Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Water Wise Landscape Practices: A Case Study For The City Of Gering, Christina E. Land

Community and Regional Planning Program: Professional Projects

This professional project is founded on my education, experiences, and networks. I have had the opportunity to use what I have learned thus far and be challenged to look at public planning from a different perspective. In partnership with the City of Gering I was able to get knee deep in the facility planning of the city owned property which is home to the Community Ever Green House. The project reviews how the property is integrated into the community and the impact it has. Then, identifies opportunities to improve overall functionality with a closer look at addressing hazard mitigation using …

Law Library Blog (February 2021): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Intimate Nevada: Artists Respond, Lauren Paljusaj, Anne Savage

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

Creative Works Winner

Most of us know Nevada beyond the Strip. It’s a place of houses, of shopping plazas, of movie theaters, and grocery stores. A place of hotels that are also places of work. A place of basins, ranges, vistas, and nature. A place of personal history. For Intimate Nevada: Artists Respond, curators Lauren Paljusaj (ENG BA ‘20) and Anne Savage (CFA BA ‘22), draw on photographs found in UNLV Special Collections to uncover the intimate visuality of a Nevada of past centuries. The exhibition focuses on how the imaged built landscape of early 20th century Southern Nevada …

The Changing Reference Landscape: An Assessment Of Mann Library's Combined Service Desk, Ryan Tolnay

Upstate New York Science Librarians Conference

This project examined and assessed reference services at Albert R. Mann Library following the creation of a combined service desk. I conducted a literature review and created a survey to determine what mode of research help patrons preferred. Survey respondents were fairly evenly split between their preferences and often stated the same reasons for their preference- convenience and accessibility. Recommendations include instituting a user experience team and training all access services employees on reference techniques and library resources. This will provide patrons with more accurate answers to their questions and continue to improve library services.

The Art Of Healing The Landscape: Creating A Sense Of Place With Phytotechnology, Tia Novak

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Masters Projects

This project builds on previous work completed as part of a masters project by Matt Hisle under the guidance of Frank Sleegers in Hadley, Massachusetts at an abandoned Getty gas station. The previous project sought to integrate phytotechnology into a “comprehensive experience that provided connectivity and educational purposes” and used Phyto by Kate Kennen and Niall Kirkwood as a framework for applying six phytotechnology typologies (referred to as phytotypologies) in the design (Sleegers & Hisle, 2017).

This project also explores the site’s historical, social, and ecological sense of place and the application of phytotechnology as garden art to create a …

#Metoo Has Changed The Media Landscape, But In Australia There Is Still Much To Be Done, Bianca Fileborn, Rachel E. Loney-Howes, Sophie Hindes

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Emerging in October 2017 in response to allegations of sexual assault perpetrated by Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo highlighted the potential for traditional and social media to work together to generate global interest in gender-based violence. Within 24 hours, survivors around the world had used the hashtag 12 million times.

Societal Rebirth: The Importance Of Spirituality, Lauren Rothstein

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This article offers an exploration of what the social consequences are when modernity strips away religious-human relationships to the land. The two texts Black Elk Speaks and Grapes of Wrath both include moments of anonymous forces imposing systematic modernization on society. Particularly, I try to understand the controversial subject of societal rebirths, traditionally defined through employment and steady food source availability. This paper proposes an approach to societal rebirths that emphasizes the importance of spiritual connection to the land through a critical analysis of Bakhtin's theory of Chronotope and Leopold's theory of Land Ethic. On the issue of spiritual connection …

Referencing People And Places: Multivocality And The Materiality Of Memory In Archaeological Landscapes, Jade L. Robison

Anthropology Department: Theses

In the two papers that comprise this thesis, I explore the various intersections of the materiality of memory, the multivocality of particular landscapes, and the memorialization of people and places. In the first paper, I examine how three very different groups of people utilized the Natchitoches Trace, a trail that once extended southwest from St. Louis, Missouri, to Louisiana and Texas. Created by precolumbian groups for trading purposes, the trail was later utilized by early European pioneer families for westward expansion. The 1830 Indian Removal Act forced the repurposing of the trail as a route of exile for displaced Cherokee, …

Law Library Blog (July 2018): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Rural Sense: Value, Heritage, And Sensory Landscapes: Developing A Design-Oriented Approach To Mapping For Healthier Landscapes, Judith Van Der Elst, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Lily Díaz-Kommonen

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Landscape design needs a novel value system centred on human experience of the landscape rather than simply on economic value. Design-oriented research allows us to shift the focus from mechanistic paradigms towards new sense-making approaches that value both the sensual and the cognitive in human experience. To move in this direction, we investigate cultural and natural aspects of sensory experience in rural landscapes, arguing that: (1) rural (non-urban) regions offer diverse sensory experiences for optimising human health; and (2) spatial interconnectedness between rural and urban areas means that healthy rural regions are critical for urban development. Our key argument is …

Archaeological Predictive Modeling Along The Central Savannah River, J. Christopher Gillam

Faculty & Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Living With Landscape Fire: Landholder Understandings Of Agency, Scale And Control Within Fiery Entanglements, Amanda Edwards, Nicholas J. Gill

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Around the world, debates over how to manage and adapt to bushfires (or wildfires) are increasingly prominent as more and different people, many of whom have little or no experience with landscape fire or land management, inhabit fire-prone environments. But bushfire events represent only the most visible aspect of complex entanglements which operate across huge temporal and spatial scales and over which humans have very limited control. In this article, we focus on how Australian landholders of settler or migrant heritage understand scalar complexities and agency and control within human/landscape fire entanglements. In view of the fact that the learning …

The Language Of Sustainability, Maija Ploof

Student Showcase

This paper seeks to address the importance of understanding the ambiguous term "sustainability" through the study of humanities, chiefly literature. Additionally, the paper explores the emerging genre of climate change fiction, or "cli-fi" and its potential role in presenting the issues of both ecological and human sustainability to a global audience, using Amitav Ghosh's novel The Hungry Tide as a primary example. As a basis for the theory that literature can affect a sustainable future, I also examine the importance of language in shaping both perception and protection of the environment. Language creates familiarity, which in turn creates consciousness. Literature …

"One Narrow Thread Of Green": The Vision Of May Theilgaard Watts, The Creation Of The Illinois Prairie Path, And A Community's Crusade For Open Space In Chicago's Suburbs, Anne M. Keller

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

Women's environmental activism prior to the early 1960s in America focused on women's roles as municipal housekeepers or emphasized wilderness conservation. I offer in this dissertation the story of the Illinois Prairie Path, the country's first rails-to-trails conversion to apply for National Recreation Trail status, and the innovative women who fought for nature preservation in a suburban setting rather than in a wilderness area. Led by renowned writer and naturalist, May Theilgaard Watts, these women built support for the public footpath project by fostering an ecological awareness throughout their region. I place them in the tradition of Chicago female reformers …

Green Space, Luralyn M. Helming

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"Our time spent looking at, experiencing, and engaging with nature improves our lives."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­the psychological benefits of time spent outdoors from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world.

http://inallthings.org/green-space/

Lawn Dissidents: Performing Whiteness Through Sustainability In Urban Residential Yards, Amy Lebowitz

Geography Honors Projects

“Lawn dissidents” are people who violate norms of turfgrass yards often found in suburbia. This thesis uses ethnographic methods to examine how these subjects’ sustainability-oriented lawn alternatives create meaning by manifesting values and performing identities. I argue that such lawn alternatives operate as positional goods that inscribe exclusion into landscapes. “Green” yardscapes yield social and environmental benefits to “dissidents” while burying the ways capitalism codes lawn alternatives, enacting a regime of whiteness no better for equity and inclusion than suburban lawns. Nonetheless, I turn hopefully to sharing economies as tools to expand sustainability initiatives beyond elite, eco-conscious whiteness.

Landscape Preferences, Amenity, And Bushfire Risk In New South Wales, Australia, Nicholas J. Gill, Olivia V. Dun, Christopher R. Brennan-Horley, Christine Eriksen

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

This paper examines landscape preferences of residents in amenity-rich bushfire-prone landscapes in New South Wales, Australia. Insights are provided into vegetation preferences in areas where properties neighbor large areas of native vegetation, such as national parks, or exist within a matrix of cleared and vegetated private and public land. In such areas, managing fuel loads in the proximity of houses is likely to reduce the risk of house loss and damage. Preferences for vegetation appearance and structure were related to varying fuel loads, particularly the density of understorey vegetation and larger trees. The study adopted a qualitative visual research approach, …

A Resilience-Based Approach To The Conservation Of Valley Oak In A Southern California Landscape, James J. Hayes, Shannon Donnelly

Geography and Geology Faculty Publications

Conservation thinking will benefit from the incorporation of a resilience perspective of landscapes as social-ecological systems that are continually changing due to both internal dynamics and in response to external factors such as a changing climate. The examination of two valley oak stands in Southern California provides an example of the necessity of this systems perspective where each stand is responding differently as a result of interactions with other parts of the landscape. One stand is experiencing regeneration failure similar to other stands across the state, and is exhibiting shifts in spatial pattern as a response to changing conditions. A …

Gelang: A Photography Of Belonging, Chase Clow

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Gelang: A Photography of Belonging proposes a new category of landscape photography, one that moves away from emphasis upon imagery of particular kinds of landscape (such as wilderness, topographical, or wastelandscape) and also away from genres of photography (art, documentary, or scientific) and instead investigates the shared values and ethics among landscape and nature photographers and the kinds of awareness and knowledge that arise through outdoor, field-based photographic practice. An analysis of the writings of photographers and their published interviews, as well as the author's own photographic experiences in the field, reveals a common core of life-affirming values predicated on …

The New Ruins Of North Cyprus, Jim Roche

Articles

This article is a critical commentary on the speculative physical development that occurred in North Cyprus in the period following the defeat of the Kofi Annan Plan (2004) for a political settlement for the islanders.

The rejection of the Annan V Plan by Greek Cypriot voters, and its acceptance by Turkish Cypriots, was interpreted and manipulated by certain political forces and vested interests in the TRNC as a carte blanche to ‘improve’ by development, property with Greek Cypriot title deeds. After the failed referendum the physical development of North Cyprus escalated at a gigantic rate. According to one ex-patriot: “In …

Landscape, History And The Media: An Introduction, Christina E. Dando

Geography and Geology Faculty Publications

Writing from Nebraska’s eastern edge, my mind’s eye drawn to the Platte River (west and south of me), I consider landscape, history, and the media. The Oto called the river “Nebraskier” which means flat or shallow, giving us the name of the state.1 Early accounts describe the Platte as “a mile wide and an inch deep” and “too thick to drink, too thin to plow”; Washington Irving described it as “the most magnificent and useless of rivers” (Allin 1982, 1). But to dismiss this river is to judge too quickly. As the river gains momentum, growing in size, it is …

Landscape Scale Influences Of Forest Area And Housing Density On House Loss In The 2009 Victorian Bushfires, Owen Price, Ross Bradstock

Faculty of Science, Medicine and Health - Papers: part A

Previous investigations into the factors associated with house loss in wildfires have focused on the house construction and its immediate environment (e.g. gardens). Here, we examine how nearby native forest and other houses can influence house loss. Specifically, we used a sample of 3500 houses affected by the Victorian bushfires of February 7th 2009 to explore how the amount of forest, proportion of forest burned by crown fire and the number of nearby houses affected house loss and how far from the house this influence was exerted. These fires were the most destructive in Australian history and so represent the …

The Relationship Between Particulate Pollution Levels In Australian Cities, Meteorology, And Landscape Fire Activity Detected From Modis Hotspots, Owen F. Price, Grant J. Williamson, Sarah B. Henderson, Fay Johnston, David M. J. S Bowman

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

Generally, sigmoid curves are used to describe the growth of animals over their lifetime. However, because growth rates often differ over an animal's lifetime a single curve may not accurately capture the growth. Broken-stick models constrained to pass through a common point have been proposed to describe the different growth phases, but these are often unsatisfactory because essentially there are still two functions that describe the lifetime growth. To provide a single, converged model to age animals with disparate growth phases we developed a smoothly joining two-phase nonlinear function (SJ2P), tailored to provide a more accurate description of lifetime growth …

Rapid Regolith Formation Over Volcanic Bedrock And Implications For Landscape Evolution, Anthony Dosseto, Heather L. Buss, P O Suresh

Faculty of Science, Medicine and Health - Papers: part A

The ability to quantify how fast weathering profiles develop is crucial to assessing soil resource depletion and quantifying how landscapes evolve over millennia. Uranium-series isotopes can be used to determine the age of the weathering front throughout a profile and to infer estimates of regolith production rates, because the abundance of U-series isotopes in a weathering profile is a function of chemical weathering and time. This technique is applied to a weathering profile in Puerto Rico developed over a volcaniclastic bedrock. U-series isotope compositions are modelled, revealing that it takes 40–60 kyr to develop an 18 m-thick profile. This is …

Impacts Of Urbanisation On The Native Avifauna Of Perth, Western Australia, Robert Davis, C Gole, Jd Roberts

Research outputs 2012

Urban development either eliminates, or severely fragments, native vegetation, and therefore alters the distribution and abundance of species that depend on it for habitat. We assessed the impact of urban development on bird communities at 121 sites in and around Perth, Western Australia. Based on data from community surveys, at least 83 % of 65 landbirds were found to be dependent, in some way, on the presence of native vegetation. For three groups of species defined by specific patterns of habitat use (bushland birds), there were sufficient data to show that species occurrences declined as the landscape changed from variegated …

Nature Is Ordinary Too: Raymond Williams As The Founder Of Ecocultural Studies, Rodney Giblett

Research outputs 2012

In a recent article in Cultural Studies, Jennifer Daryl Slack called for the jettisoning of ecocultural studies as an add-on to Cultural Studies and the revitalizing of Cultural Studies with the eco as integral to it. One way I propose of doing so in this article is to revalue and re-establish the beginnings of Cultural Studies, and of ecocultural studies, in the work of Raymond Williams in which both were integral to the other. I call Williams both a founder of Cultural Studies and the founder of ecocriticism and ecocultural studies, though of course he did not use these terms, …

Impacts Of Urbanisation On The Native Avifauna Of Perth, Western Australia, Robert A. Davis, Cheryl Gole, J Dale Roberts

Research outputs 2013

Urban development either eliminates, or severely fragments, native vegetation, and therefore alters the distribution and abundance of species that depend on it for habitat. We assessed the impact of urban development on bird communities at 121 sites in and around Perth, Western Australia. Based on data from community surveys, at least 83 % of 65 landbirds were found to be dependent, in some way, on the presence of native vegetation. For three groups of species defined by specific patterns of habitat use (bushland birds), there were sufficient data to show that species occurrences declined as the landscape changed from variegated …

Accelerating Anthropogenic Land Surface Change And The Status Of Pleistocene Drumlins In New England, Deborah W. Woodcock, John S. Rogan, Samuel D. Blanchard

Geography

Drumlins are glacially derived landforms that are prominent in the landscape over much of southern New England. We carried out a comprehensive ground-based survey in a three-town study area in eastern Massachusetts with the goals of establishing the extent to drumlins have been altered and assessing the associated environmental consequences and probable driving factors. Results show that many drumlins have been significantly altered through levelling and truncation (creation of steep cut and fill slopes), with projects involving movement of 1-1.5×106 m3 of earth materials not now uncommon. Stormwater and wetlands infractions were documented at all the larger excavation sites and …

The Management Of Feral Pig Socio-Ecological Systems In Far North Queensland, Australia, Gabriela Shuster

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

The development of management programs for socio-ecological systems that include multiple stakeholders is a complex process and requires careful evaluation and planning. This is particularly a challenge in the presence of intractable conflict. The feral pig (Sus scrofa) in Australia is part of one such socio-ecological system. There is a large and heterogeneous group of stakeholders interested in pig management. Pigs have diverse effects on wildlife and plant ecology, economic, health, and social sectors. This study used the feral pig management system as a vehicle to examine intractable conflict in socio-ecological systems. The purpose of the study was …

Social Memory And Landscape: A Cross-Cultural Examination, Joshua L. Stewart

Student Publications

The study of social memory and landscape in archaeological contexts is a recent trend in social archaeological theory. As such, and despite the flexibility, applicability, and usefulness of this approach, not many sites or societies have been studied from this perspective. The purpose of this examination is to demonstrate the flexibility, applicability and usefulness of the interpretive frameworks by applying it to three disparate sites and societies which are vastly different culturally, spatially and temporally. Research at these sites has not focused on issues of social memory and landscape, despite their perfect suitability.