Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Values In Place: Intersecting Values In Rails To Trails Landscapes, Lisa Rainey Brownell

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a study of the values and meanings people attach to places and why exploring those values is important in trails and historic preservation planning. From a foundation in critical humanistic geography and values based preservation literatures, the dissertation examines three rails to trails projects as case studies. Primary research questions include: how does a landscape become valued, devalued, and/or revalued through time? In what ways do different values of different people or groups intersect in rails to trails landscapes and how do they shape the landscape? How do historic values intersect with economic, social, political, and other …

The Effects Of Minimum Salaries On Firm Tenure, Career Length, And The Experience Distribution: Evidence From The National Football League, Johnny C. Ducking

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

I use data from the National Football League (NFL) to analyze the impact of minimum salaries on an employee’s firm tenure, an employee’s career length, and an employer’s distribution of employee experience. The NFL has a salary structure in which the minimum salary a player can receive increases with the player’s years of experience. Salary schedules similar to the NFL’s exist in public education, Secret Service, Internal Revenue Service, other federal government agencies, the Episcopalian church, and unionized industries. Even though the magnitude of the salaries in the NFL differs from other industries, this study provides insight to the impact …

Three Essays Evaluating Choices Of Teachers And Administrators In Kentucky Public Schools, Nathan Barrett

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

Public K-12 education is a large enterprise in the United States. Through local, state and federal sources, the U.S. allocated over $610 billion to K-12 public education in 2009 (NCES). Not only is the commitment of public funds for education substantial, the provision of K-12 education is primarily administered by the government in non-market settings through local school districts. It is this institutional environment that generates the impetus for evaluating how those in education make choices in the absence of markets.

Like traditional markets, non-market solutions often fail because the incentives facing individuals and agencies elicit choices which produce outcomes …

Pollution Knowledge And Urban Water Politics In The Ganges River Basin (India), Sya Buryn Kedzior

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

Millions of people rely upon the Ganges River as a source of water provision and a site of disposal for sewage, solid waste, agricultural runoff and industrial effluent. The river is also a goddess in the Hindu pantheon who is worshipped for her purificatory powers, despite water quality levels that fall far short of standards for use in bathing, washing, and drinking. In recent years, a number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have formed to oppose both pollution of the river and the failure of state-run pollution abatement programs. They are joined by an increasingly frequent number of seemingly spontaneous protests …

Nationalism And Its Expression In Cuba’S Art Music: The Use Of Folklore In Mario Abril’S “Fantasia (Introduction And Pachanga)” For Clarinet And Piano, Nikolasa Tejero

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

In the centuries since the colonization of the New World, the people of Cuba created a strong musical tradition. Initially, their music mirrored the European composition canons of structural, melodic and harmonic order. The eventual confluence of its distinct cultural elements (i.e. the European, African, and, to a lesser extent, Amerindian) led to the emergence of a new, distinctly Cuban musical tradition.

The wars for independence that began in the United States and Europe in the eighteenth century created a surge towards political and cultural autonomy that swept across the Latin American colonies, generating a wave of nationalism during the …

Lavapiés, Madrid As Twenty-First Century Urban Spectacle, Matthew Isaiah Feinberg

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

Informed by the theories of Henri Lefebvre regarding the production of space and the theories of scale found in current scholarship in Cultural Geography, my methodology analyzes both dramatic texts and theater spaces to investigate how cultural production and capital converge in the “spectacle” of urban space. While employing this term “spectacle” to describe how dramatic texts, theater productions, and modern architecture transform the urban landscape into a metaphoric theater space for the production of local, national, and global identities, this project examines the relationship between theater and urban change in Lavapiés, an iconic, multicultural, and oftenunderserved neighborhood located in …

Conditioning Democratization: Eu Membership Conditionality And Domestic Politics In Balkan Institutional Reforms, Ridvan Peshkopia

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

The uneven effects of EU membership conditionality on Eastern European reforms continue to puzzle the research community. Sometimes, the research focus has been too large, considering EU membership conditionality as a policy implemented uniformly across policy areas. Other efforts take a too narrow approach by trying to explain the effects of EU membership conditionality in single sectors. I suggest studying this phenomenon through a set of mid-level theories in a cross-country, cross-sectorial approach. I argue that both the intensity of EU membership conditionality and reform outcomes are contingent upon the policy sector context; hence, we should take a sectorial contextual …

Boundaries And Breaches: Complexities And Strategies Down On The Farm, Debra S. Kershaw

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

Employing a wide range of theoretical and methodological tools, practitioners within an array of disciplines have attempted to gain new understanding about the structural changes in the agricultural system in the United States and around the world. From Agricultural Economists to Sociologists, quantitative and qualitative research has attempted to shed light on structural change in agriculture and its implications for the real lives of farmers, their families, and consumers of their goods. The current research adopts a comparative-historical approach to examining the particular affects of structural change in six counties in central Nebraska. The general theoretical frame on which this …