Digital Commons Network^™

Academics And Activism : A Comparative Study Of Contemporary Historical Writings On Same-Sex Sexuality And Lgbt Activists In The Middle East., Lauren Copeland

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the past several years, there has been an abundance of U.S. news stories outlining the widespread oppression of queer people in the Middle East. At the same time, some international human rights organizations have focused all attention on LGBT asylum seekers, implying that the only course of action for queer people in the Middle East is to flee. However, contemporary historical writers on same-sex sexuality demonstrate that the history of same-sex desire and behavior in the Middle East is incredibly nuanced and has changed greatly over time. Additionally, LGBT activists in the Middle East work from within their communities …

Greening Louisville's East Market District : A Comparative Assessment Of Sustainability., Ashley O. Dale

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The East Market District located in Louisville, KY is currently undergoing a multi-million dollar urban regeneration. This transformation is being marketed as a primer sustainable neighborhood with the goal of serving as a model for other cities in the United States. As result of these changes, it is imperative to analyze the concept of sustainability from a variety of stakeholder perspectives utilizing content analysis on interviews and LEED Neighborhood Scorecard. Utilizing these methods, the central goal of this study is to understand the various interpretation of sustainability within this neighborhood. The findings observed via the critical assessment of the LEED …

Transboundary Groundwater And Unsustainable Practices Of Water Governance In The Guarani Aquifer : The Case Of The Province Of Misiones., Paula Carolina Gomez 1974-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent changes in the governance of the Guarani Aquifer System - a transboundary groundwater resource in South America - reveal contradictory practices of water governance embedded in the individual politics and ideologies of sovereign states overlying the aquifer. Emerging practices of water marketization through the commodification of bottled groundwater at the provincial level in Misiones, Argentina, contest the current scale of transboundary groundwater governance, delimited by The Guarani Aquifer Agreement and its main principles of cooperation, equitable and reasonable utilization and the obligation not to harm - under the imperatives of the United Nations International Law Commission (UNILC) Law of …

The Grey Eagle Of Glen Lily : Simon Bolivar Buckner's Place In The Lost Cause, Reunion, And Politics Of The Late Nineteenth Century., Whitney K. Todd 1989-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Simon Bolivar Buckner (1823-1914) lived a long and distinguished life. He began his career as solider at West Point and fought for the Confederacy as lieutenant general during the Civil War. Buckner took the skills, influence, and connections gained from his early life and transformed them into a postbellum political career. In the late nineteenth-century, he earned supporters by becoming a symbol for Civil War memories, both in the Lost Cause and reunion movements. Buckner’s popularity led to his success as governor of Kentucky from 1887 to 1891. His roots to the past also presented difficulties as the nation’s economic …

Three Essays On Institutional Change, Kathleen M. Sheehan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation consists of three essays which empirically investigate different avenues of institutional change. The introduction opens with a discussion of the topics explored in the three essays and provides an overview of important results from each essay. Essay one is a joint effort with Dr. Andrew Young. In this essay, we examine how foreign aid affects institutional change using a panel of aid recipient countries and multiple measures of institutions. In essay two, I examine how globalization affects informal institutions, measured by the level of culture in a country. The final essay explores if there are spatial spillovers from …

Flipping The Classroom In College Algebra: A Design And Development Study, Lori Ogden

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation documents the development of a flipped classroom teaching model for teaching college algebra. The model supports the use of multiple teaching strategies including video lectures for students to view as homework, outside of class. A design and development framework is used to describe the design decisions, model implementation, and evaluation of the model across three deliveries, or case studies, of a college algebra course from fall of 2012 through fall of 2013. Design decisions included course sequence and instructional materials. Model implementation described the teaching and assessment strategies throughout each unit of material taught in the course and …

Country Schoolgirls: A Study Of Rural Women And The Rise Of Public Education, 1820-1914, Allyson Perry

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis explores the rise of public education, its influence on rural society, and the ways that farmwomen used schooling for a variety of purposes. Throughout the nineteenth century, more opportunities for women appeared as communities in the mountainous areas of West Virginia and Pennsylvania established free, public schools. With these social developments came an attempt to balance the public's perception of women's role in rural society. Administrators charged with implementing state-wide, public education had to set boundaries on women's advancement as they reacted to the public's changing ideas of women's proper role. Confronting these ideas set forth by administrators, …

Real Ireland- An Investigation Into Us Tourists' Holiday Photographs, Sean T. Ruane

Doctoral

Drawing from literature straddling tourism, marketing, geography and anthropology, this thesis investigates how US tourists consume and thereby make sense of Ireland as a place through practicing photography as part of ‘being a tourist’. The constructivist approach to this research facilitated an exchange of ideas between the researcher and the participants. This exchange between the researcher and the participants, in which knowledge is not discovered, but rather created, informs the hermeneutically-situated methodologies sometimes used by constructivists. The thesis, therefore, employs a suite of participant-focused, hermeneutically-situated methodologies, including in-depth interviews and focus groups to produce a phenomenographical account of how the …

Types Of Mankind: Polygenism And Scientific Racism In The Nineteenth Century United States Scientific Community., Robert A. Smith

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

In the mid-nineteenth century, a group of American scientists known collectively as the “American School” of ethnology challenged the validity of the biblical story of creation. They proposed that, contrary to the teaching of Genesis, there had been a number of separate divine acts of creation, leading to the appearance of more than one human species within the genus homo. They ranked the species, also known as varieties or races, in terms of relative superiority, with the Caucasian in the highest position of all.

I argue in my thesis that the rise of the American School was a defining moment …

Hot Crime: Economic Analysis And Insight Into The Relationship Between A City's Latitude And Its Rate Of Violence, Erin K. Piepenbrok

Economics Undergraduate Honors Theses

Every day in America, a case of violent crime makes headlines across the television, newspapers, websites, and social media. These tragedies deeply affect those directly involved and the communities in which the crimes take place. Not only are individuals physically and mentally affected by violent crime, but communities and cities suffer an economic loss from rising violent crime rates. Reducing the current rates of violent crime (robbery, assaults, rapes, and murders) can reduce costs for cities and taxpayers, while ultimately improving the quality of life for Americans. Research into what affects violent crime rates lead to discoveries that unemployment, gun …

Lobbying On Behalf Of The Faithful: Three Mainline Protestant Denominations And Their Advocacy Efforts On Capitol Hill During The 110th Congress, Julia Ann Summers

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A number of mainline Protestant denominations engage in direct lobbying and grassroots advocacy efforts with Congress on behalf of the poor and other marginalized groups. This study explores the work of three specific denominations the Presbyterian Church [PC(USA)], the United Church of Christ (UCC), and the United Methodist Church (UMC), as religious special interests. Specifically, the study explores how they facilitated their policy agendas on Capitol Hill during the 110th Congress (2007-2008). This question is answered primarily through interviews with and surveys of the professional staff engaged in this work during that session. Results indicate that each denomination works extensively …

Analysis Of Environmental Influences On Dressed Stone Decay: A Case Study Of Tafoni Development On A Hewn Djinn Block In Petra, Jordan, Kaelin M. Groom

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Petra, Jordan captivates tourists and researchers with its dramatic sandstone cliffs, Nabatean, Roman, Byzantine and Roman architecture, and rich cultural heritage. However, increasing tourism in the valley is exacerbating stone degradation and complicating heritage management. This research analyzed environmental influences on dressed stone decay via tafoni development and evaluating cell evolution on an isolated hewn feature, known as Djinn Block X. Resembling other sandstone blocks found in the area, this irregular sandstone monument exhibits faces ranging in size from 2.5m by 3.5m to 3.9m to 4.2m (29m perimeter). Protruding features, incisions along the top, and a large platform attached to …

Hope, Faith And Trust: Conversations With Tibetans In Exile, William Lukas Gramlich

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goal of Hope, Faith and Trust: Conversations with Tibetans in Exile was to create a documentary to serve as a platform for Tibetan refugees living in India to tell, in their own words, the story of the Tibetan peoples' political struggles since the Chinese government occupied Tibet in the 1950s. To achieve this goal, this project utilized oral-history interviews with Tibetan exiles, gathered as part of the University of Arkansas TEXT Program. The TEXT Program, short for Tibetans in Exile Today, is a study abroad oral-history project in which undergraduate students conduct interviews with Tibetans living in India. The …

You Can't Get There From Here: Movement Sf And The Picaresque, Robert Glen Wilson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the crisis of authenticity in postmodern culture and argues that contemporary science fiction, specifically the subgenre of Movement SF, has evolved a unique answer to this crisis by adopting, perhaps spontaneously, the picaresque narrative structure. Postmodern fiction has a tenuous relationship with the issue of authenticity, such that the average postmodern subject is utterly without true authenticity at all, alternately victim to the socioeconomic conditions of his or her culture and to the elision of the self as a result of the homogenizing effects of advertising, television, etc. Postmodern SF also carries this bleak perception of the …

Methane Emissions And Ammonia Volatilization From Drill-Seeded, Delayed-Flood Rice On A Silt-Loam Soil In Arkansas, Christopher Wade Rogers

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) currently uses a single methane (CH4) emissions factor of 160 kg CH4-C ha-1 for a primary rice (Oryza sativa L.) crop. The emissions factor is based on studies that do not adequately represent current management practices in Arkansas. Another concern is pre-flood fertilizer nitrogen (N) management, as the common N source, urea, is prone to loss via ammonia (NH3) volatilization. Thus, the objective of this research was to investigate trace gas emissions from rice on a silt-loam soil, including CH4 emissions as influenced by nitrogen (N) fertilization (i.e., optimal N and no N) in 2011, …

Integrating Seismic Activity Into Land Use Management: A Case Study From Central Arkansas Using Hazus Software Application, Robert Dean Breashears

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Almost 20 years after a remarkable swarm of more than 30,000 micro-earthquakes, a new swarm revisited the same region of central Arkansas, less than 30 miles northeast of Conway, Arkansas. A main shock on May 4, 2001 of magnitude MR = 4.4 was followed by a large number of aftershocks in a small crustal volume about 2,500 events for about 2 months. Preliminary locations of aftershocks from the portable network together with the locations based on data from regional networks lead us to conclude that both swarms (2001 and 1982) occupy virtually the same crustal volume. In following years several …

Places That Change, Water That Remains: An Analysis Of Rio Arriba County Nm-Land Use And Figure Ground Study, J. Jarrett García

The Rio Chama Basin: Land, Water and Community

No abstract provided.

Strategizing Britain's Role In The World, J Gaskarth

School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

The End Of Sustainability, Melinda Harm Benson, Robin Kundis Craig

Publications

It is time to move past the concept of sustainability. The realities of the Anthropocene warrant this conclusion. They include unprecedented and irreversible rates of human-induced biodiversity loss, exponential increases in per-capita resource consumption, and global climate change. These factors combine to create an increasing likelihood of rapid, nonlinear, social and ecological regime changes. The recent failure of the Rio +20 provides an opportunity to collectively reexamine--and ultimately move past--the concept of sustainability as an environmental goal. We must face the impossibility of defining--let alone pursuing--a goal of "sustainability" in a world characterized by such extreme complexity, radical uncertainty and …

In Reality Meager: Eluding Death Anxiety In Walt Whitman And Federico Garcia Lorca's Poetics Of The Body, David E. St. John

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Christopher Maurer, a leading biographer and critic of Federico Garcia Lorca, describes the Spaniard’s Poet in New York using the adjective “Whitman-esque.” Indeed, the poet’s posthumous collection lambasts the rampant materialism and putrid urbanization of New York through extensive divergent shifts in style and tone from Lorca’s earlier work that point toward the influence of Walt Whitman: radical line lengths, exclamatory prose, and lengthy catalogues. This study proposes that the influence of Whitman upon Lorca is more than cosmetic or strictly imitative. Using the writings of the American anthropologist Ernest Becker as a methodology, I propose that further similarities between …

An Examination Of George Orwell's Newspeak Through Politeness Theory, Byron Scott Millard

Theses

This thesis aims to analyze the formation of politeness in the use of Orwell's artificial language, Newspeak. Multiple theories of politeness will be utilized for the examination but with primary focuses on Brown and Levinson's (1987) original theory and Watts' (2003) views on politic behavior. Orwell's (1949) original novel will be used for the grammatical and lexical basis of the language as well as the source for the language's sociolinguistic aspects. It will be shown that politeness is present within the society and its language, even though it is mechanically altered due to the structure of Newspeak. The largest changes …

Transportation Costs And U.S. Manufacturing Fdi, Joseph P. Daniels, Marc Von Der Ruhr

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

In empirical models of foreign direct investment (FDI), distance is most often used to proxy for transportation costs and other pure-trade costs. Given that distance is time invariant but transportation costs are not, this approach is less than satisfactory when actual transportation costs rise and fall over time. The contribution of this work is to explicitly control for transportation costs and thereby better understand their impact on FDI. We explore the impact of shipping costs on total US FDI stocks abroad, manufacturing stocks and service stocks using measures of sea-shipping and air-shipping costs in a Hausman–Taylor model that controls for …

Three-Dimensional Reconstruction Of Marine Clay Nano- And Microstructure By Transmission Electron Microscopy: Analysis Of Fabric And Pore Network, Jessica Rae Gardner Douglas

Master's Theses

Three-dimensional reconstructions of marine fine-grained sediment open a new dimension for studying nano- and microscale organo-clay fabric important to improving and advancing organic matter (OM) sequestration and fluid flow dynamics modeling. I created 3-D reconstructions of clay fabric and pore pathways from serial sections and photographic mosaics obtained using transmission electron microscopy. These reconstructions show aggregations of clay domains, surrounding OM, and pore networks. I examined a Model sample (laboratory consolidated) with 1% OM and a Natural sample (polychaete fecal pellet) with high levels of OM. Three-dimensional reconstructions were segmented into 300 nm cube subsamples to make highly localized qualitative …

U.S. Relationships With Iran, Israel, And Pakistan: A Realist Explanation, Aaron Daniel Coates

Master's Theses

The purpose of this work is to assess U.S. relations with Iran, Israel, and Pakistan throughout the Cold War into the contemporary age of Islamic extremism. It demonstrates how the international relations theory of realism is most applicable to these relations when compared to the four competing theories of neorealism, liberalism, neoliberal institutionalism, and constructivism. Each case study is examined and evaluated in full detail. Particular emphasis is allotted to variables such as foreign aid, interventionism, sanctions, geography, and political and cultural similarities. The thesis concludes by offering a brief explanation as to the lessons that should be learned from …

A Tale Of Two Cities: Vicksburg And Natchez, Mississippi During The American Civil War, Ruth Poe White

Master's Theses

In 1860, Vicksburg and Natchez, Mississippi, had far more in common with each other than with the rest of the state. Most significantly, they both opposed secession. Beyond that opposition and their initial support for the war, however, the two city’s reactions differed. This thesis argues that one of the main reasons for this difference is that two distinct communities developed in each city. Pre-war experiences shaped the citizens of Natchez and Vicksburg, allowing Vicksburg civilians to quickly develop feelings of Confederate nationalism, while their Natchez counterparts, loyal to their city and their national trade networks, were more pro-Unionist but …

Assessing Landscape Change In Highland Peru With An Emphasis On Tree Cover Change, 1948-2012, Timothy Guy Sutherlin

Master's Theses

Tree cover change was examined around three cities in the central Andes of Peru, 1948-2012, using repeat photography, remote sensing, and ethnographic methods. Forest transition theory provided a framework to study the causes of the changes observed. The repeat photography results show that there were more trees on the landscape in 2012 than there were in 1948. There were increases in smaller groupings of trees visible in the photography that were associated with smallholder intensification in the form of new woodlots, field borders and dooryard trees. The remote sensing results show there was a significant increase in larger patches of …

Cost, Quality, And The Community College Enrollment Decision, Caroline Swiger

All Dissertations

Numerous studies model whether students enroll in higher education, but few have investigated how students decide where to attend. Even fewer studies have considered how community college students make this nearly first noncompulsory human capital investment decision. This research focuses on the enrollment decisions of students whose first postsecondary destination after high school graduation is one of the nation's public two-year colleges, a group that comprises nearly 40 percent of the undergraduates in American higher education (Knapp et al. 2011). The first chapter introduces the reader to community colleges with a brief history of the schools, their role in higher …

Hybrid Spaces: Users' Perceptions Of Digitally Mediated Public Space, Melanie Duffey

All Dissertations

Public space has served as a central component to human settlement since the ancient Greeks, and a forum for unmediated discussion, communication, and debate (Hénaff & Strong, 2001; Mitchell 2003). During the industrialization of cities, public space continued to transform in form and typology, and has served society in various ways (Carr, Rivlin, Francis, & Stone, 1992). Public space is also a physical environment where interaction with digital environment occurs. Today, in the City of New York there are 503 privately owned public spaces (POPS) (Kayden, 2000); often these spaces provide varying levels of wireless access as public and/or private …

Can Very Rapid Adaptation Arise Without Ancestral Variation? Insight From The Molecular Evolution Of Herbicide Resistance In Genus Amaranthus, Kristin Elizabeth Beard

All Dissertations

In this dissertation I investigate the source and spread of adaptive resistance to the herbicide glyphosate by the weedy species Amaranthus palmeri. This is an ideal system for furthering scientific understanding of the dynamics of evolution because the adaptation is in response to a well understood selection pressure and is happening on an extremely short time scale. The plant genus Amaranthus contains several agriculturally important weeds, but is not closely related to any current model systems—the closest model system is Beta vulgaris(sugar beet). In the first part of this work I seek to determine the relationship between extant species of …

Profiles Of Teachers In Selected Curriculum Areas: Further Analyses Of The Staff In Australia’S Schools 2013 Survey, Paul R. Weldon, Julie Mcmillan, Glenn Rowley, Phillip Mckenzie

School and system improvement

This report was commissioned by the Australian Government Department of Education (formerly the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations). It was designed to analyse the characteristics and profiles of the teachers teaching in selected learning (or curriculum) areas in primary and secondary schools. The intent was to use the data collected through the Staff in Australia’s Schools 2013 (SiAS) project to provide a more detailed analysis of the teachers concerned than was provided in the main survey report (McKenzie et al., 2014 ) . The SiAS project was designed to provide a detailed picture of the Australian teacher workforce, …