Ph.D. - Geography
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Item The economic value of Hawai‘i beaches, site characteristics, and outdoor recreation time assessed at multiple scales under stated and revealed preference methods (of non-market valuation)(2024) Peng, Marcus; Szuster, Brian; GeographyItem SOVEREIGNTIES OF THE FOREST: WAR, CONSERVATION, AND TOURISM IN YAMBARU, OKINAWA(2020) Schrager, Sayaka Sakuma; Mostafanezhad, Mary; GeographyItem Carbon Trapping: Climate Mitigation and Indigenous Resistance in Vanuatu(2024) Pfalzgraf, Foley C B; Mostafanezhad, Mary; GeographyItem Island Empire: The Hidden Political Geography of American Expansion in the Pacific(2024) Harden, Meagan Marie; Jones, Reece; GeographyItem Indigenous Ecology of Kalapana Hawaiʻi(2023) McGuire, Gina Maelynn; Jiang, Hong; GeographyItem Hulihia Nā Kānāwai ʻĀina: The Effects of Post-1893 Land Law Changes On Native Hawaiians - Population Demographics Supplement or Supplant?(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2023) Wright, Michelle Kawēlau; Jones, Reece; GeographyThe 1895 Land Act was a culminating step in the effort to remake Hawaiʻi into a settler-colonial landscape. Sanford Dole and the rest of the usurpers utilized white supremacist ideals to create land law changes that enabled white American immigration while dispossessing Native Hawaiians concurrently. The Land Act was an integral part of a systemic racist process designed to supplant Kanaka Maoli in their homeland and disconnect them from ʻāina, a legacy that lives on today. This dissertation, “Hulihia Nā Kānāwai ʻĀina: The Effects Of Post-1893 Land Law Changes on Native Hawaiians – Population Demographics Supplement Or Supplant?,” archivally examines (1) critical steps that the usurpers made immediately after the coup that laid the foundation for a white supremacist agenda, (2) post-coup legislative changes to laws connected to the ownership and use of land, (3) how those land law modifications changed the social, demographic, and economic landscape in Hawaiʻi and continue to impact Native Hawaiians today. The Hawaiian Kingdom’s internationally recognized sovereignty required the usurpers to take specific, unique steps to ensure the success of their white Supremacist settler project. These steps included the 1893 coup, the faux-colonial oligarchical government, and the creation of mechanisms to suppress the swift and long-standing Native Hawaiian refusal to submit to the Provisional and Republic of Hawaiʻi governments. Additionally, this dissertation argues that the usurpers’ white Supremacist project began before the actual coup and was comprised of several incremental policies that taken together altered Hawaiʻi’s landscape. These policies, supported by legislation, included the expansion of immigration by white American settlers, the creation and growth of tourism, and the development of Hawaiʻi as the center of U.S. military control. This study finds that using this three-pronged approach ultimately lured white American settlers here while simultaneously disenfranchising Native Hawaiians socially, demographically, and economically in their homeland. Comprised of seven chapters, this dissertation asserts three interventions. First, it centers Native Hawaiian people and their experiences, whose voices have been overlooked in prior scholarship about this period. Secondly, archival primary documents are used as the sources of knowledge and evidence of change. Documents were gathered from multiple archives across countries and continents to ensure a plurality of critical voices were heard and represented in the text. Lastly, other Native Hawaiian scholars have asserted that the 1848 Māhele was the real start of Native Hawaiians losing their sovereignty. Through this text, I argue instead that the post-coup land law changes were more detrimental to Native Hawaiian land ownership, land rights, and ultimately Kanaka Maoli identity and sovereignty than the Māhele of 1848. The 1895 Land Act forever altered the course of Hawaiian history and land tenure. Native Hawaiians went from being the largest ethnic population segment in Hawaiʻi to a minority in their homeland in 125 years. In addition, Native Hawaiians represent the bottom of the socio-economic scale in nearly every indicator category. How did this happen? How did Native Hawaiians become landless in Hawaiʻi? Was it their fault? The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to explore these questions through an analysis of land law changes from 1893 to 1959 and expose the racist and settler-privileged policies which enabled the dispossession of Native Hawaiian land, rights, and power. As such, this project is not only connected to expanding academic understanding of Hawaiʻi’s post-1893 land law changes but, perhaps more importantly, is also designed to impact Native Hawaiian understandings of this period. Native Hawaiians did not willingly submit to the settler colonial project but were systemically disadvantaged throughout the Provisional and Republic periods. Revealing this history provides an opportunity to affirm the identity and well-being of our Native Hawaiian communities who continue to resist the effects of white American settlement today.Item Altermobilities: Everyday Life On The Move In The Western Balkans(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2023) Lubura-Winchester, Borjana; Jones, Reece; Mostafanezhad, Mary; GeographyThis dissertation contributes to migration studies from below by focusing on people on the move and their political agency. It conceptualizes processes of altermobilities along the Western Balkan Route (WBR). This dissertation draws on six and a half months of qualitative research (2017-2018) and some field revisits (summers of 2021 and 2022) in Srbija (Serbia) and Bosna i Hercegovina (Bosnia and Herzegovina). The ethnographic data collection included semi-structured interviews, structured interviews, participant observation, and follow-ups through social media and smartphone messaging applications. The participants were people on the move, governmental and non-governmental organization staff, and humanitarian volunteers along the WBR. This thesis also blends in an autoethnographic approach to knowledge production—the author’s autobiographical experiences as a former refugee are situated alongside contemporary people on the move to reveal the power of those who are perceived to be powerless. While it is important to discuss the sovereign state’s wrongdoings and condemn border violence to hold states accountable, we must also acknowledge how people avoid these obstacles and reach safe destinations. Myconcept of altermobilities removes negative connotations surrounding people on the move—they are humans who, through solidarity and self-capacity, move forward in the face of state violence. The first chapter situates this study within the critical geopolitics’ theoretical framework and feminist geopolitics conversations. The second and third chapters discuss my autoethnographic knowledge production methods in Srbija and Bosna i Hercegovina, respectively. The fourth and fifth chapters outline the topology of the self-made squats system and the everyday practices people on the move developed along the route. The sixth chapter demonstrates the power of the migrants’ rumors as an everyday lived knowledge and the state’s ineffective attempts at counter-rumors. Chapter seven unravels the web of interconnectedness between people on the move, their things, and places—such assemblages create everyday political subjectivity along the route and elicit (often violent) state reactions. When read together, this dissertation foregrounds people on the move’s wit and resourcefulness in incredibly precarious conditions and times. This thesis introduces three main interventions. Firstly, it humanizes people on the move and tells their stories of survival and altermobilities along the WBR. Secondly, it recenters the researcher into knowledge production; a researcher’s ‘I,’ when combined with the experiences of those researched, can shed light on everyday practices of marginalized people and illustrate how their political subjectivity reimagined sovereign state territories. Lastly, this work considers critical geopolitics through assemblage thinking to explore the power of assemblages (i.e., of people on the move, their things, and places). Each one of these assemblage elements acts in symbiosis to allow altermobilities to occur across the WBR. Crucially, people will move forward—fences, deterrence, and violence at the borders may slow them, but will never stop them. The people on the move involuntarily escaped their homes, and many experienced (extended) violence before embarking. There was no option but to move forward. Nothing could dampen the dream of a safe and secure environment for themselves and their families, not even the potential of death at the border.Item The Everyday Geoeconomics of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Fiji: Entrepreneurial Encounters Along the Maritime Silk Road(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2023) Szadziewski, Henryk; Mostafanezhad, Mary; GeographyThis dissertation examines how global political economic change interacts with the everyday encounters between Chinese and Fijians in Fiji. Made visible through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s imprint overseas has been at the forefront of such shifts. BRI is a transnational initiative to restructure flows of trade and financial governance with “people-to-people” interactions at its core. Encompassing the land-based Silk Road Economic Belt and the ocean-based 21st century Maritime Silk Road (MSR), the initiative links China and the world through a series of infrastructure corridors. Global commentary and scholarship on the BRI are divided. It is often presented as a policy to buttress China’s bid for world hegemony, or as an alternative financing opportunity for emerging economies. In the field of geoeconomics, broadly defined as the strategic use of economic tools to achieve state goals, this increasingly normalized binary narrative overshadows a more nuanced appraisal of a globalizing China, particularly in regard to the movement of Chinese people. This dissertation denaturalizes such binaries through an examination of grounded responses to the Belt and Road Initiative among Fijian and Chinese entrepreneurs in Fiji. By foregrounding peopled accounts over empowered knowledge producers, I demonstrate how a diverse range of non-state actors implement an “everyday geoeconomics” that leverages their own interests within the global political economy. I define “everyday geoeconomics” as the strategic actions deployed by non-state actors to achieve non-state goals within state-led and transnational economic initiatives. In doing so, I contribute conceptual and methodological tools for scholars to better address the geoeconomics of BRI in the Pacific and beyond. I focus on encounters between Fijians and Chinese entrepreneurs in the context of the MSR in Fiji. The emphasis on non-state actors in Fiji offers new perspectives on Chinese presence in Oceania. To date, analysis of renewed Chinese interest in Fiji has centered on the regional strategic anxieties of external powers, such as the United States and Australia. This dissertation reverses the scale of analysis to the local exposing a contested field of interests between civil society, the state, and the private sector in Fiji on “Chinese presence.” Since 2005, economic relations between China and Fiji have deepened, while the local response among Fijians has become increasingly conflicted. Host community anxieties over the direct benefits of Chinese economic interventions and presence is contrasted with the anticipated boon of increasing private investment and state-funded infrastructure construction. However, the motivations and outlook of Chinese companies and new migrants in Fiji are frequently subsumed into statist discourses on China. In sum, reliance on analyses that privilege great power competition overlooks the local power competition that plays an important role in determining perceptions of “China in Oceania.” To reflect grounded views, I draw on semi-structured and unstructured interviews among members of civil society, state officials, and private sector actors from the Chinese, Fiji Chinese, iTaukei, and Indo-Fijian communities. These interviews, as well as participant and non-participant observations, were predominately conducted in Suva during four fieldwork visits from 2017 to 2021; however, I traveled across the Fijian Islands speaking to a variety of actors and visiting multiple entrepreneurial sites. Additionally, I draw on a critical discourse analysis of over 2,000 media articles, government documents, and digital media from 2014-2022. This research contests the naturalized geostrategic objectives of the BRI and reveals how grounded views are significant sites of challenge for “geoeconomic” strategy. Further, it critically engages with statist analyses of China’s economic initiatives to highlight the political importance of local scale actors directly impacted by Chinese presence, as well as the transnational spatiality of the Chinese economy and embodied responses to these interventions by rescaling our appreciation of global economic shifts. The work contributes to emerging scholarship on the influence of the everyday geopolitical encounters of China’s Belt and Road Initiative as well as the political geography of the Pacific, and Chinese presence in Oceania.Item Somewhere To The West’: Constructed Sovereignty And Everyday Geopolitics In Maritime Borders In The South China Sea(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Beatty, Dylan Michael; Jones, Reece; GeographyThis dissertation explores the territorial dispute over the Spratly Islands through multiple scales, including the international, national, provincial, and municipal levels. The dispute officially involves six claimant states—Brunei, China, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam. While addressing broader, macro-level aspects of the topic, this project deliberately focuses on communities directly enveloped and affected by the dispute. This includes ordinary civilians, fishers, and military personnel from the Province of Palawan, Philippines. The dissertation traces the everyday geopolitics of the dispute and, consequently, illustrates China’s rise in maritime Southeast Asia. The chapters are individual studies of components of the larger Spratly Island story. However, taken collectively, the dissertation is generally organized in a thematic arc, tracing Kalayaan and the Spratly Islands from an undefined, vague idea towards a built materiality and increased militarization. The conceptual arc is the process of making the marine space progressively more legible, from imagined, to fluid, to solid, and finally, to a fluid-solid hybrid. This latter phase is illustrated by a fluid, swarm territoriality practiced by maritime militia. The dissertation situates its findings within broader literatures on volumetric sovereignty, nationalism, assemblage, and frontier borders. It develops several concepts relevant to political geography. This includes fluid visions of place and territory, deploying sovereignty, and constructing sovereignty. Using qualitative research methods, including semi-structured interviews, the dissertation shares the everyday experiences of Filipinos who find themselves on the frontlines of the Spratly Island dispute.Item Producing fair tuna, reproducing inequality in a small-scale fishing community in Sulawesi, Indonesia(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Simandjuntak, Desiree L.; Suryanata, Krisnawati; GeographyCommodity certification is based on the premise that providing producers with economic incentives will encourage them to follow certain production standards. However, most certified products are sourced from developed economies, marginalizing producers from developing economies in an increasingly competitive market. Fair Trade (USA) incentivizes small-scale fishers to be part of global market, offering above-market price and premium fund for community development. Framing the certification as a form of payment for ecosystem services (PES), this dissertation investigates the implementation of market approach to fishery governance in facilitating environmental and social improvements. It is based on a 9-month fieldwork in Kiapu, a fishing village in Sulawesi, involving non-participatory observations and semi-structured interviews predominantly with Fair Trade-registered and conventional tuna fishers.In offering monetary incentives, Fair Trade assumes a well-functioning market where its above-market price and premium would promote sustainable fishery and development. This vision, however, confronts customary fishing and trading practices on the ground that are shaped by complex, ever-changing ecological processes, social dynamics, and labor relations in small-scale fishing communities such as Kiapu. As a result, the scheme has unintentionally reinforced and reproduced inequalities among supply chain actors. The findings in the study suggest that the appropriateness and effectiveness of incentive-based environmental governance depend on the condition of the target community.