kurlan

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Mental Health Stigmas In Formerly Incarcerated Individuals And The Impact Of Solitary Confinement On Their Attitudes Toward Seeking Treatment, Leyli Kangarloo-Foroutan

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Stigmas around mental health include both an individual’s stigmas, as well as public stigmas, both of which impact whether or not an individual seeks treatment for their mental health problems. These attitudes toward mental healthcare translate into prison settings as well, where individuals are often afraid to seek treatment because of the way in which they could be stigmatized by the staff and other incarcerated individuals. Between the fear around how they might be perceived if others find out they are getting treatment for their mental health and the lack of reliable and efficient healthcare resources in correctional facilities, individuals …

Beyond Translation: A Critical Comparison Between English Renditions Of The Holy Qur’An, Mohamad Eisa

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

Chasing The Dream: The American Dream Narrative, Motivations, And Well-Being Among First-And Second-Generation Caribbean Immigrants, Joanna Elizabeth Jones

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Abstract

This study explored the relationship between parental endorsement of the American Dream on young adults’ academic motivations and psychological well-being, with a focus on first- and second-generation Caribbean immigrants. A review of the literature suggests that many immigrant populations in the United States view it as the land of opportunity and upward mobility. These populations also may put pressure on themselves and/or their children to succeed in these ways. For example, Wallace (2023) found that Caribbean students in New York City can identify with the model minority stereotype of academic achievement, and children of Black immigrant parents receive an …

A Hitchhiker's Guide To Psychologically Informed Physical Therapy, Asher S. Wright

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Almost a decade and a half ago, the terms “psychologically informed practice” and “psychologically informed physical therapy” entered the academic world. The latter is a subset of the former, and both are imperatively new and important methods of practicing healthcare that bolster and enhance a world that has learned that there are better ways to care for each other – a way that combines physical care and psychological care into one. A review of critical literature from its genesis to its current standing on the stage of empirical study will serve to guide and enlighten any person on nearly everything …

Breath Of Forgetfulness: Respiratory Effects Of Memory Suppression, Luka Jijieshvili

Senior Projects Spring 2024

When confronted with unwanted memories, individuals engage in a cascade of interconnected cognitive, neurological, and physiological responses. While the cognitive and neurologic effects of memory suppression have been well-studied, the physiological responses, most notably respiration, and associated neural correlates remain relatively unexplored. A total of 18 participants underwent the Think No-Think (TNT) paradigm and had their physiological data, specifically respiration rate and depth, collected using a respiration belt. We aimed to observe how this measure changed when they tried to suppress unwanted memories. We successfully replicated key behavioral findings from the standard TNT paradigm. While we did not observe differences …

Angry Men Versus Happy Women: A Study Of Facial Expression Bias In Young Adults And Preschool Children, Adi David

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Angry-male/happy-female bias is the tendency for people to perceive male faces as angry and female faces as happy. Previous research has shown this bias in adults with both stimulus-driven face tasks and stereotype-driven character tasks. The main goal of the current study was twofold. The first part was to further investigate what is underlining this bias in adults, by replicating previous studies. In particular, the study focuses on whether this bias is due to top-down or bottom-up processing. The second part of the goal was to create a method design that would be able to test young children for this …

Don't Ban This Project, Tristan H. Timpone

Senior Projects Spring 2024

On June 7th, 2023, the Joe Biden Administration announced that they would appoint an anti-banned book coordinator for the Department of Education to inform school districts that removing certain books would violate federal civil laws concerning free speech. Biden and his Department of Education have worked tirelessly to find someone to fill this position, yet it still remains vacant as of the time of this draft. Biden may be too busy to fill the position. Or maybe he realized that the term “banned books” is misleading. There are no banned books in the United States. The phenomenon that the Biden …

Edutainment: A Sociological Study Of Rap As Social Theory, Rodney C. Bailey

Senior Projects Spring 2024

The music being made during the Golden Age of Hip Hop amounted to social theory for the way rappers identified, analyzed and were critical of the inequalities experienced by people of color. The period spanned between the late 80s and early 90s and was marked by the emergence of a number of artists who would go on to shape the culture of Hip Hop and its music. These rappers were heavily influenced by their geographies and the the social organizations native to them. For New York, those organizations were the Nation of Islam and a breakaway sect of the religion …

Sedimentary, Claire E. Sullivan

Senior Projects Spring 2024

S E D I M E N T A R Y is a mixed-media exploration of the layers and connections between the synthetic and natural world -- Where do the natural and built environments begin and end? In what ways might natural elements and man-made materials mimic or defy one another? What aesthetic, economic, or sustainable possibilities can be unearthed when nature's laws and patterns are applied to our calculated, built environment? Most importantly, how responsible must we hold ourselves and one other for our particular interactions with and impact on our environment? S E D I M E N …

3rd Nature, Heather Diane Phelps-Lipton

Senior Projects Spring 2024

My work is rooted in critical thought and centered by photographic imagery. Created as a mechanism of societal metamorphosis via the language of the familiar (capitalism, media and public policy), it is always an experiment. The realized form varies, but my working hypothesis is consistent: with intentional practice, human energies and activities can be (re)directed into an existence of non-destructive curiosity, wonder, and gratitude.

Be it a video poster, street fashion concept or a design for a future-forward food system, my work is best activated beyond the walls of the gallery or museum. I’m interested in creating works in collaboration …

Navigating White Dominated Spaces: Black Women And Their Trials Towards Upward Mobility In White Collar Occupations, Mae E. Redmond

Senior Projects Spring 2024

This study uses place-sensitive sociology to analyze how black women experience oppression in places of achievement, specifically white-collar occupations. I look to highlight the unique challenges faced by black women due to the pervasiveness and inescapability of racial and gender discrimination. I ask, do Black women continue to experience discrimination in high-level occupations? If they do, how do these experiences inform their treatment, approach to their work, and their perceptions of the self? I explore these questions through interviews with nine black women professionals and analyze their experiences with oppression in the workplace, as well as their strategies in navigating …

"I'M Never Going To Be Arnold Schwarzenegger": A Study On Fitness Culture In Relation To Young Men's Self-Perceptions, Lily M. Motyka

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Sectoral Composition In Mexico: Is Nearshoring The Path To Development?, Ana Aparicio

Senior Projects Spring 2024

This project delves into the economic dynamics of Latin America, with a specific emphasis on Mexico, through a comprehensive historical analysis to contextualize Mexico's economic evolution. It explores the evolution of economic structures and trends utilizing data from the 2018 OECD Mexican Input-Output table (IOT) and National Institute of Statistics and Geography of Mexico (INEGI) databases, mapping out the economic activities of Mexico. However, the difference in levels of aggregation in the data posed a barrier to updating the 2018 OECD Mexican IOT with 2022 INEGI data. The author attempts to introduce a roadmap for updating the 2018 tables with …

Boys Town, Grant Steven Venable

Senior Projects Spring 2024

How much of our identity comes from within or is constructed by the media and entertainment mediums we consume growing up?

For my senior project, I set out to write and direct a multimedia performance piece following the relationship between two West-coast friends–George and Antonio–as they navigate their friendship and identity at the dawn of the new millennium. By incorporating multimedia, I sought to explore how media in the 90s and early 2000s could construct queer identity and affect George and Antonio’s navigation of the world as emerging queer men. Through lighting, sound design, and CRT TV installations, I aimed …

Slit Sensilla, Clementine V. Williams

Senior Projects Spring 2024

In these paintings I echo the collage-like elements of both cyberspace and the ‘mental plane,’ Menz Insana inspired. I reference an actively accumulating archive of iPhone pictures that range from self portraits and construction sites to pelicans. Often, it is unclear to me why an image feels important until it becomes resolved in the process of painting. These digitally mediated pictures are in conversation with figures from my imagination. I like to think of Slit Sensilla as both an apparatus for uncovering images through feeling, as well as a destination: an unknown place my work flocks to or orbits around, …

Process In The 1977-1994 Earth Art Of Nancy Holt, Meg Webster, And Mia Westerlund Roosen, Catherine Clare Curry

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts and Social Studies of Bard College.

Bread And Circuses: Mussolini, Football, And The 1934 World Cup, Claire Richele Peet

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

The Stark Implications Of Abolishing Child Welfare: An Alternative Path Toward Support And Safety, Antonio R. Garcia, Jill Duerr Berrick, Melissa Jonson-Reid, Richard P. Barth, John Gyourko, Patricia Kohl, Johanna K. P. Greeson, Brett Drake, Victoria Cook

Department of Social Work - Faculty Scholarship

Scholars and advocates are at odds about how to achieve higher levels of child safety and permanency. Calls for change include the recent upEND focus on eradication of child welfare services to a radical refocusing of the present system towards prevention/early intervention. To clarify the implications of reform over abolition, we seek to portray a future in which the abolition of child welfare has occurred, in juxtaposition to maintaining four core elements of established child maltreatment programmes around the world: (1) receiving and responding to community signals about the risk to children; (2) assessment of need coupled with a proportionate …

“The Program Encourages People Not To Have A Heavy Heart”: A Qualitative Study Of A Family Strengthening Program In Kenya, Johanna K. P. Greeson, John Gyourko, Sarah Wasch, Christopher Page

Department of Social Work - Faculty Scholarship

There are millions of street-connected children worldwide, with thousands estimated in Kenya. Many child-serving organizations - including Agape Children’s Ministry (Agape) in western Kenya - provide rehabilitation and family reintegration services to remove children from the streets and reunite them with their families. This study aims to elucidate barriers and facilitators of Agape’s Family Strengthening Program (FSP) and elicit feedback. Twelve children and 12 caregivers who participated in the FSP, as well as 11 Agape staff, participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews for this study. Salient child/caregiver themes include: (1) spirituality/religion, (2) reflections on the FSP, (3) reflections on Agape, and …

Predictors Of Identity Crime Victimization Of Adolescent Youth In Foster Care, John Gyourko, Greg Ridgeway

Department of Social Work - Faculty Scholarship

Identity crimes pose serious risks and challenges for youth in foster care. As young people move through various out-of-home placements and schools, their personal data are often widely disseminated, difficult to secure, and thus vulnerable to theft and misuse. When they transition from foster care to adulthood, identity crime victims with compromised credit histories may be denied loans, employment, and/or housing during the already-precarious period of emerging adulthood. Even though federal law requires state child welfare agencies to conduct annual credit checks for adolescent youth in foster care, little is known about the factors contributing to risk of identity crime …

Target Selection And Enhancement During Attentional Tracking, Marvin R. Maechler

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

At any waking moment, we are bombarded with more sensory information than we can fully process. Attention is necessary to deal with the dynamic world we live in. One fundamental function of vision and attention is to keep track of moving objects, but what are the targets of attention during tracking?

One of the first theories of attentional tracking predicted that targets would be selected at early processing stages. By employing the double-drift illusion, which dissociates physical and perceived positions of moving objects, we investigated which of these positions is selected for tracking. Contrary to earlier theories and in line …

The Gender Effects Of Covid: Evidence From Equity Analysts, Frank Weikai Li, Baolian Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We use COVID-19 and sell-side analysts as an experiment to study the effects of gender on labor productivity. We find that the forecast accuracy of female analysts declined more than that of male analysts, especially when schools were closed and among analysts who were more likely to have young children, were inexperienced, were busier, or lived in southern states of the US. Relative to male analysts, females also reduced their forecast timeliness and resorted to more heuristic forecasts but did not reduce coverage or updating frequency. Relative to pre pandemic, female analysts’ careers were more negatively affected than male analysts’. …

Geographic Links And Predictable Returns, Zuben Jin, Frank Weikai Li

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Using establishment-level data of U.S. public firms, we construct a novel measure of geographic linkage between firms. We show that the returns of geography-linked firms have strong predictive power for focal firm returns and fundamentals. This effect is distinct from other cross-firm return predictability and is not easily attributable to risk-based explanations. It is more pronounced for focal firms that receive lower investor attention, are more costly to arbitrage, and during high sentiment periods. The cross-firm information spillovers and return predictability are also stronger for geographic peers with economic linkages and with positive information. Our results are broadly consistent with …