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
A Crisis of Bodies at the Border: The Weaponization of Reproductive Injustice against the Latinx Body at the US-Mexico Border
Siegel, Erin; Fernandez-Anderson, Cora
My project utilizes reproductive justice frameworks to critically analyze and critique US immigration policy. I use primary source historical records, interviews, and scholarly secondhand sources to shape my portrayal of the realities at the border. I explore the processes before, during, and after border crossings to guide the reader through the journeys of immigrant women. In this thesis I make some broader connections between unrest about the border and reproductive justice crises we see today, especially in a post-Dobbs era. I argue that controlling the bodies and the reproductive lives of immigrants is a covert tool employed by the state to weaponize discrimination and to render vulnerable populations invisible. To begin, I will look at the prejudices embedded in current policy and how those tie directly to reproductive harm. For example, I’ll look at the histories tying deviant sexualities to racial identities and how that shapes efforts to control reproduction. After establishing the greater motivations behind immigration prejudice, I will take the audience on a journey from before the border to post-migration, detailing all the points where reproductive injustice takes place. Finally, using the critiques of the current system, I explore recommendations for how a different set of border policies can better ensure reproductive rights.
Weaponized Filmmaking in the Japanese New Wave
Bazir, Shannon; Ballina, Bianka
When the Dragon Dances on the Roof of the World: Chinese Influence on Tibetan Refugees in Nepal
Caya, Catie; Dinko, Dinko Hanaan
All-Consuming Desires: Feminist and Queer Usages of Cannibalism in Twenty-First Century Texts
(2025-08-22) Tarinelli, Emily; Young, Elizabeth
Consumers of popular culture have a taste for cannibalism. American writers have produced stories about cannibalism for hundreds of years, but only within the last generation, I argue, have cannibal narratives — many of which are created by women — adopted stronger themes of gender and sexuality.
This thesis focuses on the female cannibal as a figure whose monstrosity is tied to women’s sexuality. The first half of my project explores works that employ cannibalistic horrors to critique the racialized, gendered, and sexualized configurations of human consumption under capitalism, such as Chelsea G. Summers’ novel A Certain Hunger (2020), Mimi Cave’s film Fresh (2022), Monika Kim’s novel The Eyes Are the Best Part (2024), and Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017). The second half of my project explores works in which cannibalism allegorizes the all-consuming nature of lesbian desire, awakening, and existence in a heteronormative world, such as Karyn Kusama’s film Jennifer’s Body (2009), Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson’s streaming series Yellowjackets (2021–), and Luca Guadagnino’s film Bones and All (2022). By analyzing these feminist and queer cannibal narratives, I show how cannibalism functions as both a form of resistance and a model of oppression in twenty-first century American literature, film, and television.
Please Return To:
(2025-08-22) Jakobson, Sophia; Williams, Marianna Dixon
In Please Return To: I construct mixed media paintings, sculpture, and textiles that contend with the relationship between queerness and the landscape. I draw from landscapes that have shaped me, using the body and landscape as orientation devices to explore my experience occupying a queer body. Landscapes are not neutral, but rather are shaped by and reveal systems of power. I use queerness as an active and expansive term– in queering the landscape, I’m not only thinking about how landscape painting can be subverted, but also how this process may reveal complications of queer legibility, belonging, and embodiment.
Like an archeological dig, I pull from personal archives and queer theory. Theorist Sara Ahmed explores the body as a sedimented history– both the body and its surroundings are mutually shaped through repetitive action over time. I use materials such as recycled paper, fiber, and cement as forms of physical poetry to build emotional landscapes. Industrial and natural, soft and rigid, fragmented and solid– the work traverses material boundaries, drawing attention to how we construct naturalness and how these embedded assumptions construct possibilities for how bodies should appear and behave.
Inviting participation, I ask the viewer to co-construct the landscape by tangibly shaping the environment through imaginative play. I engage with cast shadows and camouflage as metaphor for queer legibility, acknowledging both the simultaneous complications of and desires to be seen. Amidst an increasingly contentious political backdrop in which queer and trans people are subject to violence, surveillance, and erasure, the work contends with how grief and concealment can exist alongside play, growth, and possibility.