The dissertation examines cultural projects and economic development enterprises to explore the power and potential power that culture has in informing, guiding and improving community and economic development efforts in the Hoopa Nation of Northern California. The unique political standing of Native American tribes as "domestic dependent nations," coupled with federal devolution policies of the 1970s and 1980s, opened opportunities for Native Nations to pursue tribally-directed economic development projects. After decades of failed federal policies, many Native Nations have achieved modest to remarkable success. Despite the compelling nature of these relatively astonishing success stories, these cases remain absent from key development literatures, including urban planning and international development. The absence offers an opportunity for a close examination of a number of key concerns including 1) what tribes are doing right; 2) the key components of this success; 3) whether, how and where these are replicable; and 4) how these practices might inform urban development and planning theory. These broader concerns frame this study, which examines the relationship between culture and community and economic development in a Native American context. Drawing from a series of interviews with tribal leaders, development practitioners, business leaders, and tribal enterprise managers, it explores the ways in which the conceptualizations, discourses, and practices of Hupa culture have the potential to inform and shape development projects and the ways in which these practices provide for greater efficacy. The research aims to show the concrete ways in which "culture" can be an effective input for development, a mobilizing discourse, and is often both a means and an end to development goals. Building on the work of Native Nation Building scholars, the study offers insights into methodologies for operationalizing cultural information in community and economic development.

Issues of health inequities and environmental hazards affect low-income communities of color throughout the US (Pastor et al, 2001; Morello-Frosch and Lopez, 2006). These communities are both rural and urban, and located in every corner of the US, but one area of California hosts a disproportionate share of environmental hazards in the form of toxic facilities, pollution, and health disparities. One San Joaquin Valley community, Kettleman City in Kings County, California is an unincorporated, rural community lacking political representation in environmental and land-use decision-making processes. This lack of influence in decision-making has led to the Kings County Planning Commission permitting a large, Class I landfill near Kettleman City that residents believe has a negative impact on their health.

Using a single case study of Kettleman City and an environmental justice framework, this dissertation examined how rural communities with few resources can utilize community-based strategies to be meaningfully involved in the permitting process of a hazardous, Class I facility. Relying on planning and legal documents, participant observations at public meetings in 2013 and 2014, archival research, and in-depth interviews with 22 residents, organizers, and advocates, as well as government officials involved with the public meetings in 1990 and 2009, this study reveals the challenges and opportunities for meaningful involvement with local and state permitting processes that occurred in 1991 and 2009. By examining the community resident’s experiences with these two permitting processes, their challenges, strategies, and resilience for inclusion in the processes is demonstrated. Ultimately what is revealed are the limitations for using public participation to achieve environmental justice, the barriers to challenging state permitting decisions, and what is needed from government officials to work toward achieving environmental justice.

Moral foundations theory (MFT; Graham et al., 2013) proposes that moral judgments are intuitions that developed over the course of human evolutionary history, largely falling along five discrete foundations: authority, loyalty, care, fairness, and purity. MFT has been applied to media research by the model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME), which delineates how innate moral intuitions guide selection and evaluation of media content (Tamborini, 2011). However, neither MFT nor MIME delineate the role of group membership in moral judgments, despite research on social identity theory suggesting hostile outgroup members fall outside the boundaries of moral judgment (e.g., Deutsch, 2006; Haslam, 2006). The present research examines MFT in the context of moral violations between Democrats and Republicans. A quasi-experiment was performed using a volunteer sample recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants were randomly assigned to read one of five news stories depicting moral violations in Congress: a Democrat attacking the authority of a higher-ranking Democrat, a Democrat attacking the authority of a higher-ranking Republican, and Republican attacking the authority of a higher-ranking Democrat, a Republican attacking the authority of a higher-ranking Republican, or a neutral condition in which the political party of the two politicians was not specified. While MFT suggests that the type of moral violation (i.e., whether it is an authority, loyalty, care, fairness, or purity violation) should determine participants’ reaction to the moral violation, results largely corroborate a social identity perspective. Participants were not critical of ingroup members who committed authority violations against outgroup members, even when the participant reported caring heavily about authority violations generally. Additionally, participants were highly critical of outgroup members who committed authority violations against ingroup members, even when the participant reported not caring heavily about authority violations generally. Moreover, even though participants only saw news stories depicting violations of the authority and loyalty foundations, results showed significant differences in ratings of a moral transgressor’s care, fairness, and purity based on their status as an ingroup or outgroup member. Results suggest that group identity plays an important role in evaluating moral violations, often trumping individuals’ innate weightings of the five moral foundations outlined by MFT.

The last decade has witnessed an increase in scholarly attention paid to experimental electronic music, especially the subgenres of sound art and noise music. Numerous books, articles, and conferences have taken up these topics as objects of study. However, only a small amount of that work has focused on the music’s relationship to affect, identification, and cultural history. There remains in some disciplines an assumption that examples of experimental electronic music are either dryly formal demonstrations of art-for-art’s-sake, or essentially resistant to legibility and meaning. The more “abstract” and “difficult” a piece appears on first glance, the more likely it will be seen to retreat from social and political concerns. This dissertation considers specific works of experimental electronic music through the lenses of affect theory, performance studies, sound studies, cultural studies, and other related approaches to argue for a perspective that more thoroughly accounts for the human in the electronic.

The dissertation’s case studies are selected from a variety of different media. Chapter 1 addresses four historically significant works of sound art that each take a technological or physical property of sound as a guiding compositional principle. The chapter considers the ways these pieces can be heard to signify beyond their “modernist” strategies with attention both to the affective experiences of hearing the works, and the sociopolitical contexts of their creation. Chapter 2 outlines a selective history of noise music through the vacillation between opposing poles of “noise” and “music.” The chapter contains a sustained analysis of Macronympha’s Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1995) that investigates the titular city’s deindustrialization and the affects of anger and disappointment that animate the album’s representations of “white trash” masculinity. Chapter 3 examines diegetic appearances of experimental electronic music in two films—Lipstick (1976), and Bewildered Youth (1957)—in which the music is made to signify sexual perversion and criminality. Using Susan McClary’s notion of gendered structures in western tonal music, I argue that, in these cases, music that rejects tonality becomes characterized by a failure to adequately perform “normal” gender. Finally, Chapter 4 engages examples of extreme performance art with a particular focus on the significance of recorded audio in the documentation of John Duncan’s Blind Date (1980). All four chapters prioritize close readings of audio compositions to interrogate the dense bundles of affect and meaning they generate.