Digital Commons Network^™

Assessing The Climate Water Balance Model’S Ability To Predict Soil Moisture Variability And Species Distribution Of A Forested Watershed In The Northern Cumberland Plateau, Katherine J. Love

Theses and Dissertations--Forestry and Natural Resources

Spatial patterns of moisture and tree species have been studied using environmental gradients, often represented by terrain attributes in GIS. With climate change, GIS terrain variables, which are static as long as the elevation remains unchanged, will not reflect alterations in temperature, water cycle, and atmospheric conditions. In this thesis, the commonly used terrain variables and climate water balance variables were evaluated and compared for their ability to explain soil moisture and tree species distributions in a forested watershed in the Northern Cumberland Plateau. The results suggest that GIS terrain variables generally perform better than climate water balance variables, however, …

Place And Digital Space, Suraj Chaudhary

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

The intersection of philosophies of space and technology is a fecund area of inquiry that has received surprisingly little attention in the philosophical literature. While the major accounts of space and place have not considered complexities introduced by recent technological developments, scholarship on the human-technology relationship has virtually ignored the spatial dimensions of this interaction. Place and Digital Space takes a step in addressing this gap in literature by offering an original, phenomenological account of place and using this framework to analyze digitally mediated spaces. I argue that places are continually evolving, internally heterogenous, and spatially distinct meaningful wholes with …

Shiny Objects, Hiding Places: Examining Community-Engaged Data Practices In Lexington, Ky, Emily Barrett

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

As local governments increasingly turn to data-driven solutions to help address some of their most acute challenges, from entrenched poverty to affordable housing, they often call on community-engaged researchers as collaborators, analysts and experts. While critical scholarship has highlighted the problematic logics underpinning this turn to data and digital technologies as the solution for urban issues, university-community partnerships offer a unique opportunity to further explore not only how these discourses materialize, but also how they are being actively negotiated and re-imagined in spaces of local government.

In this thesis, I explore one such university-community partnership and its efforts to critically …

Cartographic Efficacy: Histories Of The Present, Participatory Futures, Amber J. Bosse

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Throughout history, maps have held a particularly potent ability to inform and persuade their users. Recognizing the power maps and their modes of productions possess, participatory mapping has been celebrated for its capacity to empower systemically disenfranchised communities by way of establishing inclusive pathways for influencing collection and representation of spatial information. What has remained largely periphery to considerations of participatory mapping, however, has been discussions of map design. Decades of scholarship in both traditional and critical veins of cartography, however, argue that it’s the careful execution of design choices that grant the map its power. Without attention to design, …

Risky Business: Visualizing And Historicizing The Role Of Geographic Representation And Thinking In American Business, John Swab

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Geographic representation and thinking has a long history in the American business world. This thesis examines the role of geographic representation and thinking in the fire insurance industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the Sanborn Map Company and in the development of site selection as a concept in the mid-twentieth century through the biography of William Applebaum. Through these case studies, I explore the relevance applied cartographic representations to the business world and the opportunities it presents towards advancing geography as a discipline.

Becoming Gentrifier/D: Aesthetics, Subjectivities, And Rhythms Of Gentrification In Seoul, South Korea, Myung In Ji

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Gentrification has been extensively studied beyond Euro-American societies. In particular, previous research of Seoul’s residential gentrification has broadened our understanding of the role of the developmental state and property speculation in urban clearance and renewal. However, little attention has been paid to the contemporary retail gentrification in Seoul that has different aesthetics, subjectivities, and rhythms compared to residential gentrification. In retail gentrification, old urban neighborhoods are no longer demolished but cherished with their nostalgic landscapes and atmospheres. In this context, this dissertation project explores Seochon, a gentrifying neighborhood in Seoul, that was designated as a cultural heritage site in 2010. …

Reserved For The Whole Earth: Forms Of Evidence, Ought Anxiety, And The Futures Of Geographic Inquiry, Eric M. Robsky Huntley

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation examines geographic forms of evidence in the practices of landscape architects and geographers. I analyze evidence not only as an epistemic phenomenon, but as an aesthetic one, as well. Convincing an audience that the world is (or should be) one way and not another requires that knowledges be stacked, extended, and stitched together in a manner admissable to an audience. In the first two chapters, I use the case of the landscape architect Ian McHarg to examine how his approach to integrating scientific knowledge---a aesthetic response to what I theorize as 'ought anxiety'---grew alongside the environmental bureaucracy in …

Street Musicians, Soundscapes And Hearing The State In Urban Public Spaces Of Istanbul, Lacin Tutalar

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This study explores street musicians’ routines and associations with public space in Istanbul, Turkey between 2014 and 2016, a period which corresponds to a new, more conservative routine in the aftermath of a time of political contention in 2013. The study overall takes up a rhythmanalytical perspective, following the cultural geography’s interest based on Henri Lefebvre’s use of the term. I contribute to that interest by paying attention to changes in the composition of an urban public in Istanbul through a mix of institutional (e.g. bureaucratic, capitalist and religious) and corporeal (e.g. tourists, musicians, young people, audience, street maintenance, refugees, …

Middle To Late Holocene (7200-2900 Cal. Bp) Archaeological Site Formation Processes At Crumps Sink And The Origins Of Anthropogenic Environments In Central Kentucky, Usa, Justin Nels Carlson

Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology

Though some researchers have argued that the Big Barrens grasslands of Kentucky were the product of anthropogenic land clearing practices by Native Americans, heretofore, this hypothesis had not been tested archaeologically. More work was needed to refine chronologies of fire activity in the region, determine the extent to which humans played a role in the process, and integrate these findings with the paleoenvironmental and archaeological record. With these goals in mind, I conducted archaeological and geoarchaeological investigations at Crumps Sink in the Sinkhole Plain of Kentucky. The archaeological record and site formation history of Crumps Sink were compared with environmental …

Poéticas Minimalistas De La Ciudad Contemporánea: Iribarren, Mínguez Y Del Val, David Delgado López

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

Throughout the Spanish poetic production of the 20^th century, cities have developed a relevant role as a recurring space at the same time as society urbanized and an exodus took place from agricultural areas to the work centers offered by the cities. Since the second half of the 19^th century the city has been the meeting place for people from different backgrounds where the poet found, from his exclusive point of view, a new universe to develop in his work. However, the evolution of capitalist society sponsored the poet's transition from an artist to a worker in the …

Essays On Institutions And Development, Andrew Jonelis

Theses and Dissertations--Economics

The essays in this dissertation examine how political institutions affect economic development. In the first essay, I examine how executive control of the legislature shapes the time horizon of governing politicians and its effect on economic growth. The second essay examines how border changes over the past two centuries have provided different areas within modern countries with different institutional histories and how this affects the geographic concentration of economic activity. For the final essay, I examine whether elections have an effect on macroeconomic volatility when controlling for the democratic nature of the regime.

Setting The Stage: Resident Experiences With Enforcement, Rescue And Spectacle In Lampedusa, Elisa Sperandio

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Located 127 miles from the shores of Sicily and only 70 from Tunisia, the island of Lampedusa is home to a population of 6000. Residents are largely reliant on a centuries-old fishing economy, a booming tourism industry and, most recently, the sustainment of a complex apparatus of border enforcement. Since the early 2000s, with the hardening of the southern border of Italy and the European Union, a multitude of actors have converged to Lampedusa: from migrants, to agents of enforcement, to NGO personnel, along with journalists, researchers and tourists. In this thesis, I center the experiences of island residents to …

Open Secrets, Congressional Oversight, And The Geopolitics Of The Cia Drone Program, Marita C. Murphy

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Analyzing four congressional hearings that publicly discuss the CIA’s ‘secret’ drone program, this thesis considers the interaction between publicity and secrecy in facilitating practices of later-modern warfare. Specifically, I examine the content of these drone hearings within the broader context of leaks, Obama administration speeches, and public interest in CIA drones to better understand how open secrecy engages with public oversight. I argue these hearings are deceptively productive. While they largely fail as oversight events, the hearings facilitate numerous unexpected outcomes—including the normalization and entrenchment of the CIA drone program. Paradoxically then, publicity proves essential to the maintenance and acceptance …

Utilizing Large Scale Datasets To Evaluate Aspects Of A Sustainable Bioeconomy, Gwanseon Kim

Theses and Dissertations--Agricultural Economics

This dissertation combines large scale datasets to evaluate crop prediction, land values, and consumption of a crop being considered to advance a sustainable bioeconomy. In chapter 2, we propose a novel application of the multinomial logit (MNL) model to estimate the conditional transition probabilities of crop choice for the state of Kentucky. Utilizing the recovered transition probabilities the forecast distributions of total acreages for alfalfa, corn, soybeans, tobacco, and wheat produced in the state from 2010 to 2015 can be recovered. The Cropland Data Layer is merged with the Common Land Unit dataset to allow for the identification of crop …

Unsettling Refuge: Syrian Refugees’ Account Of Life In Denmark, Malene H. Jacobsen

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This doctoral dissertation examines the lived experiences of refuge in Denmark from the perspectives of Syrian refugees. Situated within feminist political geography, it moves beyond examining geopolitics merely from the perspective of the law, the state, and policy makers. Instead, it seeks to grasp the ways in which geopolitics are encountered, experienced, and negotiated on the ground – by the people who are most affected by state policies and practices. It draws on more than ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark with Syrian refugees, including semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and participant observations, as well as interviews with state and …

Visualizing Barrier Dune Topographic State Space And Inference Of Resilience Properties, Li-Chih Hsu

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

The linkage between barrier island morphologies and dune topographies, vegetation, and biogeomorphic feedbacks, has been examined. The two-fold stability domain (i.e., overwash-resisting and overwash-reinforcing stability domains) model from case studies in a couple of islands along the Georgia Bight and Virginia coast has been proposed to examine the resilience properties in the barrier dune systems. Thus, there is a need to examine geographic variations in the dune topography among and within islands. Meanwhile, previous studies just analyzed and compared dune topographies based on transect-based point elevations or dune crest elevations; therefore, it is necessary to further examine dune topography in …

“We’Re Being Left To Blight”: Green Urban Development And Racialized Space In Kansas City, Chhaya Kolavalli

Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology

In this dissertation, I explore ‘green’ urban development and urban agriculture projects from the perspective of residents of an African American majority neighborhood in Kansas City—who reside in an area referred to as a ‘blighted food desert’ by local policy makers. In Kansas City, extensive city government support exists for urban agricultural projects, which are touted not just as a solution to poverty associated issues such food insecurity and obesity, but also as a remedy for ‘blight,’ violence and crime, and vacant urban land. Specific narratives of Kansas City’s past are used to prop up and legitimate these future visions …

“Beyond Sisterhood There Is Still Racism, Colonialism And Imperialism!” Negotiating Gender, Ethnicity And Power In Madagascar Mangrove Conservation, Manon Lefèvre

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Understanding women’s experiences of mangrove forest conservation in the Global South is important because mangrove forests are a crucial defense against climate change, and are also increasingly the targets of global climate change policies. The intervention of postcolonial feminist theory combined with feminist political ecology has the potential to bring forward women’s seldom-heard experiences of climate change in these valuable ecosystems. This work supports previous feminist political ecology scholarship focused on understanding women’s complicated relationships to the environment and the gendered effects of climate change policies, while challenging dominant conservation discourse around women as a monolithic group. This thesis focuses …

“One More Way To Sell New Orleans”: Airbnb And The Commodification Of Authenticity Through Local Emotional Labor, Ian Spangler

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Since 2014, Airbnb has been the poster-child for an impassioned debate over how to best regulate short-term home rentals (STR’s) in New Orleans, Louisiana. As critical perspectives toward on-demand economic practice become increasingly common, it is important to understand how the impacts of STR platforms like Airbnb extend beyond the realm of what is traditionally conceptualized as the economic (i.e., pressure on housing markets). In this thesis, I explore the ways in which Airbnb recalibrates the spatial and temporal rhythms of everyday neighborhood life for people external to the formal trappings of an STR contract. Drawing in particular on theories …

Leveraging Overhead Imagery For Localization, Mapping, And Understanding, Scott Workman

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Ground-level and overhead images provide complementary viewpoints of the world. This thesis proposes methods which leverage dense overhead imagery, in addition to sparsely distributed ground-level imagery, to advance traditional computer vision problems, such as ground-level image localization and fine-grained urban mapping. Our work focuses on three primary research areas: learning a joint feature representation between ground-level and overhead imagery to enable direct comparison for the task of image geolocalization, incorporating unlabeled overhead images by inferring labels from nearby ground-level images to improve image-driven mapping, and fusing ground-level imagery with overhead imagery to enhance understanding. The ultimate contribution of this thesis …

Exploring Spatial And Temporal Variability Of Soil And Crop Processes For Irrigation Management, Javier Reyes

Theses and Dissertations--Plant and Soil Sciences

Irrigation needs to be applied to soils in relatively humid regions such as western Kentucky to supply water for crop uptake to optimize and stabilize yields. Characterization of soil and crop variability at the field scale is needed to apply site specific management and to optimize water application. The objective of this work is to propose a characterization and modeling of soil and crop processes to improve irrigation management. Through an analysis of spatial and temporal behavior of soil and crop variables the variability in the field was identified. Integrative analysis of soil, crop, proximal and remote sensing data was …

Modeling And Mapping Location-Dependent Human Appearance, Zachary Bessinger

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Human appearance is highly variable and depends on individual preferences, such as fashion, facial expression, and makeup. These preferences depend on many factors including a person's sense of style, what they are doing, and the weather. These factors, in turn, are dependent upon geographic location and time. In our work, we build computational models to learn the relationship between human appearance, geographic location, and time. The primary contributions are a framework for collecting and processing geotagged imagery of people, a large dataset collected by our framework, and several generative and discriminative models that use our dataset to learn the relationship …

Catastrophic Futures, Robby Hardesty

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

By means of a peculiar magic, insurance preserves the quantified value of capital through destructive, contingent events. The principal subjects of this project, global reinsurers, stand at the end of a long line of loss claims, holding capital together as forces threaten to tear it apart. The apocalyptic imaginaries of climate change portend events that will be increasingly destructive to capital, and insurers counter with new products and narratives. In examining reinsurers and the catastrophes they protect against, this project questions how novelty emerges from the eternal return of the same. I show how power is inscribed in the landscape, …

“I Thought I Found Home”: Locating The Hidden And Symbolic Spaces Of African American Lesbian Belonging, Aretina Rochelle Hamilton

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation investigates the place-making practices of African American lesbians in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1990 to 2010. For this project, I ask how African American lesbians claim space to examine how race, sexuality, and class shape their place-making practices. The study is situated in the city before and following the 1996 Olympic Games, which was a period of rapid social, economic, and political growth.

The primary question posed in this study is as follows: How do African American lesbians claim space in Atlanta? This dissertation posits three arguments. First, African American queer spaces are transitory, reflecting the shrinking boundaries of …

Producing Tradition: International Standards And Development In Jordanian Olive Oil, Brittany Eleanor Cook

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation project examines how value is changed and created through organic certification and the universalizing ideas of capacity building within the olive oil industry in Jordan and how these shifts affect the social and material processes of production. I approach organic olive oil production in Jordan as one method that producers use in accessing markets and capacity building. By shifting from looking strictly at organic certified farms to examining the larger context of capacity building and international standards, I identify how organic is just one strategy in a larger effort to diversify Jordanian agricultural production and to access global …

Accounting For Spatial Autocorrelation In Modeling The Distribution Of Water Quality Variables, Lorrayne Miralha

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Several studies in hydrology have reported differences in outcomes between models in which spatial autocorrelation (SAC) is accounted for and those in which SAC is not. However, the capacity to predict the magnitude of such differences is still ambiguous. In this thesis, I hypothesized that SAC, inherently possessed by a response variable, influences spatial modeling outcomes. I selected ten watersheds in the USA and analyzed them to determine whether water quality variables with higher Moran’s I values undergo greater increases in the coefficient of determination (R²) and greater decreases in residual SAC (rSAC) after spatial modeling. I compared non-spatial ordinary …

Understanding Haitian Women’S Health Care In Immokalee, Florida, Usa, Michele Leigh Flippo Bolduc

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This social science research project takes a critical approach to understanding the health of a population by using the health care system as an entry point through which we can see how large-scale social processes produce a particular health care landscape in the rural, im/migrant farmworker community of Immokalee, Florida, USA. Using a multi-scalar analysis of health care, I investigate how anti-immigrant legislation and neoliberal economics influence the experience of health care for health care providers and Haitian im/migrant women navigating these processes. First, I argue that anti-immigrant and pro-market discourses have been successful in limiting the accessibility to health …

Financial Inclusion In The City: Examining The Democratization Of Finance In Boston, Massachusetts, Jessa M. Loomis

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This doctoral dissertation examines how the financialization of the economy affects the everyday lives of low and moderate-income (LMI) urban residents in the United States. Specifically, the research presented in this dissertation provides a critical examination of the democratization of finance by examining financial empowerment programs designed to promote financial inclusion for LMI residents in Boston, Massachusetts. These programs were created in the wake of the financial crisis to promote financial security by training participants to manage their debt, to monitor their credit scores, to avoid predatory lending, and to invest using mainstream financial products.

This research has two significant …

Entrepreneurialism Meets The Sustainable City: The Case Of Lexington’S Town Branch Commons, Thomas E. Grubbs

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Although the idea of the entrepreneurial city is nothing new, recent research in contemporary urban geography and related disciplines indicates that the modus operandi of such entrepreneurial endeavors has shifted, as a result of an increasing recognition and acceptance of global climate change, to include and even prioritize sustainable urban development discourses and practices. While these discourses purportedly culminate in the production of the “sustainable city,” they often fail to deliver upon their promise to create a greener, more sustainable city for all. Such practices, in an effort to help cities obtain an urban sustainability fix (While et al. 2004), …

Cultivating A Culture Of Food Justice: Impacts Of Community Based Economies On Farmers And Neighborhood Leaders In The Case Of Fresh Stop Markets In Kentucky, Heather Hyden

Theses and Dissertations--Community & Leadership Development

In this thesis, I focus on two tensions within the alternative agro-food movement. First is a question of who/what community is allowed to define food systems problems and then implement solutions. For example, food desert metaphors rely discursively on defining communities as being “without”, which perpetuates needs-based narratives, in which only professional “experts” know how to solve problems of food access. These representations ignore the creativity, agency, and resiliency of everyday food justice mobilizations happening at the grassroots level. Second, what form can solutions take within hegemonic constructions of development? I build a theoretical model based on Black geographies (McKittrick, …