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 (Re)Placing America: Cold War Mapping and the Mediation of International Space(2011) Barney, Timothy; Parry-Giles, Trevor; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The United States emerged from World War II as an undeniably global power, and as the Cold War unfolded, America faced decisions about where to place and display its power on the globe. The Cold War was a battle between two ideologies and competing world systems, both of which were vying for space and had the tools and technologies to control those spaces. Maps became a central vehicle for the testing of these new boundaries. Mapping projects and programs emerged from a variety of popular cartographers, foreign policy strategists, defense leaders, Congressional representatives, scientists, oppositional movements, labor unions, educational publishers, even everyday citizens. As each of these sources confirms, the scope of American commitments had expanded considerably; to account for this expansion, a cartographic impulse underwrote the continually evolving Cold War, and the tensions of art and science, realism and idealism, and space and place inherent in this impulse helped form the fault lines of the conflict. (Re)Placing America looks largely at the ways that cartography adapted to such changes and tensions in the second half of the twentieth century, and how the United States marshaled the practice of mapping in a variety of ways to account for the shift to internationalism. This dissertation explores how cartography mediated visions of space, and particularly, how it defined America's place within those spaces. Treating cartography as a complex rhetorical process of production, display, and circulation, the five chapters cover major geopolitical thematics, and the responding evolution of maps, from World War II until the Cold War's end in the early 1990s. Some of these driving themes include the "air-age" expansion of visual perspectives and strategic potential in journalistic maps; the appropriation of cartography as a medium for intelligence and national security objectives; the marshaling of maps as evidential weapons against the Soviet Union in diplomatic exchanges, Congressional reports, and government-sponsored propaganda; the shifts from East/West antagonisms to North/South ones as cartography was drafted into the modernization efforts of the U.S. in mapping the Third World; and the Defense Department's use of maps to argue for nuclear deterrence, while protest groups made radical cartographic challenges to these practices of state power. (Re)Placing America reads closely the maps of the forty-years-plus conflict and considers the complexity of their internal codes (in colors, shapes, icons, etc.), while also reaching out externally to the intersecting interests and visions of the cartographic producers and the Cold War contexts in which they emerged. The project seeks out and explores particular nodal points and thematics where maps consolidated and shaped changing shifts in perception, where cartographic fragments cohered around the defining moments, but also sometimes in the everyday politics of the Cold War. Ultimately, this project offers four conclusions about and conduct and operation of American mapping during the complex, ideologically charged time of the Cold War. First, the function of the map to both "fix" and "unfix" particular perceptions of the world is relevant to assessing how America sought to stabilize its place in a rapidly changing world. Second, the internationalism of the Cold War was bound up in the capacities for cartography to document and adapt to it. Third, the humanistic notion of a geographical imagination is central to understanding why particular Cold War agents and institutions continually drew on cartography to represent their interests. Finally, combining an ideological approach to reading maps as articulators of contextual tensions and historical ideas with an instrumental approach to maps as material, strategic documents can best help to situate cartography as an ongoing process of production, circulation, and display.Item Literary Cartographies of Spain: Mapping Identity in African American Travel Writing(2011) Ramos, Maria Christina; Nunes, Zita C; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes the considerable body of twentieth-century African American travel narratives of Spain, including those by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Frank Yerby, and Richard Wright. Building on recent scholarship that has shifted frameworks for understanding cultural processes based on history to ones based on space or geography, it explores the imaginative geographies mapped in these African American travel narratives and examines the use of Spain as a location that permits challenges to the geopolitics inherited from early modern European mappings of the world. Spain's liminal position geographically (between Europe and Africa), historically and culturally (between West and East), and politically (between liberal secularism and religious totalitarianism) provides these writers with a variety of routes through which to both revise the dominant European imaginative geographies of the world and expand theoretical discourses of the politics of location and identity. This dissertation argues that these African American travel narratives of Spain create literary cartographies that remap our global imaginary to enable a reconsideration of racial, ethnic, and national identities and that explore the capacity of transnationalism to transcend these categories. The figure of the Moor is central to these literary cartographies as a shifting signifier of race, ethnicity, and religion, and is used to help map individual and community identity as relational rather than fixed. In these mappings, identity is envisioned within a constantly fluctuating network of flows and mapped in relation to a variety of nodes within that network. This travel writing also highlights the importance of travel as a type of wayfinding for individuals and larger societies in need of critical self-reflection, ultimately attempting to articulate novel ways of building genuine and generative relations to others around the globe.Item A Cartographical Exploration of Collaborative Inquiry as a Professional Development Model for Art Educators(2011) Gates, Leslie; Valli, Linda R; North, Connie; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation draws on a number of cartographical processes to explore the particularities and circumstances of eight visual art teachers engaged in a yearlong collaborative inquiry within a formal, federally funded professional development program for arts educators. Art educators, many of whom lack content area colleagues within their schools, often work separated by geographical distance and may not have opportunities to regularly engage in professional development opportunities that are simultaneously content-specific, collaborative, and related to their working contexts. By examining the ways in which collaborative inquiry might provide such an opportunity, this study presents a number of challenges that emerged for the participants in this study, including: 1) Participants' socio-cultural norms and a desire to belong to a group that could offer the collegial support absent in many of their schools led participants to downplay their differences and suppress conflict for the sake of inclusion in the group; 2) Teachers' participation in a collaborative inquiry group operating within a funded professional development program provided them with professional opportunities and technological equipment, yet offered little support as they attempted to integrate the technology into their classrooms and to negotiate their sudden visibility within their teaching contexts; and 3) The researcher, acting as a participant facilitator within the group, unintentionally assumed a neutral stance in an effort to negotiate her competing desire for a close relationship with participants with her desire to disrupt assumptions and trouble practices for the sake of professional learning and growth. A number of "openings" may allow art educators to continue to engage in, create, and advocate for arts-based collaborative inquiry opportunities in a current socio-political climate that threatens such opportunities. For instance, art educators' need for collegial support and the existence of online networks and free internet-based software provides both a motive and means for geographically separated art educators to connect. Future research that more specifically addresses the challenges of providing art educators with collaborative professional development opportunities can build on the particular description and identification of challenges this study offers.