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 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 Narrow Space : Designing the Interstitial(2015) Steen, Siobhan Marie; Rockcastle, Garth; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis is an investigation of the formal and phenomenological characteristics of a specific spatial morphology: narrow, tall, long, habitable space which occurs between at least two other spaces whether connected or not. This investigation does not aim to address all types of interstitial space. The general form of the space is the constant; variables include size, scale, modulation, intended and unintended uses. The method of investigation will be the creation of a matrix of examples that allows sorting by the various categories. It is expected that examining sorted categories will lead to a comprehensive and profound understanding of this spatial type. And that this, in turn, will prompt a program that will provide the basis for a demonstration of the range of uses of this spatial type. An investigation of the interstitial is intended to illuminate the author’s affinity and intuitive use of this spatial form in her work and to generate a framework for the author from which to approach architecture, using interstitial space intentionally as the primary organization and driver of form in future explorations.Item Driving Around Los Santos: Space, Place, and Place-making in Grand Theft Auto V(2014) Neuner, Alyssa Marie; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)With the emergence of videogames came an exodus to the digital worlds created within them. To understand this shift is to understand the human needs they have come to fulfill. One of these basic human necessities is having a sense of place. Here Grand Theft Auto V becomes one game in a slew of game titles to foster this need.Item Giving Children Space: A Phenomenological Exploration of Student Experiences in Space Science Inquiry(2011) Horne, Christopher Robert; Hultrgren, Francine; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study explores the experiences of 4th grade students in an inquiry-based space science classroom. At the heart of the study lies the essential question: What is the lived experience of children engaged in the process of space science inquiry? Through the methodology of phenomenological inquiry, the author investigates the essence of the lived experience of twenty 4th grade students as well as the reflections of two high school students looking back on their 4th grade space science experience. To open the phenomenon more deeply, the concept of space is explored as an overarching theme throughout the text. The writings of several philosophers including Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer are opened up to understand the existential aspects of phenomenology and the act of experiencing the classroom as a lived human experience. The methodological structure for the study is based largely on the work of Max van Manen (2003) in his seminal work, Researching Lived Experience, which describes a structure of human science research. A narrative based on classroom experiences, individual conversations, written reflections, and group discussion provides insight into the students' experiences. Their stories and thoughts reveal the themes of activity, interactivity, and "inquiractivity," each emerging as an essential element of the lived experience in the inquiry-based space science classroom. The metaphor of light brings illumination to the themes. Activity in the classroom is associated with light's constant and rapid motion throughout the Milky Way and beyond. Interactivity is seen through students' interactions just as light's reflective nature is seen through the illumination of the planets. Finally, inquiractivity is connected to questioning, the principal aspect of the inquiry-based classroom just as the sun is the essential source of light in our solar system. As the era of No Child Left Behind fades, and the next generation of science standards emerge, the students' stories are viewed through the lens of the scientific practices found in A Framework for K-12 Science Education (The National Research Council, 2011). The critical challenge for elementary educators interacting with this text is to find the lived meaning of giving children space in an inquiry-based experience.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 Spatial Perceptual Transformation: a thesis in body_scale_form_movement(2010) Faulkner, Shawn; Eisenbach, Ronit; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis is based on three stems of interest. First, the love and respect of making and the knowledge that comes through the process of making. Second, the interest in the thesis as a proposition and the process in which a thesis is developed, similar to that of a scientific experiment. The third interest is the profound intersection between the human body and space. Building at full-scale allows one to ask questions important to the field of architecture that are not possible to explore through the conventional means of scale models, drawings and writing. The tangible qualities of a full-scale structure allow for inhabitation and direct modulation of space. This strategy enables an inquiry into the relationships between the body, embodied movement, perception, and space. The thesis will address the effects of transformational space upon the individual psyche, while exploring ways to record and measure bodily movement and perception in a changing space. This is accomplished by testing whether the introduction of change at the boundaries of an enclosure might affect human experience. The following questions are raised by the work: Is it possible to create an environment whose form alters human perception? How can we record this transformation and successfully analyze, and interpret the results? Can a dynamic, ever-changing space participate in relation between body, mind, and form? The first step of this thesis is the production and fabrication of a device in which the spatial configurations can be modulated and the reactions and movement of people can be recorded. Captured data will be analyzed to gain understanding into the relation of environment and the psychology and motion choices of the inhabitants. Knowledge gained from this experiment will be applied to design choices in which an existing movement-oriented site will be transformed. This second phase of the thesis will further speculate and reflect on the relationship between a designer's choice and the effects that choice has upon the inhabitant's movement.Item The Role of Academic Space Management at Research Universities and Academic Medical Centers(2008) Watt, Catherine E; Schmidtlein, Frank A.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Facilities represent the greatest financial investment for most institutions, yet they remain largely ignored from a management perspective. Improving academic facilities information would provide institutional leaders with an additional tool to improve institutional planning and resource allocations. Academic Space Management (ASM) is a construct that suggests how space management can be more detailed, web-based, and utilized for planning and decision making. This project reports on a case study of three research-focused institutions and the institutions' interest in and use of space information. Results suggest the importance of senior leadership, trust among participants, the practical nature of the space database, and understanding the role that institutional culture plays.Item Developing a Methodology for the Assessment of Freedom of Movement: The Influence of Spatial Parameters on Movement and Space Use in Mice (Mus musculus)(2008-11-26) Brooks, Raymond Matthew; Stricklin, William R; Animal Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Despite recent progress in developing housing conditions that more effectively meet the needs of managed species, there remains a lack of detailed information regarding the influence of a space on animal health and well-being. If improvements are to be made to current guidelines so that they accurately reflect the needs of the animals, this information and a reliable method for collecting it, is critical. The objective of this project was to systematically examine the effects of spatial parameters on movement and space use of mice (Mus musculus) in open-field arenas. This approach may provide researchers with a means to describe what factors are most important for maintaining an adequate welfare state, and may help address questions regarding why (and how) these factors function as they do. To accomplish this, a standardized method was used across three experiments to test the effects of floor area, arena shape and structural complexity on movement and space use of mice. In each experiment 40 female Swiss Webster mice were observed in four arenas differing in spatial characteristics. In Experiment One, mice were individually observed in four square arenas that differed in floor area (0.5, 1, 2 and 4m2). The results from this experiment demonstrated an effect of both floor area and perimeter length on movement and space use of mice, as measured by track length, area traversed and mean distance to the nearest wall. In Experiment Two, the same variables were used to describe the behavior of mice in four arenas of equal floor area (1.5m2) that differed in shape (circle, square, 2:3 rectangle or 1:3 rectangle). Observation of animals in a circular arena demonstrated the impact of corner space on continuity of movement. In the final experiment, partitions were added in pre-determined configurations to examine the influence of partition location on animals demonstrating thigmotaxis. While the addition of partitions affected the distribution of movements, the specific location of partitions had little impact on movement or space use. With some refinement, this methodology could be used across species to identify specific needs and determine how effective housing systems are at meeting them.Item Shred Chicks: Gender and Identity in Female Guitar Players(2006-05-08) Turrill, Amber; Dueck, Jonathan; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Female guitarists in the American rock industry are faced with challenges presented by gender scripts in culture that affect their public reception. In order to negotiate such challenges, women use public performance venues as spaces within which to negotiate power in gender scripts, and to create counter-hegemonic discourse. Public space may take the form of the stage, the internet, or televised media, and women utilize these spaces to render discourse performative in a variety of ways. Thus, counter-hegemonic discourses may be created that celebrate the accomplishments of guitar women.Item Easton: A 21st Century (R)evolution in Consumption, Community, Urbanism, and Space(2005-04-28) Ryan, John Michael; Ritzer, George; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research was designed, planned, and implemented with three overarching and interrelated objectives in mind - to apply existing theoretical knowledge on consumption, community, urbanism, and space to the specific case study of Easton Town Center; to enhance, contribute, and extend the research and literature surrounding these four areas; and to flesh out the paradigm of Easton into a more coherent, comprehensive theory with potential applications for future social scientific inquiry.