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.
Browse
8 results
Search Results
Item Race, Space, and Equity: How Local Youth, Longtime Resident Parents, and Local Policymakers Perceive and Experience School Gentrification(2024) Quarles, Bradley; Galindo, Claudia; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Public education has become increasingly entwined with gentrification, which involves the transformation of historically underinvested, predominantly minority neighborhoods for middle- and upper-income residential and commercial use. This phenomenon is supported by neoliberal reforms that marketize urban schools, with some policymakers and reformers assuming that these practices will attract parent gentrifiers, who will drive urban school transformation. However, this reform agenda rests on an uneven literature base that primarily highlights the perspectives of parent gentrifiers. This three-paper dissertation applies critical racial and spatial perspectives to three complementary qualitative investigations in Washington, D.C., a critical site of gentrification and market-based education reforms, to deepen our understanding of the relationship between gentrification and educational equity and amplify voices underrepresented in the existing literature. Study 1, “‘It Feels Like the City Pushed Us Aside’: Mapping Local Youths’ Experiences of Gentrification and Education in Washington, D.C.,” draws on data derived from participatory mapping activities and focus groups involving 23 Black and 7 Latinx public high school students. It explores how these young people depict and utilize space, perceive gentrification’s educational and environmental impacts, and construct narratives of belonging and justice in a gentrified city. The analysis delves into how racism, spatial disparities, and various forms of oppression mold the landscapes encountered by local youths, shaping the narratives they construct about themselves and their surroundings. The findings highlight their complex understanding of gentrification as a source of both opportunities and challenges, with many conveying that city leaders view them as disposable. Through their words and maps, a counter-narrative emerges to essentializing discourses that undermine the agency and capacity of local youth to propose policy solutions for improving neighborhood and school dynamics central to their lives. Study 2, “‘A Prisoner’s Dilemma: How Longtime Resident Black Parents Navigate School Choice, Gentrification, and Antiblackness,” uses retrospective interviews with 19 longtime resident Black parents with deep ties to the community that predate revitalization. It investigates how the intertwined dynamics of race, place, and power influence their experiences of gentrification and decision-making. The findings illuminate the tension between neoliberal school choice policies that assume all families operate in a minimally restrictive marketplace and the racial hostility and spatial disparities constraining Black parents’ agency within a gentrified school choice landscape. Instead of empowering families and compelling schools to be more responsive, the study reveals that for many longtime resident parents, school choice bred precarity, offering them “a chance, not a choice,” at securing academically rigorous and culturally affirming educational opportunities. Study 3, “Local Policymakers Sensemaking on Gentrification and Education: Working Towards Equity Across a Contested Landscape,” examines how 21 elected officials and education administrators responsible for citywide education reforms process the multiple messages and sources of influence concerning the competing interests of longtime resident families and parent gentrifiers. The study explores how local policymakers conceptualize whether gentrification enables or constrains educational opportunities throughout Washington, D.C., emphasizing its impact on longtime resident families. Additionally, it investigates how local policymakers’ conceptions of race, space, and equity shape their sensemaking of gentrification. The findings challenge simplistic portrayals of all local policymakers as advocates for gentrification catering to parent gentrifiers. Instead, participants voiced a deep commitment to advancing transformative and adequacy notions of equity and centering marginalized families in their decision-making. Transformative policymakers aimed to disrupt racially spatialized disparities, whiteness, and entrenched power dynamics, while adequacy policymakers sought to address inequities within the city’s existing policy frameworks. The findings provide insights for urban policy agendas that prioritize the needs of longtime resident families and other racially minoritized, historically disenfranchised communities.Item FALL MFA DANCE THESIS CONCERT 2023: AN IMMERSIVE WORLD(2024) Jn.Baptiste, Shartoya Rochelle; Kachman, Misha; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis seeks to describe the scenic design process for The Fall MFA Dance Thesis Concert (FMFA) choreographed by Javier Padilla and Gerson Lanza at the University of Maryland - College Park, School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies through research, documentation, photographs, and other design materials. Some of the following materials included in this thesis were used as tools to convey the scenic design to the choreographers and the production team: research images, sketches, photographs of the 1⁄4" scale white and colour models, a complete drafting packet, paint elevations, a properties list, and book. Photographs from the production and a written reflection on the design process are also included.Item THE ENDURANCE OF GENTRIFICATION: THREE ESSAYS ON MEANING, MEASUREMENT, AND CONSEQUENCES(2022) Finio, Nicholas James; Knaap, Gerrit J; Urban and Regional Planning and Design; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Gentrification is the process through which an influx of new investment and new residents with higher incomes and educational attainment flow into a neighborhood over time. This dissertation expands scholarly understanding of gentrification’s meaning, measurement, and consequences through three essays. The first essay reviews, inventories, and critiques the numerous methods scholars have used to identify gentrification. The second essay critiques the normative foundations of the smart growth movement and improves empirical understanding of how that urban policy agenda and gentrification are linked. The final essay identifies gentrification in Maryland’s Purple Line Corridor and with quantitative methods illustrates how gentrification impacts the local business economy. The findings of this dissertation show that gentrification is often not properly identified, smart growth and gentrification can be linked, and that businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods are more likely to close.Item COLLECTIVE EFFICACY, THREAT, AND URBAN CHANGE: EXAMINING SOCIAL CONTROL FORCES IN AREAS OF GENTRIFICATION(2015) Kozey, Kathryn Noe; Paternoster, Raymond; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the term gentrification was first coined in the 1960s, scholars have had an interest in understanding how this process of change can impact neighborhoods. Empirical research focusing on the relationship between gentrification and crime has yielded varying results, with little examination of the contextual mechanisms which may influence the relationship. In addition, little empirical attention has been devoted to the possibility of the spatial displacement of crime due to gentrification. The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to our understanding of how gentrification impacts levels of crime in three ways. First, using data from the U.S. Census, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, and the Chicago Transit Authority, I examine whether gentrification is significantly associated with lower levels of crime. Second, I examine levels of crime in gentrifying and adjacent areas to assess the presence of spatial displacement. Third, I incorporate two contextual factors - collective efficacy and perceived neighborhood change - to examine whether or not they modify the relationship between gentrification and crime. Analyses utilize multilevel modeling techniques and difference-in-differences estimation. Results offer preliminary support for the moderating roles of collective efficacy and perceived neighborhood change mechanisms on the relationship between gentrification and crime. While there is an overall negative association between gentrification and crime, this effect is strengthened with collective efficacy, but reversed with rising levels of perceived neighborhood change. Additionally, there is preliminary evidence that the spatial displacement of crime is not occurring as a result of gentrification. I conclude this dissertation with a discussion of the limitations, policy implications, and future directions for this area of research.Item The Capital of Diversity: Difference, Development, and Placemaking in Washington, D.C.(2011) Maher, Justin Thomas; Sies, Mary C.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Diversity has long been a part of the urban landscape, both as a demographic fact and as a valuable commodity used to attract development. Both kinds of diversity move through Columbia Heights, the rapidly (re)developing neighborhood in Washington D.C. that serves as my case study. It is home to residents of varying racial, ethnic, sexuality and class-based identifications as well as the rhetoric that selectively values them. In this dissertation, I argue that a rhetorical commitment to diversity has been an integral part of uneven development in Columbia Heights. It is the cornerstone of neoliberal development, a process in which government subsidized, private development benefits middle and upper-middle class (often white) residents, while low-income residents of color are increasingly denied quality housing, employment, and education. This interdisciplinary project draws on urban, cultural, ethnic, and queer studies scholarship to illustrate how representations of difference affect material development. I argue that they create ideological "maps" of the neighborhood that value some markers of difference while erasing and policing others. In turn, these maps guide who invests in the neighborhood and who belongs where. I chart how representations have changed over time, from the appropriation of civil rights rhetoric in the mid to late 20th century, to more recent multicultural imagery and gay-led gentrification narratives used to sell a "new," upscale Columbia Heights. Using a mixed methodology of textual and ethnographic analysis, I examine different sites of discursive production: city planning documents, real estate marketing, and an online neighborhood listserv. I also interview longtime and incoming Columbia Heights residents with various social locations, illustrating how dominant narratives of difference and development are reinforced and/or challenged among residents. This project expands existing development, gentrification, and gay enclave scholarship. It challenges singular analyses of difference and examines how multiple markers of difference affect spaces. All middle-class newcomers are not white, nor are all lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer residents middle-class. In addition to suggesting policy solutions, I suggest how "contact" between residents of different social locations has the potential to counteract uneven development and the discourse that reinforces it.Item Mister Rogers' Neighborhood Goes Upscale: Redevelopment as Neighborhood Cleansing(2010) Bergman, Ruth O.; Sies, Mary C; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Despite an abundance of literature on gentrification that has been published over the past several decades, little attention has been focused on the fate of displacees once they have migrated away from their neighborhoods of origin. This study covers new ground by tracking displacees to their new sites of habitation and applying ethnographic methodologies to collect displacement narratives spanning a decade--from forced relocation to resettlement and beyond. I argue that, notwithstanding the "trauma" of eviction, outmovers were able to tap into their own personal as well as their collective sense of place-identity in order to better negotiate the relocation process, proving to be far more resilient than might otherwise have been anticipated. Furthermore I suggest that the informants, all former residents of a cluster of courtyard enclaves in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, were empowered in their displacement journeys by the everyday practices of collaborative living that they experienced as participants in a highly articulated socio-spatial system that I have called "court-ordered living." Finally, this dissertation argues that the discourses surrounding gentrification-induced displacement be reflected upon from the vantage point of hindsight, providing new insights into the intersection of historic preservation, property rights, neoliberal governance, affordable housing, and what constitutes "a beautiful neighborhood" from the perspective of competing stakeholders across time and place.Item Go-Go Live: Washington, D.C.'s Cultural Information Network, Drumming the News, Knitting Communities, and Guarding a Black Public Sphere(2007-11-14) Hopkinson, Natalie Adele; Newhagen, John E.; Steiner, Linda; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Through the frame of Habermas's theory of the public sphere, this study argues that go-go, Washington, D.C.'s funk-based live music genre, functions as a unique public sphere in the majority-black United States capital city also known as the "Chocolate City." Go-go is a powerful counter-discourse to hip-hop, another urban culture with origins in the 1970s post-industrial American landscape. Both hip-hop and go-go originally functioned as a news and cultural medium for geographically-specific African American communities, or what rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy described as a "black CNN." While hip-hop moved into the global mainstream of popular culture, the go-go community guarded the borders of its sphere from encroachment, commercialization, and cooptation from political, cultural, and economic forces. Live concerts employ centuries-old rituals, scripts, and codes in dance, music and clothing to deliver the news in a call-and-response with African-derived traditions. The study of go-go provides insights useful to both the music and news media industries under assault by the decentralization and democratization of production and fragmentation of audiences. This study demonstrates how through a network of roving independent entrepreneurs and storefront businesses, go-go has protected the sanctity of this sphere and continues to build community across several decades and a variety of media platforms. This study combines ethnography, life history research, ethnomusicology, and cultural geography to "read" the news go-go tells, stories, communities and people overlooked or misunderstood by corporate news media.Item "If we own the story, we own the place": Cultural Heritage, Historic Preservation, and Gentrification on U Street(2005-08-09) Frank, Stephanie; Sies, Mary C; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis investigates the roles of cultural heritage and historic preservation in the gentrification of the Greater U Street neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Its larger purpose is to critique historic preservation's contribution to urban revitalization and look closely at who does and does not benefit from this relationship. Conducting interviews with five "heritage experts" and using the materials created by Cultural Tourism DC to promote the neighborhood's rich history, culture, and heritage produce a complex view of the neighborhood and its contested stories---past and present. Through analysis of the competing stories told about the U Street neighborhood and three case study buildings (the Whitelaw Hotel, Thurgood Marshall Center for Service and Heritage, and the Lincoln Theatre), I developed a cultural critique of the heritage and preservation efforts and the gentrification process, concluding that such heritage activities do contribute to the revanchist nature of gentrification.