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Full-Text Articles in Human Geography

Staying Power: The Struggle For Space And Place In Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Erin E. Lilli Feb 2024

Staying Power: The Struggle For Space And Place In Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Erin E. Lilli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at how gentrification touches down, at the neighborhood and individual scale, in Crown Heights and reproduces experiences of racial inequality in home and place. Taking an historical materialist approach and drawing on residential oral histories, this study frames these reproductions of racial inequality as always-in-tension with ongoing acts of resistance from Black homeowners, renters, and long-term residents. Specifically, the research explores the conditions under which Black residents of a predominantly Afro-Caribbean neighborhood acquire and maintain—and in some cases lose—their housing and sense of place and belonging. These residents resist the varied tactics of anti-Blackness such as landlord …


Tied Together, Eiko Nishida May 2023

Tied Together, Eiko Nishida

Theses and Dissertations

The paper is about a site-specific installation that questions a viewer’s norms and perspectives, through the use of multilingual newspapers as a sculptural material.


Salty: A Diffractive Inquiry Of Visceral Knowing And Embodied Aesthetics, Mei Ling Chua Feb 2023

Salty: A Diffractive Inquiry Of Visceral Knowing And Embodied Aesthetics, Mei Ling Chua

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation takes a diffractive, onto-epistemological approach to everyday practices with salt in order to articulate an expanded understanding of meaning making and knowledge production. This research reckons with and challenges dominant modes of knowing that engage a Cartesian perspective to situate knowing as the exclusive domain of the mind in both form and topic of inquiry. This research acts simultaneously as both a direct practice of and metacognition about knowledge production by examining 1. the embodied (including sensory and emotional aspects) and 2. the relational (including interpersonal and socio-cultural) dimensions of experience as visceral knowing. This articulation of …


Environmental Cues And The Sociospatial Imaginary: An Examination Of Spatial Perception And Meaning-Making In A Gentrifying Neighborhood, Todd Levon Brown Jun 2021

Environmental Cues And The Sociospatial Imaginary: An Examination Of Spatial Perception And Meaning-Making In A Gentrifying Neighborhood, Todd Levon Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What could be more ordinary or pedestrian than two people walking down an urban street and talking about what we see and what we make of it? Yet this simple, quotidian act of walking a street—seeing, perceiving and experiencing physical spaces, places and objects—and making meaning of what is encountered, is the basis of my dissertation. It is also my basis for claiming that I have learned a great deal—and much unexpectedly—about how differently different people see and interpret the urban streetscape. What are the various environmental cues that stand out to different individuals? What are the psychosocial imaginaries that …


Young Children's Play In High-Rise Housing: A Window Into The Changing Lives Of Urban Middle-Class Families In Pune Metropolitan Area, Sruthi Atmakur-Javdekar Jun 2020

Young Children's Play In High-Rise Housing: A Window Into The Changing Lives Of Urban Middle-Class Families In Pune Metropolitan Area, Sruthi Atmakur-Javdekar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to identify the combinations of spatial arrangements and physical features that influence young children’s access to play and the quality of their play opportunities in a heterogeneous sample of high-rise housing in India. Using Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Model of Human Development as a framework, the study examines two large umbrellas that contribute to young children’s play opportunities in high-rise housing developments: (1) The play environment that is made available for children by developers and design professionals; and (2) Parents’ and caregivers’ ways of using the designated and undesignated spaces based on their own play values and beliefs. A …


Aesthetic Perception Of Urban Spaces: New York, Timur Pozhidaev Jun 2019

Aesthetic Perception Of Urban Spaces: New York, Timur Pozhidaev

Theses and Dissertations

Aesthetic perception is an important field of interest in many aspects of everyday human life. It affects individual and social unconscious behavior and is strongly related to the decision-making processes in the human mind. The current study can serve as an important prototype for planning purposes and social and environmental justice among the regional units of New York City. With the current scientific sphere lacking a comprehensive methodology for assessing social superstructure, an aesthetic framework has the potential for success in evaluating the aspects of sustainable and resilient urban development.


Inheritances Of Injustice/Transference Of Freedom: An Intimate Project On Black Women's Intergenerational Relationships And The Consequences Of The Punishment System, Whitney Richards-Calathes May 2019

Inheritances Of Injustice/Transference Of Freedom: An Intimate Project On Black Women's Intergenerational Relationships And The Consequences Of The Punishment System, Whitney Richards-Calathes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project centers the multi-generational familial relationships between system-impacted Black women, mapping and uncovering the ways in which incarceration and practices of punishment impact, shape, hurt, and displace Black femme lineages. Through a qualitative lens and a specific focus on the current social and political landscape of Los Angeles, this dissertation examines the ways Black women are impacted by carceral ideology; from punitive definitions of Black womanhood, to the surveillance on Black femme familial intimacy and the rupture of Black women’s sense of home and place. Understandings of mass incarceration are frequently male-centered and most analyses of Black women’s system …


Persistence Of Cultural Heritage In A Multicultural Context: Examining Factors That Shaped Voting Preferences In The 2016 Election, Anna M. Schwartz May 2018

Persistence Of Cultural Heritage In A Multicultural Context: Examining Factors That Shaped Voting Preferences In The 2016 Election, Anna M. Schwartz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The prevailing discourse about the myth of the “melting pot” of American culture implies that heritage cultures are eliminated in favor of a homogenous “American” norm. However, this myth belies the persistence of our cultural heritage in forming our attitudes, morals, and habitual patterns of thought, each of which shape how we participate in our democracy through voting. By contextualizing voting predictors such as authoritarianism, social dominance, and sexism in developmental and ecological theories, this dissertation shows how they are shaped by culture and transmitted through consumption of media and interaction with members of one’s community and family. In an …


Walking As Ontological Shifter: Thoughts In The Key Of Life, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro Sep 2017

Walking As Ontological Shifter: Thoughts In The Key Of Life, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the …


Making The Gigantic Suburban Residential Complex In Beijing: Political Economy Processes And Everyday Life In The 2010s, Pengfei Li Jun 2017

Making The Gigantic Suburban Residential Complex In Beijing: Political Economy Processes And Everyday Life In The 2010s, Pengfei Li

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Suburbanization is an ongoing development process in China. Hundreds of thousands of construction projects are being undertaken in outskirts of most Chinese cities, despite the increasing domestic and international concerns over China’s housing oversupply (Xu, 2010; Gough, 2015; Li, 2015). The suburbanization of China, however, is fundamentally different from the suburbanization of most Western countries, especially the United States, whose massive post-war suburbanization took place as a continuation of its pre-war industrialization and urbanization movements. In the Chinese context, suburbanization is the process of urbanization as well—urbanization and suburbanization have been promoted simultaneously since the 1990s. It is …


Negotiating And Navigating Invisible Food Deserts: An Exploratory Study On Foodways Of Adults On The Autism Spectrum, Jungja Park Cardoso Sep 2016

Negotiating And Navigating Invisible Food Deserts: An Exploratory Study On Foodways Of Adults On The Autism Spectrum, Jungja Park Cardoso

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I explored foodways of adults on the autism spectrum in order to understand how they negotiate and navigate their food environments. Foodways are beliefs and practices involved in food production, preparation, distribution and consumption (Counihan 2008). In an effort to hear marginalized voices in autism discourse, I conducted an online survey and interviews in modes chosen by participants to accommodate the communication needs of a wide range of autistic adults. The primary participants were highly educated adults with a formal autism diagnosis (n = 23) and self-diagnosed adults (n = 6). Out of the 29 autistic participants who …


The Conflicts Of Coexistence: Contested Meanings Of Carnivore Management And Conservation In The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Hannah F. Jaicks Feb 2016

The Conflicts Of Coexistence: Contested Meanings Of Carnivore Management And Conservation In The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Hannah F. Jaicks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) encompasses urbanizing areas adjacent to essential conservation habitat with an inimitable capacity to support carnivore populations, including grizzly bears, wolves, and cougars. This geography has resulted in divisive social conflicts about these animals’ management as well as physical conflicts when they come into contact with people over the course of daily life in the region. Employing a qualitative methodology with semi-structured interviews, participant observation, wilderness treks, and archival work, this study examines the context, social processes, and decision-making processes that underlie the predator conflicts and produce management challenges in the GYE. This approach integrates theory …


Accumulation, Excess, Childhood: Toward A Countertopography Of Risk And Waste, Cindi Katz Nov 2010

Accumulation, Excess, Childhood: Toward A Countertopography Of Risk And Waste, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

This piece grows out of my on-going project, ‘Childhood as Spectacle’, and my enduring concern with social reproduction and what it does for and to Marxist and other critical political-economic analyses. After more than 30 years of Marxist-feminist interventions around these issues, symptomatic silences around social reproduction remain all too common in analyses of capitalism. Working through these issues and their occlusion, I offer what I hope is a useful and vibrant theoretical framework for examining geographies of children, youth, and families. Building this framework calls into play three overlapping issues; neoliberal capitalism in crisis and David Harvey’s notion of …


It's All Happening At The Zoo: Children's Environmental Learning After School, Jason A. Douglas, Cindi Katz Apr 2009

It's All Happening At The Zoo: Children's Environmental Learning After School, Jason A. Douglas, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

Pairing dynamic out-of-school-time (OST) programs with zoos can encourage young people's relationships with and sense of responsibility for animals and the environment. The project presented in this article, Animal Rescuers, gave the authors the opportunity to examine how such a pairing can work. OST programs enable learning in settings that are generally unavailable during school time (Honig & McDonald, 2005). They provide space for collaboration among students, teachers, and others such as program visitors or outside educators. Taking advantage of the flexibility, location, and educational playfulness of an OST setting, the authors worked intensively with a small number of 10-12-year-old …


Los Terrores De La Hipervigilancia: Seguridad Y Nuevas Espacialidades De La Niñez, Cindi Katz Jul 2006

Los Terrores De La Hipervigilancia: Seguridad Y Nuevas Espacialidades De La Niñez, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

A partir de estudios anteriores que vincularon las geografías de los niños y las niñas con un análisis de los efectos de la reestructuración de la economía global en la reproducción social, este artículo examina las nuevas espacialidades de la niñez en Estados Unidos. Sostengo que los espacios contemporáneos de la infancia, en todas las escalas, desde las del cuerpo hasta las globales, han transigido frente a la seguridad y al avance de la privatización. Recurro al lenguaje del «terror» para indagar estos efectos y sus consecuencias en la vida cotidiana de los niños y las niñas en un entorno …


Reconfiguring Childhood Boys And Girls Growing Up Global, Cindi Katz Jan 2004

Reconfiguring Childhood Boys And Girls Growing Up Global, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

Children are a spur, a commitment, a way of imaging the future—but all too often these sorts of phrases just rattle around a vacuum, their utterance the beginning and end of the commitment. We emphasize “the best interests of the child,”but this gloss provides a moral imperative to all manner of uncompleted projects and unfulfilled policies. Likewise, the use of children’s images or presence in public forums of all types gives a patina of honorableness to practices and plans that never actually make good on the promissory note of childhood. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit is a notable example. Such …


The State Goes Home: Local Hyper-Vigilance Of Children And The Global Retreat From Social Reproduction, Cindi Katz Oct 2001

The State Goes Home: Local Hyper-Vigilance Of Children And The Global Retreat From Social Reproduction, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

In an early scene in The Terminator, the Cyborgian Arnold Schwarzenegger walks into an L.A. gun shop and asks to see the wares. The shopkeeper lays out Uzis, submachine guns, rocket launchers, and other sophisticated means of overkill, nervously understating, "Any one of these will suit you for home defense purposes." The situation is likewise in the growing child protection industry. In keeping with the shopkeeper's sly comment, these businesses feast on an all-pervasive culture of fear, while creating a mockery, alibi, and distraction out of what they are really about - to remake the home as a citadel through …


Interview: Cindi Katz. Creating Safe Space And The Materiality Of The Margins, Cindi Katz Jan 1997

Interview: Cindi Katz. Creating Safe Space And The Materiality Of The Margins, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

Cindi Katz, associate professor and chair of the environmental psychology program at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, visited the University of Kentucky in February of 1996 to deliver the keynote address at the 5 1/2 Annual Geography Graduate Student Conference. In her address, entitled "Power, Space and Terror: Social Reproduction and the Public Environment," Professor Katz discussed how changes jn urban built environments, particularly the privatization of urban public space, negatively affected New York City children. Privatization, she argued, not only serves a 'child hating' mentality prevalent in our society, but fosters, among other things, …


A Methodology For The Study Of Children's Environmental Knowledge In Other Cultures, Cindi Katz Jan 1985

A Methodology For The Study Of Children's Environmental Knowledge In Other Cultures, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

This paper presents a methodology which I used to study the content and acquisition of children's environmental knowledge as central to the social reproduction of a rural agricultural economy in the Sudan. My approach was forged drawing on methods of geography, linguistics and anthropology to provide information on (1) how children learn to interact productively with their environment, (2) the nature of their interactions and (3) their knowledge of environmental processes and resources. In this paper I will describe first the methodology adopted including participant observation, ethnosemantic interviews, child-led walks, environmental modeling and "geo-dramas". I will then discuss its use …