Several narratives exist about the Balkans and people from the region, with the primary narrative often being negative. Many know the region as one of conflict, where neighbors are always squabbling over land and history. This negative narrative has spread into the Balkan Diaspora in the United States and across the globe. This is significant because diasporas are independent actors that actively influence and are connected to the homelands they represent, as Barth and Shain argue in “Diasporas and International Relations Theory”. Currently, there are neither reliable statistics on the number of members of a greater Balkan Diaspora in the United States, nor are there many statistics on the number of members of the individual ethnic diasporas, such as the Serbian Diaspora, Bulgarian Diaspora, Romanian Diaspora, etc. A lot of research that exists on the Balkans is related to the conflicts in the 1990s, helping to shape the negative narrative of the Balkans as a region of prejudice and hate. Additionally, there aren’t enough resources allocated towards the Balkan Diaspora. There is some literature on diasporas in the post-communist world, such as in Koinova’s research on “Diasporas and democratization in the post-communist world”, as well as on ethnic diasporas from across the Balkan region, such as in Prelec’s research on the Serbian Diaspora’s political views and its impact on the 2017 presidential election and Raggazi’s article on the invention of the Croatian Diaspora during the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. There is a lot of existing literature on prominent diasporas in the United States, that are large in both number and geopolitical soft power, such as the Armenian (Bolsajian, 2018) and Greek Diasporas (Kaloudis, 2008). However, there remains a gap when it comes to questions regarding identity and being part of both the Balkan Diaspora and its individual ethnic diasporas in the twenty-first century. Across the US, there are communities for individual ethnic diasporas, such as ethnic Orthodox Churches and Bosnian and Albanian Islamic Centers. However, there isn’t much of a dedicated space for a unified Balkan Diaspora and its members. For example, Balkan Bred is a company that sells products catered towards the former Yugoslav Diaspora and tells former Yuogslav Diaspora members’ stories in the form of blogs. Still, there isn’t a space for the entire Balkan Diaspora that includes both the western, eastern, and southern Balkans communities. Based on these considerations, we pose a few questions for our research: How do we create a space and community for all members of the Balkan Diaspora that is free of hate so we can more positively share our culture and heritage with one another and with the world? How can individual ethnic identities exist in conjunction with a unified Balkan Diasporic identity? The overarching idea is to reconstruct existing narratives about the Balkans as a region of prejudice and conflict by providing a space for members of the Balkan Diaspora to share their stories. The fields of study from which we derive our topic are Eastern European Studies and Global Politics with a thematic focus on Conflict Resolution. There are several goals with this project. We want to share Diaspora members’ stories about their experiences in the United States, related to identity, migration, and ethnicity. We want to build such a community for a unified Balkan Diaspora, initially virtually on social media, and then in-person. We want to share resources about the Balkans and its various ethnic diasporas, for both members of the Diaspora and for those who would like to learn more. We want these resources to be related to topics other than conflict, such as ethnic organizations, communities, articles, and books that celebrate individual ethnic diasporas.

Coral reefs provide many ecosystem services for coastal people. Coral reef fisheries are an important asset to food systems but their role in supporting food sovereignty for Indigenous people has not been assessed. Using ethnographic methods, I conduct a small-N comparative case study of two different areas in Indonesia to discover the role of coral reef fisheries in Indigenous food sovereignty and how food brings value to Indigenous communities.

Life on a college campus can get incredibly busy between classes, work, and a social life. Because of this, it can be easy to completely forget to grab those essential items on the way out the door that you might need for your day. The goal of LifeSaver’s Lane is to remedy the need to remember to grab those items by creating a small, easily accessible kit of essential items that can be thrown in a backpack or purse to keep at all times. Through this project we collected information on what would best work within our bags, as well as gathering expressed interest in regard to purchasing the product after we began to produce it. This project showed a large need for a product like these personal hygiene kits to deal with the chaos of daily life.

This paper analyzes the factors that contribute to suicide using current literature, statistics, and research towards what affects suicidal tendencies. It was found that there are 5 main factors that contribute towards these tendencies: economics, social factors, geography, politics, and biology. Additionally, some of these factors included subcategories of factors and/or were connected to the other factors mentioned. It was concluded that there is not just one factor that may contribute to someone taking their own life, however a combination of different factors that may influence suicidal tendencies.

This paper examines the multifaceted challenges surrounding college students' nutrition, with a specific focus on Arizona State University (ASU). Examining economic shifts, psychological influences, nutrition knowledge, and body image dynamics, it reveals the profound impact on students' food security and eating behaviors. Despite existing initiatives, persistent gaps in resources remain, necessitating comprehensive interventions to support students effectively. In response, "The Ultimate Health Resource for ASU Students," a website, was developed as an innovative solution. This platform aims to empower students by providing a centralized hub to access vital resources, connect with peers, and discover nutritious recipes. Proposed strategies encompass expanding food pantry offerings, developing mobile applications for nutritional guidance, and fostering partnerships with local organizations. By tackling these challenges head-on and fostering a culture of support, ASU can ensure that all students have equitable access to nutritious food options and the necessary resources to thrive academically and personally. The website serves as a place of empowerment, offering practical solutions and fostering a sense of community among ASU students striving for optimal health and well-being.

In this paper, we conduct a review of the existing literature on maternal care trade-offs. From our research, we found that allomaternal care arose as the main strategy used by mothers to combat these trade-offs. In industrialized societies, the increased prevalence of women in the work force has given rise to systemic maternal support in the form of maternity leave. We used the 2022 American Time Use Survey Data to simulate the effects of such policies, as well as marital status on women’s time allocation. We created dependent variables to measure the agents’ career advancement, wellbeing, and child wellbeing. Across all of our models, those who had an unmarried partner had better career advancement and child wellbeing, whereas those who were single had the highest maternal wellbeing. We used an agent-based model and ultimately concluded that, over the span of 10 years, 12 weeks of paid maternity leave was not enough to impact the agents’ long-term time allocation behavior.

Was Israel’s early successful vaccine rollout enough to get their population vaccinated in a timely and sufficient manner? This paper will dive into this question by approaching it from the lens of supply and demand. Factors that enabled their successful supply chain management of vaccines will be contrasted against demand constraints to illustrate that while Israel was successful in obtaining vaccines for their population, they ultimately, similarly to other countries, faced issues with vaccine hesitancy and reaching full coverage.

Waggle Ballet explores the possibility of increasing access to ballet for blind audience members by using a combination of live music, accessible choreography, a sensory based workshop, and wearable sonification technology. Waggle Ballet is a classical ballet excerpt that addresses the limitations presented by audio descriptions. Where audio descriptions serve to describe exactly what can be seen on stage for audience members with blindness or vision impairments, Waggle Ballet uses other sensory elements to trigger the imagination and create a sound environment that is generated through ballet movements with the help of motion capturing sensors and thematic sound outputs. The piece was performed in front of a live audience of varying sight abilities with the live musical accompaniment of the bass clarinet. A mini workshop was given that incorporated storytelling and touch to help audience members become familiar with the environment created in the piece. With all the elements coming together, Waggle Ballet hopes to evoke a unique experience that draws from the aspects of ballet performance beyond purely visual aesthetics.

Healthy relationships are a key contributor toward life satisfaction. Thus, it is important to understand correlates of relationship functioning. Partners high in empathy have been found to experience higher levels of relationship satisfaction. However, it is unclear which facet of empathy matters more in determining satisfaction, an individual’s own empathy or their perception of their partner’s empathy. The present study surveyed both members of 54 heterosexual couples (Mage = 38.57, SD = 14.44) on relationship satisfaction and two measures of empathy: self-reported empathy and perceptions of one’s partner’s empathy. Bivariate correlation analyses showed that both higher self-reported empathy scores and higher perceived empathy scores from the female partner were associated with higher relationship satisfaction among men. In women, the same pattern occurred: higher self-reported empathy in women and higher perceived empathy from the male partner were associated with higher relationship satisfaction among women. Moreover, higher empathic discrepancies – defined as the absolute difference between an individual’s self-reported empathy and their partner’s rating of the individual’s empathy – were associated with lower levels of relationship satisfaction among partners. These results lend support for empathy-focused efforts in developing and maintaining satisfying relationships.