Political Theory Commons^™

Cancer In Pajamas: Radio, Podcasts, And The Politics Of Free Time In The Digital Age, Daniel Grjonko

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The podcast, an extremely potent fermentation of the radio which was so central to many of the Frankfurt School thinkers, is an important political subject to consider in light of rekindled social discussions concerning a society straddling the line between fascism and socialism. Especially the political podcast, which has become a pulse of intellectual discussion and historical analysis, promises itself simultaneously as a medium of entertainment, pedagogy, and translation into real-world organizing for a different world, true for both the left and the right. The truth, I propose, is a sinister other experience, one which maintains the status quo …

What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?: Visualizing Extreme Wealth, William Mahoney Luckman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The word “billion” is a mathematical abstraction related to “big,” but it is difficult to understand the vast difference in value between one million and one billion; even harder to understand the vast difference in purchasing power between one billion dollars, and the average U.S. yearly income. Perhaps most difficult to conceive of is what that purchasing power and huge mass of capital translates to in terms of power. This project blends design, text, facts, and figures into an interactive narrative website that helps the user better understand their position in relation to extreme wealth: https://whatdoesonebilliondollarslooklike.website/

The site incorporates …

A Pearl Ravaged: The Paradox Of Haiti And Its Socioeconomic Origins, Isabel Ishibe Exel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Saint-Domingue was once the most profitable colony of the Caribbean, the so-called pearl of the Antilles. Nowadays, Haiti is known for being the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, a dramatic shift that raises the question of the factors contributing to Haiti's current state, marked by persistent violence, natural disasters, and political instability. Various discourses have framed Haiti as a country doomed for failure. However, relying on binary concepts such as success and failure is counterproductive to a refined analysis. How, then, should we structure this conversation? My ultimate goal for this work is to provide a nuanced analysis of …

Normative Orientations To Housing Activism And The Uneven Path To Nonprofitization In New York City, 1964–1989, Andrew Wilkes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What are the distinct contributions of normative orientations (including theological and ideological ones) in the public policy process? While the literature on policy formation in the past three decades has embraced at least some idea that ideology matters, little has focused on whether the content of their specific normative orientations leads groups to contribute to, and engage in, a policy process differently. By examining Paul Sabatier’s advocacy coalition framework in conversation with Rev. Dr. Gayraud Wilmore’s tripartite, theoethical framework of liberation, elevation, and survival, this dissertation contends that the normative commitments of advocacy stakeholders within New York City’s tenant movement …

Collect Cosmic Dust, Make It Into Bright Stars: The Use Of Temporal Data In Regeneration Of Life Space And Time Via A Construction Of The Political-Sociological Theory Of Justice, Yi Wang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis argues for an argument-counterargument approach to the atypical classics of Franz Kafka and Emily Dickinson. This approach to the literature is useful for a construction of the political-sociological theory of justice, which claims that the state of a just world is each individual’s lifetime moving in a dialectic-of-anti-violence-and-non-violence manner.

Freedom Song: Uncovering A Politics Of Dignity In Black Feminist Thought And Praxis, Abegail M. Dobson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This master's thesis delves into Intersectionality as an organizing framework and critical social theory, emphasizing the significance of Black feminist thought to social justice initiatives that challenge prevailing intersectional violence. The central inquiry of this project is uncovering a Black feminist conceptualization of dignity as articulated in foundational texts. I scrutinize the essence of dignity within Black feminist theory and praxis, particularly addressing the question: How valuable is a "right" when societal experiences consistently undermine one's basic needs and protections required to live a dignified life beyond survival?

Black feminist thought, encompassing praxis, is posited as a profound space for …

Numbered, Weighed, Divided: Revolution And/As Apocalypse In The Modern Liberal Tradition, Asher J. Wycoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A long-standing political-theological critique contends that liberalism lacks the capacity to address theological challenges, and qualitative political challenges more generally. This charge is prevalent in our current age of crises, when the capacity to address such challenges is essential to any political tradition’s self-legitimation. I argue that the liberal tradition, broadly conceived, has long contended with theological challenges, particularly during modern revolutionary periods. Theological discourses, especially eschatological ones, circulate widely in these moments. Modern political actors impute cosmic significance to the events of their present, with a central analogy crystallizing between revolution and apocalypse. Reading major theorists of three modern …

Power And Authority In Karl Marx, Niccoló Machiavelli And Thomas Hobbes, Ekim Kilic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The concepts of power and authority have been fundamental to political philosophy and science from the beginning. However, in much recent thinking, power’s central and defining relationship with the state has been called into question. This thesis studies the understanding of power and authority in the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Karl Marx, in the context of the emerging trend around the world today of searching for a new social, economic, and political order. It aims to demonstrate how the works of Marx may open a path to rectify the limitations of the traditional thinking of power and …

Language And Conjuncture In Populist Strategy: Podemos And Contemporary Spanish Political Thought, Francisco J. Fortuño Bernier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent times, emergent political movements have sought to construct a project of political renewal based upon the search for such a new language, renaming and rewording both the political world and their own traditions. One such is the Spanish political party Podemos, whose sudden rise and success has already made it a referent for contemporary radical politics. This group has articulated a political strategy based upon what I call a politico-linguistic conjecture: the idea that an effective political strategy is dependent on finding the right words for the moment, on an appropriate fit between conjuncture and discourse. The production …

Notes On Insurgent Universality In Ambedkar’S Social And Political Thought: A Critique Of Postcolonial Anti-Universalism, Sitharthan Sriharan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, we seek to take steps towards problematizing postcolonial theory and its frequent anti-universalism. Towards this end, my initial focus will be some of the productive and problematic aspects of what Getachew and Mantena term the “decolonization of political theory”. Here, we highlight how some comparative political theory scholars have methodologically overemphasized ‘difference’ in their studies of non-western political thought as an overcorrection to Eurocentrism. In supporting this claim, we review literature in comparative political theory, postcolonial theory, and modern South Asian history and historiography in order to demonstrate that a more philosophically robust, but still historically informed, …

Towards A Multi-Polar International System: An Analysis Of The Brics Countries’ Growth As Economic And Political Actors, Damla Senlik

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At the regional and international levels, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (a grouping called BRICS) are considered as the most powerful emerging economies and political powers. In 2021, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF 2021), BRICS countries comprised 41 percent of global population and about 24 percent of global GDP. They are deeply engaged in the global economic and political system, and this system is being transformed by the forces of globalization into an increasingly multipolar character, especially in economic activities. Many analysts are asking whether we are evolving into a new international order that is more …

Tablets As A Vehicle For Imprisoned People’S Digital Connection With Loved Ones, Andrea Mufarreh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The intersection between criminal justice and technology is fairly understudied, despite increasing technological advancements in the world and within the criminal justice system. A rather recent addition to the technological landscape of prison is the adoption of tablets used by imprisoned people for communication and connection with loved ones and other activities, which is particularly important given the context of COVID-19, a virus which caused a global pandemic from 2020-2022. While the use of tablets by imprisoned people appears to be a new trend, the use of tablets in prison both prior to and during the pandemic has remained an …

Afterlives Of Discovery: Speculative Geographies In The Colombian Political Landscape, Heidi A. Rhodes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers how the temporal remains of the Age of Discovery and its doctrine persist in a racial-geographical ranking of human and non-human, terrestrial and planetary life and worth. Across this work, I interpret a series of historical moments and their objects of speculative geographic cultural production: a state mapping program, a painting, a biomedical project, a de-monumenting protest action. As repositories of codified belief and repertoires of Discovery’s political and affective modes of racialized domination, I read these materials from the Colombian archives of coloniality and liberalism to illuminate their implications for Colombia’s national becoming as a liberal …

Orban's Hungary: Lack Of Freedoms Becoming The Motivation For Hungarian Emigration, Fanni Sampson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the past 10 years Hungary has gone through some major systematic changes since the Orban administration took office. The implementations of the Orban government serve the benefits and power of his party and aim to limit the freedom of Hungarian citizens. Orban, throughout these changes, emphasizes the importance of preserving the Hungarian national identity, which he defines as far-right conservative christian values and takes control over everything that does not fit under this definition. This thesis argues that the Hungarian government is becoming increasingly dictatorial under the Orban administration which not only challenges the life of Hungarian citizens but …

The Federalist Papers' Account Of Human Nature, Jeffrey P. Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper is an analysis of the account of human nature found in The Federalist Papers. This interpretation assumes The Federalist is a work of political rhetoric and advocacy, but also one of genuine significance as political science and philosophy. As a book, The Federalist is a coherent whole, which offers a coherent account of human nature, despite the collective nature of its authorship, the time pressures of its publication, and the piecemeal nature of its workmanship. This understanding of human nature is the thread which runs through all its analysis and numbers. Its arguments asserting the inadequacies of …

On The Woman Question: A Defense Of Alexandra Kollontai Against Liberal Critics, Nicole Baltzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alexandra Kollontai envisioned a world in which all women and their proletarian comrades were liberated from subordination under capitalism. She served as People’s Commissar in the Bolshevik government and established the Zhenotdel, the government’s department for women. Under the Bolsheviks, women were granted equal legal status to men, divorce rights, access to birth control, and were the primary benefiters of the nationalization of domestic work (i.e., communal childcare, dining, and laundry halls). Kollontai and the Soviet Union provide us with one of the few examples of Marxist feminism in action. Liberal critics of Kollontai and her Marxist comrades and contemporaries …

The Palestinian’S Venison: John Locke, Colonialism And Liberal Zionism, Benjamin Geier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Liberal Zionism is one of the most potent political forces with the American Jewish diaspora, as it allows for Jews living in the U.S. to support a strong Israel while still holding to the liberal values that the majority of American Jews believe in when it comes to domestic politics. Liberal Zionism can seem like a contradiction, but it is rooted in the work of the father of liberalism himself, John Locke. This paper examines portions of Locke’s Second Treatise and compares it to the pillars of liberal Zionist thought, showing the parallels between Locke’s justification for European colonialism in …

Optimism Of The Intellect, Pessimism Of The Will? A Gramscian Analysis Of Two New York Police Reform Campaigns, Christian Covington

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper attempts to analyze two recent New York police reform campaigns - one to overturn the state’s system of criminal bail release, the other to make police officer discipline transparent to the public - using theories given by Antonio Gramsci. The paper will apply the concepts of hegemony, hegemonic discourse, the intertwining of the state and civil society, the attainment of political agency amongst the subaltern, and the role ideology plays in all of these concepts, to assess the success of the reform campaigns. The paper will argue that many of these concepts are further developments of political theories …

Beyond Pathology: Specters Of Suicidality In The Queer Community, Alison E. Parks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the psychic effects of a life haunted by proximity to suicide. Beginning with demographic data indicating that the queer community has experienced disproportionately high rates of suicide in the U.S. since nationwide data collection began in the 1960s, my dissertation’s argument is twofold. First, suicidality shapes the experience of being queer. Second, the queer community’s history of association with suicide has shaped its relationship to death and morbidity. Therefore, in order to better address the issue of suicide in the community, a new approach is required that considers this history’s entanglement with systemic power relations and the …

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 …

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 …

Thoughts Of Becoming: Negotiating Modernity And Identity In Bangladesh, Humayun Kabir

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation constructs a history and conducts an analysis of Bangladeshi political thought with the aim to better understand the thought-world and political subjectivities in Bangladesh. The dissertation argues that political thought in Bangladesh has been profoundly structured by colonial and other encounters with modernity and by concerns about constructing a national identity. Negotiations between the incomplete and continuous projects of modernization and identity formation have produced certain anxieties about becoming that permeates political consciousness and ideas in the country. Though such anxieties of becoming are also shared by other postcolonial countries, the specific, though not necessarily exclusive, character of …

False Cures Of U.S. Nationalism: The Border Wall – A Raucous Call From The Silent Center, Tatiana N. Browne-Kai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In trying to grasp the authoritarian surge in the U.S. since 2016, political theorists have increasingly turned their focus back to the Studies of the Authoritarian Personality. In response to the risk of these contemporary studies’ use of psychoanalysis in a de-historicized and individualized way, this paper opts for a double historicization of modern mass-formations. In analyzing the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, the Minuteman Border Fence and We Build the Wall, civil initiatives that aim at fortifying the U.S.-Mexican border wall (D. Trumps central campaign theme), the current surge to the right is shown to be based on and made …

Closing The Chasm: Al-Fārābī On Islam And Politics, Onur F. Muftugil

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Much Islamic history evinces a separation between religious and political registers of thought and action. To be sure, these two registers always remained, to some extent, mutually intertwined since the origins of Islam. However, in about two hundred years into Islamic history, or, in other words, in the 9th century, the political register based on coercion began to mark itself off from the moral concerns associated with the religious register. Political authority acquired an increasingly absolute character. It focused more on ensuring the obedience of its subjects than the moral/religious purpose of creating a just society where even the weakest …

Red Sea, White Tides, And Blue Horizons, John P. Devine

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Eric Hobsbawm, in his effort to explain the fundamental divide which produced the Second World War, convincingly argues that “the crucial lines in this civil war were not drawn between capitalism as such and communist social revolution, but between ideological families: on the one hand the descendants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the great revolutions including, obviously the Russian revolution’, on the other hand, its opponents.” This thesis argues that the American Civil War was a “great revolution” that represented a crucial transformative point in the formation of these two waring factions. The struggle was especially influential on the theory …

Modernity In Miniature: Maoism And The Beijing Department Store, Samuel M. Hellmann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the Beijing Department Store as a contradictory structure embedded in the world’s largest Communist revolution. By looking at the urban planning decisions behind constructing a colonial form in the center of the socialist capital, I attempt to unravel the complex intersection of economic development and egalitarian mass action in the early Maoist period. Constructed in 1955 during the first Five Year Plan, the Department Store sheds light on the specific parameters of post-revolution modernization campaigns. Furthermore, by looking at the conceptualizations of the building by the Party, architects, and the workers inside the store, I examine how …

Paper House: The Revolution, The Disappeared, And The Historicity Of Lebanon, Elsa Saade

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will be an attempt to reenact events in relation to the disappeared and the Lebanese civil war, with the help of newspaper cuts, oral history, theories on historical writing, memories, and books on Lebanon. As a prospective historian, the writer will be tapping into the internal event of thought processes and meaning of the past, as advised by R. G. Collingwood in The Idea of History. (Collingwood, 1946 ) That critical inquiry will only be at the service of understanding the present from the lens of a self-reflecting inquisitor that has faced many silences in a past …

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 …

Dangerous Exhibitions: Erotic Justice And Comparative Constitutional Law, Elena Cohen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The beginning of the 21^st century is widely seen as a time of great progress for LGBTQ people. Gay marriage, gay sex, adoption by same sex couples, and gay people serving in militaries have all been legalized in many countries in the past two decades, often through the decisions of constitutional courts. However, these constitutional protections of sexuality have been found in limited contexts and applied to a limited class of people, such that many are still vulnerable to repression by governments and majoritarian politics. In order to resist this sexual oppression, I widen the focus from gay and …

Ascriptive Nationalism, Demagoguery, And The Modern Presidency: A Case Study In Constitutional Decay, Christopher J. Putney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is an account of the modern presidency as a source––and under Donald Trump, an accelerant––of systemic problems in American politics. Against the prevailing scholarly view of the Trump presidency as an unqualified aberration, I argue that the signal features of his efforts at governance are actually the product of converging patterns of political and institutional order. Building on seminal (but previously disjointed) work on ascriptive Americanism and the rhetorical presidency, I show that Trump represents the political synthesis of America’s ascriptive tradition and a form of presidential leadership inaugurated more than a century ago by Woodrow Wilson. Moreover, …