Browsing by Subject "Geography"

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Child nutritional well-being in Ghana: an analysis of associated individual, household, and contextual health indicators and socioeconomic and biophysical environmental variables.
(2011-08) Nikoi, Ebenezer Goodman Ashie
Depriving children of the nutrients needed for growth sets them up to fail in life. When children are well nourished and cared for, they are more likely to survive, thrive, and to meaningfully contribute to society. This study assesses the association of characteristics of individual children under age five in Ghana, their mothers, and their households—as well as socioeconomic and environmental characteristics of the places where they live—with differential nutritional well-being. What distinguishes this study from most research on young children’s nutritional status in the Global South is its analysis of data for individual children, made possible by use of Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), and assignation of district variables that capture characteristics of their places of residence to individual children as cases. This enables assessment of the relative explanatory role of variables that describe the socioeconomic and biophysical environments. This study implements a three-level multivariate logistic regression analysis with separate models for each of the nutritional outcome variables—height-for-age, weightfor- age and hemoglobin—at each level. Descriptive statistics summarize the prevalence of stunting, underweight, and hemoglobin and delineate frequencies and proportions for selected independent variables at each level. Further statistical analysis relies on chisquared (χ2) tests to determine significant bivariate associations. All significantly associated variables in the bivariate analysis are subjected to binary logistic regression analysis. The results of fixed effects are reported with odds ratios (ORs) along with confidence intervals for p<.05. The following variables were found to be significantly associated with at least one of the three nutritional outcomes in multivariate analyses at the child and district levels: child’s age, months of breastfeeding, fever, mother’s health status, prenatal care, mother’s occupation, mother’s ethnicity, household water supply, household wealth status, population density, percent literate (vs. illiterate) in district, percent in rural (vs. urban) locations, wealth status of district residents, and ecological zone of residence. As found in much previous research, mother’s education and occupation, father’s education and occupation, household size and structure, and sanitation were significantly associated with children’s nutritional status in bivariate analysis but not in multivariate analysis. After controlling for the characteristics of children, mothers and households, significant associastions with children’s nutritional status were found for population density, percentage of literate (vs. illiterate) residents in a district, wealth status of district residents, and residence in the Guinea Forest-Savanna Mosaic and Central African Mangrove ecological zones. Other significantly associated variables in the final models were the age of the child, months of breastfeeding, whether the child’s mother has health insurance and the wealth status of a child’s household. Notwithstanding the shortcomings of this study, its findings can potentially assist stakeholders by providing a better understanding of the diverse set of factors that influence children’s nutritional status and some explanation for differences in nutritional status among places within Ghana.
Circulating citizenship practices: Bolivian routes of migration, hometown associations, and development.
(2012-07) Strunk, Christopher
International migration has become a widespread phenomenon across the Andes in recent decades. In Bolivia, where approximately 20 percent of the population lives abroad, long-term routes of migration have transformed cities and rural areas within the country and beyond. This dissertation examines the lives of Bolivian migrants from the Valle Alto of Cochabamba in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Drawing on Bolivian scholars, I analyze the non-linear paths taken by migrants and the varied nature of indigenous experiences through the vertical archipelago model. Using a collaborative multi-sited ethnography of migrant organizations, I explore the circulation of money, values and practices between migrant settlement nodes and places of origin. I show that Bolivian hometown associations have adapted rural organizational practices to a suburban U.S. landscape while also transforming places in the Valle Alto. I also analyze migrant efforts to negotiate their belonging within changing citizenship regimes in Washington D.C. and Cochabamba. By playing soccer, performing folkloric dance in public spaces and constructing transnational houses and public works projects, Bolivian migrants are able to be recognized as members of communities in Cochabamba and the Washington D.C. metro area even if they are not physically present or formal members of the national polity. Finally, I analyze the decisions of migrants to stay in the Washington or return to Bolivia through the lens of gender and the family, highlighting the importance of family responsibility and fatherhood for male migrants. The case of migration from the rural municipality of Arbieto offers important insights into both the struggles and opportunities confronting migrants as they traverse international, regional and local boundaries and put down roots in multiple places. Ultimately, I argue that migrant practices are changing what it means to be a campesino (peasant) from the Valle Alto. While Bolivian migrants are using collective remittances and the intention to return to construct a reformulated rural identity based on long-distance ties and investment in the rural economy, migrant identities also have to be located within a broader understanding of belonging that takes into account the deep roots that migrants have developed in multiple communities.
Constituent space: re-theorizing the geographies of contestation and control.
(2011-01) Clough, Nathan L.
This dissertation analyzes contemporary contentious politics through a qualitative study of the mobilization against the 2008 Republican National Convention (2008 RNC) that was held in St. Paul, Minnesota from September 1-4, 2008. Empirically this study contributes to the emerging literatures in geography on social movements and social control. At the theoretical level this dissertation is an attempt to expound on recent incitements that neoliberal capitalism should be studied through its articulation with the myriad contestations that constantly emerge in reaction to, in relation with, or alongside of it. I contribute to this project through an engagement with some theoretical concepts that have been developed within the trajectory of Autonomous Marxism, including constituent and Constituted forms of power, biopolitics, and governmentalities and counter-conducts, as well as developing a geographical theory of constituent space.
Convective weather hazards in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area, MN
(2008-12) Blumenfeld, Kenneth A.
This dissertation investigates the frequency and intensity of severe convective storms, and their associated hazards, in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area (TCMA), Minnesota. Using public severe weather reports databases and high spatial density rain gauge data, annual frequencies and return-periods are calculated for tornadoes, damaging winds, large hail, and flood-inducing rainfall. The hypothesis that severe thunderstorms and tornadoes are less likely in the central TCMA than in surrounding areas also is examined, and techniques for estimating 100-year rainfall amounts are developed and discussed. This research finds that: i) storms capable of significant damage somewhere within the TCMA recur annually (sometimes multiple times per year), while storms virtually certain to cause such damage recur every 2-3 years; ii) though severe weather reports data are not amenable to classical comparative statistical testing, careful treatment of them suggests all types and intensity categories of severe convective weather have been and should continue to be approximately as common in the central TCMA as in surrounding areas; and iii) applications of Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) statistics and areal analyses of rainfall data lead to significantly larger (25-50%) estimates of 100-year rainfall amounts in the TCMA and parts of Minnesota than those currently published and used for precipitation design. The growth of the TCMA, the popular sentiment that downtown areas somehow deter severe storms and tornadoes, and the prior underestimation of extreme rainfall thresholds for precipitation design, all act to enhance local susceptibility to hazards from severe convective storms.
Crisis in Jordan's Water Sector? Understanding the Dynamics of Institutional and Political Constraints in Water Management and Corporatization Reforms
(2015-05) Mahayni, Basil
Since 1999, Jordan has experimented with various forms of privatization and corporatization reforms in Amman's municipal water services and the national water sector. The goal of these reforms, it is argued, is to improve water management conditions in light of its stark lack of domestic water and energy resources and ongoing political and economic impacts of regional wars and conflicts. The reforms, however, experienced numerous setbacks. This dissertation seeks to understand why the privatization process has struggled and the effects it has generated. Privatization reforms come after nearly fifty years of World Bank and USAID sponsored water sector development projects in Amman specifically, and Jordan more generally. These projects were part and parcel of Jordan's state building processes and modernization of municipal and national water services. The overall claim in this dissertation is that these state building and modernization processes created institutional and political constraints, which have become endemic to, and evolved with, water sector operations and reforms. Four sub-claims are offered. First, advocates of privatization and corporatization depict water sector crises through economic and engineering frameworks, which neglect considerations of political and institutional dynamics. Second, contemporary water crises are strongly influenced by the history of water sector development and state building processes, on the one hand, and the imbricated evolution of municipal and national water policies and institutions on the other. These processes resulted in political and institutional constraints that have become part and parcel of the water sector's operational dynamics and continued transformation. Third, corporatization reforms have been shaped by these institutional and political contexts, while also introducing new constraints that further change the dynamics of the water sector. Last, reform programs and the design of municipal water services shape household experiences, while their opinion of reform processes remains critical for understanding the likelihood of more contentious reform programs.
Dynamics of old-growth forests of Minnesota.
(2009-08) Rauchfuss, Julia
Disturbances are an essential part of almost every ecosystem. I studied disturbances in three different old growth forests in Minnesota. These old-growth remnants include the white and red pine forest of the Lost 40 in northern Minnesota, the balsam fir and white spruce forest at Itasca State Park in northern Minnesota, and the hardwood forest of the Big Woods in south-central Minnesota. In the Lost 40, white and red pine are not regenerating and shade-tolerant trees are abundant in the understory and canopy. This lack of regeneration is probably due to the lack of a disturbance like fire. If a management plan were to be implemented, the advancement of the shade-tolerant species into the canopy and the shifting climate space of white and red pine need to be taken into consideration. The white and red pines in Itasca State Park are actively managed, but not the fir-spruce forest. Now, mature fir-spruce forest is dying because of a recent spruce budworm outbreak. Spruce budworm, a defoliating insect that prefers balsam fir and spruce, has been in the park before the most recent outbreak. Before the two outbreaks that were reconstructed, the climate was wet, whereas other studies found dry conditions before an outbreak of the spruce budworm. In reconstructing canopy disturbances of eight remnants, I tested several methods for evaluating canopy disturbance in closed canopy forests. The sequential t-test (regime shift) method had best results when reconstructing canopy disturbances of these forests. I then used the sequential t-test method to reconstruct the canopy-disturbance history. Although a drought-disturbance relationship was detected by other authors, I did not find a consistent relationship in my data. I studied three different old-growth forests in Minnesota. In these stands, disturbances are an integral part. Methods of disturbance-history reconstructions were tested and one (sequential t-test) subsequently used. I made contributions to reconstructing canopy disturbances using release and suppression periods in tree rings of forest types that previously had not been studied this way. The information that I gathered could now be used to inform a management plan, to apply a possibly more precise method to reconstruct a canopy-disturbance history, and to inform the public.
Ecology, conservation and climate-fire challenges on Uluguru Mountain biodiversity hotspot, Tanzania
(2010-12) William, Christopher Mungo Peter
In this research, I investigate the relationship between short-term climate variability and the fire ecology of the Uluguru Nature Forest Reserve (UNFR). I investigate the influence of relief, altitude, the Indian Ocean Dipole or Dipole Mode Index (DMI), and Niño 3.4 on short (November-December) and long rains (March, April, May) in the UNFR. Fire events correlate weakly with amount of annual local rainfall, suggesting that fire occurrence in the UNFR results from a combination of factors, such as rainfall anomalies, topography, type of vegetation (fuel), timing and use of fire by local people as a farm preparation tool, and teleconnections. A thorough understanding of fire behavior across time and space is necessary to design a successful UNFR management plan; the resulting plan must address both anthropogenic and climatic drivers of fire.
Electricity, Marginalization, and Empowerment: For Whom? And Who Decides? Evaluating Participatory Mapping in Río Negro, Honduras
(2015-08) DeGrave, Jeff
Participatory mapping's ability to empower its users has come under severe reproach by many scholars. Drawing on these critiques, this ex-post mapping study of the mountain village of Rio Negro, Honduras that employed participatory mapping to prioritize access to electricity through hydro-microturbines echoes and extends these critiques. However, prevailing power structures within the community impacted the decision-making processes, affecting the outcomes of the participatory mapping project. Through various political and social interventions, village elites were able to influence the distribution of the microturbines, further enhancing differences in marginalization and empowerment within the community. Elites successfully directed the participatory mapping exercise toward their interests and continue today to reap the multiple benefits of electrical access. This dissertation assesses how participatory mapping in this exemplary case reinforced existing conditions of marginalization and empowerment over the long term.
Evaluating Students' Ability to Integrate Written and Visual Communication
(University of Minnesota, 1996) Gersmehl, Philip J.; Lockwood, Catherine M.
We are developing criteria for assessing writing skills of students and the applicability of written assignments in an introductory level geography course (US & Canada). This course usually has an enrollment of 175 to 250 students per quarter. Our proposal has two elements of research: 1) to determine ways to present instructions so that students clearly understand how to meld spatial ideas and graphical methods into their written arguments; and 2) to measure the degree to which students are able to integrate written and graphic text. Graphics are a powerful means of communicating ideas that text alone may not adequately convey. Graphics, in the context of geography, are more than simple illustrations. Geography combines written text with graphic text to explain spatial relationships. One of the most effective ways to portray spatial data is with maps (a graphic language with its own conventional symbols, grammatical rules, and semantic overtones). Several alternative instructions that build upon three previous projects were prepared and tested winter quarter 1993. These course projects are intended to develop an understanding of graphic text, along with the ability to read, analyze, and then explain map patterns through clear, concise written language. The instructions for the first project were a two-page handout. No formal explanation of the instructions was given, but examples and references to project elements were given in several lectures. The second project also included a two-page handout, supplemented by a poster exhibit. The display showed examples of effective integration of text and writing, proper use of color and cartographic techniques, and acceptable ways to calculate and adjust data sets. Students were given a two-page set of written instructions plus a thirty-minute formal classroom explanation for the third project. We developed forms to assess student performance in five specific areas: research, writing style, selection and description of analytical tools, integration of maps and other graphic texts, and bibliographic skills. Because of class size, a set of criteria and standards for uniform grading by teaching assistants was developed and tested. We are now evaluating the effectiveness of these criteria and student response to these projects. Preliminary evaluation of student work and method of instructions suggest that written instructions should be reinforced with some formal classroom explanation. The visual presentation enhanced student performance. Additional graphic displays would benefit students as well as aid the professor and teaching assistants with visual examples of project components. Based on the original objectives and preliminary findings of our research, we expect two outcomes: 1) students will develop a graphic vocabulary and a set of skills that can be used in other courses or applied fields; and 2) students will gain an alternative perspective on writing techniques (i.e. integration of graphic text and written text).
Everyday landscapes of immgrant integration in post-socialist Berlin: integration projects, othering and meanings of work.
(2011-02) Matejskova, Tatiana
This research examined everyday landscapes of belonging and responses of local population to recent immigrants in one of the new urban areas of immigrant settlement in Germany, namely neighborhoods of eastern Berlin, Marzahn. Once the largest socialist-era housing estate in the former East Germany, now severely socio-economically marginalized, central and northern Marzahn has over the past 15 years become home of the largest concentration of post-Soviet immigrants of German ancestry (so-called Aussiedler) in the former East Germany, the second largest migrant group by now in Germany. The project focused first, on what I call integration practices, that is practices through which local integration projects and policies seek to enable greater social inclusion of recent immigrants as well as acceptance of immigrants by the local society. And second, I sought to understand how such projects as well as immigrants and local residents themselves understand what "integration" - a vague but increasingly ubiquitous and contested term - entails and how they construct belonging in everyday urban contexts. The study is more broadly situated within the context of Germany's new regime of immigrant integration, which promotes neoliberalized, work-based understanding of belonging. These research questions were approached through a mixed-method qualitative case study, which entailed ethnographic work focused on northern and central Marzahn, including volunteering in two integration projects, focus groups conducted with local residents and Aussiedler immigrants, semi-structured expert interviews with local integration practitioners and experts, as well as document analysis. Findings point out in the first place to the myth of an integrated national society that immigrants encounter and in which they strive for belonging. Namely, I show that local practices through which Marzahner Other Aussiedler immigrants in everyday spaces as Russians hailing from backwards East and thus non-belonging in Marzahn and in Germany, are strongly entangled with and embedded in the national landscape of citizenship, in which Marzahn and Marzahner themselves occupy a very precarious position. Second, this project finds that while local integration projects in Marzahn play an important role in supporting immigrants' process of settlement through creating linguistically and socially familiar social spaces, crucial for regaining social confidence in a new environment, they often fail in achieving their goal of providing spaces of increased contact between immigrants and local residents. Rather, such sustained encounters are enabled within the spaces of larger community centers housing integration projects, mostly because they employ often significant numbers of otherwise unemployed residents through workfare programs. While such engagements do tend to increase empathy and more positive attitudes of local residents towards individual Aussiedler, I have cautioned against overoptimistic expectations for increased contact to also bring about reduced stereotyping and prejudice against the Aussiedler as a whole group and category. And finally, this dissertation shows that, quite in line with Germany's neoliberalized norms of belonging as based on employment and work contributions, especially middle-aged and older Aussiedler perceive their long-term exclusion from labor market as an obstacle to their feeling integrated in Germany. As I show, their insistence on the centrality of work for their feelings of belonging in a society is less a result of an influence of local integration practitioners or community leaders - for whom the importance of work for Aussiedler integration is instrumental rather than ideological - or from Marzahn's residents, many of whom do not see steady employment as a precondition for immigrant integration, in part also because of their own strong experiences with long-term unemployment. Rather, as I argue, this centrality of work draws primarily on the persistence of dividual conceptions of personhood and self as deeply socially embedded and emerging through a practice and experience of work, that these subjects internalized during their Soviet-era socialization.
Forward modeling of tree-climate relations across the Northern Hemisphere
(2014-12) Li, Xiaolu
This thesis uses the Vaganov-Shashkin model of tree ring formation, a multivariate, nonlinear, mechanistic model that directly predicts tree-ring growth using climate data, to simulate tree-ring formation across the Northern Hemisphere. Previous research has shown the model has skill in reproducing ring-width variability and climate sensitivity at local and regional scales, but its ability to simulate the major geographical differences in tree-climate relationships at a hemispheric scale has not yet been tested. In this study, we ran the model at over 7,000 locations across the Northern Hemisphere, and compared the seasonal climate responses of the simulations against a network of nearly 2,200 real tree-ring width records. We also calculated the predicted dominant factor at each location and used relative growth rates to explain these patterns. Simulated tree-ring chronologies are consistent with the real ones in the seasonality and relative strength of the encoded climate signals, demonstrating that the model has skill in reproducing tree-ring growth response to climate variability across the Northern Hemisphere. Because the simulations were produced using only climate records and the same set of parameters, the fact that the model was able to reproduce major geographical differences in the observations suggests that climate is the primary factor in determining large-scale tree-climate relationships. We also used relative growth rates to show the sequence of events during the growing season and the possible mechanism of the climate response of tree rings. We found that temperature dominates growth at temperature-sensitive sites during most of the growing season and that at stations where temperature dominates growth at the end of growing season, summer precipitation generally has a strong positive influence on tree-ring formations, while at locations where soil moisture limits growth at the end of growing season, ring widths usually have a positive correlation with winter precipitation. Because the model has skill in reproducing ring widths and tree-climate relationships at local, regional and hemispheric scales, we suggest VSM can potentially be used as a low-cost estimator to predict tree-ring response to climate prior to sampling and to forecast long-term changes in tree-climate relationships.
The geographies of local immigration policies in the United States
(2011-06) Walker, Kyle E.
Over the past decade, hundreds of local governments have considered or implemented locally-scaled immigration policies. Some localities have enacted inclusionary policies that seek to promote an inclusive environment for all immigrants regardless of legal status, whereas others have opted for exclusionary policies designed to drive away undocumented immigrants. A burgeoning interdisciplinary literature has provided substantial evidence of how both transformations in US federal immigration policy and locality-specific conditions have led to the emergence of these local immigration policies. This literature has paid less attention to how these policies vary geographically, and the role of social and political spaces in enabling or constraining these policy responses. In this dissertation, I employ a multi-methods approach to conduct a geographical analysis of the factors and conditions that influence local governments to implement local policy responses to immigration. The first part of the dissertation is based on a national quantitative study I designed to test a series of hypotheses about the introduction and intent of these policies. I find that local immigration policies are associated with the size and pace of change of the local immigrant population, and that exclusionary policies tend to be found in suburbs, the US South, and areas of lower education, higher Republican voting, and higher owner-occupied housing. The remainder of the dissertation draws from a multi-sited qualitative study of six suburbs in the Chicago, Washington DC, and Phoenix metropolitan areas. Based on this research, I find that local immigration policies are influenced by multi-scalar immigration policy hierarchies, networks of national and regional immigration activists, and deeply-rooted place identities. Further, proponents of exclusionary immigration policies in the suburbs frame their policy positions as a defense of a suburban ideal reflected in the "American Dream." Such policies, however, also reflect anxieties about fiscal insecurity and loss of local identity in the wake of continued suburban population growth.
Geography and the rule of law in the making of two American Indian Reservations: a geographic study of law as a social system
(2008-08) Shockey, Frank Clinton
This study explores the use of Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems in the geographic study of law. Describing law as the communication of congruently generalized normative expectations allows access to the spatiality contained within the operations of the legal system. This exploration takes place in the context of a legal system whose self-description, the so-called "rule of law," orients it toward the observation and coding of every possibility of experience. Topically the focus of this study is on the legal system's expansion into the lands and lives of indigenous people and on the making of two American Indian Reservations, the Red Lake Reservation and the White Earth Reservation, in nineteenth-century Minnesota. The conception of unorganized territory as "Indian Country," the cession of Indian lands and creation of tribes and reservations as legal entities, and the allotment of reservation lands to individual Indians in severalty provide comparative material. In addition to reformulating the geographic study of law as a study of law as a social system, the methodology allows the history of federal American Indian law to be described with emphasis on the use of space. Like time, space has been an integral medium for the legal system's infiltration of indigenous peoples' societies, as this study shows.
A geospatial analysis of West Nile virus in the Twin Cities metropolitan area of Minnesota.
(2009-07) Ghosh, Debarchana
The West Nile virus (WNV) is an infectious disease transmitted to humans and other mammals by mosquitoes that acquire the virus by feeding on WNV-infected birds. Since its initial occurrence in New York in 1999, the virus has spread rapidly west and south, causing seasonal epidemics and illness among thousands of birds, animals, and humans. Yet, we only have a rudimentary understanding of how the mosquito-borne virus operates in complex avian-human-environmental systems. The virus first reached Minnesota in 2002 and resulted in several hotspots by 2003. The year 2007 saw one of the severest incidences of WNV in Minnesota. For my dissertation research, I have developed novel approaches to understand the spread and dynamics of the virus by using key environmental, built environment, and anthropogenic risk factors that determine why, when, and where WNV strikes in the Twin Cities Metropolitan area (TCMA). The first study demonstrates the use of a novel spatiotemporal approach to identify exposure areas. The method retrospectively delineates transmission cycles as exposure areas in their entirety, involving dead birds, mosquito pools, and human cases. Given the strong spatial clustering of WNV infections in the urban areas of TCMA, the next study explores how urban landscape features contributed to the viral activities. This investigation contributed to the broader research question in the field of health geography, of how the heterogeneous urban landscape affects human health and disease patterns. The remaining studies focus on the building and interpreting a nonlinear model which captures the complex relationships between the disease incidences and the hypothesized risk factors. The goal of these studies is to identify risk factor(s) whose management would result in effective disease prevention and containment. This dissertation has applied contributions to the vector control policies. The findings from the studies can answer two fundamental questions to eliminate larva and adult mosquitoes capable of carrying WNV. First, when is the optimal time to apply insecticides and pesticides? Second, where (area) should we target spraying of pesticides? This will lead to efficient allocation of resources and allow a balance between mosquito eradication and environmental conservation efforts with respect to insecticide usage.
Global displacements : geographies of work and industrial restructuring in the Dominican Republic.
(2010-02) Traub-Werner, Marion
Many accounts of the globalization of production in the late 20th and early 21st centuries focus on the boom of new foreign direct investment in so-called global factories in the global South. Global Displacements shifts the focus of academic inquiry to an equally pervasive moment of transnational capitalist production: the collapse of labourintensive employment strategies and the restructuring of spatial and social divisions of labour in their wake. Drawing on ethnographic methods and historical accounts of economic change in the Dominican Republic’s northern Cibao region, I consider the restructuring of the country’s export apparel industry, the most long-standing and successful in the circum-Caribbean. Over the past decade, facing increased competition for US market share and a new regime of trade regulation without global quotas, garment firms in the Dominican Republic undertook a process of restructuring, including the retrenchment of the majority of the country’s garment workforce. I explore this process from the perspective of four sociospatial locations: Dominican firms integrated into transnational production assemblages, the embodied labour geographies of former garment workers, the layered histories of accumulation and disinvestment of the Cibao region and its border with Haiti, and my own position as a researcher. Bringing the insights of deconstruction and Marxist and feminist theory to bare on a critical ethnography of industrial restructuring, I examine geographies of production as constituted by displacements: that is, the complex mechanism of inclusion in and exclusion from circuits of capital accumulation that reproduce subjects and places with difference. My study of displacements in the Dominican Republic illustrates how accumulation proceeds through the reproduction of hierarchies of labour, premised upon reworking the violent abstractions of race, gender and nation along existing and new spatial contours of profit-making and disinvestment. Geographies of work and industrial restructuring in the Dominican Republic reveal problematic assumptions that lie behind much contemporary analysis of industrial change. Many accounts frame global industrial restructuring since the 1970s as a process of outward capitalist expansion, incorporating new places and new subjects into transnational labour processes. Such a framing reduces complex, nonlinear experiences of industrial transformation to a teleological sequence, where industrialization serves a marker of “development,” signifying a measure of one’s closeness or distance from Eurocentric modernity. By decentering teleological assumptions of industrialization, the geography of displacements presented in the following pages demonstrates industrial restructuring to be an on-going reworking of industrial and deindustrial processes irreducible to fixed and sequential categories of the postindustrial, newly industrializing, or so-called developing worlds.
Icon Under Fire: The Giant Canada Geese of Rochester, Minnesota
(2012-03-06) Eckberg, Daniel
For over 30 years the giant Canada goose was thought to be extinct, but in 1962 the species was rediscovered in Rochester, Minnesota. Ever since, the city has held a special bond with the species and specifically its local flock. As the goose population has grown, it has become, in some eyes, an intolerable nuisance and a public health threat. In response to complaints, local officials have taken steps to limit human contact and stymie the flock’s growth, polarizing people supporting and opposing the measures and leaving the city at a crossroads. By analyzing the diverse actions and outcomes of communities across North America that have faced similar issues with Canada geese and acknowledging the unique cultural and economic ties between Rochester and its geese, a course of action is developed and recommended. Such a plan would balance the well being and contentment of the city’s residents with the local connections to the flock, and thus necessarily retain at least some of the geese, while improving their management.
In pursuit of a public: following Khaleeji women in the blogosphere.
(2010-06) Al-Arfaj, Amna
Summary abstract not available
The informal sector revisited: Botswana's developmental state and micro-enterprise development.
(2009-12) Menyah, David
Governments, policy-makers and academics have come to recognize and acknowledge the vital role played by the informal sector in facilitating economic development especially in the third world. To realize the full potential of the informal sector as a possible engine of growth, more research is needed as to how the state can create a favorable institutional, regulatory and policy environment that allows productive employment, income generation and growth of the informal sector. The dissertation goes beyond the neo-liberal theory informed antagonistic pathways that characterize the relationship between the state and informal sector in the literature because they operate at opposing logics. I argue that such one-dimensional assessment of state-informal sector relations is highly problematic and flawed because the state is packaged as a unitary category with no differentiation and critical interrogation. The dissertation unpacks the state and identifies different types of states with varying abilities and capacities to engage the informal sector productively. Secondly, the antagonistic pathways framework of analysis is counterproductive and limits the possibilities of the state engaging the informal sector positively for mutual development. An alternative scenario is possible but contingent on the character of the state or a state that goes beyond "the Smithian Watchman" to a developmental one. Using Botswana as a case study, the dissertation appropriates survey and interview data to interrogate how the developmental state engages the informal sector for mutual development or otherwise.
Innovation Effects and Origins of Ego-Network Stability: The Hidden Dimension of Social Capital
(2018-04) Kumar, Pankaj
Much research has shown that firms’ ego-network configurations, i.e., structural holes or network closure, help them achieve superior innovation outcomes. However, little is known about how overall ego-network stability affects innovation. In this two-part dissertation, I first argue that in the alliance network context the stability is detrimental for the focal firm’s innovation performance. Moreover, firms are affected differentially by the stability depending on whether they span structural holes and on whether their inventive activities are geographically concentrated. Spanning structural holes mitigates the negative effect of ego-network stability whereas the geographic concentration of firms’ inventive activities further worsens the negative relationship. Next, I develop propositions about the origins of firms’ ego-network stability. I limit my theorizing in this case to structural hole stability or the stability of open structures only, with special focus on the embeddedness of alliance brokerage structures in geographic and network community space. I argue that the stability of network structures increases with the geographic distance between member firms. In contrast, I hypothesize that member firms’ location in different network communities has a negative effect on the stability of networks. I empirically test my propositions regarding the (ego-network) stability-performance relationship using 198 biopharmaceutical firms headquartered in the U.S. over a 21-year period from 1985 to 2005. My estimation sample for testing the origins of structural hole stability comprises of 329 broker and 680 alter firms over 1985-2005, yielding 61,495 triad-year observations in the global pharmaceutical industry context. I find support for my ideas. I contribute theoretically by highlighting the importance of network stability, a salient but lost dimension of social capital, for the focal firm’s performance. My work has practical implications in terms of network rewiring and maintenance.
The Interactions between E-Shopping and Store Shopping: A Case Study of the Twin Cities
(2010-08) Cao, Jason; Douma, Frank; Cleaveland, Fay; Xu, Zhiyi
This research aims to reveal the interactions between e-shopping and in-store shopping using a sample of Internet users in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. This report summarizes previous research on the interactions among spatial attributes, e-shopping, and travel behavior and makes eight recommendations for future research. Guided by the recommendations, this study adopts an innovative research design by integrating a conventional shopping survey with an activity diary. This report provides a detailed description of survey development and implementation and points out several common pitfalls in survey administration. This report also presents results on the interactions. Specifically, two ordered probit models and structural equation models were developed to investigate the influence of geography on online shopping usage and the influence of e-shopping on traditional shopping.

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