Senior Thesis
There is no honors program at Haverford — because every student performs honors work. The senior thesis is the capstone to a Haverford student’s academic career. It is an opportunity to do original research at levels usually reserved for graduate students, in partnership with faculty mentors. Haverford is one of only a few institutions in the country to include a senior thesis project as part of every student’s academic program. The process of producing the senior thesis gives Fords the opportunity to demonstrate their analytic skills and creatively apply what they’ve learned during their four years at the College. Students become true scholars, and come to understand at a deep and practical level what it takes to create knowledge and to seek answers to challenging questions. In turn, they become more effective and influential agents for change in whatever fields they choose and in the communities they serve.
Joseph Spir Rechani Anthropology
Hannah Beilinson Computer Science
Harrison Burns Economics
Abiola Irvine Psychology
“¿Majestad Negra? Understanding Puerto Rican Racial Politics in Philadelphia Through Diasporic Performances of Bomba”
“ Fairness and Information Access Clustering in Social Networks”
“The Effect of Corporate Taxation on Total Factor Productivity Growth Rates in the U.S. Manufacturing Sector”
“A Novel Method Evaluating the Effects of Peripartum Estrogen Fluctuations on Sleep”
I examine the intersection between race, national identity, and music within my film, BOMPLÉ. The film shows the powerful and sonically immersive worlds of Bomba and Plena, two Afro Puerto Rican music genres, and how they evolved from their racialized, highly stigmatized past through the diaspora of Puerto Ricans to North Philadelphia. BOMPLÉ grapples with conversations of racial politics, national identity and diasporic pride. Through a detailed ethnographic vignette, supported by ethnomusicology and personal reflection, my accompanying récit converses with the film and ultimately grounds itself in the questions: what does it mean to be Puerto Rican; how is Puertoricanness being exhibited and reimagined through Bomba; and how has the blackness of Bomba persisted over time?
Building off the field of influence maximization, I examine how the spread of information in a social network advantages some individuals over others. I review how others have handled fairness analysis in influence maximization and propose information access clustering as a new method to examine fairness. I formalize information access disparity by clustering individuals in social networks into groups based on their level of information access. I then show that these information access clusters correlate to existing measures of information access, using a coauthorship dataset as an example. By studying fairness in social networks, I was able to learn more about the social science behind social network theory while also thinking about how we can bring the skill sets of Computer Science to help ameliorate social disparities.
Corporate taxation is a powerful tool used by the U.S. government and a material portion of overall tax revenue. The goal of my thesis is to understand how these taxes affect productivity growth rates in the manufacturing sector. Income statement and balance sheet data from the U.S. Census Bureau and productivity data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was collected on 17 manufacturing sub-industries between 2006 and 2017. A multiple OLS regression model was used, yielding statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that corporate tax rate increases decrease productivity growth rates. The findings of this study can be used by policymakers when determining the corporate tax rate.
Clinically, sleep disorders are prevalent during pregnancy with more sleep disruptions occurring from late pregnancy through the postpartum period. Although there are many physical demands associated with pregnancy and birth that may contribute to these sleep disruptions, an understudied possibility is that hormones are directly acting in the brain to disrupt sleep. In order to test the effects of pregnancy hormones on sleep we used a hormone simulated pregnancy model in Syrian hamsters. Using Ethovision XT software, we developed a method to measure sleep using actigraphy data gathered through behavioral video recordings. Using these data, we found trends suggesting that estrogen withdrawal following birth decreases total sleep time compared to sustained estrogen treatment following birth.