2008 Winners

Laura Adrienne Brady (International Studies)
Faculty Advisor: Professor Deborah Porter
Resisting the National Narrative: Charisma and the Venezuelan Cooperative Movement in the Context of the Bolivarian Revolution

Rigorous state-promotion of cooperatives as part of the Bolivarian Revolution has increased the number of cooperatives in Venezuela from 762 in 1998, before President Hugo Chavez came to power, to 108,000 in 2006. However, in July 2007, Chavez declared the program a failure, a surprise given his break from a past of exclusionary national rhetoric and his popular support. By examining CECOSESOLA, one of the most successful cooperatives worldwide, I argue that a cooperative’s success is tied to its effectiveness in generating agency and a group narrative of resistance. Unlike CECOSESOLA, which has maintained autonomy and developed its own alternative narrative of belonging, Chavez’s program provided cooperatives with a politicized and state-centric narrative of cooperative identity reliant on his charisma. My research ultimately suggests that though Chavez discursively encourages citizen mobilization, the Bolivarian narrative perpetuates patterns of exclusion and may consequently undermine the creation of a strong civil society.

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Jessica Frederick (English)
Professor Charles LaPorte
Clad in Plaid: Finding the Nation in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley

With the growing tide of Scottish national sentiment stemming from the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) bid for independence from England since the late seventies the contemporary polemics of Scottish national identity begs for historical grounding. With two centuries worth of historiography concerning the Scottish nation and its often-cited colonial past under England’s supremacy, it is worthwhile to pursue a definition of the nation under a more auspicious lens. Sir Walter Scott is the de facto national author of the Scots, writing from the early 19th century and still sending significant ripples across contemporary society despite modernity and globalization being issued from the bi-centennial gap. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the meticulous lengths Scott took in reproducing the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion–a moment in history crucial to the understanding of Scotland’s nation-making–and investigate the unique national identities that divide his cast of characters from one another.

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Kalila Gloria Jackson-Spieker (International Studies)
Professor Sabine Long
The Right to be Different: Film, French Identity, and the National Space of French North Africans

“The Right to be Different: Film, French Identity, and the National Space of French North Africans” asks two questions: Why do French North Africans continue to face high levels of prejudice and social marginalization even as they attempt to fulfill all the requirements of Republican French identity? How do film portrayals of North Africans provide an explanation for such issues of marginalization? Specifically, it analyzes depictions from four different films of French North African conceptions of personal identity, their interactions with native white French, and the legacy of the colonial period. My thesis discusses these films within the context of broader scholarship on how the concept of Republicanism contributes to French national identity and the challenges it is facing in the new millenium, and how collective memory of the Algerian War of Independance continues to affect the treatment French North Africans receive.

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Jing-lan Lee (International Studies)
Professors Deborah Porter and Chris Hamm
Wuxia Film: A Qualitative Perspective of Chinese Legal Consciousness

This thesis offers a qualitative perspective on whether an increase in Chinese litigiousness—indicated by the passage of hundreds of new laws, the rise in the number of legal professionals and a statistical increase in the use of courts—that many scholars identify is truly indicative of a transformation of Chinese legal consciousness, or that the Chinese have faith in the law as a vehicle for eventual social and political reform. I conduct a close reading of wuxia film, a source neglected in discussions about legal consciousness despite expressing implicit commentary on the issue, by analyzing shifts between the 1980/1990s and post-2001 in the characterization of the protagonist and the visual composition of the films. I argue that changes in the contemporary films suggest Chinese skepticism of the transformative power of current legal reforms that is deeply rooted in the country’s historical experience of being objectified by the West.

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Jeff Bowman (Oceanography)
Professor Julian P. Sachs
Chemical and Physical Properties of Some Saline Lakes in Alberta and Saskatchewan

The Northern Great Plains of Canada are home to numerous permanent and ephemeral athalassohaline lakes. These lakes display a wide range of ion compositions, salinities, stratification patterns, and ecosystems. Many of these lakes are ecologically and economically significant to the Great Plains Region. A survey of the physical characteristics and chemistry of 19 lakes was carried out to assess their suitability for testing new tools for determining past salinity from the sediment record. Data on total dissolved solids (TDS), specific conductivity, temperature, dissolved oxygen (DO), and pH were measured in June, 2007. A comparison of these data with past measurements indicates that salinity is declining at Little Manitou and Big Quill Lakes in the province of Saskatchewan. However salinity is rising at other lakes in the region, including Redberry and Manito Lakes. The wide range of salinities found across a small geographic area makes the Canadian saline lakes region ideal for testing salinity proxies. In addition the nonlinear increase in salinity at Redberry Lake is likely influenced by the morphometry of the basin. This acceleration has ecological implications for the migratory bird species found within the Redberry Important Bird Area.

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Gabriel Chrisman (History)
Professor Alexandra Harmon

“If anyone lays a hand on that net they are going to get shot.” Uncompromising Activism: The Fish-In Protests at Frank’s Landing

This paper provides a narrative history of the Native American fishing rights protests which occurred during the 1960s and 1970s at and around Frank’s Landing, Washington. These highly visible and frequently dramatic protests were instrumental in securing special treaty rights for Native Americans, and were also highly influential in altering public opinion of the Pacific Northwest tribes during this turbulent period. After a background summary covering the century following the signing of the original treaties, I primarily focus on the organization known as the Survival of the American Indian Society, also describing the ways in which the eventual success of this organization was in large part due to assistance from many outside individuals and other participating groups. This cooperation was fundamentally important in linking the Native Americans’ cause to the broader civil rights movements of the period.

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Gwendolyn Slote (History)
Professor George Behlmer

A Series of Papers on Utopia…

These papers were written for a History 498 class, the Senior Seminar. This particular 498 was “non-traditional” because we wrote four shorter papers rather than a single longer paper. The class was based on Utopian and Dystopian novels from the Industrial Age: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia. For each paper, the initial research topic was to originate from a theme from the novel, staying within the contemporary time of the novel and using primarily primary resources. I wrote on electricity at the close of the nineteenth century, birth control in the early twentieth century, behaviorism and its critics in the 1920s, and The (Updated) Last Whole Earth Catalog in comparison to Ecotopia, both from the 1970s. Even though the four papers focus on very different themes and time periods, they constitute one project as they represent a quarter long process of research on themes found in Utopian and Dystopian literature.

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Gabriel Chrisman (History)
Professor James Gregory

The Port Madison Area in the 1870s and the 1880s: An Integrated Community

This paper examines the nature of the interactions between the Native American community living on the Port Madison Indian Reservation and the settler community directly across the bay, known as Port Madison, Bainbridge Island. I particularly focus on the period of the 1870s and 1880s, and I argue that the two groups were less driven by idealized and preconceived images of each other during this period when compared to the decades preceding and following it. This openness led to a complex social and economic environment which differed markedly from equivalent interactions of the 1850s and 1860s, and also from the 1890s and 1900s, but which resulted in a successfully integrated community during the 1870s and 1880s. This conclusion is presented with accompanying evidence from various sources, including a wide variety of archival evidence.

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Liam Joseph McGivern (UW Bothell)
Professor Julie Shayne

Justice Denied: Impunity During and After the Salvadoran War

Justice Denied: Impunity During and After the Salvadoran Civil War is an examination of three infamous atrocities of the Salvadoran civil war and attempts to bring the those responsible to justice. The Salvadoran civil war lasted twelve years, from 1980-1992, and resulted in the deaths of approximately 75,000 civilians. The first case is the March 1980 assassination of Archbishop Romero, a highly revered and outspoken critic of the Salvadoran government. The second case is the December 1980 rape and murder by a government death squad of four American churchwomen. The final case discussed is the November 1989 murder by Salvadoran military personnel of six Jesuit priests/professors and their two domestic servants on the University of Central America campus where they taught. The Salvadoran justice system, the international justice system vis-vis a United Nations Truth Commission, and the United States civil courts attempted to hold those responsible for the human rights atrocities accountable for their crimes. The Salvadoran justice system, however, tried only to accountable hold those individuals who actually committed murders, not the military officials who ordered the killings. I argue that ultimately justice was never served due to four factors: corruption within the government of El Salvador, a lack of power given to the United Nations Truth Commission, United States Cold War politics, and the inability of the United States civil courts to create meaningful accountability for former members of the Salvadoran military responsible for human rights violations. In addition to secondary research, this paper is based on first-hand accounts from the memoirs of Robert White, who was United States Ambassador to El Salvador during the time the atrocities were committed, and James Burgenthal, who was a member of the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador.

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