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Attack Of The Drones : Unmanned Aerial Vehicles And Moral Problems, Tyler B. Kirk Jan 2014

Attack Of The Drones : Unmanned Aerial Vehicles And Moral Problems, Tyler B. Kirk

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The frequency of use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for combat by the United States has increased dramatically in recent years. Since this technology has comprised a significant portion of American counter-terror operations abroad and there are virtually no signs of this practice slowing or ceasing in the foreseeable future, it is necessary to closely examine the ethical implications of remote-control warfare. At first glance, arguments supporting the use of "drones" seem robust and sensible: in theory, they save American military lives. But upon further investigation, the use of drones in practice actually creates morally murky, problematic situations that could lead …


"For Divers Good Causes And Considerations" : Manumission Practices Of Albany, Ny Slaveholders, 1799-1824, William Angelo Meredith Jan 2014

"For Divers Good Causes And Considerations" : Manumission Practices Of Albany, Ny Slaveholders, 1799-1824, William Angelo Meredith

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

On March 29, 1799, the New York State Legislature received notice that the state's Council of Revision had approved, "an Act for the gradual abolition of Slavery." The bill changed slavery in such a way that children born to slaves after July 4, 1799, became free upon reaching the age of twenty-five for females and twenty-eight for males. Given the monumental change produced by this legislation, historians have linked passage of the gradual abolition bill to an increase in slave manumissions. While the gradual abolition bill may have prompted slaveholders to consider manumission, it was not the overall motivating force …


A "Silk-Shot" Voice : Constructing Social History In The Future-Bound Novels Of H.G. Wells, Sophie Moss Jan 2014

A "Silk-Shot" Voice : Constructing Social History In The Future-Bound Novels Of H.G. Wells, Sophie Moss

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

ABSTRACT: This thesis argues that H.G. Wells' attempts to craft a successful narrative of the predicted future, as viewed through three primary texts (Anticipations, A Modern Utopia and The Shape of Things to Come) are not only trials at the most effective textual platform for his social ideology but also explicit attempts to create a new hybrid literature. The author first embarks on a close reading of Anticipations to analyze Wells' social ideology and his early theory of the role of fiction. Next, the author examines the two later novels, A Modern Utopia and The Shape of Things to Come, …


Education And Women Mathematicians In The Middle East, Syeda Tooba Zahra Jan 2014

Education And Women Mathematicians In The Middle East, Syeda Tooba Zahra

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Middle Eastern women have made important contributions in the field of Mathematics. The purpose of this thesis is to understand the educational background for women in the Middle East and look at the life and contribution of a sample of women mathematicians in representative Middle Eastern countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, and Pakistan.


El Wavering Imaginativo Y La Conciencia Imaginante En Los Cuentos De Marvel Moreno Y Angela Carter, Alejandra Olarte Jan 2014

El Wavering Imaginativo Y La Conciencia Imaginante En Los Cuentos De Marvel Moreno Y Angela Carter, Alejandra Olarte

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In this dissertation, I explore the short stories of Colombian writer Marvel Moreno and English writer Angela Carter. I propose that the authors' works share a dual conceptualization of the notion of imagination -- imaginative wavering and imagining consciousness. These conceptualizations constitute interpretative frameworks to comparatively examine textual strategies and themes within the authors' works of fiction. A fundamental characteristic of both imaginative wavering and imagining consciousness is movement. With the former, movement implies a constant oscillation between intradiegetic reality and rational thinking, as exposed in the stories. With the latter, movement entails the act of grasping the reality that …


Household Economies : The Production And Consumption Of Plumbate At Miguel AlemáN, The Conquista Campesina Complex And The PiñUela Complex, Marx Navarro-Castillo Jan 2014

Household Economies : The Production And Consumption Of Plumbate At Miguel AlemáN, The Conquista Campesina Complex And The PiñUela Complex, Marx Navarro-Castillo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The Soconusco region of Chiapas, Mexico, where the sites of Miguel Alemán, the Conquista Campesina Complex (Conq-18) and the Piñuela Complex (PIN) are located, has been an object of study by archaeologists since the beginning of the nineteenth century. My project focused at this locale is concerned with craft production as related to the organization and the development of hierarchical social relations and how this relationship is reflected through diverse indexes. Although Plumbate ceramics are my principal source of information, I studied other ceramic types as well.


Democracy, Political Externalities & The Labour-Process, Nicholas Alan Partyka Jan 2014

Democracy, Political Externalities & The Labour-Process, Nicholas Alan Partyka

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

My dissertation focuses on elaborating a problem for democratic political institutions posed by an externality of the capitalist labour-process, particularly for more participatory conceptions of democracy and democratic citizenship. I argue that the labour-process under capitalism causes a transformation in the skill-level and personality of worker-citizens. In the main, the direction of this transformation is towards workers who lack important deliberative skills enabling them to effectively participate in democratic politics. If one is committed to democracy as a means of collective self-government, then this negative transformation, or deformation, should be troubling. If the labour-process under capitalism deprives workers of the …


Sound Environment Programming The Post-1945 Moment : Charles Olson, Sun Ra, John Cage, And The Way Back In, Michael Peters Jan 2014

Sound Environment Programming The Post-1945 Moment : Charles Olson, Sun Ra, John Cage, And The Way Back In, Michael Peters

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

On the eve of 1945, when the Manhattan Project's machinations to split the atom were almost in place, another physicist published a little book--What Is Life? Applying physics to biology, Erwin Schrödinger described how genetic "code-script" could create aperiodic (non-repeating) new life from periodic materials, revealing the "secret" of life. This dilemma of life or death defines the post-1945 moment. Fraught with Hamlet-like uncertainty, I argue this moment is the apex of a long-fomenting, eco-historical crisis where Western thinking had severed "Man" from "Nature." Sound Environment Programming is a term I invented to detail how Charles Olson, Sun Ra, and …


Stirpiculture : Science-Guided Human Propagation And The Oneida Community, Alexandra Leah Prince Jan 2014

Stirpiculture : Science-Guided Human Propagation And The Oneida Community, Alexandra Leah Prince

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Between 1869 and 1879, the communal Christian group the Oneida Community undertook a pioneering eugenics experiment called "stirpiculture" by the group's leader, John Humphrey Noyes. Stirpiculture resulted in the planned conception, birth, and communal rearing of fifty-eight children, bred from selected members of the Oneida Community. This thesis concerns the scientific as well as the religious origins of the Oneida Community's stirpiculture experiment, and explores the ways in which the experiment changed the Community over time, especially as the "stirpicults," or children of the experiment matured and reoriented the Community away from the religious tenets on which it was founded. …


For The Improvement Of The Breed Of Horse : Thoroughbred Racing And National Security In The Age Of Horsepower, 1776-1945, Elizabeth Redkey Jan 2014

For The Improvement Of The Breed Of Horse : Thoroughbred Racing And National Security In The Age Of Horsepower, 1776-1945, Elizabeth Redkey

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

From Biblical times through the mid-twentieth century, humans relied on horses as a critical vehicle of war. But horses, unlike modern machines, could not simply be manufactured to the necessary specifications, in the necessary numbers, at the necessary times. In addition, cavalry warfare was the most physically demanding of all tasks to which humans have put horses, and required horses of exceptional endurance and athletic ability. Creating a pool of such horses to be drawn from in times of military need took careful breeding and planning. But the United States, with its fear of a standing military, and its decentralized …


Locke's Theory Of Justified Resistance : An Explanation And Defense, Peter E. Reinisch Jan 2014

Locke's Theory Of Justified Resistance : An Explanation And Defense, Peter E. Reinisch

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Peter Reinisch


Critique Is Not Enough : The Empirical Imperatives Of Innovative American Poetry, Christopher Rizzo Jan 2014

Critique Is Not Enough : The Empirical Imperatives Of Innovative American Poetry, Christopher Rizzo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Critique is Not Enough: The Empirical Imperatives of Innovative American Poetryproposes that innovative modern and early contemporary American poetries redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience. This study demonstrates how the radically different poetic projects of Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson not only equally insist upon empirically investigative poetics, but also endeavor, each to each, to individualize their poetic methodologies, which thus challenges the generalized Enlightenment myth of rationality. In that each of these writers undertakes to redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience, they also …


The Platforms Of Stage Horror : Defining Elements And Cultural Characteristics, Kimberly Saunders Jan 2014

The Platforms Of Stage Horror : Defining Elements And Cultural Characteristics, Kimberly Saunders

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The aim of this thesis is to examine a selection of dramatic examples from specific historical time periods in order to determine the elements that manifest horror on stage. By establishing the parameters of the horror genre as it pertains to live theatre, a definition begins to form that incorporates not only characteristics of the text, but also the significant role of audience response and authorial intent. The audience's relationship to the text, which ultimately dictates what the playwright chooses to include in the drama, is a communal experience of catharsis based on the battle between good and evil that …


Lithic Analysis Of The Becker Site : Continued Reevaluation Of The Culture-Historic Approach, Christopher Joseph Sobik Jan 2014

Lithic Analysis Of The Becker Site : Continued Reevaluation Of The Culture-Historic Approach, Christopher Joseph Sobik

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The Becker Site was originally interpreted as a River Phase, Late Archaic central base camp. While excavations at the site yielded numerous Normanskill projectile points, the diagnostic artifact for this phase, several rounds of radiocarbon testing yielded dates firmly in the Woodland Period. A literature review of the history of the use of the culture historic approach in New York State Archaeology, as well as several modern critiques on the same subject was undertaken with the goal of interpreting the site free of its constraints. A lithic analysis of both the formal tools and lithic debitage was undertaken in order …


Self-Effacement Of The "Author" To Circulate Texts : Strategies To Construct Authorship In Antebellum America, Rumi Takahashi Jan 2014

Self-Effacement Of The "Author" To Circulate Texts : Strategies To Construct Authorship In Antebellum America, Rumi Takahashi

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

From the post-Revolutionary days, American print materials and political institutions were interrelated with each other for the purpose of building a new nation. The democratic institutions composed of the president and a sovereign people marked the country's difference from European monarchy, while the book trade served as a means that would disseminate a moral image of an ideal citizen to endorse the national identity. Yet, as drastic changes of industry in the 1820s enabled more people to participate in the economic system, the sovereignty of people turned out to be potentially subversive power of the mob, which required the literary …


Reading After The End Of The World, Christina Thyssen Jan 2014

Reading After The End Of The World, Christina Thyssen

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Reading after the End of the World is an investigation into challenges to our critical registers brought on by the increasingly visible effects of climate change and the era of the anthropocene. Its concerns are with how these realities can be seen as transformative of our notions of "reading" and with a literature that seems to anticipate such a moment of disarticulation. The project is organized around close readings of novels by Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison and John Edgar Wideman and it traces in these texts what I refer to as a "positive nihilism," which serves as a …


Museum Representation : Ethnostatic Representations Of Culture, Brynna Elizabeth Tussey Jan 2014

Museum Representation : Ethnostatic Representations Of Culture, Brynna Elizabeth Tussey

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Museums act as knowledge production centers for cultural objects. The knowledge produced and distributed frequently portrays the Other as being immobilized in ethnostatic history. Models and modes of representation serve to reinforce these perceptions, rather than aid in the development of new forms of knowledge production. Through the discussion of these models, my research presents new theoretical perspectives for the agencies within the museum, and proposes possible new models for displaying objects from other cultures and the dialogues around said objects.


Toward Explaining The Gap : How A Particular View Of Explanation Underwrites The Explanatory Gap, Kimberly Van Orman Jan 2014

Toward Explaining The Gap : How A Particular View Of Explanation Underwrites The Explanatory Gap, Kimberly Van Orman

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In my dissertation, I consider a common argument for the existence of an unbridgeable explanatory gap between materialism and conscious experience which purports to show that we can determine a priori that conscious experience cannot possibly be explained by a materialist theory. The claim is: no matter what we might yet learn about the brain (or the world), we know enough right now about materialism and explanation to know that an explanation of conscious experience is beyond our reach. I argue that three well-known examples of this position (Jaegwon Kim, David Chalmers, and Joseph Levine) rely on a very narrow …


"Crawling Between Earth And Heaven" : Shakespeare And Elizabethan Aristotelianism, Matthew Fairchild Vivyan Jan 2014

"Crawling Between Earth And Heaven" : Shakespeare And Elizabethan Aristotelianism, Matthew Fairchild Vivyan

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

From the twelfth century well into the seventeenth century, Aristotelianism was the dominant philosophical system in Europe, and William Shakespeare's life and professional career coincided with a broad and significant revival of interest in Aristotelianism in Elizabethan England. Shakespeare responded to this intellectual movement, and in Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Timon of Athens, he demonstrates a highly sophisticated, comprehensive understanding of Aristotelian moral philosophy which, I argue, he gained by reading John Case's Speculum quaestionum moralium (1585), the standard Elizabethan commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. William Shakespeare, the man who over the centuries has become all …


Turrialba, Una Encrucijada : ArqueologíA Regional Y Rutas De ComunicacióN En Un Valle Del TróPico HúMedo De Costa Rica (11.000 A.C.-1600 D.C.), Ricardo Vazquez Leiva Jan 2014

Turrialba, Una Encrucijada : ArqueologíA Regional Y Rutas De ComunicacióN En Un Valle Del TróPico HúMedo De Costa Rica (11.000 A.C.-1600 D.C.), Ricardo Vazquez Leiva

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Routes are related with human occupation and social changes from the end of the Pleistocene to the beginning of the Spanish colonization in the Turrialba Valley, Costa Rica. The archaeological research was conducted in conjunction with the Angostura Hydroelectric Project, within a 120-km-square survey area and 145 sites. A limited number of them were excavated.


Queer Bodies And Queer Materials In Post-Wwii American Texts, William Joseph Whalen Jan 2014

Queer Bodies And Queer Materials In Post-Wwii American Texts, William Joseph Whalen

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Although the primary subject of this dissertation is contemporary American literature and popular culture--individual chapters are devoted to careful studies of Octavia Butler's short story "Bloodchild," Cormack McCarthy's gothic novel Child of God, Chuck Palahniuk's epistolary novel Pygmy, and the track "It's Good" by hip-hop artist Lil Wayne featuring Drake and Jadakiss--I develop a reading of these contemporary texts that places them within much older and richer intellectual, spiritual, psychological, and even biological traditions. My primary focus is the human body, both literal and figurative, as the site of dynamic exchanges, movements, blockages, and productive potentialities. I argue that at …


The Gendering Of Space In Colonial Burma : Race, Sex, And Power On The Road To Mandalay 1888-1948, Michael Zaborowski Jan 2014

The Gendering Of Space In Colonial Burma : Race, Sex, And Power On The Road To Mandalay 1888-1948, Michael Zaborowski

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis contends that British colonials reproduced Victorian ideas about separate roles and spaces for the genders in Burma during the period of British rule from 1888 to 1948. This reproduction affected and was affected by issues of race, sex, power, and identity in the ruling British class and the subject Burmese population.


Carbon And Nitrogen Isotope Analysis Of Archaeological Faunal Material From Dutchess Quarry Caves, Ny, Jessica Zuhlke Jan 2014

Carbon And Nitrogen Isotope Analysis Of Archaeological Faunal Material From Dutchess Quarry Caves, Ny, Jessica Zuhlke

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The purpose of this study was to do an isotopic analysis to determine the carbon and nitrogen isotope concentrations of archaeological faunal material found in the Dutchess Quarry Caves in Orange County, NY. These isotope values were then used to compare the taxa from which the samples were taken to determine if and how trophic relationships were formed. The main focus of this comparison spotlighted a sample from a human femur; to establish the human's position trophically with the other large and small mammal samples collected. The human had been previously radiocarbon dated to have lived between 2877 and 3180 …


The Blackness Of Black (W)Holes, Eric M. Anderson Jan 2014

The Blackness Of Black (W)Holes, Eric M. Anderson

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The Blackness of Black (W)holes analyzes Toni Morrison's Sula, William Faulkner's Sanctuary, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as against establishing the illusion of a coherent, recognizable self through relational identities and subservience to denotative language and categories of identity. These novel’s feature characters packing knives, I claim, because they advocate for what I term stylistic self–extrication: a rupture with prevailing forms of identity and cliché ways of speaking through rhythmic, sonorous, experimental language use. Characters who succeed at the task, I argue, are associated with a blackness in excess of racial markings, because they become unclassifiable as a result. In …


Working Mothers' Work And Family Satisfaction : The Influence Of Time Demands And Time-Based Conflict, Lauren Berger Jan 2014

Working Mothers' Work And Family Satisfaction : The Influence Of Time Demands And Time-Based Conflict, Lauren Berger

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The present study sought to examine a comprehensive model of work-family conflict and family-work conflict for working mothers. Specifically, the study tested time-based work-family conflict and time-based family-work conflict as mediators of the relations between the predictor variables of work hours, work demands, and family demands, and the outcome variables of work satisfaction and family satisfaction. It was expected that time-based work-family conflict and time-based family-work conflict would fully mediate these relations. A total of 677 working mothers in the United States participated in the study. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the hypothesized fully mediating model, as well …


TodavíA Bailamos La Cueca Sola : From Local Protest Practice Against Chile's Dictatorship To (Trans)National Memory Icon, Karolina Sonja Babic Jan 2014

TodavíA Bailamos La Cueca Sola : From Local Protest Practice Against Chile's Dictatorship To (Trans)National Memory Icon, Karolina Sonja Babic

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation is a multi-sited cultural-historical ethnography about the cueca sola, a dance that was created to denounce the disappearances of citizens during Chile's dictatorship in the 1970s. Some women with missing relatives, who belonged to the music group Conjunto Folclórico of the Association of the Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared (AFDD), created a variation on the Chilean national dance (the cueca - traditionally a courtship dance between a man and a woman) which did not involve a male partner. Instead, they performed it alone. In so doing, these women, who were among the first to denounce the military's …


Desideratum, Laurie Buckley Jan 2014

Desideratum, Laurie Buckley

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

"Desideratum" is a fictional account of a family of addicts, alcoholics, and cannabis users spanning from the mid-eighties to present time; it attempts to accurately depict a common conflict between individuals within a society and the laws by which they are unable to adhere to due to a biological imperative to self-medicate with addictive substances. This work follows two members of the Millbrook family to a rehabilitation center, and a third into chemotherapy treatment in an attempt to highlight both recreational and medicinal uses for cannabis. It explores the world of illicit drug consumption, cultivation, and dealing amid a contemporary …


Fordism & Modernist Forms : The Transformation Of Work And Style, William Jeffrey Casto Jan 2014

Fordism & Modernist Forms : The Transformation Of Work And Style, William Jeffrey Casto

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Fordism and Modernist Forms argues that Fordism is an American manifestation of a global tendency towards concentration and rationalization that we know as "monopoly capitalism." Fordism, as part of the historical transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism, reshapes and reorganizes the structures of modern life - accentuating repetitive habits and efficient behavior, replacing craftsmanship with deskilled labor, and integrating consumer culture into identity formation. These socio-economic transformations obfuscate the actually existing structures that produce their uneven societies and the monotonies of modern, everyday "life" and, therefore, create an artistic crisis of representation as the individual increasingly relies on the prisms …


Preservation Or Progression : Indo-Trinidadian Cultural Fluidity As Seen Through The Works Of V.S. Naipaul And Shani Mootoo, Mohua Chakraborti Jan 2014

Preservation Or Progression : Indo-Trinidadian Cultural Fluidity As Seen Through The Works Of V.S. Naipaul And Shani Mootoo, Mohua Chakraborti

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The aim of this thesis is to clarify and analyze the arguments about national and marginal identity made by two Indo-Trinidadian authors, V.S. Naipaul and Shani Mootoo. Naipaul argues that Trinidad as a nation cannot survive because it must be dependent on colonial rule. He argues that Indo-Trinidadian's are neither British nor Indian, and they lack identity and stability. In contrast, Mootoo argues that Trinidad is fully capable of establishing its own identity, and that Indo-Trinidadian culture does not need colonization nor India to define it. She argues that culture is a fluid and constantly changing idea. Mootoo recognizes the …


Motives, Reasons, And Morality : The Humean Theory Of Motivation, Reasons Internalism, And The Problem Of Objective Morality, Elliot Cross Jan 2014

Motives, Reasons, And Morality : The Humean Theory Of Motivation, Reasons Internalism, And The Problem Of Objective Morality, Elliot Cross

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In this dissertation I argue that the Humean theory of motivation, and reasons internalism ought to be accepted and are compatible with moral objectivity. The Humean theory of motivation is the view that only desires, and not beliefs, are capable of motivating. Reasons internalism is the view that only those considerations capable of motivating can be reasons. The combination of these two views entails that we only have a reason for action when we have a relevant desire. Accordingly, if we hold both of these positions then we cannot have reason to be moral unless we desire to be moral. …