Digital Commons Network^™

For Love And For Justice: Narratives Of Lesbian Activism, Kelly Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the role of lesbians in the U.S. second wave feminist movement, arguing that the history of women's liberation is more diverse, more intersectional, and more radical than previously documented. The body of this work is five oral histories conducted with lifelong activists and public intellectuals for the Voices of Feminism project at the Sophia Smith Collection: Katherine Acey, former Executive Director of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice; Dorothy Allison, author and sex radical; Suzanne Pharr, southern anti-racist organizer and author; Achebe Powell, activist and diversity trainer; and Carmen Vázquez, LGBT activist and founding director of the …

Historical Relationships Between Land Elevation And Socioeconomic Status In New York City: A Mixed Methods Gis Approach, Jennifer Brisbane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The role that topography has played in the development of New York City is essential to understanding its present urban form and foreseeing its changes. Geographers and economists have generally agreed that for cities in the United States, socioeconomic status increases with land elevation. This seemingly simple relationship between elevation and class, however, is complicated by factors such as technological innovations, economic shifts, politics, cultural perceptions, and the idiosyncrasies of cities and the neighborhoods within them. The lack of comprehensive research in this area coupled with conflicting findings warranted further exploration into the complex and changing relationships between elevation and …

Transformative Science Education Through Action Research And Self-Study Practices, Olga Calderon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The research studies human emotions through diverse methods and theoretical lenses. My intention in using this approach is to provide alternative ways of perceiving and interpreting emotions being experienced in the moment of arousal. Emotions are fundamental in human interactions because they are essential in the development of effective relationships of any kind and they can also mediate hostility towards others. I begin by presenting an impressionist auto-ethnography, which narrates a personal account of how science and scientific inquiry has been entrenched in me since childhood. I describe how emotions are an important part of how I perceive and respond …

"The Last Of The Great Bohemians": Film Poetry, Myth, And Sexuality In Greenwich Village And The Atlantic, 1930-1975, Thomas Winfield Hafer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Greenwich Village, a final generation of bohemians contested the rise and trajectory of gay liberation. During the 1930s, this generation blended modernist poetry and sexuality to develop a new manifestation of bohemia. In the postwar period, they transformed modern poetry into the new artistic medium of film that was critical to shaping postwar American art and culture. This wave of bohemia was built on certain modernist principles, including a universalist understanding of sexuality and identity that was different from, and incompatible with, the growth of identity politics in the 1960s. This dissertation argues that this was a last gasp …

Gravity Modeling Of Casinos In The United States: A Case Study Of Philadelphia, Moira Conway

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recently, casino gaming has emerged in the United States in a variety of new locations as a source of economic development. Despite this, in the United States there has been only a very limited amount of research that has examined gambling from a spatial perspective. An important concern identified in international gambling research is that of problem gambling. This project seeks to examine the potential impacts of casinos in the major metropolitan area of Philadelphia, which is currently the largest city in the United States with an open commercial casino. There are three additional casinos in the metropolitan region. In …

Italians And The New Byzantium: Lombard And Venetian Architects In Muscovy, 1472-1539, Ellen A. Hurst

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores how early modern Russian identity was shaped by the built environment and, likewise, how the built environment was a result of an emerging Russian identity. I focus on the years 1472 to 1539 because they were crucial to the formation of this early modern Russian identity. Muscovite princes, seeking to rebuild Moscow's cityscape in a grander style, imported a large community of architects, engineers, stonemasons, and statesmen from Lombardy, the Veneto, and Rome. At least six architects, and an unknown number of masons, from Italy worked in Muscovy during these years, and their presence indelibly changed the …

Dollar Democracy: The Politics Of Dollarization In Latin America, Cori Madrid

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The state's right to print money and control monetary policy is among its most powerful abilities: it allows the state to manage the economy, raise revenue, and reward political allies. Since the establishment of the Westphalian state system, the state's monopoly of money within its borders has been a source of wealth and within the last century, influence over the macroeconomy and local actors. Nevertheless, in the year 2000, Ecuador and El Salvador surprised the world by announcing that they would officially dollarize their economies, replacing their national currencies with the dollar. What can explain why countries, such as Ecuador …

Occupy Mall Street? How The Court Conditioned Public Space Where People Go, Anthony Maniscalco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the tension between practicable space and property rights. That tension has frequently animated legal contests over political expression in privately owned, publicly accessible marketplaces in the United States. Do American marketplaces function as marketplaces of ideas? Should they? In order to examine those questions, I survey the Supreme Court's considerations of expressive activity on public and commercial property, in particular, shopping centers. I begin by developing indications of public space, as well as noting the challenges for civic inclusion within the modern political sphere. Next, I survey historical practices of public space within (Western) marketplaces. Those practices …

The Other Tribeca: Immigrant Work And Incorporation Amid Affluence, Elizabeth A. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Tribeca, a small, affluent neighborhood in the lower west side of Manhattan, is a microcosm of the service-and-information-based economic structure that characterizes many communities in other American cities today, and thus provides an opportunity to study the effects of this system. Tribeca residents are predominantly wealthy and work in high-end service-oriented professions, so they consume low-end personal services produced locally. Many of the people who provide these personal services in the neighborhood are foreign born. Although they share space and have regular interactions, conventional assumptions might suggest that Tribeca residents and immigrant service workers lack much in common, and have …

Engaging Bad Governments: Resource Groups And Patterns Of Engagement In Bangladesh, Nayma Qayum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bangladesh's governments have pursued an aid-based neoliberal development agenda since the 1980s, which has allowed new resources and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to permeate rural society. These NGOs operate programs through resource groups, small groups of impoverished women who gather at the village or ward levels. This dissertation argues that resource groups have built new citizen-state relationships and enabled new forms of engagement between citizens and their governments. These new transactional relationships are governed simultaneously by informal institutions of accountability and informal institutions of exchange; the former allow actors to reinforce formal rules when badly-performing institutions deviate from them, and the …

"A New Way Of Doing Politics": The Movement Against Cafta In Costa Rica, Jeremy Rayner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In October of 2007, Costa Ricans voted in a referendum to ratify a Free Trade Agreement with the United States (DR-CAFTA, or CAFTA). The first referendum in their nation's history--and the first referendum ever held on a Free Trade Agreement--marked the culmination of a cycle of contention over liberalization that transformed practices and expectations of politics in a country often considered an exemplar of representative democracy. In this dissertation I provide an account of the opposition to CAFTA (the NO), based on two years of ethnographic research with the Patriotic Committees (Comites Patrioticos), the decentralized, grassroots network at the heart …

Common Knowledge: The Epistemology Of American Realism, Mark Sussman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, Common Knowledge: The Epistemology of American Realism, focuses on realist fiction (primarily the novel) at the end of the nineteenth century. Its motivating claim is that the central descriptive and thematic imperative of realism--to depict life "as it is" rather than in some idealized form--emerged in response to crises in the status of knowledge that resulted from an attempt by writers and readers to come to a common understanding of the relationship between private experience and an increasingly fragmented social world. While William Dean Howells's definition of realism as a form of writing that displays "fidelity to experience …

Performing Modernity In Turkey: Conflicts Of Masculinity, Sexuality, And The Köçek Dancer, Brittany Giselle Haynes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis reexamines the history of the köçek dancer in Turkey and thereby opens modern heteronormative constructs of masculinity and sexuality to contestation, particularly as they have been symbolically embodied by the rural population of Anatolia. It traces the evolution of the köçek dancer from the early modern Ottoman Empire when the dancer embodied notions of divine love and the ideal of beauty as a young male object of adult men's desires. In the nineteenth century, perceptions of the köçek began to change, primarily among Ottoman elites, whose modernization efforts were influenced by the European gaze and travelers' Orientalist interpretations …

Origins Of The Movement And The Development Of Protest: The Birmingham Campaign, 1963, James Munro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Social movement theory in the late twentieth century has offered competing explanations for the origins and development of protest. In an attempt to explain the American Civil Rights Movement, scholars from the resource mobilization (RM) and political process theory (PPT) schools have provided somewhat mechanistic and formulaic explanations for how the black protest developed in the southern states. This study takes the emergence and development of protest in Birmingham, Alabama, culminating in the Birmingham Campaign of 1963, as a case study to examine the claims of RM and PPT. An evaluation of the Birmingham Campaign suggests the emergence of protest …

The Unitary Executive And The Plural Judiciary: On The Potential Virtues Of Decentralized Judicial Power, Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Jr.

Notre Dame Law Review

The federal judiciary features a highly decentralized system of courts. The Supreme Court of the United States reviews only a few dozen cases each year. Meanwhile, regional U.S. courts of appeals operate independently of each other; district courts further divide and separate the exercise of federal judicial power. The role of the state courts in enforcing federal law further subdivides responsibility for the adjudication of federal law claims. Indeed, the Office of Chief Justice itself incorporates and reflects this vesting of the judicial power of the United States exclusively in collegial institutions—literally in a multiplicity of hands—effectively precluding its unilateral …

Learning To Be Lebanese: Socializations Of Citizenship And Subjecthood In Beiruti Primary Schools, Jade Lansing

Theses and Dissertations

This research project will explore the ways the Lebanese state and individual classroom actors construct and contest citizenship through the curriculum and structure of civics classrooms in contemporary Lebanese primary schools. Using civics classrooms as a lens to understand broader trends in educational environments, this study will analyze the role of education in the narration, diffusion, and aggravation of social and political discord. It argues that schools and classrooms are not passive or neutral mirrors of external dynamics, but rather play an active role in the narration and construction of these realities. This research shows that education is a space …

Small And Medium Enterprises And Access To Finance In Egypt, Ismail Houssien

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to put a spotlight on some of the problems of access to finance that stand in the way of small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) in Egypt and to draw the attention of policy makers to try to solve those issues. These problems vary from financial issues such as getting access to money to non-financial shortcomings in such areas as knowhow, marketing, management and accounting systems. Furthermore, SMEs in Egypt suffer from complex governmental regulations as well. To address the overall research question, “how do informal areas SMEs meet their financing needs and why do …

Hats And Tarbooshes: Identity, Cosmopolitanism, And Violence In 1920s Alexandria, Daniel Woodward

Theses and Dissertations

In May of 1921 Alexandria was consumed by demonstrations against the British-backed Adly Cabinet. In a matter of days these protests developed into violence which targeted people based on perceived communal affiliation. In total, 88 people were killed and 238 were wounded. Through a detailed examination of this communal and political violence, a moment that has largely be left out of the Egyptian historical narrative, I provide a greater understanding of how the complex dynamics of identity and power operated in Alexandrian society in this crucial period in the formation of the narrative of Egyptian identity. Utilizing a variety of …

An Analysis Of The Strategic, Operational, And Organizational Differences Between The Islamic State And Al-Qa'ida, Jacob Greene

Theses and Dissertations

This project provides a comprehensive examination of the strategic, operational and organizational character of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Sham (ISIS). The purpose of the project is two fold: first, to challenge the perception that ISIS and al-Qā’ida are fundamentally “one and the same;” and, second, to offer policy makers a systematic and detailed description of ISIS on its own merits. Drawing on variables pertaining to three dimensions—strategy, operations, and organizational characteristics—and informed by both primary sources and secondary analyses, I investigate the qualitative differences between the two organizations. I find that, despite some similarities, ISIS and al-Qā’ida …

Risky Bodies Offshore: Spatialisation, Securitisation And Visual Regimes Of Migration, Angela Smith

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

China Near Seas Combat Capabilities, Andrew S. Erickson, Ryan D. Martinson, Peter A. Dutton

CMSI Red Books

The capstone U.S. Defense Department study on the future operational environment declares, "China's rise represents the most significant single event on the international horizon since the collapse of the Cold War. Understanding and assessing changes in China's traditionally defensive naval strategy, doctrine, and force structure are of obvious importance to the U.S. Navy (USN) and other Pacific navies concerned with the possible security implications of that rise. This chapter examines the development of the Chinese navy's Houbei (Type 022) fast-attack-craft force and its roles and missions in China's near seas and discusses implications for the U.S. Navy and other navies …

Hurricane Preparedness: Community Vulnerability And Medically Fragile Populations, Joshua G. Behr, Rafael Diaz

VMASC Publications

No abstract provided.

Accountability Before The Fact, Michael R. Dimino Sr.

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Rationalizing Everyday Life In Late Nineteenth Century Istanbul C. 1900, Ersin Altin

Dissertations

This dissertation explores the rationalizing process of everyday life in late nineteenth century Istanbul, within the framework of the modernization agendas that swept the Ottoman Empire from the 1830s on. Starting with the period known as Tanzimat (literally ‘the reforms’), the study covers the Hamidian period (1876-1909), Second Constitutional Era (1908-1918) and first seven years of the Turkish Republic (1923-1930) noting the complexities of shifts and novelties by looking at daily practices and discourses, as well as the relationships between them.

Within this historic framework, the main focus is the changing relationship between everyday objects and behavioral patterns of the …

Biology Professor Collaborates With Chinese Researcher, January 31, 2014, Tom Scherberger

USF St. Petersburg Campus News and Press Releases

No abstract provided.

Svmaud: Using Textual Information To Predict The Audience Level Of Written Works Using Support Vector Machines, Todd Will

Dissertations

Information retrieval systems should seek to match resources with the reading ability of the individual user; similarly, an author must choose vocabulary and sentence structures appropriate for his or her audience. Traditional readability formulas, including the popular Flesch-Kincaid Reading Age and the Dale-Chall Reading Ease Score, rely on numerical representations of text characteristics, including syllable counts and sentence lengths, to suggest audience level of resources. However, the author’s chosen vocabulary, sentence structure, and even the page formatting can alter the predicted audience level by several levels, especially in the case of digital library resources. For these reasons, the performance of …

Emu Today, January 31, 2014, Eastern Michigan University

EMU Today

No abstract provided.

Harbor Notes, January 31, 2014, Tom Scherberger

Harbor Notes

The January 31, 2014, issue of Harbor Notes.

Privatization Of Agriculture In Post-Soviet Russia: A Model Of Transitioni, Joseph Brian Gross, Dr. Phillip J. Bryson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This research began as in inquiry into the general causes for the failure of modern rural reforms in Russia. This study traces the development of rural trends from the abolition of serfdom in 1861, through the Soviet era of centralized planning and collective farming, up until the post- Soviet era of privatization. This study identifies and categorizes the modern incentives and obstacles that have stymied organizational restructuring of Russia’s rural sector.

Ethnic Change In Slovakia Between 1773 And 1910, Michele N. Richardson, Dr. Samuel Otterstrom

Journal of Undergraduate Research

At the end of World War I, the Treaty of Trianon divided the former Austro-Hungarian Empire into multiple autonomous states including Czechoslovakia. Hungarians vociferously decried the southern border around the Slovak portion of this state, which became the independent Slovak Republic in 1993, claiming that it bisected an ethnically homogeneous Hungarian area between two political states. Conversely, proponents of the 1918 border argued that the dominant Hungarian presence in southern Slovakia was merely the result of Magyarization, a government policy aimed at suppressing minorities and forcefully assimilating them into Magyar (ethnic Hungarian) culture. Unfortunately, at this time nobody definitively knew …