Geography Commons^™

Market Making: Crises And The Global Production Of Shipbreaking In Chittagong, Bangladesh, Elizabeth A. Sibilia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shipbreaking is a dismantling process with a primary objective of extracting large amounts of steel from ocean-going vessels, oil tankers, bulk cargo carriers, and container ships. As mobile forms of fixed capital, these devalued vessels have experienced a gradual or sudden loss of value. The removal of devalued ships from the world fleet, through an increasingly sophisticated global demolition market and expanding domestic shipbreaking markets, have played a critical role in helping the global shipping sector solve its crises of overproduction since the mid 1970s. Since the early 1990s Bangladesh has become one of the most important domestic shipbreaking markets. …

Rails To Revolution: Railroads, Railroad Workers And The Geographies Of The Mexican Revolution, Hector Agredano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a historical geography of the role of railroads and railroad workers in the Mexican Revolution. It shows that despite the presence of railroads in the popular imagination of the Mexican Revolution, the role of railroads and railroad workers themselves remains largely missing from scholarly accounts of the conflict. I argue that railroad workers were central to the revolutionary process from its beginning, and I demonstrate that their close relationship to a critically important transportation network allowed them to intervene at crucial moments of the revolutionary process. Undoubtedly, this relationship to transportation networks also had a formative impact …

“How To Lose The Hounds”: Tracing The Relevance Of Marronage For Contemporary Anti-Police Struggles, Celeste Winston

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the interconnected practices of flight from slavery and flight from policing. Focusing on Black communities within Montgomery County, Maryland, I provide evidence for how local legacies of enslavement and flight from slavery have empowered later generations of residents, including people still living there today, to practice safety and security on their own terms, beyond policing. I draw on archival and ethnographic research in seven Black communities in Montgomery County to document historical and ongoing local Black life practices and organizing against and outside of policing. I center these communities’ past and present placemaking and collective strategies of …

Losing Louisiana: Race, Techno-Science, And The Disappearing Geographies Of The Lower Mississippi River Delta, Monica Patrice Barra

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on eighteen months of ethnographic and historical research in southeast coastal Louisiana (USA), this dissertation explores the racial histories, engineering and scientific practices, and geophysical processes that have shaped land loss and coastal restoration in the lower Mississippi River Delta. Rather than treating land loss simply as a natural process or matter of environmental restoration, this ethnography examines its cultural, material, and political dimensions, especially for communities of color that have already experienced long histories of loss — of property, livelihood, and political rights. A focus on the geophysical transformations of the river - dictating land growth, sinking, and …

Training As Restructuring: Cases From Entry-Level Healthcare And Manufacturing Workforce Training In Eastern Connecticut, Shelley Buchbinder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the 1980s, capital mobility and state restructuring have increased precarity in older industrial regions, such as eastern Connecticut (CT). These changes reconfigured labor markets, changing the work available, including the types, conditions, and skills required. Greater responsibility devolved onto poor and working-class people to navigate a labor market with insufficient living-wage work with 42.4% of jobs pay under $15/hour (Tung, Lathrop, & Sonn, 2015). Entry-level healthcare and manufacturing are two avenues for sub-baccalaureate, living-wage employment. Employment and Training (E&T) prepares people for entry-level jobs; it is a politically popular response to restructurings (Lafer, 2002; Laney et al., 2013). How …

Hearing/S: Will In The Carceral Archive, Kayla Morse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This long-form poetry project follows the human will — in this case the “criminal,” or captive will — as it is manhandled through an archive of reverends, wardens and superintendents narrating the future of prison reform. Drawing primarily from National Prison Association Conference archives between the years 1874 and 1895, these documents saturate the work with a will resistant but compelled towards subjugation by the state — as it appears within the text across forced labor economies, eugenic prison science that dictates starvation, classification, and isolation as the rule, the dehumanization of banal bureaucratic processes, the visceral and spectacular violence …

Contested Development: A Poor People's Movement For A Better Los Angeles, 1960–2018, Deshonay R. Dozier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Zooming in on the historical development of Downtown Los Angeles’s (LA) Skid Row, this dissertation traces a continuity of abolitionist alternatives made by homeless and poor Angelinos from the 1960s to our present day. Skid Row is an important entry way into Los Angeles urban politics, particularly with respect to how forms of difference, at the axis of race, gender, class, and ability shape regional relations of property and the built environment. I show how these relations shape Downtown Los Angeles’s geography through carceral practices. These carceral practices, made by social services and policing, shape space by routinely containing and …

Inheritances Of Injustice/Transference Of Freedom: An Intimate Project On Black Women's Intergenerational Relationships And The Consequences Of The Punishment System, Whitney Richards-Calathes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project centers the multi-generational familial relationships between system-impacted Black women, mapping and uncovering the ways in which incarceration and practices of punishment impact, shape, hurt, and displace Black femme lineages. Through a qualitative lens and a specific focus on the current social and political landscape of Los Angeles, this dissertation examines the ways Black women are impacted by carceral ideology; from punitive definitions of Black womanhood, to the surveillance on Black femme familial intimacy and the rupture of Black women’s sense of home and place. Understandings of mass incarceration are frequently male-centered and most analyses of Black women’s system …

Little Siberia, Star Of The North: Prisons, Crisis, And Development In Rural New York, 1968–1994, Jack Norton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is a study of how prisons became a common sense solution to economic and social decline in northern New York in the 1980s, about how prisons became synonymous with development in rural counties in the long wake of New York City’s fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s. The United States imprisons more people per capita than any other nation-state on earth. The number of U.S. prisoners has increased nearly six fold since 1970 and there are now over 2.25 million people incarcerated across the country. Accompanying and encouraging this rise in the prison population was an expansion of the prisons …

Limits Of The Black Radical Tradition And The Value-Form, Shemon Salam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Black Radical Tradition was supposed to be victorious against racial capitalism. Instead the tradition was defeated by the early 1970s never to return again. Surprisingly the scholarship still treats the tradition as if this world historic defeat never happened. Furthermore, geographers have not reckoned with this defeat. Limits of the Black Radical Tradition and the Value-formbegins the process of starting a debate, hoping to ignite radical rethinking around the nature of the Black Radical Tradition, racial capitalism, and the value-form.

The Contested Terrain Of The Louisiana Carceral State: Dialectics Of Southern Penal Expansion, 1971–2016, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The Contested Terrain the Louisiana Carceral State” examines the development of the Louisiana carceral state as produced from above and contested from below from 1971 to 2016. Through a combination of archival research, oral history interviews, and in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that Louisiana has expanded, consolidated, and adapted its carceral infrastructure in response to multiscalar political economic crises tied to global oil booms and busts, federal state interventions, and when oppositional movements gain traction. “Carceral infrastructure” refers to both the literal building of new state prisons and parish jails alongside passage of draconian sentencing laws, and bulking up of …

From Prison To Homeless Shelter: Camp Laguardia And The Political Economy Of An Urban Infrastructure, Christian D. Siener

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At this time of increasing housing insecurity, recent reforms in homeless shelter policy have attracted the attention of scholars and activists. This research sheds light on these changes by placing them in historical and political-geographic perspective, focusing on the role of homeless shelters in stabilizing social displacement by destabilizing solidarity. It demonstrates historical continuity between prisons and homeless shelters in New York City through a case study of conditions surrounding the transition of Camp LaGuardia, a prison that slowly transformed into the city’s largest, and longest lasting, homeless shelter. The case study is an empirical demonstration of some of the …

Corporate Urbanization: Between The Future And Survival In Lebanon, Deen S. Sharp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

If you look today at the skyline of downtowns throughout the Middle East and beyond, the joint-stock corporation has transformed the urban landscape. The corporation makes itself present through the proliferation of its urban mega-projects, including skyscrapers, downtown developments and gated communities; retail malls and artificial islands; airports and ports; and highways. Built into these corporate urban structures are edifices of politics, ideology and certain forms of socio-spatial and temporal organization. The corporation, however, has largely escaped critical scholarly analysis in Geography and/or Urban and Middle East Studies. In this thesis, I argue that the corporation is far more than …

We Refugees, Again, Aaron Linas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dramatic shifts in climate have generated a new form of global displacement. These ‘climate migrants’ challenge the notion of state sovereignty by introducing a new paradigm for global responsibility. I seek to address this emerging demand of sovereignty by outlining the normative mechanisms of state institutions when encountering displaced persons. The extreme cases of disappearing island nations creates stateless population incompatible with standard liberal values of humanitarianism and border security. My claim is that current normative institutions and principles of assistance to migrating people are insufficient to manage the international crisis of climate change. To be able to aid migrants …

Persistence Of Cultural Heritage In A Multicultural Context: Examining Factors That Shaped Voting Preferences In The 2016 Election, Anna M. Schwartz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The prevailing discourse about the myth of the “melting pot” of American culture implies that heritage cultures are eliminated in favor of a homogenous “American” norm. However, this myth belies the persistence of our cultural heritage in forming our attitudes, morals, and habitual patterns of thought, each of which shape how we participate in our democracy through voting. By contextualizing voting predictors such as authoritarianism, social dominance, and sexism in developmental and ecological theories, this dissertation shows how they are shaped by culture and transmitted through consumption of media and interaction with members of one’s community and family. In an …

Merging Subsistence Perspective And Buen Vivir: An Alternative To Damming The Mekong, Aaron B. Eisenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will examine the planned development on the Mekong by looking at the historical, political, and economic reasons why largescale hydroelectric dams are now being pushed upon the river. It will then critique the international state sovereignty system focusing directly on the Mekong River Commission and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) for their inabilities to mitigate environmental impact while pursuing development. I analyze how the “global city” discourse cannot rationally be applied to Southeast Asia and how the urban-rural divide in Southeast Asia creates only greater problems as dam production on the Mekong accelerates. I propose an alternative …

Out-Group Threat Or Inter-Group Contact Theory? Out-Group Attitudes And Interaction In Times Of Diversity Growth, Annette Jacoby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Much attention has been devoted to the presumed negative effect of diversity growth on various dimensions of attitudes and interaction between different racial and ethnic groups. However, whether the claims hold true is unclear- there is a considerable controversy over the impact of changing diversity on societal behavior. With ongoing migration, the United States are becoming more and more ethnically diverse but a sound debate on racial and ethnic composition and its consequences for inter-group interactions and attitudes towards others has not yet been possible due to a lack of causally-oriented panel studies.

In this study, two important features are …

The Production Of Space: Indigenous Resistance Movements In The Peruvian Amazon, Christian Calienes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The resistance movement that resulted in the Baguazo in the northern Peruvian Amazon in 2009 was the culmination of a series of social, economic, political and spatial processes that reflected the Peruvian nation’s engagement with global capitalism and democratic consolidation after decades of crippling instability and chaos. The recently discovered oil and natural gas reserves that occupy the subsoil of much the Peruvian Amazon provide the latest natural resource upon which the national project can continue to be implemented. In a context of neo-imperialism and neo-extractivism where through accumulation by dispossession, new markets are introduced into global capitalist structures after …

Making A Case For Social Innovation As A Structural Counterpart To Public Participation In Regional Planning, Manju A. Adikesavan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Multi-locational living – working, shopping, playing, learning and commuting across administrative and, sometimes even political boundaries is an essential aspect of metropolitan living. Although it is anticipated that everyday experiences of the physical, social and economic inter-connectedness between urban communities and peri-urban hinterlands would automatically engender a regional outlook in planning and governance, it is currently not the case. In the New York City region, a lived regional experience does not translate into support for a regional governance structure.

While strong legislative support has ensured the public its rightful place within metropolitan regional planning, it has regrettably bred a procedural …

Yellowing The Logarithm: How Money Solved The Problem Of Freedom, Neil S. Agarwal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is on the historical development of a co-constitutive relationship between money as the form of appearance of value and race as the form of appearance of human difference. It demonstrates this relationship through a study of experiments with monetary value in eighteenth-century British America. At a time when Bank of England notes circulated primarily among merchants and within London, colonial freeholders issued paper currencies through representative assemblies and posited a link between this enterprise and the well-being of a larger provincial community within which their bills would circulate. I show how their experiments provided a means for creole …

Thule Iron Use In The Pre-Contact Arctic, Eileen Colligan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the use of iron by the Thule people, a Neoeskimo culture that lived in the North American Arctic between approximately 1000 AD and 1400 ̶ 1500 AD. The study takes a pan-Arctic perspective to bring together research that has usually been done on a more-limited geographical scale. This viewpoint shows the Thule culture from a view that corresponds to their world.

The study focuses on: (1) revisions in the accepted chronology of the Thule and how these have affected the explanations for the Thule Migration from Alaska to Greenland; (2) new understandings about the iron that was …

Walking As Ontological Shifter: Thoughts In The Key Of Life, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the …

Mapping How Culture In New York City And London Influences Respectively The Iconic Fashion Brands Of Kors And Mcqueen: A Case Study, Carol Brathwaite

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is an explanatory case study that applies geographic information systems (GIS) data, biographical data, and other secondary data. It includes mainly qualitative data collection and analysis; furthermore, the study examines quantitative data on the cultural events offered within each city. Overall, this case study adopts a theoretical perspective. The two individual cases (based on a multiple, holistic case-study design framework) of fashion culture in New York City and London, as per Michael Kors and Alexander McQueen respectively, represent ‘confirmatory cases or presumed replications of the same phenomenon’ (Yin 2014:59). Each describes the house’s fashion aesthetics as well as …

Capture And Abandon: Social Reproduction And Informal Land Tenure In Jamaica, Rachel Goffe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Capture and Abandon: Social Reproduction and Informal Land Tenure in Jamaica examines how ongoing policy development to curtail squatting is shifting state capacity away from a project of land reform and towards one of land management. Scholarship about informal settlements elsewhere tends to understand dispossession as a project of the neoliberal state. I argue that it is strategically necessary to elucidate the ways in which the production of durable but insecure access to land is not novel, but is imbricated in the historical production of a Black labor force that is self-sufficient and yet ready at hand, reproducing themselves through …

Aesthetic Geographies: Art, Crises, Urban Imaginaries, Erin Siodmak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Performance art, with its origins in Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism, has long been a political, politicized, and transgressive form of art, posing challenges to art world institutions, political and social norms, and the nature of art itself through practitioners’ unconventional uses of the body, space, and audience/viewer participation. Much of the power of performed art comes from its performative and transitory nature: it does not simply express, represent, or communicate information. Rather, performative art forms such as installation or performance are productive of political aesthetics. Art may not necessarily intervene directly with political, legal, and legislative decisions or acts, but …

Making The Gigantic Suburban Residential Complex In Beijing: Political Economy Processes And Everyday Life In The 2010s, Pengfei Li

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Suburbanization is an ongoing development process in China. Hundreds of thousands of construction projects are being undertaken in outskirts of most Chinese cities, despite the increasing domestic and international concerns over China’s housing oversupply (Xu, 2010; Gough, 2015; Li, 2015). The suburbanization of China, however, is fundamentally different from the suburbanization of most Western countries, especially the United States, whose massive post-war suburbanization took place as a continuation of its pre-war industrialization and urbanization movements. In the Chinese context, suburbanization is the process of urbanization as well—urbanization and suburbanization have been promoted simultaneously since the 1990s. It is …

Pension Fund Evictions: Lessons For Housing And Labor, Marnie F. Brady

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I analyze an institutional investor portfolio of over-leveraged multifamily rental housing in East Palo Alto, California to demonstrate how changing forms of landlordism produce both new and familiar targets for tenants organizing against displacement and for housing security. Venture capital investors in the first decade of the 2000s exploited the Silicon Valley regional conditions of racial exclusion, uneven development, and municipal rent control. I introduce the legacy of Black political organization in East Palo Alto as a way of contextualizing the tenants’ and the city leaders’ response to the monopoly investment purchase. The structure of this rental …

"The Engine Of Free Expression": The Political Economy Of Copyright In The Colonial British Atlantic And Early National United States, Nora Slonimsky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1985, the Supreme Court of the United States concluded that copyright was included in the Constitution in order to serve as the “engine of free expression.” By providing economic incentive to drive artistic and scientific innovation, the nation received essential information and other tools of learning necessary to make sound political decisions. However, transnational copyright disputes, then and now, frequently resulted in complex and often contradictory understandings of free expression. The formation of copyright in America was thus a far more complex story, and it is that story that forms the basis of this project.

Amidst the many moving …

Local Immigration Enforcement Entrepreneurship In The Punishment Marketplace, Daniel L. Stageman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The contemporary neoliberal economic order plays a significant role in American social organization and policy-making. Most importantly, neoliberal ideology drives the creation and imposition of markets in public goods and services and the valorization of free market ideology in cultural life. The neoliberal ‘project of inequality’ is in turn delimited and upheld by an authoritarian system of punishment built around mass incarceration, surveillance, and an unprecedented level of social control directed at the lowest strata of American society – a group that includes both the urban underclass, and unauthorized immigrants.

This study lays out the theory of the punishment marketplace …

Land Change History Of Oil Palm Plantations In Northern Bengkulu Province, Sumatra Island, Reconstructed From Landsat Satellite Archives, Atsushi Tomita

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of this study is to reconstruct the history of land conversion to oil palm plantation in tropical Asia using multi-temporal satellite data. A new method was constructed with a newly developed computer model, Land Change Detection and Land Definition Model (LC/LD Model) to map out spatio-temporal distribution of land changes. A comprehensive, cloud-free Landsat dataset was created from all the available Landsat data from 1988 to 2015. The pixel-based dataset was converted into a polygon-based dataset by applying the multi-temporal image segmentation method. The representation of the spectral information was also reduced to a single index of IB45, …