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 Coming Home as "Wounded Warriors": Identity, Stigma, and Status among Post-9/11 Wounded Veterans(2018) Montgomery, Sidra; Kleykamp, Meredith; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Increased public attention on wounded and injured veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has popularized the term "wounded warrior.” This defining phrase is used as both a colloquial term and an official status. This dissertation traces the symbolic meaning of “wounded warrior” in the lives of post-9/11 wounded veterans. Specifically, I examine how this socially constructed status is defined, its impact on the community of wounded veterans, and how it has come to shape the everyday experiences of post-9/11 wounded veterans. I rely on two forms of qualitative data, content analysis and in-depth interviews, to capture public discourse and personal experiences of being a “wounded warrior.” In the content analysis I use news media coverage from 2001 to 2013 to analyze the broader construction of wounded veterans as “wounded warriors.” Secondly, I conducted in-depth interviews with 39 wounded Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to examine how veterans see themselves and their injuries and how they craft their personal and social identity within the “wounded warrior” framework. In both sets of data I attend to the role of visibility, whether a veteran’s injuries are readily seen, as a significant factor affecting both the portrayal and experience of veteran’s status as a “wounded warrior.” Post-9/11 wounded veterans are a socially valued group, benefiting from civilians who want to “support the troops” after the hostile homecoming of Vietnam veterans. “Wounded warrior” is a status connected to material benefits, social esteem, and symbolic capital, but the definition of who qualifies shifts and changes depending on the context. Combat wounded veterans use social and symbolic boundaries to establish themselves as the real “wounded warriors.” Wounded veterans employ social closure, a strategy of social stratification, for distinction using expectations and community norms to position themselves as the most worthy “wounded warriors”, protecting the meaning of their service and sacrifice. The visibility of a veteran’s injuries conditions their experience as a “wounded warrior”, impacting their relationship to the wounded veteran community, the experience of stigma, and their own identity. Overall, I find that post-9/11 wounded veterans actively shape and are shaped by their status as “wounded warriors.”Item Pirates, Anarchists, and Terrorists: Violence and the Boundaries of Sovereign Authority(2014) Shirk, Mark Alexander; Haufler, Virginia; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines how states combat episodes of violence that pose an ontological threat to the state. Sovereignty is a bundle of practices that draw, maintain, and redraw boundaries around political authority, the state is the polity constructed by these boundaries. The boundaries can be physical such as a border between state or conceptual such as that between public and private. These boundaries create the `conceptual maps that state leaders use to make sense of the world. The threat posed by violent action is constructed by narratives. Revisionist narratives of violence, the focus of this study, are illegible to states using current conceptual maps and therefore cannot be defeated while they remain. States are forced to redraw the boundaries of sovereign authority in the course of combating these threats, resulting in a transformed state. In my three cases - golden age piracy in the 18th century, anarchist `propagandists of the deed' at the turn of the 20th, and al Qaeda - I demonstrate that the state develops creative solutions to concrete crises. For instance, golden age pirates exploited a surfeit of ungoverned land and open markets in the early 18th century Atlantic to attack trade forcing colonial states to bring their Atlantic colonies into the domestic sphere and shift the sea into an open space. Similarly, the rise of the labor movement and the development fingerprint databases and the universal passport system were, in part, responses to the threat of anarchists propounding "propaganda of the deed" at the turn of the 20th century. Finally, counterterror innovations devised to combat al Qaeda, such as targeted killing and bulk data collection, have transformed borders from sites of exclusion designed to keep out undesirables to sites of collection where they are tracked and controlled. Each case demonstrates how states re-inscribe themselves by redrawing conceptual boundaries, such as between in order to make sense of an episode of revisionist and respond effectively.Item A BOND RATHER THAN A BARRIER? CONSTRUCTING THE ST. LAWRENCE SEAWAY(2014) Brideau, Jeffrey Mitchell; Zeller, Thomas; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A mid-20th century water infrastructure megaproject, the St. Lawrence Seaway is a shipping channel that accommodates ships with a 26-foot draft and allows them to traverse a distance of 2,300 miles, from the headwaters of Lake Superior to the Atlantic Ocean. It also facilitates the production of hydroelectric power, harnessing the river's kinetic energy to produce electrical current. Its official opening, in 1959, unified several formerly discrete elements into a coherent bi-national envirotechnical system. An environmental and technological system embedded in specific social and ecological contexts, the Seaway caused significant disruption - inundated and relocated communities and altered hydrologic dynamics are the most conspicuous repercussions of its construction and continued operation. Despite this contested history, the Seaway has been "naturalized" and masks many attendant ecological and socio-historical transformations. The Seaway's symbolic power is as potent as its social and ecological legacies. The project and associated institutions have become symbols of bi-national cooperation, and are held up as exemplars of transboundary resource management. This symbolic legacy obscures the protracted and acrimonious debate that preceded Seaway construction, as well as alternative possibilities and perspectives marginalized in the process. Accordingly, I contend that the Seaway has both engendered new bonds and simultaneously erected new barriers, transforming the landscape and peoples in myriad and often unanticipated ways. By teasing out the stories concealed by the dominant Seaway narrative, I show that the remaking of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence, between the 1820s and 1960s, materially and discursively reconfigured adjacent societies and landscapes. Using envirotechnical analysis deployed in a bi-national narrative, I explore the Seaway as both a symbol and a reality. The boundaries between these forms are permeable not fixed, and both are crucial to its construction and operation. This story is, at its core, an interrogation of boundaries - a narrative focused on two nations and the river that divides and unites them. It is also about the boundaries drawn between culture and nature, the environment and technology, the abstract and physical, expertise and advocacy, as well as myth and materiality.Item Morphotropic Phase Boundaries in Tb1-xDyxFe2 Alloys(2013) Bergstrom Jr., Richard Eaton; Wuttig, Manfred; Material Science and Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Magnetostrictive alloys, materials that change in dimension under an applied magnetic field, are desired candidates for transducers. Unfortunately, common magnetostrictive metals, alloys, and oxides produce such small strains that they are not a viable option. In the early 1960's rare earths were found to possess extraordinary magnetostriction values at cryogenic temperatures. When alloyed with traditional transition metals they form a Laves phase compound of the form AB2. These Laves phase compounds have shown large magnetostriction values, up to 2500με in TbFe2. A major drawback to using these materials as transducers is their huge magnetocrystalline anisotropy constants, K1 and K2. However, it was found that TbFe2 and DyFe2 have opposing signs of K1 and K2. A pseudo-binary alloy, Tb1-xDyxFe2 (Terfenol-D) TDFx, was formed to decrease the total magnetocrystalline anisotropy. The anisotropy reached a room temperature minimum for TDF73. It is suspected that this minimum of the anisotropy is accompanied by a morphotropic phase boundary (MPB) at which the crystal structure changes from tetragonal to rhombohedral. Unraveling the nature of the temperature and composition dependence of the magnetic and crystalline properties along this MPB is the primary focus of this thesis. The structure of the TDF alloys was probed through macroscopic and microscopic techniques. The maximum in the DC magnetization at the transition temperature from tetragonal to rhombohedral broadens as the transition temperature is increased. This is attributed to decreasing anisotropy at increased temperature. Synchrotron and neutron powder diffraction are utilized to elucidate the microscopic changes in the structure and magnetism. Neutron powder diffraction results were somewhat inconclusive but were sufficient to produce magnetic moments that were invariant, within experimental error, across the transition region. Synchrotron powder diffraction was used to probe the structure at temperatures across the MPB. Reitveld refinement of the structure in TDF65 reveals that large strain gradients exist across the MPBs. This was supplemented by temperature dependent scans of various TDF alloys showing a broadening of the phase transition with increasing temperature which we attribute a widening of the meta-stable [100] and [111] easy directions.Item Boundaries and the Built Environment(2010) Riggin, Alyse; Eisenbach, Ronit; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The human tendency for bounded space bridges time, place and culture. Boundaries can either be physical or invisible, permanent or temporal, political or natural, they can invite or exclude, unite or divide. Boundaries can assist in regulating communication between separate entities, but they can also isolate and be detrimental to the well being of their contents. It is a natural human tendency to place people and things into well-defined categories, and it can be difficult to dismantle our preconceptions about these categories. If designers are not aware of this predilection, harmful environments can be created if these boundaries are replicated spatially. The Oldtown and Penn Fallsway neighborhoods in East Baltimore, Maryland are disconnected and therefore isolated from their surroundings, and also function as a centrifugal boundary between downtown and East Baltimore. This thesis explores the rise and fall of these neighborhoods over time, and how a series of decisions relating to physical and sociocultural boundaries were instrumental in their eventual decline. This thesis explores how to dissolve those perceived and actual boundaries by weaving the urban fabric back into the surrounding context. By critically studying how boundaries related to the temporal, sociocultural, and ecological aspects of this site, Oldtown can once again be a healthy connected neighborhood.