Digital Commons Network^™

Reciprocity And Development In Disaster-Induced Resettlement In Andean Ecuador, Albert J. Faas

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation addresses gaps in anthropological knowledge about how reciprocity--and a specifically Andean form of reciprocity--works in disaster and resettlement settings. This study looks at the practices of reciprocity in a disaster-affected community (Manzano) and a disaster-induced resettlement (Pusuca) in the Andean highlands of Ecuador. Specifically, it examines two aspects of reciprocal exchange practices in these sites. It first looks at some of the factors that affect the continuity of reciprocal exchange practices, which other studies have found to play a vital role in recovery from disasters and resettlement. It then looks to the roles of unequal power relations in …

"People...Do Not Come With Standardized Circumstances": Toward A Model For An Anthropology Of E-Government, Marc K. Hebert

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many Americans appreciate the availability and ease of using government websites to conduct their business with the state. What then of the most vulnerable in society? How do they access and use a standardized application process for government assistance, considering their potential resource, educational and physical constraints? Many go to public libraries and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which shifts the responsibility to help applicants from the government agency administering the program to local actors whose primary duties lie elsewhere.

The aim of this research is to document the experiences of three groups of people, primarily located in a central Florida, urban …

Selling Masculinity And Profiting From Marginality: Sex Work And Tourism In A Jamaican Resort Town, Lauren C. Johnson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This ethnography explores the practice of sex tourism in Negril, Jamaica, and its sociocultural, economic, and health impacts on the popular tourist destination. Transactional sex with female tourists has become a popular income generator for some young Caribbean males who are excluded from formal employment in the region's leading industry. Like other resort locales, Negril draws both men and women from various parts of the country who choose to engage in sex work in order to benefit from the tourist dollars spent in Jamaica's third most popular resort area. Through the analysis of observations, interviews with residents, tourists, government officials, …

Teachers' Narratives Of Experience With Social Class, Natalie Elizabeth Keefer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Equality of educational opportunity has been a long elusive goal of public education in the United States. This narrative, phenomenological study conducted inquiry into how five teachers in Tampa, Florida construct meaning about social class and academic achievement based on their life experiences as members of a class-based society. Data produced descriptive, narrative stories that contextualize how meaning is constructed about social class based on participants' life experiences. This line of inquiry provides relevant insight into teachers' understandings of social class which may influence the provision of equal educational opportunities to all students. The following study includes a comprehensive analysis …

Archaeological Survey And Testing On St. Vincent Island, Northwest Florida, Elicia Victoria Kimble

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

St. Vincent Island is one of the barrier islands in the Florida panhandle between Apalachicola Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. The St. Vincent National Wildlife Refuge encompasses all 5000 hectares of the island. Archaeological fieldwork in the summer of 2009 included a survey of the entire island and a test unit at one of the island's richest sites. In spring of 2010 a second test unit was excavated at another archaeologically rich site. A total of 16 known sites were investigated and two newly discovered sites recorded. This research combines all these data with information obtained from existing artifact …

Wetland And Lake Destruction, Development And Mental/Emotional Distress Among Residents Of Tampa Bay, Florida, Gina Larsen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research project is to understand how local environmental destruction in Tampa Bay, Florida, including changes in water resources and development activities, affects local Tampa Bay residents mentally and emotionally. The study also examines residents' personal connections with their landscape and documents the degree of stress that may be caused by experiencing environmental destruction through the use of interviews, freelists, and two psychometric stress scales (Hopkins Symptom Checklist-10 and the Environmental Distress Scale). The topic of emotional distress and environmental change has rarely been studied in social science research, particularly in the United States and with regards …

Schooling, Community, And Identity: The Perspectives Of Muslim Girls Attending An Islamic School In Florida, Vanessa Martinez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the number of Islamic institutions increases in America, the need for greater understanding of the Muslim community, and the challenges faced by this minority, increases as well. This project seeks to provide such knowledge by exploring one of these rapidly growing institutions founded and funded by Muslims, private Islamic schools. Absent from media and literature is an understanding of Islamic schools and the experiences of youth as their attendees. This project addresses this gap through an ethnographic focus on female students at one Islamic school. Data was collected via interviews, focus groups, observation, and participant observation. This student-centered approach …

"Planting Wholesome Seeds": Organic Farming And Community Supported Agriculture At Sweetwater Organic Community Farm, Philip R. Mcnab

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sweetwater Organic Community Farm is an organic farm and environmental education center located in Tampa, Florida. The farm employs the community supported agriculture (CSA) model, in which members pay a single fee before the growing season begins and receive a weekly or biweekly share of the ongoing harvest in return. Using multiple ethnographic methods, this research aimed to understand the daily operations at Sweetwater as well as the perceptions of staff and CSA members. Findings indicated that there were myriad perceived advantages of organic agriculture but also imposing challenges that needed to be overcome. Moreover, staff members acknowledged the challenges …

Wrecking Recreation Center Relationships: How Policy Affects Urban Youth In Tampa, Florida, Brett A. Mervis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the impact of housing and recreation policy on Tampa's urban youth. Deconcentration policy suggests that public housing youth have improved life chances when relocated to mixed-income neighborhoods. In 2007, Tampa's Central Park Village (CPV) public housing complex was demolished and all families were relocated to new neighborhoods. Similarly, neoliberal policy advocates for the government's reduced role in poverty-alleviating mechanisms to include housing the poor and the funding of afterschool programs. To offset a smaller city budget due to state property tax rollbacks in the mid-2000's, Tampa Parks and Recreation instituted increased afterschool and youth sports participation fees. …

Parental Leave: Policy And Practice, Amanda Parr

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Parental leave is a broad term that encompasses maternity and/or paternity leave to care for an infant. Parental leave provides job protection for workers and may be paid or unpaid, with provisions varying throughout the world. Every industrialized nation offers some form of paid parental leave, with the exception of the United States, whose only federal policy regarding parental leave is the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), a law that allows eligible workers to take up to twelve weeks of unpaid, job protected leave for the birth or adoption of a child.

This research project explored how parents understand …

Spatial Assessment And Analysis Of Pollution Sources And Water Quality In The Bogue Falaya River And Abita River Watersheds, St. Tammany Parish, La, Chelsea Core

LSU Master's Theses

Watershed planning is an important ongoing process for enabling communities to repair polluted waterways and ensuring the health and vitality of waterways for future generations. This study defines a process to spatially track pollution sources entering into our waterways. An essential tool used in the watershed planning process is geographic information systems. It is important to gather spatial information to illustrate where all potential pollution sources are located within each watershed. The data for this study were assembled into a database and mapped to locate pollution sources including: commercial/small business wastewater treatment plants; subdivisions without community wastewater treatment; and individual …

The Return To The World: Precís Of A Defense Of Heideggerian Realism, Graham Charles Bounds

LSU Master's Theses

I defend Martin Heidegger’s philosophy from Lee Braver’s contention that it espouses or entails anti-realism, and instead contend that it strongly supports a robust realism. Realism is, in essence, the metaphysical position which states that human beings are aware—or are capable of being aware—of entities that exist independently of us. The counter-position, anti-realism, sometimes equated with idealism, holds that this is not the case. Braver breaks down these simplistic definitions into several more technical propositions, or “matrices,” and attempts to show how Heidegger rejects the realism matrices in favor of their anti-realist counterparts. I will likewise examine the matrices, arguing …

Oysters And Catfish: Resource Exploitation At Rollins Shell Ring, Ft. George Island, Florida, Julie Ann Doucet

LSU Master's Theses

Detailed faunal analyses were conducted on two major subsistence resources, oysters and marine catfish, at Rollins Shell Ring, a Late Archaic (5000 – 3000 B.P.) site on the northeast coast of Florida. The focus of this investigation was on resource exploitation, and, specifically, whether there was evidence that oysters from this site were over-exploited. Three units from previous excavations at the site were selected for analysis, and represent the span of occupation recorded for this site. Measurements were obtained from oysters to determine habitat, and, along with shell height, were compared across time for any changes in the pattern of …

Pig (Sus Scrofa) Exploitation At Hallan Çemi, Southeastern Anatolia: Proposing An Alternative Model, Ximena Lemoine

University Honors Theses

Hallan Çemi presents itself as a unique site to study the transitional period before the onset of agriculture in the Near East. The site fails to fit nicely into demographic or environmental models that have widely been accepted for the region. Hallan Çemi thus represents the potential to study innovative human strategies for subsistence, and to provide insight into the processes that led to the eventual adoption of agriculture only a few millennia later. Richard Redding and Michael Rosenberg presented one such innovative strategy for pig exploitation at this site with their New Guinean model (Redding and Rosenberg 1998; Rosenberg …

Lay Versus Medical Analysis: A Conflict Centered On The Disciplinary And Professional Identity Of Psychoanalysis, Sam Yoder

University Honors Theses

The psychoanalytic conflict surrounding lay and medical analysis was a prominent conflict within both the European and American psychoanalytic communities. This thesis is an analysis of that conflict from the time period of 1900-1940. I argue that this conflict is an expression of two conflicting ideas for the disciplinary identity of psychoanalysis. Lay analysts believed that psychoanalysis should be a distinct discipline and be used in a multidisciplinary context. Medical analysts believed that through aligning psychoanalysis with medicine it would obtain professional legitimacy. This thesis also covers concepts of professionalization in disciplines.

Instant Canons: Film Festivals, Film Criticism, And The Internet In The Early Twenty-First Century, Morgen Ruff

University Honors Theses

Film festivals have been major events on the yearly film calendar since the first international festival at Venice in 1938. A handful of events--Cannes, Berlin, Venice, and Rotterdam, among others--have traditionally dominated discussion, although there are several parallel circuits within the festival world that generate different types and degrees of discourse among critics and audiences. Popular film criticism, concurrent with the recent crisis in print journalism, has undergone a broad shift toward the online sphere during the first decade of the twenty-first century, which has engendered new forms of criticism and consensus, such as the review aggregator. This thesis examines …

Digital Video: Engaging Students In Critical Media Literacy And Community Activism, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

This article presents a strategy for teaching health communication that fosters critical media literacy through the strategic combination of digital video, documentary film, video worksheets, and peer-reviewed journal articles. Given the media-saturated environment in which notions of health are shaped, critical media literacy skills are crucial to students in health-related fields. Cases of key concepts illustrated through documentary films and the peer-reviewed literature are presented. The article then explores how one class took the lead in designing a community event that critically engaged both a YouTube video and a documentary film about police brutality as a public health issue.

The Social Life Of Musical Instruments, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Accordion Crimes, a novel by E. Annie Proulx, traces the life of and routes travelled by a green diatonic button accordion: its birth in Sicily in the workshop of “The Accordion Maker,” its numerous changes of ownership in the Americas during encounters between various immigrant communities, and its death when it finally falls into disrepair in the town of Old Glory, Minnesota. There are other accordions in the book, and many temporary human owners, but it is one particular green accordion that is the book’s protagonist. We meet and experience other characters largely through their interactions with the green accordion, …

Making Lives, Changing A Landscape: An Environmental History Of The Tualatin Valley, Washington County, Oregon, Camille A. Cope

Geography Masters Research Papers

Sheltered by mountains on all sides, the 724-square mile Tualatin Valley has been home to successive groups of people who have shaped the landscape based on their needs, tools, and ideas about the human relationship to nature. Thousands of years of indigenous burning practices and cultivation of native plants, followed by two centuries of European-American fur trapping, agriculture, logging, and urbanization have created the Tualatin Valley landscape of today. Understanding how a history of changing land use has affected the region is integral to building an environmentally sustainable future.

Myths And Measures: The Cultural Performance Of Portland’S Strip Club Identity, Wayne Coffey

Geography Masters Research Papers

Identities of place develop through a multitude of perceptions. Place myths guide much of this perception. Portland, Oregon’s identity has evolved in particular around a much quoted but unchallenged statistic regarding the volume of nude dancing venues. This paper focuses on the literature specific to both nude dance venues and place identity; Portland’s legal history that contributed to this phenomenon; and some of the cultural and spatial variables pertinent to this issue. Two initiatives, aimed at restructuring the state constitution specifically to deal with nude dance venues and other adult entertainment, are analyzed.

Flesh As Communication -- Body Art And Body Theory, Falk Heinrich

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

On the last pages of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty investigates “the bond between flesh and idea, and the internal armature which [it] manifests and which it conceals.” Flesh and idea are intertwined in that the body reflects on itself in the act of perception and, one could add, action. A correlative bond lies in communication theory as the operational difference between ego and alter-ego. This article investigates the non-semiotic intertwinement of ‘flesh’ in art perception and theory based on communication theory in performance art (body art). The thesis is that ‘flesh’ in performance art is presented as absolute …

Encounters With Witchcraft, Norman Miller

Dartmouth Scholarship

My first experience with witchcraft in Africa occurred in March 1960 in Mombasa, Kenya, just as I stepped off the gangway of the MS Inchanga following a voyage from India. Next to the ship in a dockside kiosk I saw a newspaper with the headline, “European Geologist Attacked in Gogoland: Witchcraft Suspected.” It was the story of a 22-year-old British geologist, William Hanning, who had been prospecting for minerals in a remote part of nearby Tanzania when by mistake he dug into a burial ground. He was believed to be a witch, disguised as a European, out to steal body …

Artification And The Aesthetic Regime Of Art, Aleš Erjavec

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The author discusses “artification” and attempts to ascertain whether some common features can be found between artification and Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics, especially his notion of the “aesthetic regime of art.” The author argues that Rancière’s project of “art become life” can be employed as a common denominator of both theoretical frameworks, that of artification and that of the aesthetic regime of art. Nonetheless, the art to which Rancière’s notion primarily applies is different from art in the traditional sense, which seems to form the empirical basis of the notion of artification.

An Empirical Test Of Alternative Theories Of Educational Inequality, Arthur Sakamoto, Changhwan Kim, Hyeyoung Woo

Sociology Faculty Publications and Presentations

A classic issue in education centers on the nature of the relationship between schooling and labor market outcomes. Three general theories of this relationship are the human capital view, the market signal view, and the credentialist view. All three approaches predict a positive association between education and wages, but they differ in regard to its underlying causes. We argue that these theories may be fundamentally differentiated in terms of their implications for productivity, and we provide some relevant findings using productivity data for US manufacturing industries from 1976 to 1996. The results most strongly support the market signal view which …

From Environmental Aesthetics To Narratives Of Change, Nathalie Blanc

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Environmental aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that originated in the English-speaking world and is developing in France. It aims to take a new look at how relationships with the environment are constructed. Often addressed from a landscaping, technical or scientific angle, such relationships have remained largely unaddressed from a cultural perspective, i.e., one that includes a series of practices and values that represent a human group. In this article, I will address environmental aesthetics and how they point up tensions between fixed and static visual representations of the environment in the future and representations that can accommodate ordinary encounters, …

The Return Of Biological Race? Regulating Race And Genetics Through Administrative Agency Race Impact Assessments, Osagie K. Obasogie

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Mining Culture In Roman Dacia: Empire, Community, And Identity At The Gold Mines Of Alburnus Maior Ca.107-270 C.E., Heather Ann Pundt

Dissertations and Theses

Trajan conquered Dacia in 106 CE and encouraged one of the largest colonization efforts in the history of the Roman Empire. The new province was rich in natural resources. Immigrants from Dalmatia, Moesia, Noricum, Pannonia, Greece, Syria, Bithynia, Italy, indigenous Dacians, and soldiers from Legio XIII Gemina participated in the extraction of gold from the Apuseni Mountains. The inhabitants of mining settlements around Alburnus Maior and the administrative center Ampelum coexisted under Roman governance but continued to mark their identities in multicultural communities. At Alburnus Maior the presence of wage laborers with access to outside materials and ideas created the …

Are We Cool Yet?: A Longitudinal Content Analysis Of Nerd And Geek Representations In Popular Television, Christopher Louis Cardiel

Dissertations and Theses

This study explores the representation of nerds and geeks in popular broadcast television programs over the course of the past twenty years. A content analysis of the five most popular scripted broadcast television programs for each year was conducted in order to assess the frequency of nerd characters, as well as the social competence, physical attractiveness, and demographic information of each such character. In addition, a supplemental survey design study was employed in order to collect public opinion data regarding perceptions of nerds in general and on television. The results of these studies indicated that while the per-year frequency of …

Fundaments Of Morfo-Syntactical Ergativity (Fundamentos De Ergatividad Morfológico-Sintáctica), Eva Núñez-Méndez

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

The main goal of this research paper is to clarify the concept of ergativity, which has been used as a modern term in recent grammar studies, from a morpholo gicalsyntactical approach. This term, nonexistent in the traditional linguistic studies on romance languages, has been newly applied to values of transitivity where the participant roles in the action may or may not have the agent function. latin and his daughter-languages have a syntactical accusative profile where the subject of the action is also the agent, different in form from the direct object. in latin, the correspondence subject-agent is marked morphologically in …

Introduction: The Trajectory Of German Philosophy After Kant, And The "Difference" Between Fichte And Schelling, Michael Vater

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.