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  'Blind Consumption' and 'Squished' Series

  Olivia Carlson

  My work explores humankind’s complicated relationship with the natural world, bringing attention to the sometimes heedless or reckless interactions between humans and insects or nature, and broader issues of a viewer’s role in the environment. Within this larger theme, my subjects are human figures and insects, separated visually, but related by ideology. These humans are using their smartphones (their bodies are slouching, necks bent awkwardly), but where their dead-looking eyes would be, are a species of fungi called cordyceps. The cordyceps fungus doesn’t infect humans in real life but is parasitic on insects. The fungus attacks and invades the host, much like the way smartphones invade every aspect of our lives and body. Conversely, the insects in this series are “squished”--a common action performed by us humans-- but painted large-scale in intricate detail to confront the viewer with a viscerally offensive image yet intriguing quality of beauty. My work process is to gather photographic imagery, whether from the internet or my own hand (for the insects, I squash and photograph myself), and paint the image using gouache for the human figures or watercolor for the squished insects. I’ve chosen to leave the background white; it conveys the cleanliness that as a culture, we wish nature had. I’m also interested in challenging the historical context of water-media as inherently feminine, clean, and aconceptual. My work is trying to say that we need to give more concern and caution to the environments we inhabit. To ignore our actions will be ruinous.

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  Domestic Violence and Its Impact on Children

  Charles D. Hassinger

  Domestic violence (DV) is an ongoing phenomenon, detrimentally affecting society. Often, women suffer as direct victims of DV, but children who witness DV also experience adverse effects in these settings. For a single day in 2018, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services reported, “19,673 children found safe-refuge in domestic violence emergency shelters or transitional housing programs, with another 5,888 children receiving non-residential services with their abused parent”. Research studies in the fields of Human Services, Sociology and Psychology have not fully explored this element of the family relationship. In my review, so far, I have learned that the few studies on this topic conclude child witnesses of DV suffer the same adverse consequences as those abused, normalize the DV witnessed, and will perpetuate the family dynamics they have observed. Future work on this topic should use narrative analysis from victims to better understand their patterns of thinking about this experience, and how support groups and services may help people break out of the cycle of violence.

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  Citizen Science and the History of Vaccination

  Bailey Kemp

  Vaccination has saved millions of lives by harnessing the power of the immune system to confer resistance to infectious disease. While modern “vaccination” is relatively new, “inoculation,” or the transferring of “virulent matter” from infected to uninfected person, has earlier origins. For instance, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu played a pioneering role in popularizing smallpox inoculation in 1720s England by inoculating her own children. Across the ocean, the Puritan minister Cotton Mather advocated for inoculation against the demands of other religious leaders who viewed inoculation as an assault on the will of God. Neither of these individuals were doctors, or even scientists, yet they played a pivotal role in the advancement of what is often considered to be the greatest medical breakthrough in human history: the development of vaccination. In this intersection of literature and science, I analyze written works of Montagu and Mather as well as contextualize the medical and scientific discourse that was occurring at the time. In doing so, I argue that these two figures manipulated their place in the public eye and overstepped boundaries of gender (in the case of Montagu) and religion (in the case of Mather), in order to insert themselves into the scientific community and navigate a controversial scientific enlightenment.

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  Social Class and Its Affects on Childhood Bereavement

  Connor Kirwan

  I propose that the treatment and coping of bereavement among children depends on their social class. I researched and analyzed secondary sources and cited existing related literature studying childhood bereavement in the United States as well as the effect that social class has on it. I argue that social class greatly determines children’s experiences of bereavement as well as the struggles and dynamics that change within the family due to differing financial situations, emotional availability and responsiveness of the surviving parent, and ability to adapt to take on a new role in the family.

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  An Examination of Two Types of Identity Achievement

  Emily Kuehn, Maggie Schauff, and Oscar Baldelomar

  Marcia’s ethnic identity status model (MEIM) emphasizes an independent process of identity formation where adolescents choose a differing identity from influencing authorities, similar to changing religions from what one’s parents believe to another. Phinney & Baldelomar (2011) modified this approach to balance individualistic and collectivistic identity outcomes. This modified approach uses the AMIS (Adaptive Measure of Identity Statuses), which classifies participants into statuses including two types of identity achievements: interdependent/collectivistic and independent/individualistic identity outcomes. The AMIS is a self-guided questionnaire that provides follow-up questions based on past answers. We examined the validity of the AMIS against the MEIM’s scores on identity commitment and exploration (the two components of identity formation). Online versions of the AMIS and MEIM were given to 316 undergraduates. Our hypotheses were supported: the two measures of identity converged well, and interdependent ethnic identity dominated the categories.

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  3D Imaging of a Binary Colloidal Fluid

  Kate Livermore and Michael Korth

  In order to understand the nature of colloidal fluids, we wanted to visualize a 3D representation of their thermodynamic distribution. Colloidal fluids are fluids that consist of two parts: colloidal particles and a dispensing medium. Some examples include toothpaste, mayonnaise, plaster, and muddy water. We could also think about colloidal fluids simply as a mixture of two or more parts. In this poster, we used the hard-sphere system to represent the structure of colloidal fluids in a 3D graph using Mathematica (MMA). In the hard-sphere system, we used two different sizes of impenetrable spheres that could not overlap to represent particles in a binary colloidal fluid. We focused on how their interactions caused probable arrangements. We located big and small particles in the hard-sphere system by finding their pressure distribution, where the pressure distribution was found by calculating the forces created by the particle collisions. The results of our 3D graph representation of the particle distribution of a binary colloidal fluid showed that the particles’ interactions with each other caused ray and sheet-like structures. Understanding this particle distribution and structure of a colloidal fluid can help us in several applications. For example, we could apply this knowledge when dealing with separation processes of binary mixtures, which are similar to colloidal fluids. In addition, understanding the thermodynamic distribution of colloidal fluids could help in understanding buoyancy seen in colloidal mixtures, which has been seen to break Archimede’s principle.

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  Relaxed Strong Colorings of Hypergraphs

  Harrison Piehowski

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  Writing Early Ireland: A Panel Discussion

  Laura Steblay, Caroline Vodacek, Rachel Larsen, Corinne McCumber, and Bailey Kemp

  In past decades, early Irish literature has received relatively little scholarly attention. However, works such as the Tain Bo Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), Edmund Spenser’s Book Five of The Faerie Queene, and Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland provide unique and important representations of early Irish culture. In this five-person panel, we will examine these works and our collective analyses of Irish cultural and literary representations within them. Specifically, we will critique problems of colonialism and portrayals of gender, and we will affirm the importance of the landscape and of literary intersections with archaeology and history. By doing so, we will shed light on an underrepresented aspect of literary history and explore how these writings can reshape modern perspectives of early Ireland.

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  An Exploration of the Prairie Through Ceramic Art

  Erin Wilaby

  The prairie is an underappreciated ecosystem. This is evident comparing the amount of US protected land: according to the 2018 Land Areas Report, there are 50 times more acres of National Forest as National Grassland. To change this unappreciation, I endeavor in this project to aid people in seeing the prairie as a complex, beautiful, and interesting ecosystem. My method is to present scientific knowledge about the prairie through the medium of ceramic art. Specifically, the project explores relationships between biotic (living) and abiotic (non-living) factors in the ecosystem. The ceramic works entail a large amount of functional pottery with complex designs and glazes to show their topic. Signs accompany the ceramic work, providing background information about the specific science concepts presented and as well as providing leads and keywords to help viewers search for more information. The ultimate goal of this project is to entice people to explore the prairie on their own.