Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, English

Throughout Appalachian Ohio, residents in small post-industrial cities grapple with redefining themselves as a place and a people in order to compete in the global economy. Young people caught in the middle of this economic transition—those born after the major factory closings in the early 1980s—struggle to negotiate their relationships with their hometowns, which typically offer limited career options beyond the service sector. Listening to the stories of college students and residents from postindustrial Appalachian Ohio helps us understand the ways in which place, economics, and identity intersect in their lives. In a region where cooperation regularly makes up for a lack of resources, leaving to attend college becomes a fraught decision. Moral geographies of the region—the ways in which people position themselves in relation to people and place—are thus filled with reflections from elsewhere, constructions of self and community that are responsive to the expectations of peers, outsiders, and discourses of success and failure that influence everyday choices. Reflections from elsewhere work in two ways in this dissertation: they are both the lived negotiations of self in response to the expectations of others as well as the ways that students and residents reflect upon, evaluate, and tell stories about the ruptures that have shaped their experiences. Students' negotiations of place reveal the tensions they experience in coming from a place that is impossible to return to without the stigma of failure and to which continued belonging is possible only by habitually traversing the long-worn road home. Road stories, then, become all the more important as units of analysis, and force us to consider notions of place that cannot be defined in terms of a single locale. Contextualizing the students' evaluative discourse, I examine critical positionings staked out by the university and home communities that shed light on the ways in which economic instability strains st (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Amy Shuman (Advisor); Dorothy Noyes (Committee Member); Katherine Borland (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Folklore; Higher Education

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2015, American Culture Studies

This paper explores the untold history of the Black community of Portsmouth and Scioto County, Ohio. It provides a brief overview of the national and state level political and cultural context in which this story is told. This project is limited in both scope and in resources, and as such, while some information about Scioto County's early history in relation to Black citizens is included for context, this research is focused mainly on the struggle for integration of the Portsmouth City School system in 1885, and the larger political and cultural context in which these events took place. This story not only highlights the struggles that members of the Black community in the area have faced, but also demonstrates the abundance of Black history in Scioto County, and the causes of the erasure of this history. The folklore of the county itself, like the Floodwall Mural project's artistic summary, omits the rich Black history of the county. This paper argues the historical importance of the Black community to this particular place, a cultural and racial crossroads in the nineteenth century, and being a larger conversation about the role of Black citizens in Scioto County history. Additionally, this paper purposes to situate Portsmouth in the broader social and political culture of the nineteenth century.

Committee: Nicole Jackson PhD. (Advisor); Rebecca Mancuso PhD. (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; American History; Ethnic Studies; History

MCP, University of Cincinnati, 2008, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning : Community Planning

Portsmouth, Ohio is a small, struggling city in rural Appalachia. The population has steadily declined since its peak in 1930, in part due to the closing of industrial plants throughout the decades. Portsmouth is home to Shawnee State University, which, through university-community partnerships, is likely to be the most influential entity to the city's survival and success. Three emergent themes from both the university and community will be identified and assessed. These themes, in conjunction with a literature review and personal experience, will be used to formulate recommendations to overcome the city's barriers to economic development.

Committee: Mahyar Arefi PhD (Committee Chair); William Meyers PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Urban Planning