Digital Commons Network^™

Eating Your Greens: Community Gardens And Gentrification In Oakland, Nicholas C. Felicich

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The issue of gentrification is paramount to the viability of poor and at risk communities in Oakland. Literature on gentrification has historically focused on larger societal and economic movements, but little has been studied about the role planned green space and gardens play in the spatial transformation of the urban environment. In this case study of two gardens in West Oakland, I explore questions of community involvement in the gardens, the role of garden aesthetics in attracting development and new residents to the neighborhood, the unique relationship between the City government and the gardens, the larger symbolic significance of green …

Listening To The Mattole: Lessons In Bioregionalism, Cannabis, And Capitalism From A Northern California Community, Nicola R. Walters

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In the United States, from the 1960s through the 1970s, nearly a million Americans left urban areas to establish themselves in rural environments; this exodus is now known as the back-to-the-land movement. Nestled in the mountains of Northern California, along a capricious river, and surrounded by natural beauty, the Mattole Valley became home to many of these back-to-the-land immigrants. Seasoned in the social and cultural movements of Berkeley and San Francisco during the 1960s, the “new settlers” transformed the social and environmental landscape of southern Humboldt County as they integrated into rural communities. The Mattole Valley offers a unique look …

A "Dying Breed"? Exploring Logger Identity After The Decline In The Timber Industry In Hayfork, Ca, Sheri L. Harrison

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The rapid decline of timber operations in the late twentieth century had an immense impact on rural communities whose economy was dependent on logging and lumber mills. The voices and concerns of timber-dependent communities and timber workers have been marginalized by broader forces that focused on political, economic, and environmental issues throughout the Pacific Northwest timber conflict and the subsequent deindustrialization of the timber industry. This study examines the social impacts on loggers, their families, and the broader community in Hayfork, California, through the framework of identity theory. The formation of logger identity and the broader processes that have impacted …

A State-Level Carbon Tax With Border Adjustments, David Gamage, Darien Shanske

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This essay develops three new doctrinal arguments in support of the conclusion that a state-level carbon tax with border adjustments should be permissible under the dormant commerce clause. This essay builds on our prior work to argue against the view that a single state cannot (practically) impose a significant carbon tax due to the claim that border tax adjustments are Constitutionally impermissible. By demonstrating how a state government could implement a carbon tax with border tax adjustments in a Constitutionally permissible fashion, this essay shows that levying a carbon tax is a realistic and practical option for U.S. state governments. …

Descendants Of Abraham: A Comparative Approach To Jewish And Islamic Rhetorics, Brandon Katzir

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Descendants of Abraham: A Comparative Approach to Jewish and Islamic Rhetorics provides two important correctives to modern scholarship. It emphasizes the importance of Jewish and Islamic rhetorics typically neglected by Western-centric historians of rhetoric, and it showcases the cultural relationship between Jews and Muslims that has been typically occluded by modern scholarship. Focusing on the early Islamic world, I demonstrate instantiations of interconnectivity between Jewish and Islamic rhetoric in Arabic from the 9th-12th centuries CE. Specifically, I look at how judicial rhetoric plays an important role in the adjudication of halakha and sharia, followed by a consideration of theological rhetoric …

The Fooding Of Narrative In Contemporary Women's Transnational Fiction, Stacey Marie Amo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Fooding of Narrative in Contemporary Women’s Transnational Fiction examines how foodstuffs are strategically deployed in recent fiction about migration to the United States. The novels examined, all set in the period following the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, depict the experience of resettlement from a diverse set of postcolonial sites: Haiti, Cuba, Vietnam, and India. The Fooding of Narrative argues that food is deployed as a structuring trope and acquires narrative significance in articulating the profound sense of identity crisis that frequently accompanies the immigration experience. By focusing on food’s narrative significance in a broad …

A Palynostratigraphic Investigation Of Holocene Coastal Texas Bays: Implications For Future Coastal Change, Shannon Marie Ferguson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Although the Gulf of Mexico is one of the most studied basins in the world, a majority of the focus has been driven by petroleum exploration and/or on seismic and sedimentological facies models. Rarely has the intent of previous studies been to characterize the Holocene climatic record of coastal Texas. Of those studies that discuss Holocene vegetation change, the majority focus on the Mississippi River Delta, the Edwards Plateau or central Florida, leaving an absence of insight to western Gulf of Mexico climate changes. The Texas coastline stretches 595 km across almost 4° of latitude and the strong northwestern precipitation …

Aleksander Peçi Before And After The Iron Curtain, Elida Dakoli

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Abstract This research describes the life, compositional style and works of one of the most well-known Albanian composers, Aleksander Peçi, focusing on how the political climate affected his life and his art. Several of Peçi’s techniques are examined, including Carousel structure, Cartesian Production, Kabaoisos, and Polygravité. Albanian iso-polyphony and its influence on Peçi’s work are discussed. The research was done in hopes of reaching a better understanding of the effects Communism and the subsequent period of freedom have had on Albanian music.

Digital Osteology: 3d Surface Scanning The Os Coxa, Victoria Harrington

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT This research was designed to isolate a standard 3D scanning methodology using a popular 3D scanner (NextEngine®) used in biological anthropology to reproduce research-quality human skeletal remains. Settings using NextEngine® hardware were determined through three successive studies. The first study used minimum settings to create a topography of nine postcranial bones excavated from a Maya archaeological site, Moho Cay, Belize. The research was conducted in Louisiana State University’s (LSU) Digital Imaging and Visualization in Archaeology (DIVA) Lab. The resulting 3D scans were visually compared to the original bone specimens for similarities in five categories. The similarity ratings were used …

Brazilian Surface And Upper-Level Wind Characteristics Based On Ground And Model Observations From 1980–2014, Joshua M. Gilliland

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The examination of temporal changes in surface winds has been analyzed by scientists for a variety of physical, biological, climatological, and socioeconomic reasons. This research uses surface and upper-level wind data from historical in-situ and climate models to examine the geographical and climatological characteristics of wind across Brazil during 1980–2014. Overall linear and quantile regression shows that surface wind speed trends are changing regionally across Brazil. Wind speeds across northeastern Brazil are increasing, while a decreasing trend is documented for interior and southeastern Brazil. The spatial and temporal trends found are possibly related to alterations in the physical landscape (urbanization …

Local Embeddedness Matters: A Study Of Hip-Hop Artists' Interaction With Their Local Community, Castel Vette Sweet

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation study is an exploration of hip hop and rap artists’ embeddedness in local communities, and their interpretation of the connectedness between their work and their communities. I explore the influence of place and space in the identity development of artists, and how artist use those identities to guide their interactions with their local community. I also investigate the significance of artists’ interactions and relationship in the cultivation of social and cultural capital. In contrast to previous scholarship emphasising the negative influence rap and hip-hop artists have on their communities, I utilize in-depth interviews with artists to examine the …

Crime Analysis In The City Of Baton Rouge And Brec Park Based On Crime Location Quotient And Hotspot Method, Anliu Jiang

LSU Master's Theses

City parks provide intrinsic environmental, aesthetic, and recreation benefits to our cities and their inhabitants. Some researchers indicate that City parks serve as places of reduced crime and actually increase the safety of the surrounding area. Other researchers claim that city parks have been seen as contested space. The purpose of this thesis research is to study the relationship between parks and crime or comparing crime types between parks and their cities. First, this thesis research address the difference between crimes in city parks compared to crimes in the entire city. The second research question addresses the impact that parks …

Vertebral Pathologies And Implications For Economic Lifestyle Changes In Two Prehistoric Skeletal Populations, Alyxandra Leigh Stanco

LSU Master's Theses

Little research considers the vertebral column in relation to inter-populational variation and changes in economic lifestyle. Numerous studies have been conducted regarding the influence of activity-related stress on post-cranial elements such as the knees, hips and shoulders, but few studies have considered the vertebral column. This study examined the vertebral columns of two prehistoric skeletal populations. The Indian Knoll site, home to a population of early hunter-gatherers, is located in Ohio County, Kentucky along the Green River. Indian Knoll was first excavated in 1915 by C.B. Moore. The Moundville site, a chiefdom of early agriculturalists, is located in the Black …

Pronoun Marking In African American English-Speaking Children With And Without Specific Language Impairment, Gayatri Ramamoorthy Brown

LSU Master's Theses

The present study was designed to describe and quantify patterns of pronoun use by African American English (AAE)-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) relative to their AAE-speaking typically developing (TD) peers. Pronouns were of interest because: they are produced frequently in everyday speech, they are often targeted when a child’s language abilities are evaluated by a speech-language pathologist, and limited pronoun data exists for AAE-speaking children. The data were language samples that had been elicited from 96 children (35 SLI, 61 TD) enrolled in kindergarten. The samples were searched for 11 different pronoun forms, and these were coded as …

Feasting In Florida: Evidence Of Swift Creek Ceremonial Feasting And Multi-Group Interactions At Byrd Hammock South (8wa30), Wakulla County, Fl, Joseph Michael O'Keefe

LSU Master's Theses

During the LSU 2015 Summer Field School at the Byrd Hammock South site (8WA30) in Wakulla County, Florida, excavations uncovered a large stratified pit-fill feature (Length 78 cm x Width 65 cm x Depth 136 cm) associated with the Early Swift Creek culture (A.D. 0 – 500). The Swift Creek have been generally identified as a transegalitarian society, and are believed to have participated in the phenomenon known as the Hopewell Interaction Sphere. The feature, Feature 1 (F1), was located approximately 60 meters south of Burial Mound B on the western edge of a semi-circular midden that surrounded a clean …

Non-Metric Cranial Differentiation Between Asian And Native American Populations For Ancestry Assessment, Dominique Marie Bodoh

LSU Master's Theses

Assessing ancestry from skeletal remains provides important information to aid in personal identification. However, trying to specify ancestry for Native American and Asian populations in the United States is a current challenge in laboratory analyses. Both Native American and Asian populations are still often combined in research for a variety of reasons: small sample sizes, skeletal similarities and less emphasis in contemporary literature. Historically, Carlton Coon, in 1939, and Riesenfield, in 1956, refer to this combination of both Native American and Asian populations as “Mongoloid,” a term which is deemed by many as an offensive and inaccurate categorization of both …

Grounds For Displacement: Issues Of Migration On Louisiana's Disappearing Coast, Jessica Rose Simms

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research inquiry engages with residents from three Louisiana parishes who have already or are currently facing possible migration decisions. The research focuses on understanding the links among the influence and mobility of three factors: social relations (i.e., faith-based networks, civic organizations, family, cultural and heritage identities, etc.), inherent resilient practices, and place, including sense of and attachment to it. It will draw from those bodies of literature as well as environmental migration literature, while underscoring that decisions of migration are influenced by environmental factors, but ultimately shaped by a complexity of often simultaneous forces, including social, political-economic, and cultural …

Corporate Masters & Low-Wage Servants: The Social Control Of Workers In Poverty, Nantiya Ruan

Scholarly Works

The Article describes and analyzes how the state’s control over low-wage workers has been relegated to private employers. While the state has historically controlled and limited the lives of poor people, today, people in poverty are subjugated through the privatizing of poverty governance by corporate masters who control the lives and shape the behaviors of their low-wage worker servants. The policies of these employers ensures that low-wage work is precarious, unpredictable, and insufficient.

This Article starts an important conversation about how today’s low-wage employers are corporate masters that control their servants through poverty-level pay and precarious positions. Work is scheduled …

A Comparative Study Of The Effects Of River Flow Rates On Decomposition, Maddisen Paige Neuman

LSU Master's Theses

While the general biological processes of decomposition are known to forensic anthropologists, data on aquatic decomposition is in need of refinement. Water composition varies in mineral content, temperature, flow rate, and scavengers; each of these elements can have an effect on the rate of decomposition. This study specifically focuses on the effects of river flow rates on decomposition by comparing the rate of decay of three feral pigs (Sus scrofa) on land (control specimen), in faster flowing water, and in slower flowing water. The hypothesis states that the pig placed in the faster section of the river will decompose more …

Reclaiming The Streets: Black Urban Insurgency And Antisocial Security In Twenty-First-Century Philadelphia, Jeff Maskovsky

Publications and Research

This article focuses on the emergence of a new pattern of black urban insurgency emerging in major US metropolitan areas such as Philadelphia. I locate this pattern in the context of a new securitization regime that I call “antisocial security.” This regime works by establishing a decentered system of high-tech forms of surveillance and monitory techniques. I highlight the dialectic between the extension of antisocial security apparatuses and techniques into new political and social domains on the one hand and the adoption of these same techniques by those contesting racialized exclusions from urban public space on the other. I end …

Innovator Or Butcher?: Herophilean Research Methods In Early Ptolemaic Alexandria, Annastasia C. Conner

University Honors Theses

In a period of Ptolemaic Alexandria that has been referred to by modern scholars as a "frontier environment" for scientific achievement and discoveries, Herophilus of Chalcedon was a leader of innovation. Religious and cultural boundaries and the presence of taboos and death-based pollution should perhaps have limited his research capabilities, but under the patronage of the ruling Ptolemaic kings (Ptolemy I Soter, and Ptolemy II Philadelphus both reigned during Herophilus' lifetime), he and his contemporaries were able to dissect and vivisect human cadavers within the pursuit of their studies. Although Herophilus' therapeutic practices largely fell within the scope of the …

Lacking Legitimacy: Neoliberal Governance And The Erosion Of Local Democracy In The United States And Argentina, Adriane Ackerman

University Honors Theses

An extension of capitalism’s relentless growth, neoliberal globalization has characterized most of the policies and practices that have proliferated between nation-states since the late 1970's, producing a "flatter" world in which spheres of influence, both economically and politically, have become inextricably interdependent. Some prominent results of this interdependence include consolidation of wealth, extreme socioeconomic stratification, greater influence of money upon politics, and deepening ideological divide within the populace. Increased sharing of the roles and responsibilities of governing with the private sector, along with increased access to information and exposure to systemic nepotism, have together undermined the sovereignty and preeminence of …

Emancipatory Rural Politics: Confronting Authoritarian Populism, Ian Scooner, Marc Edelman, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ruth Hall, Wendy Wolford, Ben White

Publications and Research

A new political moment is underway. Although there are significant differences in how this is constituted in different places, one manifestation of the new moment is the rise of distinct forms of authoritarian populism. In this opening paper of the JPS Forum series on ‘Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, we explore the relationship between these new forms of politics and rural areas around the world. We ask how rural transformations have contributed to deepening regressive national politics, and how rural areas shape and are shaped by these politics. We propose a global agenda for research, debate and action, which …

Shifting Wetland Policy And Perception In The Columbia Slough, Ryan Pemberton

Geography Masters Research Papers

On the periphery of Portland, Oregon, at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers lies an expansive wetland, the Columbia Slough. Once a thriving wetland ecosystem nineteen miles long by three miles wide, the Slough has been drained, filled, and developed into a humanized landscape. The human experience of this landscape has always been about use: people make, move, and exchange things here. Few people actually live and play in this transformed wetland, and most would consider it a featureless, polluted, and otherwise valueless landscape save for the money to be made here. Yet remnants of the old, wild …

Material Blue, Justin Winkler

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In the 1780s, de Saussure invented the cyanometer that was subsequently used by Humboldt on his research travels. It served to determine the blueness of the sky at various altitudes. This article examines the research context in which this device was used and seeks to trace an underlying aisthesis materialis (Barck). I raise the question whether this recourse to a supposed pre–art theory and aesthetic practice can help establish a better concept of the everyday aesthetics to come.

Disseminating Agriculture Information Using The Bbq Boot Camp Model, Austen John Germolus

Animal Sciences

The BBQ Boot Camp program was designed to educate consumers about agriculture production and sustainability, while teaching outdoor cooking methods with meat as the focus. Through the BBQ Boot Camp model, consumer impact was analyzed using a pre- and post-program test. The test questions focused on outdoor cooking, agriculture practices, and food safety issues. Data were collected from 3,112 attendees from 31 BBQ Boot Camps in 2009–2013. Data were analyzed using the MIXED procedure in SAS with fixed effects of year, time, age, sex, and city size (1=population>15k; 2=population between 2.5k-15k; and 3=population<2.5k) and all two-way interactions were tested and removed from the model if P>0.1. Consumer demographics included men and …

Towards An Intellectual History Of Evolutionary Economics: Competition And Struggle Versus Cooperation And Mutual Aid, John B. Hall, Svetlana Kirdina-Chandler

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Our inquiry considers the origins of Evolutionary Economics by reintroducing a debate that took place in Russia in the 19th and early 20th century. Responses to Charles Darwin’s The origin of Species are considered, especially critiques stressing Darwin’s emphasis upon competition and struggle in natural selection, that can be traced directly to Thomas Robert Malthus. Considering challenging contributions made by several Russian scholars, we place special emphasis upon Peter Kropotkin’s focus on cooperation and “mutual aid” in natural selection and evolution. We then speculate upon the commonality found in the evolutionary views advanced by Kropotkin and his American contemporary, Thorstein …

Assessing State Efforts To Integrate Transportation, Land Use And Climate, Rebecca Lewis, Robert Zako

TREC Final Reports

Climate change is increasingly recognized as a threat to life on earth. “Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems. Limiting climate change would require substantial and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” (International Panel on Climate Change, 2014, 8).

The transportation sector accounts for almost one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in the United States. Reducing GHG from transportation rests on the “three-legged stool” of improving vehicle efficiency, reducing the carbon content of fuels …

St. Johns Housing Action Plan, Jai Singh, Julia Michel, Andres Oswill, Gabriel Rousseau, Ludwig Salzmann, Eric Rutledge

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

The St. Johns Housing Action Plan (Action Plan) is designed to serve vulnerable St. Johns residents who are first to feel the impacts of increased housing costs and market pressures. It also intends to capture the support of residents who are not at risk of displacement but realize that the neighborhood change they fear is partly fueled by housing instability.

Building A Paradise? On The Quest For The Optimal Human Habitat, Anu Besson

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Do humans have a natural habitat? If yes, is it the original habitat of early hominids or the most optimal environment for today’s humans? Are these two the same thing and, if not, what does ‘optimal habitat’ mean? I examine the concept of the optimal habitat from four viewpoints: 1) paradise; 2) urban design based on environmental psychology; 3) favorite places; and 4) environment as an invitation for action. I conclude that an optimal habitat is not a collection of more or less fixed elements but an environment that can be experienced as a beneficial feedback loop based on and …