IDA
Mount Holyoke College Institutional Digital Archive
The Institutional Digital Archive (IDA) is a service that collects, preserves, and showcases the scholarly work of MHC's faculty and students. Some materials are restricted to the campus community and require an MHC login to access.
Communities in IDA
Select a community to browse its collections.
Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
- This is an archive of United States immigration sanctuary policies that were passed from 2001-2014. The archive contains four main collections organized by policy type: Executive Orders; Ordinances; Policing Policies; and Resolutions. There are 234 policies in the archive. Welcome!
- This community houses data collected on campus as part of the Campus Living Laboratory Initiative. Data include those collected from environmental monitoring stations, as a result of faculty and student independent projects, or data collected in labs or other collection exercises. Datasets are presented with varying levels of access as described by the party responsible for uploading the data.
- Repositories for retaining data and scholarly research of the Mount Holyoke College faculty
- Repositories for retaining data, scholarly research, and academic output of Mount Holyoke College students
Recent Submissions
Escaping the Birdcage: Complicating Narratives of Agency and Victimhood through Maternal Metaphors of the Female Tigers in the LTTE
(2024-06-24) Rao, Madhavi; Medhi, Abhilash
It is hard to imagine genocide, war and violence without imagining women. Cruelty against women, or more essentially mothers, represents the darkest aspects of war against a people. To humanize a group, you invoke their mothers – symbols of the capacity of those people to love and be loved. However, in many contexts, womens and mothers are not only victims of violence, but its perpetrators as well. During the Sri Lankan civil war, it was Tamil women within the militant separatist organization of the LTTE who disproportionately enacted mass violence against both soldiers and civilians. Women became perpetrators, not victims. And yet, their violence was assigned a maternal virtue – a mother’s divine wrath and extreme urge to protect. The association of women as docile, servile and above all self-sacrificing dispelled any sense of empowerment that female combatants might have gained when they picked up their weapons. Their participation in an extremist movement was attributed to the manipulation of their maternal instincts, not to an active choice fueled by their beliefs. By reducing women to different aspects of motherhood – the mother of a people, the ever-giving mother, the mother goddess – they are stripped of their agency and bound to their “nature”. This thesis attempts to complicate narratives of violent women as only acting upon and being exploited through their most maternal instincts. To this end, this thesis will engage with propaganda about and by Tamil female militants, mythical and religious depictions of mothers within nationalist rhetoric and the bodily autonomy of women fighting the Sri Lankan civil war to assert their identities as militants, not mothers.
Characterization and Spatial Analysis of Official and Unofficial Caldera and Coronae Populations on Venus
(2024-06-21) Woerner, Jess; Dyar, M. Darby
Venus is often considered Earth’s evil twin due to their similarities in structure, but its surface conditions render it a volcanic hellscape. Through the mapping of previously defined populations of calderas and coronae on Venus using ArcGIS Pro, many features considered “caldera-like” and “coronae-like” were identified, prompting the creation of potential caldera and potential coronae catalogues. Heat maps were created to assess the spatial distribution of these features across the surface of Venus and it was found that 61% of the identified potential calderas were contained within or closely associated with the official caldera population, while 85% of the identified potential coronae were contained within or closely associated with the official coronae population. Further analysis of high-density feature clusters uncovered a significant presence of coronae with depressed topography as well as relationships between highly deformed terrain and coronae formation on the surface. A previously undocumented coronae cluster was identified in the Bereghinya Planitia quadrangle, outside of the distinct geologic settings in which coronae are most common. Upcoming missions to Venus will produce higher-resolution radar maps of the surface, allowing closer research of these findings.
How do Pigeons Find Their Way Home?
(2024-06-21) Schlein, Silvie; Lawlor, Andrea; Yu, Wesley
In an exploration of what it means to construct queerness with and without language, my thesis aims to bring a new perspective to Chaucer’s work while also engaging in the current conversations surrounding queer identity. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Pardoner are reimagined as modern characters living in New York City. As they struggle to understand the strange pigeon-like reflections they have been seeing in the mirror, they end up helping each other through an unlikely friendship. Throughout this project, my process was rooted in an interest in queer and medieval theory, as well as in a love for the questions of identity that humans share across centuries. Incorporating illustration, fabulism, poetry, and prose, I pull from queer and medieval traditions to create a narrative that grapples with the abstract constructions of identity, gender, queerness, and pathology.
Regulation of Insulin Signaling by Matrix Metalloproteinase 2 in Drosophila melanogaster
(2024-06-21) Stichter, Madigan; Woodard, Craig
Insulin sensitivity declines progressively with age in mammals, potentially leading to diseases such as metabolic syndrome, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. The mechanisms underlying this decline are not well understood. Matrix metalloproteinases or MMPs are multifunctional Zn2+-dependent protease enzymes that play key roles in tissue development, cell organization, cell cycle control, and response to stimuli and signaling in a wide variety of animals, including mammals and the model organism Drosophila melanogaster. Many MMPs are attached to the cell membrane by the protein glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI), which enables them to interact with the cell’s extracellular matrix (ECM) (Cieplak & Strongin, 2017). Previous studies of MMPs in D. melanogaster indicate that MMP1 and MMP2 work cooperatively and distinctly to degrade ECM components, particularly type IV collagen and laminin, during tissue remodeling of the larval fat bodies (Jia et al., 2014, 2017). MMP2 overexpression causes premature fat body remodeling in larvae and is both necessary and sufficient to induce fat body dissociation in D. melanogaster (Bond et al., 2011). I investigated the role of MMP2 in insulin signaling using D. melanogaster, which is a great model organism with a short life cycle that requires minimal culturing effort. Despite the fruit fly having low genetic redundancy, it still has a 75% similarity to all human genes implicated in disease. This makes it an ideal model organism to study the insulin signaling pathway.
Previous studies show the indirect involvement of MMP2 in insulin signaling in D. melanogaster, and overexpression of an MMP (MT1-MMP/MMP14) in mouse hepatic (liver) tissue showed direct cleavage of the insulin receptor, thus suppressing insulin signaling (Guo et al., 2022). I hypothesized that in D. melanogaster, MMP2 has direct involvement in the insulin signaling pathway through cleavage of the insulin receptor. In my investigation - inspired by the mouse study - I overexpressed MMP2 in the fat body of transgenic flies and quantified the effect on insulin signaling via western blot analysis. Quantification of the western blot by downstream protein biomarkers of autophagy, Atg8a proteins, resulted in a surprising decrease in autophagy in the fat bodies of MMP2 overexpressing transgenic flies compared to the control group. Despite that outcome, it was notable that early fat body remodeling occurred in MMP2 overexpressed flies, which is consistent with the findings of Bond et al., (2011). In future studies, more western blots should be performed to gain a higher n value, and tissue samples should also be taken from feeding 3rd instar larvae when insulin signaling is at its highest (Chen, 2020).
Assessing Thermal Tolerance of Infected and Uninfected Bombus impatiens to a Variable Thermal Environment
(2024-06-21) Lohr, Micah; Van Wyk, Jennifer; Brodie, Renae
In insect species such as the common eastern bumble bee, Bombus impatiens, the relationships between body size, temperature, and disease are closely intertwined. Given the significant selection pressure that the latter two of these stressors impose, it is critically important to understand how climate change will impact species who carry out critical ecosystem services as mean temperatures and thermal variability increase. This work assesses the ecophysiology of B. impatiens in a simulated heatwave. It compares the thermoregulation, behavior, and metabolic rate of bumble bees when uninfected versus infected with a sublethal intestinal trypanosome, Crithidia bombi. Using a thermally controlled chamber, I measured thoracic body temperature, behavior, and respiration rates in infected and uninfected B. impatiens workers from 24 to 36 ºC. I found a significant interactive effect of infection status and body size on thermoregulation, with infection masking the side-mediated effects seen in uninfected bees. The likelihood of an individual fanning– a physiological adaptation to heat stress– increased at higher temperatures regardless of infection. Finally, the respiration rate of infected individuals demonstrated a negative relationship with infection intensity. Obtaining this fine-scale understanding of interacting stressors will provide insight on outcomes for important pollinators with respect to global climate change.