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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Digitalizing Religion In The Age Of Covid-19: A Uses And Gratifications Perspective, Abdulaziz Altawil Sep 2022

Digitalizing Religion In The Age Of Covid-19: A Uses And Gratifications Perspective, Abdulaziz Altawil

Dissertations - ALL

The current COVID-19 pandemic has impacted people’s religious behavior around the world. Due to the coronavirus outbreak, most in-person religious services have shifted to virtual platforms. The online religious transition amidst the outbreak has alleviated many issues for worshippers as it provided them with a sanctuary space to connect with their faith and community. According to a 2020 Pew Research analysis, the pandemic has made many Americans change their religious habits by watching religious content online instead of physically engaging with their local religious institution. This dissertation provides a preliminary examination of this phenomenon by exploring the role of digital …


Freyre’S Plantation Playground: The Changing Landscape Of The Sugar Plantation Monjope, Catherine Elizabeth Lavoy Aug 2022

Freyre’S Plantation Playground: The Changing Landscape Of The Sugar Plantation Monjope, Catherine Elizabeth Lavoy

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation investigates the changing landscape of the sugar plantation Monjope in Pernambuco, Brazil from the mid-seventeenth to the end of the twentieth century. I examine this plantation’s changing landscape as part of a number of larger social, economic and environmental forces; in particular the development of racially based labor. Established in the sixteenth century, Monjope was one of the many Brazilian sugar plantations that relied on African slavery for labor until the end of the nineteenth century. I argue the plantation’s built environment in conjunction with the larger plantation landscape was part of a global trend of controlling labor …


Hell's Black Intelligencers: Representing Clandestine Labor On The Early Modern Stage, Evan Alexander Hixon Jul 2022

Hell's Black Intelligencers: Representing Clandestine Labor On The Early Modern Stage, Evan Alexander Hixon

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation, "Hell's Black Intelligencers: Representing Clandestine Labor on the Early Modern Stage," builds upon critical scholarship pertaining to early modern service and political theory to interrogate the imagined economic and social functions of clandestine service in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Webster. Drawing heavily on the works of András Kiséry, David Schalkwyk, Elizabeth Rivlin, and Michael Neill, I look at the exchange of service between spy and spymaster as an accumulation of social and cultural capital. Thinking through spying in this light, this dissertation explores how playwrights represent these service relationships which fall outside of systems of patronage-driven …


Receiving A Queen: A Queer And Trans Feminist Classical Reception Rhetorical Historiography Of Elagabalus, Thomas William Passwater May 2022

Receiving A Queen: A Queer And Trans Feminist Classical Reception Rhetorical Historiography Of Elagabalus, Thomas William Passwater

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation studies representations of Elagabalus, the sovereign of Rome who ruled between 218–222ce, after her assassination to examine how depictions and historical accounts of Elagabalus's life make rhetorical decisions about Elagabalus's identity and being that can foreground the composer's relationship to history and the function of history as a rhetorical force. Thus, this project, through studying Elagabalus's composers, raises questions about the nature of figure studies and history. The project draws on trans, queer, and feminist theories and rhetorics which help highlight the contingent and conflicting nature of Elagabalus's identities across representations without settling them into a singular narrative …


'Play The Book Again': Towards A Systems Approach To Game Adaptation, Johnathan Sanders May 2022

'Play The Book Again': Towards A Systems Approach To Game Adaptation, Johnathan Sanders

Dissertations - ALL

Situated at the interstices of game studies, adaptation scholarship, and literary theory, this dissertation puts forth a theoretical framework for effectively analyzing literary game adaptations (that is, playable digital or analog systems that are based upon a work or works of literature) as expressive intertextual systems which facilitate aesthetic experiences. By integrating contemporary game studies with filmic adaptation studies and literary theory, I argue that game adaptations allow us to see how games, adaptations, and indeed all texts can be productively conceived of as Barthesian networks of meaning: collections of interacting formal, narrative, intertextual, and contextual elements from which a …


American Transcendentalism Contra Contemporary Political Philosophy: Applications Of Thomas Carlyle And Ralph Waldo Emerson To Liberal Democratic Capitalism, Platonism, Islamism, Technology, And The "End Of History", Brian Wolfel May 2022

American Transcendentalism Contra Contemporary Political Philosophy: Applications Of Thomas Carlyle And Ralph Waldo Emerson To Liberal Democratic Capitalism, Platonism, Islamism, Technology, And The "End Of History", Brian Wolfel

Dissertations - ALL

I construct Thomas Carlyle's political philosophy in the contexts of twentieth-century and contemporary political philosophy by dialoging and contrasting Carlyle with the work of John Rawls, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jacques Ellul, and Sayyid Qutb, among others. I also focus my attention on Carlyle as a philosopher who is an intermediary between ancient Platonism and nineteenth-century American Transcendentalism. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus is a Platonic text that provided a foundational inspiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and American Transcendentalism writ-large. Despite Carlyle being a chief source of inspiration for American Transcendentalism, his political theory did not inspire the development of a …


The Problem Of The "Virtual": Virtual Reality, Digital Dualism, And Religious Experience, Jordan Brady Loewen May 2022

The Problem Of The "Virtual": Virtual Reality, Digital Dualism, And Religious Experience, Jordan Brady Loewen

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation uses resources from religious studies to critique the problem of digital dualism haunting notions of the "virtual" in the discourse of contemporary virtual reality technologies (VR). Digital dualism is the idea that digital or "virtual" worlds are fundamentally distinct from the "real" or physical world. Digital dualism is a problem because it mischaracterizes how we experience the spatial and temporal connections to our body in digital-virtual worlds and contributes to a false sense of subjective singularity rather than multiplicity that destabilizes how we relate to ourselves and others. Using the study of religion, philosophy, and aesthetics, we can …


Fragmented Landscapes: An Archaeology Of Transformations In The Pra River Basin, Southern Ghana, Sean Hamilton Reid May 2022

Fragmented Landscapes: An Archaeology Of Transformations In The Pra River Basin, Southern Ghana, Sean Hamilton Reid

Dissertations - ALL

This doctoral archaeological research examines the Pra River Basin in southern Ghana through lenses of landscape, temporality, and transformation. Drawing on the Annales school and the writings of Tim Ingold, this study moves away from binary constructions of natural and cultural landscape features toward a more integrated view of the landscape's long human history. The primary temporal focus of this research is the past three millennia but evidence recovered of even more ancient eras is also examined. The artifacts and features documented while surveying this landscape allow us to glimpse pre-Atlantic (pre-1450 CE) settlement patterns, subsistence, and technology, as well …