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

American Indian communities were among the most heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even as many begin to treat COVID-19 as an endemic pathogen, Native peoples continue to navigate its far-reaching impacts as the most immediate affront to their physical and cultural lives in a long line of historical and contemporary abuses. To understand response to crises such as the pandemic, anthropologists often rely on the concept of resilience. However, despite a history of its theorization in anthropology and related social sciences, its usefulness as a concept remains hindered by assumptions encouraging overgeneralized and deterministic applications. As some scholars have noted, culturally-specific notions of resilience may clarify the concept while increasing its usefulness among marginalized communities. In response to calls from Native community members, this project sought to understand how resilience was conceptualized among Native peoples in the wake of the pandemic and how this impacted their abilities to move forward. Within a community-based participatory research framework, I conducted an ethnographic project facilitating community conversations, follow-up interviews, and community-led working groups in ten communities across Native America. Participating communities represented both reservation and urban, off-reservation communities in the Great Plains, Great Lakes, and Southeastern regions of the United States. Participants were asked to engage in a community conversation to discuss their pandemic experiences alongside their visions for their communities' futures with an option to participate in additional follow-up interviews. Further, interested participants organized community-led working groups to address their post-pandemic concerns. The findings from this project suggest that resilience in these communities was not simply a passive ability to weather upheaval. Rather, it represents an iterative process that involves considering responses historicall (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Anna Willow (Advisor); Mark Moritz (Committee Member); Nick Kawa (Committee Member); Morgan Liu (Committee Member) Subjects: Cultural Anthropology; Native American Studies

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

My dissertation aims to discuss how Hong Kong literature, including speculative fiction, science fiction, and zines, in English or translated into English, might help us to open new avenues of transformation by working through the past and imagining alternative futures. Referencing scholars and activists in queer, transformative, and disability justice, Postcolonial Studies, and Hong Kong Studies, my dissertation adds new materials from the Hong Kong context to enrich the discussions of affect that have hitherto mostly focused on Western societies. It also employs affect as a heuristic device to re-examine the rampant neoliberalizing process and its dire consequences. Diverse and divergent as the materials for analysis are, they are all organized around an investigation into the collusional connection between the biopolitical regulation of populations and the manipulation of affective potentials that upholds and sustains the transnational neoliberal system. While foregrounding key concepts of decoloniality and affect from a range of interdisciplinary approaches, my project probes deeply into the question of what imaginations are intentionally denied, foreclosing possibilities of hope and change. The central questions that my study intends to answer are: How can literature and other cultural products created by Hong Kong writers and artists construct the foundation of a liberating aesthetic that reflects a capacity to imagine alternative worlds? And what are the conditions in which new forms of livability, sociality, and futurity can emerge, survive, and flourish? My project seeks to contribute to anticolonial traditions and decolonial thought. While grounded in literary and textual analysis, my research thinks with people's everyday practices under conditions of political and economic duress in imaginative and hopeful ways. Modelling the cross-disciplinary, cross-border work required for this moment and drawing from the rigorous and well-establ (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Pranav Jani (Advisor); Jian Chen (Committee Member); Martin Ponce (Committee Member) Subjects: Asian Literature; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2024, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

Unfortunately, Black people in America are considered structurally futureless (Lothian 2018), meaning the Black population is disadvantaged across social and governmental systems making their future outcomes less favorable than their white peers. Yet, Black people continue to invest in their own futurity, imagining a way forward. Current discussions involving Black futurism relates to literary fiction, but little has been researched on the futures everyday Black people imagine for themselves. A new concept in describing individual futures, the five dimensions of futures-consciousness (Ahvenharju, Minkkinen, and Lalot 2018), offers an opportunity for rhetoricians to analyze the language people use when imagining their futures. Seizing this opportunity, this dissertation explores the individual futures of undergraduates who invest in the future through higher education. A total of five participants, Chartreuse, Purple, Vaughn, Terra, and Hunter, contribute interviews where they imagine themselves one and five years in the future. This study shares participant experiences as examples of the futures Black students are creating for themselves, how imagination might correlate with verbal cues, and finally, how their described futures might fit within the five dimensions of futures-consciousness. A Black feminist framework maintains transparency of the power dynamics of research. Participants were invited to complete a follow-up interview where they could edit or expand their previous answers. Transcripts were analyzed with feminist listening to create codes in a grounded theory method. And lastly, each chapter of this dissertation opens with a reflection, juxtaposing the researcher against the researched. The results of this dissertation feature thick descriptions of participant transcripts, utilizing complete utterances of their responses to interview questions. The results discover a correlation between hedging and imagination as participants utilize more hedging w (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Neil Baird PhD (Committee Chair); Chad Duffy PhD (Committee Member); Chisty Galletta Horner PhD (Committee Member); Lee Nickoson PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2022, American Culture Studies

This dissertation is rooted in the general question: How do contemporary TV series featuring Black queer and trans representation highlight and address sociopolitical questions often found circulating within queer and cultural studies? Employing three programs, The Prancing Elites Project (2015), Empire (2015), and Pose (2018), this study argues that recent upticks in Black queer characters on TV provide room to move beyond traditional analyses often predicated on critical suspicion to instead engender readings revealing themes related to Black futurity, worldmaking, and coalition building, prominent topics within the fields of queer and cultural studies. Building from both Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's articulation of reparative reading and prior scholarship often critical of Black queer televisual representation, this dissertation's interventions are both theoretical and methodological, presenting a recalibrated approach to gleaning the richness in Black queer media. Black Queer TV: Reparative Viewing and the Sociopolitical Questions of Our Now invigorates and broadens critical scholarship on media through nuancing programs depicting a range of Black queer people's represented experiences.

Committee: Bill Albertini PhD (Advisor); Vibha Bhalla PhD (Other); Susana Peña PhD (Committee Member); Clayton Rosati PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; American Studies; Black Studies; Economic Theory; Gender Studies

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2021, Bioethics

The medical management of intersex persons focuses primarily on forms over functions, with limited attention paid to the futurity for these individuals through reproductive capabilities and fertility preservation. Some types of intersex conditions preclude reproductive or preservation options, while other impediments to these capacities stem from surgical interventions to address malignancy risks or from sexual assignment procedures. There is clear documentation for general medical management, debates on the ethical implications of sex assignment interventions, as well as some addressment for fertility preservation options for post-pubertal individuals. Absent is inquiry into medicine's relationship with intersex futures, and this paper seeks to delve into the driving influences of socio-cultural norms that direct intersex medical interventions. Specifically, I ask what, if any, obligation does medicine have to intersex futurity. By interrogating conceptions of proxy decision-making on open futures, noting hegemonic norms that direct collective understanding, and challenging these norms through queer, disability, and crip perspectives, I have presented the conversations that are being had as well as highlighting the ones that are still needed. Acceptance of fallibility and contributing unknowns gives space to confront responsibilities and obligations, re-evaluating engagement with the norms behind ethical decision making.

Committee: Dana Howard (Advisor); Courtney Thiele (Committee Member); Jordan Brown (Committee Member) Subjects: Ethics; Gender Studies