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Date of Award

Winter 2022

Rights

Access perpetually restricted to EWU users with an active EWU NetID

Document Type

Thesis: EWU Only

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA) in Critical GIS and Public Anthropology

Department

Anthropology and Geography

Abstract

This thesis investigates the built environment of Fort George Wright in Spokane, Washington. This fort was active from 1898 until 1957, when it was declared surplus by the United States government (Meyer, 1994, p.84). It was bought by the Sisters of the Holy Names in 1960, renovated, and turned into Fort George Wright College (Meyer, 1994, p.99). In 1990, Mukogawa Women’s College bought it and turned it into a satellite campus for English language instruction and immersion (Nilsson, 2019). This thesis developed a quantitative methodology to analyze the spatial organization of the built environment of Fort George Wright and compared these results to other regional military fortifications to create an empirical database. This was to see if social stratification affected these built environments and if so, in what ways. To see if the built environment of Fort George Wright reflected late Victorian ideals of social division, a spatial analysis of the fort’s plan at different periods was conducted using Visibility Graph Analysis. The results of this analysis were compared to similar studies of contemporary fortifications in Washington State. This thesis demonstrates that an analysis of the physical arrangement of space at Fort George Wright can provide insights into how individuals might have perceived and utilized their space.

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