Student Scholarship

This comic tells the story of one of my case studies, Bill Fujimoto, a Japanese-American food retailer. Berkeley-based Fujimoto was the first person to source locally grown and specialty produce for Alice Waters’ revolutionary California Cuisine restaurant Chez Panisse when it opened.

The relationship between casting and race has been insufficiently examined in both popular and academic writings on Hollywood.

As agriculture industrializes, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are becoming more common. Feces from CAFOs is often used as fertilizer on fields. However, little is known about the effects manure has on the soil microbiome, which is an important aspect of soil health and fertility. In addition, due to the subtherapeutic levels of antibiotics necessary to keep the animals healthy, CAFO manure has elevated levels of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Using 16s rRNA high-throughput sequencing and qPCR, this study sought to determine the impact of swine CAFO manure application on both the soil microbiome and abundance of select antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and mobile element genes (erm(B), erm(C), sul1, str(B), intI1, IncW repA) in agricultural soil over the fall and spring seasons. We found the manure community to be distinct from the soil community, with a majority of bacteria belonging to Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes. The soil samples had more diverse communities dominated by Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, Verrucomicrobia, and unclassified bacteria. We observed significant differences in the soil microbiome between all time points, except between the spring samples. However, by tracking manure associated taxa, we found the addition of the manure microbiome to be a minor driver of the shift. Of the measured genes, manure application only significantly increased the abundance of erm(B) and erm(C) which remained elevated in the spring. These results suggest bacteria in the manure do not survive well in soil and that ARG dynamics in soil following manure application vary by resistance gene.

Examines the attempt by the film Birth of a Nation to shape one's perception of American history and culture.

Preprint, code, and experimental results for the CRV 2021 paper by Chen et al. introducing a z-buffer and negative-depth loss for self-supervised monocular depth prediction

“On White Eyes” explores two moments in American history when societal events collided with new modes of visual representation in ways that forced white Americans to pay more attention to their conceptions of race.

Through legislation and social code, modern-day Nigeria has become a hostile and dangerous country for queer people. As a queer person of the Nigerian diaspora, I struggle to hold both my “queer” and “Nigerian” identities because they seem contradictory. In this paper, I detail my journey reckoning with these two seemingly dissonant parts of my identity. In my endeavor to find communal belonging in Nigeria and its diaspora, I turn to the archive of pre-colonial Nigeria to discover if the nation of my ancestry was always hostile towards queer people. In particular, I try to uncover the violence British colonialism introduced to Nigeria. In this paper, I draw on the work of Saidiya Hartman to contextualize and guide my research and archivally-driven quest for belonging. As I have matured into myself, I have grappled with the intersections of my Nigerian-American and queer identities. Recently, I learned how Saidiya Hartman's "critical fabulation," a method for being attuned to and coping with archival gaps, can be a tool for survival when multiple realities conflict (Hartman, 2008). I practice critical fabulation in my venture to grapple with my “contradicting” identities by researching and drawing on the history of gender in Nigeria to imagine a more inclusive nation. Further, in this essay, I co-opt W. E. B. Du Bois’ framework of double consciousness to describe the internal conflict I feel regarding the friction between my Nigerian heritage and my queer identity because of the violence modern-day Nigeria inflicts upon queer people (Du Bois, 2007). Throughout this auto-ethnography, I discuss my double consciousness that stems from the intersectional oppressive structures in my life, such as patriarchy, transphobia, and homophobia. Additionally, in this paper, I demonstrate how the act of critical fabulation allows me to reconnect with myself and my (pre-colonial) Nigerian heritage to imagine and create spaces where queer Nigerians and I can belong (Hartman, 2008, p. 11).

Although economists in recent years have begun to apply economic theory to the activities of religious organizations, very few have ventured deeply into the realm of the Roman Catholic Church and almost none have considered the confluence between Internal Labor Market Theory and the promotional job ladder for ordained Catholic clergyman. This analysis explores the implications of the Catholic Church’s internal promotional ladder on its level of theological flexibility and hence its ability to adjust to changing market conditions. Specifically, by treating the Catholic Church as an organization subject to many of the same market forces as ordinary business firms, the research presented in this analysis shows how much of the “crisis” the church is confronting in the modern era—such as the rapid decline in the number of priests—can be explained by microeconomic structures that have developed over the past two millennia. At the broadest level, this analysis offers a new paradigm for viewing resistance to change in the church and provides a model for understanding the long-term implications of inflexibility on the viability of the church as an institution.

Andelson, Jonathan Gary, 1949-; Mottl, Larissa; Mertaugh, Hilary

A field guide to the natural environment of the Grinnell area.