Mall after mall was built in American cities, exhaustively emulated by developers often working in concert with civic governments. In service of capital, neoliberal urban governance engages in the risky subsidization of spatio-spectacle production, working together with private business entities to bolster tax revenue and aid in private capital accumulation. The extensive replication of malls in close geographic proximity to one another across the American landscape, erected through the neoliberal partnerships of civic governments and private business interests, has greatly contributed to mall decline and mall death. There is now, however, a new spatio-spectacle that has arisen to take the place of the "great American shopping mall"—the luxury mixed-use development. These luxury mixed-use projects have been adopted as a new trend within urban development following the reality of sweeping mall decline and are proliferating across the (sub)urban landscape. Luxury mixed-use developments, I argue, are merely a continuation of late capitalism's problematic spectacle fetish. Moreover, this process is revealed to be inextricably entangled with gentrification, driven by cities' neoliberal desires to become/maintain status as global, "world-class" cities, performed through the spatialized ideology of neoliberal multiculturalism.

The production of Hate, albeit a historical, long-existing, and relentless process, has been reinvigorated by the simultaneously globalizing and localizing power of cyberspace. Techno-capitalism, often perceived as the actuating force of neoliberal globalization, has emanated novel formations of social interaction, community formation, the dissemination of ideology, and political mobilization. Far-right ideology is being globalized throughout popular social cyberspaces like YouTube by thought leaders or ideological entrepreneurs, while users then localize within alternative social cyberspaces like Gab, wherein their beliefs are reaffirmed, identities are consolidated, and communities are formed. This process is integral to the materialization of far-right extremism, manifested as political action in real, physical space, and thus, illuminates new expressions of real virtuality, various politics of scale, and contemporary consequences of neoliberal globalization.

This thesis interrogates sense of place and place attachment in the Big Empty on the north central Texas plains. The region stretches from the Red River on the north to the Colorado River basin on the south and from the Cross Timbers on the east to the Caprock escarpment on the west. Since 1930, the Big Empty has seen sustained and severe population decline such that some counties there now register less than a quarter the population they did at their peaks during the interwar years. Through in-depth field interviews, I examine sense of place and place attachment amidst apparently irreversible decline. I also describe conditions of postindustrial rurality arising from rolling reconfigurations of economic and social relations, particularly changes in scale in farming and the diminished centrality of productivist agriculture in local economies and culture, and how these conditions become legible through the study of place.

Ethnic and religious conflict, and the deepening of capitalism have led to global diaspora at unprecedented levels. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that as of 2015, 1 in every 122 persons worldwide were either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. The U.S. currently admits the largest number of refugees worldwide. However, policies fail to reflect the multitude of elements that constitute successful resettlement. Moreover, many refugees come from farming backgrounds and are forced to migrate to a landless urban environment, where their skill sets may not be utilized and farm land is not available. I argue that existing resettlement processes are embedded in logics and practices that alienate humans from nature and from each other through competition, isolation, and placeless environments. Through an exploration in concepts of urban agriculture, place-making, identity, and otherness, and illuminating the experiences of resettled refugees involved in a community gardening project in Fort Worth, Texas, show how the urban refugee garden provides the individual a space to narrate an identity, and to resist industrial agriculture and labor outside their industry. Exploring best practices in resettlement should be a priority to governments, politicians, and communities involved in the process and highlight the …

Just and equitable responses to the disparate impacts of climate change on communities and individuals throughout the world are at the heart of the concept of climate justice. Commodification, in the context of my research, is the process of monetizing nature and livelihoods for the purpose of surplus accumulation and profit maximization. In this study, my aim was to contextualize the concepts of climate injustice, disaster capitalism, and the commodification of lives and livelihoods in the specific setting of disaster vulnerability in southwest coastal Bangladesh. By conducting a case study in Kamarkhola and Sutarkhali regions of southwest coastal Bangladesh, I utilized discourse analysis and content analysis of livelihood interviews, semi-structured interviews, and policy documents to demonstrate the conceptual interrelation among global climate change, climate injustice, disaster capitalism, and capitalist expansion in environmentally precarious areas. I argue that in Southwest Coastal Bangladesh, the vulnerability to disasters stems from a complex and multifaceted layer of social hierarchies and inequalities, entwined with factors such as class and power relations. I also argue that Inequalities in the political, economic, and social realms have a key role in imposing vulnerability on disadvantaged people living in ecologically vulnerable areas. The perpetuation of inequality is sustained by …

In 2006, the United States Congress passed the Pandemic All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) which mandated that all emergency preparedness planning shall address at-risk populations. Further, in 2013, the reauthorization of this act, known as PAHPRA, defined at-risk individuals as "children, older adults, pregnant women, and individuals who may need additional response assistance." This vague definition leaves emergency managers, planners, and public health officials with the difficult task of understanding what it means to be at-risk. Further, once identified, the geographic location of at-risk individuals must be obtained. This research first uses the concept of social vulnerability to enhance the understanding of what it means to be "at-risk." Then, by comparing two data disaggregation techniques, areal weighted interpolation and dasymetric mapping, I demonstrate how error of estimation is affected by different scenarios of population distribution and service area overlap. The results extend an existing framework of vulnerability by stratifying factors into quantifiable and subjective types. Also, dasymetric mapping was shown to be a superior technique of data disaggregation compared to areal weighted interpolation. However, the difference in error estimates is low, 5 percent or less in 72 percent of the test cases. Only through local collaboration with community entities can emergency …

The Dallas-Forth Worth Metroplex (DFW) serves as a diverse resettlement location for globally displaced refugees. While research examines how the nation impacts refugee resettlement, studies that examine the role of the city and community in placemaking are still lacking. In city resettlement investigations, research often focuses broadly on advocacy and political movements rather than the impacts of local-level structures and policies. In this paper, I develop an evaluation model using Jenny Phillimore's categories for successful refugee resettlement that examines how structural barriers, community interactions, and resource accessibility affect space and place for refugee populations. Through an ethnography of Chin and Rohingya refugee communities in DFW, I explore the differences between community-settled and state-settled refugee groups and the idea of an integrated resettlement program. Additionally, I argue that refugees who choose their settlement location in the United States are empowered and thus have a stronger connection to their host community than state-settled refugees. For example, in interviews, the Chin emphasized their ownership of Lewisville and feelings of home, while the Rohingya expressed feelings of placelessness and dispossession in Dallas. As governments push towards an entirely privatized system of refugee resettlement, this research argues for an integrated method that draws upon federal …