College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item HAVE THE LOCAL PEOPLE BECOME INVISIBLE? A CASE STUDY OF A MILITARY INSTALLATION ON JEJU ISLAND, SOUTH KOREA.(2018) Jo, Nayoung; Geores, Martha; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines the effects of the construction of a military base on local communities on Jeju Island, South Korea. The South Korean military's intent in building these facilities is to demonstrate military sovereignty to neighboring countries while also providing socio-economic benefits to the local population (Korean Navy, Ministry of National Defense of Korea). However, local communities and NGOs continue to resist contemporary military construction policies due to the ecological, social and economic impacts of this process, which are exacerbated by the government’s unilateral approach and its failure to implement a system where the surrounding localities can influence construction policies (Sze et al., 2009). While resistance to military facilities is widely documented, this research highlights the disconnect between the different political scales represented by the military and the local community, or those who are empowered and the average local citizen, whose voice has been marginalized. This study focuses on the local people’s experience through the theoretical frame of environmental justice, and the concepts of scale and political ecology while using phenomenology to analyze open-ended interview data. This research concluded that 1) the local people were made voiceless and invisible through marginalization by the government; 2) this case is an environmental injustice case by identifying how the current process marginalizes local communities and environmental impacts through the analytical frames of environmental justice and the concept of scale; and 3) the combination of environmental justice theory and the concept of scale from political ecology is a more effective application of this study and can contribute to future related studies.Item Integrating Environmental Justice and Social-Ecological Resilience for Successful Adaptation to Climate Change: Lessons from African American Communities on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay(2016) Hesed, Christine Danielle Miller; Paolisso, Michael; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research concerns the conceptual and empirical relationship between environmental justice and social-ecological resilience as it relates to climate change vulnerability and adaptation. Two primary questions guided this work. First, what is the level of resilience and adaptive capacity for social-ecological systems that are characterized by environmental injustice in the face of climate change? And second, what is the role of an environmental justice approach in developing adaptation policies that will promote social-ecological resilience? These questions were investigated in three African American communities that are particularly vulnerable to flooding from sea-level rise on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, I found that in all three communities, religious faith and the church, rootedness in the landscape, and race relations were highly salient to community experience. The degree to which these common aspects of the communities have imparted adaptive capacity has changed over time. Importantly, a given social-ecological factor does not have the same effect on vulnerability in all communities; however, in all communities political isolation decreases adaptive capacity and increases vulnerability. This political isolation is at least partly due to procedural injustice, which occurs for a number of interrelated reasons. This research further revealed that while all stakeholders (policymakers, environmentalists, and African American community members) generally agree that justice needs to be increased on the Eastern Shore, stakeholder groups disagree about what a justice approach to adaptation would look like. When brought together at a workshop, however, these stakeholders were able to identify numerous challenges and opportunities for increasing justice. Resilience was assessed by the presence of four resilience factors: living with uncertainty, nurturing diversity, combining different types of knowledge, and creating opportunities for self-organization. Overall, these communities seem to have low resilience; however, there is potential for resilience to increase. Finally, I argue that the use of resilience theory for environmental justice communities is limited by the great breadth and depth of knowledge required to evaluate the state of the social-ecological system, the complexities of simultaneously promoting resilience at both the regional and local scale, and the lack of attention to issues of justice.