Tag: Poster: 139

Sami Sovereignty and International Climate Change Mitigation

Presenter(s): Augustine Beard − History, Environmental Studies

Faculty Mentor(s): Mark Carey

Poster 139

Research Area: Social Science

This paper seeks to understand the intersection of climate change and geopolitical challenges to the sovereignty and self-determination of Sami people in Sápmi, the artic region of modern-day Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. While much of previous research on climate change and Sami people has focused on traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and management for reindeer herding or other natural resources within single states, fewer scholars have engaged the linkages between the challenges to sovereignty posed by the partition of Sami territory. This research will situate intergovernmental climate discourse within a longer narrative that includes colonization, partition, European integration, and globalization. Further, I will examine the impacts of inter-state approaches (or lack of such approaches) to climate mitigation and adaptation on local communities and cultures. There are two major areas of interest/questions for this research: (1) How do inter- European and international conversations about climate change compound or complicate the geopolitical challenges that the Sami face in self-determination? (2) How do the impacts of climate change on reindeer herding and Sami natural resource management impact their capacity to assert sovereignty to multiple state actors? In sum, this paper will demonstrate how international agreements and organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Paris Accords have perpetuated a pattern of marginalization and exclusion seen in previous geopolitical challenges to Sami sovereignty and natural resource management.

16 Characters for Change: Colin Kaepernick and the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

Presenter(s): Giselle Andrade

Co Presenter(s): Carlos McCarter, Sierra Connolly

Faculty Mentor(s): Dave Markowitz

Poster: 139

Session: Social Sciences & Humanities

A lack of political activism among African American athletes over the past two decades has drawn widespread criticism. Critics posit that the modern-era African American athletes’ accumulation of wealth has influenced the de-politicization of sports. Our study directly tests the applicability of this narrative. We used the Twitter patterns of former National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick, as a case study to understand the Black Lives Matter social movement. We posed the following research question: Were Kaepernick’s political tweets about #BlackLivesMatter more influential than his non-political tweets? To evaluate this question, we created a dictionary of words that contained political speech as reflected by Kaepernick’s Twitter feed. We then used the automated text analysis program, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, to count the rate of political speech in Kaepernick’s tweets that were scraped computationally in the computing environment, RStudio. Regression tests analyzed the relationship between Kaepernick’s political speech and engagements, defined as the rate of favorites and retweets per tweet. We found political speech did not affect the level of engagement of favorites (p = .65). However, the rate of political speech was related to the number of retweets per tweet (p = .056), and for each percent increase in political speech, Kaepernick’s tweets received nearly 130 fewer retweets. We believe that these data suggest retweets are a more critical degree of expression than favorites.