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Ground Truthing: The Politics And Culture Of Soil And Water Conservation In Iowa Agriculture, Brianna Farber
Ground Truthing: The Politics And Culture Of Soil And Water Conservation In Iowa Agriculture, Brianna Farber
Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation explores the complex relationships between people, technologies, and ecologies involved in natural resource conservation and industrial agriculture in Iowa. Specifically I focus on the various efforts to address water pollution affected primarily by agriculture in the state. Using a theoretical framework informed by political ecology, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and posthumanist theory, I draw on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork to discuss what makes conservation culturally salient and practically difficult to achieve. This difficulty around conservation arises in part from the tensions between what I describe as the corn assemblage and the prairie assemblage. I identify these …
The Walking Debt: Surviving An Outbreak Of Predatory Lending, Arya Novinbakht
The Walking Debt: Surviving An Outbreak Of Predatory Lending, Arya Novinbakht
Theses and Dissertations
The Walking Debt provides first-hand accounts of predatory finance and financial literacy. This thesis displays how low- and middle-income earners afford their cost of living in times of stagnant wages and rising costs, through face-to-face interviews with payday loan recipients. Payday loans are short-term, high interest loans whose clients typically “rollover” to afford the cost of credit and their cost of living. Although these loans are not new, they came to thrive following a series of neoliberal reforms beginning in the 1970s that ultimately undermined the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. Due to the nature of neoliberalism, responsibility for …