Arts and Humanities Commons^™

¿Cómo Traducimos "Ni Una Más" Al Inglés?: Latin American Manifestation Of The Phenomenology Of Femicide, And The United States’ Subsequent Internal Neglect, Suemi Mendez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper aims to tackle two components in analyzing the phenomenological concept of femicide, most simply known as the killing of women because they are women through structural violence and oppression. First, it will develop its deployment within the Latin American framework as it has been adapted to function within the regional lexicon, both socially and legislatively. This assessment will serve to address the successes and failures thus far in tackling femicide as the location with the highest statistics globally. Through this foregrounding, it will lead into how this revised deployment of femicide fits into the context of Global North …

The Modes Of Intervention In Alvin Lucier’S I Am Sitting In A Room, Daniel Fox

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room (1969) is an icon of experimental music and sound art. The sizable literature addressing the aesthetic and philosophical implications of this piece rarely discusses the performance practice beyond what is indicated in the score itself. This is problematic for two reasons: 1) The meaning that is derived from the piece often hinges not just on what sounds are obtained, but on how they are obtained. 2) Over the past 50 years, changes in the performance practice have altered what constitutes the work: magnetic tape was used until 2000 when it was replaced …

Freedom, Markets, And Equality In Eighteenth Century Philosophy, Nicole Whalen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how eighteenth century thinkers Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant defended the value of free markets. It reconstructs their defense of liberal economic reforms, including free trade (domestic and foreign) and the deregulation of markets in labor and land. Through this reconstruction, I demonstrate how the normative foundations of early free market thought were contested throughout the period. Pro-market thinkers (e.g. Turgot, Smith, and Kant) viewed economic liberalization as a mechanism that increased the economic freedoms of individuals, whereas critics of the market, including Richard Price and other “agrarian republican” thinkers, concluded that liberal …

The Political Aesthetic Of Hannah Arendt: Modernity, Judgment, And Culture, Quixote R. Vassilakis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The plan of this thesis is, first, to interpret Arendt’s critique of the modern age. Next, this paper outlines Arendt’s reconceptualization of Kant’s theory of judgment as the basis for a novel model of the public sphere in light of the conditions of modernity. Finally, this paper explores Arendt’s poetics as a means of activating the faculty of judgment in order to reconcile with the modern world. In order to address the political crises of modernity, Arendt develops a political aesthetic alive to the role of narrative and culture in reconstituting political communities. I argue that Hannah Arendt develops a …

All Day In The Trey-Fold: Sound, Objecthood, And Place In The Mixtapes Of Dj Screw, Matthew K. Carter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the impact of the mixtapes of DJ Screw on the emergence of Houston hip hop culture in the 1990s. The relationship between these “screwtapes” and local culture resists demonstration through conventional modes of representational analyses, due in part to the screwtape’s preponderant use of hip hop tracks that originally represent other places. I suggest that representation itself is the result of the structuring tension emerging from a threefold field of representation of sound, objecthood, and place, and that when a hip hop artist or critic or fan claims to "represent" Houston (or any other constituted and constituting …

Digital Occult Library, Alexis Brandkamp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project is a website, titled Digital Occult Library, hosted by the CUNY Commons and built with WordPress. The site address is:

digitaloccultlibrary.commons.gc.cuny.edu

It features (in this iteration) twenty-five unique pages with information on and discussion of occult and esoteric topics. It also hosts a forum that can be accessed and utilized by anyone, not just those registered on the Commons. The purpose of the site is to inform three types of interested parties on the highlighted topics: a general audience with no current knowledge of the occult, practitioners of esoteric traditions, and academics. Not only is the …

A Defense And Expansion Of The Theory Of Capitalist Ground Rent: Speculation, Securitization, And Struggles Over Land And Housing, Francesca Manning

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Why are the rents so high? Who is responsible for homelessness, for urban and rural displacement? How can these problems be combatted?

Recent literature addressing these questions has pointed to gentrification and the financialization of land and housing, faulted financialized landlords, hedge funds, and the irredeemable logic of finance, and pointed to the importance of land and housing regulation to prevent displacement.

However, theories of displacement—in both land and housing, on both urban and rural terrain—suffer from a lack of an underlying theory of the logic, tendencies, and limits of ground rent extraction in capitalism.

This dissertation develops a theory …

Epistemic Injustice And Sexual Violence Intervention Advocacy, Jennifer Ware

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this project, I will explore how victims of sexual violence have faced epistemic injustices by reviewing the histories of two advocacy movements aimed at improving collective understanding of those experiences. In doing so, I will consider how those very activist movements may have introduced new epistemic lacunas and, even while successfully addressing some injustices, committed further epistemic wrongs as well. I will explore forms of hermeneutical resistance used by victims of sexual violence and their advocates. While these methods of resistance have been discussed elsewhere, I contribute to this ongoing work by applying these ideas to new examples. Finally, …

Beast-Gods, Bandits, And Beggar-Kings: The Traveler In Political Thought, Nader Sadre

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I use texts by Plato, Locke, Homer, and Gandhi to explore the political dimension of travel. I argue that travel is a proxy for practices and conditions that exceed “normal” politics. In this capacity, travel reveals what normal politics is, or is assumed to be. Travel marks a boundary of the political realm in a double sense: it may conceal or point to a pre-political source of authority; and it may provide an intimation of new political modes and orders. My analyses suggest that there is no single or consistent relationship between travel and politics. Rather, the …

Revisiting Juchitán: Witnessing An Indigenous Mexico Within The Latin American Archive, Michelle G. De La Cruz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout archives of photographic collections, as one discovers the focused, artistic selective process of images that become part of a photographer’s collection, one must venture further and ask: will these choices be decisively remembered by an individual or collective audience or actively be dismissed, misunderstood, and denied presence? For my master’s thesis, I will be analyzing Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide’s photobook, Juchitán de las Mujeres, a photo-collection of the women-empowered indigenous society in Oaxaca, Mexico which erupted during Latin American photography’s prime in the 20th century, turning away from a deeply exoticized past and towards a celebration of Hispanism as …

Topics Of The Sky: Ashbery's Involving Search For The Poem, Tom M. Carlson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An essay lived by John Ashbery's Three Poems with special attention to the possibility of cosmic relevance. This paper attempts to imagine priorities and needs proper to celestial bodies. Three Poems is the consciousness that gives possibility to the text, while Blanchot, Nietzsche, and other thinkers ground its exploration in philosophical analysis.

Object-Oriented Musicology: Some Implications Of Graham Harman's Philosophy For Music Theory, History, And Criticism, Eric Taxier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation brings the ideas of the philosopher Graham Harman (b. 1968) into a musicological context. His “object-oriented ontology” is widely known in continental philosophy, but it has not yet entered rigorous contact with musicology. Certain factors pose difficulties at first glance, such as Harman’s focus on metaphysical issues (originating in his critique of Martin Heidegger) and his rehabilitation of the widely criticized concept of aesthetic autonomy. But these are also sources of novelty that could make an object-oriented encounter with musicology fruitful. In the first chapter, I outline the main features of Harman’s thought. He critiques assumptions about the …

Hannah Arendt’S Vision Of Politics: Exemplary Negativities And The Ostjuden, Jacob E. Pearce

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hannah Arendt’s vision of politics is one of the most enigmatic, perplexing, thoroughly analyzed, and potentially generative aspects of her philosophic corpus. It is marked by insightful analysis, cutting deconstructions of pressing moral issues, and confusing vernacular wherein her analytic boundaries, topics, and categories appear obfuscated. Although it has been observed that Arendt’s late-career theory of the political owes a debt to her earlier writings on Jewish history, including her Kantian-influenced theory of political judgment and storytelling, in this thesis I would like to narrow down this debt to a specific trope: The Ostjuden, or the imagined associations with Eastern …

An Eco-Political Theory Of Territory, Jonathan Kwan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I advance a novel eco-political theory of territory that grounds a people’s territorial rights in its right to political self-determination understood as inextricably and normatively bound up with its right to ecological integrity and duty of ecological sustainability. I develop a social ontology of the people as the holder of territorial rights based on its members’ place-based common activities that aim at their own independent governance rather than in terms of state institutions, cultural nationhood, ethnogeography, political identity, or shared conceptions of justice. The common activities of a people generate a group right to democratic self-determination since …

Narcissus And Beauty: A Renaissance Of Paterian Aesthetics, Amir Dagan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is intended as a correction to the almost universal contemporary assumption that beauty is either nonexistent or a tool of oppression, and that the arts should be judged less by their aesthetic value than their social, political, or moral dimensions. This dissertation will propose a fivefold argument. First, I will assert that the experience of beauty is real, pleasurable, and not in any way culturally determined, second, that beauty is the most significant and characteristic feature of art, third, that the rejection of the reality of beauty is motivated more by the fragility of the mass man’s ego …

A Modelist Proposal, Jian Shen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many philosophers of mind regard "What is representation?" as a question of paramount importance. In ask this question they overlook the possibility—what I argue is in fact the correct answer—that there is simply nothing specifically representational about representational systems. "Representation" is a label we somehow feel compelled to stick to some systems but not to others, but it fails to pick out an explanatorily relevant kind. This is most clearly seen when we look at representational systems through the lens of formal models—in particular, the sender-receiver model as developed by David Lewis, Brian Skyrms, and others. I offer a cosmetically …

Environmental Transformative Justice: Responding To Ecocide, Manuel Rodeiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation’s central objective is to normatively devise ethically appropriate sociopolitical and juridical responses to ecocide (i.e., grave environmental harm). More specifically, the work seeks to philosophically engage the ethical question of what is owed to human societies that are displaced due to intentional environmental destruction.

The motivation behind the project stems from the lack of academic research (excluding a pocket of recent analysis of the international community’s obligation to assist ‘climate refugees’) involving the question: “What ought to be afforded victims of environmental harm?” The dearth of scholarship is surprising, considering growing global concerns, vis-à-vis accelerating rates of environmental …

The Coherence Of Left-Libertarianism: A New Approach To Reconciling Libertarianism And Socialism, Jesse E. Spafford

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The past twenty-five years have witnessed the emergence and development of what has become known as left-libertarianism—a philosophical position that seeks to show that certain moral principles traditionally associated with libertarianism are compatible with egalitarian views about the distribution of resources. However, this position has also come under fire from various critics who argue that the position lacks coherence. For example, Barbara Fried argues that, even if left-libertarians show that one can simultaneously hold some combination of ethical principles, it doesn’t follow that one should. This dissertation argues that there is a suitably coherent version of left-libertarianism wherein egalitarian …

The Problem Of Literary Development In Russian Formalism And Digital Humanities, Basil Lvoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The interest of this dissertation is how our understanding of literary development—as gradual or revolutionary; self-governed or socio-politically determined; like or unlike biological evolution—informs the status, meaning, and value of literature and literary studies. The dissertation shows how this problem—most pressing in our post-logocentric age—was addressed at the dawn of contemporary literary theory by the Russian Formalists. The latter are compared with Distant Readers, i.e., the Digital Humanists from, or conducting research in dialogue with, the Stanford Literary Lab: Franco Moretti, Matthew Jockers, Ted Underwood, William Benzon, and others.

This dissertation argues that both Russian Formalism and Distant Reading were …

Queer Displacements: Minorities, Mobilities, And Mobilizations In French And Francophone Literature, Thomas Muzart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Focusing on the work of Virginie Despentes, Jean Genet, Guy Hocquenghem, and Abdellah Taïa, this dissertation challenges the antisocial turn taken in queer theory, by means of a parallel study of the authors’ geographical and intellectual itineraries. While critics like Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman have suggested that the revolutionary potential in queer identity lies in its opposition to romanticized forms of community, I argue, along with José Esteban Muñoz, that their praising of singularity and negativity is similarly extreme. Alternatively, my study shows how the geographical displacements both experienced and imagined by my primary authors can illuminate the passage …

Social Contract Theory And Transitional Justice: A Philosophical Approach To A Problem Of Global Importance, Brendan Moriarty

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I seek to bring together two areas of scholarly work to see how each can inform the other: social contract theory and transitional justice. The social contract, as it exists and as it was theorized about by Rousseau, was born from the world-historic forces that spread capitalism across the globe, stirring up nationalism everywhere it went. In its wake, there was vast inequality and new legal regimes which protected the hoarded wealth of the capitalist class by enshrining the right of private property along with life and liberty. To examine the intricacies of transitional justice and its …

British Romanticism And The Paradoxes Of Natural Education, Catherine S. Engh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“British Romanticism and the Paradoxes of Natural Education” offers a distinct perspective on Romantic-era ideas on “natural” education and human development. Though the Romantic retreat into nature has long been understood as a break from the Enlightenment’s programmatic commitment to the progress of reason, I contend that the ideas on natural development of four canonical Romantic authors—Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley—actually originate in the ideas of one of the foremost figures of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Natural education is doomed to failure in Rousseau’s thought because “nature” is paradoxically a social construct. I argue that …

Production, Not Dependence: The Metaphysics Of Causation And Its Role In Explanation, Responsibility, And The Law, Yuval Abrams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Causation is production, not dependence. It is not merely a matter of how two facts or events covary, but about what underlies that covariation. Furthermore, causation is unified (not fragmented or plural) and is a natural relation (in the world). To cause is to make something happen, to generate. The causal nexus (the web of causal influence) consists entirely of productive positive causes. With these fixed, the (causal) dependence relations are determined.

Dependence belongs to the theory of explanation. Causal dependence is an explanatory notion: A causally explains B, in virtue of a causal relation between cause C and effect …

Ethical Validity: An Ethical Validity Claim For Discourse Ethics, Jamie B. Lindsay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Discourse ethicists generally are anti-realists about moral rightness, in that the rightness of moral norms is a matter of discursive justification, and is not grounded in or by any objective feature of the world. Put differently, the position is that rightness is wholly constructed by our moral practices. Further, discourse ethics and liberal theories of justice more broadly generally rely on a distinction between goods that are generalizable, and goods that are in some way context-bound and particularistic. Jürgen Habermas’ discourse ethics makes the distinction wholly formal, abstaining from any theoretical commitment to which goods are generalizable and leaving this …

In Support Of Abstraction: Physical Interiority Beyond Postmodern Dance, Irene Hultman Monti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I investigate how speculative philosophy informs critical thinking about dance and its performance, encompassing both the act of creating and the action of executing. Speculative thinking augments and draws out new experiences and realities in the artistic body. I will argue that speculative theories widen the understanding and implementation of dance and its performance through a combination of human and nonhuman forces. This broadened understanding encourages progress, transformation, and evolution within the field of dance. I discuss the human (that which is experienced through sensibilities, therefore tangible and understandable on a cognitive and practical level) and the nonhuman (forces beyond …

Continuity As Crisis: Two Traditions Of Theorizing About Animal Minds, Adam See

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Contemporary philosophers and scientists remain largely resistant to attributing humanlike capacities to non-human animals, particularly great apes, for reasons that are not based on compelling empirical or theoretical grounds. Mental faculties such as reason, agency, and theory of mind are widely seen as differing in kind from functionally analogous abilities in other extant species. This dissertation appraises the current state of the animal minds literature by means of a critical genealogy charting the development of skepticism about animal cognition throughout the history of philosophy. In doing so, this project addresses the sedimentation of epistemic, linguistic, ontological, and methodological impasses that …

Failures Of Grace: Limits Of Tragedy In The Late Nineteenth-Century Novel, Anick S. Rolland

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Failures of Grace argues that nineteenth-century novelists challenge the hegemonies of literary form and the value of personal suffering through what I call the trans-genre tragic novel. This new form is emblematic of a period in which values hang in the balance and places traditional values at odds with themselves by combining the low form of the novel with the highest mimetic mode in the Western tradition: tragedy. It simultaneously proposes the most vulnerable members of society as tragic heroes in contrast to the noble figures who previously were presumed to define the genre.

Through close readings of works by …

Logical Pluralism And Vicious Regresses, Daniel Boyd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This material in this dissertation will be divided into two parts. The first part is a preliminary discussion of vicious regress arguments in the philosophy of logic in the 20th century. The second part will focus on three different versions of logical pluralism, i.e., the view that there are many correct logics. In each case an argument will be developed to show that these versions of logical pluralism result in a vicious regress.

The material in part one will be divided into three chapters, and there are a few reasons for having a preliminary discussion of vicious regress arguments in …

The Police And The State, Brandon Del Pozo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation offers a systematic account of the relationship between the police and the democratic state. It describes the role of the police, the powers the police use to discharge the requirements of their role, and the means by which they should justify the exercise of their powers. I argue that the role of the police is to produce a type of substantive, practical justice, and that it involves the exercise of three powers: (1) to protect and rescue third parties from harm, (2) to collect people and evidence and present them to the magistrate for adjudication, and (3) to …

Identity And Counterparthood In A Many Worlds Universe, Sophia A.M. Bishop

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics - arguably our most powerfully predictive scientific theory to date - describes a branching Universe composed of an infinite number of quasi-classical macroscopic physical worlds. Though elegant in its straightforward rendering of the mechanics, the Many Worlds Interpretation presents a challenge for understanding identity over time. If we wish to preserve the notion of strict numerical identity, we are faced with the choice between: denying the transitivity of identity; very short-lived lives with near constant death; or accepting that the world is filled with many more individuals than we previously dreamed. In adopting …