2018 FSDG Combined Abstracts

https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/fsdg_abstracts/1000/thumbnail.jp

Big Spring: Anatomy of Environmental Cooperation, January 12, 1994

This project was funded, in part, by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Region VII, Nonpoint Source Program (Clean Water Act, Section 319), through a grant to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. The contents of this document do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the EPA or the DNR; mention of trade names or commercial products does not constitute their endorsement or recommendation for use

Applications and Experiences of Quality Control

The rich palette of topics set out in this book provides a sufficiently broad overview of the developments in the field of quality control. By providing detailed information on various aspects of quality control, this book can serve as a basis for starting interdisciplinary cooperation, which has increasingly become an integral part of scientific and applied research

Big Spring: Anatomy of Environmental Cooperation, January 13, 1994

The 1980s would be the decade for evolving a strategy which did for groundwater what had already been done for surface water quality and drinking water supplies. Unlike surface water supplies, the remediation of groundwater is considered to be an almost impossible task. The last great unregulated area of contamination of the environment is nonpoint source agricultural contamination, much of which comes off the country's 2.2 million farms. Historically, education and incentives, along with disincentives associated with government support programs, have been used to push farmers in the direction of less environmentally-damaging practices. That effort has been largely focused on restricting soil erosion. After over half a century of concerted effort, soil erosion continues to be an enormous problem for the farm sector. It was generally conceded that part of the farm policy encouraged damaging practices. Thus it was reasonable to speculate on how effective could be an educational program on groundwater protection, unless basic changes are also made in farm policy. Independent of this evolution of thought by persons within the agricultural community, public attitude became less tolerant of farm subsidies. It was an ideal climate in which to introduce the novel notion that/armers, like other polluters, should pay

Improvising difference : constructing Canarian Jazz cultures

textThis dissertation is a performance of and around borders, emphasizing how physical and virtual boundaries impact members of a community on the global periphery. More specifically, it interrogates the ways in which Canarian jazz musicians encounter and interact with the multiple types of actively produced aislamiento (isolation). As an autonomous community of Spain, the vestiges of colonialism are quite present in everyday Canarian life, despite many inhabitants' self-identification as African. This project traces three main lines of inquiry: the historical construction of the Canary Islands as exoticized periphery; the eradication of the Afro/Canarian subject through the ongoing ideological and physical violence; and the ways in which Canarian populations are re-asserting their identities—as Afro/Canarian, diasporic, and trans-Atlantic—through critical performance against trenchant stereotypes and the dominant paradigms that propagate them. Throughout the dissertation, I examine how surfaces—architectural, cartographic, scholarly and sonic—act to frame (and mask) cultural and musical identity. The ideological seams of these surfaces can function as interstitial spaces from which critical resistance can be performed through improvising musical and discursive acts. Just as Canarian jazz musicians play against and across dominant paradigms to subsist, I will demonstrate how interstitial research methodologies can break open the potentially obscuring surfaces that these paradigms construct. I extend David Sudnow's notion of the "articulational reach" and his phenomenologically informed exploration of piano performance into ethnographic research, emphasizing how my own subjectivity as researcher/pianist impacts and shapes the project. Crucial to Sudnow's "reach" is its inherently improvisatory emergence and the uncertainty of its outcome. In short, the ways in which Canarian musicians must improvise performances in musical and social environments will be examined and resonating with an approach imbued with the same improvising, subjective unfolding—both in terms of research methodology and of writerly perspective. The dissertation could be read as an unfolding, improvised construction that is constantly accruing new meanings: its chapters are not so much driven by an overarching or individual theses so much as by the spinning out of possible responses to the questions surrounding the project's initial premises.Musi

Zones of Intelligibility: The Trial of Louis Riel and Nineteenth-Century Canadian Media

‘‘Zones of Intelligibility’: The Trial of Louis Riel and Nineteenth-Century Canadian Media” is a critical discourse analysis of Louis Riel’s 1886 trial transcript. Using a post colonial, interdisciplinary, and critical race approach, I examine various Canadian media upon which the event was predicated. My research project enters Canadian history in the mid-nineteenth-century setting of Riel’s 1885 high treason trial and uniquely draws together three distinct areas: Canadian media history, illustrative print culture, and the intertextual use of Shakespearean works in a selection of media. The 1886 trial transcript is my point of departure from which I address how the tripartite discourses of sovereignty, civility, and memory, each with inherent paradoxes, operate through the media to cultivate a specific national pathos that shaped the zones of intelligibility and naturalized the (mis) representation of Louis Riel, the Métis peoples, and Aboriginal Nations in Canada. My analysis of Louis Riel’s trial transcript is concerned with critically addressing the historic and inherently dichotomous verdict, guilty or innocent, to uncover what it elides. Here, I argue, Riel’s trial was not about his guilt or innocence, nor his insanity or sanity; Riel’s trial and his execution were about Métis people’s sovereignty

'Insidious Pollen': Literature and Industrial Toxicity, 1935-Present

This dissertation tracks the entwined cultural and environmental histories of ‘legacy contaminants – enduring poisons from the past’. It focuses chiefly on literary texts about industrial toxicity written in Britain, or in response to British imperial projects, from 1935-present. Critically, it situates itself within the field of what I call ‘environmental justice scholarship’, and in Anthropocene studies. In 2011, Rob Nixon influentially coined the term ‘slow violence’ to describe ‘a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’. Nixon’s term has since helped to shape an interdisciplinary discourse that enquires into toxic legacies, and the political systems that regulate their distribution. Often working in the social sciences, environmental justice scholars measure toxic pollution through an array of quantitative and qualitative methods. Literature too, I argue, can operate as a sensing technology for toxicity – but while environmental justice documents tend to serve defined political aims, many of the literary texts I discuss here are less direct in their intentions. They are preoccupied with how adequately to describe unsettling sensory experiences: tactile encounters with new synthetic materials, for example, or exposure to invisible toxicants. They also respond to difficult questions of systemic complicity and frustrated agency. While some of these texts overtly call their readers to political action, others voice how toxic legacies can leave people bewildered, frightened or jaded. As toxic materials have proliferated, writers have represented new kinds of political, affective and imaginative experience. The first half of the dissertation concerns 1930s and 1960s British literary texts about synthetic technology and its associated industrial systems. In chapters One and Two, I discuss how 1930s writers associated synthetic materials with distinctive moods, such as vertigo and paranoia. In chapters Three and Four, I trace how 1960s fears about agrichemical toxicity manifested in British science fiction and nonfiction. The second half of the dissertation turns to literature about British nuclear colonialism. Chapters Five and Six draw together hitherto-unconnected literary texts that give careful representation to the aftermaths of the United Kingdom’s nuclear weapons programme in South Australia and East Anglia, respectively. I conclude with a chapter on the legacy of Rachel Carson’s influential 1962 book Silent Spring, and contemporary American literary work on slow violence and cancer.Emmanuel College; Derek Brewer Research Studentship; Emmanuel College Late 80s Fun