Geography Commons^™

Geographies Of Desecration: Race, Indigeneity, And The Militarization Of Hawai'i, Laurel Turbin Mei-Singh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Geographies of Desecration: Race, Indigeneity, and the Militarization of Hawai‘i develops a genealogy of military fences and their relationship to Hawaiian struggles for self-determination and national liberation. Military occupation has transformed entire ways of life on the islands by altering Hawaiian land tenure systems through displacement, disruption of subsistence practices, and environmental degradation. Hawaiian mo‘olelo (stories, history) also structure life in a highly militarized place, centering interconnectivity between human and nonhuman realms while impelling grassroots efforts that shape its landscape.

This dissertation develops in-depth case studies of militarized sites on the Wai‘anae Coast of O‘ahu, where military bases occupy 34% …

Losing Values: Illiquidity, Personhood, And The Return Of Authoritarianism In Skopje, Macedonia, Fabio Mattioli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

On May 17, 2015, over 50,000 people took to the streets of Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia, protesting against Prime Minister Gruevski and his party, the conservative neoliberal Internal Revolutionary Organization of Macedonia (VMRO). After nine years of authoritarian government, it was the first significant demonstration in which the population demanded accountability for Gruevski's despotic system of rule. This dissertation is the story of how Gruevski's system of power was built and why it lasted for so long. I argue that a series of failing financial processes, which included the use of illiquidity, created the material and …

Is Only One Gps Point Position Sufficient To Locate You To The Road Network Accurately?, Hao Wu, Weiwei Sun, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Locating only one GPS position to a road segment accurately is crucial to many location-based services such as mobile taxi-hailing service, geo-tagging, POI check-in, etc. This problem is challenging because of errors including the GPS errors and the digital map errors (misalignment and the same representation of bidirectional roads) and a lack of context information. To the best of our knowledge, no existing work studies this problem directly and the work to reduce GPS signal errors by considering hardware aspect is the most relevant. Consequently, this work is the first attempt to solve the problem of locating one GPS position …

Measuring Vulnerable Population’S Healthy And Unhealthy Food Access In Austin, Texas, Junfeng Jiao

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Food deserts—areas with a significant low-income population experiencing low accessibility to healthy food sources—have been well studied in terms of their connection to obesity and its related health outcomes. Measuring food accessibility is the key component in food desert research. However, previous studies often measured food accessibility based on large geographic units (e.g. census tract, zip code) with few transportation modes (e.g. driving or taking public transit) and limited vulnerable population measures. This paper aims to demonstrate a new method to measure food access for different vulnerable population groups at a smaller geographic scale with different transportation modes. In detail, …

Is Only One Gps Position Sufficient To Locate You To The Road Network Accurately?, Hao Wu, Weiwei Sun, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Locating only one GPS position to a road segment accurately is crucial to many location-based services such as mobile taxihailing service, geo-tagging, POI check-in, etc. This problem is challenging because of errors including the GPS errors and the digital map errors (misalignment and the same representation of bidirectional roads) and a lack of context information. To the best of our knowledge, no existing work studies this problem directly and the work to reduce GPS signal errors by considering hardware aspect is the most relevant. Consequently, this work is the first attempt to solve the problem of locating one GPS position …

The International Whaling Commission—Beyond Whaling, Andrew J. Wright, Mark P. Simmonds, Barbara Galletti Vernazzani

Wildlife Population Management Collection

Since its establishment in 1946 as the international body intended to manage whaling, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has expanded its areas of interest to ensure the wider conservation of whales. Several key conservation topics have been taken forward under its auspices including climate change, chemical and noise pollution, marine debris and whale watching. Work on each of these topics at the IWC has grown substantially since the 1990s and remains ongoing. Important developments were the establishment of the Standing Working Group on Environmental Concerns in 1996 and the IWC’s Conservation Committee in 2003. Trying to address this diverse set …

Editor's Notebook, Amanda M. Di Battista, Paul Huebener

The Goose

Editorial introduction to The Goose Volume 15, Issue 1 (2016).

Searching Cézanne’S Provence, Robert M. Girvan

The Goose

This personal essay describes the author's visit to Provence to see the sites where Cézanne painted a number of well-known landscape paintings. He compares the paintings with the landscape as it existed when the paintings were painted, and as exist today, to trace the connections between landscape, and art, and in particular, Cézanne's artistic techniques. Finally, the author suggests that Cézanne's close observation of the natural world, and commitment to studying the old masters still has something important to teach us today in our digital age.

A Spatial Analysis Of Settlement, Accessibility, And Quality Of Life Of The Burmese Refugee Population In Bowling Green, Kentucky, Matthew Riggle

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Refugee populations face many challenges when relocating and settling into a new country. The Burmese refugee population in Bowling Green, Kentucky experiences unique challenges when trying to settle and be assimilated into a typical midsize city. This paper explores a variety of geographic and demographic characteristics of neighborhoods with high concentration of Burmese immigrants, seeking to characterize the neighborhoods by several quality of life metrics. These metrics include median household income, rental rates, educational attainment, and many others. The neighborhood characteristics are studied using recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, specifically from the 2014 American Community Survey 5-year sample …

A World For My Daughter: An Ecologist's Search For Optimism By Alejandro Frid, Gina M. Granter

The Goose

Review of Alejandro Frid's A World for My Daughter: An Ecologist’s Search for Optimism.

Float By Joeann Hart, Tonia L. Payne

The Goose

Review of Joeann Hart's Float.

The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography Of Poetry, Person, Place By Tom Bristow, Mark Dickinson

The Goose

Review of Tom Bristow's The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place.

Water As A Social Opportunity Edited By Seanna L. Davidson, Jamie Linton, And Warren E. Mabee, Katherine Chung

The Goose

Review of Seanna L. Davidson, Jamie Linton, and Warren E. Mabee's Water as a Social Opportunity.

Wildlife In The Anthropocene: Conservation After Nature By Jamie Lorimer, Pamela Banting

The Goose

Review of Jamie Lorimer's Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation After Nature.

Use Of Water Indices Derived From Landsat Oli Imagery And Gis To Estimate The Hydrologic Connectivity Of Wetlands In The Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, Debra Sue Blackmore

Dissertations and Theses

This study compared two remote sensing water indices: the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) and the Modified NDWI (MNDWI). Both indices were calculated using publically-available data from the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI). The research goal was to determine whether the indices are effective in locating open water and measuring surface soil moisture. To demonstrate the application of water indices, analysis was conducted for freshwater wetlands in the Tualatin River Basin in northwestern Oregon to estimate hydrologic connectivity and hydrological permanence between these wetlands and nearby water bodies. Remote sensing techniques have been used to study wetlands in recent …

Global Ecologies And The Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches Edited By Elizabeth Deloughrey, Jill Didur, And Anthony Carrigan, Joshua Bartlett

The Goose

Review of Elizabeth Deloughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan's Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches.

Animals In Irish Literature And Culture Edited By Kathryn Kirkpatrick And Borbála Faragó, Geneviève Pigeon

The Goose

Review of Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Borbála Faragó's Animals in Irish Literature and Culture.

Ecology Or Catastrophe: The Life Of Murray Bookchin By Janet Biehl, Benjamin C. O'Heran

The Goose

Review of Janet Biehl's Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin.

Listening For The Heartbeat Of Being: The Arts Of Robert Bringhurst Edited By Brent Wood And Mark Dickinson, Kirsten Alm

The Goose

Review of Brent Wood and Mark Dickinson's Listening for the Heartbeat of Being: The Arts of Robert Bringhurst.

The Canadian Horror Film: Terror Of The Soul Edited By Gina Freitag And Andre Loiselle, Jennifer Schell

The Goose

Review of Gina Freitag's and Andre Loiselle's The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul

Heidegger's Way Of Being By Richard Capobianco, Brian Mccormack

The Goose

A review of Richard Capobianco's Heidegger's Way of Being.

The Preservation Of Identity: A Narrative Examination Of National Parks In Kentucky, Abigail Ponder

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

National parks are symbols of national identity. They tell the history of places—personal legacies and natural phenomena. My Capstone Experience/Thesis (CE/T) project for the Honors College at WKU features two stories that fuse fiction and non-fiction conventions to share the experiences of national parks in Kentucky. Currently, the National Park Service is celebrating its centennial anniversary at parks across the nation. First established in 1916 by President Woodrow Wilson, the national parks have become symbols of the quintessential American experience: serving as memorials to nature, to history, and to culture. As such, these stories that take place at Mammoth Cave …

Winds Of Change: Short Stories About Our Climate Edited By Mary Woodbury, Veronika Kratz

The Goose

Review of Mary Woodbury's edited collection, Winds of Change: Short Stories about Our Climate.

Educating The Imagination: Northrop Frye Past, Present, And Future Edited By Alan Bewell, Neil Ten Kortenaar, And Germaine Warkentin, David Carruthers

The Goose

Review of Alan Bewell, Neil ten Kortenaar, and Germaine Warkentin's Educating the Imagination: Northrop Frye Past, Present, and Future.

My Last Continent By Midge Raymond, Jessica George

The Goose

A review of Midge Raymond's My Last Continent.

A New Index For Predicting Catastrophes By Madhur Anand, Andrew Gordon Jeffrey

The Goose

A Review of Madhur Anand's A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes.

Found In Alberta: Environmental Themes For The Anthropocene Edited By Robert Boschman And Mario Trono, L. Camille Van Der Marel

The Goose

Review of Robert Boschman and Mario Trono’s edited collection Found in Alberta: Environmental Themes for the Anthropocene.

Marry & Burn By Rachel Rose, Carolyn J. Creed

The Goose

Review of Rachel Rose's Marry & Burn.

Sleeping In Tall Grass By Richard Therrien, Gillian Frances Harding-Russell

The Goose

Review of Richard Therrien's Sleeping in Tall Grass.

Timing Canada: The Shifting Politics Of Time In Canadian Literary Culture By Paul Huebener, Cheryl Lousley

The Goose

Review of Paul Huebener's Timing Canada: The Shifting Politics of Time in Canadian Literary Culture