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
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Item FROM BLACK LIVES MATTER TO WE DON’T EVEN MATTER: THE INVISIBLE HAND OF POWER ON SOCIAL MOVEMENT PARTICIPATION AND ACTIVISM IN URBAN AND RURAL SPACES(2024) Koonce, Danielle; Marsh, Kris; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The field of social movement research is vast and evolving as technological advances continue to expand the field of movement space to include virtual worlds and digital platforms, ensuring new research endeavors. However, as movement spaces expand, one constant is the pursuit and exchange of power between competing groups and within groups with similar collective identities. My research focuses on identifying and tracing some of the diverse paths within social movement spaces that power dynamics manifest. Specifically, I ask the following three questions. What do participants in Black Lives Matter reveal about the movement and internal power dynamics? How does power manifest itself in public hearing spaces? How do Black people living in the rural South engage in the Environmental Justice Movement? I explore power within groups such as Black Lives Matter participants in local chapters, participants in state-regulated public hearings, and development of a local movement center within rural, eastern North Carolina through engagement with the Environmental Justice Movement. Through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and discourse analysis, I investigate, analyze, and interrogate the various pathways of power within movement spaces. I find that participants in local Black Lives Matter chapters negotiate power through their activist identity. Also, residents can be rendered illegitimate because they do not speak the language of those in power even though they have the power to participate in public hearing spaces. Finally, there is a shift from indigenous funding sources within rural, Black communities which potentially disempowers those communities from advocacy and engagement.Item Defending Giants: The Battle over Headwaters Forest and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics, 1850-1999(2010) Speece, Darren Frederick; Sicilia, David B; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The redwoods have long been a source of inspiration and conflict. By the end of the twentieth century, disputes over logging Redwood Country had helped transform American environmental politics. Historians have largely neglected the redwood wars, but their impact on environmental politics was great. After 1945, the redwood wars ended official corporatist timber regulation in California, established a series of legal precedents governing private property management, and prompted the reordering of the federal environmental protection regime. This dissertation describes those transformations in detail, and helps situate the long history of conflicts over logging the redwoods in American history. The history of the redwood wars demonstrates the ways in which local activism influence the development of environmental politics, Northcoast activists complicate our understanding of radical environmentalism and wilderness ideals, and conservation methodologies persist in the priorities of modern environmentalism. The redwood wars were one of the longest and most violent environmental disputes in American history, beginning during the 1970s and lasting into the twenty-first century. Northcoast residents had grown increasingly concerned about the future of the ancient forest, timber jobs, and their rural culture as the rate of clear-cutting increased and as corporate giants swallowed up land. Some residents organized and challenged the industrial logging regime because of its threat to the health of their rural society. Eventually, the Northcoast was awash in daily direct actions, persistent litigation, and intense media scrutiny. After 1986, the citizen activists focused more and more on Pacific Lumber's plans to harvest its remaining old growth groves in Humboldt County. Pacific Lumber owned nearly all of the unprotected ancient redwood forest in the world, and the forest complex that contained those old-growth groves became known as Headwaters Forest. In 1999, after more than a decade of violent and protracted conflict, Pacific Lumber, California, and the federal government consummated an agreement to publicly acquire several old-growth groves and manage the rest of the company's land under a comprehensive land management plan. Even so, the wars continued because of the uncompromising nature of the local activists.