Abstracts for Wednesday, February 22
3:00-3:30
Matthew Sparacino, Variability of Erodibility in Bedrock Floored Channels Produced by Differential Weathering
The erosion of bedrock-floored channels is a critical process governing the rate of landscape evolution in many settings. Field and modeling studies suggest that bedrock channels evolve toward equilibrium through adjustment of geometry and slope to the imposed discharge, sediment supply, and substrate erodibility conditions. Recent numerical modeling of rock-floored channel cross-sections suggests that equilibrium channel geometry and slope are sensitive to variation in rock erodibility along the channel perimeter. I hypothesize variations in weathering intensity and duration across some channels results in variable erodibility.
4:30-5:30
Austin Strange, Domestic People's Liberation Army Non-Combat Operations: Dimensions, Drivers, and Broader Implications
While there are considerable external benefits from participation in international non-combat missions such as improving combat capacity and enhancing international soft power, this paper emphasizes that the PLA’s non-combat missions are firmly rooted in achieving domestic goals such as maintaining regime stability, balancing complex civil-military relations, and ensuring broad public support of the military. Non-combat operations in modern China are responses to challenges to these core objectives arising from China’s economic development, military modernization and broader historical trends in the post-reform era. These challenges, interrelated and formidable, are intimately linked to the Army’s perpetually changing relationship with Chinese society during the 20th and 21st centuries. Specifically, the nature of the PLA’s involvement in modern domestic noncombat operations, such as disaster relief and domestic stability maintenance, reflects the increasingly complex and sensitive relationships between the army, the Party and the people. Such relationships reinforce the notion that an “outward-looking” approach focusing primarily on international ramifications of non-combat operations is insufficient to fully understand the the PLA’s non-combat missions. Rather than serving as a platform for the PLA to increasingly assert itself beyond China’s borders, non-combat operations as a whole are more likely to hinder overall outward PLA expansion as China dedicates a growing share of its security and military resources to address internal issues.
John Kirn, Visions of the Good
No state imagines itself as continuous with the whole world. Even the most powerful hegemons don’t desire to absorb the globe, rather, they seek to shape the peace through defining what is acceptable behavior. International Politics revolves around these “Visions of the Good” – perceptions of what is appropriate state action.
6:00-7:00
Sarah Ross, 'A Counterfeit Presentment': The Duality of Portraiture in Eliot and Hardy
The Victorians wanted to see. From eye-catching advertisements and newspapers, to new styles of painting and photography, they sought to picture and to frame their world. Novelists too concerned themselves with the problem of presenting the self, and the world, as it really was. Two of the most successful novelists of the century, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, both tackle this question of vision and identity though in vastly different ways and to crucially different ends. By examining two of each novelist's works, I hope to show how portraiture -- and specifically the duality of portraiture -- illuminates important aspects of each author's oeuvre and helps show how the great popular novels of the mid-1800s become the Modernist works of the twentieth century.
Katelyn Durkin, The (Re)Production Craze: Bodies, Machines, and the Modern Family Home in Edith Wharton’s 1920s Fiction
My thesis traces Edith Wharton's portrayal of early twentieth-century America's transformation from a production-obsessed society to a consumer culture, analyzing her depiction of the damaging misapplication of industrial standards to family life and the personal home.
