"Re-Collecting the Depression and New Deal as a Civic Resource in Hard Times"

The Buffalo and Erie County Public Library seeks a Level 1 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to plan a digital humanities resource exploring the history of the Great Depression and New Deal in Buffalo and Western New York. We want to integrate digitized primary source collections, artifacts, manuscripts, oral histories, photographs, music, art, and site-specific field documentation in a community-specific multi-media digital resource. While our project will include an interactive web presence, our defining goal is a different kind of interactivity: digital humanities content-management tools that enable the resources to directly support intensive civic discussion and reflection centered in public libraries throughout our community, exploring the links between this legacy and current challenges. Though locally focused, our project will be a demonstration model of how digital humanities can help a public library mobilize collections to address the civic purposes central to its mission

Baywalk developing landscape memory

The primary purpose of this thesis was to investigate the narrative potential in the contours of a site, specifically, in contours shaped by dredge and fill. Contours provide a record of weather, growth and erosion as well as the processes of dredge and fill. In South Florida, our modification of both the coastline and inland swamps document the history of our occupation of the land. The record or memory of this change is often apparent only as an absence. This thesis design exposes the landscape narrative of dredge and fill in Miami\u27s Biscayne Bay through the design of two areas of Baywalk Park along the eastern edge of downtown Miami from Margaret Pace Park to the mouth of the Miami River. The design reveals the historic sequence of dredge and fill on the site

Investigating the Impact of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers on Poverty Reduction and Economic Empowerment: The Case of Nigeria

Since the year 2000, achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) has become the central focus of the international community. Using an empowerment framework, this study assessed the impacts of the four projects associated with Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) or its Nigerian blueprint, National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS). It gathered data with semi-structured interviews/focus group and interpretation based on qualitative content analysis. Findings suggest that PRSPs present opportunity for Nigeria to achieve the MDGs, especially one and five, but that opportunity is being overshadowed by the desire to see economic growth rather than human development. Hence, the projects associated with NEEDS tend to reinforce the existing problems, participants were exposed to exploitation and its attendant consequences such as deprivation, destitution and homelessness. However, it is hard to imagine what could have happened to poverty in Nigeria without PRSPs and not within the scope of this study to draw conclusion about the degree of poverty, but the views of the forty-two participants suggest that they have lost hope in the MDGs. Hence, without a drastic modification of the Nigerian government's modus operandi, reduction in absolute poverty in Nigeria by half in 2015 or even 2030 will remain a dream

Investigating the Nigerian Leadership Capability and its Impact in Development and Society

Despite Nigeria\u27s abundance of human and natural resources, after 57 years of independence, most Nigerians live in absolute poverty. The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine the extent to which the Nigerian leadership exercised leadership capability. The primary research question investigated leadership actions that facilitated or undermined development and good governance objectives. This study adopted critical thinking leadership framework, as developed by the author. The primary data used in this study came from Afrobarometer surveys, round 4, 5, and combined data round 6, which is an updated version of independent surveys administered between 1999 and 2016. Also, data from the Transparency International, the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum were used to complement the Afrobarometer surveys. This study used descriptive statistics, multiple regression analysis, analysis of covariance, and multivariate analysis of covariance. Study results suggest Nigerian leadership exhibits self-centered attitudes toward development and good governance. Hence, the observed outcomes include poor government performance, weak economic management and governance, a high-level of ethical and financial corruption, and eroded public trust in government. It is an indication of a weak leadership capability and an absence of critical thinking leadership. This study recommends a change in the way the Nigerian government recruits top public servants if Nigeria seeks to curtail ethical and financial corruption and achieve its development objectives. This study is expected to contribute to positive social change by offering the Nigerian policymakers recommendations that are essential to address the issues associated with weak leadership capability among the Nigerian leadership

Impact of Foreign Capital inflows on Economic Growth and Self-employment in Ethiopia

This paper examines the impact of foreign capital inflows on economic growth and self-employment in Ethiopia; using self-employment as a proxy for poverty reduction. It employs a descriptive statistics in the first part and Granger causality Wald tests in the second part. In the first part, 1961 to 2010, the findings indicate that there is an increase in the average growth rates, especially in the six economic sectors, agriculture, mining, trade services construction, transport services and dwellings. However, there is a significant increase in growth elasticity of self-employment in agriculture and trade services. Likewise, an evidence of reduction in absolute poverty ($1.25 per day) from 63 percent in 1990 to 37 percent in 2010 but poverty under$2 per day remains high, 72 percent. In the second part, 1992 and 2012, our results show that in the short run, foreign direct investment (FDI) has a direct positive effect on the real GDP, but no evidence that FDI has a direct positive effect on self-employment. In contrast, development assistance (DAC) has no direct effect on the real GDP, but it has a direct positive effect on self-employment. Suggesting that foreign capital inflow into the economy from 1992-2012 has stimulated economic growth, self-employment and poverty reduction. The policy implication of these results is that Ethiopia requires foreign capital inflow into the economy to sustain the current economic growth, self-employment and poverty reduction

Intimate Other: The Rhetorics of Race, Gender, and Place in a Southern Environmental Imagination

This dissertation explores the imbrication of race, gender, and place in the context of American Southern literature between 1911 and 1942. It examines Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, W.E.B Du Bois The Souls of Black Folks and The Quest of the Silver Fleece, and Zora Neale Hurston’s short stories from the New Negro Renaissance as well as Jonah’s Gourd Vine. The project claims these texts are representative of how an environmental imagination rhetorically deployed the mutually constitutive categories of race, gender, and place during the decades when the United States experienced restructurings of social and cultural power as well as came to a different relationship with the environment through the acceleration of modernity. Through literary analysis, the project argues each of the four authors utilize the imaginative resources of the environment as well as the overlapping categories of race, gender, and place to rhetorically instrumentalize an environmental imagination for cultural and political ends. In the case of Faulkner and Mitchell, this project argues these authors use history, the plantation romance, and a pervasive nostalgia to embed the hegemony of white supremacy into the landscape even as their text strive to present the land as a moral and ethical resource. For Du Bois and Hurston, this project argues their works use a rhetorically active environmental imagination to present readers with a more just and economically viable future for the South as well as preserve cultural and social memories in the landscape even as the land itself proves an archive for memory. I build on research from a New Southern Studies, critical race studies, literature and the environment, and rhetoric to observe how intersections of environment, imagination, rhetoric, and narrative inflects both representations of identity and place within a particular literary artifact’s historical context. Ultimately, the project argues that because we can neither get outside of language nor environments, studying how language and the environment interact with one another provides a better understanding of how rhetorics, narrative, identity, and place

Mr. and Mrs. B. B. Conable, Jr. to Mr. Meredith (1 October 1962)

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/mercorr_pro/1425/thumbnail.jp