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
  • Archive of U.S. Sanctuary Policies, 2001-2014  
    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!
  • Campus Living Laboratory Initiative  
    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.
  • College Initiatives and Programs  
  • Faculty -- Research, Data, Projects, and Papers  
    Repositories for retaining data and scholarly research of the Mount Holyoke College faculty
  • Students -- Research, Data, Projects, and Papers  
    Repositories for retaining data, scholarly research, and academic output of Mount Holyoke College students

Recent Submissions

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    Hymn to the Third Death: An Orchestral Portrait of Three Endangered Birds
    Gillogly, Finn; Sanford, David
    This extended program note follows my process conceptualizing, composing, editing, and workshopping a set of three orchestral miniatures detailing three species of birds: the Red-legged Kittiwake, the Gunnison Sage-Grouse, and the Bachman’s Warbler. Each of these species are at varying levels of peril, being Threatened, Endangered, and Extinct, respectively. I undertook this project with the goal of drawing attention to these birds and the challenges that they face using an orchestral format, and demonstrating the ways in which music can be a method for science communication. This extended program note aims to give background and context to the piece that I composed and the birds I chose to highlight. I will begin with a brief overview of the piece, introduce the birds that I chose, discuss my inspirations and writing process, and the workshopping process and performance with the Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra. I will conclude with my thoughts on music as a tool of science communication, and the importance of joy in the environmental movement.
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    The Impact of Brexit on European Union Agricultural Trade
    Vavra, Kate; Mitchell, Christopher
    The United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union marked a broader retreat from globalization, affecting both trade relationships and government budgets. The majority of existing research on Brexit’s impact on trade focuses on the UK’s experience, overlooking the realities that EU member states faced after losing one of their top budget contributors and adapting to shifts in trade agreements with a global economic power. To evaluate the impact of Brexit on European Union agricultural trade, this study follows a research design that contains both a time series and a comparative analysis. Annual data points were collected from 2015, the year before the Brexit referendum, through 2023, which is the most recent year with reliable data. To accurately represent the EU within research limitations, France, Germany, and Poland were selected for study. To assess the agricultural trade of EU member states before and after Brexit, four subjects were selected: each country’s economic dependence on agriculture over time, the effects of EU agricultural policy shifts on member-states, overall bilateral agriculture trade flows by member-state over time, and international trade by agricultural product category. This research led to the conclusion that Brexit caused small trade shifts, but may have created larger consequences for the EU budget, CAP, and investment in less wealthy member states. This research adds to ongoing discussions regarding the various consequences of Brexit, as well as larger debates on the importance of European Union membership in an increasingly evolving world.
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    To see the Brad Pitts through the Actors: How Race, Gender, and Familiarity Affect the Categorization of Faces
    Bunting, Remi; Singh, Balbir
    A single object can bring a multitude of categories to your mind. For instance, a singular dog can evoke terms such as living being, animal, dog, or most specifically, German shepherd. Prior research has indicated that the abstractness of these terms indicates its level on the taxonomic hierarchy. The level of abstraction used first has been found to vary as a function of object typicality and the expertise of the viewer. When applying this framework to social categorization, previous research has found that differences in group membership (such as race or gender), as well as familiarity with the object itself can influence what level comes first to mind. As much of this research has been conducted using cognitive and behavioral methods, the present research takes a different approach by allowing participants to make multiple free-response answers to a single stimulus. Using a free-response paradigm, this study explored how differences in race (Black or White), gender (man or woman), and level of familiarity (high or low) affects the categorization of faces. Analyses revealed that participants used identity terms sooner than either race or gender terms; moreover, this relationship was strengthened by the familiarity of the target. Moreover, the race and gender of participants and target image influenced the entry point of social categorizations. In sum, these findings highlight how social identity and familiarity can influence a perceiver’s first categorization about the people around them.
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    Beggars Can’t be Choosers: Exclusion of People with Lived Experience from the Homelessness Policy Process
    Grybko, Naoise; Reed, Adolph
    This senior thesis explores the exclusion of homeless people from the creation of homelessness policy and service provision, focusing on the Western Massachusetts Hampshire, Hampden, Franklin, and Berkshire counties. On a broader scale, this project is concerned with the gap between the aims of social service policymakers and the conceptualization of policy and services by recipients. The questions that sparked this research are as follows: 1) How can the lived experience of homelessness inform a critique of existing policies to address homelessness crafted by policymakers? 2) What knowledge can experts draw from the ethnographic accounts of homeless individuals detailing their lived experience with homelessness and housing policy? 3) How could homelessness policies change if those covered by them had a voice in shaping them? Utilizing semi-structured ethnographic interviews with homeless individuals and policy actors, as well as analysis of policy documents and meeting notes from local Continuums of Care and homelessness advocacy networks, this thesis explores why homeless individuals are not seen as legitimate actors in the social welfare policy process, and why current policy responses to homelessness are failing. Findings suggest that current homelessness policy does not take into account the structural factors that construct the experience of homelessness. Policymakers and individuals experiencing homelessness appear to conceptualize policy at different levels of governance, where homeless individuals reflect upon programmatic or local policy responses where policy actors look to state and federal response.
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    Tradeoffs in Energy Investment for Reproduction Between Sexes in Two Species of Fiddler Crabs
    Bloom, Lindsey; Brodie, Renae
    All animals must portion their energy in order to reproduce, and energy investment for reproduction may vary by sex. Fiddler crabs invest energy in their hepatopancreas and gonads for reproduction, and males also invest in their major claw. This study looks at how energy investment for reproduction differs by sex in two species of fiddler crab, Minuca pugnax and Leptuca pugilator. Energy investment was determined through analysis of hepatosomatic index (HSI) and gonadosomatic index (GSI). We found that in M pugnax, there was not a significant difference in HSI between males and females, but in L pugilator, females had a significantly higher HSI. M pugnax females had a lower HSI than L. pugilator females. Females in both species had higher GSIs than males, and M. pugnax females had higher GSIs than L. pugilator females. Both HSI and GSI were impacted by month and year. The results suggest that differences in brooding and mating behavior between species leads to differences in which sex may invest more in a particular part of their reproductive biology.