Essentialist beliefs about gender modality, which conceptualize being transgender as an inherent and unchanging aspect of an individual, stand in contrast to perspectives that emphasize the social construction and fluidity of gender identity. These contrasting beliefs about the transgender identity are meaningful, as they shape the attitudes and behaviors among and towards trans individuals, who historically and currently face discrimination. To understand how trans people make sense of both cisgender and transgender individuals’ beliefs about the trans identity, I am conducting 12 semi-structured interviews with University of Washington students ages 18-25 who identify as transgender and/or non-binary. I analyze how specific assumptions, expectations, and cognitive worldview perspectives impact experiences and identity formation through a double consciousness perspective, a concept that has adapted from the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois about the impacts of racism. Double consciousness is an instinctive social awareness to uphold two identities, one that is “true” to oneself, and one that is constructed to conform in accordance to societal expectations in an act of self-protection. This can lead to feelings of inauthenticity and loneliness in a society that has rigid expectations for how gender should be represented. Therefore, certain assumptions and essentialist explanations about the social category of transgender, may motivate trans people to hold an additional social awareness to anticipate how cis people will react to their identities under the cis gaze. My data provides insight into the forces behind trans prejudice and offers transphobia mitigation recommendations, while centering transgender and non-binary voices in the research. Additionally, this research provides theoretical contributions, important for understanding the processes motivating essentialism and double consciousness. I conclude with directions and suggestions for future research.

Building on the literature of the importance of strategy, this paper explores the relationships between wealth, strategy, and battle related deaths to find out why we may see unexpected conflict outcomes like Ukraine being able to hold back Russian offensives. This paper argues that wealthy actors often use expensive strategies, like strategic air bombing, that are ultimately ineffective at helping win a war and only cause unnecessary casualties, and that less wealthy actors are forced to be more creative with their strategies and this leads to less casualties. To do this, I analyze the relationships between data on rebel contraband (proxy for non-state actor wealth), GDP, and strategies used in war and their effect on battle related deaths. The paper will also cover the ongoing conflicts in Myanmar and Ukraine as a theoretical supplement to this data. Examining these relationships is increasingly important because wars fought in the modern era often see different sides of varying wealth using different strategies. Implementing the discoveries of this paper may give us opportunities to minimize casualties in conflicts by looking at what strategies are the least lethal at what levels of wealth.

Does Universal Basic Income impact educational attainment? Theorists and prior researchers have drawn mixed conclusions on the effectiveness of UBI. While some argue that unconditional cash transfers increase personal goal seeking and human capital investment behavior, increasing educational attainment, others find that UBI negatively impacts educational attainment because it encourages individuals to neglect any investment in their human capital. Despite these arguments, prior research on this topic is extremely limited, which is why it is so important for this paper to investigate these claims. I expect UBI is associated with increased educational attainment because people could use the finances from UBI to support the additional financial and time commitment costs of education. To investigate this puzzle and test my theory, this paper uses Alaska as a case study, as it provides an opportunity to study the effects of UBI through the Permanent Fund Dividend. The Permanent Fund Dividend is a recurring annual payment given to nearly every Alaskan citizen, sourced from the State’s mineral revenue, thus presenting the best large-scale proxy of UBI available to study. This paper will estimate a counterfactual, or synthetic, Alaska without the PFD, which will allow us to infer the impact of PFD on education by comparing real educational attainments with the estimated levels.

This paper explores the significance of U.S. financial assistance to weak democracies and its impact on their political processes, particularly protest movements. In recent history, almost every nation has seen anti-state demonstrations, driven by factors such as war, elections, inflation, or social issues. Domestically, these international conflicts have sparked debate among politicians, scholars, and voters about how U.S. aid should be allocated. While U.S. aid is generally regarded as a stabilizing force that fosters economic growth and democratization, little is known about its influence on political mobilization. Protest as a concept remains underutilized as a mechanism for understanding political dynamics, especially in the context of ongoing global regime changes. This paper examines how U.S. aid shapes protest in weak and transitional democracies. It investigates two competing theories: increased aid either promotes economic stability, discouraging protests, or fosters democratization, which empowers civil society and encourages protests. Using data from transitioning democracies from 1990 to 2020, this research analyzes the frequency of anti-state protests in relation to U.S. economic and military aid allocations.

Historically, prosecutors have been elected into office based on their “tough on crime” policies. More recently, there has been a rise in the election of “progressive” prosecutors who run on commitments to criminal justice reform. As these prosecutors have been elected, they have faced extensive opposition due to the surmise that progressive prosecutors lead to higher crime rates. While contemporary research has aimed to investigate whether “progressive” prosecutors lead to rising crime, this literature does not address a vital sociological principle: crime is a social construct. Crime, like other social constructs, are recognized and made meaningful through peoples’ shared beliefs, behaviors, and interactions. Previous research explores the media’s role in constructing crime, but does not address its influence on perceptions of prosecutors and their role in fluctuating crime rates. Our research aims to fill this gap. We do so by analyzing media narratives about a sample of “progressive” and non-progressive prosecutors (our categorization is based on Fair and Just Prosecution, a “progressive” prosecutor membership organization). We did two rounds of flexible, inductive qualitative coding to code the ten “most relevant” articles about each prosecutor based on Google News searches. We found that whether jurisdictions with “progressive” prosecutors truly have higher crime rates is less meaningful to the political implications of prosecutors than the public perception of higher levels of crime. The findings from our study hold implications towards the importance of understanding how media-based perceptions influence political consequences for prosecutors or other actors seeking to advance criminal justice reform. Such points to needed shifts towards more accurate, unbiased portrayals of prosecutors and crime within the U.S., ensuring prosecutors who are desired to represent districts are able to do so.

Children of immigrants are uniquely situated in the United States. They share parts of both their American identity and upbringing, along with that of their parents’ and relatives’ homeland(s). Previous research has shown that because of these identities, children of immigrants are more civically engaged than any other group of young people. However, more research is needed to understand what is most effective for this population along with broader implications for these individuals. Utilizing the Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Study of 1965-1997 from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, I examine different civic engagement methods including civic education and community involvement and the effect on children of minority groups as opposed to their majority group counterparts. Furthermore I predict that these methods have a positive long term impact on measures of civic engagement, while also having a stronger effect on minority groups.

Tame knots, which are equivalent to a polygonal knot with a finite number of sides, have well-studied invariants; conversely, wild knots that exhibit infinite and pathological behavior are difficult to study and classify. Knot mosaics, introduced by Lomanoco and Kauffman, are an example of a complete invariant for tame knots. Our project aims to expand the existing formal system of knot mosaics to develop an invariant for wild knots. We define n-singular mosaic tangles, the mosaic analog of tangle insertions in pseudoknots and singular knots, and we formalize a system of infinite insertion that generates a wild mosaic to represent certain wild knots. We also intend to define wild mosaic equivalence moves to capture the notion of wild knot equivalence in the mosaic setting. This gives insight to many wild knots explored in existing literature and provides methods to generate and classify new examples.