Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Material Culture Of Temperature: Measurement, Capital And Semiotics, Scott W. Schwartz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Temperature was invented in the 17th century. While cosmologists affirm that fluctuations in heat are as old as the universe, the intensive quantified scale marking these fluctuations has a relatively short history. This dissertation analyzes why temperature developed when it did and what temperature does for and to its users. I demonstrate that the ubiquitous and quotidian epistemological artifact temperature epitomizes capitalized methods of seeing, measuring, and knowing. At its broadest, the concern of this dissertation is the material culture of knowledge production among capitalizing populations—those that believe in and practice the perpetually accelerating asymmetrical growth of wealth.

In this …

Commmunity, Ecology, And Modernity: Faunal Analysis Of Skútustaðir In Mývatnssveit, Northern Iceland, Megan Hicks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the archaeofaunal remains from Skútustaðir, a middle to high-status farm in Mývatnssveit, Northern Iceland, to understand the experience of rural communities and their ecologies during Iceland’s transition from regulated colonial exchange to a capitalist economy during the 17^th through 19^th centuries. Archaeofaunal analysis is used to reconstruct changes in the ways that people herded, hunted, and fished, providing insights into how they managed their local environments for subsistence and novel contexts of exchange. In addition to archaeofaunal analysis, primary textual sources are explored to assess how the Skútustaðir household and its rural community mobilized long-term …

Discourses Of "Cruelty-Free" Consumerism: Peta, The Vegan Society And Examples Of Contemporary Activism, Andrea Springirth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper draws upon the principles of critical discourse analysis in order to examine the production of capitalist and consumerist discourses within contemporary nonhuman animal rights activism. The analysis presents evidence to suggest that the discourses being produced via the websites of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and The Vegan Society are consistently being constructed through market-centric ideologies that treat activists mainly as middle-class consumers. This paper argues that the consistent presence of neoliberal discourse signals an instructive entanglement with broader sociopolitical issues. Specifically, there are concerns as to how this discourse relates to what is thought …