Human Geography Commons^™

“Beyond Sisterhood There Is Still Racism, Colonialism And Imperialism!” Negotiating Gender, Ethnicity And Power In Madagascar Mangrove Conservation, Manon Lefèvre

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Understanding women’s experiences of mangrove forest conservation in the Global South is important because mangrove forests are a crucial defense against climate change, and are also increasingly the targets of global climate change policies. The intervention of postcolonial feminist theory combined with feminist political ecology has the potential to bring forward women’s seldom-heard experiences of climate change in these valuable ecosystems. This work supports previous feminist political ecology scholarship focused on understanding women’s complicated relationships to the environment and the gendered effects of climate change policies, while challenging dominant conservation discourse around women as a monolithic group. This thesis focuses …

Catastrophic Futures, Robby Hardesty

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

By means of a peculiar magic, insurance preserves the quantified value of capital through destructive, contingent events. The principal subjects of this project, global reinsurers, stand at the end of a long line of loss claims, holding capital together as forces threaten to tear it apart. The apocalyptic imaginaries of climate change portend events that will be increasingly destructive to capital, and insurers counter with new products and narratives. In examining reinsurers and the catastrophes they protect against, this project questions how novelty emerges from the eternal return of the same. I show how power is inscribed in the landscape, …

“One More Way To Sell New Orleans”: Airbnb And The Commodification Of Authenticity Through Local Emotional Labor, Ian Spangler

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Since 2014, Airbnb has been the poster-child for an impassioned debate over how to best regulate short-term home rentals (STR’s) in New Orleans, Louisiana. As critical perspectives toward on-demand economic practice become increasingly common, it is important to understand how the impacts of STR platforms like Airbnb extend beyond the realm of what is traditionally conceptualized as the economic (i.e., pressure on housing markets). In this thesis, I explore the ways in which Airbnb recalibrates the spatial and temporal rhythms of everyday neighborhood life for people external to the formal trappings of an STR contract. Drawing in particular on theories …

Financial Inclusion In The City: Examining The Democratization Of Finance In Boston, Massachusetts, Jessa M. Loomis

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This doctoral dissertation examines how the financialization of the economy affects the everyday lives of low and moderate-income (LMI) urban residents in the United States. Specifically, the research presented in this dissertation provides a critical examination of the democratization of finance by examining financial empowerment programs designed to promote financial inclusion for LMI residents in Boston, Massachusetts. These programs were created in the wake of the financial crisis to promote financial security by training participants to manage their debt, to monitor their credit scores, to avoid predatory lending, and to invest using mainstream financial products.

This research has two significant …

Works Of Dr. P. P. Karan 1960-2016, Brad Allard

Library Student Employees' Research

No abstract provided.

Cultivating A Culture Of Food Justice: Impacts Of Community Based Economies On Farmers And Neighborhood Leaders In The Case Of Fresh Stop Markets In Kentucky, Heather Hyden

Theses and Dissertations--Community & Leadership Development

In this thesis, I focus on two tensions within the alternative agro-food movement. First is a question of who/what community is allowed to define food systems problems and then implement solutions. For example, food desert metaphors rely discursively on defining communities as being “without”, which perpetuates needs-based narratives, in which only professional “experts” know how to solve problems of food access. These representations ignore the creativity, agency, and resiliency of everyday food justice mobilizations happening at the grassroots level. Second, what form can solutions take within hegemonic constructions of development? I build a theoretical model based on Black geographies (McKittrick, …

No Such State As Palestine: Notions Of Home And The State In Palestinian Relationships With Palestine, Osama A. Abdl-Haleem

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

There is no such state as Palestine. But nearly 70 years after the termination of the British mandate for Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel, Palestine remains a home for the Palestinian. It is an identity not dependent on the existence of a Palestinian state, nor arrested by the presence of an Israeli one. Palestinians have a home relationship with Palestine, where home is a sense of belonging that comes from within, that isn’t earned and given, but personal and chosen, even while it is communal. Home is a self-determined relationship of person to place. The relationships …

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), …

Poland’S Voivodeships And Poviats And The Geographies Of Knowledge: Addressing Uneven Human Resources, Stanley D. Brunn, Marcin Semczuk, Rafał Koszek, Karolina Gołuszka, Gabriela Bołoz

Geography Faculty Publications

In a postindustrial economic world, information economies are key components in local, regional and national development. These are service economies, built on the production, consumption and dissemination of information, including education, health care, outsourcing, tourism, sustainability and related human welfare services. We explore the geography/knowledge intersections in Poland’s voivodeships and poviats by using the volumes of information or hyperlinks about selected information economies. Google hyperlinks are electronic knowledge data that can be mapped to highlight the areas of most and least information about certain subject categories. While some mapping results are expected, such as Warsaw and Krakow, being prominent, in …

Beyond Metropolises: Hybridity In A Transnational Context, Raihan Sharif

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Beyond metropolises and within transnational contexts, investigating hybridity discourses is long overdue. This article argues that the epistemic violence embedded in such discourse has grave implications for the very impoverished nations and peoples with whom it claims solidarity and that, because this discourse is trendy in academia, its service to neoliberal capitalism is both easy to miss and important to expose. Interstices of postcolonial hybridity discourses, development discourses, and environmental justice discourses—dominant versions of which are segregated from contextual issues—as produced in Western academia and exported to third world countries for appropriation as developmental efforts—reveal epistemic violence, the manipulation of …

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 …

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 …

Stone Walls And Shopping Malls: Retail Landscapes In The Bluegrass, Jason Richards

Kaleidoscope

This paper is an analysis of the recent use of veneered stone walls in the contemporary retail landscapes of the Bluegrass. These walls have been used in conjunction with other elements of the region’s landscape symbol vocabulary to re-create the equine landscape of Central Kentucky in commercial spaces. They seek to evoke the region’s symbolic landscape of wealthy horse estates, utilizing their inaccessibility to elicit an associative attitude of aspiration in the shopper. But they also speak to the values of the businesses and citizens who produce them. The earliest of these walls were found in the street frontage and …

Changing Geography Of Retailing In Japan: Move From Traditional Shopping Arcades To Malls, Adam Peach

Kaleidoscope

No abstract provided.

Influx: Why Everyone Benefits From Migration, Ethan Rutledge

Ex-Patt Magazine

Ex-Patt editor Ethan Rutledge reviews Paul Collier’s most recent book.

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 …

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, …