Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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2007 - 200912010 - 20181

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    INCREASED INDIVIDUAL SIZE AND ITS POTENTIAL EFFECTS ON EMERGENCY EVACUATION SCENARIOS
    (2018) Ahrens, Katherine; Milke, James; Fire Protection Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The increase in human body size due to obesity and overweight conditions is recognized as becoming more prevalent throughout the world. The effect which increased body size and weight has on movement has been examined from a kinesiological and physiological standpoint. Its effect on egress during emergency evacuation has largely remained unstudied. This study reviews current data on body size using modeling software to examine the potential impact an increase in body size has on evacuation times and whether that impact is significant enough to warrant potential changes to current code and regulatory requirements. The change in body size distribution is analyzed and tests are conducted at increasing body size intervals of 0.025 meters for six different scenarios. Results indicate that an increase of 0.225 meters to a body radius increases evacuation times in simple scenarios between 12% and 72%.
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    Performing Fatness and the Cultural Negotiations of Body Size
    (2007-04-27) Tillery, Sarah M.; Struna, Nancy; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In his thoroughly researched work, Transmen and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities (1999), Jason Cromwell states for the communities of transmen and FTMs, "The limits on the uses of bodies, and on what types of bodies are considered legitimate, is regulated through the body politic (judicial, medical, and political systems) Furthermore, through the body, the body politic dictates what constitutes legitimate sex and gender, normal sexuality, and even what identities are considered appropriate" (32). Similarly, our cultural understandings about and personal relationships to fatness are informed by an intricate configuration of medical, legal, political, and visual messages that convey notions of "acceptable" and "unacceptable" body size. This dissertation will examine multiple instances wherein the negotiation of these messages produces complicated subject positions for bodies of size. It will investigate how the fat body operates to reveal both hegemonic as well as counter-hegemonic significance by drawing upon the authority of medical, legal, and political narratives produced about fatness and body size. By analyzing the performative texts of the film, Real Women Have Curves, the photography collection Women En Large, and a political performance group of fat cheerleaders, called F.A.T.A.S.S., this project will examine the representations of fat women to illustrate how fat subjectivities are neither merely accommodating nor simply resistive. Denying any construction of a one-dimensional story about resisting bodies or hegemonic narratives, this dissertation seeks to highlight the nuanced and complicated subjectivities produced by and for fat women within various contexts. And by analyzing the complexity of these moments, "Performing Fatness" will attempt to elevate body size as a major point of consideration within the analysis of all bodies. In so doing, body size will be revealed as interconnected and inseparable from our understandings of race, class, gender, sexuality, as well as, other points of identification, and ultimately transform the ways in which we theorize and understand bodies altogether.