Human Geography Commons^™

Claudio Perna, Ca. 1970: The Impossibility Of Wholeness, Silvia Benedetti

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis identifies two main themes in Claudio Perna’s (1938–1997) work: his use of technology to explore self-representation and his interrogation of mapping as means of knowledge. This study also situates Perna’s conceptual work in relation to his field of human geography, in the specific Venezuelan context.

Creando Las Estrellas: Determining The Quality Of The Dominican And Cuban Player Development Systems, Samuel C. Hearn

Honors Theses

Recently, there has been a huge rise in the number of Cuban ballplayers, or peloteros, as the baseball playing Latinos are known. Why do Major League Baseball (MLB) teams go to such lengths to sign Cubans, when a heavy presence already exists in Cuba’s Caribbean neighbor, the Dominican Republic? Through the comparison educational systems, statistics of each country’s elite players, and comparative accounts of the Dominican and Cuban player development systems, the contrast between the two systems is evident. Though the Dominican system creates a large return in the investment MLB teams make in the country, the socialized sport system …

Art Education In My Backyard: Creative Placemaking On An Urban Farm, Jodi Kushins

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

An art educator describes how she used her knowledge and experience of artistic and educational initiatives that forefront collective activity in real world settings to transform her backyard into an urban farm with the help of friends and neighbors. She combines an autoethnographic account of her experiences, including original photographs, with research on conceptual artists, participatory culture, and creative placemaking to position her work as participatory environmental art education. The paper is organized around the major steps one undertakes in planting a garden – siting, amending, seeding, tending, and harvesting - to draw parallels between the processes of maintaining a …

Transportation And Sanitation Drivers Of Land Use/Land Cover Change: Loss Of The Jamaica Bay Wetlands, Margaret Joy Cytryn

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents an analysis (1830-2014) of the historical events of land use/land cover change in the Jamaica Bay estuary, identification of the agents of change, and a perspective on the potential drivers of transportation and sanitation in land use/land cover change.

Influence Of Changes In Political Barriers And Of Geographic Distance On Kinship Inferred From Surnames And Migration Data In Olivenza (Spain) And Surrounding Portuguese Areas, J. Román-Busto

Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints

The existing relationship between human populations is a function of their migratory and genetic exchange which will be inversely proportional to the distance separating them. The effect of geographic distance on population structure may be estimated by means of isonymic methods which use information on the surnames present in a territory as an approximation to the distribution of allele frequencies. The objective of this study is to analyse whether the modification in 1801 of the political border in an area surrounding the town of Olivenza, which experienced a change of sovereignty from Portugal to Spain, has had noticeable influence on …

Here I Am And Here I’M Not: Queer Women’S Use Of Temporary Urban Spaces In Post-Katrina New Orleans, Vigdís María Hermannsdóttir

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis builds on previous work on the relationship between queer identities and urban space. Drawing from an analysis of two recurring New Orleans-based queer women’s events, I examine how lesbians and queer women not only use but also actively produce social spaces of their own through participation in events organized specifically for lesbians and queer women. Using qualitative methods, I examine the ephemeral and transient quality of lesbian and queer women’s social spaces in post-Katrina New Orleans and the processes through which such spaces come into being. I argue that lesbian and queer women’s production of ephemeral social spaces …

Swenson Center Report, Dr. Christopher Strunk

Swenson Center Faculty Research Stipend Reports

As a migration scholar, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to spend a week this summer conducting research in the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center. During my three years at Augustana, my students and I have explored urban development and recent patterns of immigrant and refugee settlement in the Quad Cities. In places like the Floreciente neighborhood of Moline, located about a mile from Augustana’s campus on the west side of the city, the Mexican and Mexican American community is transforming a landscape that had already been influenced by a much earlier wave of migration from Sweden.

Procedural Modeling For Ancient Maya Cityscapes: Initial Methodological Challenges And Solutions, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Rachel Plessing

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Digital reconstruction of 3D cityscapes is expensive, time-consuming, and requires significant expertise. We need a 3D modeling approach that streamlines the integration of multiple data types in a time-efficient and low-cost manner. Procedural modeling—rapid proto-typing of 3D models from a set of rules— offers a potential solution to this problem because it allows scholars to create digital reconstructions that can be quickly updated and used to test and formulate alternative hypotheses that are derived from and linked to underlying archaeological data. While procedural modeling is being used to visualize ancient Roman, Etruscan, and Greek cities, in the Maya region the …

Alpine Experiments: The National Parks And The Development Of Skiing In The American West, Jeffrey T. Meyer

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In 1886, the U.S. Army mounted cavalry soldiers on skis to patrol the winter landscape of Yellowstone National Park. Prior to Yellowstone's skiing soldiers, the U.S. government had no formal relationship with skiing. In Yellowstone, the Army initiated the U.S. government's intimate and enduring relationship with skiing in the American West. When the National Park Service (NPS) took over the management of Yellowstone, the government's involvement with western skiing transferred over to the NPS. Upon its creation in 1916, the NPS inherited a national park system primarily carved from the high western mountains and embraced the promotion of recreational skiing …

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 …

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, …

May You Walk In Beauty: The Decline Of Navajo Land And Culture, Jocelyn Catterson

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

The Navajo homeland, Dinetah, is bordered by four mountains that are sacred to the Navajo people: two in Colorado, one in New Mexico, and one in Arizona. Historically, Navajo medicine men have traveled to these mountains to renew prayers and collect medicinal herbs. Today, the mountains, which exist outside of the reservation boundaries, are used for resource extraction and various recreational pursuits. While many Navajo are fighting for the protection of these sacred lands and their traditional culture, others are disinterested. Traditional practices and beliefs are slowly disappearing within the Navajo Nation. The land-use issues associated with these sacred mountains …

Place-Making, Mobility, And Identity: The Politics And Poetics Of Urban Mass Rapid Systems In Taiwan, Anru Lee

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

A Cross-Cultural Comparison Of Weekend–Trips In Religious Tourism: Insights From Two Cultures, Two Countries (India And Italy), Kiran A. Shinde, Katia Rizello

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

This paper explains peculiarities, significance, and universality of weekend-trips as significant form of religious tourism using a comparative analysis of this phenomenon in two pilgrimage sites from two different cultures (and countries), namely, Vrindavan in India and the Shrine of Santimissi Medici in Italy. The findings derived from a case-study approach and visitors’ survey method confirm that religious tourism falls under the more general category of leisure and that visitors who flock to these places on weekends do not coincide either with general models proposed in the extant literature, nor can they be assimilated to the conventional categories of pilgrims …

The Museumification Of Rumi’S Tomb: Deconstructing Sacred Space At The Mevlana Museum, Rose Aslan

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Tourists and pilgrims from across Turkey and around the world flock to the tomb of Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273), one of the greatest poets and Sufi masters in Islam. Since 1925, the Turkish government has relentlessly struggled to control Islamic influences in society and to channel people’s devotion to the memory of Kemal Ataturk (d. 1938) and his secular ideology. This article argues that by restructuring the layout and presentation of the tomb complex of Rumi, and putting the sacred space through the process of museumification, the Turkish state has attempted to regulate the place in order to control …

Into The Red: A Look Into The Reasons Why Refugees Decide To Flee, Settle Or Migrate To And From Morocco, Fadeelah E. Holivay

Master's Theses

This research paper explores some of the main reasons why refugees and asylum seekers, particularly from sub-Saharan African countries, embark on a journey and decide to settle, flee or migrate to and from Morocco. Because of this phenomenon, Morocco has seen a 96% increase of refugees migrating to the borders of Morocco each year for the past three years. Many say that this astonishing increase of migrants choosing Morocco is due to such factors as: wars breaking out regionally across central African and Middle Eastern countries causing them to flee; Morocco being a culturaly diverse francophone country whose laws and …

Have Dominicans Surpassed Puerto Ricans To Become New York City’S Largest Latino Nationality? An Analysis Of Latino Population Data From The 2013 American Community Survey For New York City And The Metropolitan Area, Laird W. Bergad

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction: This study examines three data sets from the recently released American Community Survey (ACS) of 2013 to estimate the population sizes of the largest Latino national sub groups in New York City and in the City’s surrounding counties.

Methods: Data on Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Cases in the dataset were weighted and analyzed to produce population estimates.

Results: The data released by IPUMS in November 2014 from American Community Survey for 2013, and analyzed here, …

Vukovar, Siege Of, 1991, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Provides an over view of fhe siege of the Croatian city Vukovar bu the Serbian Military during the Serbo-Croatian war between May-November 1991.

Nato In The Balkans, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

This encyclopedia entry examines the contemporary and recent historic role of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Balkan countries. It also discusses and emerging security concerns affecting these countries.

Human Trafficking In Morocco: A Focus On Sub-Saharan Migrant Women, Ladarrien Gillette

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The purpose of this study was to report on the situation of exploited and trafficked Sub-Saharan migrant women in Morocco. With the lack of legal framework to recognize or combat human trafficking my research focuses on the broader context of trafficking as a means to exploit mostly women in regards to sexual assault. Since the crime is not explicitly defined within Moroccan penal code there are no specific organizations dealing with survivors of trafficking but there are a few that indirectly address women migrants. The irregular situation of migrants in Morocco makes their involvement with being trafficked more complicated than …

Review: Humanist Geography: An Individual's Search For Meaning By Yi‐Fu Tuan, Justin K. H. Tse

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Yi‐Fu Tuan's latest book is a defence of individualism aimed at a wide lay readership, “a book on education that could benefit children everywhere” (p. ix). It is also a fascinating illustration of the relevance of geographies of religion to ongoing interests in humanistic geography. Indeed, one of Tuan's central arguments is that “religious thinking both undergoes and completes humanist thinking” and is therefore not “a relic that humanism has to outgrow,” for that would be a “regrettable” narrowing of the “scope of inquiry” in humanistic geography that “offends the spirit of humanism” (p. 5). It is this latter interest …

An Interpretive Plan Guide For Wilderness Park In Lincoln, Nebraska, Rachel J. Ward

Community and Regional Planning Program: Professional Projects

Wilderness Park, located in Lancaster County, Nebraska, is a public park of unique ecological and historical value to the city of Lincoln and to the surrounding region. The natural and historical features of the park present an opportunity to communicate environmental and historical topics that are relevant on local, national, and global levels, as well as inspire a lively sense of pride in the community. The problem is that many topics relevant to Wilderness Park are not currently being interpreted at the park, and that there are relatively few interpretive resources available to park visitors.

The purpose of this project …

Mitochondrial Dna Variability Among Six South-American Amerindian Villages From The Pano Linguistic Group, Celso T. Mendes-Junior, Aguinaldo L. Simoes

Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints

Although scattered throughout a large geographic area, the members of the Pano linguistic group present strong ethnic, linguistic and cultural homogeneity, a feature that causes them to be considered as components of a same “Pano” tribe. Nevertheless, the genetic homogeneity between Pano villages has not been examined before. To study the genetic structure of the Pano linguistic group, four major Native American mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) founder haplogroups were analyzed in 77 Amerindians from six villages of four Pano tribes (Katukina, Kaxináwa, Marúbo, and Yaminawa) located in the Brazilian Amazon. The central position of these tribes in the continent makes them …

Questioning The “Melting Pot”: Analysis Of Alu Inserts In Three Population Samples From Uruguay, Pedro C. Hidalgo, Patricia Mut, Elizabeth Ackermann, Gonzalo Figueiro, Monica Sans

Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints

The way that immigrants integrate to recipient societies has been discussed for decades, mainly from the perspective of the social sciences. Uruguay, as other American countries, received different waves of European immigrants, although the details of the process of assimilation, when occurred, are unclear. In this paper, we use genetic markers to understand the process experienced by the Basques, one of the major migration waves that populated Uruguay, and its relation to other immigrants as well as to Native American and African descendants. For this purpose, we analyze the allele frequencies of ten ALU loci (A25, ACE, APOA1, B65, F13B, …

Latino Rhythms In Downtown Los Angeles: A Case Study Of The Social, Physical, And Economic Environment Of "La Broadway", Ulises Antonio Gonzalez

Master's Theses

In an attempt to practice inclusive planning, this research project explores whether Broadway Avenue functions as an ethnic commercial strip and identifies social, physical, and economic components that contribute to the Latino neighborhood/ barrio. Using pilot studies Loukaitou-Sideris (2000), Loukaitou-Sideris (2002), Rojas (1993), Manzumdar et al. (2000), Main (2007), and Fernando (2007) as a foundation, this research uses a single case study in addition to several research methods: 42 random surveys, literature review and analysis, site observations/pictures, and land use survey.

Various scholars write that barrios have unique physical, social, economic, and political attributes. A new aesthetic, art, symbols, …

Climate Change Vulnerabilities: Case Studies Of The Maldives And Kenya, Katherine A. Peinhardt

Honors Scholar Theses

This paper examines the political and social vulnerabilities of climate change, with the use of two salient case studies, the Republic of the Maldives and Kenya as exemplars of effects observed and projected. The susceptibilities for each nation are examined, with unique sensitivities highlighted and common themes synthesized between the two states. Examples of existing conflict, and implications of projected territorial conflict will be discussed. Policy outcomes will also be discussed for the situation of each nation, each with its own set of contextual sensitivities in the face of climatic shifts. Generalized policy options will be proposed for the common …

The American Compound, Kelley A. Snowden, Perky Beisel

CRHR Publications

Scarcely addressed in the literature, the compound has gained broad recognition in the American vernacular as a spatially separate and unique form of settlement. Although largely viewed as a fringe development, compounds have deep roots in the historical development of the American landscape.

The American Compound, Kelley A. Snowden, Perky Beisel

CRHR: Archaeology

Scarcely addressed in the literature, the compound has gained broad recognition in the American vernacular as a spatially separate and unique form of settlement. Although largely viewed as a fringe development, compounds have deep roots in the historical development of the American landscape.

Credit Card System In Ghana: An Investigation Of Why Credit Cardsare Not Widely Used In Ghana And How Widespread Use May Be Implemented, Emmanuel Andoh

Masters Theses

Credit card systems offer economic advantages to many families and individuals across the globe. In economically developed countries and most emerging ones, the credit card system helps individuals, businesses, and even government agencies, speed up business transactions and access to short term loans. However in developing countries such as Ghana this is not the case. The result is that many people find it very difficult to buy goods and services without having cash at hand. Moreover a vast majority of people have to carry bags of money to travel across cities, towns and villages in the country to trade and …