Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

You Have to Save Something is a collection of nonfiction essays about growing up in Appalachia as the eldest daughter in a blue-collar, working-class family. The writer narrates profound moments with her family, especially with her brothers and their friends in a small community where they gained insight into their economic place, their losses, their abilities, their father's tremendous work ethic, and their mother's depression along with her particularly harsh methods of punishment. Memory and story are often connected to and shared through treasured objects that were and remain connected to the fabric of the family's life and to the writer herself. At the heart of these essays is a fondness for the place and the people that endures throughout the writer's life and into the present day.

Committee: Elissa Washuta (Advisor) Subjects: Families and Family Life; Folklore; Social Structure

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Political Science

In discussing the intersection between business and politics, Robert Dahl claimed that there is "no dearth of important and even urgent questions." This dissertation tackles one such question: How do economic firm intervention in the development of the state influence modern outcomes? I argue that when institutions are in transition, firms and state actors both face uncertainty, and as a result, they enter an arrangement in which the state actor consistently provides the firm with public resources in return for patronage. I define this as state capture. Across my three papers, I find that when we focus on the role of firms in political development, there are widespread and long-term consequences for the state and local populations when the state is captured. Across all three of these papers, I explore these ramifications in Appalachia Kentucky. State capture is not a novel concept, but its usage is uneven and unclear, and there is no cohesive intellectual conversation. The first paper ameliorates this by taking this literature and synthesizing a concept from which we can derive clearer implications. I use Kentucky and the Appalachian coal region to explore this concept. I collect archival data to test one observable implication of the concept---lack of democratic commitment and non-competitive elections. I find the inverse of what I expect to observe, elections in Appalachia Kentucky, for the locally elected sheriff and tax commissioner are more competitive than my theory predicts. I discuss this finding considering my concept and argue that this represents a need for understanding how economic firms can influence political outcomes. The second paper applies the conceptualization of state capture more deeply to the case of Appalachia Kentucky, to create a model to better understand the region's persistent economic underdevelopment. I argue that compared to previous Appalachian development models, understanding the region's local politics as captured is empiric (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Amanda Robinson (Committee Chair); Jan Pierskalla (Committee Member); Janet Box-Steffensmeier (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy in Urban Studies and Public Affairs, Cleveland State University, 2017, Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs

The location where businesses choose to locate or re-locate their businesses, also known as site selection, is an important policy matter for economic development practitioners and academics since significant amount of resources are spent in this area. As places spend a great deal of public dollars marketing their city, region, and state to potential investors and businesses, private sector dollars from business invest a significant amount on land, labor, and capital to get these new facilities and sites up and running. To date, most of the literature as it relates to place image and business site selection decisions examine traditional factors related to the decision-making process. This dissertation presents exploratory research which for the first time summarizes this multi-disciplinary literature and deconstructs its five components into: brand, visual image, reputation, sense of place, and identity. Beyond this, this research continues to open the scholarly conversation on how locations are advertised and sold and how this marketing can affect where businesses locate their headquarters. Using a literature review, interviews, grounded theory, a survey of professionals in the field of site selection, and an analysis of the five components of place image using structural equation modeling, this research quantitatively investigates the association of place image on site selection of headquarters. In all, the analysis found that brand, visual image, and reputation have a positive effect on place image. And place image had a positive direct effect on site selection decision. Also, brand and reputation showed a stronger effect in east and west coast states, and reputation was more important for small and medium sized companies and public companies. The measures for sense of place and identity were not found significant in the model. since place image is a complicated concept and hard to quantify. In the end, this research found that the concepts of place image (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ashutosh Dixit Ph.D. (Committee Chair); William Bowen Ph.D. (Committee Member); J. Mark Souther Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Economic Theory; Marketing

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2010, Geography

As North America has undergone a shift from an industrial to a post-industrial society, the rural landscapes devastated by industrial activity (i.e. resource extraction) have begun a transition as well (ODNR 2010). In Southeast Ohio, an economically depressed and formerly environmentally degraded region, this transition can be seen in a gradual forest recovery, or “regreening” (Mather 1992). This regreening process and the decline of the extractive industry have led to a diversification of the Appalachian Ohio economy. Local people have taken advantage of the changing landscape, reasserted a claim on their region, and are pursuing alternative means of economic opportunity. This research focuses on one local initiative that exemplifies local people attempting to create a positive alternative future for their region, The Ohio Outback project. The Ohio Outback project is an initiative based on unifying Appalachian Ohio under a single brand in order to market the region more widely as a tourism destination. Through an analysis of the Ohio Outback project and its leaders, this thesis offers a rich narrative about rural economic development, connection to place, and the challenges of place-based initiatives. This thesis also addresses themes of local power and elitism in a rural America, a setting often not associated with those ideas. Through a study on the agency of rural people, this research presents a much more complex and conflicted situation than might be expected in the “backwards” countryside of Appalachian Ohio. This thesis tells a unique dual story, first explaining why the Outback program should likely have succeeded based on previous evidence from McSweeney and McChesney (2004) and three other major bodies of literature: innovation diffusion, political ecology, and sense of place. These three literatures, which rarely reference one another, are used in tandem to create the theoretical background of this research and explain the processes occurring in places (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kendra McSweeney PhD (Advisor); Linda Lobao PhD (Committee Member); Edward Malecki PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Geography

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2013, Communication Studies (Communication)

Disaster can sometimes be a time of opportunity: for reflection, reevaluation, and readjustment--for questioning the status quo. Through a case study of Wilmington, Ohio, a small Ohio town in the midst of a self-described economic disaster, I consider how organizational networks and communities constitute each other in efforts to redefine a sense of place and local identity amid large-scale unplanned change. As I explore the ways in which "community" is named and placed in micro, meso, and macro-level discourses, I am guided by the following broad questions: How do component organizations in a transorganizational network demonstrate and defend their legitimacy? How do they communicatively construct and maintain a shared vision for the future towards which to mobilize a collectivity of individuals? What opportunities for and obstacles to collaboration do community organizers encounter in their efforts to redefine the communal spaces of a town? By analyzing transorganizational narratives of crisis, disaster, and opportunity, this study strives to engage communication studies more deeply in understanding the inextricable relationship between individual, organizational, and community identity.

Committee: Laura Black Ph.D. (Advisor) Subjects: Communication