Digital Commons Network^™

Hannah Arendt And Feminist Agency, Katherine N. Fulfer

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My goal in this dissertation is to articulate an Arendtian conception of feminist agency, that is, agency that aims at resistance from within oppressive situations. There is a tendency in feminist literature to depict women in the global south as if they are passive victims of their oppression, with no opportunities to resist. This tendency is replicated in feminist responses to transnational contract pregnancy, the practice in which people travel across national borders to hire a woman to gestate an embryo.

I argue that the feminist literature on contract pregnancy is polarized and unable to resolve the problematic trend of …

Nonprofit Funding Agencies’ Review Of Grant Recipients, Siobain Mcilvain

Honors Theses - Providence Campus

Nonprofits need to be just as responsible as public corporations. Nonprofit funding agencies have the responsibility for evaluating the organizations they fund to make sure that they are operating with high integrity, maintaining strong internal controls, remaining financially stable, and overall being good stewards of the funds received. This paper will explain the criteria that a funding agency should follow in order to affect this process, as well as how a recipient nonprofit will benefit from following the criteria.

What Studios Do, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

This essay is focused around a seemingly simple question – what do recording studios do? First, a clarification. I am not primarily asking “what are studios” or “what do people do in studios,” two comparatively straightforward questions that are tangentially addressed in academic and trade writing. Rather, I wish to consider some of the ways in which the studio itself shapes the kinds of social and musical performances and interactions that transpire within. I contend that studios must be understood simultaneously as acoustic environments, as meeting places, as container technologies, as a system of constraints on vision, sound and mobility, …

Questioning Appropriation: Agency And Complicity In A Transnational Feminist Location Politics, Joseph D. Parker

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

In feminist circles agency is often opposed to complicity and associated with resistance to sexism and patriarchy, yet such binary oppositions make the political stakes of their presumed boundaries difficult to interrogate. By bringing location politics into dialogue with agency theory, boundaries of same/Other and location categories may move from a naturalized ground for political work to the contested center of a politics of resistance. I follow a Foucauldian interpretation of agency to reconsider the ethico-politics of established divisions of self and Other both individually and in terms of social movements. By following Gayatri Spivak, Meyda Yeğenoğlu, and Chandra Mohanty's …

When In China, Do As The Chinese Do? Learning Compliment Responding In A Study Abroad Program, Li Jin

Li Jin

近年来中国大陆吸引了越来越多以英语为母语的留学生。留学生在中国留学期间是否学习到并在语言行为上体现中国文化的礼节方式是个很值得研究的话题。本文使用定性分析方式研究了美国大学生在中国上海暑期语言学习期间（八周）所习得的汉语称赞答复方式及学习称赞答复的过程。考察对象为四名在美国中西部一所私立大学学习汉语，以英语为母语的学生。其中两名二年级学生，两名三年级学生。数据来源为学生参加暑期学习班初期的问卷调查，每周一次的单独采访（一共六次），学生每周的博客，及本文作者的现场观察记录。分析结果发现四名学生学习到不同的称赞答复方式，称赞答复方式的学习过程复杂并受到个人在暑期学习期间社会经历的影响。本文并讨论了影响以英语为母语学生在中国短期留学期间学习称赞答复方式的各种社会及文化因素。 Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of English-speaking students studying abroad in China. Whether these students can learn and reflect in their behaviors certain uniquely Chinese-style speech acts during their sojourn in China merits investigation. This paper reports on a case study investigating what and how four American university-level students developed knowledge and skills of compliment responding in Mandarin Chinese when they were participating in an 8-week intensive summer language program in Shanghai. Among the four participants, two were from a 2nd-year Mandarin Chinese class and two from a 3rd-year class. The qualitative data were collected from one …

Identification Through Inhabitation In Literature, Film, And Video Games, Charlotte Palfreyman Smith

Theses and Dissertations

In real life we each experience the world separately through our individual bodies, which necessitates what Kenneth Burke calls "identification." In this paper, I assert that as artistic media have structured our aesthetic experience in a way that increasingly resembles our lived, embodied experiences, our identification with fictional characters requires less imaginative effort and is more automatic and powerful. I will show this by analyzing how we inhabit characters through sensory engagement, point of view, and narrative form in literature, film, and video games (specifically action/adventure games, RPGs, and MMORPGs). I will then build off of Burke's foundational theory to …

The Construction Of Locative Situations: The Production Of Agency In Locative Media Art Practice, Conor Mcgarrigle

Doctoral

This thesis is a practice led enquiry into Locative Media (LM) which argues that this emergent art practice has played an influential role in the shaping of locative technologies in their progression from new to everyday technologies. The research traces LM to its origins at the Karosta workshops, reviews the stated objectives of early practitioners and the ambitions of early projects, establishing it as a coherent art movement located within established traditions of technological art and of situated art practice. Based on a prescient analysis of the potential for ubiquitous networked location-awareness, LM developed an ambitious program aimed at repositioning …

Anthropological Perspectives On Colonialism, Globalization And Rural Lifeways: Expanding The Limits Of Archaeological Interpretation In The Lower Rhineland., Karim Mata

karim mata

No abstract provided.

Multiple Aspects In The Sense Of Agency, Shaun Gallagher

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Recent significant research in a number of disciplines centers on the concept of the sense of agency. Because many of these studies cut across disciplinary lines there is good reason to seek a clear consensus on what ‘sense of agency’ means. In this paper I indicate some complexities that this consensus might have to deal with. I also highlight an important phenomenological distinction that needs to be considered in any discussion of the sense of agency, regardless of how it gets defined. Finally, I suggest that the sense of agency has an ambiguous phenomenology and I offer some critical comments …

Questioning Appropriation: Agency And Complicity In A Transnational Feminist Location Politics, Joe Parker

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In feminist circles agency is often opposed to complicity and associated with resistance to sexism and patriarchy, yet such binary oppositions make the political stakes of their presumed boundaries difficult to interrogate. By bringing location politics into dialogue with agency theory, boundaries of same/Other and location categories may move from a naturalized ground for political work to the contested center of a politics of resistance. I follow a Foucauldian interpretation of agency to reconsider the ethico-politics of established divisions of self and Other both individually and in terms of social movements. By following Gayatri Spivak, Meyda Yeğenoğlu, and Chandra Mohanty's …

The Ghetto Biennale: Art And Agency In A Haitian Context, Caitlin Elizabeth Lennon

LSU Master's Theses

On January 12, 2010, the world was stunned when a massive earthquake struck Haiti. Following the crisis, author Jeremy Rifkin described the collective spirit that developed worldwide as man’s transformation into “Homo empathicus.” The social state described by Rifkin is one in which individuals leave behind their differences and rally around the common humanity that unites all humans. Despite proclamations of the earthquake’s ability to create a sense of equality among all people, the images coming from Haiti only added to the country’s lengthy list of ailments. The spectacle surrounding the earthquake was unsuccessful in generating equality, but instead, further …

Engaging And Enacting Writing In First-Year Composition: Re-Imagining Student Self-Efficacy In Writing, Mary L. Tripp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to educational theory, learning to write necessitates self-belief that one is capable of performing required tasks. This belief is called self-efficacy, a component of human agency. Students who enter First-Year Composition (FYC), are often unaware of the writing challenges that lie ahead, and many educational psychologists posit that self-efficacy beliefs are the most important factor in meeting these writing challenges. While socio-cognitive theory shapes views of self-efficacy in education literature, to date, measures of self-efficacy in writing have focused only on the individual cognitive beliefs as they influence writing performance outcomes. However, current research in writing studies as well …