Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Mystical Revelation And Knowledge Of God: Reclaiming Spirituality In Theology Through The Mystics, Elizabeth A. Merski

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the scholastic era, the pursuit of God has occurred preeminently through reason, leading to an imbalanced theology of God that persists to the present day in the form of intellect-centered theology. As a resolution, this work proposes that the mobilization of private, mystical revelation as a source of legitimized theological knowledge of God has the potential to close the existent epistemological gap between reason/belief and theology/spirituality, demonstrating the integral unity between authentic knowledge of God and the receiver’s personal acceptance of God in faith. After examining the required methodological components for the discipline of theology and identifying criteria for …

The Person As Foundation Of Responsibility: The Insufficiency Of Rights-Based Human Development Approaches, Jaclyn Berg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Building on the plethora of research that demonstrates the way rights language has been more useful for those with wealth and power to further expand capitalist markets, this text extends that criticism to human development programs and institutions. While they claim to be directed towards addressing global issues of poverty and hunger as well as climate crises, they continue to treat the symptoms without accurately diagnosing the disease. Approaches to development that rely on rights without questioning the way rights have been influenced by neoliberal capitalists or without questioning the capitalist global economic system will never be able to achieve …

Dialogic Communication Ethics As A Hopeful Response To Artificial Intelligence, Kristen Haldeman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Within the past five years, a new technology has dominated modern culture: artificial intelligence. With a multiplicity of ways to respond to this new environment, this dissertation situates a response to artificial intelligence by combining the media ecology and communication ethics perspectives. Media ecology explores historical roots and biases of technology to learn about their influence of humanity. A dialogic communication ethics seeks to find an opening for hope to emerge. Hope, grounded in the works of Jacques Ellul and the Christian tradition, offers a new rhetorical perspective by shifting focus away from technology and to our neighbor.

A Philosophy Of Communication Response To Bullying In Corporate America, Chris A. Phillips Dr.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This philosophy of communication response to bullying in corporate America follows the structure of posing research questions, synthesizing relevant literature, and offering advice to practitioners. It invites the reader to have hope in continuing the conversation through a constructive hermeneutic approach to the problem. By building on literature in oppression, silencing, bullying, incivility, and communication ethics, this dissertation reveals how (rhetoric) and why (philosophy) the problem occurs in corporate America today. This dissertation offers a new angle to an old problem, or, a rhetoric and philosophy of bullying. It responds to the following questions:

RQ 1: As a destructive communication …

The Narrative In The Algorithm: Storytelling, World Literature, And The Smartphone, Chad Szalkowski-Ference

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I interrogate the role algorithms, artificial intelligence, and smartphone technology play in contemporary world literature. My analysis begins with the post-truth condition, which speaks to the contemporary era’s embrace of alternative facts, authoritarianism, and conspiratorial thinking. I draw on narrative theory and paradigms of world literature to show how “algorithmic reasoning” has led to a state of paranoid persecution. This reasoning has forged new collectivities across traditional borders. Additionally, I show that these new collectivities and new technologies have produced new narrative points of view: the algorithmic first- and third-person, allowing narratives to retain the intimacy and …

The Rending Of The Temple Curtain In The Gospel Of Luke: Its Relocation And Implications, Kim Kai Chan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The rending of the temple curtain at Jesus’s death is recorded in all three Synoptic Gospels, yet Luke relocates the event from after to before Jesus’s death, creating interpretive challenges. While Mark connects the curtain’s tearing to the rending of the heavens at Jesus’s baptism through the verb σχίζω, this study argues that Luke reframes the tearing motif by linking the curtain’s rending to the tearing of the new garment in the parables of Luke 5:36–39, likewise employing σχίζω.

On the one hand, these parables in Luke 5 represent Jesus’s reasoning with his critics that to resist him and his …

The Kings Are Dead. Long Live The Kings: The Legacy Of Roman Kingship In The Republican And Imperial Periods, Dylan Hillebrand

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

From Romulus through Tarquinius Superbus, Rome’s kings occupied a major place within the collective cultural imagination of the ancient polity long after the office was abolished. For generations, no accusation was as odious as “king” and the entire period was seen as a cautionary tale. While the legacy of the kings remained an essential part of Roman identity, how the people related to that legacy changed eventually resulting in a restoration of kingship. A complete picture of the establishment-rejection-restoration cycle becomes clear through examination of the works of Roman (and Greek) historians. Central questions which guide this study: Why were …

A Modest Proposal For Discourse Analysis In Nonbinary Communities: Method And Case Study, Nikoli Michael Daigneault

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While linguists have long used discourse analysis to study language variation in binary and nonnormative gender groups, nonbinary people have often been excluded from analyses or treated without a nonbinary-informed framework. Nevertheless, nonbinary language use can provide key insights into the relationship between gender and language. In this thesis, I propose Nonbinary Discourse Analysis, a set of recommendations and best practices for conducting discourse analysis in nonbinary communities. These methods are informed by previous empirical research on nonnormative gender identities and theoretical work in trans linguistics (Zimman, 2020) and trans epistemologies (Nordmarken, 2019; Raclaw, in press). To demonstrate the methodology, …

Illuminating Sanja Matsuri: Lived Religion And Festival Practice In Asakusa, Caleb R. Merckle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Sanja Matsuri, a major Shintō and Buddhist festival in Asakusa, Tokyo, through the lenses of lived religion, participant observation, autoethnography, and anthropology. Departing from institution-centered approaches, it foregrounds the experiential dimensions of festival participation, showing how physical devotion, collective movement, and festive intensity function as expressions of spiritual meaning. Ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2023 and 2025 included participant observation, informal interviews with local and foreign participants, and Reflexive Discourse Analysis of fieldnotes and bilingual transcripts. Analysis reveals a dynamic interplay between formal sacralization strategies — such as mitama-ire rituals and structured processions — and spontaneous, informal participant …

The Republican Party And The Creation Of The Bipartisan Foreign Policy, 1945-1953, Alexander Gellos

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a historical and structural reexamination of the Republican Party’s role in shaping American foreign policy from 1945 to 1953. Defying the historiography of a frictionless postwar consensus and an executive branch-centered narrative, this historical chronological study demonstrates that the Republican Party’s role in formulating the bipartisan foreign policy was a contingent and debated legislative construction. Far from representing passive submission or a surrender of partisan identity, the GOP’s role was an indispensable exercise in creating it, and due to politics being what it is, straining it. Through historical chronology spanning from 1945 to 1953, the party's center …

Neoliberalism & The Care Economy: Exploring The Gendered Impacts Of Social Protection Systems, Rachel Carruthers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how neoliberal transformation of social protection policy influences gender dynamics within the care economy. Care is necessary for well-being, but traditionally excluded from economic thinking. This thesis completes a historical overview of how care has been incorporated or excluded by different economic paradigms and is anchored in feminist political economy that emphasizes care as a central consideration. A comparative analysis across California, Texas, and Sweden demonstrates how social protection, specifically access to paid parental leave, varies across regimes and results in inconsistent care outcomes. The findings suggest that social protections can reduce some inequalities, but inadequately address …

Difficult History During Difficult Times: Amache Junior Rangers, Katelyn Morkovsky

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My research aims to understand approaches to teaching difficult histories to children at cultural heritage institutions. To do this, I examined the creation process of the Amache Junior Ranger booklet that launched at the site in the fall of 2025. Amache, a WWII Japanese American incarceration center, presents significant interpretive challenges in balancing the traumatic nature of the site with age-appropriate content as well as highlighting the agency people exercised without losing the gravity of the situation. In addition to how the booklet was made, I use my research to situate the booklet in the social and political climate in …

Ka Here Tāngata:1 Mātauranga And Te Ao Māori In Biocultural Kākāpō (Strigops Habroptilus) Conservation Approaches, Sophie Perfetto

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This master's thesis examines conservation as a form of living cultural heritage practice through the co-management of kākāpō (Strigops habroptilus), a critically endangered parrot and taonga species in Aotearoa New Zealand. Situated within ongoing histories of colonial dispossession and Western frameworks of land and species management, contemporary kākāpō conservation is shaped through the partnership between the Department of Conservation’s Kākāpō Recovery Programme and Ngāi Tahu. Drawing on semi-structured interviews collected during fieldwork from July to August 2025, this study examines how institutional partnerships structure decision-making, authority, and responsibility in contemporary conservation governance. Findings demonstrate that Māori knowledge systems …

Otherness And The Trinity: Toward A Critical Reimagining Of Christian Divinity From A Postcolonial Ethos, Taylor Muma

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I address the Trinity’s potential as an emancipatory relational archetype in the philosophy of religion, while at the same time recognizing the complicity of Christian doctrine in colonial conquest. My dissertation will be a reimagining of trinitarian theology as an ecotonal paradigm of multiplicity and alterity that provides a generative means of moving beyond the enmeshment of divinity with constructs of mastery.

The post-structuralist and postcolonial methodologies in this project emerge from the work of such scholars as Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Gloria Anzaldúa. They foreground critical ideations of otherness and multiplicity in ways …

The Permanent Emergency: The Anti-Fascist And Anti-Colonial Intersections Of James Joyce’S Ulysses And Roberto Bolaño’S 2666, Lily V. Mcmanamy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My thesis is going to explore the (Irish) Anti-Colonial and (Spanish) Anti-Fascist parallels between James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004). Using the major epic novels of two exiled authors, I hope to explore the intersections of poetic fiction and political resistance. I read these texts as bookends spanning the pre- and post-war periods, highlighting the continuities of colonialism, totalitarianism, and fascism, and the way these authors develop a post/modernist narrative that nods towards these themes. I plan to draw on Alberto Toscano’s LateFascism (2023) as a means of situating these authors’ novels with our own political moment …

She Believed She Could, So She Did: A Lifecycle Approach To Understanding Leadership And Self-Efficacy Development In Women Astronauts, Savanah Faith Sellars Bray

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how women leaders develop and sustain self-efficacy, and develop as leaders, throughout their lives. Although decades of research document the barriers women face navigating leadership journeys, including the challenges described in the Women’s Leadership Labyrinth of prejudice, discrimination, and childcare issues, existing literature offers limited insight into how women actively build belief in their capacity to lead and accomplish their goals. Further, research consistently shows that women report lower leadership self-efficacy than men, even with comparable experience, yet the developmental processes that shape this gap, beginning in childhood, remain underexplored. Guided by self-efficacy research and its four …

Reseeding Relations: Comparing Museum And Indigenous Seed Sharing & Rematriation Protocols In The Midwestern United States, Madeline G. Anderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) paved the way for the repatriation of ancestors and certain cultural objects to Indigenous communities, museums still struggle to address other forms of cultural returns. Heritage seeds, those which hold cultural significance to Indigenous peoples, held within museum collections perpetuates the colonization of Indigenous lifeways. This research examines rematriation as an Indigenous form of cultural return better suited to address these needs than limited repatriation models. I analyze how museums are working to create rematriation processes for their collections which reflect diverse Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies through a three-tiered approach: …

Who Tells Our Stories?: An Analysis Of Lgbtqia2s+ Community-Museum Collaboration In Northeastern Wisconsin, Frances Kerkhof

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Traditionally, histories of LGBTQIA2S+ individuals have been excluded from mainstream conversations and censored from public records. This exclusion was evident in how LGBTQIA2S+ history is retold in museum spaces. Over the past few decades, public institutions have shifted how LGBTQIA2S+ histories are communicated, with efforts to include more diverse histories and perspectives. During the summer of 2025, I conducted a museum ethnography of the Neville Public Museum’s Telling Our Stories: LGBTQ+ Voices of Northeastern Wisconsin to answer the research question: How does community engagement enhance the representation of the LGBTQIA2S+ community in a local museum in Northeastern Wisconsin? Through this …

Becoming The Phoenix: Black Women’S Experiences And Leadership Growth Through Humanized Black Feminist Action Learning, Jovan Keith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the workplace learning experiences of Black women professionals in corporate leadership contexts. Leadership development programs often rely on standardized models that overlook the lived realities shaping Black women’s professional experiences. In response, this study introduced Humanized Black Feminist Action Learning, a leadership development intervention that integrates Black feminist scholarship, humanizing pedagogy, and critical action learning.

Using a qualitative case study design, the research examined a cohort of midcareer Black women professionals who participated in four facilitated learning sessions structured around workplace dilemmas. During these sessions, participants engaged in reflection, dialogue, and action as they examined workplace dynamics …

Defying Impossibility: Critical Qualitative Reorientations To Black Lgbtqia+ Sense Of Belonging, Olivia H. Hunte

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Belonging is a human need central to survival and can be cultivated within all spheres of life. Social environments are vital for experiencing a sense of belonging. In some social environments, Black LGBTQIA+ people encounter greater impediments to their daily lives with consequences for survival, including threatening their belonging needs. Within the United States, systems of oppression create and inform conditions within social environments that can potentially thwart pathways to belonging for Black LGBTQIA+ people. Thus, fulfillment of belonging needs for Black LGBTQIA+ people is one of nuance, pain, resilience, hope, harm, trauma, resistance, and healing; scant research is available …

Becoming A "Still Point Of Grace": Identifying Obstacles Faced By Catholic Elementary School Teachers In Meeting The Needs Of Students With Generalized Anxiety In The Classroom, Kerry Smigielski

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the midst of a mental health crisis in the United States, teachers in the Diocese of Cityville need to be equipped to serve elementary students who experience anxiety within an authentic Catholic context. The purpose of this study is to begin improvement research on classroom supports for students with generalized anxiety in the Diocese of Cityville elementary schools. Journey lines and a focus group discussion were conducted within a causal systems analysis to respond to the central research question: “What obstacles do Catholic elementary school teachers in the Diocese of Cityville face in meeting the needs of students with …

The Illocutionary Constitution Of Second Nature: An Interpretive Reconstruction Of Hegel’S Philosophy Of Language, Roland William Carspecken

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers an interpretive reconstruction of Hegel’s philosophy of language. Rich reflections on the nature of language and its significance to human life can be found across Hegel’s works. Many of these reflections strongly suggest that language plays a vital role in Hegel’s philosophical project. Yet surprisingly, Hegel never set down a comprehensive account of his view of language. To this day, it remains a matter of dispute whether Hegel’s writings on language are consistent enough to amount to a single ‘philosophy of language’ and, if they are, what sort of philosophy of language they might offer. In the …

“The Right Of Black Folk To Love And Enjoy”: Black Romanticism, Pleasure, And Poetics, 1900-1920, John D. Hadlock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores poetry written at the turn of the twentieth century in order to closely examine what I call the “Black Romantic” impulse of the Harlem and New Negro Renaissances. I argue that Black American poets turned to a Romantic notion of the poet as cultural representative and of poetry as a radical celebration of beauty that disavowed and disputed social ills, namely racist ideologies in America, while simultaneously demanding the right of Black pleasure-taking. However, I also contend that Black American poets of various backgrounds and identities used different poetic, rhetorical, and artistic strategies to elevate the status …

St. John Henry Cardinal Newman’S Mariology: A Distinctively Patristic And English Understanding Of Marian Doctrine And Devotion, Erin Meikle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

St. John Henry Newman’s understanding and reception of the dogma of divine motherhood grew during his pre-Catholic years. This study employs a form of reception theory to argue that Newman exercised reserve and compromise in his discourse on Mary’s identity as the Mother of God during both his evangelical and high church Anglican periods. The first three chapters conduct a historical investigation of Marian devotion and reception of the dogma of divine motherhood in England from the period of the apparition at Walsingham (1061) up until the nineteenth century. The analyses indicate that England had an intense Marian devotion and …

Values-Based Clinical Ethics: A New Model Of Health And Ethics Consultation For Patients Suffering In Extremis, Adam Trainer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation argues that contemporary clinical ethics is inadequately equipped to support patients suffering in extremis because it relies on an insufficiently discriminating account of health and a constrained model of moral reasoning. Drawing on Bernard Lonergan, it reconceives health as an emergent, multi-layered, heuristic notion shaped by biological, psychological, social, and existential goods. On that basis, it critiques principlism’s global applicability thesis and the undergirding claim that its principles form part of the common morality, arguing that this justificatory structure is philosophically insufficient and practically limited for clinical ethics in cases marked by profound suffering, moral plurality, and normative …

Phenomenological Philosophy Of Psychedelics: Psychedelic Experience In The Modes Of Saturation And Flesh, Michael V. Kramer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work seeks to develop the nascent sub-field of the phenomenological philosophy of psychedelics. Beginning with a general overview of key aspects pertinent to psychedelic studies, the focus then turns to a general disciplinary discussion of current approaches within the philosophy of psychedelics, as well as psychedelic philosophy—a distinction which is technically deployed. Special consideration is given to the specific approach known as the “natural philosophy of psychedelics,” which is taken as the philosophical foil to the preferred approach of phenomenological philosophy. A survey of the extant literature regarding the implementation of phenomenology within psychedelic discourse is then provided …

Weathered, Haylee A. Dyess

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Weathered focuses on themes of change, accumulation, time, and acceptance. Each artwork holds layers of information and experiences that form a unique narrative for all its viewers. The construction of each piece is a symbol of the physical ability it takes to create each painting. After my mobility was hindered due to my medical conditions, a new appreciation for physical health and the world I live in was gained. Striving to pack this sense of appreciation into my work, my method became a way for me to cope with my illness and to enjoy being creative, freely.

My art is …

The Southampton Plot: The Case For Innocence (1415), Haley Buckles

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the "Southampton Plot" of 1415, a famous conspiracy to overthrow King Henry V of England. While history often portrays the plotters as simple traitors against the government, this study reexamines original records to show a more complex story. By looking closely at how the English government handled the trials, the research reveals that the English Crown may have exaggerated the threat to strengthen the King’s political power before he invaded France. This study shows that what we call "treason" was often shaped by the government’s need to control its public image and hold on to power. Ultimately, …

Reading The Wisdom Of Psalm 37 Through The Lens Of Metaphor And Lament, Hannah N. Johanson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis proposes that reading Ps 37 through the lens of both metaphor and lament can reshape the way the reader understands the reality of evil, fostering hope and agency. While Ps 37 is often classified as a wisdom psalm, this thesis diverges from the interpretation that this psalm is a list of proverbs. Instead, this thesis attempts to show that Ps 37 forms a metaphorical landscape where evil withers, vanishes, and is cut off while goodness thrives and is secured forever. This thesis also places this psalm in dialogue with two poems that engage Ps 37 from a post-Shoah …

A Phenomenological Study: Examining Organizational Change Initiatives Within The U.S. Army To Influence Racial Climate, Reginald Gerald Dash Ii

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research study was aimed at examining organizational change initiatives influencing the racial climate among African American soldiers in the United States (U.S.) Army. African Americans comprise a significant portion of the U.S. Army. However, African Americans’ significant contributions do not readily translate into “equal treatment”, which includes proportional representation at the highest levels of leadership. African Americans in the U.S. Army face career navigation challenges rooted in systemic racial division. The goal of this qualitative phenomenological study was to add African American soldiers’ voices to the existing literature by interviewing African American soldiers with at least five years of …