Theory, Knowledge and Science Commons^™

Prerogative In Common: On The Emancipatory Potential Of Radical Mutuality Amid Sovereign Decisionism, Matthew Builes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In times of crisis, liberal democracies resort to authoritarian measures that undermine core democratic values. Dominant thought in the study of emergency-era law and politics appeal to a dichotomy of normal and exceptional times, to critique or justify the turn to sovereign decisionism. While this strategy seems clear-cut, the persistence of exceptional spaces and the crises that supposedly generate them challenge existing frameworks by blurring the line between norm and exception. This project explores the prospect of radical mutual aid, as a transformative response to the enduring crisis of modernity.

Not Meant To Be Read: The Stories They Silence, The Resistance That Speaks, Cristina Onea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I trace the evolution of surveillance from overt state violence to the more insidious forms of ideological policing embedded in everyday life. Through lived experience, oral history, and critical autoethnography, I explore how surveillance moves through bodies, families, institutions, and memory—not simply as external control, but as internalized rhythms of fear, vigilance, and self-surveillance. I move between my father's life under Romanian dictatorship, my own embodied inheritance, and the contemporary struggles of librarians facing ideological suppression to reveal surveillance as a structure that persists through generations, mutates across contexts, and demands new forms of resistance.

I argue …

Beyond The Rational: Exploring Transrational And Embodied Knowledge Through Ceremony And Nature, Dimitris A. Alexakos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores transrational and embodied knowledge gained through my experience within ceremony and nature. This thesis uses transrational to mean “information and experience that does not readily fit into standard cause and effect logical structure” (Bernstein, 2005, p. xv). By reflecting on personal experiences and embodied sensations during ceremonies in nature, the thesis outlines a framework for exploring transrational and embodied knowledge within nature. I offer heuristics, a phenomenological tool to “explore, focus, and raise awareness” (Alexakos, 2015) to provide context for my experience in nature, ceremonies and ceremonies in nature.

The research investigates transrational and embodied knowledge through …

Algorithmic Love: Twenty-First Century Organizations Of The Romantic, Sandra Moyano Ariza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the highly computed and accelerated experiences of digital love as well as their cultural and artistic representations in order to shed light on the human and more-than-human entanglements producing the algorithmic love experience. The recent turn to love in critical theory and cultural studies examines how love circulates in neoliberal societies and in the subjective processes of the users, foregrounding the control of populations and the very much lamented “end of love” (Illouz 2019). My study of love supplements the neoliberalist critique of algorithmic love with a posthuman and media theory approach that attends to the material …

The Politics Of Expertise And The Articulation Of Authority In Democracy: Cognitive Style And Intelligibility In The Education Of Problem-Solving And Professional Decision-Making In The Domain Of Law, Michael W. Raphael

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Computational complexity refers to the representational aspect of problem-solving. This representational aspect is commonly understood to describe the regularities that organize the definition of the problem-situation, the qualities that designate its difficulty, either in terms of the process of arriving at a definition of the problem or in the process of arriving at a solution. It is for this reason, that it is commonly said that “representational design precedes computational efficacy.” The point of this maxim is to serve as a reminder that an efficient use of resources begins with the design of near decomposability, the specification of the properties …

Salty: A Diffractive Inquiry Of Visceral Knowing And Embodied Aesthetics, Mei Ling Chua

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation takes a diffractive, onto-epistemological approach to everyday practices with salt in order to articulate an expanded understanding of meaning making and knowledge production. This research reckons with and challenges dominant modes of knowing that engage a Cartesian perspective to situate knowing as the exclusive domain of the mind in both form and topic of inquiry. This research acts simultaneously as both a direct practice of and metacognition about knowledge production by examining 1. the embodied (including sensory and emotional aspects) and 2. the relational (including interpersonal and socio-cultural) dimensions of experience as visceral knowing. This articulation of …

Close-Quarters Antagonism: The New Left Within And Against The War On Poverty, Andrew S. Anastasi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation suggests a new way of thinking about relations between social movements and capitalist states through a comparative historical sociological study of how three New Left social movement organizations – Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panther Party, and the National VISTA Alliance – related to the United States government’s War on Poverty in the 1960s and 1970s. It contributes to historical knowledge of the period by investigating the archives of these social movement organizations, and it systematizes the viewpoint of movement participants in dialogue with social and political theory. The dissertation finds that the trajectories of these …

Time And Power: The Will To Temporalize In Digital Culture, Talha Issevenler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I analyze the new forms of temporalization of social media in relationship to arrangements of power through nonhuman agency of the algorithm. The new social media industry refers to the entities that make up its circulatory movement, simply as ‘content’. This suggests that scientific or empirical study of social media should deal with content and analyze this as the data of research through sampling (Manovich, 2020, p. 93-94). Yet the forms and the temporality in which the content is presented not only are open to empirical research but should be central to our understanding of the organization …

"It Was Handed To Them": The Origins Of Targeted Delivery And The Spirit Of Nanomedicine, Marzena Woinska

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nanotechnology is widely recognized as an important field. Since the 2000s, nano-based targeting has been a cutting-edge approach in cancer research. To specify what nanomedicine means and describe its significance at the cultural level, this study harnesses data from peer-reviewed articles published in leading scientific journals.

Balancing precariously between sociological theory and science and technology studies, this project turns to nanomedicine’s origins to address broader questions regarding the relationship between science and society and the causes of scientific discovery and technological innovation. It tells the story of nanotechnology's discursive formations taking on a life of their own and congealing into …

Spirits In The Dark: Black Community Education And The Light It Bears, Sydoni A. Ellwood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Spirits in the Dark” is a digital space dedicated to the efforts of Black community education. It memorializes the commitment and strategies of spirits, light bearers like Mary McLeod Bethune and Huey Newton – people who devoted their lives to the fortification of their communities via education. This project also presents a variety of answers to one specific question: What lessons can school leaders and educators incorporate from community-controlled education programs to make learning spaces affirming and engaging for Black students? In totality, the digital space contributes to conversations in urban education and sociology, specifically the ones being held around …

Progress Narratives In Trans Internationalism: Surveying A Collected Archive Of The Global Trans Movement, 2008–2018, Flora P. Wolpert Checknoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Trans liberation as a global movement began to be documented in public reports in the mid-2000s. Gathered together from their first decade (2008-2018), publications produced by three trans INGOs—Transgender Europe (TGEU), the Asia Pacific Trans Network (APTN), and Global Action for Trans* Equality (GATE)—demonstrate the cultivation of a global trans imaginary and materialize records of a coalescing struggle. The publications depict tensions between an evolving global trans imaginary and the construction of a rights deserving trans population in the development sector. The seeking of international action and resources has compelled the unification of messaging through rhetoric and data aggregation across …

Factors Predicting Sustainability: A Correlational Study Of One Multi-Site Program, Meredith L. King Jensen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Healthcare organizations invest significant economic, physical, and human resources to implement changes and expect sustained benefits for their investments in the long term. Yet, few studies have examined long-term sustainability and factors contributingto sustainability. The primary aim of the study was to gain a better understanding of sustainability and five factors (champions, leadership support, policy, resources, and training and education) that might predict long-term sustainability within the context of one Safe Patient Handling and Mobility (SPHM) program implemented in a large, nationwide system more than 7 years ago. The secondary aim was to examine the number of nursing staff injuries, …

Towards A Pedagogy Of Life Purposes, Manny Lopez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

College students who understand how the courses that they are enrolled in connect with their broader life goals are more likely to apply an approach of task perseverance with academic endeavors. Yet, nearly three million adolescent community college students in the United States may not have developed clear purposes in life. Relatedly, overtime the lack of lucid life purposes contributes to maladaptive behavior.

This dissertation is a compilation of three interrelated studies that took place in two public community colleges in the City University of New York. Guided by authentic inquiry and framed by sociocultural theory, central to each study …

Signals In The Black Stack / Geometyr Design Manual, Jason T. Scaglione

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following white paper provides a critical accompaniment to my capstone project: the GEOMEtyr Design Manual. GEOMEtyr is a virtual reality to be made accessible as a mobile and web platform for the visualization of certain systemic elements of a utopic world that parallels our own planet’s geographies, polities, and climates. As such, the GEOMEtyr virtualization is designed to derive utopian space from the informational structures of our own world. The operations by which this may be accomplished are broadly described within the accompanying GEOMEtyr manual. The white paper, Signals in the Black Stack, elaborates vital world-building characteristics of informational …

Queerness, Witchcraft, And Embodied Presence: Aesthetic Knowings Of What A Body Can Do, Megan Bigelow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Taking as a point of entry the critique of representation and affirming the limitations of the cuts that language makes, this capstone project explores the imbrications and assemblages between Foucault’s concept of subjugated knowledges, witchcraft and other body-based ways of knowing and being, and the consciousness of non-human forms such as plants and through the framework of non-representational theory, process philosophies, aesthetics, queerness, and the concept of difference itself.

Since such theories themselves are living, breathing entities, this capstone project explores the ideological split that has occurred between sacred and secular beliefs, moving through different figures such as nuns and …

Critical Paradigm Theory: A Deconstruction Of The Dominant Discourse Shaping Public Education In America, Kevin Froner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to deconstruct the dominant discourses shaping public education in America. To understand the ontological and genealogical roots of public education, the researcher developed a framework referred to as Critical Paradigm Theory (CPT) to examine the current education paradigm. Longitudinal data was collected from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) with an analysis of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Additional analysis was performed applying critical paradigm theory to a …

Making It Pay To Be A Fan: The Political Economy Of Digital Sports Fandom And The Sports Media Industry, Andrew Mckinney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a series of case studies and sociological examinations of the role that the sports media industry and mediated sport fandom plays in the political economy of the Internet. The Internet has structurally changed the way that sport fans access sport and accelerated the processes through which the capitalist actors in the sports media industry have been able to subsume them. The three case studies examined in this dissertation are examples of how digital media technologies have both helped fans become more active producers and consumers of sports and made the sports media industry an integral and vanguard …

Electric Light: Automating The Carceral State During The Quantification Of Everything, R. Joshua Scannell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the rise of digitally-driven policing technologies in order to make sense of how prevailing logics of governance are transformed by ubiquitous computing technology. Beginning in the early 1990s, police departments and theorists began to rely on increasingly detailed sets of metrics to evaluate performance. The adoption of digital technology to streamline quantitative evaluation coincided with a steep decline in measured crime that served as a proof-of-concept for the effectivity of digital police surveillance and analytics systems. During the turbulent first two decades of the 21^st century, such digital technologies were increasingly associated with reform projects designed …

Walking As Ontological Shifter: Thoughts In The Key Of Life, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the …

Bodies Of Knowledge: An Anatomy And Kinesiology Of The American Prison Nation, 'Human'-Making, And Twenty-First-Century Techno-Gods, Lyndsey Karr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The social production of hegemonic knowledge has historically been legitimized in relation to the sanctioned status of the ‘Human’.[1] Beginning with the American Prison Industrial Complex and what sociologist Beth E. Richie conceptualizes as the “prison nation,” I will show the ‘human’ as a contingent and composite status appearing along a spectrum of Flesh, Body, and ‘Human’ (Flesh-Body-‘Human’) statuses and subjectivity.

Bringing this ‘Human’ continuum into conversation with twenty-first-century media, (micro)computational technologies, and contemporary knowledge and social economies, I expand the notion, reach, and scale of the American “prison nation.” Following Mark Hansen’s treatment of twenty-first-century digital media, I …

Denial: A Sociological Theory, Christina Nadler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation develops a theory of sociological denial through an investigation of contested social problems. I begin by reviewing the literature on denial, both sociological and psychological, in order to situate the project and exemplify the relevance and need for a sociological theory of denial. Then, through examining three scales of the social, I account for multiple layers of the social structure and denial’s place in each. These scales are the sites at which denial happens: geographic, cognitive, and unconscious. I explore five contested social problems through varied paradigms that allow me to analyze each scale of the structural. I …

The Value Of Value-Added: Science, Technology, And Policy In Educational Evaluation, Daniel Douglas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the first decade of the 21^st century, researchers and policymakers in K-12 education began to focus on evaluating teacher and school performance based on students’ standardized test scores. One evaluative technique, value-added assessment (VAA), has been given particular attention. This research presents a comprehensive study of the theoretical, technical, historical and political dimensions VAA. Theoretically, the assumptions that underlie value-added diverge significantly from the observed operations of the schools and classrooms these models are supposed to evaluate. Technically, even if the theoretical assumptions are accepted, teachers’ actual value-added rankings are shown to be unstable across time periods and …

Empty Metal Jacket: The Biopolitical Economy Of War And Medicine, Sandra Lee Trappen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Empty Metal Jacket: The Biopolitical Economy of War and Medicine undertakes study of how global conflict and violence shape the entire range of social production, from commodities and culture to social goods and social theory. The research presented in this work draws from cutting-edge theories in body and science studies, in addition to theories of affect and biopolitics to address how war became a problem solving paradigm in medicine. Combat casualties are shown to serve as a material nexus for medical knowledge production. Although the focus here is on medicine and medical innovation in particular, these developments are connected to …