2019 UMKC Theses - Access Restricted to UMKC
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Item Navigation errors(University of Missouri -- Kansas City, 2019) Kotur, Kevin; Terrell, WhitneyNavigation Errors is a collection of personal essays that explore the ideas of religious fundamentalism, humanity’s place in—and relation to—nature, physical and mental challenge, paradigm shifts, and the mistakes that define individuals and communities. The pieces trace the development of a single “I” narrator from a devoted evangelical Christian, through a crisis of faith, and into process of resituating his place in the world and finding new sources of meaning. Some essays lean on memoir, others place more emphasis on research, but all are essays in the original sense, attempting to understand what it means to be a young writer establishing an artistic, social, and philosophical identity.Item Bureaucracy and other stories(University of Missouri -- Kansas City, 2019) Paur, Stephen; Hodgen, Christie, 1974-The following project is the product of three years of intensive research and trial and error. You’ll notice it’s divided into two sections: fiction and nonfiction. However, one of the research questions central to this project is: What are some of the reasons such genre differences matter? What follows aims to trouble the line between the two categories. Ultimately, the main difference, this project argues—indirectly—comes down to the expectations readers bring to the table, based on the way a given piece is presented, packaged, and/or framed by the writer, editor, publisher, platform, etc. There are no essential differences between the two genres, in other words. If a piece is presented as nonfiction, there are certain assumptions in play, on the reader’s part, and it makes sense to hold the writer to certain standards of accuracy and accountability that don’t necessarily obtain in fiction. However, oftentimes fiction is more rooted in the real world, in actual people and events, than we realize. And nonfiction, of course, often relies on many of the same narrative devices and dramatic conventions that fiction does, even if we don’t always think of nonfictional accounts as being shaped, constructed, or embellished. Anyway, I hope this project represents a valuable, if small, contribution to ongoing discussions about the limits and advantages of conceptual divides like those between “real” and “invented,” “found” and “made.” Categories like these matter, in part, because they have ethical and political implications: they affect how we go about trying to separate truth from falsehood, right from wrong, just from unjust, and the fixed/given/static from the changeable/contingent/fluid. Ultimately, the difference between “things in the world,” on one hand—the stuff of life—and “things about the world,” on the other—the stuff of art—is, I think, more of a difference in degree than in kind. Narrative helps us see and engage with the world in new ways. And the world itself is always to some extent filtered through the stories we use to organize (and reorganize) it—regardless of whether or not such stories are explicitly “creative” or “literary.Item Swallowing frogs(University of Missouri -- Kansas City, 2019) Saxon, Erin; Terrell, WhitneyThis collection is comprised of short fiction, poems, two essays, and one short script. The work contained revolves around themes of mental illness, disillusionment, gender dynamics, and the difficulty of knowing others. “Manatee Lake” is about a young woman who naively follows her partner into the Bolivian Amazon. “In Case of Anhedonia” is a portrait of a woman’s depression as she attempts to chase dopamine in self-destructive ways. “One Good Thing” looks at the damage addiction and mental illness inflict on a family and asks who or what is at fault. In “104.3 The Action,” a teenaged girl attempts to find connection and validation by catfishing a radio DJ. The essay “Swallowing Frogs” is about the complicated ramifications of sexual assault.Item Detrital zircon geochronology of the Upper Miocene Boleo Formation in the Santa Rosalia, Baja California Sur, Mexico(University of Missouri -- Kansas City, 2019) Henry, Matthew William; Niemi, Tina M.The Santa Rosalía Basin (SRB), Baja California Sur, is a transtentional to rift basin that formed during the opening of the Gulf of California. The Boleo Formation is the oldest and dominant sedimentary fill of the SRB, but its age is poorly constrained. We carried out a U-Pb detrital zircon study of the Boleo Formation to constrain its maximum depositional age. The Boleo Formation has basal limestone and gypsum sections that may be time transgressive. These are overlain by a much thicker clastic sequence, with coarsening upward cycles of mudstone, sandstone, and conglomerate. The formation also includes bedded Cu-Zn-Co-Mn ore deposits (known as mantos) that cap the conglomerate on each cycle, numbered 1, 2, 3 and 4 (from top to bottom of section). Sandstone samples were collected for U-Pb detrital zircon geochronology below each manto and in a clastic layer within the gypsum. A field wash table was constructed as a first step to concentrate heavy minerals and further processed in the lab using standard zircon separation methods yielding roughly 1,000 zircons per sample. We analyzed 315 zircons per sample by LA-ICPMS. Detrital zircon U-Pb ages from the Boleo Formation range dominantly from Late Miocene through Early Cretaceous, with minor Paleozoic and Precambrian ages. Only 5 to 22 grains per sample are less than ~10 Ma, and of those, all stratigraphic levels are dominated mostly by ~9 Ma zircons, except for the stratigraphically highest sample. Zircons from the top section of the Boleo Formation form a coherent group of 3 with a TuffZirc age of 5.5-5.7 Ma and an age of 8.9 (+0.04/-0.10) Ma for the base. The 8.9 Ma below the lowest copper bed and limestone in the Boleo Formation marks the maximum age of the inception of the Santa Rosalia basin which is also constrained by underling rift transition volcanic rocks. These zircon-based age results indicate the existence of a seaway in the gulf region after 8.9 Ma and certainly by 5.5-5.7 Ma paralleling Late Miocene crustal extension in the Gulf of California and development of the offshore Guaymas Basin.Item Paleoliquefaction and possible surface deformation along the New Madrid Seismic Zone in Yarbro, Arkansas(University of Missouri -- Kansas City, 2019) Dunahue, James Christian; Niemi, Tina M.From interpretation of historical aerial photography and LiDAR imagery of northeast Arkansas, we identified a northeast-striking topographic lineament coincident with the trend of modern seismicity along the Axial Fault (AF) in the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) (Fig. 1). The linear ridge extends 7.0 km across the landscape, is approximately 1 – 2 m higher than the topography to the east and west, and has en echelon trend segments. The anomalous topography appears to crosscut scroll bars, meander loops, and other geomorphic features along this portion of the Mississippi floodplain. This study sought to determine whether the lineament was of depositional or tectonic origin. We collected geophysical data including electrical resistivity (ERT), ground penetrating radar (GPR), magnetics, and seismic refraction across the ridge at three locations in order to image the subsurface of the structure of the ridge. ERT data show an abrupt discontinuity between higher and lower resistivity at depth beneath the western margin of the ridge suggesting a possible fault. Paleoseismic trenches excavated across the western side of the ridge revealed both a large, linear graben and a large linear sand blow with multiple sand units. The graben is 6.5 m wide and 1.0 m deep, and is filled with an organic-rich clay plug with many fractures along which root casts have formed and sand dikes have intruded. The liquefaction features include a main 1.8-m-wide, feeder dike that crosscuts a paleosol, several subsidiary dikes, and an overlying and related compound sand blow. These data suggest that the linear ridge graben pair and the parallel sand blow features may either be evidence for an active fault or be related to earthquake – induced lateral spreading and liquefaction. It is possible that the two features may both reveal and mask the presence of an active fault.