Browsing by Subject "Space"
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Item Exploring intersectionality in physical activity spaces among Somali adolescent girls: implications for programming(2012-10) Thul, Chelsey MarieThul and LaVoi (2011) conducted a study in 2008, titled "Reducing Physical Inactivity and Promoting Active Living: From the Voices of East African Immigrant Adolescent Girls," to learn about barriers facing this underserved population. The purpose of the study was to explore East African (n= 12 Somali, and n= 7 Ethiopian) adolescent females' experiences with and beliefs about physical activity, and their suggestions for promoting active living. Based on the data, the girls faced barriers on multiple levels which impeded their physical activity participation. To overcome barriers the girls suggested a culturally relevant, female-only physical activity program be developed. Based on the girls' wishes, in 2008 the Girls Initiative in Recreation and Leisurely Sports (G.I.R.L.S.) program was created for primarily East African adolescent and young adult females, and implemented in a gym at the Brian Coyle Center in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Thul--a participant-volunteer-consultant to the program--noticed the gym and other physical activity spaces in the neighborhood appeared to be contested spaces wherein "real and symbolic boundaries have been drawn to limit access" (Cooky, 2009, p. 260) for the participants. Specifically, Thul observed several physical activity spaces and the female participants who used them were affected by the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and cultural markers of identity. Thul, in conjunction with G.I.R.L.S. program leaders, decided conducting a spatial needs assessment and extending Thul and LaVoi's (2011) study by listening to girls' voices was imperative for understanding their experiences with, and perceptions of, the identity markers and physical activity space, as well as the impact such experiences have on future physical activity programming. Thus, the purpose of this dissertation study was two-fold: 1) to employ Henri Lefebvre's (1991) Conceptual Model of Social Space and aspects of a feminist participatory action research (FPAR) approach to explore Somali adolescent girls' experiences with, and perceptions of, the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and culture in perceived, conceived, and lived physical activity spaces in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, and 2) to understand the implications of the Lefebvre's model for locating and implementing future physical activity programming. Data collection included mixed methods--a quantitative participatory mapping activity (n = 30) to assess perceived space, and focus groups (n= 27) to explore the intersection of the identity constructs within conceived and lived spaces. Numerical trending of the participatory maps, and deductive and inductive content analysis of the focus groups, revealed many complex findings. The overarching finding was that physical activity spaces for Somali females are contested terrain. Perceived space mapping trends indicated males had more access to physical activity spaces than females, indoor physical activity spaces were perceived as more relevant than outdoor ones, and females have low accessibility to physical spaces. Participants' perceived space definitions and behaviors of physical activity revealed a wide ranging definition and performances of physical activity. Conceived space themes suggested an intersection of identity markers influenced a variety of gender ideologies and expectations of females, social constructions of femininity, cultural and religious beliefs and tensions, and ethnic Somali cultural norms. Together the perceived space, conceived space, and identity markers impacted an array of lived space perceptions and experiences regarding a lack of freedom, gender spatial inequality, surveillance tensions, familiarity tensions, inclusivity tensions, accessibility, and strategies for change. These findings indicate future physical activity programming should maintain its inclusivity of all females regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, and culture, as well as take place in accessible, high-quality, private community locations. The findings also support the need to incorporate a wide variety of physical activities and occasionally new venues, ensure trusted, adult-female surveillance, and maintain accessibility. Above all, however, the findings suggest multi-systemic efforts must be undertaken to achieve spatial equality for physical activity among Somali adolescent girls.Item "Meine kühnsten Wünsche und Ideen": women, space, place, and mobility in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany(2014-04) Shepela, Anja SchoenbergThis dissertation is an investigation of bourgeois women educators' complex relationships with space and place in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany. These relationships were greatly influenced by the limited mobility and the restricted access to space that bourgeois women faced within the patriarchal order. At the same time, the very success of these women's professional aspirations hinged upon the securing of spaces for their pedagogical endeavors. I argue that attention to the politics of space and to women's spatial practices, that is, women's use of space, can give us valuable insights into women's initiatives and women's agency. In my study, I therefore focus on the ways in which female educators, as portrayed in historical and in fictional texts, were able to use (built and imagined) space subversively to pursue their own interests and on the strategies they employed in order to create places in which to carry out and professionalize their work in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany. My study reveals how resourceful women were in their use of space and in turning that space into a place, and it illuminates how women managed to have agency and take control of their lives at a time when the odds were against them. Furthermore, this study uncovers how female authors were using the themes of mobility and women's spatiality as a vehicle for social criticism and as a subversion of hegemonic gender norms. Thus, I integrate readings of literary and other historical documents in order to reach a better understanding of German women and their situation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century.Item On Order Types of Spatiotemporal Dimensions(2017-08) Al-Dhalimy, HaidarIt has been suggested that mathematical truth can be accounted for or explained in terms of infinitary computations. Certain Zenonian arguments against the possibility of performing such computations raise problems about the structure of time and space. We study the kinds of spatiotemporal structures that would allow for infinitary computations, and identify where further work is needed.Item Selfsame spaces: Gandhi, architecture and allusions in twentieth century India.(2011-05) Maddipati, VenugopalIn this dissertation, I suggest that the Indian political leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi infused deep and enigmatic meanings into everyday physical objects, particularly buildings. Indeed, the manner in which Gandhi named the buildings in his famous Satyagraha Ashram in Ahmedabad in the early part of the twentieth century, makes it somewhat difficult to write, in isolation, about their physical appearance. Quite apart from considering what the buildings at the Ashram denoted physically, that is, architecture as shelter, one must also take into account what their names connoted. Writing a history of Gandhi's engagement with architecture must necessarily involve taking into account how he sometimes mythified architectural spaces into metaphors for other spaces. In this dissertation, then, I enquire into how Gandhi mobilized particular aspects of the physical appearances of the buildings that he lived in or considered between 1891 and 1930, as allegories. I also write about how Gandhi systematically infused allegorical meaning into his experiences of places by giving names to those places. Moreover, I consider how, in 1936, Gandhi explicitly emphasized the physical appearance of a hut that had been built in the village of Segaon by Mira Behn, the famous social worker. If Gandhi spoke at length about how Mira Behn had built that hut out of material that contingently became available to her in Segaon, he did so in order to emphasize life as the activity of making do with contingencies. To fully appreciate the purport of Gandhi's description of Mira Behn's hut, then, one has to read it primarily as an allusion towards a contrast between an inner life of equanimity and an outward life of coping with transience and contingencies. Indeed, on the one occasion Gandhi exclusively spoke about the denotative aspects of architecture, he did so in order to make those very aspects connote a deeper, more enigmatic spatial reality which he was always already familiar with. I derive, then, from Gandhi's reading of spaces as allegories for other intensely familiar spaces, or what I call self-same spaces, to write about Gandhian architectural experiments in post-colonial India.Item Technologies to Solve the Orbital Debris Problem and its Effects on the Future of Space Exploration(2020-11) Allen, NiaThis thesis deals with the orbital debris problem and its impact on small satellites such as CubeSats. Currently there is approximately eighteen tons of space junk that are currently in Earth orbit of which, 80% of this space debris is in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), which is where most spacecraft are launched into. A simplified orbital lifetime tool is developed and used to analyze the impact of the exponential rise in small satellite launches into LEO. It is shown that unless proactive measures are taken, the orbital debris problem will become worse in the future. To this end, two proactive approaches are examined: active removal of technologies and space policy changes. With respect to active removal technologies, three solutions being considered are examined: laser removal, electrodynamic tethers and mechanical nets. Laser removal involves using a space based or ground based laser to ablate material from space debris. The ablated material acts as a miniature thruster which decrease the semi-major axis of the debris’ orbit. The second technology considered is electromagnetic tethers. The tethers are based on using the earth's magnetic field to generate an electromotive force which acts as drag and, thus, causes the orbit of a debris object to decay. Lastly, there is the concept of a deployable net. A net with flexible rods is deployable from a host satellite and captures multiple forms of debris and knocks it out of orbit. For this concept, there is a closing mechanism to efficiently remove the debris. The advantages and disadvantages of all these technologies are analyzed.Next policy changes that can take advantage of these coming orbital debris removal technologies as well as existing technologies are considered. As well be shown, current space policies do not effectively deal with the orbital debris problem. Many papers have discussed how it is the launcher’s responsibility to remove their spacecraft from operational orbit. Since the creation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, countries know that space is deemed as an environment for exploration as opposed to property. After examining multiple scenarios involving various countries’ space interactions and removal technology proposals, it results into how orbital debris can be created. National space policies will be analyzed with focus on responsibility of removing orbital debris and keeping the space environment clean for future exploration. Another policy reform that is considered is that of future design standards. Using CubeSats as an example, we explore what kind of changes in design standards can help mitigate the orbital debris problem. To this end, typical CubeSat subsystems are separately examined, Structures, Propulsion, Control, Power, Navigation, and Communication. The analysis will also focus on how changes in the practice of designing these subsystems can be used to mitigate the orbital debris problemItem Un-semiotic space: symbolism, perception, and space(2014-12) Revak, David PaulTo challenge the notion of symbolism and to develop an architecture that ignores these preconceptions of space and create space void of semiotics, or un-semiotic space. Essentially, an architecture that can no longer be conceived through normalized means, a space that embodies the purest relationship between subject and space. The outcome of such a direction is to allow the subject to realize and draw attention to how he or she actually engages space. The subject of such environments cannot help but question their placement in space and how they come to some sort of rationalization.Item Unmapping Poetry: The Poetics of Space in the French Nineteenth Century(2019-08) Dubois, AlexandreMy dissertation deals with the notion of space in late nineteenth-century French poetry. I understand this notion in three ways. First, space as commonly related to geography and dimensions of height, depth and width. In the history of modern geography, space is reduced to coordinates on a map, to ultra-connected points of departures and destinations. Reading space in such a way equates to reducing it to its visibility, to its public display so that sight traverses it at a glance, in the same manner as sight traverses and defines landscapes in the modern world. Second, I understand space as the marker and threshold between literature and everything else. This second perspective on the notion defines literary space as resolutely different from other writing mediums. Moreover, it requires the awareness of the role of the reader/commentator in helping to define a text as literary, that is a text where hermeneutics is of central importance. In a way, this perspective asks about the space of poetry, a space that seeks to withdraw itself from the language of newspapers on the one hand, and of realistic and naturalist novels on the other. Poetic space strives to impede any fixed linear reading in profit of a re-arranged and unconventional syntax, so that sight cannot grasp the whole of the literary text and thus cannot traverse it with ease. The act of reading, in such a context, does not lead to fixed and true meanings, since it only triggers more interpretations. Third, and correlated to the second and first points, if the role of the reader is mentioned and analyzed in my dissertation, so is the distanced role of the twenty-first century commentator looking at nineteenth-century texts. The gap lying between the two also constitutes a space that ought to be pondered, because the poetry I study is defined by the space between it and its readers, whether they belong to the same century or to our contemporary one. Talking about the space between distant centuries allows for distant readings, so that the poetry I refer to, the one of Lautréamont, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, has to do with a specific distance that can never be crossed, and that makes us—the contemporary readers—witness a literary space that eludes domination and control over its understanding. It is not to say that poetry refutes interpretation, but that it constantly reminds the reader of its opacity, of its distance that none can traverse. The understanding of poetry then has to do with the impossibility of understanding. This aporia is what defines poetry, what makes it understandable through the awareness of an unreachable space that separates the reader from the text. This unreachable-space-that-defines-poetry is also correlated to geographic space because it allows to conceive that reading space is done with limitations and distance rather than domination and control. The question of the unreachable not only opposes poetry to modern geography, it also defines nineteenth-century poetry in space and time. Since poetry could not stop the geographic advancements and conceptions of the modern times, it summoned a remote, far-off reader figure, any reader who comes after the writing of poetry. It means that as soon as poetry is written, as soon as Poetics appears, it is of Space because of the spatial gap it creates in the very moment it appears. To recapitulate and put differently, my dissertation argues that nineteenth-century poets devised anti-communicative styles and dreamed of unreachable spaces in order to resist modernization and geographical expansionism. Since the railway and modern geography rose in popularity and became the emblems for the colonization and domestication of space, my dissertation shows how French poets re-imagined aesthetic wonderment as the obverse of a cartographic, mechanical and networked world. This work, thus, dives into geographical matters where the role of the railway is clearly perceivable, transforming space into a mathematical grid that ought to be traversed with the highest mechanical efficiency, that is an efficiency that disregards any in-between for it only focuses on the connection between cities. The expansion of the urban over the rural and with it, the ultra-connectedness and domestication of the world were a strong concern for many poets of the time, who rejected objective and accurate descriptions so to disconnect language and through it, an empirical understanding of the world. Such rejection extends to maps and geographical conceptions of the French nineteenth century, and a consideration of these materials allows us to claim that poetry is a literary form that interrupts the hyper-connectivity displayed in modern maps. Numerous geographers of the period gave a representation of space that turned toward objective descriptions and modeled maps in a way that maintains a mastery over space that the railway could traverse and dominate. I investigate the influence of the rise of empirical methods and of the railway’s infrastructure on maps and literary texts, by pointing to their effects on the reader’s sight which is entirely guided from one coordinate to another, going through territories and texts with an efficiency that discards other possible territorial and textual identities. My work claims that poetry obstructs this indoctrinated way of reading, by being displayed under new and non-linear forms that rehabilitate the reader’s sight and endow it with the ability to wander and wonder, that is to escape fixed landmarks and objective descriptions. Geography is subsequently an important part in this dissertation, but so is literary space. Poetry, in a way, asks a question: when does one enter the space of literature, leaving ordinary language in profit of an unfixed and ever-changing meaning, space, poetics?Item Where All May Meet on Common Ground: Elements of College Unions Evident in Campus Community(2016-06) Smyth, CorbinThe college union, having served as a thriving community center on college campuses for more than 100 years, is a compelling venue to discuss physical space and community. The purpose of this study is to understand how highly rated unions make meaning of community, to identify common elements of college unions that are evident in campus community, and to provide a framework that practitioners can use when building or developing facilities that are purposefully community-centered. Despite the existing scholarship regarding community on campus, very little formal research can be found regarding community and its relationship with the college union (DeSawal and Yakaboski, 2013). Understanding this gap, the research presented in this paper aims to offer new insight into the connection between community and the college union. The research questions developed for this study are: 1) How do students attending colleges with highly rated union facilities make meaning of community?, and 2) What elements of highly rated unions contribute to the development of community on college campuses? The research questions were addressed by employing action research methods as described by Herr and Anderson (2005). Briefly explained, this process entails identifying the problem at hand, inserting oneself (the researcher) into the subject, investigating what is already occurring/not occurring, and developing an action plan to improve upon the existing process. This qualitative study researched three college union cases, each located on public regional campuses in the upper Midwest. Multiple site visits of the college unions were conducted over the course of this study, which included semi-structured interviews with facility managers/directors, focus groups with users of the facilities, a review of documents related to the design and construction of those facilities, and researcher observations. The college unions selected as case studies are: Porter Memorial Union (PMU) – the central hub of activity at Alliance State University; C. Shaw Student Center (CSSC) – a focal point of community on the campus of State University–Concord; and Shirley Bird Student Union (SBSU) – which sits at the center of the Hearthstone State University campus. Following the collection and subsequent distillation of data into patterns and relationships, five key elements of community emerged. The discovered common elements that are evident in campus community among the three college union cases are: 1) Student-Centered, 2) Dynamic Spaces, 3) Pathways to Success, 4) College is a Conversation, and 5) House of Serendipity. When taken together, the elements presented in this study offer a well-considered plan for college union leaders, designers, and university administrators to employ when moving forward with college union renovation or construction projects.