Human Ecology Commons^™

“Mira Cómo Tejemos”: La Construcción De Una Red Comunitaria Y La Educación Ambiental En La Organización Frente Insular De La Reserva Marina De Galápagos, Katie Draeger

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

El Frente Insular de la Reserva Marina de Galápagos (FIRMAG o Frente Insular) es una organización para la conservación comunitaria, ubicada en la isla de Santa Cruz. Para explorar el significado del trabajo comunitario de esta organización, este estudio examina dos elementos de la estructura organizativa: los valores y las fortalezas. Al analizar tanto las perspectivas de los líderes y miembros de FIRMAG como las observaciones sobre el trabajo mismo, los valores que buscan construir y servir la comunidad se revelan como 1) un rechazo a la institucionalidad/burocracia y 2) a los fondos extranjeros, 3) la educación ambiental comunitaria sin …

Bridging Knowledge Systems In The Peruvian Andes: Plurality, Co-Creation, And Transformative Socio-Ecological Solutions To Climate Change, Domenique Ciavattone

Capstone Collection

In the current era of anthropogenic climate change, Quechua farmers in the Peruvian Andes are some of the most impacted by, yet some of the lowest contributors to global warming. Dominant Western systems alone have proven insufficient in tackling the climate crisis, and there have been increasing efforts to elevate and center Indigenous voices and epistemologies when addressing climate change. Researchers and communities are calling for a bridging of knowledge systems, in which Indigenous and Western methods collaborate to co-create innovative solutions to climate challenges. This research sought to explore methods and successes in bridging Indigenous and Western knowledge systems …

Salty: A Diffractive Inquiry Of Visceral Knowing And Embodied Aesthetics, Mei Ling Chua

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation takes a diffractive, onto-epistemological approach to everyday practices with salt in order to articulate an expanded understanding of meaning making and knowledge production. This research reckons with and challenges dominant modes of knowing that engage a Cartesian perspective to situate knowing as the exclusive domain of the mind in both form and topic of inquiry. This research acts simultaneously as both a direct practice of and metacognition about knowledge production by examining 1. the embodied (including sensory and emotional aspects) and 2. the relational (including interpersonal and socio-cultural) dimensions of experience as visceral knowing. This articulation of …

Pathways To Sustainability: Industry, Development, Business, Agriculture, Economy, And Politics, Andreas Hernandez, Pablo Arias-Benavides, Dayana C.M. Machada, Ousmane Pame, Alice Main, Per Moller

Geography and Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

In this chapter we examine six compelling on-the-ground experiences, which are demonstrating pathways to sustainability, resilience and regeneration. Each case opens a pathway to sustainability in a key sphere of human activity: industry, development, business, agriculture, economy and politics. These experiences are creating new social imaginaries embodied in the practical forms of new politics and economics aimed at profound democratizations of human life, and towards a creative realignment of humans with the rest of the web of life. These social imaginaries are both open and encompassing. They are open in the sense that they can be filled with new possibilities …

Toxic Timescapes: Examining Toxicity Across Time And Space, Simone M. Müller, May-Brith Ohman Nielsen

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

An interdisciplinary environmental humanities volume that explores human-environment relationships on our permanently polluted planet.

While toxicity and pollution are ever present in modern daily life, politicians, juridical systems, media outlets, scholars, and the public alike show great difficulty in detecting, defining, monitoring, or generally coming to terms with them. This volume’s contributors argue that the source of this difficulty lies in the struggle to make sense of the intersecting temporal and spatial scales working on the human and more-than-human body, while continuing to acknowledge race, class, and gender in terms of global environmental justice and social inequality.

The term toxic …

“Trash Talk” - Rethinking The Notion Of Waste, Shivaangi Salhotra

Student Showcase

In the twenty-first century, waste has become a ubiquitous problem. Images of things like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch have ceased to become jarring, and pictures of overflowing landfills and statistics about plastic in the ocean have become so commonplace that they are “memed”. Yet despite increasing awareness and changes in policy, global waste production and its deleterious effects continue to rise. Dominant narratives surrounding waste tend to focus on how individuals can properly dispose of their waste, which, while certainly important, is not the full story. It doesn't question why we produce so much waste in the first place, …

Freedom And Heteronomy In The Anthropocene, Alexander M. Stoner, Harry F. Dahms

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Integrating Feminist Approaches In Counseling Work With Adult Women, Kristen M. Toole

Adultspan Journal

The scope of ‘women’s issues’ in counseling is an ever-evolving landscape. Recent events such as the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on women serve as powerful reminders of the necessity of this focus while underscoring a deep-rooted history of oppressive patriarchal structures. Therefore, counselors must remain informed of the unique considerations surrounding adult women in counseling and acquire proficiency in versatile techniques to meet this population’s nuanced needs. This article examines the complexity of contemporary womanhood and explores the fundamentals of Feminist Counseling Theory (FCT), a holistic, multiculturally conscious, social justice theory in counseling. …

Community Resilience In Vermont After The 2023 Flooding Event, Alex Poniz

Family Medicine Clerkship Student Projects

Between July 10th-11th 2023 Vermont experienced catastrophic flooding after receiving prolonged heavy rainfall of up to 9” over 48 hrs. Damage from the 2023 event rivals the historic destruction of Hurricane Irene in 2011 and is exceeded only by the Great Vermont Flood of 1927, an event predating modern flood controls. We collected oral histories from Vermonters to better understand their lived experience of the flood and its impacts, and identifed common themes related to community and individual resilience.

“Why You Always So Political?”: A Counterstory About Educational-Environmental Racism At A Predominantly White University, Martín Alberto Gonzalez

Chicano/Latino Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Using critical race counterstorytelling, I tell a story about the experiences of Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx (MMAX) undergraduate students at private, historically and predominantly white university in the Northeast. Drawing on in-depth interviews, participant observations, pláticas, document analyses, and literature on race and space and racism in higher education, I argue that the racially hostile campus environment experienced by MMAX students at their respective university manifests itself as a form of educational-environmental racism. Through narrated dialogue, Aurora (a composite character) and I delve into a critical conversation about how educational-environmental racism is experienced by MMAX students through a racialized landscape in the …

Social Vulnerability And The Prevalence Of Opioid Use Disorder Among Older Medicare Beneficiaries In U.S. Counties, Tse-Chuan Yang, Seulki Kim, Stephen A. Matthews, Carla Shoff

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Objectives: Recent research has investigated the factors associated with the prevalence of opioid use disorder (OUD) among older adults (65+), which has rapidly increased in the past decade. However, little is known about the relationship between social vulnerability and the prevalence of OUD, and even less about whether the correlates of the prevalence of OUD vary across the social vulnerability spectrum. This study aims to fill these gaps. Methods: We assemble a county-level data set in the contiguous United States (U.S.) by merging 2021 Medicare claims with the CDC’s social vulnerability index and other covariates. Using the total number of …

Movie Reviews Sentiment Analysis Using Bert, Gibson Nkhata

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sentiment analysis (SA) or opinion mining is analysis of emotions and opinions from texts. It is one of the active research areas in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Various approaches have been deployed in the literature to address the problem. These techniques devise complex and sophisticated frameworks in order to attain optimal accuracy with their focus on polarity classification or binary classification. In this paper, we aim to fine-tune BERT in a simple but robust approach for movie reviews sentiment analysis to provide better accuracy than state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. We start by conducting sentiment classification for every review, followed by computing …

A Quantitative Examination Of The Influence Of Social And Structural Communication Variables On The Social Connectedness Of People Experiencing Homelessness, Shawn Michael Evans

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examined the influence of social and structural communication variables on the perceived social connectedness of people experiencing homelessness in the Northwest Arkansas (NWA) and Joplin, Missouri areas. This study employed the ecological perspective of communication infrastructure theory (CIT; Ball-Rokeach et al., 2001) and a communication perspective which envisions communicative interaction as constitutive of social experience. Using survey data from 166 participants, this study examined 11 research questions and hypotheses drawn from extant literature on homelessness, social connectedness, and CIT. ANOVAs, t-tests, and hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed a complex relationship between individuals and the communicative environment. This study …

Exploring Leadership In An Extreme Environment: A Haiti Farm Project, Tami Strickland

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative case study examined the impact Situational Leadership Theory II® has on followers in a small community in Haiti. Many studies have examined Situational Leadership Theory II® in corporate environments, but not in the low-income context of Haiti. The study focused on how the leadership characteristics and adaptability levels of an expatriate influenced the construction and the ongoing management of a Haiti egg farm project, which is timely based on the volatility currently in the country prior to and after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021. Using various data gathering instruments, the study explored the expatriate’s leadership …

Full Journal

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

The theme of issue 36 of the Humboldt Journal of Social Relations is Perspectives on the State of Jefferson.

The Ring Quarry Mining Complex: A Preliminary Archaeological Investigation Into Ancient Native American Sites In Northwestern New Jersey, Joseph D. Cusack

Theses and Dissertations

The Ring Quarry Mining Complex (RQMC) in northwestern New Jersey is an archaeological, Pre-Contact Native American mining and habitation complex. The RQMC was a primary source of tool stone in the Vernon Valley of New Jersey for thousands of years. Evidence of human occupation within the study area extends from the Paleoindian through the Contact Period. This study focuses on the ancient chert quarry and surrounding sites across a landscape making up a habitational complex.

S7e8: What Is The Legacy And Future Of The Climate Change Institute?, Ron Lisnet, Paul A. Mayewski, Daniel Sandweiss, Cynthia Isenhour

The Maine Question

The nation’s first multi- and inter-disciplinary research institute to study Earth’s recent and long-term climate variability was founded in 1972 at the University of Maine. That institute, now known as the Climate Change Institute, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, a milestone that honors the many groundbreaking discoveries its scientists have made in the field of climate science.

CCI have scientists first mapped the difference between climate during the Ice Age and today in the 1970s; discovered the importance of marine-based ice sheets in the 1980s; connected acid rain to human causes in the mid-1980s; uncovered the concept of …

Debris Of Progress: A Political Ethnography Of Critical Infrastructure, Ethan Tupelo

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I advance a political ethnography of critical infrastructure to better understand terminal capitalism, in which the waste products of commodification and resource depletion are destroying the ecological systems that support life. My object of study is the massive disjuncture between individual knowledge and intention, and these catastrophic collective planetary outcomes. Theoretically, I develop critical infrastructure theory to diagnose these destructive structures. By “infrastructure,” I mean systems of material and discursive flows fundamental to sedentary human organization, connecting local actions with global systems. Such infrastructure is “critical” in three senses: A) denoting the most important forms of infrastructure …

Death Education Among Social Science College Students: The Good, The Bad, And The Unchanged, Jennifer Zorotovich, Adrienne L. Cohen

School of Human Ecology Faculty Publications

Personal identity is often dictated by the social roles a person fulfills (e.g., mother, son, partner, employee, etc.) and these social roles are defined by the greater family unit and surrounding social environments. Monumental events, such as death, often change a person’s social roles and demand a reorganization of the family unit. To provide comprehensive end-of-life care, human services professionals become an integral piece of care provisions as they are trained in serving the mothers, fathers, and children of the world, more so than treating the biological aspects of illness. It is for this reason that understanding the impacts of …

Caviar Of The Pacific: Palolo Fishing Today And Its Association With Coral Reef Health, Emma Letti Lee

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Palolo is a traditional delicacy of Samoa. It is the reproductive part of a marine worm that is released twice a year, October and November in Samoa, making palolo season a culturally significant time. Coral reefs, the palolo worm’s habitat, is under a plethora of environmental threats, which is an extremely prevalent concern for Pacific Islanders. Hundreds of palolo harvesters walking on corals twice a year adds extra pressure on coral reefs. Despite these vulnerabilities, prices of palolo are soaring year by year, while there is little to no research about the palolo worm and documentation of current harvesting practices …