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Full-Text Articles in Theory and Philosophy

Negative Psychology Of Anti-Semitism: Fear Of The Uncategorizable, Benjamin Strosberg Dec 2023

Negative Psychology Of Anti-Semitism: Fear Of The Uncategorizable, Benjamin Strosberg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Anti-Semitism is a pervasive global issue, particularly prominent in the United States. Studying and defining anti-Semitism prove remarkably challenging for scholars, leading to inadequate understanding and exclusion from contemporary academic discourse and social justice initiatives. In this dissertation, I made the case that anti-Semitism is hard to categorize, stemming, in part, from the difficulty in categorizing what it is to be Jewish, which seems to be multi-form (a figure of thought, a race, an ethnicity, a religion, a nation, none of the above). In thinking about the difficulty in categorization, I constellated various instances of anti-Jewish practices across historical epochs …


A Demonstration Of Enactivist Personality Assessment Using The Five-Factor Model, Garri Hovhannisyan Dec 2023

A Demonstration Of Enactivist Personality Assessment Using The Five-Factor Model, Garri Hovhannisyan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to extend the intellectual and existential horizon of the enactive approach by bringing forth an enactivist understanding of human cognitive life as it is lived from the perspective of personality traits. The theoretical task of this dissertation is to review existing evidence in support of the Enactivist Big-5 Theory (EB5T) of personality and its potential for bridging the phenomenological gap between minimal and human cognition. As a phenomenologically grounded theory of personality, EB5T conceptualizes individual differences not merely as differences in trait measures within a person but as differences in styles of how individuals bring forth, experience, …


Embodied Fatness In Boys: A Critical Phenomenological Study, Sean Leadem May 2023

Embodied Fatness In Boys: A Critical Phenomenological Study, Sean Leadem

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation was an exploratory study of experiences of fatness in boyhood using a hermeneutic phenomenological qualitative method. The author conducted in-depth, open-ended interviews with participants who identify as men and for whom fatness or related body-difference was an issue in childhood or adolescence to gather data on the meanings of fatness for boys and the men they become. Data analysis was organized around the existential dimensions of embodiment, temporality, and relationality. Themes emerging from this analysis included a) the discovery of fatness as ambiguous meanings mediated by others, b) fatness as a problem in a horizon that does not …


Health Equity Through Spatial Justice: A Critical Phenomenology Of Urban Trail Makers, Arvin Simon Dec 2018

Health Equity Through Spatial Justice: A Critical Phenomenology Of Urban Trail Makers, Arvin Simon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research has increasingly demonstrated that race, class and place are powerful predictors of health and social justice. This study was conducted to identify the lived experiences of individuals who were hired and trained as part of a green job program that created trails within a city park in Pittsburgh’s Mount Washington Community. This program has historically hired individuals who were formerly incarcerated, many of whom identify as African American. We explored the personal and social experiences of working in nature to better appreciate the intersections of race, class and environment in an urban community. This current study is based on …


The Zombie Apocalypse Has Already Happened: Queering Subjectivity In Zombie Film, Jessica Dunn Aug 2018

The Zombie Apocalypse Has Already Happened: Queering Subjectivity In Zombie Film, Jessica Dunn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation traces the encounter between psychology as a human science and the viral zombie film genre using the collaborative works of Deleuze and Guattari in conjunction with the queer anti-humanist theories of Colebrook and Halberstam. I interwove thematic (i.e. plot, dialogue, character development) and cinematographic (i.e. shot composition, editing, lighting, musical score) analyses of fourteen viral zombie films with theoretical arguments regarding the deterritorialization of the human subject and its relevance to psychology as a human science. The films were selected from the plethora of viral zombie films released after the turn of the 21st century. The selection was …


The Title, Laurent Turgeon-Dharmoo May 2018

The Title, Laurent Turgeon-Dharmoo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present dissertation seeks to address and redress clinical psychology’s disciplinary silence around the title of ‘Doctor’ and attempts to uncover possible meanings gathering around it by following several angles of disclosure: The self-disclosure angle recounts my own resistances and attempts at coming to terms with the title; The disciplinary disclosure angle critically reviews the scarce literature on the topic using discourse analysis; The empirical disclosure angle provides quantitative and qualitative analyses of data obtained from 27 Directors of Clinical Training and Training Clinic Directors, who were prompted to report how they use the title with various interlocutors, to outline …


Phylogeny, Psychology, And The Vicissitudes Of Human Development: The Anxiety Of Atavism, Frank Pittenger Jan 2017

Phylogeny, Psychology, And The Vicissitudes Of Human Development: The Anxiety Of Atavism, Frank Pittenger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This cross-disciplinary dissertation provides a missing intellectual history of an ostensibly dead idea. Once widely held and no less elegant for its obsolescence, the principle of biogenetic recapitulation is best remembered by its defining mantra, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Among psychologists and sociologists as well as embryologists, the notion that the development of any individual organism repeats in compressed, miniaturized form the entire history of its species enjoyed broad (if not uncontested) acceptance through the early twentieth century. The author reexamines the origins of this theory in the work of Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel, and traces its influence in psychology …