Oregon Undergraduate Research Journal: Vol. 17 No. 1 (2020)
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/25548
Spring 20202024-03-29T11:02:32ZMassacre or Genocide? Redefining the Sook Ching
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/25558
Massacre or Genocide? Redefining the Sook Ching
Singsank, Lauralei
Sook Ching is a Chinese term meaning “purge through cleansing.” Operation Sook Ching
took place in Singapore from February 21 to March 4, 1942. It was a military operation
carried out by the Japanese with the intent of executing anti-Japanese Chinese men
between the ages of 18 and 50. Ultimately, it is impossible to know exactly how many
people were killed; the official Japanese figure is 5,000, while unofficial estimates reach
as high as 50,000. Men were called into screening centers where disorganized screening
procedures determined if they were anti-Japanese. The Sook Ching’s legacy lives on as
one of the greatest tragedies in Singapore’s history.
The intent of this paper is to argue for a redefinition of the Sook Ching as a genocide
rather than a massacre. The cornerstones of this research are the United Nations’
Genocide Convention and contemporary sources discussing the crime. This research is
important because it sets a precedent of accountability, as well as acknowledging the
crimes the Japanese committed during the Second World War. This thesis will discuss the
Sook Ching, its legacy, and the steps required to address the incident and right the
wrongs that occurred. It will also examine the racial and political environment that set
the stage for the tragedy, as well as the scars it left behind.
2020-08-01T00:00:00ZFrom Nimble NIMBY to Palpable PIMBY: Anti-Blackness in George Deukmejian’s California Prison Boom
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/25557
From Nimble NIMBY to Palpable PIMBY: Anti-Blackness in George Deukmejian’s California Prison Boom
Hollenbeck, Jakob
When California Governor George Deukmejian assumed office in 1983, the state had not
added to its twelve prisons in eighteen years. During his two terms, Deukmejian oversaw
the construction of eight prisons — a 67% increase in eight years. This paper attempts to
locate the impetus of this prison boom by analyzing three siting struggles in southern
California. It argues that past scholarship fails to account for the interaction between
the state and sited communities. Specifically, state-centered research fails to account
for the power of city officials while rural-centered research fails to account for systemic
factors. Accordingly, this paper introduces the term Please in Your Back Yard (PIYBY) to
examine where and why the state sited a prison and how they tried to convince the
community to accept it. PIYBYism complements the existing Not in My Back Yardism
(NIMBYism) and Please in My Back Yardism (PIMBYism). The paper analyzes the
interaction between the three terms, revealing that ideological, not economic concerns,
caused the California prison boom. The prison boom emerged from a tough-on-crime
moment — one that was necessarily anti-black. The three siting battles support this
conclusion because anti-blackness permeated every group’s rhetoric. This paper, then,
challenges the subject’s prevailing scholarship: politics lies at the base of the prison
system. Even if one accepts the economic link, the economy only mattered in that it
exacerbated an ongoing political movement that attempted to reassert white supremacy.
2020-08-01T00:00:00ZMiłosz the Visionary: His American experience in Visions from San Francisco Bay
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/25556
Miłosz the Visionary: His American experience in Visions from San Francisco Bay
Grudzien, Ania
Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz is one of the most influential poets, prosiest, philosophers, and diplomats, his works spanning two centuries and multiple continents. Born in 1911, in what is now modern-day Lithuania, Miłosz spent most of his professional life in Europe including Poland and France. In 1960, fleeing the power of the communist regime, he found political asylum in California, teaching in the Slavic languages department at the University of California Berkley. The following paper examines Czesław Miłosz’s perspective on the radical West culture of the 1960s and ‘70s in his book Visions from San Francisco Bay. This work brings attention to previously unnoticed English mistranslations. I propose a new translation to reflect Miłosz’s original meaning, which changes the way English readers interpret his American experience as well as his book Visions from San Francisco Bay. Specifically, I consider two sets of Miłosz’s pros and cons which he crafted to describe the essence of his American experience, and one set of pros and cons I crafted from his writing to frame his experience. These juxtaposing pros and cons ultimately led him to the conclusion of the importance of richly interpreting one’s reality, especially in a time of change and uncertainty. By way of comparative literary analysis of Miłosz’s Visions and selected poems, we change the way we traditionally think of the ‘60s and ‘70s, realizing that instead of being a time of explosive interpretive energy, this was a time when Americans fell away from rich interpretation of their metaphysical realities.
2020-08-01T00:00:00ZMating Affects Lifespan Differently in Two Strains of Pseudo-female Caenorhabditis elegans
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/25555
Mating Affects Lifespan Differently in Two Strains of Pseudo-female Caenorhabditis elegans
Lancaster, Ruben
Mating is vital for sexually reproducing species, yet the ideal mating strategy for males and females can differ. The ensuing conflict between the sexes – namely, sexual conflict – results in a decrease in population level fitness. The degree of sexual conflict can be affected by the behavior, physiology, and life history of a population. Previous studies in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans have shown that mating causes lifespan to decrease in pseudo-females and hermaphrodites, which was interpreted as evidence of sexual conflict. However, it is still an open question whether variations in mating condition and strain type can affect the degree of sexual conflict and lifespan decrease. Here, I investigate whether lifespan is affected by mating in conditions other than sex- skewed individual mating scenarios used in previous work. I conducted population-based mating assays in two different strains of C. elegans using both natural and male-skewed sex ratios. Counter to expectations, I found no effect of mating on lifespan in a wild isolate of C. elegans, while virgins from a canonical laboratory strain had a decreased lifespan relative to their counterparts mated in groups. My data offers a counterpoint to the literature, which agrees that mating universally decreases the lifespan of C. elegans pseudo-females and hermaphrodites. These results highlight the flexibility of reproductive costs and the importance of life histories in experimental populations.
2020-08-01T00:00:00Z