Honors Program
The Honors Thesis of the Environmental Studies Department is awarded to Environmental Studies majors who produce a written academic work that meets these three conditions: a) scholarly excellence through original research worthy of publication in a peer-reviewed journal; b) it has an environmental issue as main topic; and, c) it is based on an interdisciplinary approach to that topic. Approaches that encompass two or more disciplines across different areas of knowledge, i.e., social sciences, natural sciences, humanities, are particularly encouraged. Students pursuing the Honors Thesis are expected to make a major commitment in terms of ime and effort. This endeavor should be undertaken only by those with strong research nterests and the ability to focus intellectually in scholarly production.
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Past Honors Thesis Projects
- 2024 – Relationships in Lacustrine Ecosystems: Carbon, Color and Precipitation in North Temperate Lakes by Emma Squires
- 2023 – How Do Highways Affect Racial Disparities in Air Quality by Valeska Fresquet Kohan
- 2023 – Examining the Role of Place Attachment in Climate Justice Engagement and Jewish Relationships to the Environment by Madeline Medina
- 2022 – Land is Life: Settler Colonial Governance of National Parks and Hunting in Taiwan by Wei-Chieh (Jarita) Chen
- 2022 – Abolition of Presence: An East Bay CA Case Study of Black Food Geographies by Ayize James
- 2017 – Is Addressing Climate Change Women’s Work? Political Leadership and the Climate by Isabella Soparkar
- 2017 – Strategies for Increasing Deployment of Photovoltaics in Developing Countries: Reducing the Cost of Technology and Lowering Implementation Barriers by Yifei Sun
- 2017 – The Carbon Continuum: Assessing the potential for production agriculture in Minnesota to mitigate climate change by Henry Whitehead
- 2016 – Lavoisier’s Legacy: The Dominance of Modern Water Quality Science by Olivia Nelson
- 2013 – From Local Actions to Global Solutions: Community-Based Climate Adaptation in Bangladesh by Brianna L. Besch
- 2013 – Conflicting Discourses of Participatory Postdevelopment in Community-Led Total Sanitation by Shaina M. Pomerantz Kasper
- 2013 – A Temporal Analysis of Suspended Sediment Concentration Changes in a Proglacial Meltwater Stream, Linnébreen, Svalbard by Kayla E. Nussbaum
- 2010 – Straws in the Wind: Race, Nature and Technoscience in Postcolonial South Dakotan Wind Power Development by Kai Bosworth
- 2010 – Undue burden: A Feminist Analysis of the Discursive and Material Realities of Breast Cancer and Obesity in the United States by Hannah Q. Rivenburgh
- 2010 – Modeling Mussels: The Importance of Hydraulic and Dispersal Variables for Unionid Abundance & Diversity by Cara S. Weggler
- 2009 – Restoring the Mississippi River Ecosystem in the Twin Cities: The Values of a Historical Approach by Samuel M. Adels
- 2009 – Paleoenvironmental Change over the last 4000 years in Glacier National Park, Montana: Carbon and Nitrogen in Lake Cores from Lake Josephine and Swiftcurrent Lake by Hannah C. Wydeven
- 2007 – Negotiating with Nature: The Evolution of Urban Parks in the Twin Cities by Ariel A. Trahan
