Digital Commons Network^™

The Self, My Self, And Female Portraiture, Kenza Fernandez

Scripps Senior Theses

Growing up in Mexico was a privilege for many reasons. I am most grateful for its history of preservation and storytelling through art, specifically portraiture. I learned about my country's history and its most influential figures primarily through visuals. From mesoamerican sculptures to Mexican modern mural art, one did not have to be literate or speak vernacular Spanish to understand the story of our culture through time. It is this visual way of recording history that I have decided to turn to for interpretation and self exploration. Throughout the course of this academic year, I will be creating a series …

Animal Sentience In Indian Culture: Colonial And Post-Colonial Changes, Nanditha Krishna

Animal Sentience

The Indian tradition has respected animal sentience and non-injury toward all life. It is repeated consistently in Sanskrit literature and the later literature of the Jains and the Buddhists. Change came with the advent of Islamic rule followed by the British, who built slaughterhouses. The hunting of wildlife increased and several wild predator species were wiped out. The result was the series of legislations for animals which were initially proposed by the SPCAs and later by NGOs. In 1976, the Constitution of India was amended to make the protection of wildlife and compassion for living creatures a fundamental duty. However, …

Wet, Flowering, Dry, Caroline A. Minchew

Theses and Dissertations

Wet, flowering, dry is a series of photographic works that explore how vernal pools are a macrocosm for holding memory and a site of omnipresent solitude and decay. This installation distills an embodied and ephemeral experience of how we are grounded in a network of invisible connections with our surroundings. This network becomes evident through biological, historical, and field research conducted at the vernal pools for over a year. Through slow observation and consideration of how multiple stories of place can weave together into a larger parable, Wet, flowering, dry reveals how the life cycle of a vernal pool is …

Contributors - Quaker Religious Thought, No. 138, Jon R. Kershner

Quaker Religious Thought

No abstract provided.

Tales From A Placeholder: A Relational Journey With Land, Place, People And Self, Kalle O. Fox

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The proposed thesis is a collection of place-based, long- and-short-form creative nonfiction essays. The places of interest are where the author spent different amounts of time in during her twenties, including Iceland, Miami and Seaside, Florida, Butte and Missoula, Montana, and a series of National Parks on the western side of the Continental Divide. This thesis is informed what cultural geographer Yi Fu Tuan coined as topophilia: the affective bond between people and place. “Place” and “sense of place,” while each having their own array of definitions in environmental scholarship, are considered interchangeable in the context of my work. A …

The Traveling Memories Project: A Digital Collection Of Lived Experiences Of Teachers Who Served In The 1961 Cuban Literacy Campaign, Kimberly Waller

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The 1961 Campaña de la Alfabetización (CLC) [Cuban Literacy Campaign] looms large in the Cuban historical imagination as a moment of transformation, sacrifice, and triumph. Yet, until recently, the unique aspects of the CLC that made it a national success were in danger of being forgotten, thus losing its potential as a model for future ways to mobilize a nation toward an important social goal. The primary objectives of this project were to: (1) expand the scope of the discourse to include a much larger range of lived experiences; (2) collect and preserve lived experiences as shared by the teachers …

Mr. Clover Goes To Washington: Land, Water, And Fraud In The Mono Basin, 1910-1945, Robert B. Marks

Eastern Sierra History Journal

The water woes of the Mono Basin of the Eastern Sierra region of California did not begin when Los Angeles' Department of Water and Power began to purchase water rights there in the early twentieth century. Robert Marks argues persuasively that James B. Clover's water schemes predated, and in a sense, opened the way for Los Angeles later to tap Sierran snowmelt and funnel it down to Southern California.

Re-Storying Grant Creek: A Case Study Of Relational Dynamics On A Degraded Montana Stream, Seamus Rucci Land

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration began in 2021, and after a history of contentious ethical debates, ecological restoration is increasingly portrayed as a viable framework for combating environmental degradation and supporting more healthy and stable social-ecological systems. The proposed ecological restoration of Grant Creek, a degraded stream near Missoula, Montana, offers an opportunity to connect a restoration site to the broader, rapidly growing field of restoration practice. It also allows the opportunity to forward the ‘relational turn’ proposed by many in the sustainability sciences as an ontological and methodological means to move beyond positivist portrayals of social-ecological systems, which …

Trailing Fire: Working In The Woods And The Future Of Forests In A Chaotic Climate, Claire Kilchrenan Thompson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Our national conversation about wildfire is shifting. As wildland fires become larger, more frequent, more severe, and more expensive—and as climate change and land-use patterns drive the trend toward more fire—we’re scrambling to find a different paradigm for engaging with fire. Scientists now call this age of increasingly extreme burning the Pyrocene, and we’re just beginning to grapple with its impacts on the way we work, play, and live on the land.

As a longtime trail worker for the U.S. Forest Service, I’ve spent hundreds of days clearing trails in burned forests. In Trailing Fire, I draw on these …

No Diving From Bridge, Lia R. Mendez

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Lia Mendez grew up on the frontlines of America's breadbasket in the great Central Valley of California where Big Ag and Big Oil reign supreme. When Lia returns home after a long absence and joins local activists in her hometown's fight to reclaim its dying river from agribusiness, she discovers that the land holds secrets whose truths have been long hidden in plain sight. As Lia's love and concern deepen for the very place she promised herself she'd never wind up in, so, too, does her understanding deepen of the systems of oppression and extraction which rule her world. In …

Traversing Paradigms: An Environmental Journey To Body And Mind, Martin Ceja Mejia

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Traumatic life experiences altered the way I perceive the world. As a result, I embark on a journey to reshape my relationship to self, the built and natural world; to environment. In this thesis I ask: How do I want to relate to the environment? Considering I am a doubly colonized agent, I also aim to decolonize my relationship to environment along the process. Therefore, this work aims to formulate a new, personal, relationship to environment through academic literature, history, psychology, Indigenous knowledge and science, and literary studies, among other fields of knowledge. This work is interdisciplinary in nature; life …

Other Orchards, Sam B. Robison

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Other Orchards is comprised of poems each suspect in their own way of those boundaries that might separate humans from nature, rural from urban, worker from scholar, or human from beast. Using the figure of the orchard, a kind of “false forest,” this collection studies the ways we map ourselves onto our work and the way work might inform an understanding of the self. Ultimately, these are poems that emerge from the seams of things—the shoulder of highway strewn with dead antelope, the feral apple tree lost to the woods, the farmer lost in their work, slowing becoming less and …

Political Culture: An Unexplored Factor In Climate Change Diplomacy, Alexander Suen

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

As climate change continues to ravage the world, mitigation efforts continue to be insufficient to rise to the challenge. Inaction on climate change has been traditionally explained by economic incentives, but some of the variability in climate policies cannot be explained by economics alone. Some variations could be accounted for by the deeply rooted national political culture of Anglo-settler colonies. This political culture may inhibit the willingness of such states to cooperate on climate change. In this dissertation, I describe the political philosophy of the Anglo-settler colony, and the histories of domination of its white settlers over the indigenous peoples …

Invited Perspective - Engaging Aspirations To Nurture Communities, Kentaro Toyama

Subsistence Marketplaces

For subsistence communities, the question is whether aspirations can be applied to motivate behavior that is, on the one hand consistent with people’s aspirations, but which might otherwise be difficult to elicit. Could poorer households be encouraged to save, to spend more on their children’s education, or to act against unhealthy social norms? A couple of examples suggest this is not only possible, but highly successful in contexts where other appeals fail.

Towards Charism Identity: A Catholic Identity Case Study Through The Lens Of Laudato Si’, Kristofer Ross Koller

Doctoral Dissertations

This case study evaluates the current relevance of how Catholic identity is conceived as an evaluative tool in accreditation processes. Catholic identity, though a concept inconsistently defined among various international contexts, is nevertheless utilized reductively as criteria for K-12 Catholic school accreditation in the United States, primarily through the framework of the National Standards and Benchmarks for Effective Catholic Schools (NSBECS). Using the example of a secondary school with an explicit Catholic charism-based commitment to environmental sustainability, this dissertation collects qualitative data in an exploratory manner to evidence how schools that may seem insufficiently Catholic according to currently utilized frameworks …

Medieval Weathers: An Introduction, Michael J. Warren

Medieval Ecocriticisms

Introduction to the first volume of Medieval Ecocriticisms.

Reviewers And Referees

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Submission Guidelines

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Statement From The Indiana Academy Of The Social Sciences And Board Of Directors, Mssj Staff

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Author Biographical Notes

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Mission And Editorial Policy, Mssj Staff

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Volume 24, Full Contents, Mssj Staff

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Editors' Note, Nirupama Devaraj, Bharath Ganesh Babu

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Performing Amish Agrarianism: Negotiating Tradition In The Maintenance Of Pennsylvania Dairy Farms, Nicole Welk-Joerger

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Amish people have a reputation for being ecologically and environmentally conscientious. As numerous scholars in Amish and Plain Anabaptist studies have demonstrated, Amish views of the environment are diverse and ultimately anchored in the understanding that God made nature for human use. In these cases, Amish views of the environment could be described as much more anchored in traditional philosophical notions of “agrarianism” than “environmentalism.” In this article, I explore how some Amish approach agrarianism with a turn from more traditional farm life toward necessary economic engagement with multi-faceted operations and diversification. Based on intensive ethnographic research and participant observation, …

Greta Thunberg: A Small But Mighty Voice For The Environment, Madilyn Mortelliti

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

Abstract

This research paper discusses Greta Thunberg and the impact she has as a climate change activist. Thunberg faces many challenges as a young woman, but overcomes these difficulties while encouraging others to follow in her footsteps. She presents herself as a positive role model for younger generations. Thunberg has many accomplishments as an extremely young woman that leads to her global iconicity. She makes her power known in front of the highest ranked men in the world which forces legislation to make a change. Thunberg motivates others to make a difference before all hope is lost.

A Lament For Plumas County, Becca May

Floodwall Magazine

No abstract provided.

Undersea Cables: The Ultimate Geopolitical Chokepoint, Bert Chapman

FORCES Initiative: Strategy, Security, and Social Systems

This work provides historical and contemporary overviews of this critical geopolitical problem, describes the policy actors addressing this in the U.S. and selected other countries, and provides maps and information on many undersea cable work routes. These cables are chokepoints with one dictionary defining chokepoints as “a strategic narrow route providing passage through or to another region."

Vision, Winter 2021

Vision

A newsletter published for Deaf Catholics in USA

VisionFinding Aid

Ua45/6 Commencement Program, Wku Registrar

WKU Administration Documents

Commencement program for fall 2021.

Contributors' Notes

Exile

No abstract provided.