Resilience to Climate Change: An Ethnographic Approach

Global projections for climate change impacts produce a startling picture of the future for low-lying coastal communities. The United States’ Chesapeake Bay region and especially marginalized and rural communities will be severely impacted by sea level rise and other changes over the next one hundred years. The concept of resilience has been theorized as a measure of social-ecological system health and as a unifying framework under which people can work together towards climate change adaptation. But it has also been critiqued for the way in which it does not adequately take into account local perspective and experiences, bringing into question the value of this concept as a tool for local communities. We must be sure that the concerns, weaknesses, and strengths of particular local communities are part of the climate change adaptation, decision-making, and planning process in which communities participate. An example of this type of planning process is the Deal Island Marsh and Community Project (DIMCP), a grant funded initiative to build resilience within marsh ecosystems and communities of the Deal Island Peninsula area of Maryland (USA) to environmental and social impacts from climate change. I argue it is important to have well-developed understandings of vulnerabilities and resiliencies identified by local residents and others to accomplish this type of work. This dissertation explores vulnerability and resilience to climate change using an engaged and ethnographic anthropological perspective. Utilizing participant observation, semi-structured and structured interviews, text analysis, and cultural domain analysis I produce an in-depth perspective of what vulnerability and resilience means to the DIMCP stakeholder network. Findings highlight significant vulnerabilities and resiliencies inherent in the local area and how these interface with additional vulnerabilities and resiliencies seen from a nonlocal perspective. I conclude that vulnerability and resilience are highly dynamic and context-specific for the local community. Vulnerabilities relate to climate change and other social and environmental changes. Resilience is a long-standing way of life, not a new concept related specifically to climate change. This ethnographic insight into vulnerability and resilience provides a basis for stronger engagement in collaboration and planning for the future.

Identification and assessment of potential wind energy project sites in the State of Maryland

Gemstone Team Renewables

Lukas Foss's The Prairie (1942): Building Community through Music

Lukas Foss's The Prairie, a seven-movement cantata for SATB soloists, mixed chorus, and orchestra, is a well-crafted and audience-friendly setting of the poem of the same name by Carl Sandburg. Acclaimed at its 1944 premiere, The Prairie has not enjoyed a robust performance history due in large part to numerous inconsistencies between the score and parts which render the work challenging to perform. Heretofore, each conductor has individually located these inconsistencies and made the necessary adjustments for performances. In this document, resources have been assembled which identify and correct many of the inconsistencies, thus facilitating more performances in the future. The Prairie is an ideal vehicle for a project-based chorus, which is itself an opportunity to create a new community. A correlation may exist between "community" and "vulnerability;" that is, when a choral singer feels comfortably connected to fellow singers, he or she may be more likely to open up to new ways of making sounds for the ultimate service of the music. Results are inconclusive, but the project points to a successful strategy for creating an affirming new community and to positive musical and nonmusical results of intentional community-building.

Dissonant Belonging and the Making of Community: Native Hawaiian Claims to Selfhood and Home

In 1898 the United States illegally annexed the Hawaiian Islands over the protests of Queen Liliʽuokalani and the Hawaiian people. American hegemony has been deepened in the intervening years through a range of colonizing practices that alienate Kanaka Maoli, the indigenous people of Hawaiʽi, from their land and culture. Dissonant Belonging and the Making of Community is an exploration of contemporary Hawaiian peoplehood that reclaims indigenous conceptions of multiethnicity from colonizing narratives of nation and race. Drawing from archival holdings at the University of Hawaiʽi, Mānoa and in-depth interviews, this project offers an analysis of public and everyday discourses of nation, race, and peoplehood to trace the discursive struggle over Local identity and politics. A context-specific social formation in Hawaiʽi, “Local” is commonly understood as a multiethnic identity that has its roots in working-class, ethnic minority culture of the mid-twentieth century. However, American discourses of race and, later, multiethnicity have functioned to render invisible the indigenous roots of this social formation. Dissonant Belonging and the Making of Community reclaims these roots as an important site of indigenous resistance to American colonialism. It traces, on the one hand, the ways in which Native Hawaiian resistance has been alternately erased and appropriated. On the other hand, it explores the meanings of Local identity to Native Hawaiians and the ways in which indigenous conceptions of multiethnicity enabled a thriving community under conditions of colonialism.