Digital Commons Network^™

Coastal Cities In The Southern Us Floodplains: An Evaluation Of Environmental Equity Of Flood Hazards And Social Vulnerabilities, Lubana Tasnim Mazumder

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Floods are recognized as one of the most common and widespread natural hazards in the United States (US). They are responsible for uncompensated losses and damages. Furthermore, evidence suggests flooding inflicts more harm among socially vulnerable groups, incapable of withstanding hazard events, raising environmental equity (EE) and justice (EJ) concerns. Regrettably, with continuing climate change and urbanization, flooding will not subside in the future; instead, the flooding frequency and intensity will increase in many parts of the US, and the trend of disproportionate impacts will continue to rise.

Since Hurricane Katrina, a considerable amount of research has been conducted on …

Framing, Emotion, And Contradiction In The Tampa Bay Times’ Climate Change Coverage, Madison Veeneman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

How the media covers climate change is a crucial issue because it can impact public opinion and influence policy, and local newspapers are an understudied yet essential source of media. Previous media research has utilized framing approaches, considered ideology and hegemony, and begun to seriously examine emotion. The purpose of this research project is to synthesize these approaches to examine how the Tampa Bay Times covers climate change. Using research questions that focus on how the coverage is framed and how emotion is used, I collected two samples of articles from different newspaper sections and conducted textual analysis. I identify …

East Tampa - Jazzy Seniors: Photo Compilation Of An Oral History, Christian Wells, Michelle Henderson, Rebecca Sohl, Maya Trotz

WeRISE Jazzy Seniors 2023

On January 25th, 2023 the "Jazzy Seniors" in East Tampa shared their stories with students enrolled in the University of South Florida's anthropology department’s Environmental Justice seminar. Students were tasked with collecting oral history interviews with the Jazzy Seniors, conducting research into the past, present, and future of stormwater ponds in East Tampa, and then creating narrative films to share with the Jazzy seniors, and on social media and the internet.

This book provides snippets of the interviews matched with the photographs taken during the event. The Environmental Justice seminar is led by faculty Dr. Christian Wells and American Society …

A Residents’ Lens To Community Wellbeing, Sarah Combs

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite its location just a few miles from the burgeoning University of South Florida, the University Area Community (UAC) is considered a severely economically disadvantaged neighborhood. When compared to its surrounding counties, the UAC experiences heightened unemployment and poverty rates in conjunction with a significantly lower median income and rate of homeownership. This study utilized a research method of Narrative Inquiry as told through Qualitative Research to gain a better understanding of the UAC residents’ lived experiences and of how community change agents could succeed in impacting community wellbeing in areas like affordable housing, resident employment, and resident engagement. The …

Forum, Volume 46, No. 3, Fall 2022, Florida Humanities, Pam Daniel

FORUM: The Magazine of Florida Humanities

Contents: Letter from the Executive Director -- From the Secretary of State -- From the Editor -- Humanities Live -- Treasure -- Oral History -- Q&A -- They Had a Dream -- Her Name was Catalina de Valdéz -- A More Perfect Union -- Rethinking the Dream -- At the End of the Rainbow -- Sojourn in the Glades -- By Design -- Sense of Place -- Taste of Florida -- The Quiz -- On Exhibit

Full Issue 16.1

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Mass Violence, Environmental Harm, And The Limits Of Transitional Justice, Rachel Killean, Lauren Dempster

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

The relationship between the environment and mass violence is complex and multi-faceted. The effects of environmental degradation can destabilize societies and cause conflict. Attacks on the environment can harm targeted groups, and both mass violence and subsequent transitions can have harmful environmental legacies. Given this backdrop, it is notable that the field of transitional justice has paid relatively little attention to the intersections between mass violence and environmental degradation. This article interrogates this inattention and explores the limitations and possibilities of transitional justice as a means of addressing the environmental harms associated with mass violence. The article makes four key …

Climate In Crisis: Art And Activism At The Brooklyn Museum, Nancy B. Rosoff

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This paper explores the Brooklyn Museum’s activism-centered museum practice as exemplified by the exhibition Climate in Crisis: Environmental Change in the Indigenous Americas. The exhibition presents the collections of Indigenous art from North, Central, and South America through the lens of climate change and its impact on the survival of Indigenous people. The main thesis is that the current climate emergency is part of a longer history of environmental colonialism that began five hundred years ago. For millennia, Indigenous communities throughout the Americas have maintained profound and expansive relationships with the natural world. However, beginning in the 1500s, Europe’s …

Forum, Volume 46, No. 2, Summer 2022, Florida Humanities, Pam Daniel

FORUM: The Magazine of Florida Humanities

Contents: Letter from the Executive Director -- From the Secretary of State -- From the Editor -- Humanities Live -- Oral History -- Florida Seen -- Treasure -- Florida Reads -- Angry Young Man -- The Colonel -- When Giants Walked the Land -- Sense of Place -- A Taste of Florida -- The Quiz -- By Design -- On Exhibit

“That’S What We Call ‘Aesthetics’”: The Social Construction Of Tap Water Mistrust In An Underbounded Community, Abby Vidmar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent research on water insecurity in the United States has revealed that underbounded communities — urban disadvantaged unincorporated neighborhoods characterized by high-poverty and high residential density lying just outside the border of an incorporated municipality — often lack consistent access to clean and safe water. In these settings, poor water quality and inadequate infrastructure shape residents’ risk perceptions often leading to tap water mistrust. However, little is known about the broader social, political, and economic drivers of water quality in these settings and how such drivers inform the social construction of risk across different stakeholder groups. Using an underbounded African-American/Hispanic …

Measuring Sustainable Development Through Tax Increment Financed Brownfield Redevelopment Statutes: A Florida Case Study, Jeff Burton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research measures the theoretically sustainable development synergy of United States’ redevelopment, tax increment, and brownfield statutes and questions local redevelopment professionals on this combination’s implementation. This policy’s integration and application measurements guide increased knowledge and best practice methods in the path of America’s population migration into urbanized areas, thus managing the economic, environmental, and social impacts for future generations.

This examination used a pragmatic, qualitative, and quantitative mixed-method approach to identify, collect, code, and analyze redevelopment, tax increment, and state brownfields laws. An exhaustive literature review of the laws’ histories explained when and why they exist. In addition, a …

Forum, Volume 46, No. 1, Spring 2022, Florida Humanities, Pam Daniel

FORUM: The Magazine of Florida Humanities

Contents: Letter from the Executive Director -- From the Editor -- Letter from the Secretary of State -- Humanities Live -- Oral History -- Treasure -- Creators -- The Soundtrack of Our State -- "I'm Florida, Need I Say More?" -- The Florida All-Stars -- The Hitmaker -- Traveling Down the Chitlin' Circuit -- Lift Every Voice and Sing -- State of Rock -- A Taste of Florida -- Sense of Place -- By Design -- More Perfect Union -- The Quiz -- On Exhibit

Anthropocene Fiction: Empathy, Kinship, And The Troubled Waters At The End Of The World, Megan Mandell Stowe

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Anthropocene literature features characters and environments grappling with the devastation of climate change. Donna Haraway’s term Chthulucene narrows this category further by exposing the tentacular connections between overpopulation, dependence on material goods, species loss, and other facets of global warming—such as water as a resource. Three novels of the Chthulucene exhibit these connections, centering on the importance of water to both ecologies and personal identity. As seen in the novels, place attachment brings ecology and identity together by forging a stewardship between person and location, often resulting in efforts to defend and preserve a place. In Octavia Butler’s Parable of …

Decision Matrix And Guidance Document For Proactive Congestion Management, Beverly Thompson Kuhn, Cheng Zhang

Research Reports

This project developed a decision matrix that transportation agencies can use to determine the viability of proactive congestion management strategies that meet their overall objective of mitigating congestion. This decision matrix can be used to help an operating agency identify possible operational strategies to mitigate or delay the onset of the congestion and can provide infrastructure owner/operators with a selection matrix based on operational conditions and available field data by which they can select potential operational strategies to consider for implementation. The matrix was augmented with data from the University of South Florida research team in “Proactive Congestion Management” and …

Beyond Fueling Our Bodies To Feeding Our Minds, Alicia Orea-Giner Dr., Francesc Fusté-Forné

Journal of Sustainability and Resilience

Food consumption in tourism is linked with creating sustainable experiences and promoting a new way of being fed and eating. This research note analyzes the relationship between new trends in food consumption and food tourism. From a descriptive approach, it reveals the meaningful connection between producers and consumers. Food tourism stakeholders should consider applying segmentation techniques to personalize its offer and create unique food experiences. Further research is required, especially concerning the Gen Z lifestyles and its impact on the future of food tourism.

The Legacy Of Hurricanes, Historic Land Cover, And Municipal Ordinances On Urban Tree Canopy In Florida (United States), Allyson B. Salisbury, Andrew K. Koeser, Richard J. Hauer, Deborah R. Hilbert, Amr H. Abd-Elrahman, Michael G. Andreu, Katie Britt, Shawn Landry, Mary G. Lusk, Jason W. Miesbauer, Hunter Thorn

School of Geosciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Urban Tree Canopy (UTC) greatly enhances the livability of cities by reducing urban heat buildup, mitigating stormwater runoff, and filtering airborne particulates, among other ecological services. These benefits, combined with the relative ease of measuring tree cover from aerial imagery, have led many cities to adopt management strategies based on UTC goals. In this study, we conducted canopy analyses for 300 cities in Florida to assess the impacts of development practices, urban forest ordinances, and hurricanes on tree cover. Within the cities sampled, UTC ranged from 5.9 to 68.7% with a median canopy coverage of 32.3% Our results indicate that …

People-Focused And Near-Term Public Transit Performance Analysis, Alex Karner

Journal of Public Transportation

Public transit ridership forecasts have long played a role in understanding the potential success of a policy or investment, but their limitations have led researchers and practitioners to identify other performance analysis approaches. Accessibility, or the ease of reaching opportunities, has become very popular and widely used for this purpose. But commonly used accessibility measures also embody weaknesses that are seldom acknowledged; these limit their utility for truly understanding the benefits of transit investments. In this paper, we identify the pros and cons of these competing approaches and offer a third strategy. Specifically, we describe how revealed travel behavior data, …

The Weekly Challenger, September 16, 2021, The Weekly Challenger, Et Al

Weekly Challenger Newspaper Collection

The September 16, 2021, issue of The Weekly Challenger.

Proceedings Of The Global Conference On Education And Research: Volume 4, Waynne B. James, Cihan Cobanoglu, Muhittin Cavusoglu

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

This is the fourth volume of the Global Conference on Education and Research Proceedings Series.

ISSN: 2572-6374

DOI

10.5038/2572-6374-v4

Learning From The Seed: Illuminating Black Girlhood In Sustainable Living Paradigms, Toni Powell Powell Young

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The contemporary image of sustainable living presents a culturally narrow view of its participants and the manner of engaging in sustainable living paradigms. Through crystallization (Ellingson, 2009) I present a mixed methods approach that emphasizes participant observation, visual, mediated, and discursive analyses, as well as demonstrates the efficacy of Culture Centered Black Feminist Auto/Ethnography. This project seeks to highlight and place within historical context, the ways in which African American girls, who are largely left out of the prevailing image of sustainability, perform and articulate sustainability for themselves, in their homes, and throughout their home communities.

In their everyday lives, …

How Culture And Storytelling Can Influence Urban Development: An Ethnographic Look At The Community-Driven Revitalization Of Newtown In Sarasota, Florida, Michala Head

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

When Americans think of Florida, tourist attractions often trail the initial thoughts of alligator sand chaos. Disneyworld and its neighboring parks are set up for optimal experience and consumption, the thought of a trip South along the coast for a sweltering beach day, sipping on a frozen drink in January sings to Midwesterners. For residents of these seaside cities, such as Sarasota, the experiences of the space are much more complex. Within the broader contexts of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd and a global pandemic that impacted America’s marginalized populations disproportionally, …

"We're The Lucky Ones": A Social Network Analysis Of Recovery After The Iowa Derecho, Kayla C. Jones

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

On the afternoon of August 10th, 2020 a straight line windstorm, referred to as a derecho, tore across the Midwest. Derechos are often described as an “inland hurricane,” with wind gusts exceeding 58 mph. This thesis explores how Iowans relied on social networks to recover from the derecho. Personal networks were analyzed to understand how people utilized relationships for specific types of support. The relationships investigated included informal and formal sources such as family, friends, neighbors, government, volunteers, non-governmental organizations, and self-reliance. Data were collected on social networks and storm recovery through a survey and semi-structured interviews. Using anthropological theories …

Clean Water For All: Examining Safe Drinking Water Act Violations Of Water Systems And Community Characteristics, Junghwan Bae

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Drinking water systems in the United States confront several challenges such as aging infrastructure, polluted source water, and fragmented systems. The burdens, however, are not equally distributed across the nation. Disadvantaged communities such as communities of color are disproportionately affected by drinking water-related problems.

This study focuses on drinking water quality violations and slow enforcement actions of Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) during 2016 to 2018. The EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) was used to obtain violation records and characteristics of community water systems. The data set in this study contains 21,845 community water systems. Based on the …

The Communicative Constitution Of Environment: Land, Weather, Climate, Leanna K. Smithberger

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My project examines the communicative constitution of environment: how we mediate environment in discursive practice, and arrange chaotic and complex timeplaces into organized relationships of agents and objects which act and are acted upon. Climate scholars across disciplines are calling for a paradigm shift in how we understand, study, inhabit, and relate to Earth’s varied environments. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how communication practices do the work of constituting the environment as we know it, and therefore conclude with the hopeful suggestion that these same practices can be used to do the work of a paradigm shift — that is, …

Addressing Health Disparities In The Rural United States: Advocacy As Caregiving Among Community Health Workers And Promotores De Salud, Ryan I Logan, Heide Castañeda

All publications

Rural populations in the United States are faced with a variety of health disparities that complicate access to care. Community health workers (CHWs) and their Spanish-speaking counterparts, promotores de salud, are well-equipped to address rural health access issues, provide education, and ultimately assuage these disparities. In this article, we compare community health workers in the states of Indiana and Texas, based on the results of two separate research studies, in order to (1) investigate the unique role of CHWs in rural communities and (2) understand how their advocacy efforts represent a central form of caregiving. Drawing on ethnographic, qualitative data—including …

The Use Of Spanish Moss As A Biological Indicator To Examine Relationships Between Metal Air Pollution, Vegetation Cover, And Environmental Equity In Tampa, Florida, Yousif Abdullah

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Studies of inequality in exposure to less common air pollutants, like metals, are often limited by the costs of high spatial resolution measurements. Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides) is a promising bioindicator for measuring air pollution due to its lower cost, enabling capture of time-average environmental concentrations at high spatial resolution. This study had three major aims. First, I aimed to use Spanish moss as a bioindicator to characterize ambient concentrations of selected metals (Ti, Cr, Mn, Co, Ni, Cd, Hg, Pb, As, and Sb) in Tampa, Florida. My second goal was to determine the impact of vegetation cover on metals …

A Sustainability Machine: The Incineration-Based Waste Regime In Tampa, Fl, Usa, Kevin P. Martyn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent history has seen some significant changes in terms of how society thinks about and deals with its wastes. Increasingly troubling indications of the immediacy of ecological concerns, now often described by the Anthropocene concept, have been provocative of a reinvigorated fervor for a sustainability transition. As a result, sustainability has become well-established as both an urgent pursuit and an eminently pliable buzzword. This research describes and explains one key aspect of society’s pursuit of some version of sustainability: our relationship with waste.

The site of this research is Tampa, Florida, a sunbelt city with a unique waste management system. …

Black Lives Matter In Engineering, Too! An Environmental Justice Approach Towards Equitable Decision-Making For Stormwater Management In African American Communities, Maya Elizabeth Carrasquillo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The United States and the world have recently been challenged with the disparate effects of COVID-19 and the continual killings of unarmed Black men and women across the nation. A history of anti-black racism has led to systemic structures of inequity that thread throughout institutions and communities across the nation. This environmental engineering research comes at a time when understanding how to effectively engage in, and with Black communities is at the forefront of discourse in academia, utilities and private sector.

In 2018 the Brookings Institute published a report on workforce in the water sector demonstrating the lack of diversity …

An Ethnography Of Wash Infrastructures And Governance In Sulphur Springs, Florida, Mathews Jackon Wakhungu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation describes the forces that shape the perceptions and practices in Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WaSH) services in the community of Sulphur Springs, Tampa, Florida. It also explores how these forces, perceptions, and practices produce adverse experiences and inequalities in water, sewer, drainage, and laundry services. This ethnographic study combines participant observation, ethnographic interviewing, freelisting, oral history, and GIS to uncover the context, experiences, and perceptions about WaSH in Sulphur Springs. The study finds that the present conditions and perceptions about WaSH are embedded into the historical contexts—especially racial segregation, the construction of the interstate, and multiple economic downturns …

Red-Green Rows: Exploring The Conflict Between Labor And Environmental Movements In Kerala, India, Silpa Satheesh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Popularly referred to as “blue-green” conflicts, the stand-off between labor and environmental movements is often understood as a class-based conflict between working-class labor unions and middle-class environmental movements. Such singular conceptions fail to explain labor-environmental conflicts in the context of countries in the Global South, where working-class participants constitute both these movements. In this backdrop, my dissertation seeks to explore the conflicts between labor and green movements surrounding an issue of industrial pollution in Kerala, a south Indian state with a unique trajectory of development and working-class movements.

I adopt a qualitative methodological approach to understand the nature and dynamics …