Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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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Item Inform: Engaging Climate Action Through Didactic Architecture(2019) Goel, Juhi; DuPuy, Karl; VanderGoot, Jana; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Our climate is changing, and so must architecture. Climate change is a fundamental design problem of our time, and it requires us to critically examine and deviate from some of our established practices with regard to the building typologies, materials, systems and design approaches that we propagate. This thesis explores an alternative model for the way we build our future cities - one that is rooted in climate action. It examines the design characteristics of a high-rise timber tower in a dense urban setting, where it effectively acts as a Carbon Sink. It addresses a number of sustainable design practices within a mixed-use program that speaks to a varied audience. And in doing so, it employs didactic architecture - or architecture as a teaching tool - to educate its users about their consumption footprint and inspire them to participate in climate action on a scale that promises systemic change.Item "The Schools are Killing our Kids!": The African American Fight for Self-Determination in the Boston Public Schools, 1949-1985(2014) Bundy, Lauren Tess; Freund, David M; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines a grassroots movement led by black Bostonians to achieve racial justice, quality education, and community empowerment in the Boston Public Schools during the postwar period. From the late 1940s through the early 1980s black parents, teachers, and students employed a wide-range of strategies in pursuit of these goals including staging school boycotts, creating freedom schools, establishing independent alternative schools, lobbying for legislation, forming parent and youth groups, and organizing hundreds of grassroots organizations. At the heart of this movement was a desire to improve the quality of education afforded to black youth and to expand the power of black Bostonians in educational governance. This dissertation demonstrates that desegregation and community control were not mutually exclusive goals or strategies of black educational activism. I examine the evolution of the goals, ideology, and strategy of this movement over the course of more than three decades in response to shifts in the national and local political climate. This work traces the close ties between this local movement in Boston and broader movements for racial and social justice unfolding across the nation in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. Most importantly, my dissertation puts this movement in conversation with a broader national project of various marginalized groups in the postwar period to radically transform the institutions of democracy. This dissertation challenges a well-known narrative of civil rights and school desegregation in Boston in this period. This story of the so-called Boston "busing crisis" focuses on white resistance, a narrow period of time in the mid-1970s, and court-ordered desegregation. In the rare instances in which black Bostonians are included in this narrative it is as victims or apathetic bystanders. The rhetoric of "busing," particularly the framing of opposition to desegregation as "anti-busing," obscured and continues to obscure the more complex racial politics driving the opposition to the integration of the Boston Public Schools. My scholarship brings light to a much broader and more nuanced history of racial politics in Boston and demonstrates that we cannot understand the period of court-ordered desegregation without examining the decades of grassroots activism which preceded it.Item At the Water's Edge: A Cultural Institute of the Charles River(2004-12-22) Marquis, Tracy Ann; Wortham, Brooke D; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Rivers have provided reason for development throughout history. As a result, many of today's major cities sit at the rivers edge. For those cities that span both sides of a river, treatment of the water's edge is very important to the perception of the river in the city. This type of urban river can act as a unifier or a divider of its city. This thesis looks at urban rivers, and utlilizing them as unifying spaces. In order to deal with the river as a space, people must be able to partake in that space. As such, they must be able to inhabit the land at the water's edge. The thesis uses a site on the Charles River in Boston, Massachusetts, where the movement systems along the water's edge start to break down, and thus so does the perception of the river as a space. The master-plan, the site and the buidling, a cultural institute about the Charles River, are used to bring people to the rivers edge and into the space of the river.