Language contact is a topic that has been researched regarding European languages, but of course not all languages are European. Because of this fact, this research is examining the cross-linguistic influence in the vowels of people who speak both Hausa and Ekhwa. Hausa, which is in the Afro-Asiatic language family, is considered a lingua franca, meaning it is used as a common language for people of Nigeria and Northern Niger to communicate. The Niger-Congo language, Ekhwa, is considered to be an ethnic language, meaning it is more spoken in the home or community than in formal situations. This research project has been underway for a couple of months now, with Dr. Rachel Burdin, myself, and Emmanuel Bawa, who is a prior linguistics graduate student from the University of New Hampshire that conducted research on other African languages, including Ekhwa which is his native language. Prior to my joining, Dr. Burdin and Bawa collected recordings of participants who spoke both Hausa and Ekhwa. During this opportunity, Bawa and I will be analyzing the data collected by plotting the vowels and comparing them with each other. With the research on European languages, it is expected that this data should show Hausa vowels being affected by Ekhwa, as it was the second language that was learned by all of the participants who were interviewed.

There are many ways to measure whether an area of the country is distressed. The CDC has been producing the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) since 2000 in order to determine the social vulnerability of census tracts and counties. In addition to the SVI, the Community Resilience Estimates (CRE) and the Multidimensional Deprivation Index (MDI), have been released by the Census Bureau in the last several years to assess the level of disaster readiness and deprivation in sub-state areas, respectively. Each measure uses American Community Survey data to describe communities in different but related ways. The goals of this project are to examine the relationships among the deprivation rates and examine the variation in deprivation rates by county size and between coastal and inland counties.

For the Nez Perce Tribe, or the Nimiipúu people, of the Northwestern region of what is now known as the United States, fishing is a lifeway, and waters are sacred. Nimiipúu people have relied upon water sources and fishing locations, both a part of their reservation and beyond its boundaries, since time immemorial. The ways in which Nimiipúu people view fish and water is often through a spatio-temporal lens, or with a conception of space and time that, for example, connects headwaters to ocean in waters that host both cycles of anadromous fish — moving upstream and downstream to and from spawning grounds — and the Nimiipúu cycles that move with them. However, these perceptions are often stifled due to the impacts of settler colonialism and institutions that often make it difficult for Indigenous communities, including the Nimiipúu people, to assert sovereignty over water. Settler space and time, often associated with private land ownership and the following of linear time, doesn’t always align with Indigenous space and time, posing a challenge resulting from colonialism. This proposed research builds on prior work that focuses on Nimiipúu spatio-temporalities and the governance of Tribal waters. Interview data will be added to a geographic information system (GIS) and water quality concerns of Nimiipúu community members will be analyzed using inductive coding methods. The overall purpose of this work is to fine-tune the GIS in preparation of data transfer to the Nez Perce Tribe, and to more broadly support Tribal sovereignty and matters associated with water governance.

Over the recent years, more buzz has circled around ESG Investing (Environmental, Social, and Governance). This paper explores the history of ESG and, as; time passed, why more laws were created to protect shareholders in their investment decision and their relation to ESG. This paper also looks at the supporters of ESG investing and those who may think it is a good idea but is not beneficial to investors' portfolios. Furthermore, data was gathered from Bloomberg to determine if companies care more about their footprint on the environment and show investors they don't only value profit. We gathered a sample size of 100 primarily United States companies boards and their respective ESG scores. To determine if they only listed information on their site to continue with the fad of sustainability investing or are dedicated; to making a change throughout their company ensuring they are aware of their actions and how they will impact all areas of ESG.