The Hanford nuclear site is a 20th and 21st century example of America’s ongoing military industrial complex. Its ties with the aftermath of the Manhattan project shows that its harm was not unidirectional, but rather multidirectional since harm was done to the people of Nagasaki and to the communities within and around Hanford, Washington. Migrant workers have had ongoing misrepresentation regarding the nuclear site’s post-communal health impact; especially within oral and scholarly accounts. In this study, we explore what factors have had short-term and long-term impacts on the health, socioeconomic status, and autonomy of Hanford migrant workers. We use literature review and discourse analysis to understand these complexities affecting migrant health, and by developing these frameworks we reveal to the reader how such human and unalienable rights were undermined for the purpose of global control.

A declassified 1962 document shows that the Kennedy Administration considered “Operation Northwoods,” a plan to fabricate a terror attack and blame it on the Cuban government in order to legitimize an invasion of Cuba. The Northwoods plan was rejected by President Kennedy. This tactic of faking an attack for political purposes is called a “false flag” attack. Modern conspiracy theorists use Operation Northwoods as evidence that the American government fakes terror attacks in the 21st century, considering attacks such as the September 11, 2001 attacks and the 2018 Parkland shooting to be “false flag” events. I engage with the Operation Northwoods document, detailing its contents and implications. I then analyze the impact of the document in the conspiracy fringe, looking at its reference in various new media spaces, such as the online conspiracy editorial InfoWars and the alt-right social media platform Gab. I find that the power of the Northwoods document is often overestimated and exaggerated on online spaces and that the conspiracy theorists use motivated reasoning to further their belief in conspiracy.  Online spaces allow for the spread of false conspiracy narratives by enabling people with fringe beliefs to connect with each other more effectively. The wide propagation of Northwoods as evidence that major contemporary tragedies are fraudulent is a supreme example of dangerous information which can be spread unchecked online.

Beginning in the 1880s, tens of thousands of impoverished Italians immigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina to create a better life. Upon arrival, they found themselves freshly socially alienated. Hybridity theory helps us understand this phenomenon demonstrated through cocoliche, the contact language spoken by the new arrivals. The period of mass migration lasted until the 1930s when Italy’s political turmoil calmed and struggling economy began to recover. The combination of southern Italian culture and Argentina’s produced lasting cultural changes and a transitory dialect that I classify as a contact language. Hybridity theory, which hinges on representing the voices of the subaltern, allows a reinterpretation of power that helps us understand the migrants’ unusual position in history as low class, white Europeans whose migration to the Global South ended not only in social stigma and continued poverty but also the dialect-speaking, comical, Southern Italian character Cocoliche. Cocoliche as a language has been studied by linguists in both Italy and Latin American southern cone countries. Cocoliche as a character has been analyzed as an element of Argentine theater. But despite these focuses little research has been done on the social and economic statuses of the Europeans who uniquely migrated to the Southern Cone and how their dialect reveals the oxymoron of their identity- that they held simultaneous and contradictory positions as privileged and yet destitute people.

The plant hormone Jasmonic acid (JA) interacts with JAZ proteins, proteins that play a crucial role in the regulation of signal cascades triggered by jasmonates, and controls the activity of MYCs, a family of genes that code for transcription factors. In the absence of JA, JAZ proteins bind to downstream MYCs and limit their activity. JA is produced in plant cells in response to tissue damage, and is crucial to plant fitness. The genome of model plant Arabidopsis thaliana encodes 13 JAZ and 5 MYC isoforms, but as of now, it is unclear why this apparent redundancy exists. Such redundancy is a common feature of plant genomes. In the case of JA-signaling, it may be that interaction strengths differ between JAZ and MYC isoforms and that this is important for system behavior. In A. thaliana, there are 65 pairwise combinations alone, which provides many opportunities for engineering incredibly fine-tuned and controlled gene expression. Our past work has been to clone and create a library of JAZ and MYC proteins. Our goal now is to create yeast mini-circuits, which are yeast cells that contain plasmids that carry certain selected JAZ and MYC proteins. After constructing these yeast mini-circuits, we will study the JA-response dynamics of these circuits to better understand the role of each of these proteins and study differences in strengths of interaction between the different proteins. We suspect that the absence of certain JAZ and MYC proteins will lead to different phenotypes in defense mechanisms. Additionally, by investigating this relatively familiar pathway through the construction of yeast mini-circuits, we are attempting to develop an efficient technique which can be used to characterize other unexplored plant systems.

Studies show that disparities in healthcare access in ethnically diverse underserved communities are linked to healthcare barriers including cost of care and language differences. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the role of technology in improving healthcare access for ethnically diverse and underserved communities and thus helping to reduce healthcare disparities. We hypothesized that ethnically diverse patients’ ready access to mobile health technologies like smartphones and healthcare apps can improve patient care by promoting self-care management and improve doctor-patient communication. To test our hypothesis, we recruited N=20 healthcare providers from Washington, state. Healthcare providers comprising physicians, medical assistants, nurses and social workers participated in a 60-minute focus group session and were asked about the role of technology in increasing access to healthcare services for diverse ethnic communities. Respondents received a $75 gift certificate at the end of the study and responses were transcribed for later assessment. We evaluated transcripts by deriving codewords, codewords used more than two times were identified and recorded on three separate occasions, codewords with similar information were grouped into codeword clusters and finally, themes were derived based on a single idea from codeword clusters. From our analysis, we learned that healthcare providers see the importance of using mobile devices to increase healthcare access for ethnically diverse and underserved communities. They noted that mobile healthcare technologies can improve patient-provider relationships via enhanced communication. The implication of our finding is that mobile health technologies can improve patient-provider communication and help to eliminate barriers to healthcare access for ethnically diverse and underserved communities.

 This project will assess how plant-based meat substitutes can most effectively replace animal-based meat. I will be focusing specifically on chicken, the most widely-produced animal in the meat industry. 8,000,000,000 chickens are killed for meat every year in the United States, dwarfing the number of all other animals used for meat combined. Chicken production is a threat to global health, because it contributes to the emissions of greenhouse gases. It is also an environmental justice issue because low-income communities with little political power live near slaughterhouses and experience polluted waterways from the animal waste. The scope of the chicken industry demands that a solution to its problems account for scale of implementation. I am going to be interviewing experts in the fields of plant-based food technology, farm transformation, and poultry industry economics. I plan to discover why poultry is one of the most prominent agricultural industries in the United States, focusing on supply chains and subsidies. I will then compare these factors to corn, wheat, and soy, the most common ingredients in plant-based meat. The current state and levels of production of the meat and animal product industry are financially inefficient, environmentally harmful, and unhealthy for our communities. For plant-based meat to realistically compete with real chicken, it must be widely available, reasonably priced, and equally nutritious. My project aims to explain what this would look like in practice.