Arctic soils are warming, making vast stores of organic carbon available for conversion to CO₂. This could create a positive feedback loop and accelerate global warming, but the processes that convert this carbon into CO₂ are not well understood. We investigated how the combined activities of sunlight and microbes degrade...
Because of their convenience and durability, single-use plastic items have become a ubiquitous part of society since the 1930s. The overuse of these convenient and durable plastic items has created a social and environmental problem that plagues our oceans and waterways. While the issue is overwhelming and daunting, it is...
This project blends personal narrative with scholarly work to recognize the interplay between these genre categorizations and to affirm the academic value of lived experience. Through this method, I play in the intersections of trans pedagogies, queer pedagogies, and pedagogies of love and care. By recounting how I blended these...
The spatial distribution and abundance patterns of benthic infauna result from interactions with a host of environmental variables including sediment characteristics (percent silt-clay, grain size, total organic carbon), depth, temperature, and dissolved oxygen. This thesis focuses on the association of bivalve assemblages and species with potentially influential environmental variables along...
The purpose of this essay is to examine the reasons for why the political, economic
and social merging of East and West Germany has been difficult, and to better understand
the factors that could lead one day to the development of one unified political culture.
In order to explain different...
The promotion of democracy abroad has become a critical national security objective for the United States. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, newly independent states have received millions in aid to facilitate their transition to democracy. A significant portion of this funding has been administered by the United States...
Many economic development methods over the years have tried to solve the problem of poverty with varied success. Microenterprise development is a method that works with the poor to create small self-run businesses to increase their income, and therefore bring more freedom from disease illiteracy and discrimination. Within microenterprise development...
Not many people in Russia have been able to successfully create an opposition movement under the presidency of Vladimir Putin. Opposition is already hard in any country, but things are especially difficult in Russia. Putin has made protest regulations, stifled the independent media, and excessively utilized selective rule by law....
Scholars posit that the successful consolidation of post-communist Central and Eastern European democracies can be linked to their subsequent accession to the European Union (EU). This led observers to assume that the continued democratization of Hungarian society was assured due to their integration into EU institutions. However, since the 2010...
Since the 1980s, NGOs have created a necessary niche for themselves within developing nations addressing poverty “traps” such as: lack of infrastructure, corruption, environmental degradation, conflict, disease, educational paucity, and gender inequality. Due to increasing issues of dependency and failed development projects resulting from a top-down, organizational structure, international nongovernmental...