Over the past twenty years, the United States has experienced what Dr. Thomas Philippon calls "The Great Reversal," or a slow drift away from the free market competition which defined the American economy for the last century, towards an increasingly oligopolistic consolidation of market power. What does this mean? For the average American, prices have increased, wages remain stagnant, quality has declined, and the variety of goods has diminished. The reason? The growing political power of incumbent firms, who use their established economic power to influence the political process in their favor, towards high barriers to entry and decreased antitrust scrutiny, through lobbying and the financing of campaigns. Or have they? "The Great Reversal," and hypotheses like it, are far from a consensus... This Thesis is a meta study of the literature surrounding domestic competition in the United States and the impact that the lobbying activity of industry leaders has on said competition. Analyzing over 20 papers covering economics, political science, and political economy, this Thesis argues that domestic competition in the United States has indeed declined over the past two decades and that the growing political power of firms, rather than "unique" technological or structural changes in the economy, has caused this drift away from free markets. Using this analysis, this Thesis further suggests a few solutions to "The Great Reversal" and restoring competition in the American economy.

Despite George Washington’s warning against political parties, the United States we know today consists of two political parties that are becoming even more polarized. Since President Trump’s first run for the Republican party candidate and presidency, these partisan tensions have been recharged with further polarization and many individuals swearing on social media they would never date a Trump supporter. According to Pew Research Center, “45% [of Democrats and those who lean left who are currently seeking relationships] say they definitely would not consider seriously dating a Trump voter” (Brown 2020). The divide between parties and the importance of political beliefs amongst partners has appeared to only increase after the actions taken at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. My research aims to quantify this phenomenon and then discover the “why?” behind it. How many people really consider their partner’s partisan affiliation and political beliefs a deal-breaker? Further, is it a deal-breaker because of the individual’s identity and political beliefs? Using intersectionality as a framework to examine identity and the confluence of identifiers and oppressors, will allow for a deeper understanding and personal account of why individuals find partisanship to be such a big criterion in a partner.

Through three generations of Iranian Jewish women's; my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, this qualitative study aims to shine a light on the complexities of their identities. This is done through a re-telling of their histories and an analysis of their views regarding gender, juxtaposed against the sociocultural and political shifts taking place in Iran. Through interviewing the women in my family, I was able to offer them a voice and highlight the importance regarding their harrowing life stories that had been previously overlooked by the world. There will be a purposeful intertwining of their individual stories with those in a larger context of Iranian Jewish history, and the history of Iranian Jewish women. By the end of this thesis, I hope the reader will have a more in-depth understanding of Iranian Jewish women and their relationship to their gender and sexual identities. More generally, I hope that the intriguing and unprecedented intertwining of Iran with Judaism and the unstable historical nature of this association are more widely known and identified.

The clothing and textile industry is often referred to as one of the largest polluters in the world. Over the last two decades, global annual consumption has increased, and the volume of discarded clothing in America has doubled from 7 to 14 million tons a year (Shirvanimoghaddam, 2020). Over 60% of textile waste overall is exported to the Global South. In the Global South, landfills that receive this waste often lack proper funding and legislation to implement effective waste management systems (Schiros). Textile waste bears a carbon and water footprint that disrupts environmental and health standards on egregious levels, disproportionately harming the health of the populations situated near to those disposal sites, and preventing so-called “developing populations” from economic independence and from sustaining critical environmental health standards. The exploitation of the Global South as a dumping ground also erodes the possibility of economic development by local production and economic self-reliance. Structural adjustments and trade regulated by the ‘developed’ country subjugate the Global South to neo-colonialist, exploitative economic partnerships with the Global North. Rwanda is one example of a country attempting to rise to the World Bank’s classification as a middle-income country, but has been accused of trading human rights for development in the process.

My investigation first seeks to answer, What are the specific health threats of post-consumer textiles? I consider the human health impacts of textiles from cultivation to disposal. This study examines the role of waste as a potential function in the production process, where waste is not considered a negative economic value. My second question is How is the Global South's participation in international collaboration empowered by acts of resistance against the assumptions, research, and policies that suggest Western aid and medicine is superior and the basis for innovative technology? Acts of resistance are pursued within the public sphere (especially in terms of community building and art making), low technology, and locally situated science (that consider the culture, approach, and resources of the Global South before scaling up to the North). Corporations and state policy are considered to expand research, but the focus is largely on acts of resistance by the public, and acts of resistance at a community-level of cooperation. Through the framework of the zine, audiences can better understand the relationship between the US and countries in the East African Community, in South Africa, in shared regions. This creative project informs and challenges the reader to think critically about their role in a postcolonial context. I seek to understand how colonialism pervades the economic relationship and import-export business today between the Global North and the Global South. My purpose is to provide the reader with a vision that suggests the most critical changes that should be made to secure humane and environmentally sustainable solutions. It also serves as a catalyst for additional research on the Global South.

There is a lot of literature and research in both the fields of culinary history and ideology studies, but there is little about the two combined. While food and culture are undeniably connected, former literature fails to connect food and thought through direct culinary creations. Therefore by analyzing an ideology’s actors, their diet, food origins, culinary symbolism, history(culinary, political, economic, and social), and physical representation, we can successfully create a recipe that reflects feminism, black liberation and gay liberation.

This paper examines the possible ties between social media influencers and their potential impact on the rise in affective polarization in the United States. With the growth of social media, its transition into a primary source of news, and with the open political atmosphere, one is left to wonder about the potential impact social media and its influencers may have on American affective polarization. The survey presented within the paper was designed in hopes of drawing a connection between the two, and to what extent it might be happening.

This thesis/creative project is a guide for other universities to follow in making their campuses more inclusive and accessible via maps. This guide will be offered in different formats (ex – PDF, a website, audio, etc.) to accommodate the disabled community. Hopefully, this guide will serve as inspiration and starting point for universities around the country to better the college experience for all.

For the past six months, I have been working with Black Lives Matter Phoenix Metro on the Tempe’s People’s Budget coalition. I served as a member on the research team as well as a temporary member of the Black Lives Matter’s nucleus leadership team. I joined weekly meetings for both groups, and conducted research on city budget proposals, initiatives, and resources. I also lead discussions and conversations about progress, next steps, and goals of the coalition with over 50 volunteers within the coalition. The Tempe’s People Budget crafted a survey in late October and sent it out mid-November to members of the Tempe community, asking them what community resources they would use and which resources and investments they believed the city of Tempe should commit to. After five months of survey collection, we presented a preliminary budget proposal to Tempe’s financial office for consideration for the 2022-2023 budget, using data from 318 survey responses. With the creation of the survey among the adaption of the Tempe’s coalition, we wanted to look at what preventive community resource most respondents wanted Tempe to reinvest in. We found that the majority of survey respondents would like investments in renewable energy, housing stability, and alternatives to police. It is the city’s job to protect and serve all members of their communities, and public safety should be prioritized by investing in preventive measures instead of remedial punishments. Public safety concerns would be most effectively resolved by addressing issues such as: little to no income, housing instability, lack of access to food and water and other basic necessities to survive. Currently, Tempe is investing in the police, who most often only serve punishments.

College athletics are a multi-billion dollar industry featuring hard-working student-athletes competing at a high level for national championships across a variety of different sports. Across the college sports landscape, coaches and players are always seeking an edge they can gain in order to obtain a competitive advantage over their opponents. While this may sound nefarious, the vast amounts of data about these games and student-athletes can be used to glean insights about the sports themselves in order to help student-athletes be more successful. Data analytics can be used to make sense of the available data by creating models and using other tools available that can predict how student-athletes and their teams will do in the future based on the data gathered from how they have performed in the past.
Colleges and universities across the country compete in a vast array of sports. As a result of these differences, the sports with the largest amounts of data available will be the more popular college sports, such as football, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball and softball. Arizona State University, as a member of the Pac-12 conference, has a storied athletic tradition and decades of history in all of these sports, providing a large amount of data that can be used to analyze student-athlete success in these sports and help predict future success. However, data is available from numerous other college athletic programs that could provide a much larger sample to help predict with greater accuracy why certain teams and student-athletes are more successful than others.
The explosion of analytics across the sports world has resulted in a new focus on utilizing statistical techniques to improve all aspects of different sports. Sports science has influenced medical departments, and model-building has been used to determine optimal in-game strategy and predict the outcomes of future games based on team strength. It is this latter approach that has become the focus of this paper, with football being used as a subject due to its vast popularity and massive supply of easily accessible data.

Using critical disability theory, Foucauldian philosophy, phenomenology and my personal lived experience with a congenital impairment, the purpose of this paper is to explore a relatively unexplored subject, stigma against disability onset at birth, and how this manifests in inequitable U.S. electoral outcomes. The scope of the paper is mostly focused on federal U.S. elected officials for two reasons: the high visibility of the position and the ideal standards for an elected official. The U.S. candidates running for federal offices receive the most social attention, drawing from millions of Americans whose views on these candidates determine their electoral success. An analysis of disability representation at this level serves as the best indicator for the stigma held against congenital disability. Additionally, the role of an elected official embodies not just the model citizen but the archetypal human. An exploration of U.S. constituent perspectives on this role in politics suggest social norms locate congenitally disabled people in a particularly marginalized identity. Insights gained from this analysis might allow readers to restructure narrow assumptions about disabled people and what would constitute effective representation.