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 Censors to Shouts: Ecologies of Abortion in American Fiction(2023) Schollaert, Jeannette; Walter, Christina; Smith, Martha Nell; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“From Censors to Shouts: Ecologies of Abortion in American Fiction” registers the urgent need to revisit the literary methods of abortion storytelling in multiethnic American women’s fiction with a close attention to one of its most significant tropes: the herbal abortifacients that signify as both code and medicine, recalling the Victorian “language of flowers” as well as essentialist metaphorical connections between femininity, reproduction, and the natural world. This project traces the literary history of herbal abortifacients from abortion’s censorship and criminalization in the nineteenth century to present-day movements to reclaim or “shout” one’s abortion. The fictional mentions of plants known to be abortifacients demonstrate how literature can communicate reproductive and plant knowledge. “From Censors to Shouts” also offers a window into how the practice of domestic herbalism (a gendered and often racialized practice) evolves over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries by pairing a cultural historical analysis of the herbs themselves alongside considerations of how authors’ fictional deployments of these herbs work towards visions of reproductive and environmental justice. “From Censors to Shouts” considers fiction from multiethnic American women writers including Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Summers Kelley, Josephine Herbst, Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, Ntozake Shange, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine. The fictional depiction of herbal abortifacients reveals our continued attention to plant knowledge and self-managed herbal abortion. Understanding how these plant names and knowledges have remained crucial rhetorical, cultural, and visual signifiers of abortion access is vital to understanding the reclamation of these knowledges as we re-commit to the fight for abortion rights and reproductive justice amidst a new legal landscape.Item Atmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination(2022) Moro, Jeffrey; Kirschenbaum, Matthew G; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Atmospheric media are techniques and technologies for the rationalization of air. They take many forms, from the meteorological media of weather maps and satellites, to the infrastructural media of ventilation and climate control, to the embodied media of the breath. This dissertation explores these atmospheric media as fundamental conduits for the cultural work of managing the air, and in turn, for managing climatological catastrophe. Through readings of diverse media objects, from electronic literature and science fiction to 3D printers to air conditioning in data centers, “Atmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination” argues that scientists, artists, and laypeople alike have come to imagine the air as a computer, one that they might program as a way out of environmental crisis. Braiding interdisciplinary insights from environmental media studies, literary studies, and the digital humanities, this dissertation explores how computation smooths over atmospheric difference with the standardization of data, and in doing so, further imperils our shared skies.Item APPLIED STASIS THEORY AND Q-SORTING FOR ORGANIZING ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE COLLABORATION FOR POLICY DELIBERATION: A CASE OF POULTRY HOUSE EMISSIONS—AMMONIA AND PARTICULATE MATTER—ON THE DELMARVA PENINSULA/EASTERN SHORE(2022) Shea, Mary E; Tjaden, Robert; Marine-Estuarine-Environmental Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)CONTEXT: Poultry farmers respond to national and global demand for low cost, packaged chicken. Raising poultry for market results in ammonia and poultry litter (manure and dust). However, for the Delmarva part of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed and Airsheds, ammonia and poultry litter mean nitrogen pollution, which effects water quality and human health. Therefore, this inquiry looks closely at the values and benefits that shape poultry farmer decisions about managing ammonia from their poultry houses using two technologies: Vegetated Emissions Buffers (VEBs) and Poultry Litter Treatments (PLTs). QUESTION: How can we better understand the values and benefits embodied in ammonia management choices by poultry farmers? METHODS: This dissertation uses three methods to engage with poultry farmers (2012-19) to better understand a range of values—economic and non-economic—about voluntary ammonia management strategies. 1. Stasis theory (Chapter Two), 2. Scaling of conceptual diagrams to three inch by four-inch cards, for designing visual Q-cards (Chapter Three), 3. Q-sorting of cards and findings (Chapter Four). FINDINGS: The Q-sorting events in this November 2019 study (25 value/benefits statements, sorted with 13 poultry producers) did not meet respondent number thresholds for formal Q-method factor analysis. However, results were studied using exploratory data analysis and chi-square testing of Q-sorting data. One important finding is that these eight cards appeared as important in two analysis categories: first, six cards likely MOST IMPORTANT (Photo 1); and second, the next two cards (Photo 2) as perhaps SOMEWHAT IMPORTANT. These pictured two sets of cards are ranked overall as having greater importance to poultry farmers, compared to aggregate card rankings of the other 17 cards in the 25-member card set. Photo 1: In the aggregate, these six cards were sorted most often into the MOST IMPORTANT category. Photo 2: In the aggregate, these two cards were sorted most often into the IMPORTANT category. The six cards in Photo 1 (MOST IMPORTANT) can be understood in several ways. First, these three cards (position noted in bold) represent economic benefits to poultry farmers, important for farm fiscal stability. The three cards on the left all represent health gains for chickens, meaning a better payout when healthy, unblemished, full-weight birds are sold to the poultry company:• Top-left card: This card symbolizes healthy chickens as “happy”—a visual shorthand for healthy—commanding more per pound at payout. • Middle-left card: This card shows reduced in-house ammonia, which means that chicken flesh is less likely to be burned or marred by ammonia, commanding more per pound at payout; generally, lowered in-house ammonia also means healthier birds, which is a specific value noted in just above in the top-left card description. • Bottom-left card: This card shows unblemished chicken “paws” which can command an extra premium for Asian specialty food markets. This portion of the bird represents a newer market for poultry producers. Within this group, two of these cards in Photo 1 (top- and middle-left) also show the value to farmers of using an enhanced schedule of PLTs to reduce ammonia inside the poultry house. The right-hand cards in Photo 1 can be understood thusly as relying on VEB use:• Top-right card: This card shows energy savings from using VEBs to shade poultry houses and provide winter wind cover, thereby reducing energy costs annually, supporting farm fiscal status. • Middle-right card: This card symbolizes reduced ammonia odor by VEB capture, which can help avoid neighbor and nuisance complaints. • Bottom-right card: This card shows the value of VEBs as helping the farmer meet existing nutrient management planning, a state-administered requirement for many poultry farmers. nitrogen and phosphorus are two nutrients associated with poultry production, poultry litter storage/composting, and poultry litter application as field fertilizer. These three VEB-focused cards in Photo 1 share the common context of concerning ammonia management strategies outside the poultry house, relying on the pollution remediation strategies of VEBs, a type of designed hedgerow plant structure._____ The two cards in Photo 2, noted as IMPORTANT but not as MOST IMPORTANT as the six cards in Photo 1 just described, relate to farmer concerns about human health. • Top card: This card show that poultry farmers can use VEBs outside poultry houses to capture ammonia and particle pollution, thereby improving local air quality, especially for farm families who live close to their poultry houses. • Bottom card: This card show that poultry farmers can use enhanced PLTs to reduce in-house ammonia, thereby improving worker conditions inside the poultry house. CONCLUSION: This case study demonstrates the value of Q-sorting used with Delmarva poultry farmers and attitudes about ammonia management. These findings can be also understood as ground-truthing evidence, in that the visual card-sorting data confirm as important the eight cards discussed above. These values/benefits depicted on these cards fit the poultry context of the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. Additional Q-sorting activities with these cards or revised card sets to meet research needs are worthy undertakings. This dissertation case study also shows the value of humanities within environmental policy deliberation. Stasis theory, from rhetorical studies, helped organize the complexity of this project, as well as made a clear role for valuing activities (including Q-sorting). A second field of humanities inquiry is science visualization studies. This field, closely allied with rhetoric, helped with design values to build clear and environmentally-situated picture cards for Q-sorting the ranked importance of these cards to poultry farmers. Finally, the last chapter reflects on ways that a human dimensions approach supports a re-imagined Delmarva poultry production. One central design criterion about poultry production futures centers the role of poultry farmers, especially young farmers, in planning for resiliency. Among the pressures on poultry production is the well-documented wetter and warmer Delmarva, to climate change. The COVID-19 pandemic due to the 2019 emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, also posed risks to Delmarva poultry resiliency. Scenario analysis and design options are better with humanist and social science knowledge, combined with environmental science.Item Fictions of Hybridity in the Anthropocene: Literature and Science in the Works of Rétif de la Bretonne(2021) Bezilla, Charlee Myranda; Benharrech, Sarah; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Experiments in genetic engineering have raised environmental, medical, and ethical questions concerning the manipulation of biological processes. Does modifying an organism in this way change its nature? What do increasingly complex relations between human and machine, organism and technology, mean for human identity and our relations with non-human lifeforms? These questions rest on uneasy but persistent dichotomies of nature and culture, of the humanities and the sciences, and on notions of modernity and progress central to ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Conceptions of humans as distinct from nature—what anthropologist Philippe Descola names the “nature/culture” divide—are deeply imprinted in the Western psyche and reflected in disciplinary divisions separating the humanities and the sciences, what Bruno Latour calls the “Internal Great Divide.”These questions about hybrid beings, manipulating nature, and the nature/culture divide were particularly pertinent in eighteenth-century French literature and natural history, a period coinciding with the nascence of biological science wherein many thinkers locate the beginnings of the “Anthropocene,” an epoch in which human activity has markedly affected earth systems. Drawing on methods from literary studies and ecocriticism, I examine how literary texts engage debates on the mutability of species, the nature of man, and anxieties about governing populations that remain relevant today. Through the lens of Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne’s 1781 novel La Découverte australe par un homme-volant, I engage close readings of the novel alongside natural historical texts to consider the possibilities of “hybridity” as a tool for understanding literary production, the relationships between humans and nonhumans, and how the domains of fiction and science can come together. I find that these texts posit hybridity as a promising intervention, despite growing concerns about degeneration stemming from crossbreeding experiments. After analyzing the formal aspects of the “hybrid” text and its paratexts in Chapter 1, in Chapter 2, I examine how the novel incorporates, interrogates, and extends contemporary theories about the nature of humans and animals. Chapter 3 explores the manipulation of hybrid creatures and proto-eugenicist politics in La Découverte australe alongside key texts from the period to trace how the novel engages contemporary discourses of perfectibility and degeneration. Chapter 4 shows how the novel promotes mechanical technology, along with biological hybridization, as tools of imperialism and societal improvement at a pivotal moment leading up to the industrial revolution.