Black middle-class neighborhoods in Louisville through multiple lenses.

This dissertation is an articles-based, mixed methods study that analyzes Black middle-class neighborhood attainment in Louisville. Racialized social structure theory is the theoretical framework that is employed to make sense of the adverse positionality of Black middle-class neighborhoods. Racialized social structure theory posits that individuals are placed in racial categories that are hierarchically arranged, which, at the neighborhood level, translates to White and Black householders advancing their material interests in competing ways. These competing interests are asymmetrical in terms of power relations, which means that the neighborhood choices of the Black middle-class are constrained by the routinized ways that the racialized social structure diminishes their claims to middle-class status. The first and second articles primarily utilize the 2016 American Community Survey to compare Black middle-class neighborhood attainment across similarly sized urban areas and to analyze the spatial proximity of Black middle-class households and households considered poor, respectively. These articles find that the segregation levels faced by the Black middle class affect how many Black middle-class households live in prototypical middle-class neighborhoods and show that durable geographical patterns are interwoven with the racial characterizations of neighborhoods, both yielding disadvantages to neighborhoods with growing Black populations. In the third article, the perspectives of middle-class Blacks are brought to the forefront and uncover that a great deal of ownership is expressed by respondents in terms of the home buying process and their neighborhood lives and a relationship is found between familial class background and neighborhood preferences. Overall, Black middle-class neighborhoods in Louisville are socioeconomically heterogeneous. However, this heterogeneity reflects neighborhood choices that are constrained by trade-offs between living in neighborhoods conducive to wealth-building or living in neighborhoods that are less economically advantaged, but allow for more social comfort

Rap music and hegemony : a historical analysis of rap\u27s narrative.

This thesis is a historical analysis of the narratives of rap music and their relationship to hegemony. I view the trends outlined in this thesis as a microcosm of large-scale social trends in the world of popular culture. A world dominated and distributed by a small collection of huge media conglomerates. The central questions of this thesis are has rap music\u27s relationship to hegemony changed? and if so, how has it changed? After collecting my data using random sampling techniques and analyzing it utilizing verifiable statistical tests, I answer these two questions. The evidence supports the conclusion that rap music\u27s relationship to hegemony has changed and this change is curvilinear, meaning that in the beginning (1984-1990) rap\u27s counter-hegemonic value was low and this value grew in the middle years (1992-1998), only to fall to its lowest point in today\u27s time, beginning at the start of the new millennium (2000-2004)

What is the status of the Lee’s Lane Landfill Superfund Site?

The Lee’s Lane Landfill is located in western Louisville, KY along the Ohio River (Fig. 1) [1]. The site was used as a quarry in the 1940s before being repurposed as a landfill from 1948 to 1975 (Fig. 2). At least 212,400 tons of municipal and industrial waste were disposed of in the landfill during this period. In 1980, the Kentucky Department of Hazardous Materials and Waste Management discovered approximately 400 drums of hazardous waste within the landfill; these drums were removed by the landfill owners in the fall of 1981, but the remaining drums of non-hazardous material, as well as any empty drums, were buried in place on the landfill. The buried and capped landfill waste covers an area of 112 acres. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) placed the Lee’s Lane Landfill site on the National Priorities List (NPL) in 1983. Cleanup efforts concluded in 1988 and monitoring of the site has continued since. This white paper summarizes reports published from 2013 through 2018 documenting Lee’s Lane Landfill site conditions and the effectiveness of the cap and other remedies put in place to protect human health. The condition of the site must be reviewed every five years by the EPA, and those results are made available to the public in what is referred to as a Five-Year Review (FYR). The Lee’s Lane Landfill FYR relies on information provided to the EPA by the Kentucky State Department of Environmental Protection (KDEP), information collected by the Lee’s Lane Landfill Group, monitoring data and conclusions from the Louisville and Jefferson County Metropolitan Sewer District’s (MSD) Conceptual Site Model (CSM) report, [2] and other interim communications. Using the information in these reports as well as relevant current and historical research documents, we identify questions that remain unanswered and need to be addressed in order to confirm that the contaminants present on the site do not pose a risk to public health and to determine whether the site is ready for re-use. We conclude by proposing several next steps to fill the identified gaps in information and confirm the conclusions in the reports

Spatial patterns of demersal communities from bottom trawl on the Portuguese North Coast (continental shelf)

Understanding the diversity and community composition of marine communities in coastal areas is of utmost importance to understand how overlapping anthropogenic pressures impact the marine environment. The demersal and epibenthic communities of the Portuguese northern continental shelf were surveyed using a bottom trawl to understand their taxonomic composition, abundance, spatial distribution, and their relationship with environmental variables such as sediment, organic matter, depth and latitude. Bottom sediments were homogenous, being mainly composed by sand particles. The diversity of the study area was low, but high abundance of important commercial species, as Trisopterus luscus, Trachurus trachurus, Palaemon serratus and Merluccius merluccius, in the juvenile stage of life, points out the importance of the area as nursery grounds. Four assemblages were identified, with a visible geographical pattern. Results obtained supply background information that may contribute to the development of future management and monitoring plans for this important and sensible coastal area.Project PRESPO 2008-1/038; PD/BD/135065/2017info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio