Cultural Resource Management and Policy Analysis Commons^™

"The Man Who Stopped Henry Ford", George Baker

Documents

Although American industrialist and business magnate Henry Ford planned a potential "super-city" in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the actions of Senator George Norris of Nebraska were a contributing factor to its end.

Indigenous Ontologies And Architecture, Reconstructing Interrelational Relationships, Arlene Garcia Guzman

McNair Summer Research Program

Contemporary architecture faces a growing pressure to respond to the socioecological crises with regard to the consequences of design that so often accept environmental systems as separate from the living. In contrast, many Native systems, often referred to as Traditional Knowledge (TK), comprehend cumulative, place-based bodies of knowledge that are developed through extended histories of interaction with specific environments. In this context, Traditional Knowledge encompasses resource use practices, sustainability, spirituality, and an emphasis on a relational worldview. It is characterized in such a framework that different layers of existence, such as humans, animals, plants, water, climate, and materials, are understood …

Modern Instructional Science, Ai Integrated Pedagogy & Innovation In Higher Education, Yasmeen Ahmed

Presentations and Posters

The rapid evolution of digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping teaching, learning, and knowledge production across higher education. This one-day faculty development workshop, Modern Instructional Science, AI-Integrated Pedagogy & Innovation in Higher Education, explores contemporary approaches to designing, delivering, and enhancing student-centered learning experiences in both face-to-face and online environments. The workshop introduces key principles of instructional science, course design, active learning, formative assessment, and learner engagement, supported by established educational theories and evidence-based best practices. Participants examine strategies for developing well-organized, outcome-aligned courses; fostering collaboration and meaningful interaction; and enhancing student success through effective instructional planning …

Characteristics Of Social Capital In Informal Housing Settlements, Lena Parsons

University Honors Theses

Many cities see growth of informal housing settlements as urban populations rise across the globe. Residents of informal settlements are observed to use robust networks of social capital to support themselves in an environment of resource scarcity and marginalization. This review synthesizes research examining characteristics of social capital in informal housing settlements, finding that (1) social capital influences residents' acquisition of basic needs, (2) the structure of social capital networks depend on the context of the settlement, and (3) the built environment of informal settlements has a cyclical relationship to their social capital networks. This synthesis concludes that formal solutions …

Adaptive Reuse As Sustainability: Reconciling The Crises Of Functionalism And Environmental Conservation In Copenhagen And San Francisco, Samuel J. Fernandez

Master's Theses

Sustainability is the buzzword for modern global development. In the age of rapidly growing populations, unsustainable building practices, and an ever-present climate crisis, there must be a reorientation in global urban development practices. While experts tend to tout one sustainable initiative as a catch-all solution to the above crises, a multidimensional problem cannot be solved with a one-dimensional approach. In other words, sustainable development can only be achieved through a combination of different practices and approaches. This case study seeks to present adaptive reuse as a viable reaction to the climate crisis, but one that requires a combination of other …

Jadughar: The House Of Magic, Dhruvi A. Shah

Masters Theses

Jadughar or the House of Magic is what people call a 'museum' in parts of South Asia. The practice of museum making, at its origin, is the act of collecting, preserving, interpreting and representing a culture’s tangible and intangible heritage to make it accessible to diverse audiences. Since the early 19th century such practices have been performed at various kala bhandars (art centers) in India, without the need of a formal or institutional organisation. The British introduced the model of a ‘museum’ in South Asia, with the aim of not only preserving ethnographic collections, but also showcasing their power and …

The Wall As Commons, Raveena Deshpande

Masters Theses

Collective infrastructures for informal domesticity 

As urban populations grow, access to affordable housing declines, pushing certain sections of the population to build informal settlements outside legal and formal construction systems. These settlements often lack access to basic living infrastructures - water, sanitation, and electricity- even as they house a large share of the population in developing countries.

Current models of designing for informality exist as top down planning approaches, that ignore lived realities at the scale of the home. These design models are incongruent with informal lifestyles, and undermine the sense of belonging that comes with rituals of self-authorship in …

Another Palace For The People, Kate Holbrook

Masters Theses

Coined the “Palace for the People,” the American public library was established as a free, democratic haven for the public’s literary and educational needs. Adapting to the changing needs of its patrons, the public library’s services have extended beyond book access to provided services ranging from tool rentals to warming centers, postal services, and more. As both an essential landmark of the physical city through its exterior and provider of social infrastructure on its interior, public libraries seek sustainable avenues to continue their tradition of gathering, idea exchange, and provision. Expanding upon the identity of the public library as a …

Performatic Learning In Informal Education: A Mixed Methods Study Of Zine-Making As A Catalyst For Intentional Epistemic Claiming, Experiential Knowing, And Cultural Mediation In A Museum-Based Learning Environment, April Ursula Fox

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Informal learning environments are powerful sites of meaning-making when learners are invited to move from observer to author. This study positions zine-making as an effective educational tool capable of promoting that transformation. The study advances a new framework—Performatic Learning—to articulate how creative, multimodal practices can support learning as becoming. Developed through foundational pilot studies and an in-depth mixed-methods investigation in a natural history museum, the framework integrates five constructs: Intentional Epistemic Claiming, Experiential Knowing, Cultural Mediation, Performatic Space, and Learning as Becoming. Across cases, zine-making emerged as a generative learning space in which participants authored knowledge, navigated uncertainty, drew on …

Lightness Shaped By Stone, Jared Arredondo

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

In a period defined by industrial standardization, automation, and increasing distance from material reality, architecture has become increasingly detached from the physical knowledge of making. Processes once grounded in time, touch, and material consequence are often replaced by speed, abstraction, and systems of production that conceal labor. This thesis begins from that condition and examines stone as a material through which architecture can recover a deeper relationship to time, craft, structure, and responsibility.

Stone resists speed. Its weight, density, and permanence demand precision, patience, and consequence. Each cut, joint, and surface operation requires an understanding of the material’s limits and …

Interweaving Cairo's Urban Fabric: The Formal, The Informal And The Contemporary, Hagar Ahmed

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Architecture is a negotiation between memory and change, preservation and erasure. In Cairo, a city layered with history, rapid development threatens historic areas and informal settlements (AlSayyad, 2011). While monumental heritage preservation is institutionalized, informal urban fabrics are often excluded from heritage discussions and planning. This research explores Mansheyet Nasser, or Garbage City, an informal settlement between Islamic Cairo and the Mokattam plateau. Over the past fifty years, Zabbaleen residents have built a communal waste collection and recycling system that processes up to 80% of materials, outperforming many regulated cities (Fahmi and Sutton, 2010; Didero, 2011). This infrastructure is both …

What’S In A Map?: Evaluating Mapping Techniques And Measures Of Culture To Inform Equitable Cultural Planning In Dallas, Texas, Kena Nicol

Planning Masters Professional Reports

The City of Dallas developed a neighborhood typology map to assess cultural resource distribution as part of its 2018 Cultural Plan, representing a relatively new approach that remains underexplored in academic literature. In the same plan, stakeholders identified equity as a central value, highlighting the need for tools that better support equitable cultural planning. This study evaluates the outcomes of two mapping techniques–cultural asset mapping and opportunity mapping – to examine how each represents cultural resource distribution across Dallas and supports equity-oriented analysis. Cultural asset mapping, the standard approach in cultural planning, identifies the spatial distribution of physical cultural infrastructure. …

Federal Government Shutdowns And Gateway Communities: Impacts On Businesses, Communities, And Workers’ Perceptions And Attitudes, Dean W. Zakrzewski

Landscape Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This study aims to answer a presented gap in the literature on how gateway community workers and businesses are directly impacted by federal government shutdowns. Three gateway communities were selected as case-study communities for this research based on a set list of criteria, including size, proximity to urban centers, geographic context, and the prominence of their associated park. The selected communities are Bar Harbor, Maine; Estes Park, Colorado; and Moab, Utah. Community profiles were drafted for each community to understand them from a contextual level, including the breakdown of their workforce and other general descriptions of their communities. A combinational …

Platforms Of Exemption (For New Relations) Within Suburbia And Other Consolidating Hegemonies, Ayden Pritchard

Honors Theses

Theory is a mode of action that opens up revisionary spaces in the world. By voicing complexity and ambivalence in a situation, disembodied patterns are put in contact with compliant, unclaimed material, and they gain a foothold within the established structures of the present. This paper seeks to sketch the lines of influence that govern association and perception in suburbia, and to speculate the kinds of spaces where new relations between people who are normally segregated can occur. The information presented here hopes to join the reservoir of patterns that structure your everyday theoretical (revisionary) activity, to make changes possible …

Edra 57: Bibliography, Tamara Karr

Bibliographies

edra 57: Embracing Regional Sustainability: Networks for People and Places

The Politics Of Remembering: Reconfiguring The Diorama Of Monas As Augmented Living Document, Suprayitno Suprayitno, Zulfatun Sofiyani, Rahmi Rahmi

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper examines the Monas diorama as a central apparatus in Indonesia’s politics of remembering, whose narrative consolidation during the New Order rendered it a state-authored monument of national memory. Drawing on Foucault’s distinction between monument and document, Ferraris’s ontology of documentality, and Perret’s concept of document design as projective epistemology, the study reframes the diorama as a documentary assemblage shaped by inscription, power, and institutionalized forgetting. Through diachronic, synchronic, comparative, and experimental analyses, the paper diagnoses failures across the physical, social, and cognitive dimensions of Monas as a document, revealing narrative authoritarianism, representational rigidity, and the absence of plural …

Humanity Is Evolving Its Consciousness: The Role Of Archetypal Energies As Guides During An Unfolding Weeding Out And Alignment Process, Carroy U. Ferguson

Psychology Faculty Publication Series

Humanity is evolving its consciousness at individual and collective levels.  Given these seemingly tumultuous times, as of this writing (January 2026), to make such a statement may sound like a strange thing to say.  However, I suggest that if you are alive today and if you are reading these words, these are the very times for which you were born—to assist Humanity as it evolves its consciousness with your unique gifts, whatever they may be.  That is, this period of our individual and collective human being-ness may be characterized as an unfolding period of weeding out and alignment with the …

Tallina Linnahall: Arquitectura Soviética Y Mundo Prehispánico, Isabel Bargallo, Montserrat Bargalló Sánchez

Actas seleccionadas del SIMPOSIO ARTE 4.2: Migraciones en la imagen prehispánica: transitando territorios del pasado al presente. 58º Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, Novi Sad, Serbia, 2025.

Existen construcciones que nos recuerdan morfológicamente aspectos de la arquitectura precolombina que no tienen, en principio, relación cultural alguna con el pasado mesoamericano y que no responden tampoco a la función que desempeñaban las construcciones originales, o quizás sí. Éste es, sin duda, el caso del Linnahall de Tallin, donde no podemos dejar de preguntarnos los motivos que llevaron a unos arquitectos europeos, específicamente a dos profesionales estonianos, a inspirarse en las formas prehispánicas para proyectar y construir un espacio monumental que formó parte de las instalaciones de los Juegos Olímpicos de Moscú (1980) en la capital de Estonia. ¿Podemos …

Enhancing The User Experience Of Colorado Bend State Park Through The Implementation Of Cultural Landscape Analysis, Hunter C. Lynch

Landscape Architecture Masters & Design Theses

This design thesis investigates how landscape character and sense of place can be more clearly expressed through a cultural landscape approach to design at Colorado Bend State Park, a state park in Texas, with a focus on guiding future trail and campsite development in the currently undeveloped eastern portion of the park.The park’s dramatic canyons, limestone bluffs, spring-fed systems, and upland prairies form a series of distinct, yet interconnected landscape conditions shaped by the interaction of physical structure, ecological systems, and cultural associations. While these characteristics define the site's identity and are reflected in portions of the existing park, they …

Women Shellfishers’ Role In Managing ‘Women’S Forest’ And Conservation Challenges In Youtefa Bay, Indonesia, Helmawaty E. Rumbiak

Open Access Master's Theses

Mangrove forests in Youtefa Bay hold critical ecological and cultural significance for the Enggros community, particularly for women. Known as the “women’s forest,” this area is where Enggros women harvest shellfish and collect firewood. Women shellfishers have a close relationship with the forest, where they connect with their children and other women. However, rapid urban development and pollution around the mangrove ecosystem have negatively impacted the women shellfishers and their role in managing the mangrove forest. Shellfishing activity will likely decrease as urban development around the forest increases, and more waste flows into the forest. This research examines the role …