Browsing by Subject "matter"
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Item Chemical Characterization Of Soil Organic Matter In A Chesapeake Bay Salt Marsh: Analyzing Microbial And Vegetation Inputs(2018-05) Bye, ErikBlue carbon ecosystems play an outsized role in the burial and storage of organic matter compared to other ecosystems. Increasing CO2 levels, sea level rise, and increasing temperature have been shown to influence the storage of organic matter in these environments. Changes to the stability of organic carbon stocks in these systems could have potentially significant affects to the current climate. For this reason, the stability of organic carbon stocks in these ecosystems must be understood at a deeper level to be able to predict how different environmental stressors will affect their stability. Through the combination of bulk organic matter analyses and biomarker methods, this project characterized the changes that organic matter underwent in a C3 and C4 plant-dominated marsh in the Chesapeake Bay to understand the degradation and stable soil organic matter formation process. Overall, the results support the MEMS framework that states soil organic matter is formed mainly through microbial degradation products that create stable organo-mineral complexes with the mineral soil fraction that resist degradation. The top section of each core shows a large decrease in labile materials coupled with indicators of microbial processing of organic matter. Overall, the formation of stable soil organic matter in this study was determined by the ecosystem properties instead of the initial input of organic matter.Item Spiritual Matter: Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism, Whiteness, and Material Performance(2022-05) Rickard, HazelThis dissertation analyzes the “physical manifestations” of nineteenth-century Spiritualism including animated objects, tipping tables, spiritual machines, spirit materializations, ectoplasm, as well as cases of animating human remains. I discuss the American spirit mediums Jonathan Koons, John Murray Spear, J.H. Conant, Elizabeth Denton, Anne Denton Cridge, Mary Schindler, G.A. Redman, Mary Comstock, Paschal Beverly Randolph, Kate and Maggie Fox, Margery Crandon, the English mediums Florence Cook and Elizabeth d’Esperance, and the French medium Eva Carrière. While my analysis is rooted in the American context, I follow where these repertoires traveled, which allows us to see this form of mediumship as a transatlantic phenomenon.I argue that these spirit mediums turned racial Whiteness (particularly feminine Whiteness) into a practical spiritual technology through literalization. Literalization, as a logic of performance that collapses the gap between matter and meaning, uniquely exposed the implicit racial and sexual meanings behind Spiritualist activities. Ultimately, I contend that Spiritualist material performance comprised a set of experimental practices employed to test the power of White identity to transcend matter by absorbing material powers associated with racially othered spirits. The first two chapters look at White mediums channeling Indian and Black spirits, the third looks at how male mediums employed female bodies as spiritual resources, and the fourth looks at how female mediums racialized and sexualized Whiteness through materialization.