Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

For Jose Esteban Munoz, queerness is not yet here–it exists beyond the here and now in a utopia we must believe in and imagine before we can build it. The current spatial- temporal “here and now” is understood, in this dissertation, as the capitalist realism defined by Mark Fisher. Meanwhile, Gloria Anzaldua invites us to think about the consciousness that privileges indigenous ways of knowing and being, while recognizing the ways colonial logic has imprinted itself on our minds, bodies, communities, and spirits through mestiza consciousness and Nepantla. Bringing these two thinkers with me—my late queer, Latinx elders—I enter posthumanist, indigenous, and queer ecological discourse with Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Robin Wall Kimmerer. Munoz sees queerness as a practice of becoming, and I approach indigeneity in a similar way, focusing on agency rather than a neoliberal or colonial understanding of it through the language of the colonizer. Barad's conceptualization of agential realism offers a way to understand indigeneity beyond anthropocentrism, emphasizing the relationality between people and their ecosystems. This framework highlights how indigeneity is an active, reciprocal process shaped by our connections with the natural world. The goal of this project is to call for hope, a hope that requires discipline, imagination, and care. I aim to inspire some material action regarding land stewardship and the #LandBack movement by addressing Kimmerer's call for re-story-ation through literary analysis.

Committee: Adéléke Adéè̳kó̳ (Committee Co-Chair); Guisela Latorre (Committee Member); Paloma Martinez-Cruz (Committee Co-Chair) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Environmental Justice; Gender; Literature; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Modern Literature; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

The history of imperialism in the Americas is one that entwines colonial interests with carceral power. Marginalized populations are dehumanized, displaced, and subjected to different forms of incarceration to secure political, economic, and cultural aims. This dissertation examines the role of rhetoric and literacy in the long historiographic arc of carceral-colonialism's development. From the new world turn, when European settler colonialism first took root in the Caribbean, to the transatlantic slave trade in the centuries that followed, I argue that carceral-colonial power was historically exercised by systematically denying the rhetoricity of dehumanized populations. At the core of my analysis is my theory of rhetorical debility, which describes the relationship between rhetoricity and the subjugation of populations marginalized by settler colonization, labor exploitation, and national security. Taking up contemporary questions in rhetorical studies surrounding new materialism, posthumanism, and marginalized global rhetorical traditions, this dissertation puts forward a series of Critical Discourse Analysis-based case studies and comparative rhetorical analyses of carceral-colonialism's rhetorical historiography. I find that humanity has historically been defined and contested according to perceived capacities of rhetoricity – of practicing rhetoric and being rhetorical in ways that suit dominant social, economic, and political interests.

Committee: Christa Teston (Committee Chair); Beverly Moss (Committee Member); Wendy Hesford (Committee Member); Pranav Jani (Committee Member) Subjects: Ethnic Studies; History; Literacy; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Arts Administration, Education and Policy

This dissertation and research study is dedicated to the exploration of critical posthuman educational technology. Research in this study determines, evaluates, and considers educational technology in U.S. art museums through a wide-reaching survey and case study evaluations of the implementation of digital content creation in museums during the COVID-19 era. Critical posthumanism provides a way to understand and restructure expectations of the educational goals of museums that are aligned with the experiences and expectations of digital learning as well as incorporate a multitude of ontological considerations through Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, and Critical Disability Studies. Beyond simply assessing what has happened in museums, this study seeks to find opportunities for greater change within the system of museum practice and education.

Committee: Dana Carlisle Kletchka (Advisor); Joni Boyd Acuff (Committee Member); J.T. Eisenhauer Richardson (Committee Member); Mindi Rhoades (Committee Member); Clayton Funk (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education; Museum Studies

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2023, Creative Writing

The Frailty of Fruit is a young adult post-apocalyptic thriller, set in a far future subterranean farming community. The novel follows protagonist Qari Hofler, a reluctant tomato farmer, who must develop a hybrid tomato to earn her family's stewardship or be banished to the Deep Dark. Her 33rd great-grandfather's tomato strain cured violence. But because their cultural understanding of violence didn't include sexual violence, Qari develops an asexually reproductive strain with the naive hope of curing gender. Little does she know, she's not the only one with the seeds of that idea. Told in intertwining narratives, a second protagonist Iona also must race against time to beat Qari at her own hybrid game. But once the two of them find each other, with the help of a humanoid sexbot-turned-scientist named Misty, Qari and Iona realize that finding a place where they could grow together was the point all along. Told in the dystopian tradition of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Frailty of Fruit draws upon themes of reproductive justice, hegemony, posthumanism, and the subaltern. Written in a traditional narrative structure, the novel invents an accessible story with textured social imaginings. It posits a poetic truth that utopias will always become dystopias, that will then become utopias, and so on. Like nature, human social conditions have birth and death cycles. In this way, the novel employs contemporary feminist methodologies which utilize post-structural theories to challenge the notions of stable concepts. The ground, literally and conceptually, is always shifting.

Committee: Reema Rajbanshi Ph.D. (Committee Member); Lawrence Coates Ph.D. (Committee Chair) Subjects: Literature; Modern Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2023, Communication Studies (Communication)

The climate crisis poses an existential threat to life on this planet and demands immediate action and forms of solidarity. In this dissertation, I explore how music can be leveraged to transform the shape and dynamics of solidarity frameworks in ways that are conducive to multi-species flourishing and modes of solidarity with a more-than-human world. I deploy a critical posthumanist (Braidotti, 2013, 2019) framework to amplify musical praxis as an ethical, affective, extra-linguistic, and “strategically transversal” mode of communicative engagement that opens possibilities for empathy and alliance beyond the particularist-universalist dichotomy that structures familiar but insufficient configurations of belonging—obligation. My central argument is that music can valuably contribute to more-than-human cartographic practices as they are articulated within a critical posthumanist paradigm and activate multi-species “response-abilities” (Haraway, 2016) and practices of care for the more-than-human world, and therefore has an important role to play in the service of climate justice.

Committee: Lynn Harter Dr. (Committee Chair); Brittany Peterson Dr. (Committee Member); Bill Rawlins Dr. (Committee Co-Chair) Subjects: Communication; Ecology; Music; Political Science

BA, Oberlin College, 2022, Comparative Literature

Why do we make analogies? The standard definition suggests “[a] comparison between two things, typically for the purpose of explanation or clarification” (Oxford Languages); an analogy is when something borrows another vocabulary, another set of terms, or another paradigm, to facilitate a deeper understanding. But here, I argue that analogy is more than a didactic tool for making explanations more convenient: rather, analogy is the essential way that we understand ourselves in relation to others—for my purposes, how artists understand their own medium in relation to other mediums. Specifically, I use the concept of analogy to explore the encounter between music and language; I take as my starting point the French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme, one of the major poets in France at the time of his death in 1898, with a legacy which resonates today in poststructuralism and experimental poetry. Mallarme interests me because he exemplifies an analogical approach to understanding poetry: in order to articulate his poetics, Mallarme found inspiration in a diverse array of mediums from dance to mime to acting, and most importantly, in music. This project adopts a three-part approach, investigating the encounter between music and language first from the perspective of language, then from the perspective of music, and finally examining art which reconciles music and language in a more liminal status. Chapter 1 discusses how Mallarme's ideal language parasites music: he uses music to articulate the terms of his ideal language, but in doing so silences music, removing its status as actual sound. Chapter 2 explores how composer Pierre Boulez turns this parasitism around, using music as a parasite on language: Boulez sets Mallarme's poetry, but in doing so, he renders it into sound, deprivileging its linguistic qualities while embedding them into the musical structure. Chapter 3 explores contemporary manifestations of music/language art with composer Georges Aperghis and Or (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Patrick O'Connor (Advisor); Matthew Senior (Committee Member); Brian Alegant (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Music

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2022, English

I argue that writing in the style of a “pillow book”--a collection of fragmented poetry and nonlinear narratives--allows for a different conception of self that avoids the pitfalls of humanist ideas that represent trauma as being able to heal through narrative. My collection, A Gallery, demonstrates the power and potential of this form's fragmentation by relaying trauma as it manifests in the individual's subjective memory.

Committee: Thomas Scanlan (Advisor); Mary Kate Hurley (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, EDU Teaching and Learning

This dissertation is an examination of maturation through the lens of adolescent cyborgs in young adult literature. I begin by asserting that adolescents are inherently posthuman because of their liminal, hybrid subjectivity. Humanism asks teenagers to suppress what it perceives as monstrous otherness so that they can become normative adult citizens. The cyborg is therefore an excellent analytical tool for examining how these adolescent identities are constrained to specific kinds of humanist conceptualizations of identity through the development that society promotes. I offer a complex matrix for understanding subjectivity that navigates humanist and posthumanist ideologies alongside conceptualizations of embodiment and socialization. In the body of the dissertation, I examine three cyborgian figures: the shapeshifter, the witch, and the virtual reality avatar. Shapeshifters embody adolescent change. Their developmental trajectories follow their navigation of the dogmatism and manipulations of humanist pursuits of science. The mutability of the shapeshifter symbolizes the adolescent's experience with changing bodies, which humanism seeks to control and posthumanism seeks to embrace. Witches must navigate access to power that exceeds that normally allowed to teenagers. The school story, a narrative regularly associated with this figure in young adult literature, restricts adolescents to particular identities by teaching them to control their powers. The virtual reality avatar signifies the adolescent's navigation of posthuman space. YAL normally privileges analog reality, asking teenagers to leave behind their virtual space in order to mature. In each of these three figures, I analyze narratives that follow the normative, humanist trajectory of growth alongside those that explore alternative, posthumanist maturations. I examine the figures across various visual and verbal formats, looking at film, comics, and prose adaptations of archetypal cyborg figures. The (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michelle Abate (Advisor); Caroline Clark (Committee Member); Brian McHale (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, Mass Communication (Communication)

This dissertation investigates how Netflix's Black Mirror (2011—) articulates both the technology/human interconnectedness and a varied array of posthuman subjects within the narrative. I engage with posthumanist theory and utilize narrative rhetorical criticism and the method of articulation to analyze a selection of ten episodes. Based on the textual analysis, I contend that each selected narrative reveals a unique hypothetical scenario that questions the humanist conceptualization of human nature in addition to envisioning potentials for challenging the common understanding of self, identity, subjectivity, and agency. With its controversial and multilayered articulations of the posthuman condition, I propose that this quality science fiction television program takes as its central theme the symbiotic technology/human relationship as the kernel of a co-constructed reality between these two actants in the digital age. I suggest that Black Mirror introduces five shades of be(com)ing posthuman: be(com)ing alienated, be(com)ing cyborg, be(com)ing fractured, be(com)ing immortal, and be(com)ing human. Ultimately, I argue for an empathetic techno/human future that recognizes that both technology and humans matter and mutually influence one another in the construction of the techno/human subject that is unapologetically cyborg, hybrid, and posthuman such that it refuses to be categorically unadulterated and pure.

Committee: Suetzl Wolfgang (Advisor); Ng Eve (Committee Member); Aden Roger (Committee Member); Sheldon Myrna (Committee Member) Subjects: Mass Communications

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2019, English

In this dissertation, Animate Literacies, I argue that conventional notions of literacy sponsorship (Brandt) fail to account for all the complexities of meaning making and power relations in queer lives, especially in othered places like Appalachia. I conduct queer literacy research in Appalachia in order to expand the scope of literacy sponsorship beyond a traditional focus on human individuals and institutions. By queering literacy methodologies and theories, I suggest that becoming literate involves a vast diversity of non-human agents, ranging from but not limited to the landscape, embodied technologies, mundane objects, and more, as well as the relations among these agents. Through a new materialist lens (Barad; Bennett; Chen), I theorize literacy as an active, participatory force—moving, shifting, flowing, perhaps even alive in its own way. My theory of animate literacies evolves from the literacy stories of five queer Appalachian participants. By bringing together queer (Alexander; Chen; Pritchard), Appalachian (Bradshaw; Donehower & Webb-Sunderhaus; Snyder), and new materialist rhetorics (Barad; Gries), my theory of animate literacies offers a queer, new materialist approach for studying the immediate affects and materiality of literacy practices. In this way, Animate Literacies forges queerly forward in order to make room for the nonhuman world to enter into its study. Complicating our relationship with the environment and all its nonhuman actors — from the food we eat, the local landscapes, to our pets, the trees, even the trash we throw away — a theory of animate literacies brings into relief how literacy is about being-with the world in more meaningful ways. Ultimately, Animate Literacies seeks to present an explanation as to how we survive in the Anthropocene and the inevitable, queer futures ahead.

Committee: Jason Palmeri (Committee Co-Chair); Sara Webb-Sunderhaus (Committee Co-Chair); Michele Simmons (Committee Member); Emily Legg (Committee Member); Roxanne Ornelas (Committee Member) Subjects: Linguistics; Literacy; Regional Studies; Rhetoric

BA, Oberlin College, 2019, Comparative Literature

Speculation is a futurist practice of looking outwards in which the subject turns to other realities in the face of a crushing here-and-now. It is from this premise, which draws from Jose Esteban Munoz's Cruising Utopia (2009) and Fred Moten's In the Break (2003), that I set out to understand how experiential, literary, and artistic speculation acts as a rejection of the capitalist and colonial structures of this world. Through a conversation with the aforementioned theorists, as well as other queer, posthumanist, and radical black thinkers, this project will analyze three different instances of speculation. First, a queer nightclub in New York which enacts a glitch between temporalities; next, a Dominican sci fi novel by Rita Indiana that shows how remixing queers time and narrative structure; and finally, a video art piece where artist Mickalene Thomas subverts the imperial male gaze, cutting into normative power and creating a break from which speculation can arise. Although these artistic forms of speculation by no means exhaust speculative potential, they sound out expressions of radical imagining that effectively draw the contours around this practice. I argue that the act of speculating towards other worlds by subjects historically excluded from the category of the Human is a radical refusal of the established order, and an embrace of the spaces between so as to find happiness and self-determination.

Committee: Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón (Advisor) Subjects: Comparative Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2019, American Culture Studies

With 171 million active users and a market value expected to climb to almost $17 billion in the next three years, Virtual Reality (VR) would appear to be a technology on the rise. Yet despite the public fervor for VR, our media landscape has long been marked by phobic depictions of the same—from William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), to The Matrix (1999), to Black Mirror (2011-present), VR fictions always seem to dread its presence even as their audiences anticipate these feared technologies. How, then, can we explain the durability of fiction fearing VR, and what use might we find for that phobic response? While ample previous scholarship has explored how horror and other forms of genre fiction reflect specific cultural anxieties, to this point little work has been devoted to technophobic fiction as it represents and serves to manage cultural responses to new and emerging technologies. As VR grows increasingly common, such fiction might offer a powerful tool toward anticipating its uses—good and bad—as well as to influence the ends for which these technologies are taken up. Through textual analysis of Ready Player One (2018) and “San Junipero” (2017), I explore how fears of capitalist subjugation, disembodiment, and the limitations of the humanist self come to be displaced in VR's technological systems. This work clarifies the technosocial politics of VR as they penetrate what it means to be human, and how technophobia itself might be mobilized toward the creation of a better technological future.

Committee: Clayton Rosati PhD (Advisor); Edgar Landgraf PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Arts Administration, Education and Policy

Matter and materiality are integral to the artmaking process, but research into materiality in this realm has been largely unexplored. Instead, discussions and explorations of artmaking practice are articulated with the assumption that the artist is the primary active agent. This dissertation interrogates how artmaking and philosophical inquiry can expand current understandings of the concepts of matter, material, and materiality in artmaking. This study looks to the philosophies of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and their reaction to the pervasiveness of Cartesian dualism in Western and their contributions to notions of subjectivity, Being, being-in-the-world, embodiment, and perception, and these ideas form the basis from which this study develops. New materialist thought offers a significant contribution to the discussion of materiality and artmaking practice enacted through this study. This dissertation is expanded through an engagement with the new materialist theories of the feminist philosopher and theoretical physicist Karen Barad. Particularly, Barad's concept of entanglements as they pertain to her theory of agential realism and her notion of onto-epistemology, or knowing in being, inform the research process in this dissertation. Moving away from merely reflexive accounts that privilege the artist and researcher as the prime subject in artmaking, this study instead embraces a diffractive methodology. This methodological direction is inspired by Donna Haraway and developed by Karen Barad and entails reading insights through one another to generate and attend to the differences and interferences enabled. By diffracting the theories that undergird this research through artmaking practice and philosophical inquiry, differences and new understandings are generated. In this study, artmaking practice and philosophical inquiry serve as methods through which insights on the role of matter, material, and materiality in artmaking practice develop. Attending to the insi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jennifer Richardson (Advisor) Subjects: Art Education

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2019, German

This thesis highlights the ways in which Bertolt Brecht's concept of epic theatre pertains to video games, more particularly, visual novels. Digital drama and romance genres (aka “dating simulators”) are known for their “realism” for their ability to make the player feel as if they are interacting with real people. Yet, the deceptiveness is their apparent inability to replicate fully the kinds of social interactions a person can have. The plot structure oftentimes is also rather simplistic: the goal of these games is that the player gets the girl of their dreams, despite any hardships. The horror game Doki Doki Literature Club (2017) by game developer Dan Salvato challenges these genre shortcomings and aspire to make productive, I will argue, a Brechtian notion of epic theatre. Salvato had a love-hate relationship with visual novels. To him, visual novels were nothing more than “cute girls doing cute things” where any tragic backstory or character arc is just another objective the player must overcome to make the girl of their dreams fall in love with them. Like Brecht, Salvato wants to destroy the illusions created by visual novels and shock people into reflecting about such illusions. He created Doki Doki Literature Club, a horror game disguised as a dating simulator, which takes a critical look at issues such a mental health that visual novels often gloss over and treat as plot points in the story.

Committee: Edgar Landgraf Ph.D. (Advisor); Kristie Foell Ph.D. (Committee Member); Clayton Rosati Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Germanic Literature; Mass Communications; Mass Media

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, English

The Anthropocene era— a term put forward to differentiate the timespan in which human activity has left a geological mark on the Earth, and which is most often now applied to what J.R. McNeill labels the post-1945 “Great Acceleration”— has seen a proliferation of narratives that center around questions of radioactive, toxic, and other bodily contamination and this contamination's potential effects. Across literature, memoir, comics, television, and film, these narratives play out the cultural anxieties of a world that is itself increasingly figured as contaminated. In this dissertation, I read examples of these narratives as suggesting that behind these anxieties lies a more central anxiety concerning the sustainability of Western liberal humanism and its foundational human figure. Without celebrating contamination, I argue that the very concept of what it means to be “contaminated” must be rethought, as representations of the contaminated body shape and shaped by a nervous policing of what counts as “human.” To this end, I offer a strategy of posthuman/ist reading that draws on new materialist approaches from the Environmental Humanities, and mobilize this strategy to highlight the ways in which narratives of contamination from Marvel Comics to memoir are already rejecting the problematic ideology of the human and envisioning what might come next.

Committee: Thomas Davis (Advisor); Jared Gardner (Committee Member); Brian McHale (Committee Member); Rebekah Sheldon (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender Studies; Literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2016, Arts and Sciences: Germanic Languages and Literature

Questions of whether consciousness is beholden to the context in which it experiences the world or not form the central debate about the nature of human life within discourses of posthumanism. Drawing on the wealth of science fiction media, theorists such as Scott Bukatman, and N. Katherine Hayles each make differing arguments about the direction humanity is heading in its ever-increasing convergence with advanced technology. While Bukatman's position calls for a redefinition of the subject and subjective consciousness in the face of a changing technological world, Hayles' focus on embodiment as the groundwork of existence refutes what she sees as the technological nightmares in Bukatman and his analysis of cyberpunk. However, this conflict did not begin in the late twentieth century; rather my work will argue that this debate, and indeed posthumanism as a whole, have their roots in the works of the German Idealists as they reacted against Kant and the Enlightenment. Specifically I will trace the roots of ukatman's argument to Fichte and his First Principle of Philosophy that grounds all subjectivity. Next I will trace the work of Hayles, who reacts directly against Bukatman in How We Became Posthuman to Holderlin, who in his essay “Being and Judgement” reacts directly against Fichte's First Principle and the idea that consciousness is independent of corporeal being. Through this analysis I will demonstrate the extremely widespread, but heretofore unacknowledged influence German Idealism has had, and continues to have, on contemporary culture and its relationship with technology.

Committee: Harold Herzog Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Tanja Nusser Ph.D. (Committee Member); Evan Torner Ph.D. (Committee Member); Valerie Weinstein Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Germanic Literature

PHD, Kent State University, 2016, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

This dissertation argues that transatlantic literary experimentation of the early twentieth century, often referred to as high modernism, expresses the emergent geological epoch defined by human impact, the Anthropocene. The historical moment that produced texts like The Waste Land, Spring and All, Cane, and The Waves becomes crucial to shifting ideas about the place of the human species in relationship to the physical world, if we attune to more inclusive conceptions of nature. High modernism actually makes profound contributions to conversations about the human relationship to the physical, nonhuman world, despite the fact that the fields of ecocriticism and modernist studies are too rarely brought into dialogue. Ultimately, modernity is an ecological phenomenon, and writers such as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, and Jean Toomer anticipate current conceptualizations of the Anthropocene in many ways—including characteristically modernist manipulations of scale, engagements with geological time, and meditations on the entanglement of humans and nonhumans. As they respond to the rapid transformation of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, these authors unsettle inherited notions of nature as a passive construct entirely separate from the human. Instead, these texts perform the complexity of a world that is simultaneously intimate and strange, self and other. For the modernists, and in the Anthropocene, humans are equally distinct and interconnected, dominant and vulnerable, as the human species is revealed to be subjected to the very systems it put into action.

Committee: Kevin Floyd (Advisor); Ryan Hediger (Advisor) Subjects: Environmental Studies; Literature

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2016, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Art History

The Mexican-American borderlands have long been a site of cultural conflict and intermingling. After the signing of the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848 at the end of the Mexican-American War, Mexico lost over half of its territory, leaving thousands of Mexicans in what became almost overnight US territory. Since that time, Hispanics have often been portrayed as sources of infection, blight, and corruption, discourses which have remained common with the 21st-century increase in immigration, both legal and illegal, from Latin American nations. In response to these dehumanizing, negative portrayals, numerous Hispanic artists such as ASCO, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, and Ricardo Valverde have taken it upon themselves to try and represent an independent Hispanic-American identity reflective of the Hispanic experience, usually focusing on images of people or shared cultural systems, with some turning to photography as a means by which to effectively capture this experience. Many American photographers have also sought to challenge stereotypes by portraying the challenges of border life and illegal migration, often creating images reminiscent of social documentary photography of the early 20th century. With a few shining examples, such as James Oles' South of the Border, few scholars of borderlands art have comparatively analyzed the works of Hispanic and American artists, or explored alternate meanings of their artworks outside the categories of identity affirmation and social documentary. Two photographers who exemplify the possibilities created by bridging these divisions are the Hispanic-American photographer Ken Gonzales-Day (b. 1964) and the American documentary wildlife photographer Krista Schlyer (b. 1971). Both have deployed strategies to engage viewers by obliging them to reconstruct the concealed human activity in the image and thereby more deeply analyze the consequences of these actions, the former by symbolically erasing the bodies of lynched Hispanic Ameri (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Tracy Teslow Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Kimberly Paice Ph.D. (Committee Member); Morgan Thomas Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2015, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation attempts to highlight the cultural relationship between the digital humanities and science fiction as fields of inquiry both engaged in the development of humanistic perspectives in increasingly global digital contexts. Through analysis of four American science fiction novels, the work is concerned with locating the genre's pedagogical value as a media form that helps us adapt to the digital present and orient us toward a digital future. Each novel presents a different facet of digital humanities practices and/or discourses that, I argue, effectively re-evaluate the humanities (particularly traditional literary studies and pedagogy) as a set of hybrid disciplines that leverage digital technologies and the sciences. In Pat Cadigan's Synners (1993), I explore issues of production, consumption, and collaboration, as well as the nature of embodied subjectivity, in a reality codified by the virtual. The chapters on Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2 (1995) and Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End (2006) are concerned with the passing of traditional humanities practices and the evolution of the institutions they are predicated on (such as the library and the composition classroom) in the wake of the digital turn. In the final chapter, I consider Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (2008) as a digital call to arms that, through an impassioned portrayal of hacktivism and the struggle for digital privacy rights, rejects the invasive political laws established in the U.S. since 9/11 and enabled by digital technologies.

Committee: Laura Micciche Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Charles M. Henley Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jennifer Glaser Ph.D. (Committee Member); Gary Weissman Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature

PHD, Kent State University, 2015, College of Education, Health and Human Services / School of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Studies

Although new materialisms are emerging as a force within early childhood studies internationally, there are few studies that blend this onto-epistemology with a reconceptualist, participatory model of inquiry with young children in the U.S. context. This is partially due to the dominance of constructivist worldviews and partially due to the paradox of attempting to blend fundamentally humanistic, “child-centered” practices with a posthuman onto-epistemology that decenters the human from the construction of knowledge. The current study attempted to “make room” (Haraway, 1991) for both a rights-based approach to researching with young children and a radical material agency – specifically Barad's (2003, 2007) notion of entanglement. A post-qualitative method assemblage was activated to attend to the more-than-human entanglements that comprised the classroom relationships of 16 kindergarten children. Through children's and researcher's ways of “being with”, “doing photos” and “becoming (with) cameras” within the classroom, they engaged with/in layers of material-discursive data events, constructing visual and narrative cuts of their daily entanglements. A rhizoanalysis was employed to attend to both the delightful and disturbing transformations that emerged between children and “things”. These data events are re-presented through four interconnected and multimodal cartographies that highlight the children's perspectives on the workings of popular media, weather, bodies, toys, nonhuman species, and more. The potentialities for this research are discussed in terms of “being-becoming, knowing, getting along well together, and living well” (Barad, 2014), specifically questioning notions of consumption, self-regulation, research practices, and quality within early childhood classroom settings.

Committee: Janice Kroeger (Committee Chair); Walter Gershon (Committee Member); Tricia Niesz (Committee Member); Kylie Smith (Committee Member) Subjects: Early Childhood Education