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 La nature et l'Autre dans Chocolat, Tintin au Congo et Vendredi ou la vie sauvage; une lecture écocritique et post-coloniale(2021) Le Saux, Guilhem Mael; Eades, Caroline; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Tintin in Congo (1931) by Hergé, is an example of the colonial discourse colonial empires propagated to reduce both nature and the Other to inferior beings. Chocolat (1988) by Claire Denis, and Vendredi ou la Vie Sauvage (1971) by Michel Tournier, offer a critical perspective on said colonial discourse. With those three texts, among others, I offer an analysis of how the colonial and neocolonial discourses destroy, exploit and reorganize colonized spaces, nature and peoples. In the first chapter, I develop the destruction of both local cultures and natures in order to make way for colonial empires’ exploitation. In a second chapter, I go over the practices of how colonial empires exploit both natural resources and peoples in colonized spaces. Finally, in a third chapter, I explain how colonial empires intend to reconfigure colonized spaces under a European model; be it language, religion or the use of nature.Item Acts of Livelihood: Bodies and Nature in International Garden City Movement Planning, 1898-1937(2018) Clevenger, Samuel Martin; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Urban planning and reform scholars and policymakers continue to cite the “garden city” community model as a potential blueprint for planning environmentally sustainable, economically equitable, humane built environments. Articulated by the British social reformer Sir Ebenezer Howard and his 1898 book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, the model represented a method for uniting the benefits of town and country through a singular, pre-planned, “healthy” community, balancing spaces of “countryside” and “nature” with affordable, well-built housing and plentiful cultural attractions associated with city life. The book catalyzed an early twentieth-century international movement for the promotion and construction of garden cities. Howard’s garden city remains a highly influential context in the history of town planning and urban public health reform, as well as more recent environmentally-friendly urban design movements. To date, while historians have long examined the garden city as an agent of social and spatial reform, little analysis has been devoted to the role of prescribed embodiment and deemed “healthy” physical cultural forms and practices in the promotion and construction of garden cities as planned communities for “healthy living.” Informed by recent scholarship in Physical Cultural Studies (PCS), embodied environmental history, cultural materialism, and theories of modern biopower, this dissertation studies the cultural history of international garden city movement planning in early twentieth century Britain and the United States. Studying archival materials related to some of the prominent planners and resultant communities of the movement, I focus on the biopolitical dimensions of the planners’ contextual designs for “nature,” “health,” and “healthy” physical culture as they devised material garden city community layouts. I argue that the intentional British and American garden cities created during the movement were planned as spatialized strategies for the regeneration of laboring bodies through organized, bourgeois physical cultural practices and access to nostalgic spaces of “naturally healthy environments and outdoor recreation.Item The Indistinct Edge: Reconnecting Experience in Nature and Architecture(2016) Bender, Matthew David; Abrams, Michael; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis explores how architectures sense of place is rooted in the natural environment. The built environment has been constructed to protect and sustain human culture from the weathering of nature. Separating experience from the natural environment removes a sense of place and belonging in the natural and reinforces architectural dominance. This separation distinguishes the natural world as an article of spectacle and gives the human experience an unnatural voyeurship to natural changes. By examining the fusion of architectural and natural edges this thesis analyzes how the human experience can reconnect with a naturalistic sense of place through architecture, blending the finite edge where architecture maintains nature, and adapting buildings to the cycles of the environment. Removing dominance of man-made spaces and replacing them with the cohabitation of the edge between built and natural forms.Item CHANNELING THE CURRENT: THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF MOVING MEDITATION FOR FINDNG A FLOW IN THINKING AND WRITING(2013) Morris, Sarah Lynn; Hultgren, Francine H.; McCaleb, Joseph; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)CHANNELING THE CURRENT: THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF MOVING MEDITATION FOR FINDNG A FLOW IN THINKING AND WRITING Sarah Lynn Morris, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation Directed by: Professor Francine H. Hultgren Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership, University of Maryland, College Park This phenomenological study explores lived experience of moving meditation for finding flow in thinking and writing. Moving meditation is intentional practice of mindfulness that brings us deeply into our selves and the world. Connecting to pedagogical implications for teaching composition, this study suggests embodied practices may open a flow of words and ideas for those practicing movement meditation. Grounded in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and van Manen, this work explores embodiment and lived experience, using human science phenomenology as method. Further grounded in writing process and moving meditation texts, this work connects body movement and writing practices through lived experience. I first turn toward my own experience to examine moving meditation as method of finding flow in my thinking and writing. Next, I explore the phenomenon in a range of traditions to further uncover the lived experience of moving writers. The metaphor of the circuit as descriptive of writing process and body process further illuminates the phenomenon. Initial emergent themes include process, practice, flow, solitude, and nature. Recognizing the intersubjective in the particular, this study focuses on lived experience of four high school English teachers as they make meaning through focused movement. In four sessions of meditative contemplation, these teachers walked in the woods, wrote reflections, and considered personal and pedagogical experiences. Renderings of these teachers' journals and conversations suggest themes including fear, care, wholeness, and transcendence. Drawing from these conversants' insights, I explore ways in which meditative movement opens a flow in thinking and writing for these teachers, writers themselves in the current of life. Orienting toward pedagogical implications, I engage with lived experience in order to suggest ways in which teachers of writing may create wholeness of experience for classroom communities: taking students outside, seeing students in wholeness, positioning themselves as more experienced writers, focusing on process rather that product, and being bodies themselves. In doing so, they may generate a culture of care that fosters growth of writing and writers--body, mind, and spirit wholeness-- with the world as classroom and lived life as text.Item Infusing Wellness: Eastern Traditions in the Western Context(2013) James, Khara; Eisenbach, Ronit; Simon, Madlen; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Wellness is defined as an optimal state of health in the mind, body, and spirit. This state is achieved through a balance of energy found in all things, including the human body. Eastern Traditions support the notion that this energy is governed by the elements of nature. Eastern architects such as Tadao Ando and Geoffrey Bawa offer lessons on how design connects humans to nature and appeals to our sense of well-being. This thesis builds on the implications of both Eastern health and design traditions to develop a building typology in the West that promotes healing in our underserved communities. It aims to heal and educate people by providing spaces for healthy, natural and preventative activities. It explores a process of design for well-being in which the users experience the healing qualities of nature in a space. The resulting wellness center acts as a threshold into nature natural environment.Item Nature, Culture, Craft: Re-thinking the National Park Visitor Experience(2012) Rubenstein, Michele L.; Eisenbach, Ronit; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis explores the role that architecture might play in the experience of wilderness. This case study focuses specifically on how architecture in the National Parks serves as a threshold to nature. The National Park building tradition began in the 19th century with the grand lodges of the west sponsored by the railroad. With the advent of the automobile, the visitor center typology was developed and the architecture shifted to focus on personal visitor needs. This project attempts to demonstrate how the architecture of an Interpretive Center can provide a destination and launching point into the National Parks. By combining ideas of a "traditional" visitor center with a science and research component, the program can become both educational and participatory. This thesis proposes a design in Apgar Village in Glacier National Park. The design reaches beyond the confines of the Interpretive Center complex to create connections throughout the landscape helping to strengthen Apgar Village as a place.Item Monsters in Paradise: The Representation of the Natural World in the Historias of Bartolome de Las Casas and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo(2010) Thompson, Katherine A.; Harrison, Regina; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the years following Columbus's landfall, European efforts to describe the physical reality of a hitherto unknown hemisphere led to profound epistemological changes. As recent studies by Canizares Esguerra and Barrera-Osorio have shown, early Spanish accounts of New World nature reflect an unprecedented emphasis on empirical methods of acquiring and systematizing knowledge of the natural world, contributing to the emergence of natural history and ultimately the Scientific Revolution. Sixteenth century texts were not, however, "scientific" in a modern sense. Empirical observation was shaped by scholastic and humanistic philosophy, and mingled with wondrous images derived from classical and medieval sources; these various discourses combined in ways that were colored by the authors' ideological perspectives on the justice of the Spanish conquest. This dissertation examines the interaction between proto-scientific empiricism and inherited epistemologies in descriptions of the natural world in the histories of Bartolome; de Las Casas and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo. While contemporary historians of science acknowledge the importance of these works, they rarely engage in detailed textual analyses. Literary critics, on the other hand, only infrequently concentrate on the role of proto-scientific discourse. Rabasa has studied several natural images in both authors, Myers and Carrillo Castillo have examined the role of empiricism in Oviedo, and Wey Gomez and Padron have studied geographical representations, but few studies have focused exclusively on Las Casas's and Oviedo's portrayals of the natural world in its totality. This dissertation analyzes how the tension between discursive modes produced contrasting images, paradisiacal and stable in the case of Las Casas and liminal or "monstrous" in the case of Oviedo. Chapter One outlines the intellectual formations of both authors; Chapter Two examines spatial and geographical constructs; Chapter Three centers on flora and fauna; Chapter Four concentrates on food and agriculture; and Chapter Five looks at concepts of Nature as active agent. In each of these areas, Las Casas's and Oviedo's attempts to describe unfamiliar and often anomalous New World natural phenomena stretched, altered, and at times subverted existing concepts of the natural world in ways that would have implications for future notions of American nature.