This study seeks to explore the perspectives of Latine students at the University of Washington (UW) regarding racial representation within the institution. Do Latine students see their experiences and identities represented and reflected in university life? How do Latine students experience and perceive Latine representation (or lack thereof) in terms of the composition of faculty, student body, and community spaces at UW? This research project aims to uncover the realities, challenges, and promise of support and community on campus. Through interviews with Latine students, faculty, and staff, this inquiry will describe how students find support at UW and navigate their academic environment. To attain a comprehensive understanding, the research utilizes a combination of primary and secondary sources, incorporating interviews with Latine students, staff, and faculty at the UW to capture personalized and nuanced perspectives. By examining the lived experiences and perspectives of individuals directly affected, the study aims to thoroughly examine the complex dynamics at play. Exploring the lived experiences of Latine students, the study will contribute to the discourse on racial representation in academia and its impact on student well-being and academic success. The findings will inform discussions on how institutions can foster an inclusive environment that recognizes and supports the diverse backgrounds of all students. This research project has emerged from ongoing conversation and collaboration with the Washington State Commission on Hispanic Affairs members. This research project will inform the community report that the Commission is preparing.

On the morning of September 10th, 1990, the body of seventeen-year-old Maria Soledad-Morales was found on the outskirts of San Fernando de Valle, the capital city of Catamarca province in Argentina. What followed in the aftermath of the murder and botched investigation was the Catamarcazo, one of the largest and most publicly salient protest movements in the decades following the Argentinian Dirty War, the military dictatorship that murdered 30,00 people between 1977 and 1983. In this project, I examine genealogies of resistance among women-led protest movements in Argentina from 1977 to 1992 and argue that linkages between movements contributed to a modern Argentinian understanding of gendered violence in the present day. Through analysis of newspapers, interview transcripts, and photographs, I link activist strategies of the 1977 - 1983 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo with the Catamarcazo movement of 1990 - 1991. I discuss how the Catamarcazo drew and built upon the strategies of Las Madres and introduced consciousness of gendered violence to the Argentinian public in the first nationally acknowledged protest movement centered on violence against women. The purpose of this study is to establish and recognize the continual development of feminist activism within Argentinian history and shed light on the subversive, revolutionary tactics used to combat state repression and gendered violence. By analyzing histories of feminist activism in Argentina, we can gain a greater understanding of how the strategies of feminist movements are built upon and expanded over time, and how the strategies of a past movement can be modified to serve a current movement.

Research shows that approximately 100 million people in the United States (US) have medical debt. However, there is a lack of qualitative research on how individuals experience and navigate the complexities of medical debt. To examine the broad implications of medical debt in the US, we interviewed 12 people from across the country about their experiences affording healthcare. Conducting virtual interviews, we asked people about the resources they use to pay medical bills, the impact of their financial struggles on their lives, and how they accrued medical debt. We analyzed our findings using qualitative coding software, Dedoose, where we identified two major themes. Our participants often lacked an awareness of secondary medical debt resources and instead primarily relied on close personal connections for aid. Second, more than half of our participants experienced feelings of stress. Our research findings show that medical debt exceeds the monetary costs owed to a hospital or doctor and include the severe emotional distress people experience mitigating medical debt, affecting their mental and physical health. Our findings are important because instead of blaming individuals for healthcare costs, they draw out the systemic barriers that prohibit access to affordable, quality healthcare in the US. Our findings also challenge cultural stigmas surrounding medical debt. We anticipate our research to be a starting point for further analysis of medical debt's broad financial and emotional ramifications and to encourage advocacy for a health system that no longer pushes millions of people into massive debt.

While much has been done to understand rape as an act of genocide and as a war tactic, little scholarly work has focused on how the intentional wartime spread of HIV/AIDS in the Rwanda genocide led to a slow genocide of the Batutsi. This work argues that the spread of HIV/AIDS resulting from the rapes that occurred during the Rwandan Genocide has led to the continuation of the slow genocide against the Batutsi people. I analyzed seventeen semi structured interviews of rape survivors that were conducted between 2007 and 2008. These interviews were published in Sandra Chu et. al. The Men Who Killed Me Rwandan: Survivors of Sexual Violence. By using thematic coding, my analysis of the interviews concluded that Tutsi women were intentionally infected with HIV by the Interahamwe so that the women themselves would be turned into biological weapons of genocide that could be used to inflict a delayed death-sentence on another Tutsi. Roughly 80% of the women who survived the Rwanda Genocide were raped, and of those women, 70% contracted HIV. With the lack of medical treatment in Rwanda for HIV/AIDS, those who test positive for the disease have 7-15 years to live before they will die a slow death. The intentional viral spread of HIV and the subsequent deaths from AIDS is a direct result of sexual violence committed as a tactic in the 1994 genocide. Despite being purposefully killed due to their ethnicity, women who died of HIV-related illness in Rwanda are not calculated in the death toll for the genocide against the Batutsi in 1994. This work expands our conception of the long-term effects of the rape campaign led by Hutu militias that intended to inflict death upon survivors of the initial violence from April to July 1994 in Rwanda.

The UN Truth Commission tasked with accounting for El Salvador’s armed conflict described it as a war in which “nobody won” (“nadie ganaba”). Between 1980 and 1992, the small Central American country was devastated by a civil war that claimed the lives of more than 70,000 and exposed its people to gross human rights violations committed, overwhelmingly, at the hands of state security forces. This project asks how the armed conflict in El Salvador existed within a broader ecosystem of right-wing state terror by examining one particularly crucial relationship: that between El Salvador and Argentina in the period immediately before the outbreak of war (1978-1980). I argue that the military regimes in El Salvador and Argentina took on a consultatory relationship during the late 1970s in which Argentina passed its “successful” model of repression onto key Salvadoran military officials. As El Salvador barreled toward war in late 1979 and early 1980, those very same Salvadoran officials came to occupy the highest positions of power, paving the way for an urban war campaign that looked eerily like Argentina’s “dirty war.” By pairing archival research conducted at the Historical Archive of the Chancellery (Archivo Histórico de la Cancillería) in Buenos Aires with existing scholarship on Argentine involvement in Central America, I trace the rise of Argentine influence in El Salvador from a few well-placed offers of aid to the minds of four of El Salvador’s top-ranking wartime officials. In doing so, I look beyond the Cold War in Latin America as a phenomenon imposed from above by the United States and instead interrogate the middle layer, in which Latin American states, driven by politics, culture, and their own will to survive, reproduced the Cold War along more local and regional lines.

From 2012 to 2022 violent crime in rural America has either increased or stayed above the national crime rate. At the same time, the amount of firearms in these counties rose dramatically while law enforcement expenditure and poverty reduction stagnated. I theorize that a combination of high poverty rates, increased firearm ownership, and fewer police has contributed to the increase in rural crime over the past decade. As the literature suggests, firearms make it easier to commit violent crimes, fewer police make crime harder to detect, and poverty pushes people into crime due to unstable living conditions. I will evaluate the effect of these three factors on rural crime rates by using FBI Uniform Crime Report, U.S Census Bureau, and RAND Corporation data to perform multivariate regression in order to determine causality. I expect to find a strong positive correlation between these three factors and the rural crime rate. I will use multivariate regression analysis to examine the influence of gun ownership, law enforcement spending and poverty on rural crime rates. By finding the causes of crime in rural communities, I will help identify the areas that local governments will need to address to solve problems of violence.

Diabetic Cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a cardiovascular complication developed from diabetes mellitus, causing a dilation of cardiac ventricle tissue, ultimately impairing systolic function. Although this condition affects 1.1% of the population and nearly 17% of all diagnosed diabetics, mortality rates are exceeding large, with almost 1 in 3 developing death or heart failure after less than a decade. Therefore, effective therapeutics are required to mitigate this prevailing epidemic. Chloride Intracellular Channels (CLICs) are a family of ion channel proteins, permeable to chlorides, which maintain specific cytoplasmic ion concentrations to regulate necessary homeostatic conditions for cellular function. Previous research from our laboratory demonstrates that the absence of CLIC4, a member of the CLIC family and a mitochondrial-associated membrane ion channel in cardiomyocytes, prevents the alteration of sarcomere integrity and beat rate upon high glucose exposure, which is highly prevalent in DCM. Additional research suggests CLIC4 regulates sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) mitochondrial calcium signaling in cardiomyocytes, and the absence of CLIC4 prevents the occurrence of diabetic cardiomyopathy. However, the mechanism of CLIC4-mediated cardiac dysfunction is still relatively unknown. Previous investigation demonstrates that dysregulation of Ryanodine Receptor 2 (RyR2) function in the SR of cardiomyocytes, due to its oxidation, could augment cardiac dysfunction upon diabetes via modulating calcium levels. This experiment illustrates that pharmacologically blocking CLIC4 reduces oxidative stress in cardiomyocytes, which we measured via staining of cardiomyocytes with DCFDA. Additionally, we found the association of CLIC4 with RyR2 through immuno-pulldown experiments. We anticipate that CLIC4 regulates the oxidative status of RyR2 and modulates its activity in diabetic cardiomyocytes.