Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Music

In 1980s Berlin, churches held a special position: while much social and political discussion was forbidden in public, pressing issues could be addressed openly within the church's walls. A March 1978 meeting between Bishop Albrecht Schonherr and Head of State Erich Honecker led to a tentative rapprochement: in exchange for official political neutrality, people in church spaces were allowed to express themselves freely, and religious content could not be forbidden. Using this new autonomy, churches emerged as sites in which multiple ideologies could be engaged simultaneously, public zones established within private spaces. In doing so, they entered into a decades-long debate over ideas of publicity, privacy, and how a church should sound. Each of the many groups that used a church space – including political activists, artists, musicians, hippies, and punks – had its own desires, its own demands on the space, and its own beliefs about the meaning of that space. When these diverse needs collided, the negotiation between divergent views brought new and profound meanings to the social space of the church. I investigate this negotiation as it was manifested in three particular East Berlin churches – the Samariterkirche, in Friedrichshain, the Erloserkirche, in Lichtenberg, and the Zionskirche, in Prenzlauer Berg – and the ways in which people within those churches engaged in public action through sound. I also examine the sometimes tense interplay between the subcultural groups involved in the debate, through the increasingly heterogeneous sonic world of the East German Church. In these churches, sound, broadly conceived, became a signifier of pluralism and of political action. The growing heterogeneity of sounds in East Berlin churches emerged in parallel with diverse new social movements. I use a combination of archival and ethnographic research to examine two complementary case studies. The “Blues-Mass” genre, performed at the Samariterkirche and Erloserkirch (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ryan Skinner (Advisor); Danielle Fosler-Lussier (Advisor); Dorothy Noyes (Committee Member) Subjects: Cultural Anthropology; Music; Religion

Doctor of Philosophy in Urban Studies and Public Affairs, Cleveland State University, 2014, Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs

As Maurice Merleau-Ponty pointed out, a work of art allows us to explore our sense for meaning in the world. It not only allows us to translate our perceptions, but it allows our perceptions to speak to us through what he called a “respiration in being” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964). In this process of respiration, artists and artful public administrators alike are inspired by what they see, and expire that which is seen (Merleau-Ponty, 1964). This research suggests that what Merleau-Ponty described is an element of the aesthetic experience that enables a person to explore the world and what it means to be in it. After Dwight Waldo argued that all ways of knowing are value laden in the field of public administration, he left the field without a prescribed way to know, and this is a problem, given that public administrators are often required to act while in a crisis. If public administrators lack a form of inquiry to understand the world, then how are they to act? This dissertation asks whether administrators, in fact, base their administrative discretion on aesthetic judgment and what they find pleasing or displeasing, their taste (Kant, 2001), to discern what to do and which type of understanding to employ (Arendt, 1992; Hummel, 2006; Stivers, 2011). Through a set of phenomenological interviews the dissertation attempts to access, or pull on the understanding(s) of artists, artful administrators, and hybrids, to better understand administrative discretion by examining the aesthetic experience more deeply and hopefully contribute to how we think about the role of the expert in public administration.

Committee: Camilla Stivers Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Nicholas Zingale Ph.D. (Committee Member); Robert Zinke Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; Philosophy; Public Administration

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2012, Philosophy

My thesis explicates Hannah Arendt's Socratic notion of thinking, the adversarial dialogue one has with oneself that enables one to take moral account of past and future actions. Plato's Socrates and Nazi officer Adolph Eichmann are utilized by Arendt as paradigmatic cases of thinking and non-thinking, respectively. My concern is how the thinking activity may become corrupt or even spoiled, whereby one is rendered genuinely incapable of thought, and hence, of moral action. I suspect such spoiling, if possible, could occur under one or both of the following conditions: (a) habituated refusal to engage in critical self-reflection; or (b) never developing the conceptual tools and language to adequately reflect on one's moral self. I show that if we interpret Arendt's claim that Eichmann was “never” capable of thinking to be absolute, in accordance with condition (b), then Arendt cannot justifiably levy moral and legal responsibility upon a man who helped send hundreds of thousands of Jews to their murderous death. However, if we interpret Eichmann's failure to think as the product of condition (a), it suggests that at some point in his past Eichmann was capable of thought, and hence, moral action. Under such a reading, Arendt can have her cake and eat it too.

Committee: Benjamin Grazzini PhD (Committee Chair); Renee Heberle PhD (Committee Member); Charles Blatz PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Ethics; Modern History; Peace Studies; Philosophy; Political Science; Social Psychology; Sociology

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2009, Philosophy

Working primarily with Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy, I critique aspects of contemporary political thought with regard to the public, the private and the nature of the individual. I challenge the vision of the public and private spheres as being necessarily divided, as well as the assumption of the family into the private realm. Using Nancy, I develop a way of thinking about plurality, the self and our interactions with the political from a more holistic stance.

Committee: Benjamin Pryor PhD (Committee Chair); Renee Heberle PhD (Committee Member); Madeline Muntersbjorn PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Families and Family Life; Philosophy; Womens Studies