Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

An Examination Of Scientific And Technical Communication For Forensic Engineering And Forensic Pathology., Tori C. Reeder

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Police communication sits at the unique intersection of risk communication, scientific and technical communication, and medical communication, as we see in forensic reports. In this dissertation, I examine the communicative underpinnings of forensic pathology and forensic engineering reports. I argue that there is not only an inherent link between the unpredictability of a written text and the reception of said text by both its intended and unintended audience, but also a link to the broader socio-cultural contexts. I will examine an atypical forensic pathology report (autopsy report) of George Floyd, a more standard forensic pathology report of an inmate who …

The Implications Of Waste Streams At Camp Au Train, Timothy J. Maze

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Archaeological remains from Camp Au Train provide an opportunity to understand sanitation methods during its use as a Civilian Conservation Corps camp and later used to house German Prisoners of War during World War II. Seven refuse features from this camp were excavated and their contents linked to functional locations within the camp in order to reconstruct waste streams across the site and to observe how military aspects of sanitation were implemented by an organization infamous for its emphasis on cleanliness, order, and hygiene. While the importance of sanitation is often mentioned by historians and archaeologists in research of these …

The Rhetorical Art Of Risk Assessment: Lessons From Risk Management In Rural And Tribal Communities, John L. Velat

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Risk assessment, mitigation, and communication rely on data from multiple sources to form a complete understanding of hazards and how to manage them. Experts can use these data to make informed decisions about the nature and extent of risks and inform the public to protect health, the environment, and economic welfare. However, in an effort to objectively make decisions, technical experts and policymakers increasingly rely on quantitative data as the most important determiner of risk, which can alienate the public, limit risk understanding, and delay or miss obvious signals of impending catastrophe. I examine several cases based on my experiences …

Rhetoric Of Surrogacy: Re-Considering Agency Through Embodied Performance, Ann Kitalong-Will

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Surrogacy as a medical practice goes back, in a practical sense, to 1988, when the court case, “In the Matter of Baby M, A Pseudonym for an Actual Person,” was tried in the Supreme Court of New Jersey. At the heart of the issue, was the question of who Baby M’s legally-recognized mother was in the relationship between the contracting parents and the woman who gestated and gave birth to Baby M. Using this case as a jumping off point, this dissertation traces a history of surrogacy as a global industry. This project explores rhetorical agency in the embodied performance …

Understanding Socio-Technological Systems Change Through An Indigenous Community-Based Participatory Framework, Marie Schaefer, Laura Schmitt Olabisi, Kristin Arola, Christie M. Poitra, Elise Matz, Marika Seigel, Chelsea Schelly, Adewale Aremu Adesanya, Doug Bessette

Michigan Tech Publications

Moving toward a sustainable global society requires substantial change in both social and technological systems. This sustainability is dependent not only on addressing the environmental impacts of current social and technological systems, but also on addressing the social, economic and political harms that continue to be perpetuated through systematic forms of oppression and the exclusion of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities. To adequately identify and address these harms, we argue that scientists, practitioners, and communities need a transdis-ciplinary framework that integrates multiple types of knowledge, in particular, Indigenous and experiential knowledge. Indigenous knowledge systems embrace relationality and …

Expatriate Middle Eastern Muslim Mothers’ Stories About Sex Education In U.S. Schools: Communication Privacy Challenges And Narrative Typologies, Nada Alfeir

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This study examines the stories of expatriate Middle Eastern Muslim (EMEM) mothers in the U.S. about how they talked with their children about the sexual education classes offered in U.S. public schools. Three concepts from the Communication Privacy Management theory (CPM; Petronio, 2002) were adapted to an interpretive narrative perspective drawn on Frank's (2013) typology of narrative types. A total of 15 EMEM mothers who had lived for more than one year in the U.S. were recruited in the study. Qualitative data were collected through written stories and interviews, and supplemented by the author's observations. All written stories and interviews …

The Motivation To Volunteer: Understanding Volunteer Motivation At United States Industrial Heritage Museums And Organizations, Cooper Sheldon

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Industrial Heritage Museums and Organizations (IHMOs) in the United States (US) and their volunteers are underrepresented in the literature on volunteerism. The motivation and demographics of volunteers in IHMOs within the US are examined in this paper. Research into this topic is exploratory and little is known, therefore any hypothesis was based on personal observations as an AmeriCorps VISTA member in a variety of US museums. An online survey was sent out to three hundred and eighty-five museums across the US, along with conducting twelve in-person or over-the-phone interviews with museum practitioners and volunteers. This research found that a majority …

Paul Robeson, Carnival, And The 2018 National Eisteddfod, Mark Rhodes

Michigan Tech Publications

No abstract provided.

American Influences At The National Eisteddfod, Mark Rhodes

Michigan Tech Publications

No abstract provided.

Quantifying Water Recharge And Water Use In Hand Dug Wells: A Case Study Of Thiawor, Senegal, West Africa, Celine Carus

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

For many rural communities in Senegal, water is an essential life-giving need received only through a network of hand dug wells. Increasing rainfall variability in the Sahel has driven greater water insecurity for those communities that rely on rain-irrigated systems for agriculture. This study investigates the retrieval, purposes, and quantities of seasonal water usage on a small domestic scale, as well as an analysis of perceived water availability in the wells during the rainy season. Additionally, using a combination of interview data and pumping test data obtained from the village wells, water usage and estimated daily needs are calculated and …

Historic Resources Study Of Pullman National Monument, Illinois, Laura Walikainen Rouleau, Sarah Fayen Scarlett, Steven A. Walton, Timothy Scarlett

Michigan Tech Publications

This Historic Resource Study is a Baseline Research Report for Pullman National Monument. This HRS summarizes the historical writings about Pullman, provides context for the significant themes identified in its founding document, collates collections of primary documents and historical resources that are important sources of information on those themes, and recommends questions that will require additional study. These cultural resources include primary historical materials in archives and oral history collections, as well as architectural, archaeological, museum collections, or landscape resources. While this report includes new historical narrative based in original archival research, other sections present synthetic reviews of existing publications. …

Towards Quantifiable Metrics Warranting Industry-Wide Corporate Death Penalties, Joshua M. Pearce

Department of Materials Science and Engineering Publications

In the singular search for profits, some corporations inadvertently kill humans. If this routinely occurs throughout an industry, it may no longer serve a net positive social purpose for society and should be eliminated. This article provides a path to an objective quantifiable metric for determining when an entire industry warrants the corporate death penalty. First, a theoretical foundation is developed with minimum assumptions necessary to provide evidence for corporate public purposes. This is formed into an objective quantifiable metric with publicly-available data and applied to two case studies in the U.S.: the tobacco and coal mining industries. The results …

A Critical Review Of Current Approaches And Practices In Computing Ethics Education, Sophia Farquhar

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Recent scandals caused by the results of negligent, malicious, or shortsighted software development practices highlight the need for software developers to consider the ethical implications of their work. Computing ethics has historically been a marginalized area within computing disciplines, so educators in these disciplines do not have a common background for teaching the topic. Computing ethics education, although often a required part of coursework, can vary widely in the method of implementation from university to university.

In this report I summarize the insights I gained from interviewing four educators from three different institutions on their pedagogical approaches to computing ethics. …

The Archaeology Of The Postindustrial: Spatial Data Infrastructures For Studying The Past In The Present, Daniel Trepal

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Postindustrial urban landscapes are large-scale, complex manifestations of the past in the present in the form of industrial ruins and archaeological sites, decaying infrastructure, and adaptive reuse; ongoing processes of postindustrial redevelopment often conspire to conceal the toxic consequences of long-term industrial activity. Understanding these phenomena is an essential step in building a sustainable future; despite this, the study of the postindustrial is still new, and requires interdisciplinary connections that remain either unexplored or underexplored. Archaeologists have begun to turn their attention to the modern industrial era and beyond. This focus carries the potential to deliver new understandings of the …

Gendered Recreational Fisheries Management And North American Natural Resource Policy, Erin Burkett

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This dissertation applies feminist theory to investigate women’s participation in wildlife-based recreation and how natural resource management organizations conduct stakeholder engagement in a North American context. Gendered social processes, including norms and expectations, as well as gendered cultures, can constrain women’s participation in recreation through social sanctions and disenfranchisement. Gender and leisure scholars have studied these dynamics in sport and leisure contexts, but how individuals negotiate these constraints is understudied in a wildlife-based recreation context. Social constructions of gender also contribute to imbalances of power within formal natural resource management organizations and influence how stakeholder engagement policies and programs are …

The Implications Of Science And Technology For Chinese Women: A Cultural Study Of The Chinese Era Of Reforms, Wenjing Liu

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the gendered implications of science and technology in the era of reforms. It argues that in this era, which began in 1978 and continues today, science and technology are highly romanticized as nearly omnipotent. This results in its being embedded not only into ordinary Chinese people’s lives, hoping to bring them positive changes, but also into the Chinese government’s political practices, hoping to achieve its political purposes through science and technology. It also points out that in the era of reforms, Chinese women’s lived experiences are full of tensions, struggles, and conflicts, as evidenced by the …

Interactive Sonification Strategies For The Motion And Emotion Of Dance Performances, Steven Landry

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The Immersive Interactive SOnification Platform, or iISoP for short, is a research platform for the creation of novel multimedia art, as well as exploratory research in the fields of sonification, affective computing, and gesture-based user interfaces. The goal of the iISoP’s dancer sonification system is to “sonify the motion and emotion” of a dance performance via musical auditory display. An additional goal of this dissertation is to develop and evaluate musical strategies for adding layer of emotional mappings to data sonification. The result of the series of dancer sonification design exercises led to the development of a novel musical sonification …

4b1: Recalling The Trenches From The Club Window: Contrasting Perspectives In Dorothy Sayers And P.G. Wodehouse, Laura Fiss

Proceedings of Armistice & Aftermath: A World War I Symposium

Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) and P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) provide contrasting approaches to the aftermath of World War I within British middlebrow fiction. Both, however, use the institution of London social clubs for gentlemen as a tool for thinking through the consequences of the war for the Victorian social order. Despite its origins in late-seventeenth-century coffeehouses and chocolate houses, the club saw great growth and solidification in the Victorian period, in part as a buttress against the increasing forces of social democratization (Reform, Emancipation, and growing rights for women, for instance). In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the New …

4b3: ‘This Mad Brute’: Postwar Male Violence And The Pathological Public Sphere, Rebecca Frost

Proceedings of Armistice & Aftermath: A World War I Symposium

War provides a space for state-sponsored expressions of violence encouraged – or at least allowed – within the public sphere. During WWI, returning soldiers were welcomed and generally hailed as heroes, especially in comparison with more recent conflicts. Men on the front lines were faced not only with rifles, machine guns, and mortars, but also the effects of poison gas. Such violence and images of ripped and torn bodies were an expected part of a soldier’s life. This daily exposure and indeed the mass media reports on what was happening on the front play into Mark Seltzer’s pathological public sphere …

4b2: Men, Military, And The Law: An Examination Of Conscription During World War I And Its Legal Challenges, Victoria Stewart

Proceedings of Armistice & Aftermath: A World War I Symposium

As in the case of the American Civil War, conscription was implemented during World War I to serve the military needs of the nation. As voluntary enlistment had again decreased, the US Congress responded with another conscription bill to institute another federally controlled system of conscription to require the service of America’s male population. Republican Representative Julius Kahn introduced the Selective Service Act. A conscription call, and registration for conscription, would be a joint effort by the US Congress and President Woodrow Wilson. The members of Congress, that supported conscription, expressed their belief that men were required to serve the …

4a1: The Great War And Modern Homosexuality: Transatlantic Crossings, Chet Defonso

Proceedings of Armistice & Aftermath: A World War I Symposium

World War I had a deep impact upon the development of gender relationships in the Western World, and was especially significant in the way that it fostered the development of homosocial and homosexual identities among its participants. Many men and women who were involved in the war effort formed profoundly deep emotional and physical same-gender relationships that were perceived either at the time or later as homosexual. Observers and participants alike have attested that World War I encouraged a kind of incipient “gay solidarity” among some of its survivors - for example the British war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon …

3a2: American Chemical Companies: World War I And Beyond, Jason Szilagyi

Proceedings of Armistice & Aftermath: A World War I Symposium

The First World War created a relationship between the United States military and American chemical manufacturers that would have an enormous influence on how private companies impacted both the civilian and military lifestyles over the next century. By the time the United States entered the conflict, the government had already asked many companies to shift towards weapons production.

The relationship between private business and war has a long pedigree in military history. Companies were contracted to produce clothes, boots, weapons, food, and medicine in order to keep a nation’s military on the battlefield. With the world-spanning scale of the Great …

3b2: The Allied Expositionary Forces: From Encouragement To Commemoration Of Wwi, Steven A. Walton

Proceedings of Armistice & Aftermath: A World War I Symposium

Most people pass war memorials in their own town or while on the road with relatively little thought, though likely with reverence for those that include soldiers names of those who died or perhaps excitement and pride for those that include military hardware, such as cannon, aircraft, or tanks. Some may see trophies in particular and smile with patriotic/nationalistic pride or frown with disapproval (also patriotic in its won way). War memorials and trophies can be found in town squares and city halls, cemeteries, airports, at and VFW or Legion halls. Each combination of statue or trophy, with or without …

3b1: ‘Your Duty On Display’: The Allied War Exhibition In Chicago, The State Council Of Defense, And The Role Of The State In Defining American Identity, Josh Fulton

Proceedings of Armistice & Aftermath: A World War I Symposium

Held in Chicago from September 2-15, 1918; the Allied War Exhibition represented the apogee of public patriotism and state activism on the homefront during the [rst world war. Overseen by the State Council of Defense of Illinois, the event brought together federal, state and local government agencies, private organizations and citizens groups to give Chicagoans a chance not only to see soldiers re-enact battles, but learn the myriad of ways in which they could contribute to the war effort. Founded in Chicago the year before, the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI) provided war films displayed nightly, and curated much …

3b3: Wwi Propaganda Poster Fluidity, Sarah Price

Proceedings of Armistice & Aftermath: A World War I Symposium

This paper will reUect a summer's work with Dr. Jessy Ohl at the University of Alabama, digitizing, analyzing, and dissecting a newly discovered collection of 130 World War I propaganda posters in the University of Alabama special collections This summer, we will be developing an immersive, multi-media platform in order to illustrate the full historical context and consciousness surrounding these images. For this paper, we will focus on the narrative of androgyny created through the representations within these posters, looking specifically at the fluidity of gender created by the shifting of professions, and the depictions of men and women within …

3a1: Electrical Communications Impacts During The Great War And Impacts On The Interwar Period, Martha Sloan

Proceedings of Armistice & Aftermath: A World War I Symposium

Technologies often change more rapidly during wars than during peacetime, as evidenced in the first half of the twentieth century. While the nineteenth century had seen major developments in mechanical engineering with the steam engine and its impact on industries and transportation, the twentieth century became the electrical century, notably for improved communications. Telephone and telegraph, established in the nineteenth century, were effective in WWI, a static war in which fixed lines and telegraph sufficed for connections between trenches, and telephones and telegraph for status reports or orders among military organizations. As the role of aviation changed from spotting to …

2a2: 'Lest We Forget': Remembering World War I In Wisconsin, 1919-1945, Leslie Bellais

Proceedings of Armistice & Aftermath: A World War I Symposium

Wisconsin had a rough few years during World War I. By the summer of 1917, newspaper editors from around the country questioned the state’s patriotism and even labeled it a “traitor state.” This reputation chagrined scores of Wisconsin’s prominent men and many of them immediately took to avenging the state’s name. They knew why their state looked like a potential hotbed of treason from afar: outspoken national representatives from the state, especially Senator Robert La Follette, had taken unpatriotic stances regarding the war, its significant Socialist population had not backed President Wilson or Congress’s declaration of war, and a politically …

2b1: An American Abroad: Perceptions Of Americans In Buchan's Wwi Thriller, Greenmantle, Peter Faziani

Proceedings of Armistice & Aftermath: A World War I Symposium

This talk will examine John Buchan’s presentation of American involvement in his World War I adventure novels, specifically his 1916 Greenmantle, to demonstrate that Buchan’s popular novels reinforced a notion of ideological power of Americans as uninvolved in the First World War. Considered the precursor to modern spy and thriller fiction, Buchan’s adventures often found British amateur spy, Richard Hannay, in the thick of some mysterious war-time plot to attack England. In his second Hannay novel, Greenmantle, Buchan’s plot is taken to Turkey to successfully decipher the code of Greenmantle after failing to prevent the on-set of the First World …

1a3: Population, The Lessons Of War, And The Promise Of Peace, Kathleen Tobin

Proceedings of Armistice & Aftermath: A World War I Symposium

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, new teachings on Malthusianism emerged. These were founded on the Essays on Population (1798-1826) by Thomas Malthus, which warned that while population grew geometrically the earth’s resources grew only arithmetically. As a result, overpopulation was inevitable and could be checked only by famine, disease, or war. He did not advocate birth control, but by 1900 many others did. Between 1900 and 1914, neo-Malthusians and birth control activists joined efforts and much of their work reacted on growing militarism in Western Europe and the United States. They continued to write during the …

1b3: Propaganda As Public Relations Antecedent: The Complex Legacy Of The Creel Commission, Christopher Mccollough

Proceedings of Armistice & Aftermath: A World War I Symposium

Scholars have documented the impact of the Creel Commission on modern war correspondence (Lippmann, 1922; St. John, 2009a, 2009b, 2011), military censorship (Lippmann, 1922, Gitlin, 1986), political communication (Bernays, 1923, 1928), advertising (Bernays, 1942; Collins, 1993, 2001), and modern public relations (DeSanto, 2000; Myers, 2015). Their efforts in propaganda helped reposition public opposition to public support for the American War effort and for the Armistice from 1916-1919 through the use of print media, music, art, and other popular sources of information, entertainment, and culture of the period. Edward Bernays (1923, 1928) discusses the inauence of his work as part of …