PHD, Kent State University, 2024, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Political Science

This dissertation investigates the causes of contentious politics across the Russian Federation between 2007 and 2020, with a particular focus on protests during periods of economic fluctuations. This study extends beyond the well-documented large-scale protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg to explore industrial regions and monotowns—localities dominated by one or a few industries. These areas, remnants of the Soviet era, are seemingly vulnerable to economic shocks due to their limited economic diversification and dependence on specific industries. Utilizing the relative deprivation theory, this dissertation sets out to test the hypotheses that post-Soviet Russian monotowns would see their economic protest activity vary in line with economic fluctuations and experience different protest dynamics than non-monotowns due to their contrasting economic structures. To accomplish this research, this study utilizes a newly constructed dataset I named the Russian Nationwide Protest Dataset which builds off Tomila Lankina's original dataset. Lankina's original dataset was expanded by reading and coding protest accounts from the March of Dissent news repository. This created a dataset covering protests across the Russian Federation for the years 2007 to 2020. Contrary to the expectations driven by relative deprivation theory, this dissertation concludes that protest activity in monotowns does not consistently align with economic performance. Furthermore, while protest activity varies across the country, nowhere does it fluctuate regularly with economic performance – inside or outside of monotowns. So then, what does drive economic protest across Russia? Again, beginning with an investigation into monotowns, this dissertation examines regional media coverage of protest events to show that it is often local grievances that motivate citizens to protest. Furthermore, when regional capitals and even Moscow are investigated, this study shows that protests there are also often bas (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Andrew Barnes (Committee Co-Chair); Joshua Stacher (Committee Co-Chair); Mary Ann Heiss (Committee Member); Julie Mazzei (Committee Member); Steve Crowley (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2019, History

The case of Dayton's “Fair-Share” Metropolitan Housing Plan (1969–1981) presents a challenge to several traditional narratives of (sub)urban postwar U.S. history. Planners in Greater Dayton successfully integrated the region's affordable housing stock while encouraging the Department of Housing and Urban Development (H.U.D.) to inaugurate a new era of fair housing in the wake of the failure of George Romney's Open Communities program. The Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission did so with the help of willing business elites and federal administrators, and also by adopting conservative suburban rhetoric to serve the end of metropolitan open housing. This narrative examines why business elites and the suburbs came to support the construction affordable housing outside of the city, and why fair share fair housing was adopted by H.U.D. This thesis challenges the assertion that fair housing inherently conflicts with community development. It also traces the history of metropolitan-wide fair housing to its proper origins: Dayton, Ohio. The Dayton Plan was successful on its own terms, in that it increased the affordability of suburban housing. But racial integration did not follow economic integration, as planners had assumed. This was due in large part to retrenchment in fair housing on the part of the federal government and local business elites. More specifically, the economic hollowing-out of Dayton played a role in the failure of the plan to racially integrate the suburbs—a heretofore unexplored explanation for continued metropolitan segregation in small cities of the Midwest during the decades following the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Committee: Steven Conn (Advisor); Nishani Frazier (Committee Member); Damon Scott (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; History

PHD, Kent State University, 2017, College of Education, Health and Human Services / School of Foundations, Leadership and Administration

NARDY, MARGARET T., Ph.D., May 2017 CULTURAL FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION THE COST OF URBAN CHANGE TO NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOLS: THE CASE OF YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO, 1946-1997 (200 pp.) Director of Dissertation: Vilma Seeberg, Ph.D. This study was designed to trace the phenomena that led to the degeneration of the neighborhood school system in a city in decline. Youngstown, Ohio, once a thriving, populous, steel-producing town, has been in a steady state of decline since the late 1970s. This study used socio-historical research methods and relied on selected literature primarily on how deindustrialization, suburbanization, and relevant social and education policies have affected the Youngstown school system's decline. This study argued that Youngstown's school system decline is a result of deindustrialization, suburbanization, and educational and social policies, all of which played a significant role in the dismantling of its neighborhoods and neighborhood schools. The study explored the specifics and dynamic interactions of both national and local facets of deindustrialization, suburbanization, and social policies relevant to the school system.

Committee: Vilma Seeberg PhD (Committee Chair) Subjects: Education

MA, Kent State University, 2015, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of History

Utilizing methodologies laid out by Kitch in Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past (2012), Linkon and Russo in Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown (2002), and Stanton in The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City (2006), this thesis examines how community memory affects the identity of a typical American Midwestern small town. Located in Western Pennsylvania, Greenville emerged as an industrial crossroads in the late nineteenth century linking Pittsburgh, Erie, and Cleveland via three railroad lines. After the relocation of several industries during the 1980s and `90s the community fell into decline and has since struggled. The Greenville Historical Society portrays the identity of Greenville as a transportation town, based on its history along an Erie Canal route and later as a hub for railroads. Yet for the modern community, this `transportation town' identity is but a shell of the past and a bitter reminder of what once was. Since the late twentieth century deindustrialization, there is a disconnect between the modern reality lived by the community and the historical identity reflected via local public history. Employing oral histories in comparison to primary and secondary sources, such as newspapers and town and county histories, this thesis examines several elements centered on community memory and small town history by focusing on how the community makes sense of its past and the importance of the town's history to the community's identity. Taking a `bottom-up' approach and focusing on the community as central to the story by drawing from social histories like Russo's Families and Communities: A New View of American History (1974), where he suggests that until the twentieth century, the “local community exerted the most profound and comprehensive influence on the lives of Americans,” Crucifix of Memory will examine three pivotal points within the history of Greenville. Chapter one will discuss the ea (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kenneth Bindas Ph.D. (Advisor); Leslie Heaphy Ph.D. (Committee Member); Donna Deblasio Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: History; Urban Planning

MCP, University of Cincinnati, 2007, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning : Community Planning

The Village of Lockland, Ohio is a small, first-ring suburb approximately twelve miles outside of the city core of Cincinnati. This Village of 3,700 residents is also considered an aging, industrial town because of its history of manufacturing companies and mills. Located directly adjacent to Interstate 75, which used to be the Miami-Erie Canal, Lockland has recently suffered from deindustrialization, unemployment and depopulation. Through use of Economic Base Analysis and other methods, the future prospects and economic feasibility of Lockland are analyzed and recommendations for further development are given.

Committee: David Edelman (Advisor) Subjects: Urban and Regional Planning

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2012, History

Local civil rights organizations of Columbus, Ohio, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Columbus Urban League, and the Teenage Action Group, served as the engine for urban educational reform in the mid 1960s. Activists challenged the Columbus School District to create equality of educational opportunity for its black residents. But civil rights groups ran up against a socially conservative city and school district that had little interest in dismantling the unequal neighborhood school system. Racial tensions ran high as African Americans faced persistent discrimination in employment, access to public accommodations, housing, and schooling. Frustrated by an intransigent district, which spurned even moderate reforms proposed by the NAACP and continued with its unequal school construction policy, the Columbus Urban League presented a radically democratic proposal in 1967. The document reimagined the image of the city by simultaneously challenging both racial and class-based barriers, primarily through the concept of the educational park—large K-12 campuses consisting of centralized resources and thousands of students. The school board snubbed this new civil rights initiative as they had with all previous proposals and instead commissioned a report by the Ohio State University in 1968. The OSU Advisory Commission on Problems Facing the Columbus Public Schools presented incremental, targeted reforms to specific issues only and thus perpetuated the district's traditional resistance to reform. In essence, by drawing on legitimized social science professionals, the district manufactured support to maintain the city's historical unequal school system. In the end, although Columbus was a relatively economically stable city and did not experience the deindustrialization of its rustbelt brethren, meaningful school reform proved impossible despite the best efforts of several civil rights orga (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Steven Conn PhD (Advisor); Daniel Amsterdam PhD (Committee Member); Kevin Boyle PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; American History; Black History; Education History; Education Policy; Land Use Planning; Public Policy; School Finance; Urban Planning

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, City and Regional Planning

This dissertation presents five essays dealing with the utilization and abandonment of a city's assets, in particular two key assets: agglomeration economies and legacy capital. The first essay traces out the causes and effects of agglomeration economies by disentangling economies of agglomeration. It disentangles amenity and productivity effects of agglomeration; it decomposes aggregate scale effects into agglomeration factors of interest to policy makers; and it estimates own effects and spillovers to neighbors. It proposes a spatial simultaneous equations model in a spatial equilibrium framework with three agents – worker consumers and producers of traded goods and housing. Results for Ohio counties estimate economies resulting from population size, agglomeration causes, and public service quality and cost on each of the three agents in own and neighboring counties. The second essay theoretically models the abandonment and reuse of legacy capital in the process of industrial restructuring. It aims to identify the conditions for abandonment and the factors that determine the length of abandonment. The model is based on investment theory and game theory. It shows that abandonment is impacted by conversion costs of legacy capital, the rate of growth of industries involved in the restructuring, and policy variables such as tax rate. The third essay empirically verifies the theoretical model developed in the second essay, using data of industrial and commercial properties (ICPs) in the Cleveland city-region in Ohio. It shows that in declining industries or regions, ICPs experience tax delinquency of longer duration and are more likely to be abandoned than elsewhere. Also, ICPs with higher conversion costs are more likely to experience longer spells of tax delinquency and are more likely to be abandoned than others. Abandoned ICPs are spatially concentrated either as a result of negative spillovers or shared history. The fourth essay theoretically models the extern (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Burkhard von Rabenau (Committee Chair); Jean-Michel Guldmann (Committee Member); Philip Viton (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics; Urban Planning

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2010, Geography (Arts and Sciences)

Globalization has transformed the economic landscape, as activities have become increasingly organized into networked spaces. Positionality, the relative power of actors within these networks, becomes an important element in understanding globalization. This study employs network positionality as a guiding framework to analyze the decline of Muncie, Indiana, a small city typical of the U.S. manufacturing region. Analysis of the city positionality is based on an examination of key companies that led the city economy, and provided its main connection point to economic networks. As in many small cities, Muncie's leading companies have been mostly branch plants of larger firms, so the city positionality is mediated first through firm networks, then industries, and wider economic networks. Examining the decline of the city's leading companies through this framework allows added nuance in understanding the city's deindustrialization. I conclude that Muncie's positionality has weakened, and connections have been severed.

Committee: Yeong-Hyun Kim (Advisor); Risa Whitson (Committee Member); Harold Perkins (Committee Member) Subjects: Geography

MA, Kent State University, 2010, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of History

This study investigates the Shenango China company of New Castle, Pennsylvania in its years of decline prior to its 1991 shutdown. Shenango China began operations in 1901 and enjoyed steady success until a lawsuit brought the plant out of family hands into a series of outside corporate owners which led to its closure. Through historical investigation of the meanings of failure, both physical and psychological, this thesis outlines Shenango's efforts to avoid their own demise in three ways. The first attempts are seen in the work of Shenango's management within the plant. The company's leadership actively promoted new products and designs to improve sales as well as renovations of the production facility and incentive promotions for salesmen, workers, and customers to keep up with a growing market of domestic and foreign competition. The dissemination and promotion of its public image through advertising make up another crucial aspect of Shenango's efforts to avoid failure. Through examination of advertisements for its subsidiary Castleton China, Shenango's overall failure is seen as a parallel to the decline in its public image as subsequent owners of the company reduced its outward appearance along with its autonomy. Finally, the viewpoints of Shenango's workforce are explored to see the effects of failure on workforce morale in the plant's declining years and how memory serves to create a narrative about the plant's success and failure. In conclusion, the attempts of Shenango China to avoid failure are compared with the overall decline in industry in the region known as the Rust Belt and the social effects of deindustrialization on the population and quality of life in areas such as New Castle that have lost their industrial base since the 1970s and face uncertain futures going through the twenty-first century.

Committee: Kenneth Bindas PhD (Advisor); John Jameson PhD (Committee Member); Donna DeBlasio PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Economic History; History; Modern History; Social Research

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2007, American Culture Studies/Popular Culture

This dissertation examines the process of deindustrialization in an urban Appalachian community from a cultural perspective. Many initial studies concerning the effects of deindustrialization on Appalachian communities concluded that these communities were ultimately devastated. Appalachian culture was too brittle, culturally backwards, and therefore unable to withstand the shock of such an economic disaster. These studies failed to consider what subtle forms of coping mechanisms existed in the workplace before deindustrialization, and what overt forms of resistance were utilized by economically dispossessed workers after the deindustrialization process. In the 1980s, the Owens-Illinois Glass manufacturing plant in Huntington, West Virginia was significantly downsized, and in the early 1990s the glass manufacturing plant was permanently closed due to the deindustrialization process. This dissertation challenges the notion that Owens-Illinois workers in Huntington, West Virginia were “culturally backward,” and therefore ultimately defeated by the deindustrialization process. Utilizing the works of Michel de Certeau, and analyzing a series of oral histories of deindustrialized Owens-Illinois glass workers in Huntington, West Virginia, this paper proposes that former glass workers in Huntington, West Virginia creatively coped with their often tedious work environments during full employment, and later developed overt forms of resistance to the deindustrialization process.

Committee: Donald McQuarie (Advisor) Subjects: