Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Seeing And Believing: Philosophical Issues In Theory Of Mind Development, Joseph A. Hedger

Dissertations - ALL

All human beings understand the behaviors of others as causal results of their mental states. Philosophers call this ability folk psychology and developmental researchers call it theory of mind (ToM). My dissertation concerns how this reasoning works and how it is acquired.

First, I develop and expand a theory of how folk psychology develops in childhood. This is the Perceptual Access Reasoning, or PAR theory of the Fabricius lab. Contrary to the two views dominant in the field, I argue that ToM (belief reasoning or BR) is acquired around 6 years of age after undergoing two preliminary cognitive stages, reality …

From Religious Freedom To Indigenous Sovereignty: The Case Of Lyng V. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1988), Dana Lloyd

Dissertations - ALL

In 1988 the United States Supreme Court declared constitutional the federal government’s development plan in an area (known as the High Country) that was considered central to the religious practice of three local American Indian nations. The Court admitted that “It is undisputed that the Indian respondents’ beliefs are sincere and that the Government’s proposed actions will have severe adverse effects on the practice of their religion.” Nevertheless, because the disputed area was on public land, the Court thought that the government should be allowed to manage its property in any way it saw fit, regardless of the severe adverse …

All The Small Things: Contingent Mereological Nihilism, Naomi Dershowitz

Dissertations - ALL

Scientists and metaphysicians alike often accept that the best theory is that which best exhibits familiar theoretical virtues such as empirical testability, fruitfulness, conservatism, explanatory power, and parsimony. In this dissertation, I assume this naturalistically respectable methodology and explore whether it can help decide between competing metaphysical theories. I argue it can.

In chapter 1, I present my version of mereological nihilism, Minimal Truthmaker Nihilism (MTN). According to MTN, only the minimal truthmakers for all true sentences are included in the correct ontology and composite objects are not among the minimal truthmakers. I argue that the proponent of MTN can …

The Third World Women’S Alliance: History, Geopolitics, And Form, Ariane Vani Kannan

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation focuses on the work of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), a women-of-color-led activist organization that maintained active chapters in New York City and the Bay Area between 1971-80. Drawing on archival research and qualitative interviews, I reconstruct how the group invoked, constructed, and circulated intersecting Third World histories and geopolitical analyses through political education, publications, and cultural events. In addition to this historical study, I seek to understand the ongoing presence of the TWWA in educational spaces through interviews with archivists and professors across disciplines. This project makes three contributions to the field of Rhetoric and Composition: …

Operating Outside Of Empire: Trading Citizenship In The Atlantic World, 1783-1815, Mark Dragoni

Dissertations - ALL

Operating Outside of Empire: Trading Citizenship in the Atlantic World, 1783-1815, looks at markets and ships as spaces for negotiation between merchants and the state. The dissertation follows the experiences of former British colonists in America who won independence and then immediately tried to find a way to get back into the British empire. For American merchants, such as Nicholas Low, William Constable, and Thomas Handasyd Perkins, the inconsistently-governed Caribbean provided an entry point to the greater British Atlantic and the markets of the empire. These merchants won access by exploiting the opportunities offered by environmental catastrophes, slave rebellions and …

Religion In Contemplative Studies, Daniel J. Moseson

Dissertations - ALL

This project is about the new field of contemplative studies, a field that seeks to use “contemplative” practices, derived mostly (though not entirely) from religious traditions in academic settings, prominently including college pedagogy. First, this project seeks to understand how contemplative studies advocates persuade others (and themselves) that what they are doing is not “religion;” that is, how do they define "religion" in order to situate their own work as non-religious academic inquiry? Second, in the course of my textual and ethnographic research on contemplative studies, it has become apparent that this field adds to the growing rebuttal of religious …

Fierce: Black Queer Literacies Of Survival, Seth Davis

Dissertations - ALL

Influenced by Black feminist and queer scholars, my dissertation focuses on how Black and queer people have made interventions through language and performance to survive larger racist and homophobic forces. Despite critical scholarship on the literacies of both Black and queer communities, there has been limited research that brings together these two perspectives and bodies of research. The foundation of my study is based on audio/video interviews and participant observation: I interviewed participants from 2013 Washington, DC, Black Gay Pride and 2017 Harlem Pride, focusing specifically on their understanding of three terms: “reading,” “throwing shade,” and “pullin’ trade.”

The central …

To Plow A Lonely Furrow: Indigenismo And Mapuche Politics In Chile, 1920-1960, Henry John Stegeman

Dissertations - ALL

This study examines Mapuche political organization in Chile from 1920-1960 through the lens of transnational indigenismo. In that period, politicians, academics and social reformers across the Americas were questioning how to incorporate indigenous populations into modern national states. While many historical accounts of similar phenomena in other countries have drawn categorical distinctions between indigenismo (as a movement led by white elites) and indigenous activism (led by Indians themselves), this work places the two phenomena side-by-side to explore connections between them. That approach shows that collaboration, periodic conflict and strategic alliance making were important components of indigenous politics in Chile. It …

History's Perilous Pleasures: Experiencing Antiquity In The Postwar Hollywood Epic, Thomas Jefferson West Iii

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation focuses on the mid-20th Century historico-biblical epic—a film genre that flourished within Hollywood from 1949 to 1966 and which took as its subject the depiction of the ancient world—and reads this body of films as a mode of historical engagement. I argue that the historico-biblical epic takes the pressure of the terrifying possibility of the end of human history engendered by the atomic bomb and transmutes this into a series of dialectics, between agency and powerlessness, embodiment and transcendence, desire and punishment, imperial zenith and nadir. While antiquity seems to offer the modern world the ability to escape …