The condition of the sagebrush ecosystem has been declining in the Western United States, and greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), a sagebrush-obligate species, has experienced concurrent decreases in distribution and population numbers. This has prompted substantial research and management over the past two decades to improve the understanding of sage-grouse and...
Retention, the ability of an institution to retain students through degree completion, is a major concern for most colleges and universities. The current first to second year retention rate at Oregon State University (OSU) is about 80% (OUS 2008; 2011). Currently the OSU Strategic Plan includes the goal of increasing...
This dissertation explores the structural dynamics of human understanding and particularly the concept of meaning and its connections to concepts of ultimate ground, necessity and contingency, language, and perception. It focuses on the history of the concept of meaning in early twentieth-century European physics and philosophy, through an analysis of...
This dissertation is situated as the third work in a series on academic women. In 1964,
Jessie Bernard published Academic Women, which provided a comprehensive
assessment of the status of women in academia. Two decades later, in 1987, Angela
Simeone offered insight into attempts to achieve equity for women in...
On May 21, 1998 Kip Kinkel drove to Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon. Kinkel killed two students and wounded another twenty-two students. He killed his parents the day before. The shootings at Thurston High School came on the heels of a number of prominent school shootings and Kip Kinkel...
Based on the author's ethnographic research at the Karakuwa fishing community in Japan, this thesis explains a cultural process of the local people's synthesis of the values they place on nature and their everyday behavior in a modern industrial world. Explicated by ethnographic narrative, this study focuses on a revitalization...
These stories follow the lives of women in a variety of roles—housewife, deli employee, artist, bird keeper, and sitter for the elderly—and at different stages of life. In “Beneath this Roof,” a young housewife’s life is rocked by a visit from an old friend who has changed in unexpected ways....
This thesis is arranged in three main chapters, each of which focuses on a particular type of Anaїs Nin text, and each of which is intended to enlarge Nin's complexities through distinct but overlapping perspectives. The idea connecting these three chapters is that Nin, who has been radically misrepresented by...
Sororities play an important role in the process by which sorority women become gendered by influencing members' ideas about what it means to be a woman. Women and men become gendered through regular social interaction with other women and men, and sororities have a particularly strong impact on their members...