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University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Masters Theses

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Full-Text Articles in Geography

“Knoxville Is Home Because I Have Made It That Way”: Drag Family And The Politics Of Joy In Knoxville, Tennessee, Devyn J. Kelly May 2023

“Knoxville Is Home Because I Have Made It That Way”: Drag Family And The Politics Of Joy In Knoxville, Tennessee, Devyn J. Kelly

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I uncover narratives of joy and love for a queer and trans drag family in Knoxville, Tennessee. Considered to be in a region that is openly hostile towards queer folk, I use documentary filmmaking to see how a family trans drag entertainers create queer space for themselves and others in the South. Current legislature is slashing rights for queer folk in Tennessee, directly affecting the lives and wellness of my participants. Through interviews I discover how this drag family, The House of Commitment, bands together to navigate their conservative surroundings, and form deep connections of home here. …


Examining Housing Experiences Among International Students At The University Of Tennessee, Knoxville (Utk), Rosemary Achentisa Ayelazuno May 2023

Examining Housing Experiences Among International Students At The University Of Tennessee, Knoxville (Utk), Rosemary Achentisa Ayelazuno

Masters Theses

As more students from across the world enrol in higher education to take advantage of the opportunities it offers, schools and universities are starting to address a problem that an increasing number of their students are experiencing, namely housing insecurity. With an increase in the number of students due to growing interest in higher education institutions, student housing has become a significant area of concern. More overseas graduate students are pursuing their degrees without regular access to their housing needs due to a lack of inexpensive and accessible housing, high tuition prices, and insufficient financial help. To better understand the …


Covered Monuments And Black Erasure In Nashville, Tennessee, Kayla S. Roulhac May 2023

Covered Monuments And Black Erasure In Nashville, Tennessee, Kayla S. Roulhac

Masters Theses

Centennial Park is a staple of downtown Nashville, Tennessee because of its founding after the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition in 1897, and also for the urban green space it provides for contemporary residents and visitors. A family-friendly space is presented to the visitors, yet there is a history of slavery within the park boundaries and Black removal. The lack of acknowledgement of the former plantation, the later removal of an African American university nearly adjacent to Vanderbilt University, and the modern presence of a Confederate monument in this space brings about questions regarding the memory of this particular landscape …


Covid-19 Renters And Housing Instability: Combatting The Eviction Epidemic During The Covid-19 Pandemic In Knox County, Tennessee, Samantha B. Myers-Miller Aug 2022

Covid-19 Renters And Housing Instability: Combatting The Eviction Epidemic During The Covid-19 Pandemic In Knox County, Tennessee, Samantha B. Myers-Miller

Masters Theses

COVID-19 has exacerbated preexisting inequities in Knox County, Tennessee. The disruption to employment caused by the pandemic has imposed a great financial burden for many individuals who rent housing. The primary relief that was afforded to renters during the pandemic was enabled by a federal eviction moratorium order, where covered renters could defer payments to avoid eviction while the moratorium was in effect. Some additional rental assistance was provided to local governments through the federal CARES Act pandemic relief package. Despite these provisions, many people experienced housing crises in Knox County, where over 3,000 renters have faced eviction filing from …


Exchange And Social Interaction In The Tennessee River Valley: A Geospatial Approach To The Analysis Of Late Archaic Archaeological Sites, Justin S. Bailey Aug 2022

Exchange And Social Interaction In The Tennessee River Valley: A Geospatial Approach To The Analysis Of Late Archaic Archaeological Sites, Justin S. Bailey

Masters Theses

The cultural manifestation known as the Shell Mound Archaic persisted in the lower Midwest and Midsouth region of the Eastern United States for over four millennia beginning in the Middle Archaic ca. 8900 cal BP and terminating at the end of the Late Archaic ca 3200 cal BP. A geospatial approach is applied to the analysis of exotic material exchange of the Late Archaic (ca. 5800-3200 cal BP) to assess how foraging peoples in the Tennessee River Valley interacted and persisted during this time. Exotic material items manufactured from copper, marine shell, steatite, and other nonlocal materials demonstrate distinct spatial …


Scars As Cartography: Bodily Commemorations And Memorials, Bethany Craig May 2022

Scars As Cartography: Bodily Commemorations And Memorials, Bethany Craig

Masters Theses

This paper seeks to study the interdependence of scars and memory to the newly emergent field of bodily cartography, specifically investigating the dynamic between scars and the spatially situated memories they preserve, produce, and commemorate within and through the body. In this thesis, I argue that scars are a form of bodily cartography which map, mark, inscribe, and pinpoint the experiences of our spatial movements through time, location, and emotion. The project’s urgency lies in recognizing and validating the body as a cartographic space; it addresses the normalizing effects of the (re)articulation and (re)production of memory through the body. Whether …


From Page To Place: Speculative Fiction, Future Space-Making, And Community Formation In Theory And Practice, Victoria L. Haynes May 2022

From Page To Place: Speculative Fiction, Future Space-Making, And Community Formation In Theory And Practice, Victoria L. Haynes

Masters Theses

This thesis shows how Black and queer-authored Southern climate fiction can serve as a guide for constructing better futures. Established as two separate academic papers, the first chapter analyzes two climate fiction novels set in the U.S. Southern landscape: Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts and Tenea Johnson’s Smoketown. Through this analysis, I name three key commonalities between both narratives that I believe are critical to facilitating future change: creating community, envisioning resistance, and fostering empathy and accountability. My identification of these three themes and discussion of their articulations is grounded in the work of Black geographies and queer …


“And They Wrote It All Down As The Progress Of Man”: Relationships Between Environment, Extractive Industries, And Appalachian Agency, Emma V. Kelly May 2022

“And They Wrote It All Down As The Progress Of Man”: Relationships Between Environment, Extractive Industries, And Appalachian Agency, Emma V. Kelly

Masters Theses

The landscape of Central Appalachia has shaped and been shaped by its residents for thousands of years. The advent of industrialized extractive industries greatly shifted the nature and the extent of these processes, with capitalistic domination being asserted over the environment. While this shift towards industrialization was a widespread phenomenon, it undertook a unique trajectory within Appalachia, a region which occupies a distinct position within the national perspective. Although geographically established by the Appalachian Regional Commission, Appalachia is more than a politically defined set of counties: It is an incredibly diverse sociocultural region that exists on varying planes of marginalization …


Statistical And Spatial Analysis Of Hurricane-Induced Power Outage And Restoration, Dakotah Daniel Maguire May 2022

Statistical And Spatial Analysis Of Hurricane-Induced Power Outage And Restoration, Dakotah Daniel Maguire

Masters Theses

Tropical cyclones (TC) cause billions of dollars in damage to coastal areas in the United States annually. Global climate change is increasing favorable environmental conditions for TCs which produce heavy flooding and precipitation. It is important to understand the communities that will be most affected, and will likely suffer the longest power outages. County-level power outage data from the Department of Energy’s Environment for Analysis of Geo-Located Energy Information (EAGLE-I) were used to analyze the relationships of environmental and socioeconomic variables on power outage trends, response, and recovery for power outages caused by two North Atlantic Basin hurricanes: Hurricane Florence …


Messy Zoning And Studentification: Fort Sanders In Knoxville, Tennessee, Yael Uziel May 2021

Messy Zoning And Studentification: Fort Sanders In Knoxville, Tennessee, Yael Uziel

Masters Theses

This study explores the unique intersection of the current coronavirus pandemic and studentification by looking at college neighborhoods in cities through a case study of at University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the near-by Fort Sanders neighborhoods. It introduces the idea of "messy zoning" to characterize the unclear and conflicting land-use regulations and their applications by local and institutional actors contributing to further studentification. Using secondary data collection and archival urban planning documents from the City of Knoxville, this study works to question the reasons neighborhoods become studentified. Particularly, it fills the gap that is blaming HMO (Houses in multiple occupation) …


Social Inequity In Memories Of Shakespeare: The Fetishizing Power Of The Globe Theatre, Reagan A Yessler May 2021

Social Inequity In Memories Of Shakespeare: The Fetishizing Power Of The Globe Theatre, Reagan A Yessler

Masters Theses

William Shakespeare’s works are widely regarded as the pillar of English literature in Western society. An understanding of Shakespearean literature is a form of symbolic or cultural capital, and a lack thereof signals that a person is uncultured, uneducated. However, in his own time, Shakespeare was not so highly regarded. To fully understand the evolution that Shakespeare and his works have undergone, one must consider the modern memory politics that reify the contemporary interpretation of Shakespeare in the Western world at liex de memoire (places of memory), which are shaped by the tumultuous sequence of historical movements that formed Shakespeare’s …


Association Between Stream Impairment By Mercury And Superfund Sites In The Conterminous Usa, Karessa L. Manning May 2021

Association Between Stream Impairment By Mercury And Superfund Sites In The Conterminous Usa, Karessa L. Manning

Masters Theses

Mercury is a natural element that can cause harm to the brain, heart, kidneys, lungs, and immune system, especially to fetuses developing in the womb. Many natural and anthropogenic factors contribute to mercury in the environment, such as geologic deposits, landfills, gold and silver mining operations, cement production, and atmospheric deposition. Mercury has been identified as a contaminant of concern at many National Priority List (NPL) sites, however, studies on contamination at NPL sites are often only conducted on a local level. This study was to analyze the potential connection between mercury-contaminated NPL sites and the presence of mercury impaired …


Tweet Diffusion Over Space And Time: A Comparison Of A Winter-Weather And Tornado-Outbreak Case Study, Alyssa Margaret Cannistraci Dec 2020

Tweet Diffusion Over Space And Time: A Comparison Of A Winter-Weather And Tornado-Outbreak Case Study, Alyssa Margaret Cannistraci

Masters Theses

Social media allows people to receive, engage in, and share weather information. Users of the social media platform Twitter actively share weather content via tweets, which researchers can acquire through an Application Programming Interface (API). APIs return tweet content, as well as temporal and spatial characteristics (latitude and longitude coordinates). Tweets can then be mapped and studied spatiotemporally through Geographic Information System (GIS) software. For this work, I compared how tweets spread (“diffuse”) over space and time during two natural hazard events in the United States. The first case study is a winter weather event that The Weather Channel named …


Identifying Smokestacks In Remotely Sensed Imagery Via Deep Learning Algorithms, Kenneth Moss Aug 2020

Identifying Smokestacks In Remotely Sensed Imagery Via Deep Learning Algorithms, Kenneth Moss

Masters Theses

Locating smokestacks in remote sensing imagery is a crucial first step to calculating smokestack heights, which allows for the accurate modeling of dioxin pollution spread and the study of resulting health impacts. In the interest of automating this process, this thesis examines deep learning networks and how changes in input datasets and network architecture affect image detection accuracy. This initial image detection serves as the first step in automated object recognition and height calculation. While this is applicable to general land use classification, this study specifically addresses detecting smokestack images. Different dataset scenarios are generated from the massive Functional Map …


Understanding The Vulnerability Of The Population Of Afghanistan Under Multiple Natural And Anthropogenic Risks With An Indicator-Based Analysis, Matthew Repine Miller May 2017

Understanding The Vulnerability Of The Population Of Afghanistan Under Multiple Natural And Anthropogenic Risks With An Indicator-Based Analysis, Matthew Repine Miller

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study is to understand the vulnerability to natural and anthropogenic hazards of the population of Afghanistan and the social factors which enhance or moderate such vulnerability. While vulnerability studies are commonly conducted in the United States, as well as many other global north countries, most studies of this type utilize data collected by central government entities in the form of a census which is periodically executed and uses standardized collection methods. In the case of Afghanistan, and many other countries in the global south, such data is hard to acquire, lacks a high level of confidence, …


Operational Jakarta: The Problem Of Representation, Kevin Patrick Jeffers May 2017

Operational Jakarta: The Problem Of Representation, Kevin Patrick Jeffers

Masters Theses

As the twenty-first century unfolds with newly formed degrees of hypercomplex interactions and reactions amongst space, time, economy, politics, social dynamics, and cultural paradigms, we are observing new typologies of urbanism that are different in kind, rather than degree, from the previous “urban” upon which the vast majority of present theoretical and practical discourse has been based. The techniques, strategies, and methodologies of the twentieth-century no longer serve to adequately represent or to explain the phenomena of today’s incipient mega-cities. A new vocabulary must be developed. A new way of seeing is required in order to understand and therefor to …


Social Capital: Helping Hand Or Source Of Friction? A Case Study Of Knoxville, Tn, Michael Davis Hodges Aug 2016

Social Capital: Helping Hand Or Source Of Friction? A Case Study Of Knoxville, Tn, Michael Davis Hodges

Masters Theses

Social capital is defined as the use of social substitutes for resources that usually must be purchased. Social capital can be an impetus for upward residential and social mobility or a source of friction that leads to stagnation. Social capital is often considered as a valuable resource with a potential to lift the urban poor out of poverty, putting them into more equitable housing situations. In low-income communities, however, this resource has the potential to suppress mobility as the quality of such social relationships is affected by fault lines of society like racism, gender disparity, and the increasingly unequal distribution …


Remittance Behavior Of Us Immigrants, Nathan Edward Trombley Aug 2016

Remittance Behavior Of Us Immigrants, Nathan Edward Trombley

Masters Theses

Remittances, the sending of a portion of an immigrant’s income to friends and family, have become an undeniable and significant part of the global economy. This is especially true in some common immigrant sending regions where remittances make up a dominant portion of the local economy. The New Immigrant Survey has released the second wave of data in its cohort study of immigrants recently achieving Lawful Permanent Residence status in the United States. In light of this newly available information, this study seeks to highlight demographic and background characteristics of immigrants that have a statistically significant relationship on their sending …


Regional Dynamic Price Relationships Of Distillers Dried Grains In U.S. Feed Markets, Matthew Fulton Johnson Aug 2016

Regional Dynamic Price Relationships Of Distillers Dried Grains In U.S. Feed Markets, Matthew Fulton Johnson

Masters Theses

Distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS) is now a mainstream substitute in U.S. animal feed rations. DDGS is rich in fat and protein content and serves as a competitive feed source in livestock markets. The objective of this study is to identify dynamic price relationships among DDGS, corn, soybean meal, and livestock outputs in context of specific livestock sectors and their geographic location. Four locations associated with a predominant livestock sector are selected for analysis by measuring density and relative proportion of a livestock sector’s grain consumption at the county level. A vector error correction model is applied to post-mandate …


Pre- And Post-Crisis Geographies Of New Urbanism In Atlanta's Inner Suburbs, Scott Nyland Markley May 2016

Pre- And Post-Crisis Geographies Of New Urbanism In Atlanta's Inner Suburbs, Scott Nyland Markley

Masters Theses

Since the 1990s, Atlanta’s historically white and affluent northern inner suburbs have experienced increasing rates of poverty alongside growing racial/ethnic diversity, challenging a region notorious for private property politics and a history of supporting anti-immigrant and anti-poor legislation. Meanwhile, on the built landscape, high-end (re)development projects incorporating New Urbanist planning and design features, such as pedestrian accessibility, compact densities, and mixed land uses and housing types, have become increasingly common in this region, especially since the onset of the Great Recession. As Hanlon (2015) has noted, the “green turn” in public planning exemplified by New Urbanism may have adverse consequences …


Classifying Nominal Voltage Of Electric Power Transmission Lines Using Remotely-Sensed Data, Erik Herman Schmidt May 2016

Classifying Nominal Voltage Of Electric Power Transmission Lines Using Remotely-Sensed Data, Erik Herman Schmidt

Masters Theses

Geospatial data of national infrastructure are a valuable resource for visualization, analysis, and modeling. Building these geospatial foundation-level infrastructure datasets presents numerous challenges. Among those challenges is that of acquiring non-visible attribution of particular infrastructure entities for which there is no viable tabular source. In the case of electric power transmission lines, these data are difficult to acquire, particularly nation-wide. The route, or geometry of transmission lines can be determined from aerial imagery, but nominal voltage, a fundamental requirement for analysis and modeling, is not readily apparent. However, inferences can be made about the nominal voltage based on visual characteristics, …


Non-Residential Pedestrian Access To Transit Systems: A Gis Modeling Application, Luis Miguel Taboada Dec 2015

Non-Residential Pedestrian Access To Transit Systems: A Gis Modeling Application, Luis Miguel Taboada

Masters Theses

The success of a city’s urban transit system relies on the efficacy of its pedestrian infrastructure. A functional and access-oriented pedestrian network translates into safer pedestrian travel, increased demand in transit ridership, increases in commerce patronage, and reduced motorized travel (i.e., less congestion, and less vehicle emissions). Prioritization and allocation of sidewalk construction improvements are not always done in conjunction with transit service provisions. As a result, potential destinations are left inaccessible to pedestrians using the transit system. This study is motivated by concurrent research involving sidewalk improvement prioritization methods, within the scope of home-based work pedestrian transit trips. This …


Drinking And Remaking Place: A Study Of The Impact Of Commercial Moonshine In East Tennessee, Helen Rosko Dec 2015

Drinking And Remaking Place: A Study Of The Impact Of Commercial Moonshine In East Tennessee, Helen Rosko

Masters Theses

Moonshine has undergone resurgence in recent years with the passage of the 2009 liquor laws in Tennessee, allowing for 41 counties to open and operate commercial moonshine distilleries. The rise of legalized moonshine is connected to broader economic changes and has already had a significant impact on the cultural landscape and the selling and remaking of place, in both East Tennessee and Appalachia, two historically underserved regions of the United States. Specifically this thesis research asks: How is place being sold, represented, and re-made through the proliferation of moonshine in East Tennessee? I address this question through an analysis of …


An Ethno-Historical Account Of The African American Community In Downtown Knoxville, Tennessee Before And After Urban Renewal, Anne Victoria Dec 2015

An Ethno-Historical Account Of The African American Community In Downtown Knoxville, Tennessee Before And After Urban Renewal, Anne Victoria

Masters Theses

Urban renewal programs that applied large-scale removal of community urban space and structures, have a long history of differential impact to its community members. These effects persist. Furthermore, current redevelopment projects continue to negatively adjust the landscapes for African Americans. Most research on these impacts tends to focus on the economic failure of downtown, or the displacement of community structures, such as businesses, homes, and churches. Less is studied on the human experience before and after the change. Based on an ethno-historical account of three African American communities in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, this thesis examines the memories of the landscape …


Four Dimensional Approach To Center City Transformation: A Case Study Of Knoxville, Tn: 1884—1950, Joseph Ryan Roberts Aug 2015

Four Dimensional Approach To Center City Transformation: A Case Study Of Knoxville, Tn: 1884—1950, Joseph Ryan Roberts

Masters Theses

Urban morphological models were created to enhance our understanding of urban growth and form. Prior to Geographical Information Systems (GIS), these models were supplementary products of ideas and concepts that set out to explain the spatial configuration of the urban landscape. While these models are of great importance to the field, they are mostly two-dimensional (2D) and static. Three-dimensional (3D) modeling has strengths in landscape visualization, manipulation, and planning, where analyses of historical urban landscapes may be carried out efficiently and thoroughly. A method that utilizes 3D modeling through time or four-dimensional (4D) modeling will enhance our understanding of transformation …


Human And Black Bear Interactions In Buncombe County, North Carolina, From 1993–2013, Adam Guy Alsamadisi Aug 2015

Human And Black Bear Interactions In Buncombe County, North Carolina, From 1993–2013, Adam Guy Alsamadisi

Masters Theses

Over the past 20 years the frequency of interactions between humans and black bears in Buncombe County, North Carolina has been increasing, posing threats to human safety, black bear populations, ecological stability, and conservation support. During this time, both the human population and the American black bear population increased in southern Appalachia, which, combined with both urban expansion and landscape fragmentation, led to an increase in human and black bear interactions. Reducing future interactions with black bears is important as these interactions put support for conservation at risk. I performed a landscape analysis to better understand where human and black …


Establishing A Chronology Of Late Quaternary Glacial Advances In The Cordillera De Talamanca, Costa Rica, Rebecca Susan Potter Aug 2015

Establishing A Chronology Of Late Quaternary Glacial Advances In The Cordillera De Talamanca, Costa Rica, Rebecca Susan Potter

Masters Theses

Little research has focused on glacial events in the tropics. Providing an absolute glacial chronology in Costa Rica will build a foundation for future glacial chronologies and paleoclimate reconstructions in the highlands of Central America. Evidence of past glaciation, including moraines and glacial lakes, is preserved within formerly glaciated valleys in the Cordillera de Talamanca. Orvis and Horn (2000) constrained deglaciation ages of the most recent glacial event in the Cordillera de Talamanca based on radiocarbon dates of glacial lake sediments. Radiocarbon ages indicated complete deglaciation after 12.4 ka cal BP but before 9.7 ka cal BP (Orvis and Horn, …


A Study Of Colloquial Place Names Through Geotagged Social Media Data, Yuan Liu May 2015

A Study Of Colloquial Place Names Through Geotagged Social Media Data, Yuan Liu

Masters Theses

Place is a rich but vague geographic concept. Much work has been done to explore the collective understanding and perceived location of place. The last few decades have seen rapid expansion in the use of online social media and data sharing services, which provide a large amount of valuable data for research of colloquial place names. This study explored how geotagged social media data can be used to understand geographic place names, and delimit the perceived geographic extent of a place. The author proposes a probabilistic method to map the perceived geographic extent of a place using Kernel Density Estimation …


Time Series Analysis Of Modis Ndvi Data With Cloudy Pixels: Frequency-Domain And Sizer Analyses Of Vegetation Change In Western Rwanda, Ephraim Robert Love May 2015

Time Series Analysis Of Modis Ndvi Data With Cloudy Pixels: Frequency-Domain And Sizer Analyses Of Vegetation Change In Western Rwanda, Ephraim Robert Love

Masters Theses

Remote sensing is a valuable source of data for the study of human ecology in rural areas. In this thesis, I attempt to analyze the presence of a long-term trend indicative of post-resettlement adaptation in the vegetation signals of Western Rwanda. There is a dearth of research utilizing medium resolution imagery to study difficult environments, such as tropical-montane regions, where complex topography and cloud cover diminish image accuracy. I attempt to add to the extant literature on frequency-domain smoothing methods as well as the literature on human-environment interaction in tropical-montane regions by applying a harmonic filtering and smoothing algorithm to …


A Decade Of Lessons Learned: The Local Implementation Of Stormwater Programs In Tennessee, Catherine Trudy Olsen May 2015

A Decade Of Lessons Learned: The Local Implementation Of Stormwater Programs In Tennessee, Catherine Trudy Olsen

Masters Theses

Over the past decade, communities across the nation have innovated, regulated, and constructed their way to managing urban stormwater runoff, with the grand goal of making the nation’s waters fishable and swimmable. Regulated under federal NPDES MS4 Phase II stormwater permits, communities have endeavored to implement the comprehensive requirements of this unfunded federal mandate. Reducing the considerable impact of municipal runoff on water resources across the country is imperative to the achievement of grand goals under the Clean Water Act: to restore and protect the quality of the nation’s waters (USEPA, 2000). Across the state of Tennessee, the capacity of …