Matching Items (50)
Description
Climate change poses a threat to the emotional well-being and livelihood strategies of individuals in biophysically vulnerable communities. While the biophysical effects and possibilities of climate change are well-documented, understanding the emotional impacts on individuals in these communities is an avenue of research that requires more exploration. Using an ethnographic approach, this study analyzes the emotional responses of individuals, first in three biophysically vulnerable communities in the United States, and second, in island communities. Study sites in the United States include Mobile, Alabama; Kodiak, Alaska; and Phoenix, Arizona, each of which have different vulnerabilities to the effects of climate change. Internationally, we conducted research in Viti Levu, Fiji; Nicosia, Cyprus; Wellington, New Zealand; and London, England. Using the 2014 Global Ethnohydrology Study Protocol respondents were asked about their emotional responses to the current effects of climate change, the effects of climate change on livelihoods in their area, and the effects of climate change on the younger generation. Using cross-cultural data allows for a broader understanding of emotional distress and wellbeing in response to climate change in areas with similar expected climate change outcomes, although with different levels of biophysical vulnerability, as well as understanding emotional distress and wellbeing in areas with different expected climate change outcomes, and similar levels of biophysical vulnerability. Results from this research can be used to understand possible mental health outcomes, the possibilities for political activism, and how to create mitigation strategies that resonate with local community members.
ContributorsDu Bray, Margaret V (Author) / Wutich, Amber (Thesis advisor) / BurnSilver, Shauna (Thesis advisor) / Bolin, Bob (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
ABSTRACT
Famine is the result of a complex set of environmental and social factors. Climate conditions are established as environmental factors contributing to famine occurrence, often through teleconnective patterns. This dissertation is designed to investigate the combined influence on world famine patterns of teleconnections, specifically the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Southern Oscillation (SO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), or regional climate variations such as the South Asian Summer Monsoon (SASM). The investigation is three regional case studies of famine patterns specifically, Egypt, the British Isles, and India.
The first study (published in Holocene) employs the results of a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) yielding a SO-NAO eigenvector to predict major Egyptian famines between AD 1049-1921. The SO-NAO eigenvector (1) successfully discriminates between the 5-10 years preceding a famine and the other years, (2) predicts eight of ten major famines, and (3) correctly identifies fifty out of eighty events (63%) of food availability decline leading up to major famines.
The second study investigates the impact of the NAO, PDO, SO, and AMO on 63 British Isle famines between AD 1049 and 1914 attributed to climate causes in historical texts. Stepwise Regression Analysis demonstrates that the 5-year lagged NAO is the primary teleconnective influence on famine patterns; it successfully discriminates 73.8% of weather-related famines in the British Isles from 1049 to 1914.
The final study identifies the aggregated influence of the NAO, SO, PDO, and SASM on 70 Indian famines from AD 1049 to 1955. PCA results in a NAO-SOI vector and SASM vector that predicts famine conditions with a positive NAO and negative SO, distinct from the secondary SASM influence. The NAO-famine relationship is consistently the strongest; 181 of 220 (82%) of all famines occurred during positive NAO years.
Ultimately, the causes of famine are complex and involve many factors including societal and climatic. This dissertation demonstrates that climate teleconnections impact famine patterns and often the aggregates of multiple climate variables hold the most significant climatic impact. These results will increase the understanding of famine patterns and will help to better allocate resources to alleviate future famines.
Famine is the result of a complex set of environmental and social factors. Climate conditions are established as environmental factors contributing to famine occurrence, often through teleconnective patterns. This dissertation is designed to investigate the combined influence on world famine patterns of teleconnections, specifically the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Southern Oscillation (SO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), or regional climate variations such as the South Asian Summer Monsoon (SASM). The investigation is three regional case studies of famine patterns specifically, Egypt, the British Isles, and India.
The first study (published in Holocene) employs the results of a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) yielding a SO-NAO eigenvector to predict major Egyptian famines between AD 1049-1921. The SO-NAO eigenvector (1) successfully discriminates between the 5-10 years preceding a famine and the other years, (2) predicts eight of ten major famines, and (3) correctly identifies fifty out of eighty events (63%) of food availability decline leading up to major famines.
The second study investigates the impact of the NAO, PDO, SO, and AMO on 63 British Isle famines between AD 1049 and 1914 attributed to climate causes in historical texts. Stepwise Regression Analysis demonstrates that the 5-year lagged NAO is the primary teleconnective influence on famine patterns; it successfully discriminates 73.8% of weather-related famines in the British Isles from 1049 to 1914.
The final study identifies the aggregated influence of the NAO, SO, PDO, and SASM on 70 Indian famines from AD 1049 to 1955. PCA results in a NAO-SOI vector and SASM vector that predicts famine conditions with a positive NAO and negative SO, distinct from the secondary SASM influence. The NAO-famine relationship is consistently the strongest; 181 of 220 (82%) of all famines occurred during positive NAO years.
Ultimately, the causes of famine are complex and involve many factors including societal and climatic. This dissertation demonstrates that climate teleconnections impact famine patterns and often the aggregates of multiple climate variables hold the most significant climatic impact. These results will increase the understanding of famine patterns and will help to better allocate resources to alleviate future famines.
ContributorsSantoro, Michael Melton (Author) / Cerveny, Randall S. (Thesis advisor) / McHugh, Kevin (Committee member) / Brazel, Anthony (Committee member) / Balling Jr., Robert C. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
ABSTRACT
Human and wildlife behavior, governance, and economics are often cited obstacles to wildlife conservation. Accordingly, conservation research has historically been conducted in the exterior terrains of behavior and systems, which can be empirically observed or known through systemic analysis and applied through institutional or technical fixes. However, conservation interventions are failing because they do not adequately address the influence of individual and collective interior phenomena including psychological states, worldviews, values, and identities of stakeholders, which can bear decisively on conservation outcomes.
This critical analysis of wildlife conservation science and the social and political histories of Southwestern landscapes illustrates the mechanism of social, cultural, and media narrative linking four irreducible perspectives of the natural world: the I, WE, IT and ITS, or the psychological, cultural, behavioral and structural/systemic terrains, which ground contemporary conservation. Through the conceptual [Re]animation of conservation, this research justifies a more-than-human approach to wildlife conservation that resists the ontological privilege of the human and contemplates human and non-human animals as vitally linked in their mutually relational, perceptual and material environments. The approach extends the human to the natural environment and also accounts for the individual and social needs and perspectives of wild animals, which shape their adaptation to changing environments and conservation interventions.
A qualitative analysis of emotion, metaphor, and narrative utilizing an Integral Ecology framework explores how psychological and cultural terrains link to, and influence, the behavioral and systemic terrains of Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) conservation in the U.S. Southwest. This research disentangles and comprehensively maps influential elements in the four terrains; enhancing relational knowledge on human-predator coexistence and conservation governance in the Southwest.
Human and wildlife behavior, governance, and economics are often cited obstacles to wildlife conservation. Accordingly, conservation research has historically been conducted in the exterior terrains of behavior and systems, which can be empirically observed or known through systemic analysis and applied through institutional or technical fixes. However, conservation interventions are failing because they do not adequately address the influence of individual and collective interior phenomena including psychological states, worldviews, values, and identities of stakeholders, which can bear decisively on conservation outcomes.
This critical analysis of wildlife conservation science and the social and political histories of Southwestern landscapes illustrates the mechanism of social, cultural, and media narrative linking four irreducible perspectives of the natural world: the I, WE, IT and ITS, or the psychological, cultural, behavioral and structural/systemic terrains, which ground contemporary conservation. Through the conceptual [Re]animation of conservation, this research justifies a more-than-human approach to wildlife conservation that resists the ontological privilege of the human and contemplates human and non-human animals as vitally linked in their mutually relational, perceptual and material environments. The approach extends the human to the natural environment and also accounts for the individual and social needs and perspectives of wild animals, which shape their adaptation to changing environments and conservation interventions.
A qualitative analysis of emotion, metaphor, and narrative utilizing an Integral Ecology framework explores how psychological and cultural terrains link to, and influence, the behavioral and systemic terrains of Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) conservation in the U.S. Southwest. This research disentangles and comprehensively maps influential elements in the four terrains; enhancing relational knowledge on human-predator coexistence and conservation governance in the Southwest.
ContributorsHagy Ferguson, Anita Dawn (Author) / Bolin, Bob (Thesis advisor) / BurnSilver, Shauna (Committee member) / Eder, James (Committee member) / Chhetri, Netra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Performing the Electrical traces the histories and futures of electrical discovery and knowledge through cultural performances, socio-political assemblages, and the more-than-human worldmaking functions of energy in general and electricity in particular, or what I refer to as energy-as-electricity. This project seeks to transform how energy-as-electricity is perceived, and thereby to re-vision the impact that energy-rich relationships might have ecologically—in both the social and environmental senses of the word. As a practice-led inquiry I use my scenographic sensibilities in combination with performance studies and energy humanities lenses to identify how energy-scapes form through social performances, material relations, and aesthetic/ritualistic interventions. This approach allows me to synthesize vastly different scales of energy-as-electricity performatives and spatialities and propose alternative framings which work towards decolonizing and re-feminizing energy-rich relationships. This research considers the way power flows, accumulates, and transforms through performance as embodied expression, practice and eventful doings of human and more-than-human agents. It asks: if place is practiced space (Henri Lefebvre), how can decolonizing and re-feminizing energy-rich relationships transform normative power relationships (or power geometries, as cultural geographer Doreen Massey refers to such globalized interconnections)—which are formed through electricity, technologies and colonial-capitalism? I ground this inquiry as an ecological intervention in order to investigate how performing with electricity differently (both in collective imaginations and quotidian interactions), can change the ways that electricity is produced and consumed in the time of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Plasticene. The following study produces written and tacit knowledge that expands the framing of energy-rich relationships shared between human and more-than-human performatives. My provocation is that experiential encounters are critical for expanding the ontological plurality of energy-as-electricity with ecological a/effect. Drawing on the insights of performance scenographer Rachel Hann, I demonstrate that scenographic methodologies in an expanded field, along with embodied sensing, provide productive insights into this endeavor of expansion. This project both serves as a space making/space keeping provocation and offers a methodology for devising more desirable futures.
ContributorsFoster Gluck, Geneva (Author) / Underiner, Tamara (Thesis advisor) / Hunt, Kristin (Committee member) / McHugh, Kevin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
The Desert Southwest has no shortage of representations in literature, art, and film. Its aesthetics—open horizons, strange landscapes, and vast wilderness—inform and saturate the early Western films of John Ford, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and continue in today’s popular imaginations. My work acknowledges such contributions and then it challenges them: why are those names more widely associated with the Southwest than Luis Alberto Urrea, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, or Pat Mora?
The project intersects the environmental humanities, critical theory, and cultural studies with the Desert Southwest. It explores the fullness of desert places with regard to cultures, borders, and languages, as well as nonhuman forces and intensities like heat, light, and distance. Dispelling the dominant notion of desert as void or wasteland, it sets a stage to suit the polyvocality of desert place. My work is interdisciplinary because the desert demands it. It begins with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in order to reorient readers towards the rupture of the US War With Mexico which helped set the national and cultural borders in effect today. I then explore Denis Villeneuve’s film Sicario to emphasize the correlation between political hierarchy and verticality; those who can experience the desert from above are exempt from the conditions below, where Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway and Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood take place. The novels expose the immanence and violence of being on the ground in the desert and at the lower end of said hierarchies. Analyzing Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World and Mora’s Encantado enables what I term a desert hauntology to produce a desert full of memory, myth, ancestors, and enchantment. Finally, the project puts visual artists James Turrell and Rafa Esparza in conversation to discover a desert phenomenology. The result is an instigation of how far is too far when decentering the human, and what role does place-based art play in creating and empowering community.
John Ford was from Maine. Georgia O’Keeffe, from Wisconsin. Edward Abbey, Pennsylvania. As someone born and raised in the Desert Southwest, I’ve written the project I have yet to encounter.
The project intersects the environmental humanities, critical theory, and cultural studies with the Desert Southwest. It explores the fullness of desert places with regard to cultures, borders, and languages, as well as nonhuman forces and intensities like heat, light, and distance. Dispelling the dominant notion of desert as void or wasteland, it sets a stage to suit the polyvocality of desert place. My work is interdisciplinary because the desert demands it. It begins with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in order to reorient readers towards the rupture of the US War With Mexico which helped set the national and cultural borders in effect today. I then explore Denis Villeneuve’s film Sicario to emphasize the correlation between political hierarchy and verticality; those who can experience the desert from above are exempt from the conditions below, where Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway and Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood take place. The novels expose the immanence and violence of being on the ground in the desert and at the lower end of said hierarchies. Analyzing Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World and Mora’s Encantado enables what I term a desert hauntology to produce a desert full of memory, myth, ancestors, and enchantment. Finally, the project puts visual artists James Turrell and Rafa Esparza in conversation to discover a desert phenomenology. The result is an instigation of how far is too far when decentering the human, and what role does place-based art play in creating and empowering community.
John Ford was from Maine. Georgia O’Keeffe, from Wisconsin. Edward Abbey, Pennsylvania. As someone born and raised in the Desert Southwest, I’ve written the project I have yet to encounter.
ContributorsOsuna, Celina (Author) / Broglio, Ronald (Thesis advisor) / McHugh, Kevin (Committee member) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
New communication technologies have undoubtedly altered the ways in which persons interact and have had a profound impact on public life. Engaging this impact, much of the scholarly literature has focused on how these interfaces mediate interaction however, less is known about technology's modulating effects. The current project moves beyond mediation, underscoring how social relations are not only activated by technology, but are actuated by these interfaces. Through an extended case study of Portals, gold shipping containers equipped with audio-visual technology that put persons in digital face-to-face interaction with others around the globe, the current project engages such actuation, highlighting how the co-mingling of affect and technology generate new ways of noticing, living and thinking through the complex relationships of public life. The human/technology relations mediated/modulated by the Portal produce unique atmospheres that activate/actuate public space and blur the boundaries between public and private. Additionally, the atmospheres of the Portal generate a digital co-presence that allows for user/participants to feel with their interlocutors. This “feeling with” suspends user/participants in atmospheres of human connection through the emergence of an imaginative dialogue, and the curating of such atmospheres leads to dialogic transformation. As such, the Portal operates as an atmospheric interface. Engaging the concept of atmosphere attunes those interested in new communication technologies to the complex gatherings these technologies create, and the potentialities and pitfalls of these emerging interfaces on public life.
ContributorsFerderer, Brandon Boyd (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C. (Thesis advisor) / McHugh, Kevin (Committee member) / Hess, Aaron (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This research scrutinizes theatre teaching practice through a teacher perspective to find mechanisms that enable health promotion and quality theatre-making skills for students. The critical investigations conducted are twofold. First, I examine the intersection of my 18 years of experience teaching high school drama for connections to theatre and health research. I employ a narrative inquiry method to analyze lived experience to create an initial health promotion framework. And second, I interrogate that framework investigating the experience of a focus group of other high school drama teachers, a high school counselor, and a psychologist. This study reveals that drama teachers perceive their drama programs as psychologically, socially, and emotionally health-promoting for involved students. Furthermore, this study identifies the complex processes, relationships, and components of the theatre-making that the teachers pinpoint as preconditions and mechanisms that enhance and enable student flourishing. The teachers describe themselves as key to health promotion by modeling the artistry of theatre and the art form's social and emotional skills. Their narratives demonstrate that flexible time, their students, and the relationships they build with them as preconditions to maximize health promotion. Specifically, they identify the creation of a safe, supportive environment as foundational to the process.
ContributorsOlsen, Nicola (Author) / Etheridge-Woodson, Stephani (Thesis advisor) / Underiner, Tamara (Committee member) / McAvoy, Mary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
In the United States, we tend to understand linguistic systems as separate and autonomous, and by this understanding, bilinguals are people who speak two different languages and switch between them. This understanding of bilingualism, however, does not reflect the reality of the way many bilinguals use language. Rather than “code-switch” between two languages, sociolinguists posit that many bilinguals understand their language as a single linguistic system, and choose different elements of that system in different situations, a process termed, “translanguaging.” Translanguaging provides an alternative framework for examining bilingual language as an ideological system in plays, particularly plays which use translanguaged dialogue to describe the experiences of young people who dwell on and cross borders, a category of plays I term, “Border Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA).” This descriptive study utilizes grounded theory and close reading theoretically grounded in border studies and sociolinguistic theory to determine what roles Spanish and English play in Border TYA as autonomous systems, and as pieces of a new, translanguaged system. Playwrights of Border TYA u translanguaging as a structural metaphor for cultural negotiation to examine identity, belonging, and borders. Translanguaging provides subaltern characters a process for communicating their experiences, examining their identities, and describing encounters with borders in their own unique linguistic system. Border TYA, however, does not exclusively translanguage. Border TYA also incorporates monolingual dialogue and translation, and in these instances the languages, Spanish and English, function autonomously as tools for teaching audience members to recognize vocabulary and cultural experience.
ContributorsSchildkret, Elizabeth (Author) / Etheridge Woodson, Stephani (Thesis advisor) / Underiner, Tamara (Committee member) / Garcia, Lorenzo (Committee member) / Bernstein, Katherine (Committee member) / Hughes, Erika (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Residents of the United States increasingly support organic and local food systems. New Social Movement theorists have described alternative agriculture as a social movement that transcends social class. Other scholars have critiqued alternative agriculture for catering to a middle-class, white public. Simultaneously, geographers have identified communities across the United States that struggle with reduced access to healthy fruits and vegetables. In some of these neighborhoods, known as “food deserts,” local groups are redefining an inequitable distribution of healthy food as a social injustice, and they have begun initiatives to practice “food justice.” The overarching research questions of this study are: 1) How do communities become food deserts? 2) How do food justice movements crystallize and communities practice food justice? 3) What are the social outcomes of food justice movements? Using an Ecology of Actors framework, this study analyzes the actors and operational scales of three food justice movements in Phoenix, Arizona. A narrative analysis of historical scholarly materials and other artifacts reveals that, for more than a century, some communities have tried to create minority-operated local food systems. However, they were thwarted by racist policies and market penetration of the conventional US food system. Interviews with residents, garden organizers and food justice advocates living and working in the city create a narrative of the present day struggle for food justice. Results of this work show that contemporary residents describe their foodscape as one of struggle, and carless residents rely upon social networks to access healthy food. Garden organizers and gardeners are creating networks of community gardens, market gardens, and informal farmers’ markets. They are actively transforming their communities’ landscapes with sophisticated garden ecology in an intense urban heat island. However, the movement’s continued success may be threatened. Many new Phoenix-based local food coalitions and national alternative agriculture social movements are now working to alter Phoenix’s foodscape. Composed of well-educated professionals, who have adopted a justice-based language around food, these organizations may unintentionally co-opt the local food justice movements.
ContributorsBleasdale, Thomas (Author) / Harlan, Sharon L (Thesis advisor) / McHugh, Kevin (Committee member) / Bolin, Bob (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Nuclear hazards, linked to both U.S. weapons programs and civilian nuclear power, pose substantial environment justice issues. Nuclear power plant (NPP) reactors produce low-level ionizing radiation, high level nuclear waste, and are subject to catastrophic contamination events. Justice concerns include plant locations and the large potentially exposed populations, as well as issues in siting, nuclear safety, and barriers to public participation. Other justice issues relate to extensive contamination in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, and the mining and processing industries that have supported it. To approach the topic, first we discuss distributional justice issues of NPP sites in the U.S. and related procedural injustices in siting, operation, and emergency preparedness. Then we discuss justice concerns involving the U.S. nuclear weapons complex and the ways that uranium mining, processing, and weapons development have affected those living downwind, including a substantial American Indian population. Next we examine the problem of high-level nuclear waste and the risk implications of the lack of secure long-term storage. The handling and deposition of toxic nuclear wastes pose new transgenerational justice issues of unprecedented duration, in comparison to any other industry. Finally, we discuss the persistent risks of nuclear technologies and renewable energy alternatives.
ContributorsKyne, Dean (Author) / Bolin, Bob (Author) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2016-07-12