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
Seeing Walls: A Study of Separation and Connection in Manila
(2025-06-04) Heller, Micah; Darling, Naomi
A careful reading of the form and materiality of colonial infrastructure in Manila exposes the extent and limitations of the colonial dominated archive. Seeing Walls reveals a history of material resistance against the walls that divide the city through informal architectural additions throughout the city.
Given the strategic location of the archipelago that make up the Philippines, Manila provides a site in which walls – understood broadly as both divisive and connective - are part of the landscape. For example, the ocean offered a protective wall to early inhabitants but, with the development of boat technology, that same water became temporarily habitable and permeable. The oceanic wall thus enabled extensive trade routes that connected the Pacific Islands and China. Since then, architectural walls have been built as part of colonial projects and, likewise, have been subverted through transient and perishable interventions. As examples, the Intramuros fortification was built during the Spanish colonial rule to separate Spanish and native Filipinos. But, woven throughout, Sari Sari shops and food carts inhabit this colonial infrastructure. These small moments of deliberate “misuse” complicate our understanding of the planned use of the city fabric. The simple act of providing people shade and respite from the tropical weather are evidence of colonial refusal. These documented examples of resistance expand the archive and recontextualize historical images.
My thesis considers the rich history that produced precedents of resistance and proposes a design strategy that deconstructs and transforms the Postigo de La Nuestra Señora De Soledad, a small hidden gate in the Intramuros fortification. By partially obscuring and inhabiting this section of the fortification, using bamboo scaffolding of coastal villages and textile boat sails in juxtaposition with the stone wall, my aim is to circumvent the reproduction of colonial ideology in architecture.
Geopolitics at Play: Trans and Intersex Athletes in Elite Sports
(2025-03-28) Kearney, Amanda; Smith, Sarah Stefana
At the foundation of many iterations of the conversation around trans and intersex athletes in competitive sports, there is a common foundational understanding that there ‘must be a male winner, and must be a female winner,’ thus justifying the exclusion of trans women from competing. In attempting to combat this kind of exclusion, I was struck by the question, ‘why is that? What is at stake? In this project, I work to investigate the gendered, racial, and global implications of winning, especially considering competitive sports’ position on an international scale and its connections to what Earl Smith defines as the Athletic Industrial Complex (AIC). The AIC is an institution with immense influence to produce/reinforce imperial hegemony due to its location in the global economy and its entanglements with other institutions of power (Smith, 2014, p. 72). I conduct a discourse analysis on the sensationalized stories of elite athlete Caster Semenya and high school student-athletes Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood. In this process, I engage with Black Feminist, Marxist, Critical Trans and Critical Sports theorizers to frame the the continuums and congruences connecting capital and imperial interests of transmisogynoir-istic legislation across time and space. The first chapter historicizes the social construction of biological sex dimorphism to disrupt the notion that there is an unbiased, objective truth. Black feminist and Marxist analyses of sex and gender help frame sex and gender as inextricably racialized and classed with serious material consequences that allows for exploited gendered labor to persist as well as (re)inforces pathologization of Black people’s bodies. The second chapter begins our discussion about Semenya, Miller and Yearwood and point out the ways that their treatment is connected to/occuring in the afterlife of slavery, thus informing the basis for their subjugation. Reading the discourse of these athletes together contours the boundaries between liberal conceptualizations of human and non-human subjectivities and their relation to the state. The third chapter explores the ways in which winning is embroiled in accumulation of capital and alienates the production of labor from athletes – particularly racialized athletes. In this chapter, I also investigate the connections of winning, nationalism, knowledge production, and imperialist hegemony. Finally, in framing the question of what is to be done, I problematize inclusionary-based politics within our current neoliberal capitalist context, particularly as it is positioned as liberatory.
(In)validating the KPFM Method for Estimating the Trap Density of States in Organic Semiconductors
(2025-03-05) Yuan, Sophia; Aidala, Katherine
Due to the complex structure of organic semiconductors, accurately estimating the trap density of states (DOS) within these materials is a challenge. In the past few decades, multiple techniques have been developed that estimate traps in organic materials. However, each technique has some limitations. This thesis focuses on improving our understanding of one less commonly used technique that employs Kelvin Probe Force Microscopy to measure the surface potential of a thin semiconducting film. We used OghmaNano to simulate this measurement of trap DOS within P3HT, a p-type material. OghmaNano computationally solves the drift-diffusion equation and incorporates non-equilibrium Shockley-Read-Hall formulism, which describes the physics of carrier traps in these materials. Our analysis employs analytical equations derived by previous groups that relate the density of states to the surface potential of a thin film as a gate voltage is changed. While this technique has been employed experimentally, the trap DOS was not known in those materials. In our simulations, we define the trap DOS, run the simulation to calculate the potential, and then apply the analysis used by others. We are unable to extract the correct trap DOS. We investigate the reason for this, examining the role of temperature and whether our use of SRH trap dynamics is sufficient to explain the difference. We were not able to conclusively determine the cause at this time.
The Art of Witnessing: An Ethnography of SUD Treatment in Rural Vermont
(2025-01-22) Pugh, Christine; Aulino, Felicity
This thesis explores the lived experience and structural conditioning of Substance Use Disorder (SUD) treatment in rural Vermont. It is based on seven months of ethnographic research with an SUD recovery center, where I participated in various modalities of clinical and social treatment for those with SUD. In this text, first I highlight the interconnections between biomedicine and policing as they come into conflict with the care goals of individuals with SUD, resulting in a need for advocates in the form of Recovery Center staff. I then discuss the moral stakes of SUD in the local area, with particular attention to the dimensions of social suffering related to SUD. Finally, I look into the ways in which current shortcomings in this realm might be addressed through the usage of art and art therapy, not just as treatment for SUD in and of itself, but also as a tool for advocacy that can affect the landscape of stigma and subsequent treatment of people with SUD.
Quel Tramonto Gentile: Validating the Tribulations of Girlhood in Lidia Ravera & Marco Lombardo Radice's PORCI CON LE ALI
(2024-07-08) Gagnon, Gabriella; Frau, Ombretta
A jarring and underappreciated book, Lidia Ravera and Marco Lombardo Radice’s 1976 novel Porci con le ali: Diario Sessuo-Politico di Due Adolescenti narrates the relationship of two Roman highschoolers, Rocco and Antonia. Originally published under the collective pseudonym of the two protagonists, this story gives voice to the difficulties of navigating the choppy waters of youth against the backdrop of Italy’s politically treacherous Lead Years (gli Anni di Piombo) and the unspoken societal norms that impacted Rocco and Antonia’s everyday decisions. Despite there existing very little scholarship dedicated to this book, Porci con le ali garnered much attention upon its publication due to the vulgar language the characters use to communicate with each other and the nature of their erotic relations. While Rocco and Antonia are both average teenagers, it is Antonia who leads this story—and their relationship—with a stronger sense of self following the blatant disrespect and disregard for her bodily autonomy that she receives from her Rocco.
My thesis seeks to defend the crudeness with which Antonia’s adolescence is handled as the story progresses. Because this novel is written in the journal format, it gives the audience a comprehensive window into the emotional turmoil she experiences in addition to appealing to a sense of nostalgia. With her own internal struggles of identity, Antonia alternates between bouts of maturity and childishness as she grapples with the notion that the only person who cares about what she has to say is herself. Through an in-depth character analysis of both characters, Antonia’s colorful use of language, and an exploration of how her sexual encounters further distance her from contemporary expectations, my work aims to circulate Lombardo Radice and Ravera’s novel back into modern feminist conversation due to its depiction of female adolescence.