Geoarchaeology is a field in anthropology that furthers archaeological research by employing and borrowing techniques from several Earth sciences disciplines. Our research focuses on the site of Prasat Basaet, northwest Cambodia. This is a small provincial temple in Angkor, one of the largest preindustrial settlements in the world. Archaeological excavations at Prasat Basaet reveal an occupational history that includes the Pre-Angkorian (6-8th centuries), Angkorian (8-15th centuries CE), and Post-Angkorian (15-17th centuries CE) periods. Our research aims to investigate the relationship between urban expansion, temple construction, and the physical environment that people lived in. Our results will provide environmental context to help understand how provincial populations were involved in the rise and demise of the Angkorian state, and the importance of climate change in these processes. We are using sediment samples from archaeological excavations to extract lipid residues using Gas Chromatography and Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) to reconstruct ancient vegetation and faunal communities. We are also using particle size analysis to understand the environment of deposit formation at the time of human habitation. We hope that our research will provide insights into human-environmental relationships at key moments in the history of one of the world’s largest ancient empires.

With the proliferation of online review platforms, user reviews have become an important source of information to consumers about product quality. As a result, the word-of-mouth through online reviews can influence consumers’ purchase decisions and thus a company’s sales. Using the airline industry as a testing field, this study investigates whether online customer reviews can predict the sales of domestic flights or the company revenue of U.S. airlines. We compiled quarterly data from 2015 to 2018 based on three sources: financial reports of nine major U.S. airlines, domestic passenger data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and online reviews of these airlines on the Consumer Affairs website. We found that the change in the number of reviews (volume) is more useful in predicting changes in revenue and the number of passengers than the change in the average rating (valence). Meanwhile, the predicted relationship becomes statistically insignificant when controlling for other factors such as seasonality. Further, we used sentiment analysis to create an average sentiment of the text of all the online reviews as an alternative measure of the average rating. We found that changes in the average sentiment is not a predictor of changes in airline revenue or the number of passengers. Our current findings and data limitations suggest a variety of promising avenues for future research, where we will expand the time period analyzed, cover a greater number of airlines, include international flights, account for layovers in routes, gather more extensive online reviews, and employ content analysis such as keyphrase extraction to identify trends in the topics of reviews.

The viability of Greek communities and their place on college campuses has been a subject of intense debate in recent years. Researchers and critics of traditional Greek communities on U.S. college campuses have argued that rigid gender segregation and rules that give fraternities control over the party scene creates a gendered imbalance which favors men which, in turn, perpetuates the incidence of sexual assault and other harmful behaviors. But do the students that participate in Greek life agree? Do sorority and fraternity men also draw a connection between harmful behaviors and the formal rules and regulations that govern Greek life? Would structural changes to the Greek community alleviate its social risks like sexual assault, alcohol abuse, and hazing, or do they persist in the absence of gender segregation? This study explores how gender-segregated household regulations perpetuate these norms and further perpetuate social risks such as sexual assault, hazing, or alcohol abuse. Within Greek Communities, access to parties, drugs, and sex are the effective social currency that is exchanged within the Greek microsociety. Formal, gender-segregated household regulations give control of the party scene. Research has established widespread knowledge of how this control creates gender-based power dynamics and courtship patterns that contribute to a social culture with higher rates of sexual assault perpetration and victimization within its population. However, the University of Washington Panhellenic and Inter-Fraternity councils allow sorority women to live with fraternity men in their chapter houses during the summer. By interviewing a mix of 20 sorority women and fraternity men who from the University of Washington, Seattle Campus we can better understand if these gendered power dynamics are alleviated when men and women are regulated equally within their household.

The Green New Deal is an omnibus piece of legislation which proposes sweeping reforms to address climate change while also tackling poverty, discrimination, and other social ills. Although the Green New Deal has been the subject of great public attention, it remains unclear whether key elements of the Democratic party, such as unions, are interested in supporting the legislation in any meaningful sense. This research examines the reaction of labor to the Green New Deal and attempts to gauge both the quantity and intensity of labor union support of the Green New Deal. To accomplish this, I conducted a review of the websites of the top fifty labor unions in the United States, ranked by reported membership. For each labor union, I looked at two factors; whether or not the union had explicitly endorsed the Green New Deal, and the number of sub-pages I had to navigate in order to find a mention of the Green New Deal. I cataloged these results and also made note of any irregularities and emerging trends in the data. The results paint a picture of labor unions as largely reluctant to engage in discourse regarding the Green New Deal, even when the organizations have been vocal on the subject of climate change in the past. Mentions of the Green New Deal, if present, are buried in archives and multiple sub-pages. These results suggest a clear point of weakness for proponents of the Green New Deal, and an examination of the causes of this weakness may offer insight into the characteristics necessary to the creation of politically viable climate legislation.

Both Germany and China are currently facing setbacks due to carbon emissions damaging the environment. These two nations are industrialized economies that depend on their productions of good for world economic power. One of the following goods each country predominantly creates is cars. Since transportation is a large proponent to the rise of carbon emissions globally, individuals are now looking at countries like Germany and China for solutions to the carbon problem. I investigated the similarity and dissimilarity in the responses these two nations took in their automobile industries towards climate change. More specifically, researching if a particular country incentivized a bigger need to steer away from carbon in their industrialized economy; such as more creation and implementation of electric vehicles, putting in place government policies to limit carbon emissions, and agreeing with their citizens' public opinion in response to issues and solutions. I have found that China has been more successful in limiting carbon emissions by vastly expanding their collection of electric vehicles and implementing strict climate policies. Germany had a later start to the electric vehicle industry and is rather making a smaller influence on their automobile industries. They have been hurt by these decisions, while China has come out very successful with its growing automobile industry. This research assists in understanding climate policy because it involves countries and industries that are at the forefront of the issue, and can hint at the repercussions of acting for and against a future of clean energy. 

The Balkans have played a pivotal role in the competition between the West and the East. Great Power competition during the 19th Century created the conditions for ethno-nationalism that led to turmoil during the 20th Century. Following World War II, Josip Broz Tito, the first president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, attempted to construct a united multi-ethnic state by suppressing nationalist impulses. This effort began to collapse immediately after Tito's death in 1980 and culminated in the breakup of the Yugoslav state and a series of bloody ethnic and religious conflicts from 1991 to 2001. These wars challenged the capacity of the international community to arrest the conflicts, and then to rebuild the peace. The region continues to suffer the effects of these conflicts despite decades of international efforts supporting reconciliation and the development of civil institutions designed to overcome division. A vicious circle constituted by the lack of economic development and continued use of divisive ethnonationalist politics has developed. This study argues that external economic and political aid efforts have been insufficient and that internal cultural changes are necessary before reconciliation, and economic and political development may proceed. This project's driving question is, "What specific values shifts and domestic efforts are necessary for the people of the Balkans to reconcile with the past and construct a brighter social, economic, and political future?" To explore this question and to identify potential solutions, this study assesses contemporary scholarship on Balkans reconciliation and economic development and incorporates local language and ethnographic resources. It concludes with a discussion of the following policy steps - democratic governance and unbiased media and education focused on rebuilding relations between different communities - and assesses whether or not these steps can be generalized to other societies either entering or experiencing post-conflict status.