Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

“Trash Talk” - Rethinking The Notion Of Waste, Shivaangi Salhotra

Student Showcase

In the twenty-first century, waste has become a ubiquitous problem. Images of things like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch have ceased to become jarring, and pictures of overflowing landfills and statistics about plastic in the ocean have become so commonplace that they are “memed”. Yet despite increasing awareness and changes in policy, global waste production and its deleterious effects continue to rise. Dominant narratives surrounding waste tend to focus on how individuals can properly dispose of their waste, which, while certainly important, is not the full story. It doesn't question why we produce so much waste in the first place, …

Reinvigorating The Hill In Turners Falls, Ma, Patrick Burns

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Masters Projects

This masters project will focus on the site of the Hillcrest and Sheffield Elementary School campus in the "The Hill" neighborhood of Turners Falls, MA. This project aims to create a vision of possibility for an underutilized neighborhood amenity. This project reviews social, demographic, physical data of the neighborhood in Turners Falls as well as research on play, nature play, outdoor experiential learning, and the local ecology of Montague Wildlife Management area. To execute this goal, the study aims to achieve the following objectives:

• Revitalize an underutilized space into a neighborhood asset;
• Improve elementary school campus reinforcing a positive learning …

Tourism-Related Climate Change Perspectives: Social Media Conversations About Canada’S Rocky Mountain National Parks, Farshid Mirzaalian, Elizabeth Halpenny

TTRA Canada 2021 Conference

This study employed quantitative social media big data analysis in conjunction with qualitative analysis of postings to better comprehend online lay discourse of climatic change issues in a nature-based tourism destination, Jasper National Park, Canada. Such mixed methodological approaches to big data enable tourism researchers to not only study unstructured social media big data for future-proofing purposes but to address some methodological concerns often raised about solely using corpus linguistic or thematic analyzes. This study unearthed divergent themes regarding tourists’ perceptions of climate change upon visiting JNP, with the most significant discourses on climate grief, education and interpretation, pro- environmental …

Reflections On Research Relationship-Building And Partnerships In Arctic Tourism, Chris E. Hurst, Bryan S.R. Grimwood, R. Harvey Lemelin

TTRA Canada 2021 Conference

“Culturally Sensitive Tourism in the Arctic” (ARCTISEN) is a three-year, collaborative partnership involving tourism stakeholders from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark/Greenland, and Canada. The aims of the ARCTISEN project are to co-create knowledge about cultural sensitivity and build relationships that support businesses and communities in developing tourism products and services that are respectful of the Arctic’s rich natural and cultural resources (ARCTISEN, 2020). Between 2018 and 2021, project activities focused on management and communications, and three thematic work packages: 1) building understanding of culturally sensitive tourism practices, 2) enhancement of entrepreneurial capacities for culturally sensitive tourism; and 3) development of a …

When Does Fertility End? The Timing Of Tubal Ligations And Hysterectomies, And The Meaning Of Menopause, Lynnette Leidy Sievert, Laura Huicochea-Gómez, Diana Cahuich-Campos, Lynn Morrison, Daniel E. Brown

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

We applied a biocultural lens to examine the temporal order of biological, behavioral, and medical events related to fertility across the female reproductive lifespan in three sites, two in Mexico and one in the United States. Using a mixed-method design, we expanded our thinking about the end of fertility in order to examine the timing of hysterectomies and tubal ligations. We discovered that menopause is not the end of fertility for a surprisingly high number of women. Across the three sites, between 43% and 50% of women underwent tubal ligations at mean ages of 32 years (in Campeche, Mexico) and …

Women’S Workforce Participation And Spousal Violence: Insights From India, Arpita Biswas, Anjana Thampi

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Intimate partner violence is a serious form of unfreedom inflicted on women across the world. How does the incidence of such violence vary with women’s workforce participation – a factor that is supposed to enhance their economic well-being? Our study examines this relationship using a nationally representative dataset from India. Given vast heterogeneity among Indian women, we investigate how this link varies by their class and socio-religious identities. Treating women’s employment as endogenous, we find that it is associated with a significantly higher probability of reported spousal violence for women from all wealth quintiles except the topmost and across all …

The Influence Of Tourism And Amenities On Place Attachment And Entrepreneurship In Remote Communities: A Case Study Of Tofino, Bc, Sreya Kumar, Nicole L. Vaugeois

TTRA Canada 2018 Conference

This study was undertaken to provide a better understanding new migrant entrepreneurs and what attracts them to rural and remote communities. Conducted as a case study in Tofino, the study was done using mixed methods including content analysis of place based promotional tools and semi-structured interviews with a sample of new migrant entrepreneurs who had moved to the community within the past 15 years . The study found that although there were no specific place promotion efforts directed at attracting entrepreneurs, businesses were often established as an indirect outcome of promotional efforts aimed at attracting tourists via destination marketing organizations. …

Addressing The Homogeneity Dilemma By Customizing Tourism Development Supports For Rural Regions Using The Typology Of Tourism Dependence, Nicole L. Vaugeois

TTRA Canada 2018 Conference

Despite the general tendency to generalize about rural areas, they are not homogenous. Programs to support development in rural areas often tend to assume homogeneity and as such, they are often created in a “one-size fits all” approach for application by communities. This paper advocates for more customized program supports that take into account the specific needs of destinations at all stages of development. The paper presents a typology of tourism dependence that classifies rural communities into three types differentiated on their level of engagement in tourism including tourism desperate, tourism active and tourism saturated communities. The typology was based …

Enhancing Visitors Experiences At Artisan Businesses: A Case Study Of The Économusée® Business Model In British Columbia, John Predyk, Nicole L. Vaugeois

TTRA Canada 2018 Conference

ÉCONOMUSÉE© is a non-profit organization founded in 1992 in Quebec, Canada which now includes over 70 Artisans from across Canada and Europe. The model promotes the preservation of traditional knowledge and local entrepreneurship by utilizing cultural tourism to showcase artisans and encourage the consumption of locally produced artisanal products. This study was completed in order to provide data on the growth and effectiveness of the ÉCONOMUSÉE program in British Columbia since it was first introduced in 2012. This paper highlights the results of the impact of the model on overall visitor experience. At this point in time, it appears that …

Environmental Destruction In The New Economy: Offshore Finance And Mangrove Forest Clearance In Grand Cayman, Katrina Jurn, Joseph Lavallee, Lawrence P. King

PERI Working Papers

Mangrove forests, which provide critical ecosystem services in tropical and subtropical coastal regions around the world, are increasingly threatened, with total mangrove area declining from 18.8 million hectares to 15.2 million hectares globally between 1980 and 2005. Focusing on the mangrove wetlands of the Cayman Islands, we use GIS spatial analysis to document past trends and project future trends of mangrove clearance, and a near-exhaustive series of 57 interviews with key business and political figures as well as leaders of environmental NGOs to identify the social forces driving these trends. Analysis of the satellite images shows that mangrove loss on …

The Perfect Storm: Lasting Impacts Of Structural Adjustment Programs And Pressures Of Climate Change In Latin America And Ghana, Africa, Sam Kefferstan

Student Showcase

This work examines the intersectionality of economic, social and environmental impacts of the International Monetary Fund’s and World Bank’s application of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) within Latin America and Ghana, Africa. Varying economic and social indicators illustrate the underperformance of SAPs in their intended mission to reduce poverty and debt in developing nations. This research argues Gross Domestic Product is an imperfect measure of improving quality of life and points towards other indicators such as increasing national debt, rising incidences of poverty, and exacerbated regional disparities to demonstrate the shortcomings of SAPs. This piece also investigates the limitations adjustment imposes …

Caring Off The Clock: Cape Verdean Home Care Workers In Lisbon, Portugal, Celeste Curington

CHESS Student Research Reports

No abstract provided.

Gender Inequality: Nonbinary Transgender People In The Workplace, Skylar Davidson

Sociology Department Graduate Student Publication Series

This study uses the National Transgender Discrimination Survey to evaluate the employment outcomes of nonbinary transgender people (those who identify as a gender other than man or woman). Regression analyses indicate that being out as a nonbinary transgender person has different effects on nonbinary transgender people based on sex assigned at birth, with those assigned male at birth tending to be discriminated against in hiring but those assigned female at birth more likely to experience differential treatment once hired. Transgender women tend to have worse employment experiences than nonbinary transgender people and transgender men, the latter two tending to have …

Greed And Fear In Network Reciprocity: Implications For Cooperation Among Organizations, James A. Kitts, Diego F. Leal, Will Felps, Thomas M. Jones, Shawn L. Berman

Sociology Department Faculty Publication Series

Extensive interdisciplinary literatures have built on the seminal spatial dilemmas model, which depicts the evolution of cooperation on regular lattices, with strategies propagating locally by relative fitness. In this model agents may cooperate with neighbors, paying an individual cost to enhance their collective welfare, or they may exploit cooperative neighbors and diminish collective welfare. Recent research has extended the model in numerous ways, incorporating behavioral noise, implementing other network topologies or adaptive networks, and employing alternative dynamics of replication. Although the underlying dilemma arises from two distinct dimensions—the gains for exploiting cooperative partners (Greed) and the cost of cooperating with …

Municipal Guidance For Flood Emergencies In Vermont, Deborah Shriver & Windham County

Water Publications

This is a guide to provide guidance to Vermont rural communities in the Deerfield River watershed to prepare and recover from devastating floods.

Municipal Guidance For Flood Emergencies: Franklin And Berkshire Counties, Massachusetts, Deborah Shriver

Water Publications

This is a guide for rural municipalities in the Deerfield River watershed in Massachusetts about what to do to prepare and recover from devastating floods.

Women's Rights In Pakistan: The Zina Ordinance & The Need For Reform, Minah Ali Rathore

School of Public Policy Capstones

This paper will begin with a historical analysis of Pakistan with a particular focus on the pro-equality vision that Pakistan's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah had. The paper then moves on to Zia-ul-Haq's regime and the rise of Islamization under his military dictatorship. The prerequisites that allowed for Islamization to take place are also highlighted. Zia's dictatorship utilized Islam and Sharia law as a tool to introduce gender-discriminatory laws into the nation. Particular focus is paid to the Zina Ordinance and the loopholes within the ordinance that have been devastating to women's rights in the country. The paper then transcends to …

“Cheating History: Blocking A Difficult Past At The Royal Museum For Central Africa.”, Jenny Folsom

Presentations based on CHESS-sponsored Research

No abstract provided.

Beware Financialization, Attractive And Dangerous, But Mostly Dangerous, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey

Sociology Department Faculty Publication Series

One of the central projects of neoliberalism has been the financialization of the global economy. Financialization refers to both the rising political and economic power of financial service firms and the growing importance of financial, rather than production, strategies in the rest of the economy. In the US case at least, financialization also accompanied a shift from values associated with employment and production to a normative elevation of financial investment. In the US the financialization dimension of neoliberalism has increased national and global systemic risk, increased income inequality between sectors of the economy, capital and labor and among classes of …

Where Do Immigrants Fare Worse? Modeling Workplace Wage Gap Variation With Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Dustin Avent-Holt, Martin Hällsten

Sociology Department Faculty Publication Series

The authors propose a strategy for observing and explaining workplace variance in categorically linked inequalities. Using Swedish economy-wide linked employer-employee panel data, the authors examinevariationinworkplacewageinequalitiesbetweennativeSwedes and non-Western immigrants. Consistent with relational inequality theory, the authors’ findings are thatimmigrant-native wagegaps vary dramatically across workplaces, even net of strong human capital controls. The authors also find that, net of observed and fixed-effect controls for individual traits, workplace immigrant-native wage gaps decline with increased workplace immigrant employment and managerial representation and increase when job segregation rises. These results are stronger in high-inequality workplaces and for white-collar employees: contexts in which one expects status-based …

Environmental Highest Courts’ Decisions: Investigating The Factors That Influence Mining And Oil Cases In Ecuador, Nathalí Costa Unda

School of Public Policy Capstones

The present research is meant to find out some of the factors that influence the Ecuadorian Highest Courts decisions in environmental cases. For answering my research question I analyzed these decisions, from 1998 to 2014, which constitutes the whole population of the decisions in environmental cases. For the Capstone, I focused in oil and mining cases. The research required three steps. First was to collect data from the corps of decisions in the national Court cases. Second, was to design a database: create variables and a codebook to organize them. Third, was to develop an analysis model using this data …

From Indicators To Action: Evaluating The Usefulness Of Indicators To Move From Regional Climate Change Assessment To Local Adaptation Implementation, Sally Miller

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

As the effects of climate change become increasingly damaging and costly, a public and political consensus is building for planning that will protect private property and public infrastructure. Climate-related planning has primarily focused on mitigation, assessing vulnerability, and building adaptive capacity. Adaptation has not gained substantial ground in the area of implementation. The uncertainty associated with climate change projection and variability has emerged as a dominant barrier to adaptation. However, as knowledge accrues, the global and national science communities have been developing more detailed, fine-scale climate projections. Regional climate assessments are available for the sub-national climate regions in the U.S., …

Financialization And U.S. Income Inequality, 1970-2008, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Ken-Hou Lin

Sociology Department Faculty Publication Series

Focusing on U.S. nonfinance industries, we examine the connection between financialization and rising income inequality. We argue that the increasing reliance on earnings realized through financial channels decoupled the generation of surplus from production, strengthening owners’ and elite workers’ negotiating power relative to other workers. The result was an incremental exclusion of the general workforce from revenue-generating and compensation-setting processes. Using timeseries cross-section data at the industry level, we find that increasing dependence on financial income, in the long run, is associated with reducing labor’s share of income, increasing top executives’ share of compensation, and increasing earnings dispersion among workers. …

Climate Change Adaptation Chapter: Marshfield, Massachusetts, Joshua H. Chase, Jonathan G. Cooper, Rory Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Filipe Antunes Lima, Sally R. Miller, Toni Marie Pignatelli

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

Climate change, understood as a statistically significant variation in the mean state of the climate or its variability, is the greatest environmental challenge of this generation (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2001). Marshfield is already being affected by changes in the climate that will have a profound effect on the town’s economy, public health, coastal resources, natural features, water systems, and public and private infrastructure. Adaptation strategies have been widely recognized as playing an important role in improving a community’s ability to respond to climate stressors by resisting damage and recovering quickly.

Based on review of climate projections for the …

Prelude To A Master Plan: Ware, Massachusetts, Belen Alfaro, Bruno Carneiro, Margaret Engesser, Kathryn E. Fox, Evadne R. Friedman, Timothy Inacio, Anita Lockesmith, Christina Mills, Stephanie Molden, Meagen Mulherin, Russell Pandres, Vinicius Pereira, Brian Reid, Pedro Soto, Jennifer Stromsten

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

Prelude to a Master Plan offers ideas, recommendations, and a toolkit to help the town chart its own path towards that future. While the teams and individual students worked to ‘drill down’ into specific topic areas, the Studio defined three basic areas in order to think about how the various assets, challenges and ideas undermine or reinforce one another. The report is loosely organized in those terms: addressing the outlying rural areas and issues specific to these places, considering one of the key growth areas that has extended from town and the conflicts that arise from the many uses occurring …

Visual Interventions And The “Crises In Representation” In Environmental Anthropology: Researching Environmental Justice In A Hungarian Romani Neighborhood, Krista Harper

Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series

Participatory visual research, or "visual interventions" (Pink 2007) allow environmental anthropologists to respond to three different “crises of representation”: 1) the critique of ethnographic representation presented by postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist anthropologists, 2) the constructivist critique of nature and the environment, and 3) the “environmental justice” critique demanding representation for the environmental concerns of communities of color. Participatory visual research integrates community members in the process of staking out a research agenda, conducting fieldwork and interpreting data, and communicating and applying research findings. Our project used the Photovoice methodology to generate knowledge and documentation related to environment injustices faced by …

Citizens And Criminals: Mass Incarceration, "Prison Neighbors," And Fear-Based Organizing In 1980s Rural Pennsylvania, Erika Arthur

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Throughout the 1980s, the Citizens’ Advisory Committee (CAC), a grassroots group of “prison neighbors,” organized for tighter security at the State Correctional Institution at Dallas (SCID), a medium security prison in northeast Pennsylvania. Motivated primarily by their fear of prisoner escapes, the CAC used the local media to raise awareness about security concerns and cooperated with the SCID administration to acquire state funding for projects at the prison that they believed would improve security. Their work coincided with the widespread proliferation of “tough on crime” rhetoric and policies, and the inauguration of the most intensive buildup of prisons ever witnessed …

Population 7 – Lyman Street Art Intervention, Carli Foster, Elizabeth Ann Englebreston, Eric Wojtowicz, Yiwei Huang

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

POPULATION 7 started as an experiment in the fall of 2011 as an Urban Art Laboratory “Art – Place – Tour” with the vision to make a tangible impact to the culture of public art in Springfield. At first sight art seems to be not existent in the public realm. We are searching for an organic, sustainable concept with the potential to grow from inside to outside. Our goal is to invite to a discussion about public art and art in general that is introduced through minimal but diverse, economical eventually temporary, site-responsive interventions. We see our art as personal …

Reclamation - An Eco-Industrial Park In Greenfield, Massachusetts, Sage W. Sluter

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Honors Projects

Sustainable Industrial Design
Reclaiming a Brownfield in Greenfield, Massachusetts
Abstract:
For the senior capstone project at the University of Massachusetts, this student completed a conceptual site design project for the City of Greenfield. The City of Greenfield wishes to redevelop the Brownfield site, currently known as the Bendix Property, into an eco- industrial park. Working closely with the City’s officials, the student created a realistic vision for the site. After twenty years of soil and groundwater treatment, the site is ready to come back to life. The student investigated what an eco -industrial park is, and how the businesses cooperate …

Proposed Greenway Of Hatfield, Massachusetts - La497c - Senior Studio, Anthony D. Brow, William C. Bunker, Nicholas J. Mastroianni, Wesley A. Lomax, Philip A. Morrison Jr

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

This is one of five reports submitted for the LA497C Spring 2011 Senior Studio project.

The town of Hatfield needs a Master plan to keep the town up to date on zoning regulations amongst other topics. They need to preserve rural character and enhance its economic base without overstepping private property rights. The town needs to attract new business, provide housing opportunities for the elderly, and standards for clustered residential development that will help preserve open space. The residents in Hatfield are concerned with three specific areas.

1. Managing growth and economic development

2. Preserving agriculture, natural resources, open space, …