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Item PARTICIPATION IN CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION: THE ROLE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS IN SUPPORTING LEARNING AND COLLECTIVE ACTION(2020) Teodoro Morales, Jose Daniel; Prell, Christina; Sun, Laixiang; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Climate change is a complex problem affecting the world in different ways and posing challenges at varying governance levels. It is widely acknowledged that broad stakeholder participation is needed to adapt to increasing climate impacts. However, interactions between stakeholders are complex and not enough is known about the social processes that support stakeholder participation or how to measure its effectiveness. The main goal of this dissertation is to increase the understanding of stakeholder participation in addressing climate change problems. Using the State of Maryland (USA) as a case study, I (1) evaluate the magnitude of climate change impacts and map the stakeholder landscape in this region, and (2) I focus on a local participatory process in the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, the Deal Island Peninsula Partnership (DIPP), to study how stakeholder networks facilitate learning and collective action. I found the Chesapeake Bay is experiencing severe impacts from sea-level rise, scientists and state government produce more data and indicators at larger scales, while fewer data are produced at the local level where is needed. Increasingly, participatory approaches are being employed to bridge the knowledge gap between experts, scientists, and local stakeholders. Moreover, I found that DIPP stakeholder views are predicted by their social networks of mutual understanding, respect, and influence. Finally, by modeling the co-evolution of mutual understanding ties, co-attendance, and climate change perceptions, I found that stakeholder participation enables stronger and denser social networks of mutual understanding, yet these ties do not facilitate changes in perceptions. These results suggest that fostering mutual understanding among a diverse group of stakeholders may be more relevant for collective action than changing their perceptions. This dissertation provides empirical evidence that stakeholder participation is important in climate adaptation policies and contributes to the development of measures for stakeholder participation effectiveness.Item Multilingual Use of Twitter: Language Choice and Language Bridges in a Social Network(2014) Eleta Mogollon, Irene; Golbeck, Jennifer; Geography/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Social media is international: users from different cultures and language backgrounds are generating and sharing content. But language barriers emerge in the communication landscape online. In the quest for language diversity and universal access, the vision of a cosmopolitan Internet has stumbled over the language frontier. Expatriates, minorities, diasporic communities, and language learners play an important role in forming transnational networks, creating social ties across borders. Many users of social media are multicultural and multilingual; they are mediating between language communities. In the microblogging site Twitter, information spreads across languages and countries. How are multilingual users of Twitter connecting language groups? What are the factors influencing their language choices? This research advances a step towards understanding the network structures and communication strategies that enable intercultural dialog, cross-language sharing of information, and awareness of global problems. This dissertation research aims at: (1) exploring the ways in which multilingual users of Twitter are connecting different language groups in their social network; (2) modeling how the network influences their language choices; (3) and exploring what the textual features of their posts can elicit about language choices and mediation between groups. This dissertation goes beyond survey information about multilingualism and provides a deeper understanding about the structural relations between language communities in Twitter. This research work is one of the few that apply social network analysis to the study of sociolinguistic questions on the Internet. Focusing on the social networks of multilingual users, this dissertation contributes an original classification of network types based on the patterns of connections between language groups. Also, it applies the novel idea of modeling the influence of network factors in the language choices of the user. Finally, this dissertation tests the hypothesis that the type of exchange influences language choice, and explores with a theme analysis how other textual features might elicit cross-cultural awareness. These results can inform the design of social media platforms.Item Analyze Municipal Annexations: Case Studies in Frederick and Caroline Counties of Maryland, 1990-2010(2012) Pomeroy, Jennifer Yongmei; Geores, Martha E; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Municipal annexations play an important role in converting undeveloped land to development, influencing landscape change. However, the existing literature does not explore the links between annexation and development. An additional inadequacy is the failure to consider environment/landscape aspect of annexation. Therefore, this dissertation proposes a new theoretical framework that is drawn upon political ecology and structuration theory to examine annexation phenomenon processes: environmental/landscape sensitivity and its causal social structures. Frederick and Caroline counties in Maryland from 1990 to 2010 were the two case-study areas because both counties experience increased annexation activities and are representative of suburban and exurban settings at rural - urban continuum of the United States. The data used in this qualitative research were collected from multiple data sources, including key-person interviews, a review of Maryland's annexation log, annexation applications and meeting minutes, and observations at public meetings. Triangulating content analysis, discourse analysis, and social network analysis, this research finds that environmental/landscape is not considered more widely in annexation practices. Although environmental mitigation measures are considered at site level if a property has site environmental elements, the overall environmental/landscape sensitivity is low. It is also found that the economic-centered space remains dynamic in the annexation processes determining annexation approvals and low-density zoning. In addition, the triangulated analyses reveal that current social structures are not conducive to environmental-conscious landscape planning because environmentally oriented non-profit organizations and residents are injected at a later stage of annexation process and is not being fully considered in the evaluation process. Power asymmetry in current annexation structures is due to a lack of environmental voice in annexation processes. The voice of such groups needs to be institutionalized to facilitate more tenable annexation practices.