Lightman, Cynthia Ann Marbut

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

My thesis is a work of fiction wherein I imagine some of the potential transformations climate change will bring to the planet. Lightman is set in the near future with a touch of science fiction. The novel explores the power of community and the importance of multiple perspectives and knowledge systems. The plot revolves around the struggles of a group of characters living in a post-apocalyptic moment created by climate change. In this time, all modern infrastructure collapses, leaving my characters to learn how to survive without benefit of technology while traveling through a wilderness. They will encounter risks to …

No Answering Riot, Jacob Z. Bienvenue

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

I left this morning for Portland, Oregon—could be for good. Told my dear mother I was taking a day trip then hopped in her dinged up black Audi and felt the thing hum alive beneath me. Her speakers were still good, so I threw on a playlist with Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie and all of the ragged traintrack prophets and went roaring out of those gilded hills for hopefully ever. There was no traffic getting to Sacramento; it took me just twenty minutes to hit the I-5 North juncture and after that I went peeling up the central flatlands …

Adobe Sugar, Liana Espey Woodward

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

With a backdrop of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Adobe Sugar is a collection of poems that finds divinity in the mundane through exploration of youth, decadence, and nourishment.

The Worm In Heaven, Daniela Rae Garvue

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Prepare To Pivot: Shifting From The Projection Surface To The Zoom Screen Necessitated By Global Pandemic, David E. Mills-Low

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Design for theatre is an endeavor in which the physical, the corporeal, the defined, is applied to an ephemeral artform, one meant to happen only in the moment and then fade away. As such, building the world of the theatrical space, whether physical or digital, is similar to shooting at a moving target. While one angle of approach may be perfect for a moment, being ready and flexible enough to pivot, whether to reimagine due to limitation or to adjust an entire project due to calamity, like the shift from in person to online streaming. This paper investigates the joy …

A Personal History Of Invasive Hands And Endangered Lovers, Samuel Paul Boudreau

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

I thought I could be ridden hard and put away wet, wet, wet. I thought death and rape and drunkenness and unrequited love were functions of a typical life, a this-is-how-it-goes kinda world. But, as I’ve emerged from hellish muck, there has been a realization: the way we treat each other and the soil, the aching earth, needs to change. “A Personal History of Invasive Hands and Endangered Lovers” explores the relationship between intimacy and pain through a history of ecology and consumption, a melancholy of sorts. It amplifies trauma as a call-to-action and refuses to sit and take it. …

The Place Of Community Food Forests: A Review And Case Study Of Community Food Forests And Their Untapped Potential, Sarah Eiden

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

As population grows, the borders of urban and peri-urban areas continue to expand. The UN projects that by 2050 more than 68% of the world population is expected to live in urban areas (UN, 2018). Presently, urban centers are heterotrophic, or highly consumptive of products produced elsewhere, making them one of the most pressing challenges to global sustainability (Wu, 2008). With an ever-increasing imperative for more sustainable food production, multi-use edible green landscapes and other autotrophic, or self-feeding urban agriculture initiatives, are gaining attention and creative practice to incorporate a diversity of ecosystem services (ES). Community food forests (CFF) are …

Mapping Ethnophysiographies: An Investigation Of Toponyms And Land Cover Of Missoula County, Montana, Emily L. Cahoon

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis investigates the ethnophysiography of Missoula County, Montana via place names. Toponyms and landscape have been observed to have a relationship that can be studied through many lenses. Ethnophysiography, the study of how language and landscape relate to each other via human conceptualization, is a lens that was applied to this thesis because it recognizes the embodied information that toponyms carry and investigates landscape accordingly. Thus, the following research seeks to understand if ethnophysiographic diversity exists between toponyms in the Salish and English languages of Missoula County, Montana by analyzing place names and land cover in GIS and analyzing …

Fourth Wall An Exploration Of Lyric Possibility, Emma Pfeiffer

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Cobalt Blue, Connor W. Southard

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Cobalt Blue is a collection of three pieces of fiction. The first piece is the titular short story, “Cobalt Blue.” The second is the short story “The Martyrdom of St. Canisius.” Finally, there is an excerpt from a novel-in-progress, Hawkfeather. Thank you for your reading and consideration.

Handicraft Art Leisure Activities And Cognitive Reserve, Genna Mashinchi

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

With increasing age, older individuals face a higher likelihood of developing dementia. The rate of cognitive decline resulting from dementia is not equivalent for all, as some patients with dementia are able to function independently longer than others, despite having similar disease burden. The cognitive reserve (CR) theory provides one explanation for the differing rate of decline. CR suggests that there are factors — most notably, educational and occupational attainment — that can protect against the cognitive decline that is a hallmark of dementia. Although the beneficial effects of these notable CR factors are clear, they may not be modifiable. …

A Large Flock Of Small Birds: Essays, Rebecca Hanna Jacobson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Sharing The “Magic”: Exploring The Phenomenon Of Community And Nature Connectedness In Ancestral Skills Education, Anne Barksdale Graham

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

An ancestral skill is a “first” skill that may have originally been used for survival purposes but is no longer considered by Western culture to be required knowledge for human survival. Ancestral Skills Education is a method of sharing this ancestral knowledge through participatory, informal learning practices, in non-competitive environments, and from a non-commercial perspective. Ancestral Skills Education has the potential to create an eco-centric feeling of connectedness for practitioners. After experiencing these feelings of connectedness, ancestral skills practitioners may increase their pro-environment and pro-community thinking and behavior. The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological study was to create a description …

Going Back Through, Cassandra Rae Lee

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

These are poems from between 2018 and 221 during which time the author continuously sought out romance, rearranged the furniture , and adopted animals. Amidst this unresolve, primary preoccupations were closeness, what we accrue+conceal, and the forces that guide poems into arrangement. Secondary preoccupations were dust, amnesia, distraction, conduits, and the seething junction of forces where contradiction can be held.

Out Into The Wilds: A Gay Marine's Journey Towards Self-Acceptance, David Harris Stalling

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

(A segment of a book-length project) Struggling with divorce, the death of his father and coming to terms with his sexuality, a former Force Recon Marine abandons the thought of suicide and decides, instead, to retreat to the wilds in a desperate attempt to make sense of thing. Hiking by himself for more than 1,000 miles, over three months, mostly off-trail through some of the most remote and wild country left in the United States, the author writes of his encounters with wolves, grizzlies, mountain lions and, more importantly, himself. "In the wilds," the author writes, "there are no societal-created …

Conservation And Conversation In The Anthropocene, Brittany Alyse Garner

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The driving questions of this dissertation consider both the scientific and communicative understanding of conservation and extinction in the Anthropocene. Overall, this dissertation portfolio explores this topic via genetic and genomic data, international policy, big data analytics, human values, and the performing arts. Chapter 1 analyzes the use of genetics and genomics in conservation, finding multiple case studies within and outside of peer-reviewed journals. Chapters 2 and 3 quantify and describe the use of genetic principles and tools in a global species extinction risk assessment, the IUCN Red List, and finds low overall use but high potential for genetics to …

Fun Ctional Implications Of Dual Transmitting Neurons On Aggression, Lewis Michael Sherer Ii

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

The Impacts Of Integrating Interdisciplinary, Introductory Computer Science In High School Courses, Jan Roddy

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

The New Monumental Era: Daniel Webster And The Commemoration Of Compromise In The Age Of Disunion, 1853-1865, Michael James Larmann

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Professional Paper 1:

This professional paper is an in-depth analysis of a statue of Daniel Webster erected in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1859. Daniel Webster was a congressman for Massachusetts who became a controversial figure after he spoke in support of the Fugitive Slave Law as part of the Compromise of 1850. This paper analyzes the Daniel Webster statue and argues that the fractured politics of Union politicized public commemoration in the late antebellum period after the Compromise of 1850. This paper furthermore analyzes one of the first debates surrounding the public commemoration of a controversial historical actor with close ties …

A Comprehensive Forensic Case Report For The Bonner County Coroner Case #20-100, Megan Copeland

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This report consists of an inventory of the skeletal remains of case #20-100, assessment of the minimum number of individuals (MNI), a biological profile if possible, and a literature review of ­­­the use of DNA in ancestry estimations. The skeletal remains are consistent with an MNI of one. The remains are likely from a male individual, and skeletal features display a mixture of European and Asian characteristics. The individual is estimated to be between of 25-35 years old with an estimated stature of between 5’1” and 5’6”.

Appealingly Unpeeled: The Layered Lemons In Dutch Golden Age And Contemporary Art, Amanda Barr

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In seventeenth-century Dutch painting, the lemon holds a prominent visual, economical, socio-cultural, and moral position. This trend would then be repeated in contemporary art, beginning in roughly the 1970s. This thesis, in two parts, will explore the significance of the prevalence of the lemon and their recurrent presence in both Dutch Golden Age art and modern and contemporary artwork. This multivalent approach will look at lemons as not only a visual representation of fruit, but a symbol of larger concepts such as globalization, commercialism, colonialism, sexuality, religion, linguistics, mythology, and pop culture.

Lost In Translation, Amanda Barr

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Lost in Translation addresses the issues that trauma can create in communication; whether that be a physical trauma that damages ability to speak, think, or understand language, or mental and emotional trauma that significantly effects abilities to process, connect, and manage interpersonal relationships. My work is my voice, and a way to help others connect, to feel heard, and to even help them begin to communicate.

Management And Conservation Of Westslope Cutthroat Trout In An Impacted, Connected River System, Troy Weant Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Westslope cutthroat trout Oncorhynchus clarkii lewisi (WCT) is a native species of high conservation value that historically exhibited partially migratory behavior throughout its range. Long-term persistence of WCT is threatened by human habitat modification, fragmentation, introduction of non-native species, and hybridization. As a result of these changes, remnant populations in Montana have shifted toward resident populations in headwater systems and away from migratory populations in larger connected river networks. This is compounded by the historic introduction of rainbow trout O. mykiss (RBT) that hybridize with WCT, especially in larger river habitats. Rock Creek in western Montana, USA was historically managed …

Wildlife-Friendly Fence Policy On Federal Public Lands Managed By The U.S. Forest Service And Bureau Of Land Management, Joshua D. Elliott

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Many wildlife species are negatively impacted by the presence of fences on the landscape. Climate change is only exacerbating the problem as home ranges shift and species face heightened levels of stress. In recent decades, wildlife biologists have studied these impacts and devised ways of constructing fences to increase habitat connectivity and significantly reduce fence-related injury and mortality rates. Conservationists attempting to address this issue on a landscape level face significant challenges resulting from complex land ownership patterns, specifically across the western United States.

The two largest landowners in the U.S. are the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the …

Inference Of Surface Velocities From Oblique Time Lapse Photos And Terrestrial Based Lidar At The Helheim Glacier, Franklyn T. Dunbar Ii

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Using time dependent observations derived from terrestrial LiDAR and oblique
time-lapse imagery, we demonstrate that a Bayesian approach to glacial motion es-
timation provides a concise way to incorporate multiple data products into a single
motion estimation procedure effectively producing surface velocity estimates with
an associated uncertainty. This approach brings both improved computational effi-
ciency, and greater scalability across observational time-frames when compared to
existing methods. To gauge efficacy, we apply these methods to a set of observa-
tions from the Helheim Glacier, a critical actor in contemporary mass loss trends
observed in the Greenland Ice Sheet. We find that …

Albuquerque, Suzanne Joy Garcia Pino

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This story is about living in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2017 as a mixed-race woman with Hispanic, European, and Indigenous Mexican and Puebloan ancestry. Albuquerque seeks to understand how marginalized cultures become subsumed and ultimately lost by the dominate culture. As a child of mixed heritage, I am interested in the internalization of this cultural disappearance, and all the subtle yet profound choices my ancestors have made: my grandparents refused to teach Spanish to their children so they would fit in better with the whites, my Indian great grandfather fled Mexico, leaving behind his tribe and culture, never to return. …

Tennessee Williams: The Characters Are The Playwright, Peter A. Philips

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Tennessee Williams was first and foremost a personage of the South, having been born, raised, and nurtured in the Mississippi Delta country. His early influences formed the concept of his “American Theatre.” He was a keen observer of people and places and wrote about the individuals he studied. He espoused the idea that as a homosexual he had the innate capability to write and appreciate various genders and sexualities, expressing himself as the character being developed in the moment of creation. Williams’s works, though containing moments of great humor, often trend toward darkness, becoming ever more pessimistic of human survival …

Witch Pamphlets, Tsea M. Francisconi

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The witch hysteria that overtook Christian Europe during the Early Modern era inspired a mass paranoia over the conspiratorial belief that the Abrahamic religion’s personification of the world’s evils, also known as Satan, the Devil, demons, or Lucifer interchangeably, was attempting to rise up and cause harm to Christian communities during this time period. It was believed that in order to achieve this goal the Christian version of the Devil had been recruiting humans within Christian communities and turning these chosen humans into witches by granting them the ability to wield magical powers to spread their destruction, murder, and terror …

The Backfiring Effects Of Forced Political Allegiance In The Online World: The Case Of Preferred Pronouns On Twitter, Yin Lok Linus Chan

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Political divisions in the United States have led to conflating political issues with political parties. People who possess a set of intercorrelated beliefs (e.g. pro-immigration, prochoice) are assumed to be liberal, while those who hold opposing intercorrelated beliefs are assumed to be conservative. Impression management research suggests that in the online world, minor cues on one’s social media profile that display political beliefs serve as indicators of people’s political ideology. While people are free to declare their political views on personal social media accounts, what happens when people perceive that they are forced to appear aligned with one political group …

Lifeglows Through The Anthropocene: Development Of The Radical Imagination And Response-Ability Within Superhero Comics, Reed G. Puc

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Scholars such as Amitav Ghosh, Timothy Clark, and Timothy Morton emphasize the importance of and challenge within the task of representing the power, scope, and scale of climate change in art and literature. These interrogations often emphasize the failures of extant works to animate their viewers towards action in a time of environmental crisis, but struggle to find any work that meets their expectations. This ‘game-over’ attitude, I argue, is the direct result of the cruel optimism present in the current scholarship’s attachment to ‘traditional’ forms of art and literature. By interrogating the conclusions Ghosh reaches about the novel’s function …