The issue of global climate change and the adverse effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide on the environment have made the reduction of CO₂ emissions a global priority. One method of reducing CO₂ emitted into the environment is through the conversion and utilization of CO₂ as a chemical feedstock. Among its attractions is that CO₂ is cheap, nontoxic and can be recycled to produce valuable new products. The increasing importance of CO₂ utilization processes encourages the pursuit of a better understanding of the conversion of CO₂ to valuable products. The industrial conversion of CO₂ typically occurs over a heterogeneous catalyst, which typically consists of small transition metal particles supported on a high surface area metal oxide. Our project is focused on studying the water-gas shift (WGS) reaction on platinum, an extensively studied catalyst with a highly active surface. The water-gas shift plays an important role in several industrial processes. We are specifically interested in whether the reaction proceeds on platinum via the surface oxidation-reduction reaction mechanism or the associative mechanism. The rate of the reverse water-gas shift (RWGS) reaction will be measured to provide information about the WGS mechanism. The experimental apparatus for this study is a packed bed reactor designed for use in steady-state isotopic-transient kinetic analysis (SSITKA) which has switching capabilities that will be used to measure the Pt surface areas of the catalyst. Our goals are to (1) quantitatively measure the RWGS rate under conditions of low CO and H coverage and (2) compare it to the rate of CO₂ dissociation, the rate-limiting step according to the oxidation-reduction mechanism and to the theoretical rate calculated using a micro-kinetic model based on the associative mechanism.

Upon entering office in 1989, Argentine president Carlos Menem spearheaded an effort to implement what is commonly described as one of the most rapid and comprehensive neoliberal economic restructuring programs ever seen in Latin America. Many of these economic policies had major implications for the character of the Buenos Aires cityscape. My research traces the effects of neoliberal policies on practices of public space, urban citizenship, and national identity in Buenos Aires, Argentina through an analysis of urban contestation in the Palermo district. My project centers the following question: Why does the Palermo district have high levels of neighborhood-based activism, despite the fact that it is one of the wealthiest and most privileged districts in Buenos Aires’ northern corridor? In response to this question, I argue that Palermo residents mobilize in order to contest the neoliberalization of urban planning and defend the cultural identity of their barrio. More specifically, these residents reject neoliberal urban modernization because it destroys earlier edified forms of the city which physically represent the myth of Buenos Aires as a white, European, and middle-class city. Thus, my project traces how this national myth became inscribed into the Buenos Aires urban landscape at the turn of the 20th century, and how Palermo residents mobilize to defend this urban palimpsest. In order to advance this argument, my project examines two forms of urban contestation in the Palermo district. The first form is a local neighborhood green space defense group called La Asociación Amigos del Lago de Palermo made up of Palermo residents who campaign to prevent the privatization of Palermo Park. The second form is several cultural resistance groups in Palermo Viejo who mobilize in order to prevent the construction of mega-residential towers and the marginalization of middle-class residents in the district.

 This paper examines the geoeconomic discourses surrounding the development of the North Korean Kaesong Industrial Complex, a free economic zone six miles north of the Demilitarized Zone that separates the Koreas. In particular, I examine the way academic literature, media and governmental reports frame Kaesong as a modality where the two Koreas can meet in preparation for eventual reunification. These discourses promote a performative, imaginary geography replete with an active negotiation of border articulation envisioned through an economic flatness and promoted by trade. Instead, as governmental reports from both sides of the Pacific tacitly accept the longevity of the North Korean regime, as well as recognize the political and economic costs of what Korean reunification would entail, a push by the Korean governments has been made for maintaining the geopolitical status quo on the peninsula. This is done by putting development within Kaesong under terms of a détente, sustained by the legacies of imperial geographies, and through which all state motives and discourses for development in Kaesong should be reexamined. I find that my framing captures the real considerations of regional and foreign powers, multinational corporations and the geostrategic interests of North and South Korea, but are otherwise absent. By augmenting the dominant discourse, my paper points towards unseen ramifications of the contemporaneous transformation of the two Koreas, which had been formerly caught in Cold War geopolitical scripts, but have become self-motivated geoeconomic actors utilizing these scripts to negotiate the terms of their own development logics within neoliberal governance strategies.