Geography Commons^™

Politics Below The Surface: A Political Ecology Of Mineral Rights And Land Tenure Struggles In Appalachia And The Andes, Lindsay Shade

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation examines how confusion and lack of access to information about subsurface property rights facilitates the rapid acquisition of mineral rights by mining interests, leaving those who live 'above the surface' to contend with complicated corporate and bureaucratic apparatuses. The research focuses on the first proposed state-run large scale mining project in Ecuador, believed to contain copper ores, and on the natural gas hydrofracking industry in three counties in north central West Virginia. Qualitative and visual methods, including mapping, are employed to determine (i.) how the geography of subsurface ownership patterns is changing, (ii.) links between changes in subsurface …

Entrepreneurialism Meets The Sustainable City: The Case Of Lexington’S Town Branch Commons, Thomas E. Grubbs

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Although the idea of the entrepreneurial city is nothing new, recent research in contemporary urban geography and related disciplines indicates that the modus operandi of such entrepreneurial endeavors has shifted, as a result of an increasing recognition and acceptance of global climate change, to include and even prioritize sustainable urban development discourses and practices. While these discourses purportedly culminate in the production of the “sustainable city,” they often fail to deliver upon their promise to create a greener, more sustainable city for all. Such practices, in an effort to help cities obtain an urban sustainability fix (While et al. 2004), …

Straight Time And Scandal: Travesti Urban Politics In São Paulo, Brazil, Christine L. Woodward

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

São Paulo, Brazil is currently pursuing a project of creative urbanism. Though city rhetoric insists this project is rooted in tolerance of sexual diversity, I suggest that city policy effectively perpetuates normative conceptions of family and respectability. Using data gathered through a series of qualitative interviews with transgender and travesti individuals living in São Paulo, I argue that the straight time of São Paulo’s creative urbanism generates exclusionary temporalities and spatialities in the city that render travestis out of time and out of place. Furthermore, I argue that travestis use their capacity to enact shame through scandals to generate temporalities …

Spaces Of Solidarity: Negotiations Of Difference And Whiteness Among Activists In The Arizona/Sonora Borderlands, Carrie Mott

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Interpersonal conflict poses a serious threat to social justice activism. In the context of multi-racial solidarity activism in southern Arizona, conflicts are often born of the challenges accompanying differentials in social privilege due to differences in race and ethnicity relative to white supremacist settler colonialism. We can see these tensions topologically through the very different relationships white, Latin@, Chican@, and indigenous activists have to on-going processes of white supremacy. This dissertation explores the factors contributing to successes and failures of multi-racial activist ventures in the context of the Arizona/Sonora borderlands, particularly the challenges of negotiating social difference among communities of …

The Working Lives And Spatial Practice Of Digital Media Developers In San Francisco, Daniel G. Cockayne

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

In this dissertation I examine work practices in the 21st Century, looking in particular at how categories such as labor and value are changing in the context of technological shifts and the valorization of entrepreneurial work. I take the example of digital media workers in San Francisco to show how work is changing in relation to correlative changes in the capitalist mode of production and the devaluation of labor under neoliberal models of reason. This approach interrogates how attachments toward work are produced and reproduced to ask why work has become such a naturalized and unquestionable category in everyday life. …

Impermeable Assemblages: Flooding, Urban Infrastructure, And Stormwater Politics In São Paulo, Brazil, Nate Millington

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This project analyzes efforts to remake the relationship between water and city in São Paulo, Brazil. Currently experiencing overlapping problems of flooding, scarcity, and pollution, São Paulo illustrates the challenges of managing water in a contemporary mega-city. This dissertation subsequently considers the city’s water management through an approach that borrows from urban political ecology, social studies of science, and post-colonial urban theory. With an epistemological grounding in these literatures, this project analyzes ongoing conversations about water management in São Paulo, and focuses on how water is encountered and engaged with in the landscape by engineers, artists, and activists. This project …

The Geopolitics Of Reproductive Healthcare: Latina Immigrants’ Experiences As Non-Citizens And Biological Citizena In Atlanta, Ga, Rebecca E. Lane

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation examines the experiences of Latina immigrants in Atlanta, GA in accessing and receiving reproductive healthcare. Although Atlanta is a new destination city for immigrant labor, the state of Georgia has passed anti-immigrant legislation, including a 2011 law that allows local police to check immigrants’ documentation while investigating unrelated violations. This localization of immigration policing heightens immigrants’ risk of detention and deportability. In combination with media discourses of illegality, local immigration policing instills fear in immigrants, which deters them from going out in public in order to perform everyday tasks such as seeing a doctor. Latinas immigrants’ ascribed illegality …

Socio-Spatial Mobilities In An Immigrant Gateway City: Analyzing Latina\O Experiences In East Boston, Mitchell Beam Snider

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation analyzes the ways in which Latino migrants in East Boston represent their material and imagined socio-spatial mobilities in the city. It considers the ways in which participants discuss the relationship of their mobilities to experiences of social exclusion and inclusion as well as feelings of belonging. The first empirical chapter specifically analyses how participants’ motility—or capacities for being mobile—interfaced with their experiences (or lack thereof) of onward migration. It finds that there is a complex relationship between onward migration and participants' motility. The second empirical chapter considers how participants represented encounters with others in the city as emotional …

“The Land Is Our Family And The Water Is Our Bloodline”: The Dispossession And Preservation Of Heirs’ Property In The Gullah-Geechee Communities Of Lowcountry South Carolina, Brian Grabbatin

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Heirs’ property is land that is collectively inherited by family members when an ancestor dies without a will. The complexity and ambiguity of rights among family members makes these parcels legally vulnerable to dispossession. This form of land tenure is found across the United States, but is particularly prevalent in southern African American communities, where educational inequities and distrust of law led to a reliance on extralegal practices of inheritance. This dissertation investigates the dispossession and preservation of heirs’ property in the Gullah-Geechee communities of Lowcountry South Carolina.

This investigation of heirs’ property is rooted in the interdisciplinary literature on …

A Plural And Uneven World: Queer Migrations And The Politics Of Race And Sexuality In Sydney, Australia, Derek Ruez

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation examines how the geographies of sexuality and race shape queer migrants’ experiences of settlement and citizenship in Sydney, Australia. Against a backdrop of economic shifts in the Asia Pacific and Australia's long history of racialized exclusion, I conducted 43 in-depth interviews with queer migrants and '2nd generation' adult children of migrants who reflect the diversity of Australia's migration streams, including historically important migration from Southern and Eastern Europe and increasingly significant movements from South, Southeast, and East Asia. Through those interviews, I examined participants' migration histories, everyday spatial trajectories in the city, and involvement with queer and ethnic …

A Model For Identifying Gentrification In East Nashville, Tennessee, William Jordan Miller

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Gentrification methodologies rarely intersect. Analysis of the process has been cornered to incorporate either in-depth, neighborhood case studies or large-scale empirical investigations. Understanding the timing and extent of gentrification has been limited by this dichotomy. This research attempts to fuse quantitative and qualitative methods to discern the impact of gentrification between census tracts in East Nashville, Tennessee. By employing archival research, field surveys, and census data analysis this project attempts to comprehend the conditions suitable for gentrification to occur and its subsequent effect on residents and the built environment. A model was generated to determine the relationship between a-priori knowledge …

Carnival, Protest, And Community Identity: West Louisville And The Kentucky Derby Festival, Benjamin L. Blandford

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation uses “Derby Cruising” in order to open up the tension between African Americans in Louisville and the Kentucky Derby Festival, especially as that tension was manifest in the spaces of West Louisville. The Kentucky Derby Festival has long served as a site of mediation between people of color and official Louisville. Derby Cruising (1998-2005) and protests around the open housing movement (1967) and anti-police violence (2000) are presented as three critical sites where African American expressions of identity, representation, and belonging have been negotiated through the Kentucky Derby Festival at particular historical moments and in particular places in …

Environmental Governance In The Carbon Economy: Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions In California's Cap-And-Trade Program, Patrick M. Bigger

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Since 2006 California has been pursuing the most ambitious climate change policy in the United States, implementing a suite of greenhouse gas reduction measures ranging from automobile refrigerant disposal rules to clean energy standards for electric power utilities. The most significant of these measures is the creation of a cap‐and‐trade program. Through this program, regulators seek to create a knowable price‐signal to incentivize emissions reductions among polluters. Using a suite of ethnographic methods, this dissertation looks at the people, ideas, and institutions that have been mobilized in the creation of California’s cap‐and‐ trade program.

Substantively, the dissertation engages with three …

Changing States: Using State-And-Transition Models To Evaluate Channel Evolution Following Dam Removal Along The Clark Fork River, Montana, Christopher Van Dyke

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Located just east of Missoula, Montana, Milltown Dam stood from 1908 to 2008 immediately downstream of the Clark Fork River’s confluence with the Blackfoot River. After the discovery of arsenic-contaminated groundwater in the nearby community of Milltown, as well as extensive deposits of contaminated sediment in the dam’s upstream reservoir, in 1981, the area was designated a Superfund site – along with much of the Upper Clark Fork Watershed. This motivated the eventual decision to remove the dam, perform environmental remediation, and reconstruct approximately five kilometers of the Clark Fork River and its floodplain. This study is part conceptual and …

State Violence, Mobility And Everyday Life In Cairo, Egypt, Christine E. Smith

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

State violence in Egypt is an embedded part of daily life and popular culture, and well documented in social and news media. The uprisings of January 11, which took place in Egypt were organized in large part against violence and torture regularly delivered by police forces. In this dissertation I examine the implications of chronic state violence on everyday life for low-income Egyptians. In doing so, this dissertation provides analysis of how violence shapes forms of intimacy within social life, how it shapes urban landscapes and the politics therein and how it informs individual piety and banal practices of security. …

Firm Characteristics And Organizational Change: The Effects Of Electronic Commerce In The United States Manufacturing Industry, Candice Y. Wallace

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation seeks to provide insight to how e-commerce adoption and utilization change the condition of U.S. Manufacturing establishments, by answering two interrelated questions: (1) What are the characteristics of manufacturing establishments that were early adopters of e-commerce activities?; (2) Once e-commerce is adopted, how has adoption affected employment within manufacturing establishments? The U.S. manufacturing industry was selected for analysis as manufacturing has been and continues to be an important sector for employment and the overall U.S. economy and has been the primary sector responsible for the majority of Business-to-Business e-commerce activity.

Using two econometric models, seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) …

Regulating Urban Belonging: China's Hukou System As Intra-National Bordering Process, Leif Johnson

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

In China's urban metropoles, the hukou system of household registration regulates one of the largest movements of people in human history. While rural-urban migrations are reshaping societies worldwide, the migrants who make up a great portion of urban China's low-wage labor force and burgeoning population face unique legal and social challenges. Although the trajectories of their migration do not cross international boundaries, most are legally prevented from ever gaining the within China's hukou system of household registration. The functions of this system parallel those of national citizenship policies, and are difficult to explain through standard conceptions of sovereignty and national …

Should We Stay Or Should We Go?: A Study Of Indian It Migrants In Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina: Deciding To Stay In The United States Or Return To India, Andrew Robert Patrick Ashley

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Over the past two decades, an increasing number of IT professionals from India have been migrating to the United States on temporary H-1B or F-1 visas. This thesis offers a case study to address how migrants on such temporary visas decide whether to seek further residency in the United States or return to India. Based on interviews conducted in 2013 and 2014 in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, I examine the factors migrants consider, as well as how the struggles presented through the visa programs may effect these considerations. I also analyze how mass migration from India has changed …

Rediscovery Of A Native American Cultural Landscape: The Chickasaw Homeland At Removal, Michael D. Walls

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Little information beyond generalities exists regarding the cultural landscape of the Chickasaw Indians in their ancestral homelands prior to Removal in the late 1830s. This dissertation evaluates one possible archival source for specifics of Chickasaw land use, the field notes and survey plats compiled as part of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). The process of original survey following land cession treaty divided the ceded area up into the familiar square-mile rectangular system of townships and ranges that extends from the Mississippi Territory westwards, in the so-called public land states.

The research compiles all cultural observations made by the surveyors …

Hispanic Religious Outreach In The Upper U.S. South: Missionary Outreach, Strategies, And Institutional Praxis Among Mainstream Denominations, John Benitez

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Hispanic religious ministry provides a way for long established mainstreams to stay afloat in the face of the demographic realities in the U.S. today. Unfortunately, the lack of literature, particularly in geography, precludes the examination of elements of contemporary Hispanic religious outreach, including such considerations as strategies, their effectiveness, and institutional praxis among mainstream religious denominations in the U.S.

Using a hybrid methodology that relies on several techniques, I examine Hispanic religious ministry in the Upper U.S. South, which geographers tell us is America’s newest Hispanic destination. I, thereby, develop and present here a case study to compare Hispanic religious …

Living Care-Fully: Labor, Love And Suffering And The Geographies Of Intergenerational Care In Northern Ghana, Kelsey B. Hanrahan

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Care is socially constructed, shaped by expectations embedded within particular relationships and the culturally-specific understandings of what it means to work, love and suffer. In this dissertation, I conceptualize care as a fundamental component of everyday life in which individuals are oriented towards the needs of others. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a rural Konkomba community in northern Ghana, I explore the geographies of care shaping the everyday experiences of women engaged in intergenerational relationships as they encounter emerging dependencies associated with ageing. Dependencies emerge when an individual requires support and care from another, and in turn the struggles for, …

Social Space And Social Media: Analyzing Urban Space With Big Data, Ate Poorthuis

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation focuses on the key role that big data can play in minimizing the perceived disconnect between social theory and quantitative methods in the discipline of geography. It takes as its starting point the geographic concept of space, which is conceptualized very differently in social theory versus quantitative methodology. Contrary to this disparity, an examination of the disciplinary history reveals a number of historic precedents and potential pathways for a rapprochement, especially when combined with some of the new possibilities of big data. This dissertation also proposes solutions to two common barriers to the adoption of big data in …

Transnational Policy Articulations: India, Agriculture, And The Wto, Christopher L. Blackden

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Agriculture remains one of the most contentious issues in the ongoing negotiations of the World Trade Organization, with serious implications for food security and the livelihood of farmers in the developing world. This dissertation examines the formation of agricultural trade policy and the politics and arguments surrounding it within the context of India’s position in the World Trade Organization (WTO). The research has two components. A set of archival documents relating to India’s participation in a WTO institution called the Trade Policy Review (TPR) was analyzed. In addition, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with a number of Indian experts and officials …

Convergence Of Dune Topography Among Multiple Barrier Island Morphologies, Jackie Ann Monge

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Wave-dominated and mixed tidal and wave energy barrier islands are assumed to have characteristic dune topographies that link to their macroscale form. However, there has been no systematic attempt to describe the linkage between barrier island macroscale form and dune topography. The goal of this thesis was to investigate how dune topographies correspond to a number of barrier island morphologies found along the southeastern U.S. Atlantic coast. Macroscale process-form variables were used to classify 77 islands into seven morphologic clusters. Islands from each cluster were selected and sites characteristic of the range of dune topographies within islands were characterized using …

Redefining Development: Exploring Alternative Economic Practices In Appalachia, Amanda Fickey

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation examines alternative economic practices and regional economic development strategies in the Appalachian region. First, I deconstruct regional economic development policies and practices. I argue that policy documents produced by the Appalachian Regional Commission and the State of Kentucky have often limited economic imaginings through the perpetuation of regional stereotypes and short-term, decontextualized strategies. Then, I explore the existence of alternative economic practices as well as the contradictory role of the state within the context of Eastern Kentucky’s craft industry. Using a mixed methods approach, I investigate how the state simultaneously supports cooperative craft production by perpetuating a geographical …

The Human–Hookworm Assemblage: Contingency And The Practice Of Helminthic Therapy, Sophia Anne Strosberg

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Through a qualitative analysis of the use of intestinal parasites for treating immune system disorders, this research illustrates how contingency emerges in the context of the human relationship to hookworms. The affect of the human–nonhuman relationship is an important part of understanding the direction of evolutionary medicine today, and has implications for the politics of biological health innovations. The shift from the bad parasite to a parasite that at least sometimes heals, discursively and materially, has opened new spaces for patients to change the way they relate to medical knowledge, medical professionals, and pharmaceutical companies. Hookworms are banned by the …

Entrepreneurial Planning And Urban Economic Development: The Case Of Establishing Commuter Rail In Orlando, Florida, Timothy J. Brock

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Rooted in the theories of urban entrepreneurialism, this dissertation employs a political economy framework as a means of analyzing urban governance and economic development in the contemporary US city. This case study of Orlando adds to our understanding of how entrepreneurial narratives are being applied to transportation infrastructure projects in pursuit of local economic development.

The empirical case study explores the relationship between planning narratives, urban governance and economic development in the establishment of the SunRail commuter rail system in central Florida. I present the political history of economic development and the role of local boosters in shaping the sociospatial …

Carbon Forestry: Pursuing Climate Change Mitigation And Poverty Alleviation Through Market-Based Forest Carbon Schemes In Chiapas, Mexico, Jonathan Otto

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Forest carbon projects seek to alleviate rural poverty and mitigate global climate change by facilitating the flow of capital from actors looking to offset CO2 emissions to land managers willing to engage in offset-oriented reforestation, afforestation, and forest preservation activities. In Mexico, forest carbon schemes have been pursued within the country’s national Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) program, and through REDD+ pilot projects and separate voluntary initiatives. In this dissertation, I explore one voluntary project, Scolel’ Te, which is managed by the non-governmental organization (NGO), AMBIO. Focusing on the case of Scolel’ Te, I show how forest carbon projects undermine …

Sacred Social Spaces: Finding Community And Negotiating Identity For American-Born Converts To Islam, Sarah A. Soliman

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This thesis examines the religious experiences of American-born converts to Islam. The social nature of religion has been long ignored in research on the lives of religious people. A review of research on Muslim identities reveals an emphasis on immigrants, women, and youth in the British context. However, there is little to no research on the unique constituency of converts to Islam and the importance of social aspects of faith for establishing a sustainable and transformative practice of Islam. This research closes this gap through a case study of the religious experiences of American-born converts to Islam.

Through in-depth interviews …

Buying A Colonial Dream: The Role Of Lifestyle Migrants In The Gentrification Of The Historic Center Of Granada, Nicaragua, Abigail Foulds

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation aims to expand our understanding of how lifestyle migrants from the Global North impact the urban space of a Global South city, particularly the built environment. In order to situate the questions posed in this dissertation, I focus on how lifestyle migrants from the Global North and their foreign capital transform the city of Granada, Nicaragua through processes of gentrification, and how the social and economic climate of the city and its residents are impacted. This research allows for empirically informed theoretical critiques to be made about the economic and social implications of the globalization of gentrification resulting …