Master of Arts (MA), Wright State University, 2025, International and Comparative Politics

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the dominant force in contemporary Indian politics. It has swept past the founding and former dominant India National Congress (INC) party in maintaining control over the nation since 2014. That is with the primary exception of South India, where the BJP has failed to gain a significant foothold outside of the southern state of Karnataka. This thesis seeks to understand why the BJP has failed to appeal to the electorate and gain power in much of South India, at the state as well as federal levels. The thesis seeks to answer this question through the examination of the local, regional, state, and national parties. The thesis also examines macro-economic factors, demographic idiosyncrasies, and linguistic and cultural differences between the South of India and the rest of the country as possible explanatory variables to explain the BJP's continuing challenge.

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2025, Art

Herself, A Wild Thing is a slurry of history both personal and collective to investigate socio-ecological connections between patriarchal domination of nature and women—a foray into the crossroads of myth and memory. It is an exploration of the animalization of women and feminization of nature used to justify their mutual exploitation. The research delves into the histories of wolf extermination and reintroduction in the Northern Rockies region of the United States and how those practices have shaped both the past and present of the American West. Collective efforts towards rewilding, reforestation, and reintroduction of keystone species into damaged ecosystems tell a tale of regret and reconciliation. The scale of environmental destruction waylaid upon the West is incomprehensible. Mountains leveled for capital profit, pit mines opened like great yawning mouths, entire populations eradicated out of fear. This paper explores that morbid past and present through an ecofeminist lens.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2025, City and Regional Planning

In this Dissertation I examines some of the most important urban shifts happening in the U.S. cities and metropolitan areas. First, I examine the role of gentrification in displacing lower income households using the case of Columbus, Ohio. Then I assess the recent changes in suburban sprawl and finally analyze the relationship between the rise in gentrification and the slow-down of urban sprawl across the US. These urban processes are connected in many ways, I focus on how changing residential mobility patterns interplay with the significant shifts in gentrification and urban sprawl. My findings show a strong relationship between gentrification and the displacement of the vulnerable households and that these households face housing choice constraints leaving them to live in worse housing conditions even when in better neighborhoods. While these households are pushed out of their neighborhoods, the in-migration of higher income replacing the displaced households is contributing to another type of urban shift. My findings indicate that the demographic and economic upgrade happening in the city is significantly connected to a decrease in the rates of sprawl growth. Thus, gentrification is considered one of the factors among other factors that are changing urban growth patterns. My findings also confirm the urban change towards more compact and dense developments and less sprawl compared to the earlier era of rapid expansion and wide spread of urban sprawl.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2025, Slavic and East European Studies

There has been a significant rise in right-wing populism throughout Europe and the United States in recent years. Focusing specifically on the Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, PiS) government's tenure from 2015 to 2023, this thesis explores the ways in which the right-wing populist party used historical memory and national identity to influence cultural policy and public cultural institutions. The close examination of right-wing populism in Poland is set in the context of the broader right-wing populist trend in Europe, the complexity of populism as a political phenomenon, and the history of Poland, which is critical to understanding the contemporary politics in the country. This research provides an overview of the major cultural policies PiS introduced and how the party and its leaders used Polish historical memory and national identity as a tool to rationalize the policies. Ultimately, I highlight the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk as a case study of how right-wing populists work to maintain a monopoly on not only cultural institutions, but their narratives and what they proclaim about the nation's identity as well.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2025, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

With more than 55% of the global population now living in cities and 68% projected by 2050, urbanization generates tremendous societal benefits. However, cities are embedded within the natural environment; they affect and are affected by natural systems, including increasing impacts of pollution, natural disasters, and climate change. Urbanization is also a long-term process involving urban development and redevelopment, environmental degradation and restoration, and other neighborhood changes that are spurred by spatial spillovers among people and firms and shaped by public policies. This dissertation studies these spatial interactions and their implications for social welfare and policy. The first chapter examines the gentrification effect of the Atlanta BeltLine, an urban redevelopment project that transforms the former railway corridor into a multi-use trail with urban and environmental amenities. I build a quantitative spatial equilibrium model with heterogeneous labor to characterize income sorting in response to amenity increases due to the BeltLine, calibrated to match observed housing price rises. I find that this amenity rise disproportionately attracts high-skilled over low-skilled residents and alters the welfare distribution both across regions and income groups, leading to significant neighborhood change and gentrification. Increasing land supply by relaxing zoning regulations can mitigate the gentrification induced by the BeltLine. In the second chapter, I investigate the extent to which roads and highways expand the spatial scale of urban areas in China. To overcome the potential endogeneity problem, I employ the 1962 highway network as the instrumental variable and take advantage of several measurements of urbanized areas. The two-stage least-squares results show that the lengths of roads and highways within a city have a positive effect on the spatial scale of urban areas. The IV quantile regression confirms that for cities with a larger scale of (open full item for complete abstract)

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2024, Antioch New England: Environmental Studies

Climate change presents an unprecedented challenge to global agriculture and food security. Small farms are especially vulnerable to the local impacts of large-scale drivers of change. Effective adaptation in agriculture requires working across scales, and geographic, political, and disciplinary boundaries to address barriers. I use elements of case study, agent-based modeling and serious games, to design a model of farmer decision-making using the sociocognitive framework of climate change adaptation. I examine how adaptation functions as a process, how complex dynamics influence farmer behavior, and how individual decisions influence collective behavior in response to climate change. This novel approach to adaptation research in agriculture examines the relationships between the contextual, compositional, and cognitive elements of the sociocognitive theory. The tools developed for this research have broad practical and theoretical future applications in climate adaptation research and policymaking. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

Chapter 1 investigates whether improved transit opportunities increase income of nearby residents by improving access to work opportunities. To explore this hypothesis, I employ a difference-in-differences model combined with matching to examine the effects of constructing a light rail transit line on median-household income for affected neighborhoods in the Twin Cities, Minnesota (Minneapolis and state capital St. Paul). I find increased income in "treated" neighborhoods and test whether that increase applies to "incumbent" residents (i.e., original residents pre-rail construction). The findings indicate a significant increase in median household income in neighborhoods close to the new transit line, as well as a decrease in the nonemployment rate, and some evidence of higher wages and longer working hours. I also appraise whether the new transit line led to gentrification, finding no evidence of either gentrification or neighborhood decline. These findings indicate that the increase in median-household income results from incumbent labor-market upgrading and supports the idea that improved transit access benefited many nearby residents. Yet, I find poverty rates are unchanged, suggesting that improved public transit is ineffective in helping the poorest, i.e., benefits are concentrated among those above the poverty line. Chapter 2 quantifies the effects of highways on labor productivity isolating the indirect effects through urban sprawl. Transport networks have significant impacts on human activity and are closely linked to urban development as a very important part of public investment. It is widely accepted that highways can reshape the city structure by expanding the city areas and by affecting urban sprawl. Those changed urban structures inevitably have effects on labor productivity. However, different directions of driving forces of highways on city development render their effects on productivity ambiguous. Most of studies only estimate an overall effe (open full item for complete abstract)

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2024, Leadership and Change

The study sought to ascertain whether introducing democracy has adversely impacted Indigenous cultural practices in Ghana or whether the path to democracy has enhanced, shaped, or strengthened aspects of the country's Indigenous culture. The study sheds some light on the realistic, symbolic, and pervasive threat(s) that transitional or Indigenous societies like Ghana undergoing the process of democratization face and must deal with. More specifically, the study provides some insights into how traditional societies, where Indigenous values and practices are held with some reverence and esteem, can be integrated into liberal democratic institutions to potentially ameliorate cultural tension and political discord that often accompanies the process of democratic and electoral transitions. The study also provides a rich context to explain and dispel some of the pernicious stereotypes and perceptions about countries that strive to build a suitable system of governance by combining aspects of their Indigenous culture and liberal democratic tenets. The primary scholarly contribution of the study is a greater understanding of how Indigenous cultural norms, as informal institutions, shape the trajectory and consolidation of democratization in sub-Saharan Africa. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, History

This dissertation examines how reformist (1989-1992) and communist (1994-1997) activist groups—holding diametrically opposing ideological views—made sense of the transition period from the Ukrainian SSR to independent Ukraine in Dnipropetrovsk print media. The main argument of the dissertation is that the two activist groups participated in the formation of a Dnipropetrovsk-specific variety of civic Ukrainian nationalism, by depicting Dnipropetrovsk political elites as an existential threat to Ukraine's sovereignty and deputizing themselves in the threat response. This blend of civic nationalism helps to explain how the Russophone, industrial Dnipropetrovsk in eastern Ukraine became a bulwark of Ukrainian patriotism and resistance to Russia's invasion of Ukraine since 2014. Dnipropetrovsk residents saw Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a threat to their regional identity, which first developed in the transition period based on the presumption that Dnipropetrovsk would play a coequal role to Kyiv in the political trajectory of the Ukrainian state. Source material for the dissertation includes the activists' periodicals, key officials' autobiographies, and other published works. Historians have noted that Dnipropetrovsk served an important supportive role in the official narratives of state prestige in the Tsarist Imperial and Soviet periods. The tumultuousness of the transition period, combined with the political and economic influence of Dnipropetrovsk vis-a-vis Kyiv, emboldened the two activist groups to claim an unprecedented coequal role to the state in shaping the official narrative of national prestige.

Doctor of Philosophy in Urban Studies and Public Affairs, Cleveland State University, 2024, Levin College of Public Affairs and Education

This dissertation investigates the restructuring process of regional economic development in US metropolitan areas through detailed analyses of the persistence of traditional technological innovations and their complex interplay with high-tech innovations. The dissertation is structured into three interconnected essays that address key issues: the sustainability of innovation in traditional fields, the impact of regional knowledge structures around traditional fields on high-tech innovation, and the potential for high-tech innovation capabilities to foster innovation in traditional fields. The first essay examines whether regions historically specialized in traditional technological fields can sustain innovation in these fields amidst stagnant population and economic growth. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that economic and population declines necessarily lead to diminished innovation, the findings reveal the enduring significance of traditional technological innovation for regional economies. The second essay investigates how diverse knowledge structures surrounding traditional fields can bolster a region's capacity to innovate within high-tech fields. This chapter highlights that, regions with a broader mix of patenting activities across both related and unrelated traditional technological sub-categories tend to exhibit higher innovation growth in high-tech fields, thereby demonstrating a stronger capacity for economic restructuring. Conversely, a high level of specialization in patenting within specific traditional sub-categories may hinder a region's ability to restructure effectively. The third essay assesses the potential for robust innovation capabilities in high-tech fields to enhance innovation in traditional fields. This notion challenges the traditional linear perspective of technological progression from traditional to high-tech fields. The results suggest instead a relationship where strong high-tech innovation capabilities stimulate inn (open full item for complete abstract)

Bachelor of Science of Journalism (BSJ), Ohio University, 2024, Journalism

Football is a fickle game. Men throw pads on and hit each other, for hours at a time. However, when you take the game away from the communities in Southeast Ohio, you see that football means much more than just a "game". When you strip away the game, you get stories of a man who rose from the 740 to national prominence, a story of a legacy forged on skulls, and coaching greatness passed down from father to son. That is the tale of Friday Night Legacies.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2024, Media and Communication

The World Bank classifies the Lebanese economic crisis as one of the 10 worst such crises globally since the 19th century—and possibly one of the top three. Azma fawq ‘azma [crisis upon crisis] includes financial collapse, inability to care for 1.5 million refugees, the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic on an already fragile healthcare system, and the catastrophic explosion in Beirut, one of the worst non-nuclear explosions in human history, that killed 218 people, injured 7,000, and left 300,000 unhoused. Due to unprecedented levels of inflation, the Lebanese pound has lost 90% of its value, food prices have risen 500%, and 80% of the population lives in poverty. These crises have transformed Lebanon from a beacon of success to a failed state. Given the severe lack of organizational communication research in the Mashreq (Middle East), this dissertation is of particular importance as it fills a critical gap in research. The dissertation takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine how NGOs mobilize support, provide services, and engage in interorganizational collaboration to support citizens, residents, and asylum seekers struggling to survive in Lebanon. The triangulated methodological approach includes policy analysis, two phases of field research in Lebanon, and in-depth interviews with leaders, administrators, employees, and volunteers representing 52 NGOs. Interview respondents (n = 64) provided first-hand experiences, insights, and assessments of NGOs' efforts to combat intersecting crises, reflected on the complexity of these crises, and highlighted the need for economic and political reform to assuage the feelings of being trapped in the azma fawq ‘azma. Emergent themes include the importance of collective identity through interorganizational collaboration, the benefits of group cohesion in providing support and services, a sense of purpose that has expanded alongside the crises, a continuing (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2024, American Culture Studies

This dissertation explores the role of democracy promotion in US foreign intervention with a particular focus on the weaponization of media and civil society by two important US democracy promotion institutions, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and US Agency for International Development (USAID). Focusing on these two institutions and building on scholarship that takes a critical Gramscian Marxist perspective on US democracy promotion, this study brings media imperialism and deep political scholarship into the conversation. Delimiting the study to focus on US activities, I trace historical patterns of intellectual warfare and exceptional states of violence and lawlessness pursued by the US government in case studies of foreign intervention in which democracy promotion has played an important part since 1983. I survey the evolution of elite US Cold War conceptions of managed democracy as well as transformations of covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) media and civil society operations into institutionalized, pseudo-overt US democracy promotion that became a foundational pretext and method for US interventionism post-Cold War. Case studies include the Contra War in 1980s Nicaragua, Operation Cyclone in 1980s Afghanistan, the 2000 overthrow of Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic, the 2002 military coup against Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, the 2004 coup against Haitian president Bertrand Aristide, and the 2014 Euromaidan Coup against Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. I dedicate the penultimate chapter to US-led intervention in the Syrian Civil War that began in 2011, demonstrating how USAID provided instrumental monetary, media, and civil society support to primarily sectarian, theocratic, Salafi rebels against the Ba'athist government. Throughout the dissertation, I argue that the NED and USAID represent important engines of intellectual warfare in US foreign intervention, mobilizing communications and organizational resources to reinf (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy in Urban Education, Cleveland State University, 2023, College of Education and Human Services

Urban ethnic churches across the nation continue to be beacons of light in communities throughout the United States. The people within have endured the same centralized struggles found in every impoverished urban neighborhood, be it crime or gentrification. Many, like the millions of Latinos across America, find respite in belonging to ethnic spaces where they can preserve parts of their cultural identities as they navigate the duality of their culture, what it means to be Latino, while navigating acculturation, what it means to be American. Whether they are immigrants, English Language Learners, or second-and-third-generation Latinos, the meaning-making found in faith-based affinity groups, like ethnic churches, where faith and ethnicity intersect, can serve as a source for understanding leadership and social mobility among minority groups. The leaders of these communities, or pastors, have a unique ability to function as transformational leaders, gatekeepers of social capital, and agents of social and economic advancement in addition to their role as spiritual leaders. This hermeneutic phenomenological study conducted in the Midwest region of the United State States, questions whether urban pastors perceive themselves as social and economic transformational agents, and how keen they are on discovering the meaning-making that happens within the walls of their often small but mighty congregations. When urban Latina/o pastors and their churches discover the intersection of their ethnic and religious identity and their ability to use their social capital through trust (Coleman, 1988), networks (Bourdieu, 1986), and resources (Putman, 2000), they may not only empower their congregations spiritually but also socially and economically.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2023, Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies

The Romani people are arguably the most ostracized group in Europe. This thesis examines how their minority status intersects with the vulnerability factors for human trafficking. Romania serves as the location of my research as it is not only a dominant sending country of trafficking victims, but it also has the largest Roma population in Europe. My research provides an overview of trafficking in Romani communities, the responses of the Romanian government, non-government organizations (NGOs), and anti-trafficking groups in Romania. I analyze data on the Roma community's access to state services, Roma socioeconomic status, Roma migration patterns, and anti-Roma sentiment among civil society and state actors in order to explain why the Roma are at higher risk of being trafficked. I employ a labor market and human rights approach to anti-trafficking in order to 1) formulate more appropriate responses to anti-trafficking efforts and Roma inclusion initiatives and 2) challenge the notion that human trafficking in Romani communities is inherently a Roma, or ethnocultural, problem.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, English

This project focuses on historical and contemporary print cultures of the Ozarks, highlighting the vernacular dimensions of print and its connection with ideas of place and history. Rather than centering popular publications with broad circulation, I take a folkloristic approach to investigate how people collect and share information, news, traditions, and knowledge through everyday genres of print. The three primary case studies examined here include regional folk magazines from the mid-twentieth century, the newsletters of a lesbian social club at the century's end, and the digitized newspaper of a small Missouri town from a hundred years in the past. Each case study brings together scholarship from folklore and print culture studies, symbolized through the application of a conceptual pair tied to each discipline: region and assemblage; genre and network; and, finally, performance and news. By exploring the conceptual pair within each case study, I demonstrate how an interdisciplinary dialogue can address the connections between print technologies and local traditions. Tracing the ongoing remediation of oral tradition and older media genres and technologies, I uncover cross-temporal layering in the experience of rural regionality. At stake in this investigation of rural print culture is the concept of regionality: how mobile and dispersed place-based networks of access, resources, and communication are actualized and sustained. The study of rural print culture can help us better understand the ways in which people make use of print, both as a technology and as a modality tied to history and tradition, to envision and negotiate regional narratives in creative and unexpected ways.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

Sustainability assessment is increasingly important due to concerns over increasing carbon damages and declining natural capital stocks. However, regional assessment is difficult due to lack of data and measurement, as well as theoretical issues due to how people and resources flow across space. The Inclusive Wealth (IW) framework offers a comprehensive approach to measuring the components of regional social welfare as the aggregate value of all capital assets in the region, and non-declining social welfare proxied by non-declining IW is defined as weak sustainability. In my three essays, I expand on the IW literature by creating novel regional estimates using the ideas of spatial equilibrium to estimate human capital, include population change within IW, and explain the spatial inequality of IW. Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for subsequent chapters by generating new regional measurements of human and health human capital by separating out the effect of health on productivity and increased well-being. I account for the inter-relationship between education and health, control for local amenities and sorting, and account for the impact of ecosystem services and social capital on health quality. I find that 47\% of counties are declining in total human capital from 2010-2017, the primary component of these declines is declining health quality which gets capitalized into productivity. These results emphasize urban-rural differences in human capital investment because a similar proportion of urban and rural counties are declining in health quality, but urban counties are able to compensate with increases in education to offset declines in health quality for productivity. Chapter 2 builds on Chapter 1 and creates an expanded IW regional framework which accounts for endogenous population and the interdependence of population and capital stock flows. I then empirically implement this approach to estimate the impact of exogenous population growth through agglomeratio (open full item for complete abstract)

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2023, Geography

In the face of past, present, and future environmental injustice in central Appalachia, mothers have been on the front lines of resistance to extractive industry. Scholars have acknowledged this pattern, yet no substantive research on why motherhood is invoked so often as a discursive tool has been completed. This thesis examines the factors which have led central Appalachian women activists to use motherhood in their activism and analyze the discourse's strengths and weaknesses.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Music

Despite hostile political conditions, a vibrant queer cultural scene formed in Appalachia during the 2010s. LGBTQ “pride organizations” in small West Virginia towns used concerts, block parties, and parades for community-building and activism. Local musicians and performers participated in this activity, reshaping local creative and cultural economies to create space for queer performance. Appalachian musicians queered traditional genres and participated in regional cultural activism as well as the national emergence of “queer country” as a network and genre formation. Through these activities, coalitions formed to support local communities through direct and mutual aid, intervene in municipal politics, and participate in statewide political activism. This project uses collaborative ethnography, oral history, documents from archives and the press, and digital/social media analysis to examine how queer socio- musical activities generate LGBTQ communities and activism in Appalachia. It develops a situated theory of queer listening to examine how place and mobility inflect queer identity, community, and aesthetics. Arguing for an attentiveness to audibility politics, the project is a case study that illuminates how queer aesthetics sound out and mobilize grassroots coalitional activism in the United States.

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2023, Political Science (Arts and Sciences)

The Chechens & Chechen national movement have a turbulent history with Russia which includes assassinations, staged bombings, two-wars, and genocide. The separatist movement itself has seen both its highs and lows, but when failed at certain points in history, transformed into other types of identity movements. This thesis uses public theologies framework to analyze how this transformation happened and argues that what exactly the movement transforms into varies on the time period, the space the movements operate in, and the spiritual meanings associated with belonging and nationalism. It identifies three distinct public theologies of belonging among the Chechens: those of the nationalist-separatists; jihadis; and the Kadyrov followers.