Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Geography

In the last decade, several leftist countries in Latin America, including Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, among others, have retooled national and regional political, economic, and social governance to push against the constraints of deeply ingrained neoliberalism. This so-called post/neoliberal era is an attempt to move beyond neoliberalism, which was forced upon and adopted by Latin American governments beginning in the 1970s, and its failures, including privatization of State enterprises, persistent poverty and increasing social inequality, and widespread environmental destruction. This dissertation uses the term “post/neoliberal” to acknowledge that post/neoliberal governance models exist alongside neoliberal models. To date, much focus has been paid to post/neoliberal macroeconomic policies and State-civil society relations. The aim of this dissertation, therefore, is to examine the influence of post/neoliberalism on the governance—that is, the discourses, policies, institutions, programs, and practices that manage, direct, and conduct everyday life—of public health, environmental health, and well-being. My conceptual framing draws from Foucauldian governmentalities, urban political ecology, and neoliberalism as governmentality and as policy. Together, these literatures provoke new questions concerning the dialectic relationship among health, environment, and development amid changing political economic governance in Latin America. The empirical basis of this dissertation draws from qualitative (discourse analysis, interviews, and participant observation) and quantitative (household survey questionnaires) fieldwork conducted in Managua, Nicaragua. This dissertation is comprised of three body chapters to be submitted to academic journals for peer review. In the first body chapter I argue that contemporary public health governance in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, three countries where post/neoliberalism is mos (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Becky Mansfield (Advisor); Nancy Ettlinger (Committee Member); Kendra McSweeney (Committee Member); Elisabeth Root (Committee Member) Subjects: Environmental Health; Environmental Studies; Geography; Latin American Studies; Public Health

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Arts Policy and Administration

This dissertation provides a Foucauldian genealogy and governmentality study on the arts clusters in Beijing, the first of which was established in 1990. By investigating how the emergence and disappearance of different types of arts clusters are produced by specific social conditions, I examine the changing power relation between artists and the political authority since the late 1970s and interpret how contemporary Chinese art has been governed. The genealogy of arts clusters takes into account not only arts-related topics but events and phenomena in economics, population migration, land regulation, international relations, etc. Therefore, the analysis also offers a window to Chinese society and its histories more generally. In addition, I conduct a case study on the 798 art factory – the most famous arts cluster in China and the one subjected to the most intense government intervention. An examination of the governance inside 798 provides an account for how contemporary art is governed at a specific site. Subscribing to the ascending research method advocated by Foucault, I ground my analysis on abundant empirical data gathered from interviews, observations, and document studies. In addition to data that accounts for people's daily practices and lived experiences, I collect social discourses on various topics and issues from law, policies, regulations, development plans, entries in yearbooks, government briefs and Party leaders' speeches. Based on these discourses and actual practices, I identify two dominant governing rationalities – Reason of Party and neoliberalism – and examine their interplay. Specifically, I interpret how neoliberalism as an exception to socialism has been promoted by the political authority to reinforce its rule and gradually extend into different social domains. I argue that artists are in a sense “pushed” to adopt the neoliberal mentality and prioritize economic calculations. I also interrogate socialist legacy within neoliberalism in (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Margaret Wyszomirski (Advisor); Nancy Ettlinger (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History; Arts Management; Asian Studies; History

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2016, Communication Studies

This study situates invasion as a form of what Michel Foucault called governmentality. According to Foucault, governmentality determined how a society was ruled and by whom it was ruled, and under what conditions. A central argument in this dissertation is that invasion, both actual and imagined, has become a fundamental means of governing the population and body, and is as much a productive force as it is destructive. Turning to media representations across a variety of formats, this study examines four key case studies. The first is the Critical Art Ensemble, a tactical media group whose work designed to expose the working of the corporate food supply brought them into direct conflict with the federal authorities. Along these lines, this study argues that tactical media functions as both a form of surveillance and governmentality. Another tactical media group analyzed is the Yes Men, who use their own bodies and the visage of corporate America to expose the often twisted logic at work. This study then turns to representations on film and television, analyzing the film Cloverfield (2008) and the science fiction television series Fringe, both of which rely heavily in the tropes of invasion. Invasion has become a loose term and its workings are not fully theorized. By looking at how invasion, surveillance, and bodies interact, this study lays out a path that not only interrogates the concept of invasion, but also how invasion may be subverted or, by contrast, unquestioned. Methodologically, this study combines visual and ideological analysis, as theorized by Nicholas Mirzoeff and Lisa Nakamura and others, in order to uncover the myriad ways by which invasion works. By combining these methods, the study examines key components from each of these sites. By examining closely the visual representation, and by turns the obfuscation of the such visual representations, of science, law enforcement, the military, surveillance, and destruction - as well as the obfu (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Radhika Gajjala (Advisor); Lara Lengel-Martin (Advisor); Scott Martin (Committee Member); Alberto Gonzalez (Committee Member); Clayton Rosati (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Geography

Scholars, politicans, and planners posit entrepreneurship and cultural industries as central to economic growth. My examination of crafters' mentalities, practices, and material conditions for starting and maintaining their businesses shows that such faith in entrepreneurship requires critique. When entrepreneurs try to start new businesses they not only produce new monetary value in a calculated quest for profits, but also consume goods and services within the urban economy and beyond in an effort to earn multiple types of fulfillment (e.g. personal satisfaction, autonomy). Crafters' consumption yields income for others, signifying their importance in the circulation of capital, even if they reap little to no monetary rewards themselves. Thus, the majority of aspiring craft entrepreneurs experience entrepreneurship as a consumer industry that is booming on their backs rather than a new paradigm for economic growth and sustainable livelihoods. They consume more monetary value through their purchases than they earn from their sales, thereby resulting in a credit debt. Aspirants see through their neoliberal subjectivities these failures to earn a livelihood as personal faults, which can be corrected by self-disciplining for stricter adherence to discourses built on market logics. Craft economies serve as one example of what I call `aspirational economies,' systems of production and consumption of resources that embed multiple notions of value, and are practiced by people who focus more on experience and hope for future successes than on immediate material gains. I mean for this concept to trouble the static categories associated with professionalized occupations and consider the lengthy and uncertain trajectories people negotiate in order to establish and sustain livelihoods. Researchers tend to focus on professional artists and formal arts events when studying arts economies, but examining only professionals obscures the informal arts economy and an often larger (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Nancy Ettlinger Dr. (Advisor); Malecki Edward Dr. (Committee Member); Munroe Darla Dr. (Committee Member); Gibson Chris Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics; Gender Studies; Geography

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2014, Comparative Studies

This thesis argues that liberal anti-gentrification discourses play a powerful if unacknowledged role in the late liberal governance of social difference in our contemporary neoliberal moment. The thesis examines anti-gentrification discourses in San Francisco that oppose gentrification in defense of treasured liberal ideals of the good life and just city—namely, the belief that liberal subjects have successfully disaffiliated from histories of xenophobia, and the attendant desire to foster social harmony by celebrating and living alongside “the otherwise.” Liberal anti-gentrification discourses posit these regulatory ideals as a corrective to the unapologetically exclusive and violent “revanchist city.” An appeal to keep “the otherwise” inside the project of citizenship amidst the competing valuations of the market, these discourses are a site at which late liberal governmentality negotiates the terms of social inclusion and reasons about the simultaneous worth and dangers of social difference. Liberal anti-gentrification discourses enlist a range of biopolitical technologies to figure differential inclusion in the image of liberal social harmony. They create a field of uneven exposure to gentrification, and in so doing quietly and unwittingly endorse and prolong longstanding patterns of xenophobic exclusion and violence in the U.S. city. Articulated in the name of an anti-gentrification politics that stakes its claim on including, accommodating, and celebrating “the otherwise,” this late liberal biopolitics make differential inclusion seem politically and ethically sensible, right, and good.

Committee: Leo Coleman (Advisor); Shannon Winnubst (Committee Member); Maurice Stevens (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Ethnic Studies; Gender Studies; Geography; Philosophy; Urban Planning

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Comparative Studies

The goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate some of the ways in which neoliberal social and economic discourse, in particular the work of Friedrich Hayek and Gary Becker, has influenced the cultural evolution of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Chapter One introduces the scope and methods of the project and situates market-oriented social epistemology alongside the development of complexity theory in the physical and information sciences. Chapter Two situates Hayek's philosophies of social science and communication within the broader science cultures of the postwar decades, arguing that his conceptualization of prices and markets is deeply rooted in coterminous projects of cybernetics and general systems theory. Consequently, Hayek's ideas about autonomy, information, and cultural transmission are seen to dovetail with the dominant scientific paradigms and media technologies of the late twentieth century. Chapter Three argues that contemporary financial markets and telematic screen cultures have become operationally analogous in their actualization of neoliberal rationality and social thought. Expanding my reading of neoliberalism beyond Hayek's macrological approach to examine the emerging and all-consuming micrological approach of “human capital” theorists like Becker, this chapter details the ways in which new media platforms, algorithmic cultural practices, and what cultural critics have named the “financialization of daily life” have become primary agents of governmentality today. Chapter Four offers an original interpretation of Michel Foucault's 1979 lectures on neoliberalism, one that reads the abrupt change of course in his research—which, directly following his interrogations of Hayek, Becker, and others, jumped from contemporary political economy to ancient cultures of self-care—as an attempt to locate a genealogical precedent for the subjectivist governmental rationality he had revealed as a dominant theme of neoliberal discourse. (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brian Rotman (Committee Co-Chair); Philip Armstrong (Committee Co-Chair); Eugene Holland (Committee Member); Kris Paulsen (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Comparative; Economic Theory; Philosophy; Philosophy of Science; Social Research; Social Structure; Technology; Web Studies

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2014, Geography

In this thesis, I critically examine connections among graffiti, public space, and resistance. Questioning essentialist views of graffiti and public space in terms of a struggle between order and disorder, I ask: how do graffiti writers produce public space, and to what ends? This project is based on interviews, focus groups, and participant observation conducted with graffiti writers in the Columbus, Ohio area. I conclude that graffiti writers' often uncritical practice of "graffiti as resistance" has, in this case, led writers to produce systems of order in public space that are largely ineffective as resistance and that produce marginalization and domination. Some practices, though, indicate possibilities for resistance that targets graffiti writers' views of public space, rather than power itself. Writers' views and practices may articulate with related views and practices, revealing connections with broader societal processes and introducing issues for efforts toward resistance.

Committee: Bruce D'Arcus PhD (Advisor); Marcia England PhD (Committee Member); C. Lee Harrington PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Geography

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, EDU Policy and Leadership

This dissertation is a result of the study of the citizenship standards in the K-12 social studies standards documents of ten U.S. states. As a qualitative textual study, it considers the content of the standards in light of recent thinking in the field of citizenship studies. Through discourse analysis it examines the emergence of global citizenship discourse in the standards as well as other traditional and emergent citizenship discourses. It employs discourse mapping as an analytical tool for reading the vision of citizenship that is presented by the standards. A governmentality framework is used to understand how standardization works to limit citizenship possibilities for students. It draws upon Foucault's notion of care of the self to conceptualize an ethical/critical social studies curriculum. This project is informed by postmodern theories of citizenship and imagines how these might be useful in creating a more robust and democratic citizenship education.

Committee: Patti Lather PhD (Advisor); Jan Nespor PhD (Committee Member); Binaya Subedi PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, History

This dissertation focuses on the local administrative practices in Vidin County during 1860s and 1870s. Vidin County, as defined by the Ottoman Provincial Regulation of 1864, is the area that includes the districts of Vidin (the administrative center), ‛Adliye (modern-day Kula), Belgradcyk (Belogradchik), Berkofca (Bergovitsa), Yvraca (Vratsa), Rahova (Rahovo), and Lom (Lom), all of which are located in modern-day Bulgaria. My focus is mostly on the post-1864 period primarily due to the document utilized for this dissertation: the copy registers of the county administrative council in Vidin. Doing a close reading of these copy registers together with other primary and secondary sources this dissertation analyzes the politics of local administration in Vidin as a case study to understand the Ottoman governmentality in the second half of the nineteenth century. The main thesis of this study contends that the local inhabitants of Vidin effectively used the institutional framework of local administration in this period of transformation in order to devise strategies that served their interests. This work distances itself from an understanding of the nineteenth-century local politics as polarized between a dominating local government trying to impose unprecedented reforms designed at the imperial center on the one hand, and an oppressed but nevertheless resistant people, rebelling against the insensitive policies of the state on the other. Without denying that a certain level of violence was prevalent, I argue, first, that the distinction between the state and society was not as clear as presumed, second, that the local administrative branch of the state was not a monolith body of state agents and third, that the society was not always oblivious and rebellious to the reform policies.

Committee: Carter Findley (Advisor) Subjects: History, Middle Eastern

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2009, Southeast Asian Studies (International Studies)

This thesis provides a 'current history' of development in the village of Aih Nuso in Gunung Leuser National Park, Sumatra, Indonesia. Development in the Leuser region began in the late 1800s when the Dutch colonial regime implemented large-scale agriculture and conservation projects in the rural communities. These continued into the 1980s and 1990s as the New Order government continued the work of the colonial regime. The top-down model of development used by the state was heavily criticized, prompting a move towards community-based participatory development in the later 1990s. This thesis examines the most recent NGO-led development project, a micro-hydro electricity system, in the village of Aih Nuso to elucidate the following: 1) The social, economic, and political impacts of the project on the community. 2) The local people's perceptions of technology, modernity, electricity, and development. And, 3) To what extent is an NGO-led development empowering to this local community or is it just a guise that reinforces development hegemony and outside power.

Committee: Gene Ammarell (Committee Chair); Elizabeth Collins (Committee Member); Haley Duschinski (Committee Member) Subjects: Cultural Anthropology; Energy

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2006, Educational Leadership

This dissertation applies the archeological concepts developed by Michel Foucault to a study of thirteen biology textbooks (1993-2004) in order to develop an understanding of ‘purchased truths' concerning cancer. This study focuses on the construction of the health/illness dialogue concerning cancer within the textbooks and not the meaning that the individual makes from reading the text; as such this study concerns itself with social truths rather than the search for an individual awareness of names, dates, or places. This study investigates the practices that allow the creation of dialogues that are inserted into a biology textbook and looks at how discursive formations create the ‘truth regime' from which the biology textbook is said to speak. Using the Foucaultian themes of ‘event', ‘emergence', ‘enunciation', and ‘exteriority' a new reading of topics concerning cancer emerge from biology textbooks. Cancer is a disease that will impact the lives of countless individuals but coverage devoted to the pathology of cancer in secondary biology textbooks is very limited and no study textbook devoted a whole chapter to the discussion of cancer. There is an identified reduction in the number of pages and depth of coverage devoted to cancer in the newer biology texts compared to the older texts. Humans are pictured more than plants or animals in presentations concerning cancer with emphasis being placed on the digitalization of human cells via the scanning electron microscope. When the whole body is presented it is seldom located within the technology of disease diagnosis and treatment but rather is posed for specific social control. Just as each digitized picture of the cancerous cell in the texts is used to create a story so too are the pictures of the whole body in action. Possible story lines offered by the publishing houses concerning the reaction of the body to cancer are shown to intermingle with risk factor analysis to project a sense of Foucaultian ‘governmentalit (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Richard Hofmann (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2013, EDU Policy and Leadership

Universities' commitments to internationalization have intensified over the past twenty years. However, most research that looks critically at internationalization in higher education is conducted outside of the U.S. In order to address this gap, Foucault's framework of biopower and governmentality were applied to a discourse analysis of the ways in which Big Ten universities' internationalization planning documents allow for both the reproduction as well as the challenging of neoliberal economic rationalities that permeate university internationalization efforts, and higher education more generally. Various discourses that shape the conduct of universities and university subjects were identified. However, the hegemony of neoliberal governmentality within internationalization efforts identified in the documents suggests that efforts to resist the dominance of economic rationality require pointed political economic critique. Further, critical engagement with the position of higher education within the blurred, shifting binaries of public and private, and local and global, would enable envisioning new subjectivities and transnational obligations that both eschew neoliberal economic imperatives and challenge the reproduction of the alterity produced by these imperatives.

Committee: Tatiana Suspitsyna (Advisor); Susan Jones (Committee Member) Subjects: Higher Education