Browsing by Subject "North America"
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Item A-AVOIR Resistance : a cross cultural study of sexual citizenship in North America and France(2012-05) Batiste, Dominique Pierre; Strong, Pauline Turner, 1953-; Speed, Shannon, 1964-; Johnson, MichaelWhat forms of resistance are gay men in France and North America enacting against heteronormativity and homophobia? And why are they enacting these particular forms of resistance? To answer these questions, this thesis aims to draw connections between gay men's resistance strategies and larger socio-political phenomena in both France and North American cultures. First I focus on the discursive construction of citizens, both heterosexual and homosexual, in order to illustrate how gay men are relegated to second-class citizenship based on their sexual identities and practices. My focus, here, is cultural citizenship and sexual citizenship, two themes that run throughout this thesis. Next, I use Foucault's theories of knowledge-power to reveal how power relations in society discursively create subject positions, such as 'homosexuals' and 'heterosexuals', utilizing structures of control, norms, rewards, and punishments in order to champion heterosexuality to the detriment of homosexuality. In order to contest exercises of power, gay men engage in acts of resistance. i examine scholarly debates centered on resistance, and create a list of criterion for overt resistance, which I dub A AVOIR Resistance on account that it includes the characteristics of Action, Alternatives, Visibility, Opposition, Intent, and Recognition. Utilizing my rubric for overt resistance, as well as Foucault's notions of power, I analyze interview transcripts from a sample of gay men in North America and France to reveal that some gay men, living outside of large metropolitan areas, are rejecting hegemonic ideals of 'gayness' and integrating into mainstream heteronormative society. These men are creating what I call 'authentic communities' where many individuals from various backgrounds and lifestyles live together harmoniously based primarily on access to resources rather than identity markers such as sexual identity. this research shows a split between the ways that urban and suburban gay men embody their homosexuality. Since research on gay men focuses on those living in urban areas, my research calls, instead, for focus on suburban gay men and their resistance to homo-normative ideologies of what it means to me gay.Item Conceptualizing vertebrate faunal dynamics : new perspectives from the Triassic and Eocene of Western North America(2013-05) Stocker, Michelle Renae; Bell, Christopher J., 1966-Conceptualizations of actual biological patterns as preserved in the fossil record must accommodate the results of biotic and abiotic drivers of faunal dynamics. However, those conceptualizations also may reflect cognitive biases resulting from foundational philosophical stances. Whether fossils are conceptualized as the remains of biological entities or as geological objects will affect both taxonomic identifications and secondary inferences derived from those identifications. In addition, operational research bias centered on relativistic views of ‘importance’ of particular components (i.e., taxonomic or skeletal region) of the assemblage results in preferential documentation of some taxa and marginalization of others. I explored the consequences of those specific cognitive and operational biases through examination of Triassic and Eocene faunal assemblages in western North America. For the Triassic I focused on taxonomic and systematic treatments of Paleorhinus, a group of phytosaurs important for the establishment of biochronologic correlations. Specimen-level reexamination of Paleorhinus supported a restricted usage of Paleorhinus as a clade, dissolved a biochronologic connection between terrestrial and marine deposits, and indicated a prior compression of the early part of the Late Triassic as a result of previous conceptualizations of species. I reexamined the Otis Chalk tetrapod assemblage in light of new specimens and modern phylogenetic frameworks. My examination supported a restricted usage of the Otischalkian for biochronologic correlation of the Late Triassic, and emphasized the importance of apomorphic character-based specimen examinations in conjunction with detailed lithostratigraphy prior to the development of biochronologic schema. For the Eocene I focused on undocumented terrestrial reptiles from the late Uintan fauna of West Texas. Specifically I discovered new taxa and new geographic occurrences of amphisbaenians and caimanine crocodylians. The amphisbaenians represent the southernmost record of the clade in the North American Paleogene, and, when combined with other amphisbaenian records, document that the clade responded to late Paleogene climatic changes in ways different from the inferred mammalian response. The new taxon of caimanine crocodylian represents a new geographic and temporal record of that clade. That new record indicates that the biogeographic range of extant caimans represents a climate-driven restriction from a formerly more expansive range, and suggests that the previous geographic and temporal gap in paleodistribution data is related to sampling biases and is not a solely a biological phenomenon. These data indicate that reliable characterization of vertebrate faunal dynamics requires open acknowledgment and appropriate documentation of cognitive and operational biases that affect interpretations of paleontological data.Item Predictive modeling of migratory waterfowl(2011-08) Kreakie, Betty Jane; Keitt, Timothy H.; Gilbert, Lawrence; Meyers, Lauren; Singer, Michael; Yang, Zong-LiangSeveral factors have contributed to impeding the progress of migratory waterfowl spatial modeling, such as (1) waterfowl’s reliance on wetlands, (2) lack of understanding about shifts in distributions through time, and (3) large-scale seasonal migration. This doctoral dissertation provides an array of tools to address each of these concerns in order to better understand and conserve this group of species. The second chapter of this dissertation addresses issues of modeling species dependent on wetlands, a dynamic and often ephemeral habitat type. Correlation models of the relationships between climatic variables and species occurrence will not capture the full habitat constraints of waterfowl. This study introduces a novel data source that explicitly models the depth to water table, which is a simulated long-term measure of the point where climate and geological/topographic water fluxes balance. The inclusion of the depth to water table data contributes significantly to the ability to predict species probability of occurrence. Furthermore, this data source provides advantages over traditional proxies for wetland habitat, because it is not a static measure of wetland location, and is not biased by sampling method. Utilizing the long-term banding bird data again, the third chapter examines the behavior of waterfowl niche selection through time. By using the methods developed in chapter two, probability of occurrence models for the 1950s and the 1990s were developed. It was then possible to detect movements in geographic and environmental space, and how movements in these two spaces are related. This type of analysis provides insight into how different bird species might respond to environment changes and potentially improve climate change forecasts. The final chapter presents a new method for predicting the migratory movement of waterfowl. The method incorporates not only the environmental constraints of stopover habitat, but also includes likely distance and bearing traveled from a source point. This approach uses the USGS’ banding bird database; more specifically, it relies on banding locations, which have multiple recoveries within short time periods. Models made from these banding locations create a framework of migration movement, and allow for predictions to be made from locations where no banding/recovery data are available.Item Queer enchantments : walking between the worlds with male witches in North America(2016-05) Batiste, Dominique Pierre; Stewart, Kathleen, 1953-; Campbell, Craig; Hartigan, John; Cvetkovich, Ann; Johnson, MichaelThe overall goal of this project is to follow the ways in which enchantment can become a central component, embedded within daily practices, by which people make an effort to bring meaning into their lives. Scholars, from a range of disciplines, have studied enchantment in an effort to theorize the psychological, aesthetic, and social characteristics of modernity. They argue that the world is either completely disenchanted, or, that there are short-lived, immobilizing, moments of enchantment, that slip through the cracks of modernity, briefly capturing individuals, before the enchantment breaks, and ‘returns’ a person, once again, to ‘normal’ life. This project follows the lines of what I call a ‘queer ecology of enchantment,’ co-created by men practicing forms of witchcraft in The United States, who produce an empirical and epistemological space in which human and non-human forces and forms coalesce. This enchanted state, which I call coalescence, is not momentary and fleeting, but is an enchanted refrain that is consistently inhabited, as an affective state of being, a form of know-how, a co-production of space, and facilitates the unfolding of queer worlds, and produces the daily practices required for navigating these worlds. Academically, witchcraft in the U.S. has been explored as a religion, a magical system, and a set of ceremonial performances, that focuses upon predominantly female participants in a predominantly female-centered spirituality; this project focuses upon men in the witchcraft movement, and looks closely at the informal daily practices of male witches, in order to trace the ways in which human and non-human objects are given value and intensified through orientations and attunements to enchantment. I argue that it is the daily practices of witchcraft, and not formalized magical or ceremonial settings, that constitute the subjectivity of ‘witch,’ producing a particular relationship between witches and their environments that manifests as intensely political, without being couched in terms of politics or political activism. This project is an experimental, ethnography-based contribution to affect studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology, religious studies, new materialism, cultural geography, and the emerging field of pagan studies, that situates enchantment, and witchcraft, in relation to social strategies connected to health movement, American spirituality, and queer forms of sociality.Item Taxonomic revision of latest Cretaceous North american basal neonithischian taxa and a phylogenetic analysis of basal ornithischian relationships(2012-05) Boyd, Clint Aaroen; Clarke, Julia A.The systematic relationships of basal ornithischian dinosaurs remain contentious, especially the position of basal neornithischians (i.e., ‘hypsilophodontids’). Prior analyses of basal ornithischian relationships have been hampered by the fact that the hypodigm material of many basal neornithischian taxa is fragmentary, denying access to character data crucial to resolving their relationships. The recent discovery of several new basal neornithischian taxa and the referral of more complete specimens to known taxa provide important new data pertinent to resolving these relationships. The results of this study supplement those recent advances by improving our understanding of the anatomy and systematic relationships of basal neornithischian taxa from the Late Cretaceous of North America. These new insights are accomplished through a taxonomic revision of the Maastrichtian taxa Bugenasaura and Thescelosaurus, a detailed anatomical description of the cranial anatomy of Thescelosaurus neglectus based on the referral of a specimen that includes a nearly complete skull (NCSM 15728), and description of a new basal neornithischian taxon from the Kaiparowits Formation (Campanian) of Utah. All of these new data are compiled into a dataset composed of 255 characters for 65 terminal taxa (all species exemplars) focused on assessing basal ornithischian relationships. The recovered strict consensus topology is the most highly resolved, stratigraphically congruent phylogenetic hypothesis of basal ornithischian relationships yet proposed. This analysis places all basal neornithischians except Hypsilophodon foxii outside of Cerapoda, substantially reducing the taxonomic contents of Ornithopoda. A new clade containing fourteen basal neornithischian taxa is recovered as the sister taxon to Cerapoda and includes all North American basal neornithischians from the Cretaceous. The historical biogeography of Ornithischia is also reconstructed using a method that incorporates time calibrated branch lengths that represent the implied missing fossil record of each taxon. The results of this analysis support two dispersals of neornithischian taxa into South America during the Cretaceous: one consisting of basal iguanodontians dispersing from Australia (possibly via Antarctica) and a second consisting of basal neornithischians dispersing from Asia through North America.