On May 13, 1985, Philadelphians watched a live news broadcast as a police officer tossed a duffel bag full of plastic explosives onto the roof of an occupied rowhome in a Black, middle-class West Philadelphia neighborhood. The bombing and the decision to allow the fire to burn killed five children and six adults – all members of a controversial group called MOVE – and destroyed 61 rowhomes. This dissertation employs insights from memory studies, critical race theory and journalism practices to examine the ways in which an otherwise little-known event has been described and commemorated in Philadelphia over the past 35 years. It also considers the extent to which public understandings of the event have changed over time, with particular attention paid to which voices are privileged - and silenced - in the official narration of a complicated tragedy. To do so, this dissertation relies on: a series of interviews with journalists, officials, and others with firsthand knowledge of the event; critical discourse analysis of 35 years of local anniversary coverage of the bombing itself; and object studies of a related documentary, real-estate listings from the now-rehabilitated blocks in West Philadelphia; and a vast archive of material related to the city's official investigation into the events of May 13, 1985. It concludes with discussion of the ways in which the bombing is currently being invoked in protests against police brutality in spring of 2020 and an articulation of the ways in which authority over the memory of the MOVE bombing has been constructed to marginalize both MOVE members and the community in order to legitimize an official narrative that benefits city administrators and law enforcement. / Media & Communication

It was hypothesized that the socialspatial dialectic (location, education, politics and race) contributes to Mississippi’s low livability ranking. Regression models were employed using race, student funding rates, high school graduation rates, property tax, and voter turnout in the 82 counties as variables. The research found evidence that Blacks have lower graduation rates than Whites and property tax has a significant effect on voter participation at the gamma = .001 level. Social capital disadvantage seems to reside within both races with voter participation, property tax rates, and school funding being more pronounced with Whites. Results suggest that political capital should not be diminished in researching Mississippi’s livability ranking.

This narrative chronicles the dissemination of sacred music from the eastern seaboard to the West and South spanning a time frame from the colonial era to the latter part of the Early Nationalist Period (1700-1820). Musical culture in its migration away from the eastern seaboard also parallels the greater western and southern expansion of the United States from its initial configuration of localized regional subgroups to the beginnings of a larger national identity. From this conceptual base, sacred music becomes a vehicle for understanding not only religious and musical changes over time, but also the broader maturity of a nation. Focusing on this period allows for inquiries both into the development of hymnody in the Middle Atlantic, and the subsequent developments of the West and South. These chronological delimitations allow for a discussion of musical practice beginning with formative sacred music developments and continuing to the incorporation of techniques shaped by reform-minded musicians from the eastern seaboard. The following topics guided the construction of this thesis: explicating how the Middle Atlantic region shaped compositional trends, aesthetic, and performance practice of the American West and South; identifying the various southern cultures as understood by eighteenth and nineteenth-century southerners and their application to sacred music practice; understanding how nineteenth-century Americans distinguished between the West and the South; understanding how southern and western music relates to individual denominations and cultures within these areas; and understanding performance practice common to the evangelical and non-evangelical branches of individual sects. Identifying patterns of development in American sacred music of the South and West involves documentation of performance practice, denominational aesthetics, and tunebook bibliography. The study of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century material by twentieth-and-twenty-first-century writers has falsely defined cultural borders of this region according to a post-bellum conceptualization of the boundaries of the North and South. Prior to 1850, writers defined their borders according to a different set of geographic boundaries than today. Consequently, this thesis differs in terms of geographic and cultural definitions of the North and South from current scholarship because of this writer’s application of colonial and Early Nationalist understandings of American culture.

The thesis discusses the development of nineteenth century responses to the United States. It hinges upon the premise that travel writing is narrative and that the travelling itself must therefore be constructed (or reconstructed) as narrative in order to make it available for writing. By applying narratology to the work of literary travel writers from Frances Trollope to Henry James I show the influence of travelling point of view and writing point of view on the narrative. Where these two points of view are in conflict I suggest reasons for this and identify signs in the narrative which display the disparity. There are several influences on point of view which are discussed in the thesis. The first is mode of travel: the development of steamboats and later locomotives increasingly divested travellers from the landscape through which they were travelling. I concentrate on Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain travelling by boat, and Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James travelling by rail to examine how mode of travel alters travelling point of view and influences the form of travel writing. The second is the frontier: writing from a liminal space creates a certain point of view and makes travel not only a passage but a rite of passage. I examine travel texts which discuss the Western frontier as well as the transatlantic frontier. As the opportunity for these frontier experiences diminished through the spread of American culture and developments in travel technology, so the point of view of the traveller changes. A third point of view is provided by European ideas of nature and beauty in nature. The failure of these when put against American landscapes such as the Mississippi, prairies, and Niagara forms a significant part of the thesis, the fourth chapter of which examines writing on Niagara Falls in guidebooks and the travel texts of Frances Trollope, Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anthony Trollope, Twain and James. Other points of view include seeing the United States through earlier travel texts and adopting a more autobiographical interest in travelogues. In the final chapter the thesis contains a discussion of the nature of truth in travel writing and the tendency towards fictionalisation. The thesis concludes by considering the implications for truth of having various travelling and writing points of view impact upon constructing narrative out of travel.

The transformation of cities is a challenge of global significance that will depend on the capacity to re-imagine the potential of cities, and thus needs more than standard technocratic urban planning approaches. Deep engagement with the arts provides one avenue for recasting the future of cities. This thesis explores the question of how ‘critical urban art interventions’ develop alternative ways of knowing urban nature, and the opportunities and limitations of using art to reimagine the future of cities. By drawing on urban political ecology and cultural geography, the thesis documents and explores the aims and tactics used in five urban art interventions to reimagine sites of urban nature in Stockholm. Qualitative interviews and participant observation were carried to explore these questions. Findings suggest that tactics used in urban art interventions promote embodied ways of knowing, and simultaneously interacting with the physical and socio- historical constructions of sites of urban natures.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Geography / John Harrington, Jr. / Geographers, as part of their work as scholars and academics, continually “do” geography. Geography is practiced as research when tools, perspectives, and techniques are applied to problems or areas of study, exploring, understanding, and building geographical information. Geography is practiced as a social discipline when geographers interact with those around them, sharing geographical knowledge through writing, publishing, presenting, teaching, and discussion so others can read, listen, and engage. In doing geography – continuously practicing research and engaging in the documentation and communication of geographical knowledge – geographers also actively continuously construct the history of geography. These incidences, slides, and pages of knowledges are the foundation and structure of geography as a practiced discipline. Research explored the historiographies of geographical knowledges in presidential addresses of the Association of American Geographers, thematic conceptualizations of the subfield of cultural geography, and representation of women across editions of introductory human geography textbooks through content analysis and spatial. Conclusions strongly support the contention that geographic knowledges and the nature of geographic thought actively evolve as contemporary scholars practice their profession. By paying attention to these constructive processes and understanding their interactive role in it, geographers are better informed of the history of their specialty and their direct and vested role in the enterprise.

<p>The future success of agriculture in arid and semi-arid areas globally will be highly dependent on the ability of farmers and agricultural systems to adapt to climate change. Most of these areas, though tremendously productive, suffer from the same limiting resource: water. As that resource becomes more scarce and availability more difficult to predict, water managers and farmers will be forced to implement new, creative solutions to water supply challenges. This anticipated exposure suggests that an improved understanding of agricultural adaptation to water stress in such areas is critical to successful outcomes in these regions under a changing climate. This work focuses specifically on the adaptation strategies employed by farmers, strategies which are determined by farmers’ assessment of their exposure and sensitivity to a stressor as well as their capacity to implement changes. This process of implementing change to limit vulnerability is broadly referred to as adaptation. </p> <p> This project focuses on the Eastern Snake Plain of southeastern Idaho as a case study in agricultural adaptation to increased water stress. The Eastern Snake Plain (ESP) is a diverse and productive agricultural basin in the inter-mountain region of the American West. The region’s primary products are potatoes, sugar beets, barley, and alfalfa, as well as a significant volume of livestock dominated by dairy cattle, and each of these products forms a significant share of the total US market for that crop. More than 74% of this agricultural land is irrigated, inextricably tying both the future of agriculture and the future of the Idaho economy to water in the state. In the mid-2000’s, legislators and water managers from across the plain came together to negotiate a new water rights settlement, now known as the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer Comprehensive Aquifer Management Plan (CAMP). The negotiations came in response to years of litigation involving groundwater and surface water conjunctive management in the region, and the resulting plan was designed to accomplish three goals: stabilize reach gains in the lower Eastern Snake Plain, replenish Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer (ESPA) levels, and ensure sustainable water resources for agricultural, industrial, and domestic users across the basin. Though the water settlement was not directly caused by climate change, it is likely that water shortages will become more frequent under climate change, and this settlement represents a simulation of just such a shortage.</p> <p>Broadly, this work and the work of collaborators hope to understand adaptation and decision-making of groundwater farmers throughout the Eastern Snake Plain as they adapt to the on-average 12.9% reduction in water availability. This thesis is divided into three primary sections (Chapters 2, 3, and 4). </p> <p>Chapter 2 investigates tradeoffs in adaptation decision making, employing semi-structured interviews to learn more about tradeoffs as a framework for understanding adaptation more broadly. In particular, the work seeks to understand the types of tradeoffs present in ESP adaptation and when and how tradeoffs are implicitly or explicitly acknowledged. Findings indicate that tradeoffs occur both at the individual and regional scale and that shifts in crop patterns and irrigation water sourcing may have important implications for adaptation policy moving forward. </p> <p>Chapter 3 employs a household survey and statistical analysis to investigate the iterative and complex relationships between exposure, adaptive capacity, sensitivity, and vulnerability. As an early attempt to examine these relationships quantitatively in the context of US agriculture and water stress, the works focuses on laying out a clear theoretical and methodological framework for continued exploration of adaptation and vulnerability in this context. Findings indicate that under-theorized components of adaptive capacity like linking capacity and exposure to simultaneous stressors may play important roles in determining farmer vulnerability in the context of policy-induced water scarcity. </p> <p>Chapter 4 is designed to investigate and develop a novel tool for exploratory work in adaptation, examining the feasibility and predictive accuracy of an agent-based model of agricultural adaptation driven by social-psychological decision-making theories and parameterized using both secondary data sources and primary fieldwork. Findings indicate that such models may have the potential to produce well-informed macro-level patterns based on theoretically-informed micro-level inputs. This has important implications for the broader agent-base modeling community, and the work concludes with a call for further collaboration between agent-based modelers and social science theorists. </p> <p>Collectively, this work seeks to inform theory on agricultural adaptation and vulnerability, as well as explore the potential role of theoretically-informed agent-based modeling in investigating such dynamics. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for future exploration of these ideas in the Eastern Snake Plain and throughout the arid American West. </p>

Esta dissertação tem como propósito a reconstituição de um debate teórico contemporâneo referenciado ao conceito de paisagem. Para tanto, apóia-se na literatura geográfica e antropológica produzida nas últimas três décadas tematizando as relações entre homem e meio, cultura e natureza. Trata-se de a partir da discussão sobre paisagem realizada pela Geografia Cultural, em especial na obra de Augustin Berque, constituir com um diálogo interdisciplinar com a Antropologia. Recorrendo ao percurso da noção ao conceito geográfico de paisagem, para evidenciar a sua própria historicidade. / This research aims to reconstruct the theoretical contemporary debate over the concept of landscape, based on the geographical and anthropological literature produced during the three last decades over the relations between man and environment, culture and nature. The cultural geographys landscape discussion, specially the work of Augustin Berque, is the starting point for an interdisciplinary dialog with Anthropology, which follows the route from the notion to the concept of the landscape, to highlight its own historicity

This thesis explores how the art world negotiates what contemporary African art means, in the context of the international contemporary art system and in relation to the histories of Western perspectives on Africa. Using conceptual and methodological approaches drawn from cultural geography, it examines the field of contemporary African art, foregrounding the terms of negotiation framing contested geographical imaginations and ideas of Africa. The research considers curatorial practices, exhibitions, art institutions, networks and the wider art infrastructure as an arena in which geographical concepts and categories are formulated, debated and contested in relation to contemporary African art. It draws on interviews with artists, curators, gallerists, collectors and scholars, as well as ethnographic fieldwork conducted in institutions and at art events, to unpick the idea of 'contemporary African art' as a working category and conceptual frame. It reveals tensions running through the field hinging on questions of categorisation, scale and location, the geographical dimensions and implications of which are currently under-explored. The conclusions argue for the importance of geographical awareness in debates around contemporary art from Africa and its shifting position internationally, particularly in the context of globalising trends in the art world and beyond, which engender complex geographies of mobility, identity, belonging and opportunity. The thesis also highlights the relevance of debates around contemporary African art for geographers, proposing new directions in research on art within cultural geography.

Este presente trabalho objetiva demonstrar a importância da geografia como campo do saber no estudo das relações raciais, através da Lei 10.639/03 e a possibilidade de referenciar a população negra, tendo como diretriz as contribuições da geografia cultural como enfoque investigativo. / This present objective work to demonstrate the importance of geography as field of knowing in the study of the racial relations, through the Law 10.639/03 and the possibility of to reference the black population, having as line of direction the contributions of cultural geography as to investigate approach.