Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Virtue-Driven Leadership: Powering Excellence In Organizations, Joseph Scherrer

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I seek to answer the question “What makes a good leader?” I approach this question systematically, starting in Chapter 1 by asking “What is Leadership?” In attempting to formulate a response, I find that the concept is slipperier than it first appears and difficult to pin down. All the same, I construct a thematic, contextually pertinent definition that provides reasonable precision for the purposes of this study. In Chapter 2, I present a representative survey of the social-scientific academic literature in order to establish the prospect that a philosophy of virtuous leadership can be empirically validated in …

The Juris Master: A Proposal For Reducing Excessive Public Defender Caseloads, Blake Comeaux

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

The US public defense system is underfunded, understaffed, and underdelivering on the Constitutional promises of the 6^th Amendment, the right to a fair and speedy trial. This state of our public defense system results in monstrous impacts for indigent defendants nationwide. Through indefinite delays in litigation, being abandoned in jail while sitting on waiting lists for public defenders, and being outright denied representation, indigent defendants are deprived of their rights. Beyond just defendant neglect, our current system puts immense strain on public defenders, prosecutors, and state budgets. In an attempt to combat this current state of affairs, this paper …

Mothering As Feminism, Meera Patel

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This critical essay proposes the concept of mothering-as-feminism, with the intention of interrogating American ideals of mothering and caregiving. Reforming the way we view mothering, as it relates to feminism, requires a re-evaluation of the American role of women and mothers—and how they are portrayed (and therefore seen and understood), valued, and supported. Focusing on the evolution of feminist theory throughout the past 70 years, as well as personal and secondary experiences, I demonstrate how political and social change occurs generationally and is dependent on the education of our children. Ultimately, I show the important role children’s literature plays …

The Feeling Of Foam & Other Essays, Ryan Erickson

Graduate School of Art Theses

I create conceptual drawings, collages, sculptures, and installations to humorously destabilize and ultimately question how human language, formal methodologies, and social institutions function. While seemingly embracing an aesthetic of rationality, I undermine it with absurdity. In my work, I take a fundamentally dialectical position by skewering the rational to the illogical as neither can exist without the other.

Psychological Construct Validity, Caroline Marie Stone

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A primary concern for any psychological research project is determining how to measure unobservable mental entities, such as "implicit memory", or "intelligence". Psychologists say that a measure has construct validity when they believe that a measurement method measures the construct they intend it to measure, where a construct is any theoretical term that refers to a mental entity. Construct validity, then, is the process of justifying one's belief that a measure has construct validity. My dissertation seeks to answer three related questions, 1. What is construct validity?, 2. What is the best epistemic theory of justification for construct validation?, and …

The Feeling Mind, Maria Doulatova

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to standard conceptions of agency, our reasons and intentions guide our actions. That is, goal-directed intentions play a key role in practical deliberation, planning, and execution of action. Furthermore, purposeful, goal-directed behavior warrants attributions of responsibility or “reactive attitudes” like resentment, anger, gratitude and forgiveness. However, recent developments of the dual-process theory of mind cast doubt on the empirical adequacy of this picture. While people take themselves to be responding to relevant reasons, they are often bypassed by irrelevant affective or automatic reactions. In this work I go beyond the dual-process theory of mind to offer a mechanistic account …

Universe Of Things: A Human Presentation Of Food-For-Thought., Madeline Halpern

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

I present this statement under three loose categories: People, Objects and their Environment. I consider People as human, Objects as art objects, domestic objects, and food, and Environment as the shared space of the former groups. Food directs this statement as I present each concept and creative process as a metaphorical dish. Material exploration carried me from a direct practice of reorienting acrylic paint and questioning object functionality through personified sculptures into theoretical thesis work in which I use interpersonal relations and the idea of consumption to translate tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensations into digital film. In this meal I …

Moral Pathology, Katie Rapier

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the relationship between morality and mental illness. Mental illness is often thought to impair moral functioning but careful examination reveals that mental illness offers its own insight into moral functioning. While we learn a great deal about moral responsibility and exempting conditions (psychopathy and addiction), we also discover that there a multiple ways to be moral and that many individuals act morally despite ongoing conditions (high-functioning autism spectrum disorder and recovered borderline personality disorder). I conclude that these insights ought to shape our ethical theories.

Its Skin Is My Skin, Bryan Page

Graduate School of Art Theses

This text examines the complexity of attempting to empathize with bodies that are vastly othered from my own. This broad yet nuanced subject crosses epistemological boundaries and complicates the dualities between both the mind and body, and between the corporeal and the virtual. My desire to better understand the conditions of another’s experience originates from a painful traumatic loss which caused me to feel isolated and incomplete. In response to this suffering, I long to emotionally connect with other beings and create artwork that attempts to bridge the qualia of individual experience.

I am interested in the capacity (or lack …

The Vanishing Line, Jacopo Mazzoni

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis is an exploratory effort to bridge the rift that political and monetary powers created between art and technology. In my practice, these socio-political motivations are exposed through the creation of non-utilitarian inventions that use different technologies as charged metaphors. I research mass media language and construct interactive pieces while borrowing strategies from the entertainment industry to make environmental, social, and political issues more palatable than documentary films or raw data could. In my work, technology is regarded as a semidivine entity with supernatural powers that can both elevate and reduce the human experience. My work functions differently according …

If My Grandmother Had Wheels She'd Be A Trolley Car: The Accumulation Of Objects, Encounters And The Passage Of Time, Sara Weininger

Graduate School of Art Theses

The house is the structure. Within the house are rooms, spaces, hallways and corners. In those live the objects.The objects live on surfaces, surfaces that much like the previous layers, are made up of many things, most certainly not one thing. A static object may hold a series of other objects, spaces and events. A static object may also embody the passage of time.Though one may try to hold the object at a constant, that is to slow or even bring a halt to its motion, this task is near impossible.

Bird Box House, Bear Box Dresser, Lamp Hat, Macaroni …

Parsing The Blues: What Depression Reveals About The Life Well-Lived, Ian Tully

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the way depression illuminates –and is illuminated by – certain aspects of moral philosophy. I begin by defending, in chapter one, a cognitive theory of one important subtype of depression. The subsequent chapters then investigate what depression can teach us about the nature of well- (and ill-) being, and about the nature of moral virtue. In chapter two I ask ‘what makes depression bad for us?’ and go on to argue that reflection upon this question shows that desire-based theories of welfare are false. Then, in the next chapter, I provide a (partial) answer to that question, …

Phenomenal Marks, Ruptured Spaces, Relearning Language, Crossing Cultures, Meelee Ahn

Graduate School of Art Theses

The form of my thesis is one of interruptions, or “Ruptures,” as I call them. These are events of my personal history, or stories from the lives of artists, that intervene against my narrative through graphic and language devices meant to be understood as equivalent to the material affects in my painting. Important artists and movements mentioned are Gerhard Richter, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenhauler, Lee Ufan, Doho Suh, and Abstract Expressionism. Writers and philosophers Maurice Merlou-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Joan Banach, Sigmund Freud, John Gage, Brian Massumi, Allen Weiss, Clement Greenburg, Shin-Chulgyu, and Yoon-Dongju are also discussed. The idea discussed include …

Cat Metamorfosis: Becoming Animal And The Freedom Of Non-Identity, Hannah Becker

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

A large number of modern and contemporary female artists have employed the state of becoming to either free themselves of or challenge the social norms that come with being a woman. Kara Walker frees the Mammy of her expectation by combining her with a sphinx in her monumental sugar sculpture, A Subtlety. The Guerilla Girls have an impenetrable and unidentifiable voice when they speak from behind gorilla masks. Lucy Gunning’s The Horse Impressionists depicts women mimicking the behavior of horses to lose their human consciousness, and more specifically, female identity. Looking beyond the art world and into recent consumerist …

Black Matter, Kahlil Irving

Graduate School of Art Theses

History as we know it, is inherited. Racism, fascism, white supremacy, and Eurocentric dominance have been presented as normal and acceptable within our society for many years. This has allowed police officers to execute Black American’s and not be acquitted for their horrendous crimes. As an activist I want to challenge the status quo. As an artist I am interested in investigating how I can present ideas embody or reflect contemporary issues and concerns. Using different colors can aggressively change how an object is perceived. Historical objects hold many important.

I explore many mediums, but an anchor material that I …

Presence-At-Hand, Eric Lyle Schultz

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

The writing that follows is intended to provide a theoretical framework for the motives behind my practice. The primary concerns addressed are the reception, transmission, and physical shape of knowledge. I will discuss a human condition that exists as a byproduct of both the legacy of representation as well as the innate biology of the brain. I will argue that as a society we are governed by the residue of an extreme logic, and that this condition places severe margins on our potential for creative solutions. I will propose that our ability to create meaning is stifled by the …

In Pursuit Of Distant Horizons, Whitney Polich

Graduate School of Art Theses

Our lasting human desire to rationalize the phenomena of nature manifests as ceaseless attempts to fix fluid landscapes within the rigid boundaries of an image. Each landscape with its own physical language, rooted in the temporal and subjective particularities of sense—taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight—requires a lived immersion to be read and as such, eludes static interpretation or expression. The physical horizon provides both a physical and metaphorical reminder of the limits we constantly find ourselves confronted with—those limits of perception, language, and knowledge—as we seek to expresses the immediate experience and profound vastness of a world far exceeding …

Implicit Prejudice And Its Implications For How Communities Should Respond To Racial Injustices, Harry Kainen

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

In the spring of 2013, a racially controversial incident occurred on the Washington University Campus. The incident raised questions about the racial tolerance of the university community as well as exactly who should be held responsible for the injustice. Most importantly, the community’s response to the incident exemplified how a community with the potential for substantial collective action can fail to mobilize and improve when they are called upon to do so. This paper examines recent psychological research that studies the existence of subconscious racial prejudices in order to examine its implications in community responses to racial injustices. Results show …