Vladimir Putin’s 2022 escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war reveals how power functions in the post-Soviet era Russia. Understanding this war as a global and regional conflict underwritten by longer-term historical and cultural factors is crucial to analyzing whether this war is exceptional or is part of a larger pattern that is redefining politics. Putin’s invocation of the Pan-Slavic movement of the early nineteenth century gives a new shape to an old form of populist agitation which stands in tension with the classic state building question of a “grand strategy”. Based on the premise that Putin may be engaging simultaneously in alliance building at a regional level, in an aggressive nationalist re-engineering of Slavic cultural ideals, and in a post-Cold War reimagining of empire, this thesis analyzes the national, international, transnational neo-populist and imperial/geo-political forces at play not just in the war, but in the actions of Russia’s leader as a kind of model for the present. This thesis studies how changing notions of politics relate to changing notions of (a particularly destructive kind of) leadership. Putin’s actions will be viewed through multiple leadership theory lenses insofar as a working characterization of Putin and his media image may be created, but also as a working hypothesis for understanding why the Russo-Ukrainian war is being conducted the way it is. Critical analysis of the forms of nationalism that Putin is weaponizing for political gain will offer new insights regarding how nationalism as a form of rhetoric has evolved since the 20th Century.

Land use has changed drastically over the years as techniques modernize and new generations of people emerge. Each new generation chances and adapts the practices they need and the practices of their time. Have the newer practices hurt the land more so than practices used by previous generations? Or is the land changing naturally? In this paper, I will be focusing on a specific section of land in Arizona. The land is located in the Southernmost portion of Game Unit 19A. I have analyzed the techniques used by three distinct generations: Native Americans, original ranchers and miners, and modern ranchers and hunters. But looking at the differences between each generation, I have been able to pick out techniques that may have contributed to how the land is today. Those techniques include hunting, ranching, and mining. I have also analyzed the density of mesquites in the area in order get a better understanding of how the soil and vegetation has changed for the past few decades. I have found that the techniques used by the three groups are similar in nature, but the way they are conducted are very different because of the mindset that has changed between each time period. The density of mesquite is showing that the land has been affected due to ranching and drought. While ranching is conducted by humans and lines up with my analyst of the generations, drought is not something that could have been affected by humans and therefore an independent factor as to how the land has changed. Overall, I was not able to pinpoint a specific generation or land use techniques that has caused more change than another. I have concluded that more research should be done in order to figure out what techniques could be doing more harm than we had originally thought.

All freshman honors students are required to take a two-semester course during their freshman year at ASU called Human Event. This course focuses on developing a student’s ability to break down the concepts in important historical texts and then write essay’s that explore these concepts. One of the unique qualities of the honors college at ASU Polytechnic is the Thesis Fest, which is an opportunity for students to share their progress when writing each essay before the due date. During Thesis Fest, students discuss the texts they are writing about with tutors and they get helpful pointers regarding how to clearly understand the concepts they want to explore. These tutors are previous Human Event students who are all enrolled in another course called the Honors Colloquium. The polytechnic campus is also unique because it allows a student’s paper to be evaluated in a conference – Paper Mini-Conference (PMC) – between the student, a tutor, and the professor. The inspiration for this project is derived from personal experiences in the Honors Colloquium. During each Thesis Fest, students and tutors are required to fill out tutor receipts, verifying that the student attended Thesis Fest as well as the texts discussed. In addition, a receipt is also used to verify that the tutor is fulfilling his/her tutoring obligations. Therein lies a pain point for both tutors and students, which is the fact that all receipts are hand-written on small pieces of paper and both the tutor and student must have separate duplicate copies. In addition, the head tutor of the Colloquium is then required to analyze the cards and verify that individual tutors have enough receipts for the semester. Lastly, the student must verify that they attended Thesis Fest by bringing a receipt to the PMC. There have been many occasions when a student has forgotten their receipt, which results in them having to email the receipt to the professor or bring it in at a later time. This project aims to solve this problem by building a mobile application that digitizes the data collection for receipts.

The United Nations outlined seventeen goals in their 2015 resolution aimed at securing a more sustainable future for the entire world. These goals cover all parts of life and are meant to standardize quality of life at a high level for all countries. Specific to the Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania, there are five main goals that would tackle some of the biggest issues facing the Maasai and greatly improve their lives. These goals include the promotion of good health and well-being, ensuring a quality education for school-age children, supporting efforts for gender equality in all communities, and securing clean and safe water and sanitation services for all people around the world. There are many Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in the Maasai community that are striving to support them and realize these Sustainable Development Goals. Organizations like the Maasai Girls Education Fund and Aid Tanzania have established educational programs to support children, mainly girls, in their efforts to get an education. Others like End Water Poverty and the Maasai Association have programs to ensure safe, accessible drinking water is made available to Maasai communities across Kenya and Tanzania. Lastly, NGOs like My Chosen Vessels have programs that support the economic sustainability and livestock management of the Maasai while also ensuring that Maasai families receive clean water and access to an education. The work and practices of NGOs like these can serve as examples of how to efficiently and effectively address and tackle issues in developing countries, specifically regarding Maasai women and girls, to move closer to achieving these UN Sustainable Development Goals and lead a more sustainable future. Many studies have been done researching the political and economic struggles for Maasai communities and how it impacts them. Vandana Shiva coined the term, “Water Democracy” in her book Water Wars to express the multiple reasons why water is a necessity and right. Many Maasai groups do not have easy access to basic essentials for their everyday lives and NGOs have been noticing this more and more. Dorothy Hodgson writes about the history of Maasai NGOs, and mentions the multiple conflicts that they have had with each other, causing many Maasai groups to have different lifestyles. The connections between the history of the Maasai tribe, their current economy and their current relationship with the government and NGOs all impact women in their communities in different ways.

This thesis will draw connections between Viktor Frankl’s psychological practices of Logotherapy and the pedagogical system put into place to support Arizona State University Barrett students on the Polytechnic campus through the Writing Colloquium. On Poly, the Writing Colloquium is uniquely structured through its six functions (Teacher Assistants, Thesis Fests, Paper Mini Conferences, Tribunals, Flipped Thesis Workshops, and Service Projects) to provide support for the Human Event and upperclassman students with an emphasis on engagement with Barrett through all four years of undergraduate learning. Through the work in the Colloquium, both the students it serves and those within the program grow in their understanding of how written language adds meaning to their time in college and can provide purpose and direction for their life after graduation. This view connects back to the existentialist framework suggested by Frankl’s writings in Man’s Search for Meaning, where he discusses the sustaining and enabling power in writing during his time in German concentration camps in World War II and his experience as a psychoanalyst. In the analysis of these theories of life, meaning, and writing, I emphasize the exploration and connection of concepts through written language as a way to discover meaning and purpose in difficult circumstances. In order to do so, also included in my thesis is interviews of: the Barrett Poly Associate Dean; three Faculty members; two Honors Staff; and five ASU Barrett Poly Alumni. These interviews document the early years of Barrett’s presence on the Polytechnic campus and also how the Colloquium has grown over the years to support the expanding population of the honors college on the campus.

This creative project is a children’s book designed to teach young readers about engineering through a fictional story about a group of children creating a robot for their school’s show-and-tell. The story aims to teach engineering principles to children in a lighthearted and entertaining form, narrating notions such as the design process, prototyping, specialty fields, and repurposing. Other principles such as learning patience, compromise and teamwork are also conveyed throughout the plot details. Small life lessons that transcend the realm of engineering are also embodied throughout. The plot of the story is a young girl who goes to visit her grandfather who is a garage tinkerer with a love of spare parts. He tells her about his job as a robotics engineer, and she loves it. She goes and tells her friends who decide they want to make a robot for show-and-tell at school. The grandfather agrees to help them build a robot and thus the group of kids are walked through the engineering design process, learning new things (and specialization) along the way. The story ends by revealing that the whole story was a flashback the main character was having as she is about to start her first day at an engineering firm.

The population of undocumented immigrants includes over a million individuals known as “Dreamers,” who are for all intents and purposes naturalized Americans but are not counted among the American citizens. Dreamers have grown up believing in the American dream of one day being able to develop themselves into hard-working, accomplished and fully recognized Americans. Unfortunately, however, Dreamers are caught in a limbo of hope: their undocumented status forces them to work and live in the “underground,” or risk being deported to an unfamiliar country. After years of activism, the Dreamers found limited protection under an executive action introduced by former-President Barack Obama, known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DACA deferred deportation and gave the Dreamer the ability to legally work within the United States. Unfortunately, DACA’s provisional protection of hundreds of thousands of Dreamers also created gaps of its own: many other naturalized residents have been excluded and those covered by the DACA program remain limited in education and work. DACA’s protection is also limited in practice and time; it lasts for only two years before needing to be renewed and it can be revoked at any time. Only through legislation creating a “path to citizenship” and/or through formal naturalization can the Dreamers’ nightmare end and normalcy be instated. But precisely this idea of a “path to citizenship” has become the object of invective by anti-immigrant politics of Trump and the Republican Party. The Republican Party has worked to define itself as the party of White America by fomenting fear and anxiety over immigrant populations, whose mere existence or growth it presents as a threat. With continuing Republican government control, the Dreamer will not be able to legalize their status and will remain to be limited with their American dreams.

In modern legal and political debates, Lochner v. New York is regularly praised by libertarians for its rejection of economic regulation. To understand the libertarian impulse for revitalizing the Lochner decision, we must examine the foundations Lochner was decided on and the cases and laws that led to the end of the Lochner Era. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (Wagner Act) was passed as a counter-revolution to the anti-regulatory framework of the Lochner Era, and it found its legal accompaniment in the West Coast Hotel and NLRB v. Jones decisions. Some retrenchment followed: The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (Taft-Hartley Act) was passed to undercut the Wagner Act in ways that is possible to see as either a return to Lochnerism or as the rise of an executive supremacy argument in to the labor market. Writing during the negotiations of Taft-Hartley, Max Horkheimer, in Eclipse of Reason, explicitly rejects the economic premises that Taft-Harley rests upon and criticizes its logic of governance. We can learn from Horkheimer’s critique of the rationality behind the Taft-Hartley Act in order to understand the fundamental issues with the Lochner decision and modern libertarian attempts at confining governmental regulation to means that ensure the functioning of free-markets. This paper analyzes the economic rationality of the Wagner and Taft-Hartley Acts, arguing that the Wagner Act was a rejection of Locherian logic and that there is latent Lochnerian premises within the Taft-Hartley Act. This paper defines the Lochner zombie and seeks to understand the attractive power that the decision has on modern legal thought. Libertarian groups use the premises of the Lochner decision, civil rights and protection of contract as a means to render all, or almost all, governmental market regulation unconstitutional. I will be examining the cases of Lochner v. New York and West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish. In doing so, I will be utilizing the legal theories of Roberto Mangabeira Unger and the critical theory of Max Horkheimer as a framework for understanding the resurrection of the Lochner zombie. Part of the purpose of this paper is to establish a linkage between Horkheimer’s analysis of means-ends rationality and the reconstructive legal interpretation advocated by Unger. Using both Unger and Horkheimer together allows for a more robust critique of the ever more dominating libertarian legal theories. The Taft-Hartley Act and modern libertarian attacks on governmental regulation seek to replace the institutional and regulatory model of the Wagner Act with a theory of legal disciplinarity bound to economics and contract theory such that it would systematically exclude ethical and social justice forms of rationality from the canons of legal thinking. I counter this by proposing legal interdisciplinarity that utilizes critical theory and rationalizing legal analysis to promote democratization and governmental regulation. The only way to slay the Lochner zombie is to develop a reconstructive theory of law as a discipline situated relative to economics and other social sciences.

My thesis, Arbitrary Samples: A Reflection on Boundaries, is a collection of poetry and prose that examines my individual perspective and interprets experiences that I have had in a way that also relates to collective experiences others may have had. I discuss the importance of art as a metaphoric medium. This is made most evident by the way I use poetry to channel emotions in inclusive manner and the way I use prose to re-evaluate pieces of my identity. I discuss the permanence of art and the ability art has to preserve and express memory. I also examine art's ability to express identity, and the necessity to separate the poetic voice from the personal identity of the writer. I go on to demonstrate the multiplicity of meanings often found in poetry, and the general subjectivity of poetic symbolism. My thesis is broken up into five sections, with five pieces of prose and twenty-four poems total. The topics I explore include, but are not limited to family illness, sexual identity, and domestic violence. The final section demonstrates the process of healing from certain experiences, and the ability to heal through writing. My thesis is a testament to both my English and History majors, and a reflection on the physical and psychological boundaries that exist in our everyday lives.