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Culturally informed care of indigenous-associated animal remains in museum collections.

I will develop and begin to implement a protocol for the culturally informed care of animal remains within the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History by incorporating Native practices and understandings into how animals are stored across departments. In many Native American cosmologies, animals and humans are viewed as equals or relatives, but this is not reflected in museum collections, which are often under-inventoried and over-filled. With this project I hope to contribute to the crucial, ongoing work of decolonizing museum practices and recentering indigenous perspectives within collections and curatorial spaces.

Although the 1990 Native Graves and Repatriation Act provided legal backing for Native American Nations’ rights to indigenous funerary materials and human remains, animal remains have been largely excluded from the growing efforts within museums to collaborate with indigenous communities in the storage and preservation of their sacred and ceremonial materials. Animal remains from archaeological sites associated with Native Nations’ land or ancestors are often marked as zoological specimens and thus removed from the cultural context from which they originated. I hope to contribute to more recent work on this by developing an achievable protocol within the CU museum.

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Disconnected: Life in a Digital Reality

America has a youth mental health crisis. The rates of adolescent-depression have skyrocketed. For teenage girls, self-harm is up 189%. Suicide, 169%. Most striking? These rises began when iPhones/social media became mainstream. Social media has transformed childhood, yet society still can't comprehend why. We might understand conceptually, but not experientially, how addictive algorithms, infinite scrolling, and 8+ hours of scrolling daily (average) have altered adolescence. Over a 45-minute documentary I’m producing, we’re illuminating a first-person narrative of what a technology-based childhood looks like, and how we can change it. We’ll be premiering in schools across the nation in September.

We’re inspired by the book The Anxious Generation, which chronicles how a phone-based childhood disrupted adolescence. This book propelled the digital advocacy movement forward, and the harrowing data of hospital admissions/anxiety disorders sent shivers around America. However, we aim to differentiate our film through the voices of Gen-Z and not the researchers who study them. We want our documentary to share our story, doing justice to a childhood that replaced free play and exploration with isolation and technology. Through vulnerability, we hope to build a narrative that our peers can point to, and say, “Yes, that’s how I grew up.”

Political Corruption in the USSR: An Analysis of the Nomenklatura

The goal of my honors thesis is to answer the question, how did corruption emerge in the so-called egalitarian society of the USSR? I argue the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin from 1928-53 fostered the rise of the Soviet elite, known as the nomenklatura, which systematically shaped a new form of oligarchy and corruption following the Russian Revolution. My purpose is to provide an understanding of systemic, institutionalized political corruption in Russia during the Soviet era. My research is important because I analyze the institutionalization of corruption, which helps scholars, students, and democracies understand how autocracy and oligarchy arise and perpetuate.

I am contributing to the literature on corruption and Stalinist subjectivity. "Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries in the 1930s" contributes by collecting the personal diaries of some nomenklatura elites. My research is unique because I will put the diaries of these elites in dialogue to analyze the institutional mechanisms of the elite class they were a part of. Khlevniuk and Gorlizki's "Substate Dictatorship" contributes to the literature on networks of corruption. My research uses a similar historical, institutional framework, but uniquely analyzes the period from 1930 to WWII, using documents from State Archive Branch of the Security Services of Ukraine.