Nature and Society Relations Commons^™

Conflict And Nature: How War In Cambodia Shaped Its Natural Landscape, Emily Lifs

Theses and Dissertations

Through the efforts of the Cambodian people and historians, the world is familiar with the tragic human story that unfolded over decades of war and the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge. This thesis is an attempt to tell the equally tragic but untold story of how decades of conflict shaped the Cambodian landscape and the lives and populations of elephants and other animals.

Expulsive Greening: A Cross-Sectional Analysis Of Green Gentrification In The Resilience Paradigm, Brooklyn 2010–2020, Rose Jimenez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: This project analyzes the spatial coincidence between gentrification typologies and urban greening in Brooklyn, New York from 2010 to 2020. Assets formed under the NYC Green Infrastructure Program were chosen as a proxy for urban greening to represent the spatial practice specifically within the 21st-century climate change resilience paradigm of development. Methods: First, five indexes measuring variations of economic and demographic conditions related to gentrification were applied to Brooklyn for comparative analysis: NOAA’s Social Vulnerability Indicators of Gentrification Pressure, The NYC Heat Vulnerability Index, The Small Area Index of Gentrification, Typologies of Gentrification and Displacement, and The Housing Risk …

Opportunities For Wonder In A Public Park, Alexander Butler

Theses and Dissertations

Research suggests unstructured play is important to a child's mental and physical development, and the natural world provides excellent opportunities for formative experiences. Urban environments, however, present challenges to finding and enjoying wild spaces. The potential role of public parks, supported by a small survey of college students, is discussed.

Vertebrate Scavenger Diversity And Ecosystem Services Along An Elevational Gradient In Central Nepal, Aishwarya Bhattacharjee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A growing number of studies recognize the ecological significance of vertebrate scavengers, and several species belonging to this diverse, functional guild are of high conservation importance around the globe. Studies on taxonomic and functional components of biodiversity often use elevation gradients to comprehensively examine patterns and drivers across multiple spatial scales. Yet, there are relatively few elevational studies on large vertebrates or multi-taxa guilds, and the related variation of their ecosystem services. In particular, scavenger research has largely focused on local-scale studies or regional/global comparisons of local-scale investigations. Moreover, these studies primarily consider taxonomic community characteristics and the patterns of …

Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia, Alaina Claire Feldman, Clayton Press, Solange Farkas, Gabriel Bogossian

Publications and Research

Bilingual catalogue for the exhibition "Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia" presented at Baruch College's Mishkin Gallery.

Sacred Music In Colonial Era Hispaniola: The Evangelization Of The Taino People, Tito J. Gutierrez

Student Theses

During the 15th-18th centuries, the major European religious orders; the Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, and Jeronymites, journeyed to the newly colonized American territories in an attempt to convert the multitudes of natives peoples living there. Along with prayer books, crucifixes, and religious images, these missionaries brought sacred European music to American shores in an attempt to attract the native people to the Catholic faith.The use of music as a tool for conversion of native people in places such as Mexico, South America, California, and the South West United States, have been well researched and documented. However, the research of the spiritual …

Constructing The Adaptation Economy In Antigua, West Indies: A Grounded Analysis Of Framing Climate Resilient Development Within A Post-Colonial Political Economy, Erin Friedman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Caribbean small island developing states (SIDS) are projected to bear the most economic costs from climate risk due to their limited ability to recover from disaster. From 2010-2015, external donors have provided $1477 million in climate financing for the region, of which 32 % has been allocated for climate adaptation activities. At the same time, Caribbean SIDS have an extensive history of participating in regional climate policymaking programs—primarily administered by the development sector (e.g., the World Bank, the Overseas development Institute). These policymaking trainings have promoted an integrated or mainstreamed approach to climate adaptation which seeks to align national development …

Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit To Climate-Displaced And Host Communities, Gül Aktürk, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Climate change is borderless, and its impacts are not shared equally by all communities. It causes an imbalance between people by creating a more desirable living environment for some societies while erasing settlements and shelters of some others. Due to floods, sea level rise, destructive storms, drought, and slow-onset factors such as salinization of water and soil, people lose their lands, homes, and natural resources. Catastrophic events force people to move voluntarily or involuntarily. The relocation of communities is a debatable climate adaptation measure which requires utmost care with human rights, ethics, and psychological well-being of individuals upon the issues …

Digital Earth: The Impact Of Geographic Technology Through The Ages, Mishka Vance Huq

Theses and Dissertations

Geographic technology encompasses a wide range of geographic knowledge, concepts, processes, and artifacts. Because of its interdisciplinarity and integration with other technologies, the paper examines the diffuse impacts of geographic technology within the evolving relationship between technological and societal developments over time.

Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon

Theses and Dissertations

This writing situates material and gestural vocabularies cultivated in my artwork in relation to my lived experience; primarily my rural upbringing in Colorado. Scattered floor dispersals, calling sounds, and bodily movements desire reconsiderations of hope in precarity through a disorientation of place, association, scale, and language.

An Application Of The Sleuth Model: Future Urbanization Of Davidson County, Tennessee, Caitlyn J. Linehan

Theses

As the urban population is expected to grow in the coming decades, there is pressure on urban areas to expand to accommodate this growth. Often times, these expansions are not sustainable, they consume valuable lands and cause significant environmental, social, and economic burdens, a theory which is known as urban sprawl. Therefore it is often imperative to model areas more likely to urbanize in order for cities to plan for their expansion in the most sustainable way possible. Nashville, Tennessee located within Davidson County is an area that has been experiencing a significant period of urban growth. The objective of …

The Emergence Of Ecosystems-Based Fisheries Management From The Groundfish Crisis In New England: An Actor-Network Theory Analysis, Catherine King

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research investigates the emergence of ecosystems-based fisheries management (EBFM) for New England's marine fisheries in the context of the "crisis" that is escalating in its groundfish fishery. Close observations of the practices of fisheries scientists in coordination with managers at the New England Fisheries Management Council, with focus on how knowledge is being produced and employed, allows for understanding EBFM as an emergent construction produced by networks of associations between actants, human and non-human, material and semiotic, and not strictly as a policy prescription informed by experts on biology, ecology, and socio-economics. This analysis identifies and elucidates the multiplicity …

Commmunity, Ecology, And Modernity: Faunal Analysis Of Skútustaðir In Mývatnssveit, Northern Iceland, Megan Hicks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the archaeofaunal remains from Skútustaðir, a middle to high-status farm in Mývatnssveit, Northern Iceland, to understand the experience of rural communities and their ecologies during Iceland’s transition from regulated colonial exchange to a capitalist economy during the 17^th through 19^th centuries. Archaeofaunal analysis is used to reconstruct changes in the ways that people herded, hunted, and fished, providing insights into how they managed their local environments for subsistence and novel contexts of exchange. In addition to archaeofaunal analysis, primary textual sources are explored to assess how the Skútustaðir household and its rural community mobilized long-term …

Sedimenting Territory: A Political Geology Of Oil, Earth, And Spatial Politics In Turkey, Zeynep Oguz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building on the recent turn to the material and earthly aspects of resources and political power in environmental anthropology and political geography, this work historically and ethnographically examines the kinds of territorial politics that oil’s materiality, geological qualities, and infrastructures have generated in Turkey. Despite being surrounded by oil-rich neighbors in the Middle East, Turkey’s domestic oil reserves supply only 7 percent of the country’s oil, all of which has been drilled in the Kurdish provinces of Batman, Diyarbakır, and Adıyaman in Turkey’s southeast, where the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) has been fighting the Turkish state since 1984 for cultural …

Signals In The Black Stack / Geometyr Design Manual, Jason T. Scaglione

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following white paper provides a critical accompaniment to my capstone project: the GEOMEtyr Design Manual. GEOMEtyr is a virtual reality to be made accessible as a mobile and web platform for the visualization of certain systemic elements of a utopic world that parallels our own planet’s geographies, polities, and climates. As such, the GEOMEtyr virtualization is designed to derive utopian space from the informational structures of our own world. The operations by which this may be accomplished are broadly described within the accompanying GEOMEtyr manual. The white paper, Signals in the Black Stack, elaborates vital world-building characteristics of informational …

A Smartphone App Survey To Encourage Sustainable And Healthy Travel Mode Choices, Paul Rivers

Theses and Dissertations

Can access to carbon footprint and health [calorie and fat burn] information influence transportation behavior? Survey methods are used in conjunction with a smartphone GPS mobile app to measure transportation tendencies in weekdays – weekends, and willingness to undertake modal shift based on app experience over one week.

Hearing/S: Will In The Carceral Archive, Kayla Morse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This long-form poetry project follows the human will — in this case the “criminal,” or captive will — as it is manhandled through an archive of reverends, wardens and superintendents narrating the future of prison reform. Drawing primarily from National Prison Association Conference archives between the years 1874 and 1895, these documents saturate the work with a will resistant but compelled towards subjugation by the state — as it appears within the text across forced labor economies, eugenic prison science that dictates starvation, classification, and isolation as the rule, the dehumanization of banal bureaucratic processes, the visceral and spectacular violence …

Culture As Sustainability: The Case Study Of Govardhan Ecovillage And Vedic Culture In India, Danielle Lella Bartolone

Theses and Dissertations

This project investigates the relationship between sustainability and Vedic culture of India. The ethnographic research at Govardhan Ecovillage seeks to understand how sustainability is embedded in culture. I employ grounded theory for my research methodology which reveals three key themes explaining fundamental and interrelated dimensions of Vedic culture as sustainability.

Hrísheimar: Fish Consumption Patterns, Wendi K. Coleman

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I examine the fish remain patterns at Hrísheimar, which have provided archaeologists with further evidence that inland sites such as those in the Mývatnssveit Region utilized both local freshwater and marine fish from the coastal regions as a part of their subsistence pattern.

We Refugees, Again, Aaron Linas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dramatic shifts in climate have generated a new form of global displacement. These ‘climate migrants’ challenge the notion of state sovereignty by introducing a new paradigm for global responsibility. I seek to address this emerging demand of sovereignty by outlining the normative mechanisms of state institutions when encountering displaced persons. The extreme cases of disappearing island nations creates stateless population incompatible with standard liberal values of humanitarianism and border security. My claim is that current normative institutions and principles of assistance to migrating people are insufficient to manage the international crisis of climate change. To be able to aid migrants …

Assessment Of The Socio-Environmental Impacts Of The Urban Expansion Using Gis And Remote Sensing In The City Of Guayaquil, Ecuador., Erika P. Jimenez Rivera

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the impacts of the urban expansion from 1990 to 2010 in Guayaquil, Ecuador using geospatial technologies. It incorporates census and land cover data to identify the social and environmental repercussions through Hot Spot Analysis, land cover classification, and Markov chains model.

The Production Of Space: Indigenous Resistance Movements In The Peruvian Amazon, Christian Calienes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The resistance movement that resulted in the Baguazo in the northern Peruvian Amazon in 2009 was the culmination of a series of social, economic, political and spatial processes that reflected the Peruvian nation’s engagement with global capitalism and democratic consolidation after decades of crippling instability and chaos. The recently discovered oil and natural gas reserves that occupy the subsoil of much the Peruvian Amazon provide the latest natural resource upon which the national project can continue to be implemented. In a context of neo-imperialism and neo-extractivism where through accumulation by dispossession, new markets are introduced into global capitalist structures after …

Of Rats And Men, Thomas S. Walsh

Capstones

This capstone is a data-driven investigation into New York City's rat problem. By using publicly available government data to map rat activity in NYC, I identified several socio-economic variables that correlate with rat populations at the community district, borough, and city-scale. I used these findings (mainly that rat problems are linked to lower incomes) as the basis of an investigation, which includes interviews with residents, experts, and city officials. Prof. Bobby Corrigan, urban rodentologist and formerly with the NYC Department of Health criticizes the city's efforts for the first time on the record.

https://thomasseiyawalsh.wixsite.com/ratstone

Walking As Ontological Shifter: Thoughts In The Key Of Life, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the …

The Anthropocene, Overview, Scott W. Schwartz

Open Educational Resources

This presentation offers an overview of the developing concept of The Anthropocene -- a term coined to describe our current geological epoch, in which human impact on the planet will leave a permanent trace.

Critical Agrarian Studies In Theory And Practice, Marc Edelman, Wendy Wolford

Publications and Research

Abstract: In this introductory article we argue for renewed attention to life and labor on and of the land—or what we call the field of Critical Agrarian Studies. Empirically rich and theoretically rigorous studies of humanity’s relationship to “soil” remain essential not just for historical analysis but for understanding urgent contemporary crises, including widespread food insecurity, climate change, the proliferation of environmental refugees, growing corporate power and threats to biodiversity. The article introduces an innovative and varied collection of works in Critical Agrarian Studies and also examines the intellectual and political history of this broader field.

Resumen: En este artículo …

Different Names For Bullying, Marco Poggio

Capstones

“There's all different forms of bullying,” says Steven Gray, a Lakota rancher and former law enforcement officer living in South Dakota. In this look into Gray’s life, we learn about two instances of bullying: the psychological and physical harassment that pushed his son, Tanner Thomas Gray, to commit suicide at age 12; And the controversial construction of an oil pipeline in an ancient tribal land that belongs to the Lakota people by rights of a treaty signed in 1851, which Gray sees as an institutional abuse infringing on the sovereignty of his people. Gray is involved in the movement that …

Institutionalizing Environmental Justice: Race, Place, And The National Environmental Policy Act, Keith K. Miyake

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I examine ways that the US National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) and its primary enforcement mechanism, the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process, have reshaped the state as a site for racial and environmental conflict by institutionalizing a particular form of environmental justice within governmental decision making processes. Combining archival methods and legal analysis, I develop three case studies involving community struggles over the social production of space that each engage the EIA process to different effect. The case studies were selected based on what they reveal about the ways that the environmental justice framework intersects …

Beaches, People, And Change: A Political Ecology Of Rockaway Beach After Hurricane Sandy, Bryce B. Dubois

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation uses restoration practices of Rockaway beach post-Hurricane Sandy as a lens to investigate tensions between nature and society on urban coasts. By focusing on this New York City beach, this dissertation aims to examine the interaction between the beach, residents, city and federal agencies, and local environmental grassroots stewards in their response to coastal flooding and erosion. This is an ethnographic case study of Rockaway Beach during the two years (October 2012-October 2014) following Hurricane Sandy. This case study is based on secondary data analysis of interviews with 52 key informants, field-notes from participant observation at community and …

The Conflicts Of Coexistence: Contested Meanings Of Carnivore Management And Conservation In The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Hannah F. Jaicks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) encompasses urbanizing areas adjacent to essential conservation habitat with an inimitable capacity to support carnivore populations, including grizzly bears, wolves, and cougars. This geography has resulted in divisive social conflicts about these animals’ management as well as physical conflicts when they come into contact with people over the course of daily life in the region. Employing a qualitative methodology with semi-structured interviews, participant observation, wilderness treks, and archival work, this study examines the context, social processes, and decision-making processes that underlie the predator conflicts and produce management challenges in the GYE. This approach integrates theory …