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
Connections in Conversation: Dialogue Rooted in Equity
(2025-07-08) Delamere, Katherine; Gebre-Medhin, Benjamin
This thesis analyzes filmed dialogues that center interracial and intergroup understanding through small group communication. This research seeks to deepen understandings of structures and power dynamics in communication networks at the intersection of social network analysis, communication analysis, and restorative justice principles. Examining seven filmed dialogues, including five intergroup identity-based dialogues and two restorative justice circles, through computational techniques to analyze the transcripts using social network analysis, centrality measures, and sentiment analysis, this research illuminates the relationship between communication, dialogic connection, and social power structures. This research finds that these filmed identity-based intergroup dialogues center the narratives and emotional arcs of the white participants, and, more often than not, use the participants of color as educators instead of equally included participants. Further, this research finds that white participants often expressed higher sentiment scores than participants of color, and that their sentiment scores followed how positively or negatively they felt about their place in a racialized society. By centering the emotional and educational stories and arcs of understanding of the white participants, these filmed intergroup identity-based dialogues reinforce the very racial injustices that they claim to work toward dismantling.
Tracing Anxieties: American Missionary Schools in Turkey and the Figure of the Spy
(2025-07-08) Yildiz, Gunes; Watson, Matthew C.
Approximately 450 American missionary schools were established between the nineteenth century and the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. Currently, only five of them exist in the form of high schools and universities in the Republic of Turkey. During the reign of Sultan Abdülhamit (1876-1909), these schools were tightly controlled by the “Yıldız Intelligence Organization.” This led to the closure of many schools and the deportation of some missionaries on the grounds that they participated in spy work or instigated minority uprisings. Rumors and conspiracy theories about existing missionary schools persist today. In my research over the summer of 2024, I traced past and present anxieties, particularly those relating to accusations of espionage, through archival research, ethnographic interviews, and fieldwork. In this thesis, rather than proving or disproving such theories and allegations, I aim to examine how the figure of the spy has been socially constructed in the Turkish context.
Effects of Climate Change Factors on Hypericum perforatum Presence in New England
(2025-07-08) Gerbi, Elizabeth; Hoopes, Martha
ABSTRACT
Climate change effects throughout the globe cause increased ecosystem disturbance risk from invasive species. Common St. John’s Wort (Hypericum perforatum) is a forb native to Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa, and considered an invasive weed in the northwestern United States. H. perforatum is present in New England, but appears to be non-invasive. Climate change is highly affecting New England temperatures and precipitation variability, which could have a species-dependent effect on invasives, either facilitating or discouraging invasion. As climate change alters New England climate and ecosystems, the shift in conditions could facilitate H. perforatum growth, possibly spurring invasion in New England. This research examines changes in temperature and water availability on H. perforatum both alone and combined with competition and disturbance. Water availability was the most important factor in H. perforatum germination in this study. Increased temperature facilitated germination when combined with consistent water availability but inhibited germination when combined with variable watering. Disturbance and competition both led to low germination and survival rates although a combination of consistent water and heat increased both. The current climate conditions in New England appear favorable for H. perforatum invasion, but non-climate factors likely best explain the current lack of H. perforatum invasion.
Mixed-Race Fugitivity: The Politics of Identity, Abolition, and Racial Performance in 19th Century American Literature
(2025-07-08) Lee Adams, Amanda; Moskowitz, Alex
This project interrogates how early American literature stages the racialized body as a contested site of power, perception, and discipline through the work of William Apess’s Eulogy on King Philip (1836), William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or The President’s Daughter (1853), and Sui Sin Far’s Its Wavering Image (1912). Through a historical materialist lens, I trace the afterlives of colonialism and slavery—ongoing structures of violence that sediment in the racialized ordering of the social—and examine how these texts mobilize narrative as a fugitive strategy, locating in the margins of literary form a critique of dominant racial ontologies. While the figures at the center of these texts are often retroactively framed within a “mixed race” discourse, my analysis resists imposing contemporary identity categories, instead attending to the historical and epistemological work of racial ambiguity: how it becomes legible to the state, how it is surveilled, eroticized, commodified, and ultimately weaponized in service of racial capitalism and settler sovereignty. Apess’s eulogy functions as a counter-historiography, reclaiming Metacomet not only as a symbol of Indigenous resistance but as a rupture in the settler colonial narrative of inevitability. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, I argue that Apess stages race as an unstable and contested construct, using performance as a mode of political intervention that resists fixed racial legibility and asserts Indigenous futurity—a fugitive practice resonant with Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s Undercommons. Brown’s Clotel, situated at the nexus of race, gender, sexuality, and labor, exposes the libidinal economy of slavery and the contradictions embedded in Jeffersonian democracy. Rather than succumbing to a narrative of tragic archetype, Clotel’s racial and gendered position destabilizes legal and ideological boundaries, foregrounding Black female body as both a juridical problem and a theoretical site. Far’s Pan occupies the racial threshold marked by Xine Yao’s term “oriental inscrutability”—her perceived unreadability becomes a mechanism through which white desire and nationalist anxiety co-produce her racialization. Across these texts, I argue that narrative form becomes a method of dissent, a praxis of disruption wherein authors refuse the coherence of racial ideology and instead foreground race as a structure of feeling—unstable, relational, and always already in crisis. These works not only historicize the emergence of monoracial paradigms but also render visible the affective and political stakes of ambiguity, situating racial perception as a battleground through which the violences of nation-building are both masked and maintained.
On the Existence of Numbers
(2025-07-08) Cazeault, Ellamae; Mitchell, Samuel
This thesis will argue that numbers are real objects and that we ought to admit them into our ontology. Results in logic, particularly Gödel’s incompleteness proofs make it impossible to avoid doing so. I will argue that to give up the fact that numbers are real is to give up math as we currently understand it and practice it. I will argue this by explaining how David Hilbert has the best method of utilizing math without committing numbers to our ontology. I will then go through Gödel’s incompleteness proofs and show why Hilbert’s methods will never work. This means that in order to do math, we must admit numbers into ontology. I will then further argue that it is very difficult to give up math. I will show this through Quine’s indispensability argument. Thus, we must admit numbers into our ontology.