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This study aims to examine the relationship between urban densification and pedestrian thermal comfort at different times of the year, and to understand how this can impact patterns of activity in downtown areas. The focus of the research is on plazas in the urban core of downtown Tempe, given their importance to the pedestrian landscape. With that in mind, the research question for the study is: how does the microclimate of a densifying urban core affect thermal comfort in plazas at different times of the year? Based on the data, I argue that plazas in downtown Tempe are not maximally predisposed to pedestrian thermal comfort in the summer or the fall. Thus, the proposed intervention to improve thermal comfort in downtown Tempe’s plazas is the implementation of decision support tools focused on education, community engagement, and thoughtful building designs for heat safety.
In this study, single-use plastics in the food packaging industry were systematically reviewed in order to determine their ‘essentiality’ for product longevity. Four grocery stores were chosen and their brands ‘in plastic’ and ‘not in plastic’ were counted. Seven subcategories of food and drink types were created such that a proportion was representative of the brands in plastic per category.
The results of the systematic review showed that the majority of categories sampled from in each store had at least 80% of their brands in plastic packaging. Across four of the seven subcategories, 99-100% of each stores’ brands were in plastic packaging. Furthermore, six alternatives to single-use plastic packaging were reviewed and compared to current methods of food and drink packaging. This comparison deemed that none of the single-use packaging methods utilized in grocery stores were considered essential.
While this study concluded that none of the single-use plastics reviewed were deemed essential, alternatives still remain at a higher cost of production. Further innovation and widespread production of safe alternatives are both integral factors in reducing plastic production and protecting the future of the environment.
Keywords: implicit bias, bias blind spot, perceptions, judgment, mitigating procedures
commits. Outside of the house, there are people speeding, jaywalking, littering, sharing
medication, and driving without seat belts. Inside the house, people are downloading
music/movies, drinking while underage, using (and abusing) social media while under the age of
18, and reading another person’s mail. With so much of a focus on serious crimes, or felonies,
people tend to forget about the everyday actions in America that are also illegal. For example, a
police officer may not do anything if several cars are going well over the speed limit on the
highway, because it is normalized. This paper explores two sides of this issue: the psychological
side and the legal side. The goal is to find out how culpable people really are for their actions
when they do not have the mental intent that the they are determined to have in court. All human
behavior will be divided into two sections (people with non-extreme mental disorders and people
who have total control over their behavior). First, I dive into the complexity of anxiety,
depression, and ADHD, and explain how these disorders will subtly change someone’s behavior.
Next, I examine how actions like speeding and jaywalking and explain how certain illegal
actions have become so normalized that people may not be very guilty, even when they are
knowingly committing these crimes. I use different misdemeanors as examples for each of these
types of behaviors to argue why people should be more culpable (aggravating factors) or less
culpable (mitigating factors) because of their respective predispositions. Finally, I discuss issues
of fixing the criminal justice system such as: how to make all punishments fair/accurate, how to
fix the public’s distrust towards the law, and how to stop these normalized illegal behaviors for
all people, regardless of mental health or intent.
In addition, the artists’ sexualities are reflected in their pieces through their representation of their bodies. Often, this requires the interpretation of subtle visual clues and crucial images of androgyny, cross-dressing, and the dandy aesthetic. Queer artists often embraced clothing and accessories to express their identity and signal to others adept at recognizing such identifiers that they are queer. The painter Gluck exemplifies how androgynous clothing can be used as a statement of her sexuality in self-portraits as visual signifiers to those in queer circles. Through salons held in their homes, or a hidden back room of their studio in the case of Marie Høeg and Bolette Berg, artists created communities to inspire each other’s achievements and unique styles. In this paper I intend to shed light on how the portraits I am explicating are declarations of queerness, and how they present the artists’ deviations from gender norms to the art world and broader society.
Through a deep analysis and application of Sonya Renee Taylor’s book The Body Is Not An Apology, I discovered that apology is learned. We learn how to apologize through body shame, the media, family/generational trauma, and government/law/policy. This apology is embodied through gestures, movement patterns, and postures, such as bowing the head, hunching the shoulders, and walking around others. Apology causes us to view our bodies as things to be manipulated, discarded, and embarrassed by. After recognizing why we apologize and how it affects our bodies, we can then begin to think of how to remove it. Because the body the site of the problem, it is also the site of the solution. Dance gives us an opportunity to deeply learn our bodies, to cultivate their power, and to heal from their traumas. By being together in community as women, we are able to feel seen and supported as we work through uncharted territory of being free from apology in these bodies. By dancing in ways that allow us to take up space, to be free, to be unapologetic, we use dance as a practice for life. Through transforming ourselves, we begin to transform the world and rewrite the narrative of how we exist in and move through our bodies as women.