Digital Commons Network^™

Engaging Neighbors: Housing Strategies And Political Mobilization In Moscow's Renovation, Anna Zhelnina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In summer 2017, residents of thousands of socialist-era apartment buildings in Moscow were invited to vote and decide whether their building should be included in the demolition and relocation program proposed by the Mayor’s Office. Renovation is an ongoing urban renewal plan, first announced in Moscow in February 2017, to demolish whole neighborhoods of socialist-era, five-story buildings and replace them with high-rises. The vast project affected more than 5,000 buildings with approximately a million inhabitants.

This dissertation addresses general questions of political agency and the possibility for diverse people in urban neighborhoods to produce change: to achieve desired policy outcomes, …

Essays On Trade Liberalization, Structural Change, And Technical Efficiency, Li Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A recent and growing literature analyzes differential growth across regions of Asia, Latin America, and Sub Saharan Africa. The structural change of labor reallocation is an important determinant of growth in developing countries having large productivity gaps across sectors within the border. Therefore, sectoral characteristics are still an important determinant of cross-region studies. In addition, it is well-known that labor reallocation across economic sectors does not automatically occur without external shocks, especially from international trade.

However, recent studies debate the importance of trade policy as more research focuses on the cost of transportation and communication in international trade and economic …

Destination Diploma: How Chinese Upper-Middle-Class Families “Outsource” Secondary Education To The United States, Siqi Tu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research examines the emerging phenomenon of Chinese urban upper-middle-class families sending their only children, the so-called “parachute students,” to American private high schools in a triple framework of transnational elite education, the emerging global middle class, and the complicated formation of citizenship, membership, and identities across borders. This study draws from data collected through multiple qualitative research methods, including content analysis of online advertising materials of educational agents, ethnographic participant-observation of school recruitment and application consulting workshops, and in-depth interviews with Chinese parents, students, and educational consultants.

I investigate why and how Chinese urban upper-middle-class families make educational decisions …

Searching For Pōhakuloa: A Citizen Scientist’S Journey In Aloha ‘Āina, Drake Logan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation tells a story about the United States (US) military’s land occupation of two Indigenous Hawaiian wahi pana (sacred places), on O’ahu and Hawai’i Island, which have produced widespread health concerns regarding exposure to military toxins. I conducted six months of fieldwork in Hawai’i, in which I partnered with local communities in a Critical Participatory Action research process. Together, we formed and co-led a community-based science pilot study of contamination from Pōhakuloa Training Area, generating new citizen science methods capable of uncovering evidence on confirmed military toxics uses. These methods were developed in critical solidarity with international communities who …

Data And Information As Our New Transport Infrastructure: An Exploration Into How The Modern Transport System Is Being Shaped By Information Communication Technology, Adam Davidson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is focuses on the role that data and information has in creating and altering behavior related to transportation. To do so, it lays out a theoretical model of technological transition and then follows it up with three case studies. The theoretical model provides a structure to consider how different actors in our transportation ecosystem – users, firms, policy actors – mix with technological evolution to uphold or incrementally recreate our transportation landscape. The case studies stand on their own to highlight important findings about how data and information are impacting transportation scenarios, but collectively reinforce the theoretical models. …

A Data Exploration Of Jeopardy! From 1984 To The Present, Brian S. Hamilton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The gameshow Jeopardy! has been around in its current iteration—hosted by Alex Trebek—since 1984. During this time, it has accumulated data on clues, contestants, and possible strategies on how to win. Using a crowd-sourced archive called J! Archive, this project seeks to find trends in the topics that the game covers and take a deeper look into the performance of its contestants. It employs topic modeling, a text-analysis method, to organize the hundreds of thousands of archived clues and statistical analysis to rate the performance of contestants by gender. Using web-based visualization tools, the data is shown in an …

Many Forms Of Black Death: Coal Extraction, Transnational Activism And The Value Of Life In Colombia, Oscar H. Pedraza Vargas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

After the murder of the president and vice president of the coal union by paramilitaries in the department of Cesár, Colombia, the union is left adrift. Its fragility is only heightened when the person who decides to take over, is killed six months later. The union has been vocal on their critique of environmental destruction produced by coal and argues that their criticism is part of the reasons why they were targeted. Not far from there, in the department of Guajira, the conglomerate in charge of Cerrejón, the largest open-pit coal mine of South America, wants to divert a creek …

A Defense And Expansion Of The Theory Of Capitalist Ground Rent: Speculation, Securitization, And Struggles Over Land And Housing, Francesca Manning

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Why are the rents so high? Who is responsible for homelessness, for urban and rural displacement? How can these problems be combatted?

Recent literature addressing these questions has pointed to gentrification and the financialization of land and housing, faulted financialized landlords, hedge funds, and the irredeemable logic of finance, and pointed to the importance of land and housing regulation to prevent displacement.

However, theories of displacement—in both land and housing, on both urban and rural terrain—suffer from a lack of an underlying theory of the logic, tendencies, and limits of ground rent extraction in capitalism.

This dissertation develops a theory …

Oceanic Groundings: Maritime Geographies And Black Internationalism In The Early Twentieth Century, Maegan A. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the shipboard writings, transnational solidarities and vernacular cultures, and spaces of social reproduction among Black and other subaltern seafarers and maritime travelers in the first decades of the twentieth century. I draw upon oral histories, literature, poetry, memoirs, and the archives of leftist political organizations and British colonial officials. Through a practice of close reading across textual genres and transnational spaces, my dissertation develops oceanic groundings as: (1) a constellation of iterative and intentional acts of political learning through the movements of ordinary people, (2) a pedagogical project of listening to and learning from the shifting grounds …

Legitimizing Violence At The European Border: Gendered Misrepresentations At Sea And The Vulnerable Other, Michela Demelas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis highlights a temporal and spatial gap in the feminist literature about migrants' journeys throughout the Mediterranean, and investigates the gendered dynamics acting upon the encounter between the European border and racialized bodies at sea. The Mediterranean sea’s material features allow Europe to approach migration as a humanitarian crisis coming from outside, which discharges its responsibility for the deaths. Yet, essentialistic views represent the feminized Other as vulnerable and needing to be saved from the male Other and the sea. Such views shape the Western narratives around concrete rescue procedures and border authorities behaviors. The encounter between the border …

Making Muslim Americans: Parenting Practices, Parochial Schools, And The Transmission Of Faith Across Generations In Metropolitan Detroit, Rebecca Karam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At present, it is estimated that there are 3.45 million Muslims living in the United States, the vast majority of whom are immigrants and the children of immigrants. While religion has typically been found to foster assimilation among immigrant newcomers, Islamophobia is rampant and threatens to challenge this process. This dissertation project intervenes in this empirical puzzle by asking the following research questions: How do we explain the conscious attempt by second generation Muslim parents to foster a distinctly Muslim and American identity among their third-generation children? More specifically, how have the parenting decisions of upper-middle class, second-generation Muslim Americans …

Object Relations, Identity Formation, And Transitional Space In Religious Conversion, Arielle Rubenstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Conversion between broad religious groups is a life transformation undertaken by 15% of Americans, yet it has seldom been studied closely from a psychodynamic perspective. The psychological study of conversion began with a Protestant paradigm of sudden and total transformation of the self, and over time came to characterize different manifestations of conversion to more diverse religious groups. Research on conversion has primarily sought to understand whether conversion is essentially a psychopathological phenomenon, and has led to a multiplicity of both positive and negative, at times contradictory, findings. Research has shown that conversion is associated with insecure attachment, neurotic personality …

Rewriting The Oeuvre: Raymond Queneau And The Art Of Translation, Christopher Clarke

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While the literary oeuvre of French author Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) has been extensively studied, his work as a literary translator has been largely overlooked. Queneau was a prominent member of the French literary avant-garde, but also a literary translator for two decades (1934-1953), and his writing was greatly influenced and impacted by his readings and translations of Anglophone writers. This dissertation provides insight into the role of translation in his conception of writing and language, and the inseparability of the different facets of his career as a writer, literary translator, and publisher. I examine his personal linguistic and literary history …

An Empire Among Empires: America's Relationship To "The Other" In The Historiography Of Empire, Lynne C. Goldhammer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper outlines two different threads in the historiography of empires regarding their treatment of “the other.” The first thread begins with the early Chinese empires, the Qin and Han, which used diplomacy and tributes as well as repression to incorporate “others” under their imperial umbrellas. This thread was then picked up and modified later by the Mongols and Mughals, both of which showed a fair amount of flexibility and openness towards cultural difference. The second thread begins with the Romans (the Republic and Empire), who were largely flexible and inclusive towards “others” until the late Empire, when Christianity took …

All Day In The Trey-Fold: Sound, Objecthood, And Place In The Mixtapes Of Dj Screw, Matthew K. Carter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the impact of the mixtapes of DJ Screw on the emergence of Houston hip hop culture in the 1990s. The relationship between these “screwtapes” and local culture resists demonstration through conventional modes of representational analyses, due in part to the screwtape’s preponderant use of hip hop tracks that originally represent other places. I suggest that representation itself is the result of the structuring tension emerging from a threefold field of representation of sound, objecthood, and place, and that when a hip hop artist or critic or fan claims to "represent" Houston (or any other constituted and constituting …

Representations Of Hustling Women: The Figure Of The Black Sex Worker In Ann Petry’S The Street And Louise Meriwether’S Daddy Was A Number Runner, Deborah L. Uzurin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis provides a close reading of Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) and Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970) by analyzing how these two black women authors wrote about sex work and black women sex workers in their novels. Black women writers in the mid-twentieth century were reluctant to write about black women’s sexuality as a result of discourses of racial uplift that rejected the white supremacist stereotype of the hypersexual black woman. While not the focus of their novels, the inclusion of sex workers in their fictional narratives provide a complicated representation of a particular form of …

The Emergence Of Ecosystems-Based Fisheries Management From The Groundfish Crisis In New England: An Actor-Network Theory Analysis, Catherine King

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research investigates the emergence of ecosystems-based fisheries management (EBFM) for New England's marine fisheries in the context of the "crisis" that is escalating in its groundfish fishery. Close observations of the practices of fisheries scientists in coordination with managers at the New England Fisheries Management Council, with focus on how knowledge is being produced and employed, allows for understanding EBFM as an emergent construction produced by networks of associations between actants, human and non-human, material and semiotic, and not strictly as a policy prescription informed by experts on biology, ecology, and socio-economics. This analysis identifies and elucidates the multiplicity …

Eating The Heart Of Weetigo World: Decolonial Imaginaries In The Stories Of Louise Erdrich And Tomson Highway, Rebecca Lynne Fullan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation asks what the decolonial possibilities of fiction are in the context of the settler colonial imaginaries particular to the United States and Canada. The ongoing process of settler colonialism demands various forms of conversion from Indigenous people: ecological/land based, religious, educational, legal, familial, but the construct of “conversion” obscures Indigenous worldviews, and indeed worlds, which function according to different principles. I interpret Erdrich and Highway's work in the context of Anishinaabe and Cree narratives and story-structures. These offer examples of what can constitute broader decolonial imaginaries, through which perception and creation of other, more liveable worlds is possible. …

The Performance And Patronage Of Baloch Culture Through Music (And Related Arts) In The Eastern Arabian Peninsula, George Murer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of Baloch musical—and ritual—idioms as cultivated (and variously innovated, embellished, patronized, and reconstructed) in the relatively prosperous and cosmopolitan urban environments of the coastal Eastern Arabian Peninsula—the third major concentration of Baloch population after Balochistan and Karachi. Due to historical and geographic particulars, the origins of Peninsular Baloch communities lie primarily in the Makran region that extends along the Arabian Sea coast and across the political boundary separating Iran and Pakistan. If musical activities play a significant role in orienting Baloch communities socially and politically, what are the presentational strategies implied in the foregrounding of …

Building Baghdad: The Construction Of Urban Space In Iraq, 1921–1963, Andrew S. Alger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the production of space in Baghdad during the monarchical and early republican eras (1921 – 1963). As the capital of the new nation of Iraq following the First World War, Baghdad expanded along the banks of the Tigris River into new residential and commercial spaces, establishing schools, boutique stores, sporting venues, electricity and running water that transformed how Iraqis conceived of the mundane activities associated with daily life. Employing a theoretical framework drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s production of space, I argue that participation in the creation of new neighborhoods and streets was uneven across differences of class, …

The Berbers: Constructed Identities By Foreigners On African Soil, Zineb Askaoui

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the textual evidence pertaining to the identity of the local North African population of Morocco. In examining the literature about North Africans and the inscriptions in North Africa, I wish to determine who their authors were. Since North Africa has been invaded and colonized multiple times throughout history, the available literature written by both the foreigners who colonized it and the locals yielded interesting and sometimes contrasting results.

The names that address the local North Africans are pertinent expressions of identity or of forceful submission. This study examines four different terms that have been used to describe …

Norman Lewis: Linearity, Politics, And Pedagogy In His Abstract Expressionism, 1946–1964, Andrianna T. Campbell-Lafleur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on Norman Lewis’s studio practice between the years 1946-1964 in particular his associations with the painters Romare Bearden, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, and David Smith. Lewis’s influence extended far into the twenty-first century. As told by numerous contemporary art practitioners—Firelei Baez, Mark Bradford, David Kennedy Cutler, Charles Gaines, Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, RJ Messineo, and Jack Whitten—Lewis was the mentor, friend, father and grandfather figure of an innovative black artist working with abstraction. In Chapter 1: An Integrative Line of Becoming, I trace Lewis’s change from Social Realism in the 1930s to semi-abstract portraits and genre paintings …

Characterizing Surface Water From Space With Microwave Remote Sensing: Advancing Conventional And Emerging Approaches, Katherine Jensen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The extent and dynamics of land surface inundation vary tremendously across the globe. Accurate spatial representation of terrestrial surface water is of critical importance for management and conservation of biodiversity and other ecosystem services associated with freshwater. Furthermore, surface water maps representing dynamic characteristics of inundated areas are also valuable for the development of wetland inventories and to assess the role of wetlands as major natural sources of methane to the atmosphere. Despite the importance of these environments in global processes and to current and future climate, the extent and dynamics of global wetlands remain poorly characterized and modeled.

The …

Descriptive Inhumanism: Description And Decolonial Aesthetics, Marcos Gonsalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation research examines, how can the act of describing, as a mode of writing, documenting, and representing minoritized bodies, be geared towards an anti-racist, multi-species, and decolonial aesthetic praxis? Paying close attention to modes of writing categorized under the rubric of description, such as ekphrasis, reportage in documentary film, travel writing, and ethnographic description, as this dissertation contends, are integral to understanding how we perceive and apprehend racialized people living out the legacies of coloniality. Through an analysis of 20th century Anglophone literature on the Americas and contemporary queer Latina/o literature, film, and art, this research looks closely at …

Going Viral: Youth And Sexual Assault In The Digital Age, Anna Gjika

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the growing phenomenon of using digital media technologies to capture and perpetuate sexual abuse. Focusing on instances of high-profile juvenile sexual assault, I use case studies, interviews, focus groups, and thematic media analysis to investigate (a) how crime, gender, status and technology intersect for young people growing up digital, and (b) the ways technology intersections with sexual abuse to create new forms of crime, new ways to victimize and perpetuate harm, as well as new opportunities to investigate and address sexual violence both through the criminal justice system and in the public. I argue that young people …

Reclaiming Indiana: The Politics Of Crisis Amid The Failures Of Liberal Capitalist Modernity, Chris Grove

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnography examines grassroots political responses to the economic crisis that began in 2008, foremost in the US Midwest, which arguably laid the groundwork both for the election of President Donald Trump and presidential candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders. President Obama launched his $787 billion stimulus plan in Elkhart, Indiana, in early 2009. At the height of the crisis, unemployment skyrocketed from four to 20 percent in Elkhart, and it became central to struggles over the political direction of the US. With few safety nets, Elkhart residents struggled to meet their basic needs, creating conditions for political organizing on both …

'Odd Secrets Of The Line': Emily Dickinson And The Uses Of Folk, Wendy Tronrud

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emily Dickinson and her poetry have famously been used as a defining example of American lyric poetry. The traditional scholarly perspective maintains that the lyric poem and its speaker exist in isolation and at a remove from social and political contexts. Recent scholarship on American poetry of the long nineteenth century, however, has taken a more historical and cultural turn, reconsidering how poetic and vernacular forms and genres circulated both privately and publicly. “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson and the Uses of Folk joins this conversation by theorizing how Dickinson’s poetry, written during the 1859-1865 period, registers the …

The Problem Of Literary Development In Russian Formalism And Digital Humanities, Basil Lvoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The interest of this dissertation is how our understanding of literary development—as gradual or revolutionary; self-governed or socio-politically determined; like or unlike biological evolution—informs the status, meaning, and value of literature and literary studies. The dissertation shows how this problem—most pressing in our post-logocentric age—was addressed at the dawn of contemporary literary theory by the Russian Formalists. The latter are compared with Distant Readers, i.e., the Digital Humanists from, or conducting research in dialogue with, the Stanford Literary Lab: Franco Moretti, Matthew Jockers, Ted Underwood, William Benzon, and others.

This dissertation argues that both Russian Formalism and Distant Reading were …

Corporeal Analysis: The Performing Body As Analytic Site, Laura Cocks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A framework of corporeal analysis posits that the physicality of the performer can be construed as a primary analytical parameter in a work. This dissertation seeks to set up such a method of analysis largely through anecdata and autoethnography with the aim of eliciting a deeper space for additional performer-driven analyses that prioritize the bodily knowledge of performers and their physical understandings of a work. Centering around David Bird’s 2013 work for solo piccolo and “no-less-than twenty-nine spatialized piccolos,” Atolls, three main aspects of corporeal analysis will be explored. These are: performance physicality as expressive connective tissue between flutist …

How To Break An Addiction: A Case For Planetary Post-Capitalist Recovery, Ann Marie (Annie) Spencer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents an evidence-based, geographically informed theory of so-called addiction in the capitalist mode of production. Taking the present-day opioid epidemic as its point of departure, it argues that ‘addiction,’ rather than an anomalous, individuated pathology, is an organizing principle of capitalist social formations. Neither moral nor medical, ‘addiction’ is a structural and pervasive expression of life lived under the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism, society structured in pursuit of profit, produces human subjects with deleterious dependencies on addictive commodity substances by design and in mass. The methodology of the project is consciousness expansion through pattern recognition, stitching together …