Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Elephants In The Room: Covid-19 Pandemic Political Ecologies Of Tourism In Tanzania, Helen C. Richardson

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

The COVID-19 pandemic brought forth unprecedented and ever-changing crisis and disruption to societies and economies around the globe.[1] As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to interrupt travel worldwide, the tourism industry, and the countries who rely on it as a major source of income, are in crisis. These processes have reconfigured economic capital flows and foreign investment in the global south. This is particularly the case in Tanzania, as tourism was Tanzania’s highest foreign exchange earner and accounted for 17% of Tanzania’s gross domestic product in 2019.[2] This project draws upon a political ecology framework to examine the Tanzanian …

Undoing Colorblind Ecologies: Redlining And Just Green Enough In The Urban Forest Of Boston's Franklin Park, Chelsea M. Parise

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Urban political ecology research increasingly engages multi-disciplinary methodologies to clarify the role that the botanic plays in creating, maintaining, or subverting ecological geographies of power. Fredrick Law Olmsted intended the forest within Franklin Park to heal the physical degeneration and social disunity he believed resulted from urban living conditions but instead the forest within Franklin Park has grown in contexts of increasingly complex environmental and racial difference. I examine how the urban forest in Boston’s Franklin Park has ecologically manifested racialized power relations through distinct periods of elite nature-making and segregated grassroots stewardship. I utilized archival research, forest surveys, and …

What Happened In Harris Neck?: Racism, Resistance, And Futures, Anna Sharpe

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This project traces the history and legacy of the seizure of Harris Neck, approximately 2,600 acres on the Georgia coast, once largely composed of rice and cotton plantations. After the Civil War, freedmen and women transformed the area into a thriving Black community. The community of approximately a hundred families, a school, a church, a post office, and many small farms and businesses flourished from the late 1800’s until 1942, when the federal government seized Harris Neck for use as an Army airfield.

The procedures used by the federal government to seize and, later, reallocate Harris Neck will be examined, …

Countering ‘Plastic Addicted Subjects’: Power, Essentialized Identities, And Expertise In Thailand, Olivia Carter Meyer

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Thailand is considered one of the six most significant contributors to marine plastic pollution in the world. This has led to widespread media attention and condemnation of Thai people as “addicted to plastic,” with little attention paid to how such discourses actually take shape. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with Thai regulatory institutions, grassroots environmental organizations, plastic industry representatives, and recyclers, I analyze the social, political, economic, and environmental processes that shape Thailand’s plasticscapes. I propose a feminist political ecology of plastic waste which attends to people’s lived experiences and perspectives, power relationships underlying discourses that inform the issue, and Thai …

Micromending The Metabolic Rift: An Analysis Of Food Waste Composting Systems In Lexington, Kentucky, Casey Byrd

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

The metabolic rift theory explores materials and social exchanges between rural and city communities and human-nature relations. Metabolic rifts can exist both environmentally and socially and are often geographically or culturally unique. Ultimately the metabolic rift is earmarked by increasing disconnection between humans and their environment. This thesis draws upon life cycle analysis studies, social-economic studies, and environmental and sustainability studies to argue that large-scale contemporary urban composting efforts, although well intended, are insufficient to mitigate the effects of the metabolic rift. Mobilizing theories around capitalism and the metabolic rift, this research paper connects social, environmental, and economic notions of …

“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 …

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 …

Politics Below The Surface: A Political Ecology Of Mineral Rights And Land Tenure Struggles In Appalachia And The Andes, Lindsay Shade

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation examines how confusion and lack of access to information about subsurface property rights facilitates the rapid acquisition of mineral rights by mining interests, leaving those who live 'above the surface' to contend with complicated corporate and bureaucratic apparatuses. The research focuses on the first proposed state-run large scale mining project in Ecuador, believed to contain copper ores, and on the natural gas hydrofracking industry in three counties in north central West Virginia. Qualitative and visual methods, including mapping, are employed to determine (i.) how the geography of subsurface ownership patterns is changing, (ii.) links between changes in subsurface …

Beyond Metropolises: Hybridity In A Transnational Context, Raihan Sharif

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Beyond metropolises and within transnational contexts, investigating hybridity discourses is long overdue. This article argues that the epistemic violence embedded in such discourse has grave implications for the very impoverished nations and peoples with whom it claims solidarity and that, because this discourse is trendy in academia, its service to neoliberal capitalism is both easy to miss and important to expose. Interstices of postcolonial hybridity discourses, development discourses, and environmental justice discourses—dominant versions of which are segregated from contextual issues—as produced in Western academia and exported to third world countries for appropriation as developmental efforts—reveal epistemic violence, the manipulation of …

Impermeable Assemblages: Flooding, Urban Infrastructure, And Stormwater Politics In São Paulo, Brazil, Nate Millington

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This project analyzes efforts to remake the relationship between water and city in São Paulo, Brazil. Currently experiencing overlapping problems of flooding, scarcity, and pollution, São Paulo illustrates the challenges of managing water in a contemporary mega-city. This dissertation subsequently considers the city’s water management through an approach that borrows from urban political ecology, social studies of science, and post-colonial urban theory. With an epistemological grounding in these literatures, this project analyzes ongoing conversations about water management in São Paulo, and focuses on how water is encountered and engaged with in the landscape by engineers, artists, and activists. This project …

Gold Mining And Unequal Exchange In Western Amazonia: A Theoretical Photo Essay, Gordon L. Ulmer

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

I combine fieldwork photography and ethnographic documentation of gold mining in Madre de Dios, Peru, to examine the localized material, social, environmental, and health outcomes of the global gold boom. This 'theoretical photo essay’ examines how local and global forces coalesce around gold mining and influence peoples and environments in Western Amazonia. I use embodiment theory in anthropology, ecological economics, and theories of underdevelopment to understand local consequences of the global gold trade and to elucidate how opulence and the machinations of capital accumulation in economic centers of the world occur at the expense of human lives and environments in …

Changing States: Using State-And-Transition Models To Evaluate Channel Evolution Following Dam Removal Along The Clark Fork River, Montana, Christopher Van Dyke

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Located just east of Missoula, Montana, Milltown Dam stood from 1908 to 2008 immediately downstream of the Clark Fork River’s confluence with the Blackfoot River. After the discovery of arsenic-contaminated groundwater in the nearby community of Milltown, as well as extensive deposits of contaminated sediment in the dam’s upstream reservoir, in 1981, the area was designated a Superfund site – along with much of the Upper Clark Fork Watershed. This motivated the eventual decision to remove the dam, perform environmental remediation, and reconstruct approximately five kilometers of the Clark Fork River and its floodplain. This study is part conceptual and …

The Use Of Improved Technology And Market-Based Incentives To Increase Forest Resource And Biodiversity Conservation In Rwanda, Kelly M. Rayens

Theses and Dissertations--Forestry and Natural Resources

This study evaluated the effectiveness of two distinct approaches to ecosystem conservation in Rwanda’s Nyungwe National Park: cookstove technology adoption and market-based policy instruments. A June 2014 survey of 250 households revealed that use of improved cookstove technology dramatically decreased fuelwood consumption for households in rural Rwanda, but that design, engineering and conflicting policy issues can hamper the widespread use of energy-efficient cooking technology. The second component of this research used the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) within a multi-criteria analysis (MCA) framework to explore the options for designing and implementing market-based instruments around the country’s conservation targets, particularly the highly …

Environmental Governance In The Carbon Economy: Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions In California's Cap-And-Trade Program, Patrick M. Bigger

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Since 2006 California has been pursuing the most ambitious climate change policy in the United States, implementing a suite of greenhouse gas reduction measures ranging from automobile refrigerant disposal rules to clean energy standards for electric power utilities. The most significant of these measures is the creation of a cap‐and‐trade program. Through this program, regulators seek to create a knowable price‐signal to incentivize emissions reductions among polluters. Using a suite of ethnographic methods, this dissertation looks at the people, ideas, and institutions that have been mobilized in the creation of California’s cap‐and‐ trade program.

Substantively, the dissertation engages with three …

Carbon Forestry: Pursuing Climate Change Mitigation And Poverty Alleviation Through Market-Based Forest Carbon Schemes In Chiapas, Mexico, Jonathan Otto

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Forest carbon projects seek to alleviate rural poverty and mitigate global climate change by facilitating the flow of capital from actors looking to offset CO2 emissions to land managers willing to engage in offset-oriented reforestation, afforestation, and forest preservation activities. In Mexico, forest carbon schemes have been pursued within the country’s national Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) program, and through REDD+ pilot projects and separate voluntary initiatives. In this dissertation, I explore one voluntary project, Scolel’ Te, which is managed by the non-governmental organization (NGO), AMBIO. Focusing on the case of Scolel’ Te, I show how forest carbon projects undermine …

The Human–Hookworm Assemblage: Contingency And The Practice Of Helminthic Therapy, Sophia Anne Strosberg

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Through a qualitative analysis of the use of intestinal parasites for treating immune system disorders, this research illustrates how contingency emerges in the context of the human relationship to hookworms. The affect of the human–nonhuman relationship is an important part of understanding the direction of evolutionary medicine today, and has implications for the politics of biological health innovations. The shift from the bad parasite to a parasite that at least sometimes heals, discursively and materially, has opened new spaces for patients to change the way they relate to medical knowledge, medical professionals, and pharmaceutical companies. Hookworms are banned by the …

Counting On The Environment: Measuring And Marketing Ecosystem Services In Oregon, Eric Nost

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

New markets for the conservation of so-called ecosystem services, like the ability of a wetland to mitigate floods, are emerging worldwide. According to environmental economists, these markets require some metric - ecological or otherwise - that names the relevant characteristics of the service to be traded as a commodity. But while this is often assumed to be a simple task of science, I argue that the environmental regulators, eco-entrepreneurs, and conservationists who actually design and implement metrics are not so easily brought into agreement. In “rolling-out” revamped metrics and protocols, regulators and their conservationist allies in one market in Oregon …

Audience Response To The Nature/Society Binary In Kurosawa’S Dersu Uzala: An Observational Online Ethnography, Laura L. Sharp

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Geographers researching cinema have predominantly been interested in how geographic meaning is constructed and negotiated within film, but have been less productive in accounting for how these constructs are received by viewers. Using the method of observational online ethnography, I therefore investigate how fans in online reviews have interpreted the nature/society binary in the film Dersu Uzala. Working from a social constructionist view of nature I begin by deconstructing the binary as it appears in Dersu Uzala before proceeding to illustrate the way this constitutive absence is made up for by the visuality of the film’s landscapes and techniques of …

Ecological Restoration's Genetic Culture: Participation And Technology In The Making Of Landscapes, Jairus Rossi

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Practitioners of ecological restoration are increasingly adopting a genetic perspective when recreating historical landscapes. Genes are often endowed with the capacity to reveal specific and distinct relationships between organisms and environments. In this dissertation, I examine how genetic technologies and concepts are shaping ecological restoration practices. This research is based on two and a half years of fieldwork in Chicago. I employed participant observation and semi-structured interviews to compare how restorationists in two plant science institutions employ genetic concepts in their projects. One institution uses high-tech genetic methods to guide practice while the other uses lower-tech genetic approaches. Each group …