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 The Crisis of Scale in Contemporary Fiction(2020) Kason, Daniel Joshua; Konstantinou, Lee; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Crisis of Scale in Contemporary Fiction studies how globalization has transformed our relationship with scale and creates a problem of representation in fiction. After the Second World War, new geopolitical, economic, cultural, and technological developments radically changed the form of existing spaces such as the nation-state, while producing new ones like the global city. By the late twentieth century, with the end of the Cold War, the spread of free trade policies like NAFTA, and the start of the Internet Age, these historical developments led to what I term the crisis of scale; that is, humanity’s growing awareness of the planet’s complexity and interconnectedness has called into question established narratives about the spaces we inhabit, necessitating the development of new representational strategies. Analyzing depictions of the global city, nation-state, world, and galaxy in novels by China Miéville, Karen Tei Yamashita, Nalo Hopkinson, and Samuel R. Delany respectively, I uncover the set of narrative strategies they use to account for the way globalization shapes daily life. Turning to popular genre fiction to describe the disorienting and dislocating effects of the crisis of scale, these novelists join a tradition of writers of literary fiction interested in advancing generic traditions such as science fiction and detective fiction. While most critics read the generic turn starting at the end of the twentieth century as a response to the decline of postmodernism, I interpret the literary movement as a formal solution to the problem of representation under the crisis of scale. By self-reflexively and intertextually engaging with their own generic histories, popular genres develop a language for the perspectival experience of the crisis of scale. This dissertation contends that tracking literary developments in genre provides us with a theoretical toolkit not only for articulating and understanding new globalizing conditions, but for developing new subjectivities capable of contending with them.Item Natural Resources, Civil Conflict, and the Political Ecology of Scale(2018) Wayland, Joshua James; Geores, Martha; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation adopts a multi-scalar and mixed methods approach to interrogate the widely observed but underdefined relationship between natural resources and civil conflict. The results of three largely independent analyses are presented, corresponding to three distinct but overlapping epistemological scales and applying analytical methods appropriate to each scale. Cross-country spatial econometric analysis concluded that interstate variation in the incidence of conflict events is explained, in part, by a resource curse mechanism, whereby economic dependence on petroleum rents undermines state capacity and democratic governance, making a state more vulnerable to conflict. The results of a subnational quantitative study of the New People’s Army insurgency in the Philippines suggest that the spatial distribution of conflict risk within countries affected by civil war can be shaped by the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of resource extraction. And, a case study of a conflict over magnetite mining in the northern Philippines found that controversial resource extraction projects can create opportunities for non-state actors to develop alliances with civilian networks, discursively rescale localized disputes over resource governance to align with broader patterns of civil violence, and propagate narrative frames justifying violent collective action. From these results, a political ecology of scale in resource-related conflicts is set forth, arguing that the scalar properties of conflict vulnerability, conflict risk, and conflict opportunity have both epistemological and ontological implications; in particular, it is proposed that extractive enclaves, by fostering overlapping and intersecting scalar configurations of economic, socio-cultural, governance, and biophysical processes, constitute ‘natural habitats’ for civil conflict in which various actors can renegotiate their relative scalar positions through discursive and violent means to achieve political objectives.Item Towards the Use of Dielectric Elastomer Actuators as Locomotive Devices for Millimeter-Scale Robots(2012) Pearse, Justin Daminabo; Smela, Elisabeth; Mechanical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) are electromechanical transducers that are promising for small scale applications. The work presented in this thesis seeks to develop DEAs as an actuation technology that would serve the purpose of ambulating millimeter-scale robots in a robust and predictable manner. To begin, the "planar" DEA configuration was characterized and the performances of various elastomers were investigated. Then, based on the requirements of a proposed robot walking gait, two principles were examined as means of converting in-plane actuation strain to bending actuation. Bending DEAs were fabricated and tested, and a maximum end displacement of 1.5 mm was achieved for a 10 mm long sample. Bending actuator design was optimized by maximizing both speed and payload capabilities. Finally, some challenges facing the design of robots ambulated by DEAs were outlined; of particular note is the DEAs' electrostatic interaction with each other and their surroundings.Item SCALE MODELING OF STATIC FIRES IN A COMPLEX GEOMETRY FOR FORENSIC FIRE APPLICATIONS(2010) Carey, Allison Charlotte; Quintiere, James G; Fire Protection Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Scale modeling can allow fire investigators to replicate specific fire dynamics at a dramatically reduced cost. A gas burner, liquid pool, wood crib, and polyurethane foam block are used to represent the wide range of fuels that investigators encounter. These fuels are classified into two groups: the burner and liquid pool that reach a semi-immediate steady state (static fires) and the crib and foam that have a fire spread and growth period (dynamic fires). This research examines the proposed scaling method for the static fires. The enclosure consists of a large corridor that provides an interesting challenge due to the presence of partitions at the ceiling. The design fires and the model enclosure are designed based on Froude scaling derived from conservation equations. The eight various sized fires demonstrate acceptable scaling results in the prediction of flame height and temperature at various elevations in the enclosure.Item On Being the Right Size: A Framework for the Analytical Study of Scale, Economy, and Ecosystem(2006-04-12) Malghan, Deepak Vaman; Daly, Herman E; Public Affairs; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)If the economy is conceived as an open subsystem of the larger ecosystem, the physical size of the economy relative to the ecosystem that contains and sustains it becomes a salient feature of economic analysis. This key question of scale is therefore one of the central organizing principles of ecological economics. However, scale has mostly been used as a pedagogical device or a heuristic rather than as an empirical tool for environmental policy. The primary bottleneck has been the lack of well-dened theoretical frameworks to empirically measure scale, and to interpret measured values of scale. Our overarching research question is: how can scale be measured at dierent levels of economic-geographic aggregations? The seemingly simple question of `how large is the economy relative to the ecosystem' is fraught with several theoretical diculties. We develop a novel theoretical framework for empirical measurement of scale based on a simple analytical representation of the economy-ecosystem interaction in terms of stock, ows, funds, and uxes. We also develop theoretical frameworks to determine benchmark scale measures" that address the questions: how large can the economy be relative to the ecosystem, and how large should the economy be relative to the ecosystem? For scale measures to be useful as tools for environmental policy, a critical requirement, besides being able to empirically measure scale, is a consistent and objective ordinal ranking of two or more measured values of scale. Given two empirical measurements we need to be able to consistently rank the states of the world represented by the scale metric. We develop an axiomatic framework for consistent ordinal raking of scale measures. The framework developed here helps identify theoretical problems with extant empirical assessments of the biophysical size of economic activity. The biophysical assessments that we review in detail include the Material Flow Analysis methodology, Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis, and the Ecological Footprint.