Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Formative Interests And Pathways To Natural Resources Careers Among Racial And Ethnic Minorities, Laura Burmann

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Land use, values, and ethics vary across cultures; however, those making natural resource (NR) management decisions are often not representative of the diversity of people who live on the land. Diversifying the workforce is a step towards ensuring management decisions and policies are inclusive of all peoples; however, few people from minority groups are pursuing degrees related to NR management. The purpose of this study is to assess factors affecting the decisions to pursue careers in NR fields among historically underrepresented groups of people, with an emphasis on the role that youth environmental education (EE) programs play in creating career …

Hometracker: A Household Information Feedback System For Food/Energy/Water Metabolism, Nichole Mackey

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The Food, Energy and Water Conscious (FEWCON) project seeks to understand how food, energy and water (FEW) as independent resources within households are connected. In the main study of the project, intervention messages that link household FEW consumption to equivalent climate consequences are pushed to the households. The goal of the FEWCON study is to determine potential intervention messages that influence household FEW consumption behavior.

A key component of the FEWCON study is a web application named HomeTracker (Household Metabolism Tracker) which collects FEW consumption data within households, then uses this data to select consumption-specific feedback to the homeowners. To …

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 …

Intemperate Men: Alcohol And Autonomy Within The Lumber Camps Of Michigan’S Upper Peninsula, Tyler D. Allen

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In industrial settings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, capital often instilled discipline through control of social behaviors. Among those, alcohol consumption was most often targeted due to its effects on worker productivity. Although many industrial settings of this time enforced sobriety policies, the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company (CCI) never enforced sobriety within their lumber camps. CCI took a hands-off approach to managing their lumber camps, which allotted their workers a great deal of autonomy. These lumber camps provide the opportunity to explore how workers used alcohol within an industrial setting when given autonomy. Looking at bottle remains and …

Ground Vehicle Driving Aids: Assessing Driver Workload And Performance In Degraded Visual Environments, Kayla Riegner

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

With degraded visual environments being a current priority to the Army, several research programs have been initiated to develop a complete sensor-to-soldier systems to allow operators to see through DVE conditions while conducting ground vehicle tactical operations. To enable indirect-driving maneuverability and threat detection in degraded visual environments (DVEs), CCDC’s ground DVE program developed and tested a range of sensors and driver aid display systems. Six candidate driving aids were identified and tested in three simulator studies and two field tests to examine the effect of driving aids on driver workload and performance in different visibility conditions. The simulator-based testing …

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 …

Mining The Evidence: Public Comments, Evidence-Based Policymaking, And A Controversial Mine, Sun V. Nguyen

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In policymaking, evidence-based policymaking is an essential method for influencing policies and decisions by telling decision-makers “what works” (Head, 2008). Western sciences typically make up most of the evidence decision-makers use, but because people are boundedly rational in understanding and incorporating it—politics, values, and beliefs impact thought processes— scholars and policymakers also include other types of knowledge to make decisions. One way for decision-makers to incorporate other types of knowledge into policies is through public comments. Although public comments may provide different types of knowledge to improve policy decisions, decision-makers face challenges with valuing different types of knowledge as evidence. …

Perceptions Of Forest Change In The Governmental Region Of Kaffrine, Senegal, Rhiley E. Allbee

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Sénégal is a semi-arid West African country with a diverse ethnic makeup and a rapidly growing population that is largely rural, predominantly employed within the agricultural sector, and heavily reliant on the harvesting of forest products within state owned forests where populations have usufruct rights. The country experienced significant changes in land cover throughout the 20^th century due to a series of major droughts and large expansions in agriculture. These changes were partially concentrated throughout the region of Kaffrine, where the wooded savannas of the early 20^th century were systematically replaced by agriculture and converted to a shrub …

Community Solar Energy Programs: A Bright Spot For Just Energy Policy?, Emily Prehoda

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Energy systems are complex, and this complexity requires diverse regulatory forms and strategies of management. Michigan’s energy system is situated within a multi-scalar governance structure reaching from national to local levels. As a result, the process of energy system decision-making can leave out smaller, remote communities and those without the economic, political, and knowledge capital necessary to engage in complex bureaucratic processes. These communities can become subject to high electricity prices and unreliable electrical service from long transmission and distribution lines, raising energy justice concerns. Additionally, resulting from utility regulatory practices, small remote communities are often not afforded the opportunity …

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 …

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 …

Attitudes About Acceptable Risk In The Context Of The Biodiversity Crisis, Thomas Offer-Westort

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Crafting and enforcing conservation policy requires making normative judgements about what levels of risk are acceptable. These judgements include crucial decisions that impact which species qualify as “endangered.” If a government’s policies are going to represent the values of the public they govern, then public attitudes should be understood. Unfortunately, essentially nothing is known about public attitudes as they pertain to acceptable risk and the biodiversity crisis.

My research aims to address this gap using data from an internet-based survey (n=1050). I focused on the Endangered Species Act of 1973 which defines an endangered species as “any species which is …

Ecotourism And Women's Empowerment: A Case Study In Quintana Roo Mexico, Mayra Sanchez Morgan

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Globally, women make up a relatively large proportion of the tourism workforce; however, they usually do menial jobs and earn lower wages than men doing the same job. Traditional gender expectations and unequal power relations between women and men persist, limiting women’s opportunities. Ecotourism could be a tool for sustainable development and might be expected to empower women, given its explicit attention to social justice, grassroots development, and empowering local people. However, it may primarily empower groups that already have power, and not those who already are in disadvantaged positions, including women. Without explicitly considering gender and power complexities, ecotourism …

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. …