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- Creators: Department of English
- Resource Type: Text
Description
Chris Miller's Souvenirs of Sleep is as serious as it is whimsical, if this is a possibility. The "Museum of the Zoo-real" may be an equally appropriate title as animals are often in performance. In this visual and spiritual investigation, childhood, dream, and the loss of a mother to suicide are the currents. Miller's work is informed by the cinema of Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson and beyond. Miller believes in the power of implication. The poems begin with intense focus, but are often in the business of expansion. Souvenirs of Sleep is a journey toward sense-making, a search for language that might allow it.
ContributorsMiller, Christopher (Author) / Dubie, Norman (Thesis advisor) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
A collection of poems that explore what it means to be from the Atomic City-- a city built atop cleared-out rural communities in East Tennessee during World War II, and with the sole and secretive purpose of enriching uranium for the atomic bomb. The poems look back to the more isolated Appalachian culture of previous generations, discovering the identity rifts caused by such massive and rushed development. In trying to understand the poet's own cultural inheritance of both nuclear weaponry and an Appalachian hardness, the poems begin to meditate on inhabitation. They ask what it means to live in a country, a local community, a body. The poems travel far beyond the Atomic City's limits, incorporating characters that live, in some sense, at the edge of a community. As he crosses the Atlantic, the Spanish poet Jiménez wonders if either sound or vision are more trustworthy tools for perception; an aging grandmother in Tennessee realizes that she still "drives" her younger body in her dreams; an American woman becomes aroused after touring the killing fields in Cambodia; and the prophet of Oak Ridge, who supposedly predicted the Manhattan Project, considers how his baby daughter has become a thing after death. The various voices show the poet grappling with her own guilt over Hiroshima, and ultimately attempt to understand the limits of both grief and love, how one inherits a tragedy.
ContributorsSams, Sara (Author) / Hogue, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Dubie, Norman (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Ranging in subject from a Tuareg festival outside Timbuktu to the 1975 "Battle of the Sexes" race at Belmont track to a Mississippi classroom in the Delta flood plains, the poems in The Body Snatcher's Complaint explore the blurring of self hood, a feeling of foreignness within one's own physical experience of the world, in the most intimate and global contexts.
ContributorsMurray, Catherine (Author) / Hogue, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Hummer, Terry (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The poems in Every House find themselves exploring spaces of expected comfort and asking how survivors reconstruct safety in their worlds when the beautiful is burnt to the ground. With little more than memory, maybe a photograph, or the chorus of a song, these poems mean to tell a truth even as perceived dangers make vulnerable the mind and body.
ContributorsHolm, Christine (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis advisor) / Dubie, Norman (Committee member) / Fritz-Goldberg, Beckian (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Over the past two decades there has been much discussion surrounding the potential of zoos as conservation institutions. Although zoos have clearly intensified their rhetorical and programmatic commitment to conservation (both ex situ and in situ), many critics remain skeptical of these efforts. This study was comprised of two parts: 1) an investigation of the general relationship between U.S. zoological institutions and the conservation agenda, and 2) a more specific single case study of conservation engagement and institutional identity at the Phoenix Zoo. Methods included extensive literature review, expert interviews with scholars and zoo professionals, site visits to the Phoenix Zoo and archival research. I found that the Phoenix Zoo is in the process of consciously creating a conservation-centered institutional identity by implementing and publicizing various conservation initiatives. Despite criticism of the embrace of conservation by zoos today, these institutions will be increasingly important agents of biodiversity protection and conservation education in this century.
ContributorsLove, Karen (Author) / Minteer, Ben (Thesis advisor) / Kinzig, Ann (Committee member) / Collins, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
ABSTRACT This collection of poetry focuses on the experiences of a soldier who served six years in the Army National Guard and eleven months in Iraq. The collection is primarily divided into six sections (though each is not separated explicitly) and each section generally involves activities such as training for Iraq, deploying to Iraq, and returning home. In these poems, the speaker recalls different scenes from his experiences: encountering roadside bombs; performing guard duty; burning feces in a can; and living on small military base while at war. The main goal is to provide the reader with an in-depth, sincere, and unfiltered look at the life of a soldier in the military, and of course, in Iraq. The work relies on mostly free verse form with some of the work utilizing the sonnet form and couplets. The poems were greatly influenced by the work of Modernist Poets including Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T.S. Eliot. This entire collection, which often does fall into that long trail of the war-poem genre, was influenced greatly by the following notable poets who went to war or served in the military: Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Jarrell, and Bruce Weigl.
ContributorsMartin, Hugh, 1984- (Author) / Hogue, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Dubie, Norman (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
In complex consumer-resource type systems, where diverse individuals are interconnected and interdependent, one can often anticipate what has become known as the tragedy of the commons, i.e., a situation, when overly efficient consumers exhaust the common resource, causing collapse of the entire population. In this dissertation I use mathematical modeling to explore different variations on the consumer-resource type systems, identifying some possible transitional regimes that can precede the tragedy of the commons. I then reformulate it as a game of a multi-player prisoner's dilemma and study two possible approaches for preventing it, namely direct modification of players' payoffs through punishment/reward and modification of the environment in which the interactions occur. I also investigate the questions of whether the strategy of resource allocation for reproduction or competition would yield higher fitness in an evolving consumer-resource type system and demonstrate that the direction in which the system will evolve will depend not only on the state of the environment but largely on the initial composition of the population. I then apply the developed framework to modeling cancer as an evolving ecological system and draw conclusions about some alternative approaches to cancer treatment.
ContributorsKareva, Irina (Author) / Castillo-Chavez, Carlos (Thesis advisor) / Collins, James (Committee member) / Nagy, John (Committee member) / Smith, Hal (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Despite years of effort, the field of conservation biology still struggles to incorporate theories of animal behavior. I introduce in Chapter I the issues surrounding the disconnect between behavioral ecology and conservation biology, and propose the use of behavioral knowledge in population viability analysis. In Chapter II, I develop a framework that uses three strategies for incorporating behavior into demographic models, outline the costs of each strategy through decision analysis, and build on previous work in behavioral ecology and demography. First, relevant behavioral mechanisms should be included in demographic models used for conservation decision-making. Second, I propose rapid behavioral assessment as a useful tool to approximate demographic rates through regression of demographic phenomena on observations of related behaviors. This technique provides behaviorally estimated parameters that may be applied to population viability analysis for use in management. Finally, behavioral indices can be used as warning signs of population decline. The proposed framework combines each strategy through decision analysis to provide quantitative rules that determine when incorporating aspects of conservation behavior may be beneficial to management. Chapter III applies this technique to estimate birthrate in a colony of California sea lions in the Gulf of California, Mexico. This study includes a cost analysis of the behavioral and traditional parameter estimation techniques. I then provide in Chapter IV practical recommendations for applying this framework to management programs along with general guidelines for the development of rapid behavioral assessment.
ContributorsWildermuth, Robert (Author) / Gerber, Leah R. (Thesis advisor) / Collins, James (Committee member) / Smith, Andrew (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Evolution is the foundation of biology, yet it remains controversial even among college biology students. Acceptance of evolution is important for students if we want them to incorporate evolution into their scientific thinking. However, students’ religious beliefs are a consistent barrier to their acceptance of evolution due to a perceived conflict between religion and evolution. Using pre-post instructional surveys of students in introductory college biology, Study 1 establishes instructional strategies that can be effective for reducing students' perceived conflict between religion and evolution. Through interviews and qualitative analyses, Study 2 documents how instructors teaching evolution at public universities may be resistant towards implementing strategies that can reduce students' perceived conflict, perhaps because of their own lack of religious beliefs and lack of training and awareness about students' conflict with evolution. Interviews with religious students in Study 3 reveals that religious college biology students can perceive their instructors as unfriendly towards religion which can negatively impact these students' perceived conflict between religion and evolution. Study 4 explores how instructors at Christian universities, who share the same Christian backgrounds as their students, do not struggle with implementing strategies that reduce students' perceived conflict between religion and evolution. Cumulatively, these studies reveal a need for a new instructional framework for evolution education that takes into account the religious cultural difference between instructors who are teaching evolution and students who are learning evolution. As such, a new instructional framework is then described, Religious Cultural Competence in Evolution Education (ReCCEE), that can help instructors teach evolution in a way that can reduce students' perceived conflict between religion and evolution, increase student acceptance of evolution, and create more inclusive college biology classrooms for religious students.
ContributorsBarnes, Maryann Elizabeth (Author) / Brownell, Sara (Thesis advisor) / Nesse, Randolph (Committee member) / Collins, James (Committee member) / Husman, Jenefer (Committee member) / Maienschein, Jane (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Guided by Tinto’s Theory of College Student Departure, I conducted a set of five studies to identify factors that influence students’ social integration in college science active learning classes. These studies were conducted in large-enrollment college science courses and some were specifically conducted in undergraduate active learning biology courses. Using qualitative and quantitative methodologies, I identified how students’ identities, such as their gender and LGBTQIA identity, and students’ perceptions of their own intelligence influence their experience in active learning science classes and consequently their social integration in college. I also determined factors of active learning classrooms and instructor behaviors that can affect whether students experience positive or negative social integration in the context of active learning. I found that students’ hidden identities, such as the LGBTQIA identity, are more relevant in active learning classes where students work together and that the increased relevance of one’s identity can have a positive and negative impact on their social integration. I also found that students’ identities can predict their academic self-concept, or their perception of their intelligence as it compares to others’ intelligence in biology, which in turn predicts their participation in small group-discussion. While many students express a fear of negative evaluation, or dread being evaluated negatively by others when speaking out in active learning classes, I identified that how instructors structure group work can cause students to feel more or less integrated into the college science classroom. Lastly, I identified tools that instructors can use, such as name tents and humor, which can positive affect students’ social integration into the college science classroom. In sum, I highlight inequities in students’ experiences in active learning science classrooms and the mechanisms that underlie some of these inequities. I hope this work can be used to create more inclusive undergraduate active learning science courses.
ContributorsCooper, Katelyn M (Author) / Brownell, Sara E (Thesis advisor) / Stout, Valerie (Committee member) / Collins, James (Committee member) / Orchinik, Miles (Committee member) / Zheng, Yi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018