Dan Tichenor – Undergraduate Research Symposium Abstracts

Freedom from Guantanamo: How the Court Curtailed Prerogative Powers and increased Civil Liberties for Detainees

Presenter: Lindsay Thane (Political Science)

Mentor: Dan Tichenor

Oral Presentation

Panel A: “Culture and Education” Maple Room

Concurrent Session 2: 10:30-11:45am

Facilitator: Nedzer Erilus

During the post 9/11 era the President made claims to expansive Commander-in-Chief Powers, yet the United States’ functioning as a constitutional democracy necessitates a sharing of power among all three branches. Executive claims to prerogative powers were scrutinized by the Court for disregarding civil liberties, most noticeably those of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay. The Court’s unprecedented step to place checks on Executive power led to this inquiry of whether the Court’s post 9/11 decisions curtailed unilateral Executive policy making and safeguarded the civil liberties afforded to detainees at Guantánamo Bay? This study looked at the Court’s decisions in the terror cases and analyzed their effect on Executive policies, as well as Congress’ activeness in shaping detainee policy and placing checks on the Bush Administration’s prerogative powers. Traditionally, the Supreme Court has deferred to the President in times of war; however, following 9/11 the Court took an active role in placing limits on the President’s unilateral powers. The Court’s decisions in these cases were effective in restraining Executive power, but they only somewhat protected and restored the detainees’ civil liberties. The protection of certain individual rights has been followed by the curtailment of others. Currently, the Obama Administration is facing criticism for the indefinite detention of detainees, and this study provides a framework which outlines how civil liberties can again begin to be restored.

Getting to Mars: Assessing In-Space Propulsion Options

Presenter(s): Manju Bangalore − Physics, Mathematics

Faculty Mentor(s): Dan Tichenor, Ben Roberts

Oral Session 3S

Research Area: Space Exploration

The evolution of life has always depended on exploration. From single cell organisms to multicellular, from water to land, and onwards to consciousness. NASA’s hope is to land astronauts on the Red Planet in the 2030s. But how do we get there? A proper propulsion system is necessary to transport the crew members to and from Mars. Current technologies being investigated will take 6 – 12 months just for a one-way trip. However, there are other technologies available for R&D, such as nuclear electric propulsion. A study was conducted to layout and translate the technical capabilities of each major in-space propulsion option for legislators and key decision makers. In addition, the paper examines the policy and political implications of choosing one system over another. This paper serves as a critical addition to the information legislators and policymakers need to decide which transportation system will carry our species beyond one planet, continuing our legacy of crossing new frontiers.

Challenges to Democratic Inclusion and Contestation of Space: Contemporary Student Activism in Transforming South Africa

Presenter(s): Anna-Magdalena Wilms-Crowe

Faculty Mentor(s): Janine Hicks & Dan Tichenor

Oral Session 3 RA

Twenty-four years into democracy, in a time marked by stark inequality and rising levels of political disillusionment, student activists are key players in the pursuit of a more just, more equitable, and more democratic South Africa. Using universities as spaces to contest, disrupt, and challenge the status quo, student activists challenge narratives of youth political apathy and act as agents of change, encouraging society to meet the goals established in the 1996 Constitution, the document enshrining the very promises they were born into believing would be their reality. Through mobilization and organizing, student actors boldly engage in questions of substantive equality and reveal the limits of South African democracy, highlighting especially how a hegemonic neoliberal framework has coopted radical transformation and maintained exclusionary principles. Yet, while #FeesMustFall protests in 2015-2016 temporarily garnered international media awareness and scholarly recognition, prolonged attention to student activism is lacking in the field of democratization and youth are often popularly conceived as apathetic or disengaged from politics. This study aims to correct this epistemological oversight by focusing on students as political agents and their contributions to the process of social transformation. This focus is especially important in Africa, the youngest continent on earth, demographically speaking, where youth hold a key role in the process of development and democratization, but has global relevance. Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews and focus groups with student activists at the University of KwaZulu Natal (UKZN) and a review of secondary literature, this project reflects on the role that student activists and institutions of higher learning play in the larger project of transforming post-94 society and deepening South African democracy. Informed by the voices of student activists involved in #FeesMustFall and more recent campaigns against gender-based violence, this study considers how student activists operate within and beyond the university to influence social change. Ultimately, I focus on how student activists conceptualize their role in creating a new social order and how that ideal translates into action. As student activists are often misunderstood, misrepresented or overlooked all together, this work fills a critical space and has important implications for our understanding of transformation in post-1994 South Africa. Moreover, examining students and universities has critical significance to the larger field of democratization and international affairs as the parallels between the state and the university reveal compromised experiences of citizenship and the urgency in addressing democratic deficit at a global scale in all spheres of society.

Seeking InSite: What the U.S. Can Learn from Vancouver’s Supervised Injection Site and How Harm Reduction Affects the Lives of Intravenous Drug Users

Presenter(s): Bryanna Moore

Faculty Mentor(s): Dan Tichenor

Poster 155

Session: Social Sciences & Humanities

The focus of my Honors thesis is on supervised injection sites and the feasibility of harm reduction as a political framework in the United States. Though there has been much research on the success of harm reduction in places outside of the United States, no supervised injection sites currently exist in the U.S. Part of my research will comprise of a comparative analysis of U.S. and Canadian drug policy, including a sociohistorical analysis of shifting cultural values around the issue of healthcare and the eventual establishment of InSite, a supervised injection site in Vancouver, British Columbia. My primary research questions are: Could a facility like InSite operate in the United States? If so, how? If not, why not? What are the obstacles — social, political, economic, legal, or otherwise — that have prevented the successful establishment of a supervised injection site in the United States? My research will make a unique, distinct contribution to the academic discourse surrounding harm reduction because it will center personal narrative and accurately situate the lives of drug users and their communities as those most affected by drug policy. This research approach reflects the principles of the harm reduction movement itself, not focusing solely on abstract policy goals or legal history but instead contextualizing law and policy in relation to lived experiences. I expect to find that drug users themselves, while at the forefront of organizing for drug policy reform and public health approaches to the issue of drug use, are rarely included in conversations with actual law-makers and policy influencers. Little existing research takes a personal narrative approach to drug policy reform. I plan to address that gap by building a body of ethnographic research that can be used in the future to determine resource allocation and shift the sociopolitical conversation about drug use from its current punitive focus to a more humanistic, health-centered approach.

“Desde Abajo, Como Semilla:” Narratives of Puerto Rican Food Sovereignty as Embodied Decolonial Resistance

Presenter(s): Momo Wilms-Crowe—Political Science

Faculty Mentor(s): Dan Tichenor, Michael Fakhri

Session 1: Oh, the Humanities!

This thesis explores the power, possibility, and agency embedded in food in the contemporary Puerto Rican context . Building from participatory ethnographic fieldwork with activists, chefs, and farmers engaged in food sovereignty work on the island, I examine the concepts of agency and subjectivity as they relate to embodied experiences of politics . This approach is made possible with the understanding that the food we consume directly connects our individual lived experiences to broader structures of power in intimate and material ways . Through food, I offer a grounded critique of US colonial violence, inherently linked to ecological destruction, cisheteropatriarchy, and disaster capitalism . I also document dynamics of radical prefigurative politics as visible in people’s generative reimagining of relationships with their bodies, each other, and the land . This analysis is supported theoretically by key indigenous, anarchist, and queer/feminist perspectives which similarly connect the personal to the political and offer examples of political action that extend beyond state-centric formal politics . Ultimately, I argue that food is a powerful site of resistance, source of resilience, and mechanism of resurgence; as Puerto Ricans reclaim autonomy via food, they are resisting deeply rooted patterns of colonial extraction and dispossession and directly cultivating a more ecologically, socially, and politically just future .

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