Digital Commons Network^™

Through The Gateway: Marijuana Production, Governance, And The Drug War Détente, Michael Polson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the 1996 voter approval of medical marijuana laws in California, marijuana policy has become increasingly liberalized. Producers, however, have remained in the greyest of grey market zones. Federal anti-drug laws and supply-side tactics have intensively targeted them even as marijuana has become more licit. In this legally unstable environment, marijuana patient-cultivators and underground producers have articulated and asserted themselves politically and economically, particularly as the likelihood of full legalization has increased. This dissertation explores how producers navigated the nebulous zone between underground and medical markets. I argue that even as producers supplied marijuana to a formalizing, regulated medical industry …

Ceasing To Run Underground: 20th-Century Women Writers And Hydro-Logical Thought, Annie M. Cranstoun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Starting from two central ecopoetic convictions—the constitutive role of environment in human experience (and vice versa), and text’s ability to connect with the world—this dissertation then moves in a different direction from most ecocritical projects. Instead of looking at the ways literary representation flows back into nature in the forms of attitude, praxis, and policy, this study focuses on the earlier part of the loop: the emergence of text from environment, particularly its aquatic parts, via the faculty of the imagination. In its scrutiny of images that spring directly from matter and its faith in the concept of a personal …

The Sciences Of The Soul: The Emergence Of Psy-Sciences And The Modern State In Turkey, Kutlughan Soyubol

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the epistemological and conceptual formation and articulations of madness, mental health, and selfhood in the context of creating a modern Turkish nation (1923-1960). Three inter-related themes run through the study. First, the emergence of new and often contested medical discourses on mental health that engaged with and participated in the construction of healthy secular subjects within the imaginary milieu of the Kemalist nationalist project. Second, the processes through which psy-sciences, armed with scientific rationality, came to engage with and appropriate the language and the terrain once occupied by religion. And third, the intricate discursive fluctuations over the …

Identification Of Aphid (Hemiptera: Aphididae) Species Of Economic Importance In Kenya Using Dna Barcodes And Pcr-Rflp-Based Approach, G. Kinyanjui, F. M. Khamis, S. Mohamed, L. O. Ombura, M. Warigia, S. Ekesi

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

Aphids are among pests of economic importance throughout the world. Together with transmitting plant viruses, aphids are capable of inflicting severe crop production losses. They also excrete honeydew that favours the growth of sooty mold which reduces the quality of vegetables and fruits and hence their market values. Rapid and accurate identification of aphids to the species level is a critical component in effective pest management and plant quarantine systems. Even though morphological taxonomy has made a tremendous impact on species-level identifications, polymorphism, morphological plasticity and immature stages are among the many challenges to accurate identification. In addition, their small …

Acoustic Sequences In Non-Human Animals: A Tutorial Review And Prospectus, Arik Kershenbaum, Daniel T. Blumstein, Marie A. Roch, Çağlar Akçay, Gregory Backus, Mark A. Bee, Kirsten Bohn, Yan Cao, Gerald Carter, Cristiane Cäsar, Michael Coen, Stacy L. Deruiter, Laurance Doyle, Shimon Edelman, Ramon Ferreri Cancho, Todd M. Freeberg, Ellen C. Garland, Morgan Gustison, Heidi E. Harley, Chloé Huetz, Melissa Hughes, Julia Hyland Bruno, Amiyaal Ilany, Dezhe Z. Jin, Michael T. Johnson, Chenghui Ju, Jeremy Karnowski, Bernard Lohr, Marta B. Manser, Brenda Mccowan, Eduardo Mercado Iii, Peter M. Narins, Alex Piel, Megan Rice, Roberta Salmi, Kazutoshi Sasahara, Laela Sayigh, Yu Shiu, Charles Taylor, Edgar E. Vallejo, Sara Waller, Veronica Zamora Gutierrez

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Animal acoustic communication often takes the form of complex sequences, made up of multiple distinct acoustic units. Apart from the well-known example of birdsong, other animals such as insects, amphibians, and mammals (including bats, rodents, primates, and cetaceans) also generate complex acoustic sequences. Occasionally, such as with birdsong, the adaptive role of these sequences seems clear (e.g. mate attraction and territorial defence). More often however, researchers have only begun to characterise – let alone understand – the significance and meaning of acoustic sequences. Hypotheses abound, but there is little agreement as to how sequences should be defined and analysed. Our …

My News

My News (2014-2020)

• Pulitzer Prize winner Jose Antonio Vargas to discuss immigration
• Learn about the newest Eagles at the National Signing Day Event Feb. 3
• Research Symposium 2016 now accepting submissions
• Sankofa African­American Museum visits the Union
• Award­winning journalists discuss 'Voting as an Informed Citizen' at Georgia Southern

The Gĩkũyũ Mũtũrĩrũ: Preserving A Piece Of Kenya's Agrarian Past Through Flute Music, Jennifer Larue

Masters Theses

The Agĩkũyũ people of Kenya are one of the largest people groups in Kenya. However, systematic repression of Gĩkũyũ culture led to many traditional elements being forgotten, put aside, if not lost completely. The mũtũrĩrũ, a bark flute used when herding and in certain ritual dances, was one such element. The mũtũrĩrũ was initially a temporary instrument, which evolved into more permanent bamboo versions. These may have between two and six finger holes. Another version, called a "spider web mũtũrĩrũ" has no finger holes but has a paper membrane over one end to create a buzzing timbre effect. Research was …

Can People Successfully Return To Nature?, Nicholas A. Sollogub

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout the course of human history, people have not only survived but thrived through their intimate knowledge of the land that they occupy. This not only includes the ability to procure food and the materials to build a shelter or tools, but it also contains the information that kept them safe from predators and other natural elements that surrounded them. The Industrial Revolution brought about many changes. People began to leave their rural lifestyles and migrate to cities in large numbers. With technologies and urbanization increasing, people became more and more distant from food production activities. Basic necessities, such as …

Exploring The Uses Of Cultural Funds Of Knowledge Among Ethnic Minority Immigrant College Students In Their Constructions Of Learning Identities Within A Collaborative Photovoice Project, Stacey Jennell Cooper

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Today’s college classrooms are distinguished by an increase in ethnic minority and immigrant student populations, yet there is little reflection of such diversity in the curriculum and teacher preparation and practice. Ethnic minority immigrant students bring with them into learning spaces much valuable cultural knowledge. If validated, this knowledge can become an essential resource from which these students can draw in creating their learning identities and goals.

This study explored how a group of ethnic minority immigrant community college students created potential identities in relation to learning by drawing on their culturally and historically informed funds of knowledge, including values, …

Occupy Citizenry: Participatory Performance In New York City: 2009-2015, Kenn Dixon Watt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Occupying Citizenry: Participatory Performances in New York City, 2009

'2015

Kenn Watt

Advisor: Prof. Jean Graham-Jones

This dissertation examines participatory aesthetics and their realization in various examples of contemporary performance. I examine a range of performance modalities, and discuss examples from military, civic, and environmentally themed work by the following New York City'based artists: International WOW Company, Aaron Landsman, and Natalie Jeremijenko and the Environmental Health Clinic. The performances took place throughout 2009'13 and involved my immersive research as both audience member and as a member of the team documenting each performance. The study examines the implicit performance 'contracts' established …

Connectivity: An Ecological Paradigm For The Study Of Bronze Age, Slobodan Mitrović

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Connectivity: an ecological paradigm for the study of Bronze Age” addresses the relationship between historic and prehistoric people, and the landscapes they inhabited, moved about, and continue to inhabit. It suggests alternative methodological approaches that have broader ramifications for the discipline of (Bronze Age) archaeology. By engaging the code and innovations stemming from ecology and digital technology, the research questions concern the interface – referred to as connectivity – between the archaeological sites, resources, networks of communication, and the conditions of archaeological knowledge acquisition. Drawing on published and new data, the aim of the project is to put forward a …

The Photographic Universe: Vilém Flusser’S Theories Of Photography, Media, And Digital Culture, Martha Schwendener

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite accelerated changes in the way we create, view, and experience photographs, critics and scholars in North America continue to read and assign an accepted canon of photography theory, often predicated on old concepts and technologies. This dissertation seeks to remedy that situation. It focuses on the work of Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920-1991), author of such books as Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), and Does Writing Have a Future? (1987), which develop a theory of technical images that reaches beyond photography to include film, television, video, computer, and satellite images. Rather …

Empowerment From Within: Supporting Palestinian Women’S Struggle Against Violence, Ortal Bensky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent reports by the United Nations and local non-governmental organizations present a troubling increase in incidents of violence against Palestinian women in Palestine. These are cases of domestic violence, where the attackers are Palestinians, and political violence, where the attackers are Israeli settlers and soldiers. These violent incidents include attacks on body and property. Most incidents are neither dealt with by the Palestinian authorities nor by the Israeli government and judicial system. There is not sufficient international pressure to enforce justice. The purpose of this study is to offer alternative ways to prevent violent crimes, enforce relevant laws, and provide …

Voicing The Other: Mock Aave On Social Media, Hanna L. Smokoski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project looks at the use on social media sites of features of African American Vernacular English by nonspeakers of it. This outgroup use of AAVE does not require nor reflect any true proficiency with the variety, but instead is often used to exaggerate the social distance between the stylizers using it on social media and the marginalized people for whom AAVE is a genuine mode of communication. Through double indexicality, nonspeakers of AAVE use features of it to annex certain positive qualities associated with Black or hip hop culture—toughness, coolness, an anti-establishment stance—for themselves, while reproducing negative stereotypes of …

From Coercion To Consent?: Governing The Formerly Incarcerated In The 21st Century United States, Karen G. Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With over 650,000 incarcerated people returning to their home communities each year, prisoner reentry reform has recently become as an important strand of penal policy innovation intended to address the barriers that former offenders face. Through ethnographic research in four correctional institutions in the Midwest, I trace the use of evidence-based practices and policies as they relate to prisoner reentry and risk reduction. This dissertation intervenes in the debates on mass incarceration and prisoner reentry and offers insights on how evidence-based practices and policies are being mobilized to mitigate the costs of mass incarceration. I show how the scientization of …

Millets From The Margins: Value, Knowledge And The Subaltern Practice Of Biodiversity In Uttarakhand, India, Priya R. Chandrasekaran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Millets from the Margins: Value, Knowledge and the Subaltern Practice of Biodiversity in Uttarakhand, India analyzes what is at stake for small-scale, predominantly women, farmers as local varieties of rainfed food grains such as finger millet are being newly commodified and valued as a biodiversity resource. With support from a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation, I conducted seventeen months of ethnographic research with farmers, activists, scientists, NGO leaders, government officials, transnational functionaries and agribusiness representatives in segregated yet interconnected realms ranging from a village in the Himalayan foothills to transnational institutions in Rome.

This work demonstrates …

This Species Of Property: Slavery And The Properties Of Subjecthood In Anglo-American Law And Politics, 1619-1783, John N. Blanton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This Species of Property examines the development of the law and practice of slavery in the 17^th and 18^th century Anglo-American empire through analysis of common law court decisions in England, Massachusetts, and Virginia. The dissertation argues that there was a long and vibrant debate over the legitimacy of the chattel principle – the definition of enslaved persons as a type of property – and that enslaved people and their allies pushed for the recognition of the legal humanity or subjecthood of the enslaved in colonial and metropolitan courts. This antislavery legal tradition culminated in the famous Somerset …

When Human-Leopard Conflict Turns Deadly: A Cross-Country Situational Analysis, Julie S. Viollaz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Habitat destruction and pollution are two of the main causes for the decline of the planet’s biodiversity. Yet environmentalists are now recognizing that illegal wildlife killings, both poaching and retaliatory killings due to human-wildlife conflict, are perhaps the next major threat. Biologists have researched illegal killings and their effect on species conservation, but few researchers have applied criminological principles of crime reduction to them. This research will explore the situational factors that drive retaliatory leopard killings in parts of South Africa, Kenya, and India. These factors, human and environmental, include local expectations from wildlife, sensitivity to environmental issues, communication between …

Republicans, Citizens, And Wards: Indian Voting In New Mexico And Arizona, 1598—1912, Maurice Crandall

History ETDs

The Spanish settlers and friars who came to colonize the Indigenous nations of the Southwest Borderlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought with them distinct ideas of voting, town governance, and citizenship. Wary of dealings with large cadres of traditional village elders, they sought to implement a streamlined system of Indian town government whereby an Indigenous electorate voted for a governor, lieutenant governor, and other town officers. Spain hoped that these semi-autonomous communities, known as repúblicas de indios, or Indian republics, would eventually result in tax-paying citizens at the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona, the mission communities of …

Commemorating Controversy: Place-Making At The Birthplace Of The Bomb, Ellen D. Mcgehee

History ETDs

In early 1943, the U.S. governments Manhattan Project built a secret laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, for a single military purpose—to develop the world's first atomic weapons. Today, the remaining places and spaces of the bomb at Los Alamos are being preserved for future generations through their inclusion in the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, a unique partnership between the Department of Energy, which will continue to own and manage its wartime properties located 'behind the fence,' and the Department of Interior's National Park Service, which will take the lead on interpreting the complex history and continuing legacy of …

The Rio Chama Basin: A Social-Ecological History Linking Culture And Nature, Sam Markwell, José A. Rivera, Moises Gonzales, J. Jarrett García

The Rio Chama Basin: Land, Water and Community

This monograph of the Rio Chama basin in northern New Mexico resulted from a larger project awarded to New Mexico State University by the National Science Foundation, Dynamics of Coupled Natural-Human Systems Program. The project was titled: Acequia Water Systems Linking Culture and Nature—An Integrated Analysis of Community Resilience to Climate and Land Use Changes. The grant was made to New Mexico State University with a sub-award to the Center for Regional Studies (CRS) at the University of New Mexico (UNM). As part of the multidisciplinary research team, the CRS investigators selected the Rio Chama watershed as a study area …

Anxious Dwellers: Housing, Labor And The Potentiality Of Tanks In Nahda, Marwa Sabah

Theses and Dissertations

The neoliberal reconfiguration of the Egyptian metropolis of Cairo has rendered the lives of the working poor in informal and destitute urban neighborhoods precarious. Over the past thirty years many of these families and communities have been resettled to new neighborhoods in desert peripheries of the city. This thesis focuses on the everyday lives of women and their networks that have been relocated to Nahda, arguably one of the most targeted neighborhoods in Cairo for relocated and displaced communities. Resettlement is a costly process especially for the working poor who not only have to deal with the physical and emotional …

Lacking A Self(Ie): "Apps" Of Desire In Virtual Cairo, Fernando Revelo La Rotta

Theses and Dissertations

This project explores through an unconventional assemblage of methods and theories the role of selfies in the contemporary process of subjectivation. Relying on an ethnographic methodology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and queer theory, this project explore three virtual spaces where selfies live (Instagram, Tinder, and Grindr) and how selfies circulate through the circuits of desire facilitated by the technological interface. The goal of this project is to remind us that there is no essential self and to question such an assumption in any project. Therefore, this project is not invested in discovering the truth about ourselves, the other, or a specific imagined …

Analysis Of The D1s80 Vntr Locus Polymorphism In The Nubian Population, Soha Rabie Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations

D1S80 (1p35-p36), variable Number of tandem repeat (VNTR,) is a minisatellite molecular genetic marker. It is known by its high polymorphism that makes it a powerful marker in the forensic applications, paternity testing, and evolutionary studies. Hypervariable D1S80 locus has been applied to study the genetic structure of the Nubian population in Southern Egypt. PCR has been applied for repeats amplification and analyzed on 2% agarose gel. 75 genotypes and 36 alleles with their frequencies were detected for 105 unrelated individuals. Allele 27 has the highest frequency 0.119% followed by allele 26 with frequency 0.09%. Heterozygosity was calculated as 0.69%. …

Memories And The Everyday: An Ethnography Of A Polish-Egyptian Family, Ola Kamal

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is premised on autoethnographic research in mapping and tracing the social. The thesis suggests and explores the elements of the past playing a role in the construction of the subject throughout the everyday, allowing for various ways for creating oneself and reassembling one’s paths. The thesis reflects on the workings of memory and constructions of narratives in creating the social. My case study is my family, which is a Polish-Egyptian family. The main concepts in my autoethnography center around the issues connected to the intertwined relation between the past, present and future, the everyday, and subject formation. Through …

We Live Like Khayalat (Scarecrows): An Ethnography Of A Palestinian Village In Egypt, Amal Adel Abdrabo

Theses and Dissertations

Based on my preliminary research on the literature, I can argue that this is the first ethnographic study of the social life of the village of Jazirat Fadil and its inhabitants. Jazirat Fadil is a Palestinian village of about 5,000 people who have lived in Egypt since 1948. The village is precisely located in Al-Sharqiya province about 150 kilometers (93 miles) east of Cairo. The village has hosted scattered Palestinian refugees who fled their home village of Beersheba (Byr Sab' / Ba'ar Sab') after the 1948 exodus. There are no official records of the number of inhabitants in the village …

Radicalization Of Zaydi Reform Attempts, Maysaa Shuja Al Deen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is studying the development of the Zaydi doctrine in order to understand the reasons of emerging the Zaydi radical group, the Houthis. The studies about Zaydism are few, since it is a doctrine that only exists in Yemen, so it is considered a doctrine of a minor group. The studies about the contemporary Zaydism are much fewer, which leads to misunderstand the Houthi phenomenon. Zaydism has a long history in Yemen and the Zaydi Imamate controlled Yemen or the northern parts of Yemen for hundreds years. Therefore, the overthrow of the Imamate in 1962 and the establishment of …

Introducing Entrepreneurship Into The Public University Scheme In Egypt, Ahmed Abbas

Theses and Dissertations

The overall study of available literature regarding entrepreneurship in Egypt reveals several gaps and barriers in the ecosystem. Human Capital represented in: education institutions, availability of skilled labor, and culture norms come at the forefront. Absence of entrepreneurship in the educational curricula in schools and most universities is a contributing factor of t the lagging entrepreneurship activities. This research investigates, explains and analyzes the existing situation of entrepreneurship, specifically social entrepreneurship in colleges of commerce in Egyptian public universities. Colleges of commerce are chosen for being the natural home of entrepreneurship education. Description and evaluation of the status quo are …

The University Of San Francisco Fact Book And Almanac 2016, Alan Ziajka

USF Fact Book and Almanac

No abstract provided.

Admissions Report - Detailed Data - January 2016, Office Of Institutional Research & Effectiveness, Wright State University

Admissions Reports

Detailed report of applicants to Wright State including data on county of residency, intended major, and ethnicity for Fall Semester 2015.