Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, ED Policy and Leadership

Peace studies has produced an abundance of research and created numerous programs and courses. Despite these successes, the field is far from establishing itself as a valued part of the academic community. This project rests on the assertion that peace studies struggles for scholarly legitimacy and visibility within U.S. higher education. Based on this premise, it seeks to investigate the different kinds of beliefs about peace studies that have been produced, maintained, and reproduced. The aim is to understand the contemporary condition of peace studies and explore the possibilities and limitations of theorizing, researching, and teaching about peace in the U.S. academy.A Foucauldian-informed poststructural analysis examines qualitative survey and interview data collected from 55 prominent U.S. scholars in the fields of international relations, peace studies, and peace science. First, a descriptive analysis of peace studies scholars' perceptions identifies three precepts of the field along with a strategy, to “make the world a better, more humane, place.” Second, a comparative analysis of peace studies from scholars working within international relations and peace science shows that peace studies faces the predicament of being nearly invisible within international relations and on the other side of an epistemological and methodological divide from peace science. Finally, a discourse analysis describes the discursive structures and rules of knowledge production that govern the way that scholars think, speak, and put into practice items associated with peace studies. The study concludes that peace studies suffers from a problem of coherence that strikes at its core objects of knowledge, subject positions, and knowledge production. Furthermore, the field desires to transform, transgress, and transcend the traditional policies of the U.S. academy. Thus, it battles historical and contemporary perceptions of (1) what qualifies as legitimate “scholarship” in terms of tra (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Patti Lather PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Peter Demerath PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Dan Christie PhD (Committee Member); Tatiana Suspitsyna PhD (Committee Member); Alexander Wendt PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Higher Education

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2013, American Culture Studies/Ethnic Studies

This study investigated aikido, a martial art that emphasizes non-violent conflict resolution. After an extensive period of preliminary research including personal study of aikido and historiographical contextualization of aikido lore, fifteen aikido students and instructors were interviewed, and thirty-four students were observed during a total of sixty-four classes at two different aikido schools, each of which were led by female head instructors who taught a mixed-sex student body. Ethnographic data was analyzed from a multidisciplinary perspective that blends feminist cultural studies with decolonial and psychoanalytic theories. Connections between research participants' understandings of the concept of power and their approaches to conflict resolution are explored. Participants described power as: physically internal, the ability to be grounded and centered, the ability to direct and re-direct energy, the ability to maintain awareness of one's self and environment, and the ability to cultivate growth. Study participants' sense of generative power resonated interpersonally through participants' self-reported and observed conflict resolution strategies, which include: maintaining awareness of one's environment, adjusting one's posture through practices called centering and grounding, not fighting by turning (tenkan) and blending with one's "opponent" while entering (irimi) the conflict with measured assertiveness, and maintaining a capacity for a wide range of reactions (ukemi). Participants demonstrated an ability to think about and productively engage with large-scale social conflicts (such as gender violence) by relying on philosophically and kinesthetically sophisticated understandings of links between the personal and the political. This is because the movement practice aikido challenges colonial ways of knowing by functioning as an embodied meta-ideological deconstruction, one of several (r)evolutionary tactics discussed in decolonial feminist theory. This (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Vikki Krane Ph.D. (Advisor); Ellen Berry Ph.D. (Committee Member); Marv Belzer Ph.D. (Committee Member); Don Callen Ph.D. (Committee Member); Christina Guenther Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; Alternative Dispute Resolution; American History; American Studies; Art Criticism; Art Education; Art History; Asian American Studies; Communication; Comparative; Cultural Anthropology; Dance; Education; Education Philosophy; Ethics; Ethnic Studies; Fine Arts; Folklore; Gender Studies; Kinesiology; Modern History; Multicultural Education; Peace Studies; Pedagogy; Performing Arts; Philosophy; Physical Education; Rhetoric; Sociolinguistics; Sports Management; Sustainability; Womens Studies; World History

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, 2021, Foundations of Education

This research is an attempt to answer two calls: (1) Betty A. Reardon's (2019a) call to move her work forward, and (2) Tony Jenkins and Betty A. Reardon's (2007) call for the study of masculinities within a peace education, human rights frame using a feminist scholarship and pedagogical perspective. The amalgamation of the two calls inferred the need to query Reardon's current and historical publications and her verbal communications for contemporary feminist thought. Inductive Textual Analysis was applied in examining Reardon's career-long academic work for correlations with four specific theories. It was induced that three of the four theories—human wholeness, democratic equality egalitarianism, and the capabilities approach—were basic to Reardon's scholarship; however, the fourth theory—intersectionality—was an outlier. It was subsequently deduced that the theory of intersectionality should be added to the pedagogical model in two areas—Masculinities Studies and the action and assessment components of Reardon's (2010) pedagogy of engagement for social transformation. The projected combination of pedagogical theory and praxis also includes a focus on the current activism in the area of transformative masculinities with the goal of working towards the interdependence that is requisite for gender equality.

Committee: Dale Snauwaert Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Lynne Hamer Ph.D. (Committee Member); Fuad Al-Daraweesh Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jamie Barlowe Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Education Philosophy; Peace Studies; Womens Studies

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2019, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture

ABSTRACT This dissertation introduces architecture as an active platform in the process of structural conflict transformation for positive peace in post-war and conflict contexts. It is an interdisciplinary research in which architecture operationalizes the theories of peace and peacebuilding. Architecture for/of positive peace is also a response to the United Nations' objectives in its 2030 agenda for sustainable development through a subject as distinct as architecture and relates it to the process of conflict transformation and sustainable peacebuilding. This research is initiated by questioning whether architecture can be employed as an active platform for positive peace. Further, it considers the role of architecture in the process of peacebuilding, its key devices, and operating characteristics. This dissertation analyzes both the existing discourses of `architecture and war' and `architecture and peace' to derive a set of themes and implications that reveal the role of architecture in the process of peacebuilding in post-war and conflict contexts. The research emphasizes theories of peace and peacebuilding, specifically the propositions of Johan Galtung and John Paul Lederach from the discipline of peace studies, in the aim of building a theoretical framework for peacebuilding through which it is possible to activate the role of architecture for positive peace. Based on the concluded theoretical framework, architecture for positive peace is distinguished from architecture for negative peace, and its characteristics are defined. Architecture for/of positive peace is a complex, inclusive, belonging, and common-ground platform. It manifests either as an `assemblage' (the physical visible form of architecture), as a space of `relational identity,' or both.

Committee: Aarati Kanekar Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Edson Roy Cabalfin Ph.D. (Committee Member); Patrick Snadon Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Architecture

Bachelor of Arts, Ashland University, 0, English

Ava DuVernay, director of Selma (2014), altered Paul Webb's original screenplay in several ways. While critics of the film usually discuss DuVernay's depictions of President Lyndon B. Johnson, critics have not yet focused on the changes, both subtle and significant, to all of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s historical speeches that had to be rewritten because the film did not receive the rights. This forced DuVernay to create speeches in the spirit of King's in regard to his appeal to the audience's sense of justice and ideals of freedom, and to establish a rhetorical call-to-action for the contemporary audience. To compare the differences in orations between history and film, I conducted the rhetorical analyses using the Neo-Aristotelian, or Traditional, approach. The editor of Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action, Jim Kuypers, defines this approach as “focused on the three modes of proof identified by Aristotle, (logos, ethos, and pathos), which broadly speaking defined rational argument, appeals to credibility, and rhetoric that produced an emotional response.” While other speeches and writings of King, such as “I Have a Dream” or “Letter from Birmingham,” are usually studied extensively, the speeches this capstone examines have not had as much attention. I perform rhetorical analyses on King's historical “Our God Is Marching On!” speech, the film's version of “Our God Is Marching On!,” the film's original song “Glory” based on King's references and allusions in his speeches, King's historical “Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance” speech, and the visual rhetoric of the “Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance” speech All of these works both by King and DuVernay not only revolve around the proficient use of logos, ethos, and pathos, but also around archetypal metaphors of war, rising light, and darkness. In this capstone, I found that even though both versions were rhetorically similar due to the use of archetypal metaphors, which appeal to the audiences' ideals of freedom, s (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Maura Grady PhD (Advisor); Linda Joyce Brown PhD (Committee Member); Christopher Swanson PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; Black History; Film Studies; Rhetoric