<p> Transnational networks are growing in prevalence and importance as states, nongovernmental, and intergovernmental organizations seek to meet climate change goals; yet, the organizations in these networks struggle between the global, technical and local, contextual sources of power, authority, and knowledge used to influence decision-making and governance. This dissertation analyzes these contestations in Pacific Islands climate change diplomacy and governance efforts by asking: i) What do <i>power</i> relations look like among the Pacific Islands&rsquo; networked organizations? ii) To what <i>authority </i> do organizations appeal to access sources of power? iii) What sources of <i>knowledge</i> are produced and reproduced by these organizations? and iv) How do these patterns fit within the <i>broader history</i> of the Pacific Islands and climate change? I draw from interviews, document analysis, event participation, and social network analysis of Pacific Island climate change diplomacy and governance. This examination leads me to propose the concept of "Climate Empire,&rdquo; which can be understood as the network of knowledge and communicative services that imagine, build, and administer the globe through a decentralized and deterritorialized apparatus of rule. </p><p> In the Pacific Islands, Climate Empire upholds technical bureaucratic and scientific approaches to overcoming climate challenges; however, the global spaces in which these approaches are produced are reconnected with the spaces of local resistance through data collection networks and efforts to relocalize knowledge. Thus, the local/global divisions found in diplomacy and governance in the Pacific Islands collectively produce and reform Climate Empire as organizations interact in the network. Further research is necessary to understand the extensiveness of Climate Empire, as well as to ensure the inclusion and empowerment of Pacific Island voices in climate governance for both justice and efficacy.</p><p>

Objectives: Traditional guided tissue regeneration procedures use particulate bone graft materials and occlusive membranes with the primary aim of reconstitution of the supporting periodontal tissues. Currently, the Food and Drug Administration has cleared only four treatment modalities for true periodontal regeneration. These materials are autogenous bone, demineralized freeze dried bone allograft, LANAP (Millennium Dental Technologies INC, Cerritos, CA) and Emdogain (Institut Straumann AG, Basel, Switzerland). The biologically inactive nature of many commercially available bone graft materials provides an opportunity for the addition of certain biologic materials to enhance the healing response. The development of an adequate carrier for biologic agents is a crucial step in the creation of a bioactive graft material. This experiment uses Emdogain (Institut Straumann AG, Basel, Switzerland) to study the specific characteristics of protein binding and release on three different commonl / Oral Biology

<p> Impacts of climate change on the already severely strained freshwater resources of approximately 1000 inhabited islands in the Pacific Ocean are of great concern. The Western Pacific region is one of the world&rsquo;s most vulnerable when it comes to risk of disaster particularly for the several of the low-lying coral islands. Impacts have already been felt regarding the security of water resources that would directly impact agriculture, forestry, tourism and other industry-related sectors. The ironic and tragic aspect of the environmental crisis of greenhouse emissions is the fact that those parts of the world least responsible for creating the water security issues are the first to suffer its consequences. Pacific Island Nations are responsible for only 0.03 percent of the world&rsquo;s carbon dioxide emissions, and the average island resident produces only one-quarter of the emissions of the average person worldwide. </p><p> Utilizing the historical data, the evidence of change in water quality and access on Guam has been examined. All indicators except for the precipitation support the hypotheses that climate change trends are impacting Guam&rsquo;s water security. This will eventually weaken Guam&rsquo;s resilience. As a result of this research and its recommendations, a sustainable freshwater resources management plan, for a water-secured Guam can be produced. Adaptive management provided here is based on a process that can measure the resilience of Guam to the issue of water security.</p><p>

Although the term hybrid has gained much traction in literary analyses of contemporary experimental poetry, there is a notable divide within scholarly discourse wherein its uses pertain to either form or content. The term has been used by literary critics and anthologists to categorize works of poetry that combine formal techniques and practices from opposing traditions of literary history, but within cultural, postcolonial, and Asian American studies, it has served as an important term that designates sites of resistance within cross-cultural contexts of uneven power dynamics. This discrepancy in uses of the term hybrid serves as the basis for my critical investigation of experimental poetry by Cathy Park Hong, Craig Santos Perez, Don Mee Choi, and Monica Ong. This dissertation presents an interdisciplinary reassessment of the concept of hybridity that applies it to both formal experimentation and cultural content by examining the innovative ways in which Asian American and Pacific Islander poets use hybrid forms to represent hybrid identities and the particular social, political, and colonial contexts within which they emerge. While the term in relation to ethnic American poetry has primarily pertained to multilingual features, my study widens the scope of hybridity to not only include verbal expression but also visual forms of representation (such as photographs, illustrations, and digital renderings of images). How do these poets grapple with both text and image as a means of communicating across and confronting different types of boundaries (such as linguistic, national, cultural, racial, and ideological)? How do they utilize the page as a textual-visual space to not only represent hybrid identity but also to critique their social and political milieu? I address these inquiries by exploring the ways in which Hong, Perez, Choi, and Ong enact formal hybridity to challenge multilingualism as cosmopolitan commodity, the colonial erasure of indigenous language and culture, hegemonic narratives of history, and representations of the racial Other. This dissertation argues that their poetry demonstrates an expansive hybridity in which multilingual and mixed-media practices serve as the very means by which they negotiate the fraught conditions of migration, colonization, geopolitics, and marginalization. / English

This dissertation examines the production of knowledge around global climate change and the character of environmental literacy among youth in Tafuna, on Tutuila, American Samoa. I analyze this production of environmental knowledge across multiple social fields (i.e. status hierarchies, governance structures, etc.) and subjectivities (school-specific, village-based, and Samoan cultural identities) during a period of social, political, economic, and environmental transformation. I interrogate the emerging forms of control that have come to structure the formal educational system in American Samoa, such as standardized or "containerized" curriculum, assessment and accountability measures, and the assignation of risk/creation of dependency on funding, deployed by American governmental agencies such as the Department of Education, and utilized by state actors such as the American Samoa Department of Education. Of particular concern is the how these structures create contradictions that affect the possibilities of teaching, learning, and the integration of youth into meaningful social roles. Informal learning about the environment includes village-based forms of service, church initiatives concerning the environment, governmental agency programming, such as that provided by the American Samoa Environmental Protection Agency, and youth-serving non-profit programs concerned with engaging youth as leaders. In both these formal and informal contexts for environmental education, American Samoan youth dynamically co-create knowledge within and outside the parameters of the socialization processes in which they are embedded. This research encompassed four trips to American Samoa over the course of three years, and utilized ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, archival research, and demographic data analysis, as the primary forms of data gathering. What this data reveals is the disengagement American Samoan youth feel for school-based environmental education because their science classes, as structured, do not integrate the co-relatedness of the social, the political, and the environmental fields that youth encounter. I discovered that youth are largely ambivalent about their future aspirations because they lack some of the cultural, linguistic, and educational tools necessary for local participation as well as for opportunities to study and work on Hawaii or the mainland United States. Lastly, I found that American educational ideals continue to be contradictory in the American Samoan context; whereas schools value and promote individually-oriented goals and responsibility, youth are also embedded in the values of communal identification and practice known as fa'a Samoa. I conclude that young people lack social integration and plan for a future away from American Samoa. / Anthropology

This dissertation explores the relationship between fiction, knowledge and "knowing" in Latin American discourses of China and Japan. By scrutinizing Brazilian and Hispanic American travel journals, novels, short stories and essays from the nineteenth century to the present, Disorientations engages with the epistemological problems of writing across cultural boundaries and proposes a novel entryway into the study of East Asia and Latin American through the notions of "cultural distance," "fictional Sinology" and "critical exoticism." / Romance Languages and Literatures

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Master of Science / Department of Apparel, Textiles, and Interior Design / Joy Kozar / This study examines colonization, development, and globalization in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) with respect to the garment industry, the main industry of the islands. A broad-reaching analysis examined population, gender, economic factors, and import/export data in order to explore the repercussions of garment industry development and subsequent decline on the CNMI. A quantitative analysis was conducted utilizing data from the United States Census Bureau, the CNMI's Department of Commerce, and the U.S. Department of Commerce Office of Textiles and Apparel. This research illustrates how the effects of the garment industry in small developing nations are dramatically impacted by a trade arrangement, the Multi-Fiber Arrangement (MFA), which was a protectionist measure used to restrict manufacturing of certain product through a quota system. In addition, this study reveals the economic implications and societal outcomes for the CNMI after the collapse of the garment industry as a result of the 2005 MFA phase-out. Garment production orders shifted to large producer nations once quota restrictions were no longer in place. Factory closures, lost business revenue, and a loss of manufacturing positions affecting predominantly women plagued the CNMI as well as cost-of-living increases. Federalization of the CNMI took place in 2009 which further complicated the islands’ politics and guest worker population status. Tourism is now the CNMI's chief industry although its growth is dismal and heavily reliant upon world economies. A comparison between Mauritius, another small island nation, concludes the discussion with insight on women's development and future considerations for economic growth as a means of development and dependency in the CNMI.