3,044 research outputs found
Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on a Legal Concept
In the early twenty-first century, the concept of citizenship is more contested than ever. As refugees set out to cross the Mediterranean, European nation-states refer to "cultural integrity" and "immigrant inassimilability," revealing citizenship to be much more than a legal concept. The contributors to this volume take an interdisciplinary approach to considering how cultures of citizenship are being envisioned and interrogated in literary and cultural (con)texts. Through this framework, they attend to the tension between the citizen and its spectral others - a tension determined by how a country defines difference at a given moment
Celebration of Student Research and Creative Activity 2023 Abstract Booklet
Schedule and abstracts for the Celebration of Student Research and Creative Activity sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Undergraduate Research Program
Exploring Tensions Between Two Maine Landscapes: Toxic and Pristine
This thesis juxtaposes a historical account of environmental toxicity in Maine against the popular notion of Maine as a “Vacationland.” Maine is famous globally for its pristine aesthetics, iconic coastline, and vast wilderness. Because of this, tourism is amongst the largest economic sectors for Maine, much different from the complex industrial history that once drove the economy and built a strong foundation for the state. Public discourse advertises Maine as a “Vacationland,” capitalizing on its natural features while ignoring and even marginalizing the toxic history of Maine which is still impacting communities today. This idyllic visage of Maine contradicts the state\u27s reality: the Industrial Era has left its mark on Maine in the form of environmental toxicity and pollution. The waste from mills has contributed to the PFAS crisis; PFAS, per-and-poly-fluoroalkyl substances, has contaminated hundreds of farmlands across Maine, deeming the farms to be polluted and useless. Drawing on the theories of William Cronan, Alexis Shotwell, and Rob Nixon, this thesis questions the validity of wilderness as truly pure and natural, thereby disputing Maine as a beautiful, untouched “Vacationland.” Public discourse illustrates Maine as an idyllic vacation destination, but this notion is a false pretense in that it ignores the reality of environmental contamination and the deleterious effects of industry in many Maine communities
Water source, climate, and water chemistry combine to influence DOC concentration and DOM quality in Buffalo Pound Lake, Saskatchewan
Freshwater lakes and reservoirs are key components of the global carbon cycle. Dissolved organic matter (DOM) is an important water quality characteristic that regulates physical, chemical, and biological functions in these systems. Elevated DOM quantity, measured as dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration, and changes in DOM source and composition (DOM quality), create challenges for water managers already facing deteriorating sourcewater quality due to cultural eutrophication, climate-related uncertainty, and water scarcity. High DOC and variable DOM quality are a concern to drinking water treatment plants owing to their effects on disinfection byproduct formation, added costs for removal, and risks of bacterial regrowth in water distribution systems. In highly managed drinking water reservoirs like Buffalo Pound Lake, Canada, in the Great Plains of North America, understanding the effects of water source, climate, and in-lake water chemistry on DOM quantity and quality is of particular concern. Inflows to this reservoir are dominated by water releases from a large upstream reservoir (Lake Diefenbaker) with episodic influxes of runoff from the local catchment. Sourcewater variability to Buffalo Pound Lake depends on local hydroclimate, which fluctuates through periods of extreme wet and dry conditions. Long-term analyses demonstrated large fluctuations (> 10 mg/L) in monthly DOC concentrations over a 30-year period, and revealed the importance of flows from Lake Diefenbaker and the local catchment, and in-lake nutrient (total phosphorus and ammonium) and solute (sulfate) chemistry, on driving DOC in Buffalo Pound Lake. On a shorter timescale, measurements of DOM quantity and quality along the length of the lake, and across four open-water seasons when Lake Diefenbaker was the primary water source, clearly illustrated the role of internal production on altering DOM quantity and quality from lake inflow to outflow. We observed increases in DOC of up to 1–2 mg/L from the Buffalo Pound Lake inflow to outflow in all years, and several DOM quality metrics suggested a shift toward autochthonous DOM production as water transited through the reservoir. In dry years with greater water residence times, these patterns suggest that long, narrow Buffalo Pound Lake may act similar to a slow-moving river with respect to internal DOM production and processing. This work advances efforts to disentangle long-term drivers of DOC and understand DOM quality dynamics in this shallow eutrophic reservoir and across freshwater systems globally. Our results provide a foundation for DOM quantity and quality forecasting in Buffalo Pound Lake and will inform the design of an ongoing $325M upgrade to the Buffalo Pound Water Treatment Plant
Doing Things with Words: The New Consequences of Writing in the Age of AI
Exploring the entanglement between artificial intelligence (AI) and writing, this thesis asks, what does writing with AI do? And, how can this doing be made visible, since the consequences of information and communication technologies (ICTs) are so often opaque? To propose one set of answers to the questions above, I begin by working with Google Smart Compose, the word-prediction AI Google launched to more than a billion global users in 2018, by way of a novel method I call AI interaction experiments. In these experiments, I transcribe texts into Gmail and Google Docs, carefully documenting Smart Compose’s interventions and output. Wedding these experiments to existing scholarship, I argue that writing with AI does three things: it engages writers in asymmetrical economic relations with Big Tech; it entangles unwitting writers in climate crisis by virtue of the vast resources, as Bender et al. (2021), Crawford (2021), and Strubell et al. (2019) have pointed out, required to train and sustain AI models; and it perpetuates linguistic racism, further embedding harmful politics of race and representation in everyday life. In making these arguments, my purpose is to intervene in normative discourses surrounding technology, exposing hard-to-see consequences so that we—people in the academy, critical media scholars, educators, and especially those of us in dominant groups— may envision better futures. Toward both exposure and reimagining, my dissertation’s primary contributions are research-creational work. Research-creational interventions accompany each of the three major chapters of this work, drawing attention to the economic, climate, and race relations that word-prediction AI conceals and to the otherwise opaque premises on which it rests. The broader wager of my dissertation is that what technologies do and what they are is inseparable: the relations a technology enacts must be exposed, and they must necessarily figure into how we understand the technology itself. Because writing with AI enacts particular economic, climate, and race relations, these relations must figure into our understanding of what it means to write with AI and, because of AI’s increasing entanglement with acts of writing, into our very understanding of what it means to write
EXPLORING THE AFFORDANCES OF OUTDOOR LEARNING: HOW TEACHERS UTILIZED THEM TO ENHANCE THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE
Outdoor learning refers to all forms of learning that take place outside the classroom. This can include specific outdoor education curriculum or other subject areas taught through outdoor experiences. There are many different theories and approaches to outdoor learning, including experiential, environmental, adventure, place or community based, and land-based learning. These approaches may have some differences in goals and methods, but they share similar theoretical foundations and practices. The concept of affordances, which describes the possibilities and opportunities for behavior that objects in the environment offer, is an important theoretical foundation for outdoor learning. The study examined the lived experiences of outdoor learning teachers in relation to how they made use of the affordances available in the outdoor environment using phenomenological methods. Semi-structured interviews were conducted one-on-one with fourteen teachers from Saskatchewan who use the outdoor environment in their teaching practice. Mind-mapping, the hermeneutic circle, and interpretative phenomenological analysis were used to analyse the data. Six themes were identified including: relationships, engagement, flexibility, risk and autonomy, freedom, and health. Out of these themes, six affordances were highlighted including: expansive spaces, distractions, freedom, real, or found, objects, dynamic changeability, and challenge and risk. Teachers utilized these affordances through walks, supporting freedom of expression, camping trips, embracing a student-centered approach, allowing and supporting student interaction with objects, and engaging in challenging or risky activities with proper risk assessment and management. This utilization of the affordances yielded numerous positive benefits including: the development and strengthening of relationships, increased student engagement, student creativity and autonomy, supporting individual learning needs and life skills, and improved student health
Rural Bashing
Anti-rural sentiment is expressed in the United States in three major threads. The first is a narrative about the political structure of our representative democracy—an assertion that rural people are over-represented thanks to the structural features of the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College. Because rural residents are less than a fifth of the U.S. population, complaints about this situation are often framed as “minority rule.”
The second thread is related to the first: rural people and their communities get more than their fair share from federal government coffers. The argument, often expressed in terms of “subsidies,” is that rural places enjoy disproportionate government investments, especially from the federal government, in forms such as social safety net payments, infrastructure investments, and payments associated with the Farm Bill. These investments are said not to be justified by the relatively low amount of taxes rural folks pay and their small populations. Some see these investments as a function of earmarks and pork-barrel politics attributable to outsized small-state power in the U.S. Senate. Implicit in this line of thinking is that urban America does not get enough return on its investment in rural America. It may even evince a lack of awareness that rural and urban are interdependent and that urban folks do enjoy—even rely upon the fruits of rural labor.
The third thread, which emerges from the other two, is a culture of annoyance, even disdain, directed by metropolitan dwellers at rural people, their cultural trappings, and their intelligence. This contempt for rural people seems to envision and target an imagined caricature of working-class and illiberal White Americans; it tends to merge negative associations of working-class Whites with rurality in a “hillbilly” or “redneck” stereotype.19 Such contempt effectively “other[s]” rural folks, marginalizing them from mainstream society as manifested in urban norms.
All three of these phenomena fuel an impulse to dismiss rural needs and penalize rural residents. This unfortunate framing necessarily overlooks the complex realities of rural life, as well as the nuances of rural power and powerlessness. Among other goals, we seek in this Article to re-complicate the situation of rural people as a step toward rural-urban détente, even collaboration. Our task is not to rebut every criticism of rural populations and lifestyles. It is, rather, to document the extreme animus and call attention to how it undermines the wellbeing of communities along the rural-urban continuum. We are deeply concerned that rural bashing hinders coalition building that could solve problems afflicting both urban and rural places
Iñupiaq Culture and Wind Band: An Analysis of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Access to Music Education on Alaska\u27s North Slope
Iñupiaq Culture and Wind Band: An Analysis of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Access to Music Education on Alaska’s North Slope is an observational ethnography examining implications for incorporating the Iñupiaq culture into the instrumental music education curriculum for the North Slope Borough School District. The North Slope Borough School District is the geographically largest and northernmost school district in the United States. The majority of the student population it serves are Iñupiaq Native Alaskans. The research interprets the Iñupiaq Iłitqusiat (cultural values), the North Slope Borough School District pedagogical frameworks, and the Alaska Standards for Culturally Responsive Schools to answer the following questions. What does culturally responsive teaching through wind band music education and Iñupiaq culture look like for current and future music educators on the North Slope? How can North Slope wind band music educators implement cultural standards, in correspondence with essential music standards, into the instrumental music curriculum? What are the best options for access to instrumental music education across the North Slope? My doctoral research addresses the esprit de corps of the Iñupiaq culture and the band program’s role within this community, the absence of essential standards for instrumental music for grades six through twelve, and the inequitable access to music education within the district. The data explains the importance of lived values in creating the learning environment and provides solutions for expanding access to instrumental music education across the North Slope
Social-Ecological Systems Analysis and Perceptions of Change in Agriculture, Food and Farm Systems in Southern Alberta and Yukon Territory
Social-ecological change such as climate change, market volatility or policy reforms are too often discussed at global and national scales; however, it is at local and regional scales that individuals and communities experience and respond to these changes. This is perhaps most evident in agriculture, food and farm systems, where change is a constant for farmers and ranchers. In this dissertation I explore the perceptions and experiences of change from the perspective of farmers, ranchers, local food producers and community residents using socialecological systems analysis, as a first approximation and effort at pattern recognition in Southern Alberta’s farm and ranch community, and in Yukon Territory. The research objective being to understand how individuals respond to change, identifying supports and barriers that exist for responding to change, and how to create more sustainable and resilient agriculture, food and farm systems. In both study areas, online surveys were used to engage farmers and ranchers, and in Yukon Territory, surveys were also distributed to residents as this study was exploring specific perspectives of local food consumption and the role of hydroponics. A soft-systems approach was taken in each study to understand the social-ecological conditions, relationships, and dimensions that effect responding to change, and the visions for the future. Each study area had unique perspectives and experiences that were a product of their social-ecological context, for example, in Southern Alberta when discussing climate, precipitation was prime concern, while in Yukon Territory, it was temperature. Despite these differences driven by place-based context, there were key similarities. In both areas, financial limitations were the prime barrier for one’s ability to respond to changes of any variety. Furthermore, despite the major differences in scale of agricultural operations in both regions, participants in both areas believed that agriculture needs to produce within their own social-ecological conditions, and there is a need for more diverse and resilient local and regional food systems
Town of Cumberland Town Council Meeting February 13, 2023
Town of Cumberland Town Council Meeting February 13, 2023 is the complete packet for the Cumberland Town Council meeting for February 13, 2023, and includes the minutes of the Town Council meeting of January 9, 2023. Agenda items include:
23 – 006. To hear a report from the Housing Task Force. 23 – 007. To appoint Devon Galvan as Aging in Place Director and to hear a report re: Aging in Place program. 23 – 008. To hear a report from the Lands & Conservation Commission re: Rines Forest Management Plan and to consider and act on acceptance of the plan.
23 – 009. To authorize the Lands & Conservation Commission to spend the $50,000 Community Resilience Partnership Community Action grant. 23 – 010. To hold a Public Hearing to consider and act on a liquor license renewal for Flannel Shirt Food Company, LLC (d/b/a/ Dara Bistro) for the period of March 27, 2023 to March 27, 2024. 23 – 011. To appoint Jennifer Doten, Registrar of Voters. 23 – 012. To reappoint a member to the Planning Board. 23 – 013. To consider and act on sending a Town Council resolution to the Rail Use Advisory Committee and the Commissioner of the Maine Department of Transportation. 23 – 014. To set a Public Hearing of February 27th to consider and act on the formation of an Affordable Housing TIF District, as recommended by the TIF Committee
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