Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
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 Cutting Edge Injury Prevention(2024) Boland, Margaret Kenneday; May, Lindsey; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The growing childcare crisis in the United States leaves many families without access to quality, affordable care. This crisis is not just a matter of statistics but a deeply emotional experience for those who find themselves torn between professional responsibilities to sustain their households and proper care for their children. This thesis explores the design of physically and emotionally safe spaces for children and their caregivers that catalyze a positive transformation in the country’s childcare infrastructure. Focused on the relationship between architecture and childhood development, this work explores innovative design solutions that consider functionality, the scale of a child, and the well-being of both children and their caregivers. Through a synthesis of research, case studies, and innovative design solutions, this work aspires to create architectural spaces that consider the unique needs of children. In doing so, it promotes a new narrative where the American dream encompasses not just economic success but also the well-being of children, the most significant investment in the nation’s future.Item Harboring Identity: Community-Informed Design for Belonging in Westport and Curtis Bay(2023) Abe, Danielle; Filler, Kenneth; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis is a community-informed exploration of South Baltimore’s Westport and Curtis Bay neighborhoods. It is about listening, empathizing, and starting the design process with these communities and then exploring forms and spaces that can serve current community anchors and community needs while acknowledging complicated histories. In the U.S., the pattern of redlining and disinvestment of resources from communities of color is sometimes followed by re-investment that leads to physical and/or cultural displacement of long-time residents. The Baltimore Harbor is experiencing pressure of potentially speculative gentrifying re-investment that would serve future hypothetical residents instead of existing ones. The design intent is to empower residents to stay, strengthen, and feel a sense of belonging in their home neighborhoods.Item SOCIOECOLOGICAL PREDICTORS OF COMMUNITY-LED MOSQUITO CONTROL SUCCESS(2023) Tingler, Aubrey; Leisnham, Paul; Marine-Estuarine-Environmental Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The worldwide spread of the Asian Tiger Mosquito (ATM), Aedes albopictus, demands effective and sustainable urban mosquito management, due to their disease vector capacity and potential for causing high nuisance levels. Agency-led mosquito management is often ineffective at controlling ATM or unwanted by residents. In 2016 and 2017, citizens of University Park, Maryland, USA led a town-wide campaign to encourage residents to purchase Gravid Aedes Traps (GATs), a lethal oviposition trap successful at capturing Aedes mosquitoes. This campaign resulted in significant reductions of adult female ATM in areas with >80% GAT coverage among yards. The goal of this study was to test the continued effectiveness of University Park’s citizen-led program and explore social and environmental predictors of household GAT deployment in 2021. We conducted adult trapping at 18 sites in University Park to test if current levels of GAT deployment still predicted reductions in area-wide adult female ATM, distributed an online questionnaire to gather data for testing relationships of demographic, environmental, knowledge, and attitude predictors with household GAT deployment, and conducted environmental yard surveys to assess relationships of GAT deployment with container habitat and mosquito container infestation. We found that only 24.9% (130/523) of University Park households deployed GATs in 2021, which is substantially lower than the 46.0% (439/954) of households that deployed GATs in 2017. GAT coverage in 2021 did not exceed 50% (3/6) in any adult-trapping area, well below the 80% threshold thought needed to reduce area wide adult Aedes. Nevertheless, we found a significant negative relationship between household GAT deployment and adult female ATM, indicating that GATs are still effective at controlling Aedes at lower coverages. Households that deployed GATs had lower numbers of total, but not infested, water-filled containers, suggesting GAT deployment was often a part of a household's overall effort to reduce mosquitoes alongside source reduction, but that source reduction and GATs may not limit mosquito infestation at the yard scale. Households with middle incomes, further from town greenspace were less likely to deploy GATs along with respondents who spent less time outdoors, were less favorable toward University Park's GAT Program, and could not name ATM as University Park's most common human-biting mosquito. Respondent familiarity of ATM was lower in renters than homeowners, and respondent favorability towards University Park's GAT program was lower in households with children, and with respondents that do fewer yard activities and who had resided for less time in the town. The results of this study show that a citizen-led mosquito-control program using a passive lethal oviposition trap is still effective, four years after its inception, and that there were specific social and environmental predictors of household participation. In this thesis, I will discuss these results and their implications for bottom-up, citizen-led, control of ATM and other Aedes in other residential communities and demonstrate a framework for understanding drivers of participation and success in community-led environmental management.Item "To Dwell, I'm Determined, on That Happy Ground": An Archaeology of a Free African-American Community in Easton, Maryland, 1787-Present(2020) Jenkins, Tracy H.; Leone, Mark P; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As early as 1787, free African Americans began making homes in the Easton, Maryland, neighborhood known as The Hill. Over successive generations, The Hill became the cultural and residential center of Easton’s African-American community. The families, businesses, institutions, social fabric, and cultural values that the first generations of free African Americans in Easton created on and around The Hill greatly influenced the development of African-American culture through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in terms of family and household structure, childrearing, religious life, and the memory and meaning of military service. Tracing these developments, with a focus on how African Americans and some white supporters worked together to combat slavery, racism, and other oppressions, illustrates how the politics of the freedom struggle were coded into everyday life. This investigation has also supported local grassroots efforts to preserve the legacy of that struggle on The Hill through public scholarship and practice, historic preservation, and community revitalization.Item Co-producing Environmental Knowledge with Community Stakeholders(2020) Todd-Rodriguez, Alana; Paolisso, Michael J; Marine-Estuarine-Environmental Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)To generate robust and integrated solutions to complex sustainability problems requires the co-production of environmental knowledge. Co-production focuses on the socio-ecological contexts and knowledge forms of diverse actors in iterative dialogue to collectively generate new knowledge and practices relevant to societal challenges and decision-making. Despite its growing popularity, there remain a range of challenges and structural barriers obstructing the inclusion of local communities and place-based knowledge in co-producing environmental research and management. This thesis presents results from a comprehensive review of the co-production literature in general and focuses in particular on case studies where local environmental knowledge and stakeholders are included within the co-production process. Key findings suggest that additional attention to institutional capacity constraints, such as socio-political processes, space, funding, timing, and facilitation, as well as power and inclusion constraints, such as representation and knowledge, provide opportunities for increased integration of local environmental knowledge in the co-production process.Item No Tangle So Hopeless: Toward a Relational Cluster Analysis(2018) Nichols, Annie Laurie; Pfister, Damien S; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)How does a semi-nomadic shepherd people on the border of Russia and Azerbaijan place themselves? How do twitter users challenge and transform institutional versions of events? How can citizens resist then narrow confines of reductive algorithmic assumptions on the internet? Questions such as these are not readily answered with traditional rhetorical methods, yet they recommend a rhetorical approach to their focus on meaning-making, constitutive community, and identity creation. This project argues that Kenneth Burke’s method of cluster analysis can be profitably revived to meet rhetoric’s growing need for an approach that focuses on relationships, listens to vernacular voices, engages multiple texts, and considers the world from other viewpoints. The most commonly used approach to cluster analysis is a reductive equational form that is primarily concerned with the dissective, analytic half of cluster analysis. Reconstituting Burke’s more constructive, drawing-together form, this project develops a relational cluster analysis that centers in connections, community, and the relationships between words, people, and ideologies. Relational cluster analysis’ effectiveness is demonstrated by use with ethnographic fieldnotes, a database of 5 million tweets, and the algorithmic infrastructure of Web 2.0. These exemplars demonstrate that, when applied at several layers of meaning, such as individual, community, dominant culture, and cross-cultural, this relational method is particularly generative in working with vernacular voices, community meanings, networked arguments, and digital cultures. Inductively listening to meaning-making foregrounds the subject, leading to substantial insight into not just individual but also community and cultural values and orientations. The elastic nature of a relationally-focused, multilevel cluster analysis affords the opportunity to gaze, engrossed, from others’ points of view.Item The Resilient Student-Athlete: Supporting Community and Mental Well-being through On-campus Housing(2019) Wright, Sarah Anne; Tilghman, James; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Young adults who enter their college years as student-athletes face the challenge of balancing their athletic demands with their academic ones, all while transitioning to their future careers as adults. The demand for student-athletes to perform at the highest level possible often begins to push some of them over the edge both physically and mentally. The culture of athletics has not always been supportive of student-athletes with mental illness, therefore, weakening the stigma of mental illness is necessary to encourage student-athletes to begin to seek the help they may truly need. This thesis explores on-campus housing at the University of Maryland (UMD) that encourages community and a supportive environment for the student-athlete and general student population living there. The community spaces and mental health resources better prepare student-athletes in dealing with mental illness and the stressors they face in college. The organization and aesthetics of the built environment encourage wellness in subtle and direct ways, creating an environment that weaves together mental well-being and everyday living without branding it as a place to be “fixed”. As a result, every individual can learn to thrive within their sport and academics and become resilient to the stressors and demands of their college career and beyond.Item Orchestrating Community: Revitalizing East Frederick through a New Hub for the Arts(2019) Tonkay, Marissa Jayne; Hu, Ming; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis intends to explore placemaking through the introduction of a community arts center. As a historic city filled with art, festivals, and musicians, Frederick is well-known as a trendy destination. The city and its surrounding suburbs host several public venues designated for art performances and individual private lessons; however, the city itself lacks a unified artistic identity and a physical expression of Frederick’s arts culture. The city needs a central, accessible hub for ensemble music and public performance and exhibit space for beginners or small groups that, together, make up Frederick’s arts culture. The thesis examines an artistic hub which includes education, performance, and mixed-use residential spaces for creators to learn, perform, live, and collaborate. Utilizing survey-derived community desires and needs as a design driver, the thesis will study placemaking and investigate the artistic identity of Frederick to strengthen the city’s designation as an Arts & Entertainment District.Item A (More) Livable Community: Community, Cooperative Economics, and Resistance At A Student Housing Cooperative In College Park(2016) Medvedev, Anton Andrei; Hanhardt, Christina; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Radical thinkers and activists have put forth “building community” as a political alternative, but what does “building community” actually entail? This thesis examines how a student cohousing group in College Park builds community in a rapidly changing college town. The group was founded to help house low-income tenants in the face of increasingly unaffordable housing. I ask how the group creates organizational structures and personal relationships that give rise to alternative housing opportunities. I examine how community shapes, and is shaped by, features of cohousing such as democratic decision-making and cooperative economics. I give particular attention to tensions that occur within the cooperative due to faults in democratic decision-making, the ability to perform cooperative duties, and the demographic makeup of the cooperative. Finally, I ask what transformative features, if any, the community possesses in the face of the city’s development.Item The Refugee Experience: Individual Survival to Community Engagement(2015) Chaudhry, Lubna Halim; Quiros, Luis D; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As the world population expands with no reduction in conflict, there has been a rapid increase in the numbers of refugees. With such a massive increase in refugees, it is important to review the built environment that people inhabit within refugee camps. In theory, refugee camps are built to be a temporary settlement, whether planned or impromptu it is meant to meet basic human needs for a short period of time. But in reality, these temporary settlements end up being populated for long periods of time, mimicking the physical organizations seen in small towns and cities. Such places should no longer be seen as short term transitional population centers but permanent settlements. In this thesis I will explored the long-term planning of refugee camps with a critical look at: how refugee camps evolve over time; the strategies people use to make these spaces their own as the camp evolves; whether camp plans relate to the cultural living patterns of the refugees; how camps might be planned to reduce dependence on the host country; and how the design of the camps might be guided by an understanding of these factors. This thesis was explored through the lens of the Syrian Civil War and the refugees that it has unfortunately produced. Through the study of precedent camps, a cluster formation of shelter was observed. The thesis proposes to give refugees a plot of land as well as a shelter that is modifiable over time. The cluster formation of plots is used as module to create community spaces at all different scales.
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