Human Geography Commons^™

Picturing The Future City: Digital Mediation And Creative Placemaking, Jessica Mccallum Breen

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Creative placemaking is an arts-oriented community development policy that focuses on the potential for art, artists, and cultural organizations to generate social, economic, and cultural vibrancy in their communities and is a primary tool of culture-led (re)development practices (Markusen & Gwada, 2010). Despite the focus of creative placemakers on the local impacts of their work, creative placemaking is more than local, it is both translocal and transcalar. In this dissertation, I examine the role that digital mediation plays in creative placemaking and how it makes visible these translocal and transcalar connections. I begin by outlining a methodology for tracing replicated …

Part-Time Normals: Embodied Trans Geographies Of Homonationalism, Ivy Faye Monroe

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Self-understanding of one’s gender identity both emerges from, and rearticulates into, the ways one experiences and mediates their personal and social relationships with the geographic worlds they inhabit. Trans geographical literature has, to date, created compelling work on the social geographies of trans people in highly-gendered spaces. This thesis extends the existing literature to research how gender is both experienced and performed in the mundane structures of everyday life. Building from theories of cruel optimism and homonationalism, this research examines how the discursive and spatial epistemologies of gender identity inform attachments to structures of normativity. Through archival research of transvestite …

Undoing Colorblind Ecologies: Redlining And Just Green Enough In The Urban Forest Of Boston's Franklin Park, Chelsea M. Parise

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Urban political ecology research increasingly engages multi-disciplinary methodologies to clarify the role that the botanic plays in creating, maintaining, or subverting ecological geographies of power. Fredrick Law Olmsted intended the forest within Franklin Park to heal the physical degeneration and social disunity he believed resulted from urban living conditions but instead the forest within Franklin Park has grown in contexts of increasingly complex environmental and racial difference. I examine how the urban forest in Boston’s Franklin Park has ecologically manifested racialized power relations through distinct periods of elite nature-making and segregated grassroots stewardship. I utilized archival research, forest surveys, and …

The Pet’S ‘Perfect Bowl’: Environmental And Welfare Discourse In Alternative Pet Food Movements, Carly Baker

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Marketing ‘sustainable and humane’ super-premium dog kibble has emerged alongside alternative food movements (AFM). Unfortunately, super-premium pet-food comprised of ‘high-quality’ protein is at odds with sustainability and affect for particular animals. This study analyzed social and geographical (mis)representations of nonhumans in the pet-food commodity chain by tracing how knowledge and value is produced, and mapping the geography of Open Farm dog food. I assess these geographies and discourses and I identify the following: (1) sustainability claims focus on transportation and packaging, ignoring the significant environmental and social impacts of animal agriculture. (2) Images of farmed animals on packaging often do …

Tracks/Traces: The New Deal Transformation Of Lexington, Kentucky’S Landscapes Of Horseracing And Housing, Piotr Wojcik

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Lexington, Kentucky is a key node in the global thoroughbred horse industry. This archival research examines the transformation of its horseracing and housing geographies during the 1930s by comparing the redevelopment of an old urban racetrack into federal public housing with the simultaneous development of a new racing plant in the nearby countryside. It analyzes the social and economic relations underlying this shift in addition to how these relations were naturalized by the new landscapes they created. Results suggest that a local growth coalition was seeking to emerge from a financial crisis through a spatial fix that capitalized on cultural …

Gender And Remittances: Lived Experiences Of Women In Oaxaca, Mexico, Araby Smyth

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation project analyzes the ways that migration and remittances, the money that migrants send to people in their place of origin, intersect with the political and social dynamics in an Indigenous community in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region of Oaxaca, Mexico. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, which included semi-structured interviews and participant observation alongside historical archival investigation, this dissertation examines the following questions: What international organizations, national government, and private sector policies govern remittances? How does Indigenous collective work and communal governance shape remittance management? How do the responsibilities of family members shift with migration and how …

Speaking Of Home Here And There: Everyday Experiences Of Belonging Among Highly Educated Immigrants, Katherine Feske-Kirby

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This thesis explores how highly educated immigrants articulate a sense of belonging upon relocating to the United States, more specifically to the Lexington, KY area. Engaging with feminist political geography as well as migration and cultural studies, I argue that articulations of belonging are framed through transnational attachments, which respectively expand individuals’ ability to employ everyday forms of belonging. Expressions and understandings of transnational belonging are framed through in-depth interviews on participants’ workplace, relational dynamics, and engagement with the geopolitical discourse on migration. Through these interviews, a broader representation belonging is presented, while questions on highly educated immigrants’ privilege and …

"It's Not Rainbows And Unicorns": Regulated Commodity And Waste Production In The Alberta Oilsands, Hugh Deaner

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation examines the regulated oilsands mining industry of Alberta, Canada, widely considered the world’s largest surface mining project. The industrial processes of oilsands mining produce well over one million barrels of petroleum commodities daily, plus even larger quantities of airborne and semisolid waste. The project argues for a critical account of production concretized in the co-constitutional relations of obdurate materiality and labor activity within a framework of regulated petro-capitalism. This pursuit requires multiple methods that combine archives, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews to understand workers’ shift-to-shift relations inside the “black box” of regulated oilsands mining production where materiality co-constitutes …

Futurological Fodder: On Communicating The Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, And Employment, Michael E. Samers Dr

Geography Faculty Publications

This article examines the debate concerning the employment implications of the so-called ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ (FIR) or the increasing presence of artificial intelligence and robotics in workplaces. I analyze three ‘genres’ associated with this debate (academic studies including neo-classical and heterodox/post-human approaches, the ‘gray literature’, and popular media) and I argue that together they represent ‘futurological fodder’ or discourses and knowledges that ‘perform’ the FIR and its purported consequences. I contend further that these genres involve a complex mix of ethics and politics, and I conclude with a reflection on the political implications of the FIR debate.

Undoing Mastery: With Ambivalence?, Jess Linz, Anna J. Secor

Geography Graduate Research

In this commentary, we respond to Derek Ruez and Daniel Cockayne’s article ‘Feeling Otherwise: Ambivalent Affects and the Politics of Critique in Geography’. We do so by picking up ambivalence—or more precisely, ambivalence about ambivalence—as a tool with which Ruez and Cockayne leave us. We find this tool somewhat difficult to grasp, but we understand this as part of its design. Ambivalence undoes the subject’s mastery. In doing so, we find that an airing of ambivalence gives other kinds of entangled, indeterminate, and unknowing relations room to breathe.

Challenges When Identifying Migration From Geo-Located Twitter Data, Caitrin Armstrong, Ate Poorthuis, Matthew Zook, Derek Ruths, Thomas Soehl

Geography Faculty Publications

Given the challenges in collecting up-to-date, comparable data on migrant populations the potential of digital trace data to study migration and migrants has sparked considerable interest among researchers and policy makers. In this paper we assess the reliability of one such data source that is heavily used within the research community: geolocated tweets. We assess strategies used in previous work to identify migrants based on their geolocation histories. We apply these approaches to infer the travel history of a set of Twitter users who regularly posted geolocated tweets between July 2012 and June 2015. In a second step we hand-code …

Uncovering Frontier Mythologies: Memorial Landscapes In Minneapolis, Mn, Corrin Turkowitch

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This thesis analyzes the relationship between settler colonialism and public memory in B.F. Nelson Park, a downtown park in Minneapolis. My focus is the Pioneer statue, a large granite memorial depicting a frontier family in the middle of the park, which I examine through the lenses of race, gender, power, and violence. Using archival and landscape analysis I examine the historical and present built environment of the park and how it relates to white supremacy. Through interviews of two municipal constituencies, I evaluate how these organizations maintain present narratives of European settlement and in turn uphold the monument. This research …

Gentrification And The Black Church: Mitigating Black Suburban Displacement In A Post Covid-19 World, Jordan Mccray

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Black churches have been playing an important, stabilizing and supportive role for their members, their neighborhoods, and their communities more broadly. However, these churches’ memberships, community functions, and abilities to support their members have been threatened by the accelerating displacement of African Americans due to the ongoing effects of gentrification, defined by massive economic investment in low-income areas leading to the displacement of low-income residents. At the same time, COVID-19 has also changed the ways churches are able to deliver their support and outreach, with some moving their services to be completely virtual, and many outreach programs having to be …

Bio-Spatial Policing In Theory And Practice: Examining Impacts And Resistance Through Mobilities And Children's Everyday Life, Emily Kaufman

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Despite decades of reforms and technological innovations, increasing evidence shows that state securitization disproportionately harms already racially, spatially, and socio-economically marginalized communities. My research investigates uneven impacts of state securitization, from punitive welfare programs to school surveillance to policing. Across sites, I focus on scales, voices and the everyday lived experiences often left out of scholarly discourse and sensational media. In the current climate of growing awareness and scholarship on police violence, my dissertation addresses three less-studied areas: 1) the interplay between racial, gendered, spatial, and technified police practices; 2) how these practices impact the everyday lives of those racially …

Debilitating Debts And Recapacitating Loans: How Fintech Made Markets For Unsecured Consumer Debt Using Alternative Data And Machine Learning, Michael Joshua Mccanless

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This thesis investigates the production and management of consumer debt on digital platforms. First, this study investigates how borrowers navigate spaces of debt and indebtedness created by fintech consumer lenders. Second, this thesis analyzes the process and impact of ‘alternative’ data and machine learning on fintech credit scoring models. As consumer lending ‘moves online’, this research analyzes the increasingly important role of digital spaces in the creation and management of debt. Tracking the interfaces and algorithms used by online consumer lenders, I weave together insight from digital and financial geographies to argue that digital technologies are enabling firms to marketize …

Building Quality? Migration, Suzhi, And Subaltern Masculinity In The Shanghai Construction Industry, Leif Johnson

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This doctoral dissertation providesa novel perspective on the everyday lives of construction workers in urban China, demonstrating the underpinnings of urban infrastructure and citizenship policy in affective and gendered relations surrounding the construction industry. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, China, this dissertation makes a series of three related arguments: First, focusing on the role that migrant labor plays in the construction of urban infrastructure in Shanghai, I argue that the physical existence of infrastructure itself is inextricably tied to systems that govern rural-urban migration across China. Second, building from the Chinese concept of suzhi as both …

Orienting New International College Students During A Global Pandemic: Spatiality’S Contributions To Staff Work Practices, Thomas W. Teague Jr.

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

U.S. colleges must increasingly respond to a wide range of complex forces and simultaneously fulfill their missions and support students. To address many of these forces, some have turned to internationalization efforts like recruiting and enrolling international students. In light of these efforts, critics have called for institutions to better, more appropriately support these students, given their challenges and needs. This call has amplified during the recent COVID-19 global health pandemic.

Traditional student support services tend to center around Tinto’s Theory of Student Departure. Examples of support programming are frequently shared, yet rarely detail how institutional staff actually perform them …

The Use Of Distraction: Doomscrolling, Losing Time, And Digital Well-Being In Pandemic Space-Times, Jacob Saindon

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

In the space-times of the COVID-19 global health crisis, how have our relationships with smartphones changed? How do popular discourses designate mundane engagements with digital technologies as healthy or unhealthy, and how are these notions of wellness practiced? This thesis draws upon an online survey of smartphone users residing in Kentucky, and a review of marketing, journalistic, and academic literature to establish current understandings of ‘digital well-being’. The paper then analyzes interviews with Kentucky smartphone users who were asked to track their screen time for a one-week period. This project reveals normative conceptions of well-being and the role of smartphone …

What Happened In Harris Neck?: Racism, Resistance, And Futures, Anna Sharpe

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This project traces the history and legacy of the seizure of Harris Neck, approximately 2,600 acres on the Georgia coast, once largely composed of rice and cotton plantations. After the Civil War, freedmen and women transformed the area into a thriving Black community. The community of approximately a hundred families, a school, a church, a post office, and many small farms and businesses flourished from the late 1800’s until 1942, when the federal government seized Harris Neck for use as an Army airfield.

The procedures used by the federal government to seize and, later, reallocate Harris Neck will be examined, …

Countering ‘Plastic Addicted Subjects’: Power, Essentialized Identities, And Expertise In Thailand, Olivia Carter Meyer

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Thailand is considered one of the six most significant contributors to marine plastic pollution in the world. This has led to widespread media attention and condemnation of Thai people as “addicted to plastic,” with little attention paid to how such discourses actually take shape. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with Thai regulatory institutions, grassroots environmental organizations, plastic industry representatives, and recyclers, I analyze the social, political, economic, and environmental processes that shape Thailand’s plasticscapes. I propose a feminist political ecology of plastic waste which attends to people’s lived experiences and perspectives, power relationships underlying discourses that inform the issue, and Thai …

Political Economy Of The Production Of Heritage Space In A Centro Histórico: Attracting Real Estate Capital, Expelling People. The Case Of Cartagena (Colombia), Camilo Rey-Sabogal

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Cartagena is a South American city whose historical built environment has been recognized as a World Heritage Site due to the preservation of elements of the Spanish military architecture of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. This recognition promoted a tourist and real estate boom in the Centro Histórico and, as a result, its inhabitants have faced gentrification dynamics that are expelling them to other areas of the city. During the last 15 years, these dynamics have shown a strong acceleration. Therefore, the Centro Histórico is experiencing, on the one hand, huge inflows of capital for the purchase of properties …

Risky Business: Visualizing And Historicizing The Role Of Geographic Representation And Thinking In American Business, John Swab

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Geographic representation and thinking has a long history in the American business world. This thesis examines the role of geographic representation and thinking in the fire insurance industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the Sanborn Map Company and in the development of site selection as a concept in the mid-twentieth century through the biography of William Applebaum. Through these case studies, I explore the relevance applied cartographic representations to the business world and the opportunities it presents towards advancing geography as a discipline.

Cartographic Efficacy: Histories Of The Present, Participatory Futures, Amber J. Bosse

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Throughout history, maps have held a particularly potent ability to inform and persuade their users. Recognizing the power maps and their modes of productions possess, participatory mapping has been celebrated for its capacity to empower systemically disenfranchised communities by way of establishing inclusive pathways for influencing collection and representation of spatial information. What has remained largely periphery to considerations of participatory mapping, however, has been discussions of map design. Decades of scholarship in both traditional and critical veins of cartography, however, argue that it’s the careful execution of design choices that grant the map its power. Without attention to design, …

Becoming Gentrifier/D: Aesthetics, Subjectivities, And Rhythms Of Gentrification In Seoul, South Korea, Myung In Ji

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Gentrification has been extensively studied beyond Euro-American societies. In particular, previous research of Seoul’s residential gentrification has broadened our understanding of the role of the developmental state and property speculation in urban clearance and renewal. However, little attention has been paid to the contemporary retail gentrification in Seoul that has different aesthetics, subjectivities, and rhythms compared to residential gentrification. In retail gentrification, old urban neighborhoods are no longer demolished but cherished with their nostalgic landscapes and atmospheres. In this context, this dissertation project explores Seochon, a gentrifying neighborhood in Seoul, that was designated as a cultural heritage site in 2010. …

Reserved For The Whole Earth: Forms Of Evidence, Ought Anxiety, And The Futures Of Geographic Inquiry, Eric M. Robsky Huntley

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation examines geographic forms of evidence in the practices of landscape architects and geographers. I analyze evidence not only as an epistemic phenomenon, but as an aesthetic one, as well. Convincing an audience that the world is (or should be) one way and not another requires that knowledges be stacked, extended, and stitched together in a manner admissable to an audience. In the first two chapters, I use the case of the landscape architect Ian McHarg to examine how his approach to integrating scientific knowledge---a aesthetic response to what I theorize as 'ought anxiety'---grew alongside the environmental bureaucracy in …

Street Musicians, Soundscapes And Hearing The State In Urban Public Spaces Of Istanbul, Lacin Tutalar

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This study explores street musicians’ routines and associations with public space in Istanbul, Turkey between 2014 and 2016, a period which corresponds to a new, more conservative routine in the aftermath of a time of political contention in 2013. The study overall takes up a rhythmanalytical perspective, following the cultural geography’s interest based on Henri Lefebvre’s use of the term. I contribute to that interest by paying attention to changes in the composition of an urban public in Istanbul through a mix of institutional (e.g. bureaucratic, capitalist and religious) and corporeal (e.g. tourists, musicians, young people, audience, street maintenance, refugees, …

Affect And Manhattan’S West Side Piers, Ricardo J. Millhouse

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Derek P. McCormack (2010) argues, "Affect, is like an atmosphere: it might not be visible, but at any given point it might be sensed ... Emotion, in turn, can be understood as the sociocultural expression of this felt intensity" (643). This paper puts McCormack (2010) and Ben Anderson (2009) into conversation to think through the ways in which atmosphere in relation to affective and emotive life has been conceptualized. I center the affective atmospheres that happen with queer bodies that make New York's west side piers queerly affective. I use "queer bodies" to signal the dis-identification with heteronormativity or binaristic …

Street Affects: An Exercise On Why We Listen To But Don't Hear The Street Music, Laçin Tutalar

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

This paper argues that affective moments between street musicians and the audience in Istanbul, Turkey suggest a loose connection to open and highly affective practices of hearing. The street brings them together during the moments of performance. The performance twists the power of sound that the musician makes and draws that into visualization of the moment, which underlines a peculiar affective attachment on the audience's side. The city's, musician's, and the listening practices' significance in these moments are taken into account and narrated with examples from the fieldwork.

Unsettling Refuge: Syrian Refugees’ Account Of Life In Denmark, Malene H. Jacobsen

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This doctoral dissertation examines the lived experiences of refuge in Denmark from the perspectives of Syrian refugees. Situated within feminist political geography, it moves beyond examining geopolitics merely from the perspective of the law, the state, and policy makers. Instead, it seeks to grasp the ways in which geopolitics are encountered, experienced, and negotiated on the ground – by the people who are most affected by state policies and practices. It draws on more than ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark with Syrian refugees, including semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and participant observations, as well as interviews with state and …

Poéticas Minimalistas De La Ciudad Contemporánea: Iribarren, Mínguez Y Del Val, David Delgado López

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

Throughout the Spanish poetic production of the 20^th century, cities have developed a relevant role as a recurring space at the same time as society urbanized and an exodus took place from agricultural areas to the work centers offered by the cities. Since the second half of the 19^th century the city has been the meeting place for people from different backgrounds where the poet found, from his exclusive point of view, a new universe to develop in his work. However, the evolution of capitalist society sponsored the poet's transition from an artist to a worker in the …