Dadaab’s Hidden Ties: How Colonial Legacies and Informal Economies Contribute to Protracted Refugee Situations

Protracted Refugee Situations (PRS) persist despite the founding intentions of the international refugee regime. Explanations behind PRS typically focus on international law, human rights, and security concerns, while the conventional media narrative presents an oversimplification that erases complex contextual nuances. Using the case of the Dadaab refugee camp, I explore (1) historical colonial legacies of social control and domination in Kenya, and (2) Dadaab as an informal economic power center, as two ‘hidden ties’ that contribute to Dadaab’s persistence. By identifying and exploring hidden ties that contribute to PRS, policy-makers and power brokers gain a deeper understanding of the realities of the hidden systems of relevant interests and power relations present in PRS contexts. This nuanced and complete understanding is essential for any negotiations of practical, feasible resolutions to PRS

The Rise of Anxiety Among the College Age Population

Anxiety among college students is a common occurrence today. This study has researched how students are dealing with this mental health issue as well as looked into many different variables that were incorporated such as gender differences, treatment options, potential triggers and coping mechanisms.https://scholar.dominican.edu/ug-student-posters/1039/thumbnail.jp

Does Simplified Estimation of Total Fruit and Vegetable Intake Pave the Way for Accurate Biomarkers of the Same?

No abstract availabl

A Field Guide to Exit Zero: Urban Landscape Essay Films, 1921 till Now

This hybrid theory-practice dissertation advocates for a landscape mode of documentary media-making. Providing case studies from the history of non-narrative city filmmaking, this work breaks new ground by locating this form in the context of environmentalist and social justice concerns. Having been guided by two central questions: what is the subjectivity of a landscape, and what does it mean to say that a landscape has subjectivity?, this research provides an historical overview of non-narrative methodologies for representing urban nature as a collective subject and a collaborative agent. Foregrounding the function of musical and temporal structures, the use of improvisational techniques, and highlights queer strategies of representation, this dissertation expands considerations of the city symphony genre to attend to jazz, feminist, postmodern and environmentalist developments of form. It also considers the lyric role of the acousmatic (off-screen) voice in relationship to the visual landscape and explores how the spoken word inspires productive forms of identification and dis-identification with the visual environment. The practice-based component of the research is Exit Zero: An Atlas of One City Block through Time, is an interactive documentary of a single city block located in central San Francisco. This web-based media artwork presents a long-view of the processes of gentrification and urban transformation. As a synecdoche for the hyper-gentrification of San Francisco, Exit Zero provides a poetic framework in which to explore the multiple dramatic metamorphoses of the city block made famous by Hayes Valley Farm, the temporary community garden built on top of a former freeway exit. Using the interaction metaphors of the compass and the timeline, this work juxtaposes the impacts of government policy and public infrastructure against the forces of anti-freeway activism and community social practice. Visitors are rewarded for their curiosity and encouraged to explore the various states of development and transformation of this block in a non-linear fashion, enacting a collaborative and improvisational relationship to the project’s content and enabling the discovery of uncanny interconnections and poetic rhymes between seemingly disparate time periods. In arguing for the urgency of validating a landscape mode of media-making that instigates collective forms of identification, this practice-theory dissertation catalyzes a new understanding of landscape as both a collective subject and an collaborative orientation to media-making

Tadpole density changes the relationship of red-eyed treefrog morphology and jumping performance [poster]

As organisms develop, increased body size is often accompanied by shape changes that alter the morphology–performance relationship. Animals with different growth histories may also have different shapes at similar body sizes. To investigate how larval growth history affects the morphology–performance relationship, we raised red-eyed treefrog tadpoles (Agalychnis callidryas) at three densities (5, 25 and 50 tadpoles per 400 L tank) and measured jump distance during metamorphosis. We predicted that tadpoles grown at low density would metamorphose into larger frogs with relatively longer legs than those grown at higher densities. We also expected low density frogs to jump further – both absolutely, because of their larger body size and relative to their size if they had longer legs. Frogs from low density had longer snout-vent lengths (SVL) than those from medium and high densities and longer tibiafibula lengths and greater masses relative to their SVL. Jump distance was strongly correlated with tibiafibula length; however, there was a significant density*tibiafibula interaction. While longer tibiafibulas in high and medium density frogs were correlated with longer jump distances, there was no such correlation in the frogs from low density tanks. We interpret these results as a consequence of the greater relative mass of the frogs from low density tanks. The relatively long legs of these frogs may not fully compensate for their disproportionately higher mass. This study demonstrates that different larval densities can change not only red-eyed treefrog morphology, but also the morphology–performance relationship. It suggests a trade-off where low larval density can increase body size and presumably fat reserves, but the latter may decrease jumping performance