Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, Art Education

In an expanding technological ecology, the spaces of learning in art education require a new appraisal of the role that visual technologies serve to learners. Through intersections of actor-network theory and theories of visuality from visual culture studies, this research focuses on developing a social ontology to investigate the role that the visual technology Photoshop plays in collaborating with users within a human-technological hybrid. In a role reversal, for this research I become the instrument of research and Photoshop becomes the focus of a non-human ethnographic inquiry that utilizes an ontological framework to consider how technology performs with us and not on us. This symmetry between human and non-humans in a social ontology generates the complexity of Photoshop in a heterogeneous network formation of agencies, through more than its instrumentality, by seeing it working with me in the production of digital visual culture.

Committee: Kevin Tavin (Committee Chair); Sydney Walker (Committee Member); Jennifer Eisenhauer (Committee Member); Robert Sweeny (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2023, History of Art

In a 1960 article entitled “Younger American Painters,” William Rubin accused Rauschenberg's Combines of rendering the “inherently biographical style of Abstract Expressionism… even more personal, more particular, and sometimes almost embarrassingly private.” Rubin's choice of the word “embarrassingly” is telling; the Combines are not just private, but embarrassingly so; that is, the problem the Combines present is that they are not private when good sense/taste tells us they should be. This spilling over of the supposed-to-be-private into the embarrassingly deviant public has been read as an insistence on the work of art as both in its environment and in communication with it, as a valorization of the femininity associated with the interior/personal and relatedly, as a refusal of heteronormative subjectivity as dictated in the Cold War era. This paper suggests another reading—not as an alternative, but as a supplement to these: a reading of Rauschenberg's Combines through the lens of disability theory. If Rauschenberg's Combines are debased (and there seems to be some agreement that they are), and if one's experience of them is bodily (and this experience seems if not universal, then nearly so), then their association with the debased/abject body demands inquiry. Made up of disparate parts that insist upon their discrete, adjunctive identities and former lives, the Combines might be best understood as Frankensteins—disabled bodies that refuse to comply and in so doing inscribe new ways of being (corporeally) in the world.

Committee: Lisa Florman (Advisor); Erica Levin (Committee Member); J.T. Richardson Eisenhauer (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism; Art History; Ethics; Fine Arts; Minority and Ethnic Groups

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2011, Film Scholarship (Fine Arts)

This thesis examines the roles of gay black men in three HBO programs: Six Feet Under, The Wire, and True Blood. Whereas such characters have always been stereotyped and ridiculed in the past, HBO has made strides forward thanks to its commitment to being on the cutting edge of narrative television. Drawing on Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages, the thesis argues that Omar Little of The Wire, and to a lesser extent Lafayette Reynolds of True Blood, add new dimensions of representation by presenting their queerness as an assemblage of diverse factors, rather than an intersection of discrete categories. Keith Charles of Six Feet Under is presented as a counterexample - a positive representation, but safer and less groundbreaking than those who came after.

Committee: Louis-Georges Schwartz PhD (Advisor); Ofer Eliaz PhD (Committee Member); Gary Holcomb PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; American Studies; Black Studies; Film Studies; Gender Studies; Mass Media; Performing Arts