Nature and Society Relations Commons^™

The Paradox Of Survival: Gendered Food Insecurity, Labor Inequalities, And Coping Strategies During The 2023/4 Drought In Eastern Ethiopia, Meron E. Lemma

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

In drought-prone regions of Eastern Ethiopia, recurring droughts profoundly reshape everyday life in ways that deepen existing gendered inequalities. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Fedis district, including semi-structured interviews with women, project implementers, and government officials, as well as group discussions with community members, this study explores how women experience, navigate, and resist the gendered impacts of drought. By attending to the sociopolitical dynamics of drought and the development interventions that accompany it, I analyze how these forces restructure labor, land, food systems, and authority in ways that reproduce and exacerbate existing inequalities. Women’s coping strategies, ranging from begging and …

Pathways Of Participation: Community Engagement And Collaborative Adaptation In Disaster Contexts Across Diverse Environments, Ria Mukerji

Geography ETDs

This paper broadens the concept of effective community participation in disaster risk reduction by analyzing three case studies that emphasize unconventional, locally driven approaches. Using a multi-case study method, I examine forms of participation that challenge traditional top-down models and focus on local knowledge and community agency. In Ohkay Owingeh, New Mexico, a co-designed environmental data dashboard with Pueblo members demonstrates how integrating Indigenous knowledge can enhance disaster preparedness. The Soldados Dam case in Ecuador shows how power imbalances drive community stakeholders to become protestors, emphasizing the need for adaptive engagement to prevent conflict. In Pajaro, California, a marginalized community’s …

We Built This Country For Free – Using A Phenomenological Approach For (Re) Imagining Mississippi Black Small-Scale Farmers, Destiny Denise Crockett

Theses and Dissertations

By the early 20th century, in 1920, Black farmers owned 14% of US farmland. Today, in the 21st century, Black farmers own less than 2% of US farmland. The demise of Black farmers and Black farmland in US Agriculture is a direct result of social, political, and racial weaponization against their foodways, culture, and livelihoods. The history concerning the plight of Black farmers goes beyond USDA's historical discrimination but enters a position where racism is embedded and perpetuated within the structure of US agriculture. In effect, Black small-scale farmers have reaped the downfall of this system, enduring racial biases and …

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 …

Seeding Resilience: An Examination Of The Impacts Of A Seed Saving Network In Western Montana, Christina Leas

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Seed saving, a worldwide practice as old as agriculture, continues even in the context of an increasingly industrialized and globalized agricultural system. While some scholarship has focused on informal seed saving practices that continue to thrive in the global South, few studies have examined the dynamics of these practices in the global North, particularly in the American West. Informal seed saving systems have implications for the resilience of agroecosystems. The concept of resilience has become an important framework for conceptualizing agroecosystems as social-ecological systems, both in scholarship and in policy. However, operationalizing the concept of resilience, particularly in agroecology research, …

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 …

Changing Geographies Of Flood Mitigation Policies: A Case Study Of Central, Louisiana, Ria Mukerji

LSU Master's Theses

In 2016, the Baton Rouge region experienced what would come to be record-setting precipitation levels. The 1,000 year rainfall event dumped almost triple the amount of water on Louisiana than was seen during Hurricane Katrina (some areas received over 10 inches of rain in a matter of hours), with rain persisting from August 12^th until the 17^th. Previously a part of Baton Rouge, Central is a relatively new development that expanded into the 100 year floodplain in 2005. This thesis will present the changing geographies of flood mitigation policies since a major flood in 1983 to the …

Geographical Analysis Of Offender Vulnerability: Modeling Coastal Hazards And Social Disorganization In Southern Mississippi, Ashleigh Nicole Price

Master's Theses

Hazards research continually examines how specific groups are affected by damaging events and how their unique sociodemographic characteristics contribute to variations in resilience and recovery. Studies have shown that underprivileged communities suffer more adversely and take longer to recover from hazard events. Probationers and parolees are uniquely disadvantaged regarding demographics and economic opportunity, both of which contribute to increased vulnerability and reduced resilience. Numerous legal restrictions and widespread discrimination towards former criminals means offenders are often relegated to underserved, criminogenic neighborhoods. Given such severe social and financial limitations, offenders have little capacity to prepare for or recover from disasters.

The …

Understanding Tourism Within A Social-Ecological System: Ometepe Island, Nicaragua, Chelsea Leigh Leven

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Tourism endures as a major component of development strategies worldwide, despite a dearth of documented successes. Tourism failures arise in part from simplistic and reductionist approaches to sustainability and tourism. Successfully implementing tourism to support sustainable futures requires, at a minimum, a more holistic and complex conceptualization than tourism currently receives, including recognition of how human values shape a system. To achieve a more complex understanding of tourism, I analyzed tourism through a social-ecological system (SES) perspective using the paradigm of resilience thinking. Through a case study in Ometepe, Nicaragua, my research considered opportunities for tourism contributions to sustainable futures …

Mulberiddlesex, Catriona Sandilands

The Goose

Through a careful tracing of the botanical presence of mulberry trees in Middlesex, Sandilands argues for a reading practice that takes plants seriously. Thinking with plants interrupts the tendency to consider literary plants primarily as motifs, metaphors or agents of crude naturalization. Sandilands insists on involving plants in reading Middlesex in order to take the novel in less anthropocentric directions: even as Cal enlists mulberries to signal inevitability, their own stories overflow the novel’s deterministic views of race, species, territory, and gender identity.

Dehumanism And Disposability, Julietta Singh

The Goose

Singh draws our attention to the “mute objects” of Middlesex, particularly The Obscure Object’s silent Black maid, Beulah, who quietly supports the unfolding romance between Cal and The Object. Through careful attention to histories of people silenced by slavery, dehumanization, and violence, Singh demands that we consider where and through what means some get to be fully human while others are made and sustained as objects for their comfort and play.

Ecological Crisis, Or “Intersex Panic,” As Answer Of The Real?, Stephanie Hsu

The Goose

Drawing upon Cal’s eventual metamorphosis into “The [white] Man” in Middlesex, and an examination of the Real of ecological crisis, Hsu explores the intersection of environmental racism, climate change denial, and intersex discrimination in order to advocate for a renewed awareness of ecological interdependency and the need for self-determination of people of colour in ecological and environmental justice discourses.

Trans-Pacific Imaginaries And Queer Intimacies In The Ruins Of Middlesex, Dai Kojima

The Goose

Taking up Roland Barthes’s concept of the “third meaning,” Kojima analyzes the character of Julie Kikuchi, the Japanese American love interest of the grown-up Cal. Taking Julie seriously as a character beyond mere plot contrivance and cultural reference, Kojima invites us to consider the intertwined histories of economic rise and fall, trans-Pacific wars, and other intimacies that Middlesex remains entangled in yet fails to fully acknowledge.

Border Crossings, Watery Spaces, And The (Un)Verified Self In Middlesex, Jenny Kerber

The Goose

Kerber traces the ways in which water liberates and transforms various characters in Middlesex in order to critique and complicate water’s taken-for-granted liberatory powers. Kerber invites us to consider the majority of those for whom water is as deadly as it is (possibly) emancipating, especially those most vulnerable to climate change and other ecological and violent upheavals.

Beyond The Biography Of A Gene, Laura J. Collins

The Goose

Collins approaches the ethical nuances of Cal’s intersex narrative in Middlesex, drawing comparisons with current debates in North Carolina concerning gender-normative bathroom use and trans rights, in order to advocate for more ethical practices of relation and responsibility outside of mere knowledge creation and policy.

Middlesex And The Biopolitics Of Modernist Architecture, Nicole Seymour

The Goose

Highlighting the architecture of the Middlesex house of Eugenides’ novel as a major technology of modernity, Seymour argues for the biopolitical understanding of such modernist architecture and for the ways in which it often works against the exploitative effects of automation and sexology, yet constitutes a complex and even contradictory force in processes of modernization, and in the novel itself.

Materialism’S Affective Appeal, Elizabeth Mazzolini

The Goose

Citing the pronounced lack of academic engagement with Middlesex since its publication and riffing on the novel’s recounting of the demise of the auto industry in Detroit, Mazzolini examines how cycles of obsolescence and currency work within academic discourse and ultimately advocates for the novel’s potential for examining the material and affective nature of relevance itself.

From Rusty Genetics To Octopussy’S Garden, Stacy Alaimo

The Goose

Alaimo critiques the “rusty” understanding of genetics, gender, and sex in Middlesex, advocating instead for queer ecological futurism.

On Being Intimate With Ruin: Reading Decay In Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard

The Goose

Blanchard argues for an intimate attention to the ruin in Middlesex and Detroit as a means of exploring the geo-bio-politics of decay as a problem of our socio-ecological present.

Introduction: Sex And The (Motor) City: Ecologies Of Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard, Catriona Sandilands

The Goose

This special cluster consists of twelve short essays, originally presented in two linked roundtables at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) conference in Detroit in June 2017, examining Jeffrey Eugenides' 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex. Through the novel, these papers explore the historical, intersectional, and ecological understandings of Detroit, exposing an exceptional—indeed, epic—range of social ecologies, concerned with everything from intersex and multispecies bio/geopolitics to transnational economies, to the aesthetics of architecture and decay. Focused on a very particular novel, written about a very particular city and experience of it, these papers bring to light and …

Embodied Ecologies And Metafictional Musings: The Limits Of Writing Intersex In Middlesex, Christopher Breu

The Goose

Breu critiques the limits of the intersex narrative of Middlesex and advocates for a non-reductive, materialist, and “muddled” approach to understanding sex and gender.

A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography Of A Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder By Ma-Nee Chacaby With Mary Louisa Plummer, Emily Leung-Pittman

The Goose

Review of A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder by Ma-Nee Chacaby with Mary Louisa Plummer.

An Integrated Approach For Developing Adaptation Strategies In Climate Planning: A Case Study Of Vulnerability In Dukes County, Massachusetts, Jonathan Pollak

Master's Theses

Climate Action Plans (CAP’s) are recent innovations in policy that have been catalyzed by a need to adjust the relationship between human activity and the Earth’s climate system. CAP’s often are composed of methods to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in addition to adaptation strategies. Research indicates, however, that many plans focus on mitigation strategies while adaptation policies related to predicted changes caused by climate change are often overlooked. This thesis presents an integrative framework for locating areas that are in need of adaptation strategies through a GIS based decision support system that visualizes vulnerability. It is operationalized through an empirical …

Regimes And Resilience In The Modern Global Food System, Sara W. Tower

Student Publications

Much public discourse surrounding the modern global food system operates on the assumption of the primary agency of individual consumers in ensuring an equitable and sustainable food supply. However, this approach fails to account for the larger structural forces of the system which frame the limits of how we interact with and are affected by our food system. Taking a closer look at the global economic, political, cultural, and environmental forces that have collectively shaped historical food regimes reveals the deeper structural patterns that currently determine how we produce, distribute, and consume food around the world. Due to the underlying …

The Management Of Feral Pig Socio-Ecological Systems In Far North Queensland, Australia, Gabriela Shuster

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The development of management programs for socio-ecological systems that include multiple stakeholders is a complex process and requires careful evaluation and planning. This is particularly a challenge in the presence of intractable conflict. The feral pig (Sus scrofa) in Australia is part of one such socio-ecological system. There is a large and heterogeneous group of stakeholders interested in pig management. Pigs have diverse effects on wildlife and plant ecology, economic, health, and social sectors. This study used the feral pig management system as a vehicle to examine intractable conflict in socio-ecological systems. The purpose of the study was …