An Exploration of Irish-American Identity through Music and Oral History

The “Irish Jaunting Car” was described by Kevin Shannon of Butte, Montana as a traditional Irish tune played in the Ceili saloons. For Shannon a Ceili simply meant to play music. For musical historians it is more commonly described as a dance or music session of the home or pubs. Common of many Irish traditional tunes, there is an emphasis on placenames:

From Roscommon to Kildare

From Dublin down to Castle Bar

From there to County Clare

From Cork to Limerick and Athlone

Then home by Mullingar

You can view the lakes of Killarney

From me Irish jaunting car.

There is a great pride in the towns of Butte and Anaconda for Irish heritage. That became clear reviewing oral histories published through the Library of Congress in 1979. The subjects interviewed were born between 1908 and 1923. Through research on the interviewed subjects, biography, and a close examination of the musical examples provided, I am exploring the impact of Irish music on cultural preservation in Butte and Anaconda Montana in the 1920s. Through my research, I discuss parallels between these Irishmen to identify commonalities with respect to their musical performances, lives, and the worlds that they inhabit. Considering the historical context surrounding Irish statehood and Irish immigration out West in Montana, there much to be discovered regarding cultural identity in these songs and interviews as understood through the lens of gender, labor, and nationalism (that is born from nostalgia).

Sin Nombre Virus (SNV) is an exceptional model system for studying wildlife disease because of how simple it is to capture, take samples, and obtain disease status from the primary host. Immune response is an important factor to consider when testing for SNV because it can affect susceptibility of the host as well as transmission of the virus. We examined individual and environmental conditions that may influence immune response and therefore possibly SNV transmission in wild populations. We investigated whether SNV infection status, reproductive status, sex, and season influenced immune response through examining total white blood cell (WBC) counts and neutrophil to lymphocyte ratios (NLRs). Across a trapping period of three years, we caught deer mice from six different trapping grids across western Montana. There was a total of 1065 mice captured from all six sites and 79 were SNV positive. Out of the total number caught, 236 blood smears from one trapping location were analyzed for this study. Results show that year and SNV are predictors of total white blood cell counts while season, year, and reproductive status are predictors of NLRs. Our results provide a coarse but easily obtainable immune assessment from a field study to offer insights into deer mice immune system and SNV interactions.

The US Forest Service’s Buffalo Creek Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout Conservation Project is a current case study in the challenges of managing Wilderness according to the 1964 Wilderness Act. This proposed management action involves removing introduced rainbow trout (RBT) from tributaries of the Yellowstone River within the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. The project also aims to introduce Yellowstone cutthroat trout (YCT) to Buffalo Fork Creek, to bolster the YCT population and reduce the effects of hybridization with RBT. Before the project's initiation, a non-profit advocacy organization, Wilderness Watch, sued the US Forest Service over the project’s violations of the Wilderness Act, including the use of mechanized equipment and human impacts on the land. On October 24th, 2025, Judge Molloy of the Missoula District Court ruled in favor of Wilderness Watch. The Forest Service filed for an appeal in December 2025, but no further information has been released to the public. Following a strict interpretation of the Wilderness Act, Judge Molloy determined that elements of the Buffalo Creek project are prohibited because they take place in Wilderness. Yet the Wilderness Act fails to describe how wilderness managers could work to conserve species threatened by human impacts. The current decision prompts the question of how wilderness management can adapt in a changing world. We see a place for non-governmental Wilderness advocacy organizations, and we believe the Wilderness Act still stands as a valuable tool for land protection. However, wilderness managers need more flexibility to better conserve wildlife that happen to live within the boundaries of Wilderness.

By the 1850s, France established the infamous “Devil’s Island” penal colony in tropical French Guiana, an isolating place of punishment described as “the dry guillotine,” where the commandant would declare, “the real guards here are the jungle and the sea.” Upon being "freed," convicts were required to stay and work to build the "colony." Decades later, France would later send Vietnamese and Algerian political dissidents to the prison, which remained open until 1938. The threat of being sentenced to offshore detention has endured. Refugees crossing the Mediterranean are kept by the European Union on island sites, while Australia has received criticism for its ongoing operation of the migrant processing facility at the island of Nauru. In many of these cases, marginalized people were most likely to be held captive. Engaging with interdisciplinary methodologies and approaches of critical geography and history, this project seeks to trace a history of island prisons—and the people sentenced to live there--from 1850 through the mid-twentieth century. As the US federal government has recently signaled its interest in detaining migrants and convicts beyond its domestic borders in foreign prisons, the inquiry of this project is timely: What might the history of the “exotic” island prison teach us about the use of peripheral environments as a mechanism of punishment?

My thesis paper focuses on the many issues that stem from the United States education system and its inherent coloniality which continues to push colonial narratives. In this paper I tackle the many differences between colonized, decolonized, and Indigenous education. The differences in pedagogies and outcomes between these methods of teaching and education assist me in answering the questions of how we will and why we must decolonize education. I focus mainly on Climate Change Studies and STEMM when discussing elementary and postsecondary education. Through many case studies, personal experiences in the education system, peer-reviewed articles, and books written by Indigenous authors, I have found that decolonizing education is one of the many steps we must take to strive for greater tribal sovereignty and a more equitable and just world in which greater solutions towards complex issues like Climate Change can be found. This thesis paper and topic is an amalgamation of the knowledge and experiences I have gained from my years at the University of Montana. The issue I tackle in this paper is one that I wish to address throughout the rest of my academic and professional career, and an issue I believe is incredibly important in the fight for greater tribal sovereignty and climate change solutions which are just and supportive of all communities.

Ethnomusicology is a subfield within cultural ethnography that aims to provide detailed, descriptive analysis on contemporary music culture, applying cross cultural comparison to trace musical lineages and identify sounds significant to a select society. The field serves as an interdisciplinary measure to accurately index musical styles that serve as a cultural marker to the heritage to which they are ascribed. Linguistic analysis aspires to many of the same goals. It is one of the four major disciplines within anthropology, and has its sights focused critically on the examination of language in its spoken form. Linguists apply research methods such as comparative analysis with goals of identifying genetic markers within the language and reconstructing proto-languages, which aid in understanding how phonological change occurs and how similar languages came to develop. My research presents a comparative analysis of methods in musicology and linguistics. I consort experts in both fields to understand the histories of each practice, and the common research methods seen in the fields today. In providing description of the fields, and the researchers committed to either practice, I will examine the overlap in how each is performed, describing common analytical methods and goals of study. Finally, I will describe how the two fields do or do not interact, and what potential there is in applying methods of linguistic analysis to vocal music.

The University of Montana is currently losing millions of dollars due to their lack of efficiency and oversight on contracts. There are many contracts that affiliates of the university have signed without authorized oversight. Without the correct oversight, the university ends up signing multiple contracts for the same product. This also leads to members of the university wrongly giving away valuable data and information to companies without properly signing contracts. All of their contracts are scattered across campus, some signed correctly and some not. These documents are stored in various offices, departments, and using a mix of storage systems. This results in lost or not easily accessible documents, double contracts, compliance concerns, and increased liability.

My project aims to reduce this over expenditure and increased liability. We aim to create a system in which all proposed contracts go through the “office of contracts” in which the UM Legal Counsel and contracts team will review each contract and ensure it is signed only by authorized signers. We will also propose new messages and a webpage to guide university affiliates to follow the newly adopted system. This will eliminate double contracts, in which the University signs and pays for many licenses or products, when they only need one. It will also eliminate the risk of untrained individuals signing away the university's data in exchange for something they believe is free. Finally, it will ensure all contracts are stored in an organized, central location for easy accessibility when a claim or dispute arises.

I approached this project with a team of individuals also studying Management Information Systems. We used the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), the Project Life Cycle, and Agile methodologies to identify, plan, collect data, and develop the project. This process contributes to my field of study and my aspirations to work in management consulting. This project is vital for my education in Management Information Systems, but it is also vital for the University of Montana. This project will decrease the expenses and liability of the university, which will lead to an increase in resources for students.

Climate change has intensified seasonal droughts particularly in Mediterranean climates. For the southern regions of Italy, the small Molisan village of Roccavivara faces increasingly worse water restrictions, with water supplies shut off for up to twelve hours a day during summer.

This project examines whether a community-based rainwater harvesting (RWH) system could offer both practical and social benefits in a town historically shaped by a decades long feud.

Over month and a half, I took measurements for prototypes, conducted interviews into how this community reacted to the climate technology solution of RWH, and finding people who want to implement it. I am anticipating a qualitative review of how people respond to implementation, as well as a quantitative study on how much water will be viable during different portions of the year.

By creating a slow building community wide RWH that connects house to house for the people to share and use. I predict that spring and fall will have to highest rainfall to supplement summer issues. As well as the possibility of it lessening the historic feud.

Evidenced its potential to bring water sovereignty by supplementing water supplies, build water resilience, and strengthen community wide comradery. All while making a easily implementable prototype.

A

As a business student focused on the intersection of sustainability and business, there is an urgency in understanding the varying motivations of sustainability in multinational corporations, as their decisions have large ripple effects. This project evaluates and compares the corporate practices of Germany and the United States. These countries have contrasting structures for addressing climate change, social responsibility, and ethical governance. This project examines how cultural values shape the way companies pursue environmental and social responsibility.

The research compares Germany and the United States using a cross-cultural analysis framework, including Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory and Michele Gelfand's cultural framework. These frameworks provide analytical foundations for understanding how national values influence business behavior and governance systems.

The central argument of the research is that culture impacts not only whether a company pursues sustainability but also how it does so. American companies tend to treat sustainability as a strategic objective driven by the open market and investor pressure. On the other hand, German companies view sustainability as a legal requirement and as mandatory based on European Union regulations. This results in a wide variation in sustainability performance across firms.

Recognizing that each country perceives the influence of sustainability differently, policymakers and business leaders need to identify which approaches are applicable in their countries and across borders.

Are the objective standards in medical malpractice law, including reasonableness and professional norms, neutral in a general manner or do they encode gendered assumptions that are disadvantageous to women in the system? Women are 66% more likely to encounter the disparity of misdiagnoses than men. One view point that is demonstrative of this question is that the negligence doctrine supposes courts avoid bias on gender and remain neutral by applying the negligence doctrine and professional norms. Through this view the very disparity of misdiagnoses in women is seen as medical failures instead of structural legal doctrine failures. In Miss Diagnosis: Gendered Injustice in Medical Malpractice Law, Cecilia Plaza argues against this view. Plaza and other feminist scholars hold that the professional norms are socially constructed by a historically androcentric culture in medicine. This view was developed well in Gender Trouble by Judith Butler, and reutilized in the debate of literature mentioned prior. The social-constructionist take argued that what is held as reasonable, in terms of diagnoses, already reflects assumptions about women's pain, emotions and even credibility to be gendered.

The neutrality view possesses strength in its ability to rely on doctrines as stable and administrative, but this poses a threat to overlooking the problems of reasonable care and norms. The feminist position indicates the existence of bias in the structure, but lacks clear guidance regarding what the courts ought to do–while maintaining authority and stability. I argue that malpractice law is not only failing to correct gendered misdiagnosis, but reproducing it as well—treating historically biased norms as an objective benchmark. Negligence is with these norms taken as standards and the gendered diagnostic patterns in these practices are sheltered from liability. Recognizing objectivity as fixed in history and not neutral is a necessary step to take in doctrinal reform. The motivation for this paper is the personal, persistent, and documented disadvantage for women in health care and analyzing the law’s role as a catalyst or resister.

ABSTRACT

While traditional methods of investing remain, such as utilizing established financial advisory services and trading applications, neo-brokerages have gamified their trading platforms. These platforms have become increasingly popular among younger generations. The “gamification of investing” is a phenomenon that involves the integration of game-like features (e.g., haptic feedback, neon colors, confetti) into brokerage applications. This “gamification” has lowered the barriers to entry for investing in capital markets for younger generations but has simultaneously coaxed them into being more risk-tolerant and potentially unaware of the consequences of high-risk investing strategies. This is partly because neo-brokers make it easy to gain access to short-term speculative trading (e.g., margin trading, options trading, prediction market integration). For the uninformed investor, this short-term speculation can be more akin to gambling than it is to investing.  While gamified trading platforms increase the user’s ability to execute trades, they do not proportionally increase the financial literacy of the user.

This research draws upon the frameworks of Dual-Process Theory and the Dunning-Kruger effect. An analysis will be conducted through 1) a review of literature pertaining to behavioral finance, and 2) a visual taxonomy of neo-brokerage application interfaces. Additionally, this research will aim to identify if and how neo-brokerage applications attempt to influence the behavior of their users to make emotion-based investment decisions rather than logical ones. Preliminary findings suggest that neo-brokerage applications with contemporary and vibrant user interfaces can lead investors to be overconfident in their investment decisions and potentially adopt a higher tolerance for risk.

This capstone project produces a status report for the University of Montana (UM) Ethnobotany Garden to facilitate continuity of care and long-term stewardship. As the garden’s primary caretaker and author of this report prepares to graduate, a significant amount of site-specific and institutional knowledge and management experience is at risk of being lost. The objective of this project is to document operational, cultural, and ecological knowledge in a format that supports future caretakers and garden leadership.

The project uses a knowledge-transfer approach, drawing on personal records and experience, including field notes and observations, alongside existing documentation gathered from UM staff. To address knowledge gaps, there will be consultation with former caretakers and a review of comparable garden or habitat management reports with similar spatial scale and cultural considerations. These materials are being integrated into a report documenting the garden’s history, purpose, current conditions, management practices, and future needs.

The anticipated outcome is an applicable guide for future caretakers and a framework for a formal written management plan. This could turn into a living document that is updated yearly. This project will help preserve institutional knowledge and inform future stewardship, upholding the garden’s purpose as an important cultural and educational campus resource. The report will benefit future caretakers, student interns, a future advisory board, and UM staff by improving continuity, streamlining decision-making, and promoting long-term sustainability of the garden.

Current practices for teaching math in school are student-centered, but highly orchestrated by teachers. While these models of education are widely accepted, math classrooms do not often afford students the space for rich conceptual play and low-stake interaction with the material. To support these goals, researchers have proposed “salon-like” mathematical spaces, where there are no roles like “teacher” and “student”, and nobody knows the answer to the question being posed. In this study, we are examining how to foster salon-like spaces within traditional schools.

My study took place in a cafeteria of a local high school, during lunch. I was given a table. My goal was for students to actively seek out the table, choose to engage in math, and contribute to the group by bringing math problems of their own.

I began the study with a set of conjectures about how particular embodiments would lead to my desired outcomes and used design-based research to test my conjectures, which is a cyclic methodology involving multiple cycles of planning, implementation, and reflection. I planned an activity based on my conjectures, then implemented that plan in the lunchroom, and recorded my observations in fieldnotes. I then reflected on whether my conjectures were supported by the implementation, and I modified the conjectures as appropriate.

In this session, I will share the initial findings from this study, offering insights into alternative formats for math learning, what kinds of math people are naturally drawn to, and how groups of people organically form around mathematical activity.

The poetry collection Showpony focuses on the real-life experiences of a twenty and thirty-year-old woman —pseudonymously known as Mrs. G — during the 1970s, who is treated by psychiatrist Dr. Robert J. Stoller at UCLA in a desperate attempt to make her normal. Mrs. G struggles with homicidal and suicidal thoughts, psychosis, as well as her homosexuality and transgender identity. Showpony examines the ways in which psychology has pathologized these experiences and the ramifications for patients, particularly those who have been publicly showcased as examples of their conditions used to train future students. The collection critiques the exploitation of patients by psychiatrists and psychologists, highlighting unethical treatments in the field. Through cut-up transcripts of therapy sessions, essays, and news articles, the collection is joined with poetic commentary and questioning. While Showpony addresses themes of mental illness and psychological distress, it resonates with anyone—regardless of their familiarity with psychology—due to the relatability of Mrs. G’s desperate quest for genuine help, for both her and her children. By centering on her conflict between the desire for masculinity and the need for femininity, readers are invited to reflect on their own journeys of self-exploration, expression, and acceptance in a world that often stamps out differences, even in spaces designed to cultivate self-understanding. Ultimately, Showpony asks: what needs to be fixed?

In June of 2025 the Trump Administration proposed to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule: a landmark conservation rule from the Clinton era that prevents roadbuilding and logging on roughly 58 million acres of federal forest and wildlands. The proposed rescission follows orders from President Trump to increase logging and thinning of forests and economic development in the wake of an “energy emergency”. More than 65% of all Forest Service sensitive species are directly or indirectly affected by inventoried roadless areas. For example, 220 species that are listed as threatened, endangered, or proposed for listing under the Endangered Species Act rely on habitat within inventoried roadless areas. My guiding theme for this project was to analyze the intersection with Section 4 of the ESA and the implications of rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule. Because ESA Section 4(a)(1)(D) requires evaluation of the adequacy of existing regulatory mechanisms, weakening roadless protections may signal gaps in the regulatory framework meant to prevent species decline. While rescission advocates emphasize timber production, energy development, and economic benefits, long-term ecological and legal costs are likely to increase. Preventative habitat protection is generally more cost-effective than species recovery after population decline. Especially in the case of ESA listed species who lose critical habitat and ESA petitioned species who are more likely to be listed in the wake of the rescission.

Human activities and climate change continue to impact wildlife populations and ecosystem integrity. In Montana’s semi-arid prairie ecosystems, the North American beaver (Castor canadensis) may increase the resistance and resilience of water-limited ecosystems and promote wildlife activity for both aquatic and terrestrial species. However, there is still limited understanding regarding the influence of beaver dams on wildlife use in these semi-arid, prairie ecosystems. Through a camera-trap study, we sought to examine how wildlife use, across taxa, is associated with beaver dams and water availability during the summer on small prairie streams in eastern Montana. We deployed motion-activated cameras that recorded nightly wildlife activity from 7 PM to 7 AM (June through September 2025) across interspersed beaver-dammed and unimpounded sites on small prairie streams. Wildlife species and presence or absence of water was determined from photos, which showed that drying events occurred at both beaver-dammed and unimpounded sites. To date we have completed photo processing for 71 cameras and have identified 17 mammal species and 5 groups of bird species, including waterfowl and songbirds. For our next steps, we will examine whether wildlife differentially use sites influenced by beaver. This project will provide useful insights into how wildlife use beaver-dammed and undammed sections of small streams, as well as how that use changes throughout the summer in response to changing water availability in eastern Montana prairies.

Effective coexistence between wildlife populations and the people that live with them requires an understanding of how people feel toward the species and their management. Bison occupy a unique place in conservation history and management. Once extirpated across nearly all of their range and only recently introduced to areas outside of large tracts of federal land, they are now a jurisdictionally challenged species, with varying management paradigms across a patchwork of landowners and managers. Recent research has shown how activating different social identities can distort people’s attitudes toward species. Here, I explore whether activating urban and rural identities distorts people’s attitudes towards bison. To explore this question, I used an online survey and randomized treatments for respondents (n=1,029, across 8 Western states). I used quantitative, continuous response scales to capture fine‐scale variation in attitudes. I found that a positive attitude towards bison persisted across rural and urban identities, as well as age, gender, and political groups. I also found that respondents significantly underestimated cross group (Rural/Urban) attitudes towards bison. This study adds to a growing body of literature exploring how underlying identities and attitudes influence people's perceptions of wildlife, other people, and conservation-related actions.

Peter Singer’s preference utilitarian defense of selective infant replacement in cases of severe disability remains one of the most controversial arguments in contemporary bioethics. The core of Singer’s position relies on the claim that replacing a severely disabled infant with a non-disabled infant increases overall preference satisfaction and is therefore morally permissible. In this paper, I argue that Singer’s argument fails to justify this conclusion. Singer’s replacement premise requires a utilitarian calculus that depends on reliable predictions about future preference satisfaction. While some critics maintain that Singer underestimates the quality of life of disabled individuals, I contend that, once this concern is integrated with the welfare impacts on caregivers and the broader social effects of disability-inclusive communities, the aggregate preference satisfaction required by his argument becomes difficult to estimate with any degree of certainty. The combined uncertainty surrounding individual well-being, caregiver adaptation, and socially distributed effects undermines the claim that replacement reliably maximizes preference satisfaction. By challenging the methodological assumptions underlying the utilitarian calculus, this paper exposes a critical weakness in the structure of Singer’s justification for replacement.