Digital Commons Network^™

The Impact Of Cultural Perceptions Of Well-Being And Resulting Sustainable Local Development Initiatives, Atifah Jatoi

Senior Theses

Views on and approaches to sustainable economic development can differ vastly depending on country and location. Historically, in the United States, sustainable development is primarily based on the four pillars of sustainability: social, human, environmental, and economic. On the other hand, in communities in relatively collectivist societies, sustainable development policies and organizations are influenced by collective interest, cooperation, and the well-being of the community. Local development initiatives centered around promoting the well-being of the community are a way to have a more equitable approach to sustainable development and are necessary to address ecological, economic, and social challenges. I will discuss …

Slow Violence And Racial Capitalism: Understanding Mass Incarceration Through A Case Study Of The California Prison System, Mason Joiner

Senior Theses

This thesis will analyze the growth of the California prison system, situating it in the national context of mass incarceration in the United States. In Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Gilmore utilizes the theory of racial capitalism to explain the history and development of the California prison system. By analyzing Gilmore’s arguments about racial capitalism and integrating them with Rob Nixon’s theory of slow violence from his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, this thesis provides a new perspective in the current discourse around mass incarceration. …

Bough And Hollow, Jeffrey Dylan Nutter

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses poetry to explore the complex relationships surrounding the speaker and the father. Furthermore, the poems contained here work to address the major themes of language, family, and home in an attempt at unraveling the self and discovering identity. Another important touchstone for this thesis is the thread of abuse throughout the father’s life. Together the various threads and themes of this thesis are working toward a collective understanding of how the past and present manifest in the body and voice of the speaker.

Flood Detection In Urban Areas Using Satellite Imagery And Machine Learning, Ahad Hasan Tanim, Callum Blake Mcrae, Hassan Tavakol-Davani, Erfan Goharian

Faculty Publications

Urban flooding poses risks to the safety of drivers and pedestrians, and damages infrastructures and lifelines. It is important to accommodate cities and local agencies with enhanced rapid flood detection skills and tools to better understand how much flooding a region may experience at a certain period of time. This results in flood management orders being announced in a timely manner, allowing residents and drivers to preemptively avoid flooded areas. This research combines information received from ground observed data derived from road closure reports from the police department, with remotely sensed satellite imagery to develop and train machine-learning models for …

U.S. Abortion Care Providers’ Perspectives On Self-Managed Abortion, Aleta Baldwin, Dana M. Johnson, Kathleen Broussard, Luisa Alejandra Tello-Pérez, Melissa Madera, Carol Ze-Noah, Elisa Padron, Abigail R.A. Aiken

Faculty Publications

State-level restrictions on abortion access may prompt greater numbers of people to self-manage their abortion. The few studies exploring perspectives of providers towards self-managed abortion are focused on physicians and advanced practice clinicians. Little is known about the wider spectrum of abortion care providers who encounter self-managed abortion in their clinic-based work. To gain a deeper understanding of this issue and inform future care delivery, we conducted in-depth interviews with 46 individuals working in a range of positions in 46 abortion clinics across 29 states. Our interpretative analysis resulted in themes shaped by beliefs about safety and autonomy, and a …

An Analysis Of Wet Bulb Globe Temperature Estimation Methods And Microclimate Heat Variability In Columbia, South Carolina, Stafford Mullin

Theses and Dissertations

Extreme heat is the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States and poses major health risks in the wake of rising global average temperatures. Wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT) is a holistic measure of human heat stress, but is not feasible to implement in most settings because the equipment is expensive and troublesome to operate. This research evaluates the performance of WBGT estimation methods using more standard meteorological variables, measured in-situ and a local National Weather Service Automated Surface Observing Station, and examines how WBGT and its components vary across two distinct microclimates in Columbia, SC. Results indicate …

Impacts In The Classroom When Students Take Ownership Of Cellphone Usage Policies: An Investigation Using A Project-Based Learning Design, Melynda Elaine Diehl

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this action research study was to investigate by using a PBL design if giving student more ownership in classroom cellphone policies has positive outcomes. This study looked at not only the behavioral aspect of classroom cellphone usage, but also the impacts of using a PBL design on student engagement, ownership, and knowledge construction. This study was also framed on constructivism. Students built on their own prior knowledge and worked collaboratively to solve a real-world problem. The research focused on answering three questions. The first question looked at how students synthesize and evaluate the literature to construct knowledge …

Gonorrhea: Core Areas And State Policies, Jessica Purser

Theses and Dissertations

This research looked at gonorrhea rates both from a community perspective and at the state level. Using hot spot analysis, means differences, and quantile regression, we found that education, specifically the percent of people over the age of 25 with less than a high school education, was the dominant factor at the state level while core areas of gonorrhea exist in the PeeDee and western Lowcountry regions of South Carolina in 2017 and 2018. Risky sexual behaviors are well-defined in the literature for individual persons, but this shows that looking at societal and community factors is important.

This is a …

Mining For Progress: Copper, Conflict, And Corporate Social Responsibility, Fritz Culp

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation examines how transnational mega-mines efface non-Western ways of knowing and being from the Andes. A growing branch of research is questioning the socio-environmental impacts of mining and the influence of regulatory institutions. Despite remarkable scholarship on the ongoing environmentalism of modern-mining, little critical attention has been given to the industry’s pivot to ‘sustainable’ development and its objectives that remain epistemologically centered on the West. My project addresses these gaps by examining Las Bambas—a large-scale copper mine located in South-Central Peru—and its contrasting objectives that emphasize both environmental ‘conservation’ and the ‘modernization’ of non-Western spaces. Building upon the critical …

The Impact Of Cannabis And Alcohol Use On The Management Of Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus, Joshua Eric Sellner

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation sought to contribute to the evidence-base of diabetes management and acute complications associated with alcohol and cannabis use among individuals with Type 1 Diabetes (T1DM). Three interconnected studies were initiated to complete this goal. First, existing literature surrounding the potential consequences of cannabis consumption among individuals with T1DM were summarized within a systematic review. Study results were combined to provide a single measure of association through a meta-analysis. Second, identified associations were further investigated through a cross-sectional study using the SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth data on alcohol and cannabis use on diabetes management and acute complications including …

Capital City Ventures Towards An Equitable Clean Energy Transition: A Case Study Comparison Between Columbia, South Carolina And Richmond, Virginia, Claire Windsor

Senior Theses

Combatting climate change requires a rapid transition to renewable sources for energy generation. In the United States, the electricity sector alone accounts for 28% of greenhouse gas emissions (28%), with about 63% of electricity generation derived from burning of fossil fuels (EPA, 2020). In order to lower greenhouse emissions from the energy sector, federal, state, and local policies must pave the way for renewable energy and energy efficiency innovations and policies. However, political action to address the effects and combat the causes of climate change have been limited due to political gridlock at the federal level. In addition, under neoliberalism, …

The Effect Of Explicit Vocabulary Instruction On Elementary Students’ Vocabulary Knowledge And Reading Comprehension: An Action Research Study, Tonia Bauer

Theses and Dissertations

Reading comprehension seems to be a significant challenge for rising fifth graders with limited vocabulary knowledge. A possible solution is to provide them with explicit vocabulary instruction which may positively impact their reading comprehension. This action research aimed to evaluate the effect of implementing explicit vocabulary instruction delivered through Schoology on fifth graders’ vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension at an urban elementary school in the southeastern United States. This study also sought to analyze students’ perceptions of the usefulness of the online vocabulary learning modules. A convergent mixed-method approach was applied to answer the research questions. The quantitative data (e.g., …

Metaphors Of Memory: Complexity And The Fourth Canon, Amber Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines four main sites of memory scholarship (bodily memory, historical and historiographical memory, material memory, and digital memory), arguing that at each site, memory is treated in ways which are inconsistent with most current scholarly understandings of how it operates. Each chapter focuses on one of the major sites of memory scholarship, demonstrating how particular uses of keywords at that site undercut its own attempt to address memory’s complexity. In the process, I lay the groundwork for alternative conceptions of memory in that site that offer new avenues for memory research.

“Why Do I Have To Learn This Anyway?”: A Qualitative Investigative Action Research Study Into The Tension Between The Rural, Working-Class Masculine Student And The Formal Educative Structure, Joshua Matthew Bowers

Theses and Dissertations

The specific problem of practice on which this study was focused is the tension experienced between the rural (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016), workingclass (Draut, 2018) masculine (Connell, 1995) student and the formal educative structure. The purpose of this investigative action research study was to identify and clarify in my context the unique tension experienced between the rural, working-class masculine student and the formal educative structure. This tension I refer to as tention, as tention is a variant of tension (Oxford English Dictionary, 1994, p. 789), and the rural, workingclass masculine student is, at his unique nexus of intersectionality, …

Urban Forest Dynamics: Untangling Ecosystem Patterns At Harbison State Forest, Derek Matchette

Theses and Dissertations

As expansion continues to push the wildland-urban interface farther into the suburbs and the landscape which surrounds cities, it will become more important to understand the factors that influence species composition in remaining green spaces. Harbison State Forest, an ~890-hectare urban forest provides a convenient setting to analyze species composition patterns within a multipurpose urban green space.

The factors that can create these patterns include environmental (topography, soil nutrient content, light, temperature, and precipitation), naturally occurring disturbances that alter these factors (e.g., fire, windthrow), and anthropogenic disturbances such as logging and prescribed burning.

I measured basal area by species on …

Life In The Time Of Covid-19: The Everyday Impacts Of The Pandemic In Amman, Jordan, Patrick Mckenzie

Theses and Dissertations

The COVID-19 pandemic and the responses taken to combat it caused enormous changes to the everyday lives of people around the world. Jordan, in its early success against the virus and with its large refugee population, represents a unique country in which to study these everyday impacts. From May to August of 2021, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Jordanian capital city of Amman while working with the refugee nongovernmental organization the Collateral Repair Project. In this thesis, I explore the COVID-19 Spectacle, examining the ways in which policies and discourses at the national and international scales bled into the …

Suas And Deep Learning For High-Resolution Monitoring Of Tidal Marshes In Coastal South Carolina, Grayson R. Morgan

Theses and Dissertations

Tidal marshes are dynamic environments, now more than ever threatened by both natural and anthropogenic forces. Best practices for monitoring tidal marshes, as well as the environmental factors that affect them, have been studied for more than 40 years. With recent technological advances in remote sensing, new capabilities for monitoring tidal marshes have emerged. One of these new opportunities and challenges is hyper-spatial resolution imagery (<10 >cm) that can be captured by small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS). Aside from enhanced visualization, structure-from-motion (SfM) technology can derive dense point clouds from overlapped sUAS images for high resolution digital elevation models (DEMs). …

A New South Tyrol: The Multilingual, Multicultural Society, Alec Lee Parry

Theses and Dissertations

Identity formation is a reoccurring theme in an increasingly global world. Monolingualism and monoculturalism is no longer a possible in a global world. Like greater society, should contemporary literature not also argue for a multilingual, multicultural society? South Tyrol, a province that experienced Nazism and Fascism, control by both Mussolini and Hitler, pitted ethnic German and ethnic Italian speakers against one another. Today, since the founding of Schengen Europe eradicated border controls between Austria and Italy in 1997. South Tyrol is officially trilingual, with German, Italian, and Ladin1 being the official languages, and in recent years, has taken in a …

The Impact Of Framing On Natural Gas Pipeline Siting In Virginia, Ritvik Shukla

Theses and Dissertations

Natural gas has become a major share of energy consumption in the U.S. over the past two decades. This rise has resulted in considerable investment in the natural gas pipeline network so that the supply can be maximized. However, pipeline infrastructures, much like other fossil fuel energy infrastructures and activities, have an uneven distribution of benefits and costs across different regions. In regions where natural gas activities and infrastructure are being developed, local communities can become increasingly dependent on natural gas systems for stable revenue and employment. Such communities risk becoming “locked in” to carbon energy at a time when …

African Seminole Settlement Ecologies Of Early Nineteenth Century Florida, Jordan E. Davis

Theses and Dissertations

For over three centuries prior to the outbreak of the Second Seminole War [1835-1842], peoples of African and Native American descent independently and collectively formed multiple communities throughout what is now Florida. During the early 1990s, several ancestral African Seminole (otherwise known as “Black Seminole”) settlements were identified across Central Peninsular Florida, many of which were founded by self-emancipated Africans commonly referred to as maroons. Previous archaeological research at the African Seminole settlement of Pilaklikaha, or Abraham’s Old Town, has greatly stimulated both scholarly and public interest in tracing the historical trajectories of individual African-Native American communities while remaining attentive …

Racism-Related State Policies And The Psychological And Physiological Wellbeing Of Black And White Adults, Calley Elizabeth Fisk

Theses and Dissertations

Recent research on how state-policy affects population health outcomes suggests that state contexts are important sites for producing health disparities. In the United States different domains of state policy are historically linked to the livelihood of Black Americans and enacted within a racist system designed to maintain white supremacy. Despite this history and evidence of racial inequities in health outcomes linked to institutional discrimination for Black and white adults, scholars have yet to examine whether racism-related state policies affect the wellbeing of Black and white Americans. Combining a dataset of racism-related state policies with a nationally representative data of older …

Describing The Impact Of The Sales Of Antibiotics On The Environment And In Population Health, Andrés Gaviria-Figueroa

Theses and Dissertations

The role of antibiotics in human health is of significant importance in the advancement of the medical field. It has contributed to an improvement of the quality of life and the age expectancy of the population. Antibiotic resistance is an expected consequence of the use of antibiotics. Bacteria have developed biological mechanisms that would help them become resistant to antibiotics. The uncontrolled use of antibiotics is significantly contributing to the ability of bacteria to become resistant to those antibiotics. This study, using the model of the Socio-Ecological Coupling of Antibiotic Resistance, explains how social and environmental factors interact and impact …

“Power, Poison, Pain & Joy”: Applying A Critical Race Conceptual Model Of Implicit Racial Bias To Narratives Framing Blackness In Black Sports Columns, Black Music, And Black Journalism, Christina Lauren Myers

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents a Critical Race Conceptual Model of Implicit Racial Bias to representations of African Americans in mass media to illustrate how stereotypical depictions and racist ideologies arise in media content, including by Black content creators. By bridging the concepts of implicit bias, framing theory and concepts from critical race theory through the conceptual model, I contend that content creators implicitly share racially biased beliefs. Moreover, Black content creators in expressing the authentic experiences of the Black community also do the same. Thus, Black content creators further stereotypes, majoritarian narratives as well as deficit perspectives about the Black community …

“That Was Denied Thee On Earth”: An Intersectional Bioarchaeology Of Institutionalized Euro-American Women Throughout 19Th And 20Th-Century America, Madeline Maria Atwell

Theses and Dissertations

In the mid 19th-century, American state-supported insane asylums, later renamed state mental hospitals in the 20th-century, were constructed to house and humanely treat individuals perceived to be socially deviant or mentally and physically ill. Women were particularly vulnerable to undue institutionalization because of the prevailing patriarchal gender ideology within medical and colloquial spheres that contributed to the perception that they were biologically pathological. This dissertation interprets the findings of combined archival, historical, and osteological analysis from two U.S. skeletal collections: The Colorado State Insane Asylum (CSIA) Collection and the Hamann-Todd Human Osteological Collection (HT), to examine the embodied, physiological impact …

Transhiphop Pedagogy And Epistemic Disobedience In Senegal, Noella Binda Niati, Payal Pradip Shah Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

This study situates transnégritude within discussions that consider the ways in which young people in Senegal, with a shared transcolonial narrative, bound through an ‘imagined community,’ negotiate their space, their identities, and their ways of knowing through a Hip-Hop pedagogy. Our analysis is informed by Mignolo’s epistemic disobedience and the geo- and body-politics that challenge neo-colonial epistemologies. The global scope of Hip-Hop culture and its manifestations in West Africa nuances the ways in which young people view education and its impact on their social identity. A transnégritude perspective aptly ‘straddles’ black identity, agency, and deconstructionism and allows for a fluid …

Flood Depth Estimation During Hurricane Harvey Using Sentinel-1 And Uavsar Data, Sananda Kundu, Venkat Lakshmi, Raymond Torres

Faculty Publications

In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey was one of the most destructive storms to make landfall in the Houston area, causing loss of life and property. Temporal and spatial changes in the depth of floodwater and the extent of inundation form an essential part of flood studies. This work estimates the flood extent and depth from LiDAR DEM (light detection and ranging digital elevation model) using data from the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)–Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) and satellite sensor—Sentinel-1. The flood extent showed a decrease between 29–30 August and 5 September 2017. The flood depths estimated using the …

The Daily Gamecock, In Bloom, March 2022, University Of South Carolina, Office Of Student Media

March

No abstract provided.

March 2, 2022 Faculty Senate Minutes, University Of South Carolina

Faculty Senate

No abstract provided.

The Global Virome In One Network (Virion): An Atlas Of Vertebrate-Virus Associations, Colin J. Carlson, Rory J. Gibb, Gregory F. Albery, Liam Brierley, Ryan P. Connor, Tad Dallas, Evan A. Eskew, Anna C. Fagre, Maxwell J. Farrell, Hannah K. Frank, Renata L. Muylaert, Timothée Poisot, Angela L. Rasmussen, Sadie J. Ryan, Stephanie N. Seifert

Faculty Publications

Data that catalogue viral diversity on Earth have been fragmented across sources, disciplines, formats, and various degrees of open sharing, posing challenges for research on macroecology, evolution, and public health. Here, we solve this problem by establishing a dynamically maintained database of vertebrate-virus associations, called The Global Virome in One Network (VIRION). The VIRION database has been assembled through both reconciliation of static data sets and integration of dynamically updated databases. These data sources are all harmonized against one taxonomic backbone, including metadata on host and virus taxonomic validity and higher classification; additional metadata on sampling methodology and evidence strength …

Off-Peak Ndvi Correction To Reconstruct Landsat Time Series For Post-Fire Recovery In High-Latitude Forests, Cuizhen Wang, Aiai Wang, Dianfan Guo, Haibo Li, Shuying Zang

Faculty Publications

Collecting long-term satellite image series in high latitudes has been challenging due to its short growing season. For off-peak imagery, its reflective properties need to be corrected to maintain the spectral consistency. This study compares three statistical approaches to reconstructing a 30-year normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) series for forest recovery assessment after the 1987 Black Dragon Fire in the Greater Hinggan Mountains Forest, Northeast China. To correct the off-peak NDVI to peak NDVI, the Landsat paired regression takes advantage of the scene-to-scene linear relationship between the two images, the GIMMS booster approach compensates the NDVI increment rate based on …