Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Curriculum and Instruction / Kay Ann Taylor / This study explored Islamophobia and Muslims’ religious experiences in the Midwest. Its purpose was to propose a new theory named Critical Muslim Theory. The research methodology was autoethnography (me, the researcher) in concert with discovering in-depth experiences and narratives of nine Muslim participants (five Muslim females and four Muslim males) in dealing with Islamophobia. Religion became the centrality of Critical Muslim Theory in replacing race (as in Critical Race Theory) while centralizing other oppressions Muslims experience through intersections with religion and law, religion and gender, and religion and race. Critical Muslim Theory represents six basic tenets, namely: (a) Islamophobia is endemic and pervasive, (b) Critical Muslim Theory is critical towards how the dominant society views Islam and Muslims, (c) Islamophobia is a social construction, (d) Legal basis, (e) Intersectionality, and (f) Storytelling and counterstories reveal the oppression and pain of Muslims. An historical context was established for Muslims in the United States of America, although more research needs to be contributed to this area. Instances of interest convergence also were present, however, more research in this area is needed. One recommendation from this research suggests combating ignorance through education and establishing a pure relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims through dialogue for understanding. This study further proposes Muslim Double Consciousness as an area for future research. This topic was of interest due to proposing the theory, its further research and development, and the potential for Critical Muslim Theory to stand on its own as a methodology.

The objective of this dissertation is to analyze the economic impact of newly operational ethanol biorefineries on rural counties in the U.S. Midwest region for the period 2001 to 2015 using a quasi-experimental approach. Rapid growth in the ethanol industry expanded the number of ethanol plants located in the U.S. Midwest from 54 in 2001 to 173 in 2015. Out of the counties with 119 new ethanol biorefineries, 97 counties met the general treatment criteria defined in this dissertation, but only 56 of those counties qualified for the rural treatment criteria. Counties with ethanol biorefineries that qualified for treatment were organized into a treated group based on county level data. Six counterfactual control groups (or control counties without ethanol biorefineries) were contemporaneously matched to the treated counties based on the Mahalanobis distance metric evaluated on a set of 29 selection variables. Matching occurred on two levels. In the first level, matching was performed both for the in-state level and over the entire Midwest region. In the second level, three criteria were used to select the final control groups: Mahalanobis distance metric best match, population best match, and rural-urban continuum codes (RUCC) best match. Economic impact is evaluated based on the growth rate in real per capita earnings for the treated group over a period from one to five years after treatment relative to the control group. A difference-in-differences (DID) model is used to assess the significance of results where the dependent variable is the natural log of real per capita earnings and a set of control variables is used to capture state fixed effects, time fixed effects and spillover effects. Empirical results evaluated against a representative Midwest control group and over six regression models adjusting for various fixed effects produced, on average, one-sided significant results for average treatment on the treated (ATOT) with a (min, max) range of growth rates as (5.53%-7.63%), (10.0%-12.0%), (14.7%-19.6%), (14.5%-18.3%), and (13.3%-18.9%) from one to five years after treatment, respectively. The minimum value of these estimates can be represented as an uncorrected average annual growth rate as 2.75%, 3.33%, 3.68%, 2.90%, and 2.22% over the respective period from one to five years after treatment. Employment levels for the treated group increased on average by 211 at the county level five years after treatment. A comparative Midwest control group lost, on average, 169 jobs over the five year period after treatment. A treated county employment multiplier calculated using the direct, indirect and induced employment impacts varied from 1.46 during the year of treatment to 7.6 five years after treatment relative to the control group. Five years after treatment, the treated group employment rate gradually increased, on average, by 2.2% which was better than either of the two counterfactual control groups used in this comparison. Overall, the analysis presented in this dissertation does show statistically significant positive economic impacts, on average, for rural U.S. Midwest counties with newly operational ethanol biorefineries relative to control counties without an ethanol biorefinery. These results demonstrate that the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) contributed to positive rural economic development impacts in treated counties with the possibility of spillover effects positively affecting contiguous counties.

This thesis is a multi-sited survey providing insight into integral performing arts institutions and how they engage in the distribution of cosmopolitan cultural capital to middlebrow audiences. It additionally provides a taxonomy of the different types of performances present across three sites: MSC OPAS, Arts Midwest, and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ Annual Conference in New York (APAP/NYC). My research methods include ethnography, interviewing, and textual analysis, but my investigation of these sites began with several leading questions: How do audiences read live performances for cosmopolitanism? How is that cosmopolitanism produced in key performing arts organizations? How is performance both a product that is marketed to venues and audiences and the means of marketing itself? Cosmopolitanism is an integral component to marketing, delivering, and enjoying live touring commercial performances. Performing arts presenters like OPAS, and presenting organizations, including Arts Midwest and APAP, engage cosmopolitanism on multiple levels as they work to provide regional audiences with otherwise unattainable “world-class” performances. Cosmopolitanism is present and presented every step of the way and the industry continues to advance cosmopolitan goals. This works shifts from analyzing cosmopolitan tourists to understanding touring cosmopolitanism because touring performances provide cosmopolitan cultural capital to community audiences located outside these urban centers. Touring performances provide opportunities for residents outside large metropolitan areas to engage in a global culture of performance and insert themselves into an imagined community of cosmopolitans. This is due in part to touring artists who deliver “world-class” performances to audiences that would otherwise entirely lack a connection to arts opportunities that accompany metropolitan centers and cosmopolitan communities. Cosmopolitanism is operationalized in performances of rurality, organizational culture and sociability, and exoticizing marketing strategies. I not only explore how cosmopolitanism is operationalized across these sites, but also how performance, in several of its variations, is operationalized, negotiated, and, of course, presented. More specifically, I examine artistic, interpersonal, organizational, and economic performances, as they are present across the three sites.

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The thesis studies possibilities of restructuring of post-industrial cities by closely following and comparing the restructuring efforts of two cities located in the U.S. Midwest, Detroit and Pittsburgh. It studies the consequences of globalizing economy on the area of so- called Rust-Belt, as well as the impacts of the federal urban policies on the older industrial cities located in this area. Through deindustrialization of their economies, both Detroit and Pittsburgh suffered from similar problems, such as depopulation, unemployment, factory closure, and urban decline. Therefore to evaluate the level of success of the cities' transformation, the thesis compares their demographic and economic development. The last two chapter of the thesis provide assessment of Detroit's and Pittsburgh's transformation efforts by focusing on the urban planning and economic restructuralization strategies.

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The contamination of rivers with nitrate from agricultural diffuse sources is not just a risk for ecosystems and their services, but also a health risk for water users. The Great Lakes (USA and Canada) are suffering from eutrophication problems. The Midwest is one of the richest farming land and one of the most productive areas on the planet. Thus, agriculture is one of the biggest drivers of local economies, accounting for billions of dollars of exports and thousands of jobs. The Midwest encompasses the Corn Belt region, a specialised system in corn production. Many of its agricultural basins drain into the Great Lakes. Corn requires a heavy amount of fertilizer to keep the best-yielding varieties. Some of the soils also require artificial drainage due to their low permeability, and to enable agriculture. The Cedar Creek watershed (CCW) in northeastern Indiana in the Corn Belt region is used as a case study area in this dissertation. Intensive agriculture in the CCW is characterised mainly by corn and soybean production. Tile drains are used, ejecting nitrate directly into the water. To find hotspots of nitrate is, then, crucial to avoid water quality deterioration. Identification of critical source areas of nitrate (CSAs) impairing waters is challenging. There are, mainly, two methodologies to identify hotspots of nitrate for the implementation of Best Management Practices (BMP): the targeting technique and the optimization approach. The targeting technique tends to identify hotspots based on loads of nitrate, omitting geomorphological watershed characteristics, costs for BMP implementation, and their spatial interactions. On the other hand, the parsimonious strategy does contemplate the trade-off of the economic and environmental contribution but requires sophisticated computational resources and it is more data-intense. This research presents a new framework based on the synergistic combination of both methodologies for the identification of CSAs in agricultural watersheds. Changes in watershed response due to alternative BMP applications were assessed using the model Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). Outputs in SWAT (nitrate export rates and nitrate concentration at the subbasin level) were used to evaluate the changes in water quality for the CCW. The newly developed targeting technique (HosNIT) considers SWAT outputs and intrinsic watershed parameters such as stream order, crop distance to the draining stream, and downstream nitrate enrichment/dilution effects within the river network. HosNIT establishes a workflow, based on a threshold system for the parameters considered, in order to spatially identify priority areas from where nitrate is reaching water. The more precise hotspots of nitrate are identified, the more improved the allocation of limited resources for conservation practices will be. HosNIT allows for a more spatially accurate CSAs identification, which enables a parsimonious optimization for BMP implementation. This parsimonious strategy will test BMP’s performance based on the environmental contribution and cost at the hotspots determined by HosNIT. The optimised solution for the CCW comes from the environmental contribution (decrease percentage of nitrate concentration at outlets) per dollar spent. For this case study means a year average of 3.7% of nitrate reduction with the optimised selection of scenarios for the studied period.

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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The transfer of nutrients from US Midwest croplands into surface waters causes eutrophication and a decline in water quality. Temporary retention of nutrient-rich runoff in constructed wetlands can help mitigate these negative impacts through physical entrapment and biological transformation of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P). However, with the expectation that wet-dry periods will be more frequent in the region, there is a need to better understand the mechanisms that control nutrient retention and release in US Midwest wetlands constructed on former croplands. In this study, soil cores (30 cm long, 20 cm diam) were collected from two constructed wetlands (4 and 8-yr old), and the surface (0-20 cm) and subsurface (40-60 cm) layers of a cropland where a constructed wetland will be constructed in the future. Soil cores were subjected to either a moist or a dry treatment for 5 weeks, and then flooded with stream water (water depth 6 cm). The flux of nutrients, N2O, cations, and variation in floodwater chemistry (pH and ORP) were monitored for another 5 week period. Porewater was tested during the final 3 weeks of the experiment. Nitrate (0.1-130 mg N m-2 d-1) and inorganic P (Pi) fluxes (0.09-2.9 mg P m-2 d-1) were significantly higher in the dry treatment cores. Regardless of site, the dry treatment also resulted in higher floodwater NO3- concentrations suggesting organic matter mineralization and mineral N build up during the drying phase. However, this initial NO3- release was rapidly denitrified as indicated by the sharp increase in N2O production during that period. In contrast to N, the release of Pi was significantly higher in cores from the cropland. Soil at these sites had higher water extractable Pi and total P. Contrary to the study hypothesis and the results of previous studies, Pi concentration in floodwater and porewater was not correlated with dissolved Fe suggesting that reductive dissolution was not the dominant process controlling P release in US Midwest mineral soils developed from calcareous glacial till. Rather, variation in Ca2+ concentration and its relationship with Pi suggest that dissolution of Ca-containing minerals may be more important and should be the focus of future studies examining the geochemistry of P in these constructed wetlands.

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