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Title: Teacher participatory action research on food insecurity, food and culture, and school gardens within a low-income urban school district
Creator: Stapleton, Sarah Riggs
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This project utilizes participatory action research with a group of four veteran urban teachers to explore the differing ways in which food intersects with the lives of low-income youth in schools. There are two major aims for this research project. The first aim concerns the content of the projects: food and schools. Food deeply affects schools, students, and communities, yet it has not been given adequate attention by formal educators, education researchers, and curriculum developers....
Show moreThis project utilizes participatory action research with a group of four veteran urban teachers to explore the differing ways in which food intersects with the lives of low-income youth in schools. There are two major aims for this research project. The first aim concerns the content of the projects: food and schools. Food deeply affects schools, students, and communities, yet it has not been given adequate attention by formal educators, education researchers, and curriculum developers. Through explorations of social, cultural, and economic dimensions of food in urban schools, our group strives to present a case for the relevance and importance of food in schools to formal educators. The four teachers devise and implement their own action research projects to investigate the ways in which food intersects with the lives of their students in one low-income urban school district. Their projects include unit design and assignments about food systems and food & culture, creation of a backpack feeding program, a potluck for English Language Learner students and their families, an investigation of the ways in which a change in district food service providers changed the ways food insecure students eat in school, and a creation of an afterschool garden club focused on STEM concepts and project-based learning. Findings from these projects include an appreciation of the ability of food-focused curriculum to engage students, an understanding of the possibilities and challenges of implementing food assistance programs in schools, an awareness of the deep impact of district food service providers in addressing food insecurity for students, and the potential for students to show ownership of garden projects. Findings across the projects include the importance of the perspective of teachers as school insiders for the design and implementation of projects about food in schools, the plethora of issues surrounding food in low-income schools, the importance of food and students’ own familial food cultures within educational settings, and the pressing concerns of food insecurity for many youth in urban schools. The second aim of this work is methodological. I am using a methodology I have termed teacher participatory action research (TPAR) to make a case that teachers who work with marginalized students have themselves become marginalized by association as a result of current neoliberal policies. As part of this methodology, the teachers conduct their own action research projects, while I explore and analyze the contexts in which they work that have led to their challenging contextual work conditions. To analyze their city, district, and school contexts I use a combination of place and neoliberal frameworks. I also document the ways in which the teachers have reported feeling marginalized within their jobs. I employ poetic inquiry to allow me to share their stories in ways that can be shared with larger audiences while also protecting them from political fallout since their identities are disclosed within the larger research project. I hope that this project may serve as an example of ways in which university researchers and teachers can collaborate to share their respective strengths—for teachers, an emic knowledge about a place, school, and district context, and for researchers an etic view of these places within a larger context and training in research methodologies—while working to improve conditions for students and teachers.
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Title: Social-ecological systems, values, and the science of "people management"
Creator: Piso, Zachary Amedeo
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation interrogates a shift in environmental science, policy, and management toward conceptualizing the environment as a social-ecological system. Social-ecological systems science reflects an interdisciplinary effort to understand how individuals and communities achieve their environmental goals through the institutions that they maintain. Though the paradigmatic institutions concern economic behavior (e.g. property rights institutions), the field embraces the social sciences...
Show moreThis dissertation interrogates a shift in environmental science, policy, and management toward conceptualizing the environment as a social-ecological system. Social-ecological systems science reflects an interdisciplinary effort to understand how individuals and communities achieve their environmental goals through the institutions that they maintain. Though the paradigmatic institutions concern economic behavior (e.g. property rights institutions), the field embraces the social sciences broadly, with contributions from sociology, anthropology, geography, political science, and so on. That said, social science is fairly narrowly conceived; leaders in the field stress that they are studying social mechanisms in order to predict and manage social behavior. In a popular textbook on the subject, Fikret Berkes and Carl Folke stress that "resource management is people management" and call for a social science of this management.Social-ecological systems scientists have generally neglected the ethics of people management-for the most part they subscribe to a fairly typical fact/value dichotomy according to which scientists describe social-ecological systems while managers and policymakers prescribe actions in light of these descriptions. Following several philosophical traditions (in particular pragmatist philosophy of science), I call attention to the ways that social-ecological systems science is value-laden. I take environmental pragmatism to provide a roadmap for conducting social-ecological systems science ethically. Environmental pragmatists stress that science is always embedded in practical problem-solving activities that presuppose particular goals for, and side constraints to, inquiry. Many traditions in the philosophy of environmental science embrace social science for the specific role of facilitating this deliberation, but these traditions do not seem to anticipate the explanatory ambitions of social sciences. This leaves unaddressed several pertinent questions about how social explanations work (i.e. how functional distinction structure inquiry), which have very practical implications for which social science disciplines should be included in a collaboration and how social and ecological knowledge should be integrated. For example, most social situations are characterized by property rights institutions, cultural traditions, political alliances, and other social institutions within the purview of particular social science disciplines, but researchers are not reflexive about whether to explain environmental change according to one set of practices or another.The dissertation traverses the following terrain: the first chapter more carefully motivates the questions above regarding the need for ethics and the promise, but present inadequacy, of environmental pragmatism to meet this need. Chapter two attends to Dewey's theory of inquiry, in particular the dialogical dimension of inquiry that authorizes warranted assertions. Through reflection on Daniel Bromley's volitional pragmatism and a debate between Richard Rorty and hermeneutic social scientists, chapter three attends to the way that social science structures inquiry in order to intervene in the normative practices of a community. Chapter four analyzes social-ecological explanations in order to locate normative and evaluative assumptions that should be accountable to democratic deliberation. Finally, chapter five redescribes interdisciplinary integration as an ethical project where decisions about the centering and decentering of different sciences is as much ethical as epistemological.
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Title: The Frankfurt School and religion : determinate negation, translation, and the rescue of critical religious potentials
Creator: Byrd, Dustin
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The Institut für Sozialforschung, better known as the "Frankfurt School," was born between the catastrophes of World War I and World War II. Rooted in Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and other philosophers, the Critical Theory of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, and others, is generally understood to be solely secular. The core thesis of this dissertation refutes that claim. I argue that not only did the Frankfurt School draw...
Show moreThe Institut für Sozialforschung, better known as the "Frankfurt School," was born between the catastrophes of World War I and World War II. Rooted in Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and other philosophers, the Critical Theory of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, and others, is generally understood to be solely secular. The core thesis of this dissertation refutes that claim. I argue that not only did the Frankfurt School draw upon their secular sources for their critical analyses, but also the religions of Judaism and Christianity. Unlike their immediate predecessors, especially the 19th century materialists, who argued for the abstract negation of religion, the first generation of critical theorists argued for a determinate negation of religion, wherein the liberational, emancipatory, and prophetic semantic and semiotic materials of religion would be rescued by way of translation into critical political philosophy. In other words, if religion was to survive secular modernity, it would need to do so via its migration into an alternative form, i.e. critical philosophy. Additionally, I argue that a similar process of determinate negation can be found in Jürgen Habermas' call for members of the Islamic faith to translate the moral-practical elements of their religion in post-metaphysical reasoing, wherein it can escape from its closed semantic universe and enter into democratic deliberations. Yet, I argue against Habermas' temperate call for the Muslim community to translate only the moral-practical elements or their religion. Rather, I argue for a return akin to the first generation of the Frankfurt School's radicality; Muslims should translate the monotheistic concept of tawhīd (divine oneness) into post-metaphysical reasoning, just as the first generation of critical theorists translated the Jewish theological concept of bilderverbot, the "image ban" of the Second Commandment of the Decalogue, into critical philosophy.
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Title: Changing Landscapes : ambiguity, Imaginations, and Amish Settlers in Northern Indiana, 1825-1850
Creator: Miller, Devon Ezra, 1963-
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Using a framework which draws from landscape, social memory, and diasporic studies, this dissertation examines the formation of the Anabaptist community located in northern Indiana. By exploring the competing histories found in the relevant archives and the built landscape, I consider the discursive processes of place-making which shaped this Anabaptist community. Since they shared pacifist ideologies and a collective memory involving displacement and oppression, how did Anabaptists...
Show moreUsing a framework which draws from landscape, social memory, and diasporic studies, this dissertation examines the formation of the Anabaptist community located in northern Indiana. By exploring the competing histories found in the relevant archives and the built landscape, I consider the discursive processes of place-making which shaped this Anabaptist community. Since they shared pacifist ideologies and a collective memory involving displacement and oppression, how did Anabaptists understand and interact with the people and places where they settled? How did Anabaptists incorporate the changes they encountered into previous understandings of how the world should be? How do competing histories provide a fuller understanding of the formation of Anabaptist communities? How did the Anabaptist place-making practices contribute to transforming the environment from an Indigenous landscape to a landscape dominated by European technology and agriculture? -- Abstract.
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Title: Toward a relational agro-food system : the case of the Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture High Country Farm Tour
Creator: Johnson, Laura Bowen
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Since the early 20th century and particularly since WWII, the ‘conventional’ or industrial agro-food system has drastically altered and deteriorated natural and social landscapes from local to global scales. Despite the many detrimental socio-ecological impacts of this type of agriculture, disconnection between production and consumption in this now-global food system obscures awareness, understanding, responsibility, and care. Understanding all socio-ecological impacts of the conventional...
Show moreSince the early 20th century and particularly since WWII, the ‘conventional’ or industrial agro-food system has drastically altered and deteriorated natural and social landscapes from local to global scales. Despite the many detrimental socio-ecological impacts of this type of agriculture, disconnection between production and consumption in this now-global food system obscures awareness, understanding, responsibility, and care. Understanding all socio-ecological impacts of the conventional food system to be related, born from the same modern cultural assumptions of science and technology, progress and rationality, and dominance over nature and human and nonhuman others, this dissertation targets socio-cultural issues related to connection, community, place, gender, and care. Exploring these themes within the conventional agro-food system, the study also examines the potential of agricultural alternatives to restore relationships among people, community, place, and the more-than-human world through a feminist ethnographic study of the Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture High Country Farm Tour in Western North Carolina. Following the introduction, Chapter 1 emphasizes the relationship between place and agro-food systems. Theorizing place as meaning, connection, attachment, and emotion, it explores the place-related impacts of the conventional agro-food system. Bringing together literature from scholars of place, agro-food studies, education, and tourism, this chapter employs farmer interviews and visitor surveys to investigate the role of place in local food systems as well as the potential of agricultural places to serve as important educational spaces via farm tours.Chapter 2 situates agro-food disconnection and reconnection within frameworks of ecofeminism and care ethics and engages with experiences of consumers participating in the High Country Farm Tour using participant-driven photo elicitation interviews (PDPE). The findings suggest that embodied emotional experiences in caring agricultural spaces can foster agricultural and ecological literacy and deepen consumer relationships with producers, agricultural practices and processes, and the more-than-human world. The findings also illustrate that PDPE can serve as a valuable window into experience, emotion, and meaning, affirming the method’s value for feminist, agro-food, and other critical researchers.Chapter 3 expands on the relationship between community and food systems, explores the relationship of women farmers and civic agriculture, and investigates community-based farm tours as a strategy for civic agriculture. Employing focus groups as a participatory action research methodology to bring women farmers together, it presents the impacts and challenges associated with participation in the tour. The chapter concludes that community-based farm tours, especially those highlighting women farmers, hold ripe potential as a creative civic agricultural mechanism and should continue to be implemented by more communities in the U.S. The conclusion overviews each prior chapter and ties them together within a relational feminist framework of place and care. Challenges associated with the High Country Farm Tour, limitations of the study, and future research pathways are also discussed. The overarching findings of this dissertation indicate that place, care, and gender are crucial elements of a thriving civic agriculture and support community-based farm tours as an innovative strategy for moving toward a relational agro-food system.
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Title: Understanding the socioeconomical construction of nonnative species
Creator: Leshko, Christina M.
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This study, seeks to evaluate the relationship between the classification of a species as invasive and the rhetorical framework used by biologists/ecologists in their academic abstracts. The methods for this study include: a classification of language used in abstracts from the Web of Science database, a statistical analysis of the categories from the analysis , and a brief review of three case examples. Invasive species includes those organisms that have an impact on human health, the...
Show moreThis study, seeks to evaluate the relationship between the classification of a species as invasive and the rhetorical framework used by biologists/ecologists in their academic abstracts. The methods for this study include: a classification of language used in abstracts from the Web of Science database, a statistical analysis of the categories from the analysis , and a brief review of three case examples. Invasive species includes those organisms that have an impact on human health, the environment, or the economy. The author posits that economic relationships will be the most commonly used discourse to frame nonnative species research, based on a social constructionist framework and grounded theory analysis of co ntemporary discourse . While a statistical analysis of the discourse used to describe invasive species in academic abstracts did not reveal any significant results, organisms classified as invasive have an association with an economic impact, indicated by the case examples--Edited abstract.
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Title: Politics of epistemic dependence : an epistemological approach to gender-based asylum
Creator: Sertler, Ezgi
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "My dissertation aims to build a bridge between analytic social epistemologies, feminist epistemologies, and refugee studies by bringing them into conversation on gender-based asylum cases, i.e. cases where gender-related persecution is the primary consideration for the determination of refugee status. It does so by using the concept of "epistemic dependence," which refers to our social mechanisms of reliance in the process of knowing, i.e. what we rely on and how we rely on it. In this...
Show more"My dissertation aims to build a bridge between analytic social epistemologies, feminist epistemologies, and refugee studies by bringing them into conversation on gender-based asylum cases, i.e. cases where gender-related persecution is the primary consideration for the determination of refugee status. It does so by using the concept of "epistemic dependence," which refers to our social mechanisms of reliance in the process of knowing, i.e. what we rely on and how we rely on it. In this dissertation, I argue that tracking problematic operations of epistemic dependence can provide an illuminating framework for understanding the epistemological impacts of the social and political structures that govern asylum claims." -- Abstract.
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Title: Imagination redux : a phenomenological investigation
Creator: Guajardo, Ivan
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: ABSTRACTIMAGINATION REDUX: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONBYIvan Guajardo The imagination has been enjoying an increase in popularity in recent years. Research on it now ranges from empirical studies of mental imagery to philosophical attempts to classify it. Although this research has generated valuable insights, most of it fails to pay sufficient attention to our intentional experience of imagination. As a result, misconceptions of imagination abound, and dimensions of our lived experience...
Show moreABSTRACTIMAGINATION REDUX: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONBYIvan Guajardo The imagination has been enjoying an increase in popularity in recent years. Research on it now ranges from empirical studies of mental imagery to philosophical attempts to classify it. Although this research has generated valuable insights, most of it fails to pay sufficient attention to our intentional experience of imagination. As a result, misconceptions of imagination abound, and dimensions of our lived experience of it that are central to describe its nature adequately are often overlooked or treated very superficially. In what follows, I revisit the phenomenon of imagination and develop a better account of its intentional structure. On the basis of Husserl's writings, I will argue that imagination is a distinctive psychic act that differs from perception and memory in terms of its quasi-positional stance on objects, its freedom to alter pure possibilities at will, and in terms of how imagine objects relate to time. After developing a phenomenological description of these three essential differences, I describe three forms of imagination, and then use everything learned as the basis of an argument against pictorialism, an alternative theory that reduces imagination to a mere ability to form mental images. I will argue that, despite its influence, pictorialism misconceives what it is like to imagine something primarily by conflating the act of imagination with image-consciousness.
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Title: Nature, sociology, and the Frankfurt School
Creator: Gunderson, Ryan
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "Through a systematic analysis of the works of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm using historical methods, [the author] documents how early critical theory can conceptually and theoretically inform sociological examinations of human-nature relations. Currently, the first-generation Frankfurt School's work is largely absent from and criticized in environmental sociology. [Gunderson] addresses this gap in the literature through a series of articles. One line of...
Show more"Through a systematic analysis of the works of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm using historical methods, [the author] documents how early critical theory can conceptually and theoretically inform sociological examinations of human-nature relations. Currently, the first-generation Frankfurt School's work is largely absent from and criticized in environmental sociology. [Gunderson] addresses this gap in the literature through a series of articles. One line of analysis establishes how the theories of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse are applicable to central topics and debates in environmental sociology. A second line of analysis examines how the Frankfurt School's explanatory and normative theories of human-animal relations can inform sociological animal studies. The third line examines the place of nature in Fromm's social psychology and sociology, focusing on his personality theory's notion of biophilia.--Abstract.
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Title: Moral economy : claims for the common good
Creator: Mauritz, Elizabeth D.
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The cases, issues, and theoretical convictions of the social science work on the concept `moral economy' are explored to develop a full understanding of what divergent theories and accounts share in common and to gauge the philosophical relevance of moral economy. The work of E.P. Thompson, James Scott, William Booth, Thomas Arnold, and Daniel Little are featured along with contemporary cases of moral economy. Conceptual clarification is guided by the categorization of common qualities...
Show moreThe cases, issues, and theoretical convictions of the social science work on the concept `moral economy' are explored to develop a full understanding of what divergent theories and accounts share in common and to gauge the philosophical relevance of moral economy. The work of E.P. Thompson, James Scott, William Booth, Thomas Arnold, and Daniel Little are featured along with contemporary cases of moral economy. Conceptual clarification is guided by the categorization of common qualities including the scope of application, whether it is used historically or normatively, relevant time frame, nature of the community, goals that motivate practitioners, and how people are epistemically situated in relation to the moral economy under consideration. Moral economy is identified here as a community centered response, arising from a sense of common good, reinforced by custom or tradition, to an unjust appropriation or abuse of land, labor, human dignity, natural resources, or material goods; moreover, it is the regular behaviors producing social arrangements that promote just relations between unequal persons or groups within a community to achieve long-term social sustainability. I argue that the moral economists are right to insist that people regularly make collective claims and take action on behalf of their communities for reasons that are not primarily self-interested. Furthermore, I demonstrate that social ethics and political behavior are culturally and temporally contextual, i.e. non-ideal. Moral economy must be understood as economic through behaviors and relationships of exchange not limited to the market or following (neo)classical economics. Importantly, moral economy recognizes that this system of exchange is embedded within the larger society. Building upon that, I maintain that all communities are embedded to some degree, so moral economy is not limited to peasant contexts or historical periods. It is not an ethical theory, but a system of practice. Moral economy is guided by a commitment to the ethos of the common good. The debate between moral economy and political economy is laid out and special attention is given to the disagreements between their two most identifiable figures, James C. Scott and Samuel L. Popkin. While moral economy and political economy may have originated from the same general considerations regarding the political and economic influence on individuals and society, they have taken distinctly different trajectories. Later moral economy is compared with several political philosophies including Liberalism, Socialism, and Anarchism. While moral economy may have more in common with Anarchism and Socialism, I contend it is more compatible in practice with Liberalism.
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Title: Working with : expanding and integrating the pragmatic method for a wicked world
Creator: Lake, Danielle
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation argues the burgeoning scholarship on wicked problems is both highly compelling and applicable to many of the public problems we confront. It is compelling because it articulates strategies for realizing a more comprehensive understanding of many of the problems we face today as a public; it is highly applicable because it provides us with a fruitful means of addressing these problems. The scholarship - as it stands in 2014 however - needs to be broadened and deepened,...
Show moreThis dissertation argues the burgeoning scholarship on wicked problems is both highly compelling and applicable to many of the public problems we confront. It is compelling because it articulates strategies for realizing a more comprehensive understanding of many of the problems we face today as a public; it is highly applicable because it provides us with a fruitful means of addressing these problems. The scholarship - as it stands in 2014 however - needs to be broadened and deepened, especially given how many dangerous wicked problems we face. The wicked problems field can be deepened by reviewing and consolidating its recommendations and through this work delving more deeply into a methodology that best supports collaboratively meliorating such problems. For instance, the various processes most recommended for tackling these problems - processes like bottom-up participation, to trans-disciplinarity, to situational and experiential learning - not only descend from the Pragmatic Method, but could also currently prosper from a more systematic engagement with Pragmatism, especially as conceptualized through a feminist lens where problems of power are systematically addressed. In the end, I argue effective responses to wicked problems require context-sensitive, dialogue-driven, action-based engagement models. Through a series of case studies the value of the recommendations within becomes apparent, suggesting there is a need to reimagine both the role of expertise and the boundary spaces between our institutions (as well as the structure of our institutions themselves). The potential for our collective future is quite exciting: potential to prepare future world citizens for engaging one another across their differences as well as the potential to encourage the re-envisioning of our institutions (and the creation of new) so they are more intentionally aimed at bridging our current, isolating gaps and thus fostering collective creativity and ingenuity.
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Title: Field philosophy : experience, relationships, and environmental ethics in higher education
Creator: Goralnik, Allison Kara
Date: 2011
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Experiential environmental philosophy, or field philosophy, is a type of fieldwork in the environmental humanities. It engages the intellectual content of environmental philosophy, while at the same time encourages participants to experience the physical dimension of this content by exploring the context of environmental learning as it is rooted in social, political, natural, and geographical place. While reflective of recent moves in environmental philosophical learning (Moore 2004d, Brady...
Show moreExperiential environmental philosophy, or field philosophy, is a type of fieldwork in the environmental humanities. It engages the intellectual content of environmental philosophy, while at the same time encourages participants to experience the physical dimension of this content by exploring the context of environmental learning as it is rooted in social, political, natural, and geographical place. While reflective of recent moves in environmental philosophical learning (Moore 2004d, Brady et al. 2004), it is an unstudied phenomenon. My dissertation contributes empirical work about the connection between a physical and an ethical relationship with the natural world to the anecdotal evidence provided by these environmental philosophy, as well as similar humanistic (Johnson & Frederickson 2000, Alagona & Simon 2010), field courses. My work on field philosophy draws on a conception of ethics that assumes ethical inclusiveness is an emotional, as well as a rational, enterprise (Hume 2000, Smith 2010, Leopold 1949, Moore 2004). It responds to scholarship in environmental philosophy, feminist ethics, and experiential place-based education that suggests physical contact with the natural world enhances environmental learning by enabling connections to, and possibly the development of an empathetic relationship with, the natural world (Outdoor Philosophy, Preston 1999, UNT). In addition to educating for content, field philosophy aims to help students develop an awareness of the role of environmental ethics in environmental issues, as well as to cultivate an empathetic environmental ethic that might enable them to participate in environmental problem-solving. In this dissertation I first ground field philosophy in the intellectual trajectory of environmental ethics as a meaningful area of study and education, then develop a historical framework for the ideas of environmental ethics to situate the feminist, relational ethics at the core of field philosophy as an emerging path. Using examples from the field philosophy course I developed and teach at Michigan State University1, I describe how--through attention to relationships, emotion, and both the human and natural world--critical ecofeminism and the ethic of care (Warren 1990, Plumwood 1991, Russell & Bell 1996) serve the objectives and curriculum of field philosophy. Next I theorize a pedagogy for field philosophy from literature in environmental and experiential education, the ethic of care, and educational psychological research on emotional engagement. These theoretical chapters ground my empirical work on student learning and ethical development on the Isle Royale field philosophy course. My methodology is grounded in a constructivist revision of grounded theory (Charmaz 2006). Using the constant comparison method (Glaser & Strauss 1969), I conducted a conventional qualitative content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon 2005) of three years of student writing data. I triangulated this data with a pre- and post-course survey and field notes, validated my codebook for inter-coder reliability, and both peer debriefed and memoed throughout my analysis. Results reveal a recurrent process of student learning and ethical development that begins with a dualistic view of environmental issues. Students transcend this lens through a reflective process of self-awareness, which enables them to develop authentic community. This social learning process can allow students to emotionally and cognitively engage the curriculum, which leads to a complex awareness, the transference of course ideas to new environments, a wider moral community, and greater responsibility for environmental action and change. 1 Outdoor Philosophy: Wilderness Ethics in Isle Royale National Park, NSC 490/FW491
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Title: The role of evidence in animal welfare science and standards : an ethical analysis
Creator: List, Monica
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The development of the field of animal welfare science in recent decades, together with growth in public interest and ethical concerns for the welfare of animals has arguably led to an increase in regulation, both public and private, in the production and use of farmed animals. Animal welfare regulation, in the form of legislation, directives, industry guidelines and private standards is characterized by its reliance on scientific evidence to justify the conditions under which farmed animals...
Show moreThe development of the field of animal welfare science in recent decades, together with growth in public interest and ethical concerns for the welfare of animals has arguably led to an increase in regulation, both public and private, in the production and use of farmed animals. Animal welfare regulation, in the form of legislation, directives, industry guidelines and private standards is characterized by its reliance on scientific evidence to justify the conditions under which farmed animals should be bred, raised, transported, and slaughtered. One of the important roles scientific evidence plays in discussions around the regulation of farmed animal welfare is providing a seemingly ethically neutral understanding of how animals should be treated, in other words, it sidesteps ethical arguments for the treatment of animals, using science as a justification. However, per the dominant philosophy of science discourse on the role of values in science, no science can be considered value-free, and furthermore, there are acceptable roles for social and ethical values in scientific practice. These roles are not just acceptable, but necessary for the direction, interpretation, and application of science. This work argues that: a) given the broad range of ethical views regarding how we should treat animals, animal welfare science provides robust and credible guidance; b) furthermore, that animal welfare science is not only inspired or informed by animal ethics concepts and frameworks, but also has embedded social/ethical and cognitive values throughout; c) thus, in order to fulfil its purpose as a socially mandated science, animal welfare science should engage in intentional processes to determine adequate roles for various kinds of values underlying all stages of the scientific process and the interpretation and implementation of findings. This intentional examination of the role of values can be supported by more effective interdisciplinary collaboration. While animal welfare science is characterized in part by its interdisciplinary nature, it is important to question to what extent the research is truly interdisciplinary in the sense of fostering epistemic integration. Philosophical tools and analyses, beyond the typical uses of ethical frameworks as a starting point, can be valuable in facilitating effective interdisciplinary work, leading to a better understanding of the normative dimensions of animal welfare science.
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Title: Outline for a metaphysics of caution : an analysis of theoretical work on animal minds
Creator: Noll, Samantha
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The amount of research on non-human animals has grown exponentially over the last fifteen years, with philosophers bringing unique insights to questions concerning duties owed to non-human animals (ethics) and animal capabilities (metaphysics), such as if animals possess reason or use concepts. The two fields focused on the later questions are animal metaphysics and post-humanism. This dissertation project is firmly situated at the nexus between ethics and metaphysics, as it grapples with the...
Show moreThe amount of research on non-human animals has grown exponentially over the last fifteen years, with philosophers bringing unique insights to questions concerning duties owed to non-human animals (ethics) and animal capabilities (metaphysics), such as if animals possess reason or use concepts. The two fields focused on the later questions are animal metaphysics and post-humanism. This dissertation project is firmly situated at the nexus between ethics and metaphysics, as it grapples with the fundamental metaphysical frameworks that form the foundations of philosophical work on animal minds and draws connections between this work and the application of ethics in human-animal contexts.The purpose of this dissertation is to further develop an outline for what I call a “metaphysics of caution” or the practice of being attentive to potentially harmful assumptions and biases that could be incorporated into theories of animal capabilities. While work in animal metaphysics and post-humanism has remained theoretical, theories coming out of these schools inform applied philosophical branches and help guide human action towards non-human others. For this reason, we need to be careful when exploring such questions, as this work has real world implications. Specifically, this dissertation 1) explores how work on animal capabilities is influenced by metaphysical, normative, and epistemological assumptions and 2) draws upon feminist philosophy of science to illustrate how this school of thought can help address issues of bias. The project of critiquing animal metaphysics and post-humanism is an important first step, as it helps us to identify commitments that could bias theories of animal capabilities.
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Title: Toward cornotology
Creator: Myers, Kelly R.
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: My dissertation appears at the interstices of the relatively recent explosion of cross-disciplinary and more popular talk about twenty-first century US agriculture. Whilst interdisciplinary scholarly and more commercial texts, including film representations, seek to expose a myriad of issues related to conventional-industrial agriculture and its central driver, commodity corn monocropping, I contend that many of these works also put forth a particular geography of US...
Show moreMy dissertation appears at the interstices of the relatively recent explosion of cross-disciplinary and more popular talk about twenty-first century US agriculture. Whilst interdisciplinary scholarly and more commercial texts, including film representations, seek to expose a myriad of issues related to conventional-industrial agriculture and its central driver, commodity corn monocropping, I contend that many of these works also put forth a particular geography of US agriculture as inveterately geographically bifurcated a deleterious global , conventional-industrial agricultural harvest-through-consumption paradigm, set against a purportedly more healthful organic, and often increasingly local , alternative. My project thus seeks to examine, through the lens of post-structuralist geography, today's most readily available and widely accepted imaginary of US agriculture as both divided global-local and mapped with accordant values. In due course, I craft and propose a post-structuralist geography ethic, ever mindful of proposals for integrating the best agricultural tools available today, for likewise reading and representing US foodways beyond divisive mappings; for moving toward assemblage of agricultural discourse and representation.In order to perform such an analysis, my dissertation first outlines the location and function of what I argue is the most significant geographical imaginary available for understanding American agriculture through time and across geography: agrarianism. Through the lens of relational geographical precepts, I set-up the project's central rubric for understanding the shape and function of American agrarian discourse from inception through the mid-twentieth century. Thereby, my dissertation can explore the most popular geographical imaginary of US agriculture that has come to the fore since WWII, i.e., neoagrarianism . I contend that the new agrarianism, while in no way unrelated to American agrarianism through space-time, even so has been most notably and particularly reconfigured and proposed over the last thirty years by popular agrarian, Wendell Berry. Now, neoagrarianism continues to proliferate through a diverse set of writings and representations which nevertheless manage to forward a rather uniform imaginary of global-local division, and associated principles and critiques, wildly popularized and disseminated by writers like Michael Pollan. Not just in writing and discourse, by the close of the dissertation I also perform analysis of how the new agrarianism extends into other popular texts, namely the documentary film. I consider the flourishing of popular new agrarian documentaries; how the singular media of documentary, when spatialized through a neoagrarian imaginary, can inculcate significant material food spectatorships, performances and projects which, given their pervasive influence on debates surrounding consumer choice and US food labeling law, require more scholarly treatment. Ultimately, it is through such extended, post-structuralist geography analysis of the preeminent imaginary of US agriculture, altogether oriented by and informative of interdisciplinary US agriculture, cultural studies and geography scholarships, that my dissertation presents and reviews the central tenants of a novel quasi-agrarian proposal for reading and representation. Quasi-agrarianism seeks a confrontation and revision of how we imagine, see and perform American food geographies today.
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Title: COMPOSING OTHER WAYS : STRUCTURALISM, REALISM, AND THE TECHNICS OF CONTROL AND RESISTANCE
Creator: Brown, Michael Philip
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation synthesizes concepts from three different realist philosophies in order to understand stabilities that structure scientific practices and the historical transformations in our capacities to exert power over matter through technologies. I explore the impacts tools and techniques have on the evolution of selves and society and I direct specific attention to technologies of writing and composition. I present archival material from poets and artists formerly and currently...
Show moreThis dissertation synthesizes concepts from three different realist philosophies in order to understand stabilities that structure scientific practices and the historical transformations in our capacities to exert power over matter through technologies. I explore the impacts tools and techniques have on the evolution of selves and society and I direct specific attention to technologies of writing and composition. I present archival material from poets and artists formerly and currently incarcerated that shows the power of poetry and artistic expression to resist forms of social control that harm persons’ abilities to thrive and exist. This dissertation shows how groups of knowers can collectively activate agency in order to navigate structures that function capture and eliminate, and it provides recommendations for those seeking to abolish the social function of carcerality.
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Title: Holding hands with death : ethical promises and political failures of our humanitarian present
Creator: Ivanovic, Mlado
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "Taking the point of departure in the urgent social challenges tied with current failures of humanitarian management and inclusion of Non-Western others in "developed" Western societies, this dissertation explores the ways in which representation and knowledge about human suffering guides our (un)willingness to act ethically with respect to vulnerable strangers and the difficult conditions they endure." -- Abstract.

Title: The habitual body and the possibility of becoming new : a phenomenological approach to thinking about feminist transformation
Creator: Proctor, Shannon Burns
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "The central argument of [the] dissertation is the claim that the habitual body, our orientation in the world established out of previously acquired ways of being, plays a crucial role in both engendering and inhibiting transformative possibility."--P. 1.

Title: RADICAL CO-LABORATION ACROSS THE MULTIPLE AMERICAN WESTS : IMAGINING PLACE-BASED ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE
Creator: Talley, Jared L.
Date: 2021
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The grand landscapes of the American West are iconic and critical to the history of environmental conservation, yet they are also highly conflicted. A history of destructive extraction has left many of these landscapes in a state of disrepair, worsened by an increasingly variable climate, continued mis-management, and that these lands are publically owned thereby requiring decision making processes that are accountable to the diverse values that the public holds. This dissertation focuses on...
Show moreThe grand landscapes of the American West are iconic and critical to the history of environmental conservation, yet they are also highly conflicted. A history of destructive extraction has left many of these landscapes in a state of disrepair, worsened by an increasingly variable climate, continued mis-management, and that these lands are publically owned thereby requiring decision making processes that are accountable to the diverse values that the public holds. This dissertation focuses on the last of these, namely that collaborative decision making in the environmental governance of the American West is beneficial yet itself understudied and conflicted. Simply, if the public wishes to collaborate in the governance of Western lands, then special attention needs to be paid to the context, opportunities, and obstacles of Western collaboration in order to better navigate diverging values, knowledges, and worldviews.This argument begins with the premise that the ideal collaborator is often conceived as rational and discursive, able to aptly articulate their positions, wrestle with other’s arguments, and come to consensus over conflict. “Values” and “knowledge” are nested in a web of “beliefs” and “attitudes,” all of which reflect the cognitive dimensions of our worlds. This is not wrong, as it seems a requirement of collaboration to navigate the complexities of our worlds through discussion of values, beliefs, attitudes, knowledges, etc. However, I argue that the focus on the cognitive dimensions of collaboration obscures the materiality of collaborators – their own bodies, the places they exist in, and the ways that these structure their worlds. Building from the works of Mark Johnson and John Dewey, I develop a theory of the embodied imagination and the role of embodied and sociocultural experience in order to explore the ways in which Western landscapes condition our environmental beliefs. These diverging beliefs – or, as I term them, environmental imaginaries – are themselves embodied, occurring as much in our minds as in our bodily performances and experiences. I argue that the places we experience are integral to the beliefs that we hold. The reflexive place-belief process leads to the American West being a multiplicity of American and Indigenous Wests where the same landscape is experienced and perceived so differently as to provide considerable obstacles to collaboration in environmental governance. Through discussions of environmental imaginaries, Western places, the experience of various fencing in the West, and the experience of scientific measurement and grouping – and its concomitant impact on environmental governance – I argue that collaborative scholars and practitioners should take seriously the ways that place, experience, and the imagination impact the potential of collaborative environmental governance. This dissertation ends with a discussion of collaboration itself, arguing that a renewed focus on the embodiment of collaborators is better understood as radical co-laboration, or that organizing Western environmental governance around collaborative principles that take seriously the emplaced body is a radical divergence from the governance philosophies currently employed in the West, namely those that that prefer top-down governance that relies on our cognitive expertise in lieu of our embodied experience. I end with a discussion of structural changes that are required in order to enact co-laboration that recognizes the imaginatively derived, embodied experience of place in hopes that Western landscapes can be better governed, conserved, and protected through public, co-laborative processes.
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Title: Epistemologies of Criminalization : Tracking Epistemic Oppression in the Lives of Black Girl Survivors
Creator: Spencer, Ayanna De'Vante
Date: 2021
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: ABSTRACTEPISTEMOLOGIES OF CRIMINALIZATION: TRACKING EPISTEMIC OPPRESSION IN THE LIVES OF BLACK GIRL SURVIVORS ByAyanna De’Vante SpencerWorking with Girls for Gender Equity, the ‘metoo’ movement, and the Firecracker Foundation, I learned from youth Black girl organizers and survivors and adult advocates and allies that the state primarily offers Black girl survivors ankle monitors and parole officers over healing resources and pathways to recovery. I came to suspect that there is a problematic...
Show moreABSTRACTEPISTEMOLOGIES OF CRIMINALIZATION: TRACKING EPISTEMIC OPPRESSION IN THE LIVES OF BLACK GIRL SURVIVORS ByAyanna De’Vante SpencerWorking with Girls for Gender Equity, the ‘metoo’ movement, and the Firecracker Foundation, I learned from youth Black girl organizers and survivors and adult advocates and allies that the state primarily offers Black girl survivors ankle monitors and parole officers over healing resources and pathways to recovery. I came to suspect that there is a problematic intersection between criminalization, how Black girls are expected to respond to violence, and how the state determines what survivors know about their own experience(s) of violence. The problem is not merely whether people in powerful positions believe Black girl survivors, but the convergence of socio-political and epistemic power to deny what survivors know about their own experiences of violence and power to punish survivors for acting on “contested” knowledge. Criminalized Black girl survivors in the US navigate an oppressive landscape of violence that goes beyond state agents not believing Black girl survivors. This is the focus of this dissertation.While criminalized Black girl survivors in the US face social and political disempowerment, they also face epistemological disempowerment through state-sanctioned non-accidental epistemic burdens. A non-accidental epistemic burden is a burden to strengthen one’s epistemic position in relation to some proposition, p, despite having an adequate (or better) epistemic position in relation to some p. As the US criminal injustice system requires survivors overcome state-sanctioned non-accidental epistemic burdens to claim self-defense, criminalized Black girl survivors are epistemically oppressed by a persistent and irregular epistemic burden to prove what they know about their own experiences of sexual violence. I explicate this argument in five chapters. In chapter one, I claim that pragmatic encroachment is a non-neutral knowledge attribution problem whereby attributors are empowered to affirm or deny a subject’s knowledge claim on the basis of the subject’s constructed practical stakes, or constructed pragmatic encroachment (CPE). Constructed practical stakes, here, refers to the potential costs/consequences of acting on knowledge of some p for some subject, ‘S,’ constructed by their practical environment. In chapter two, I critique standard pragmatic encroachment as a methodologically flawed theory in order to illuminate real-world pragmatic encroachment as a disparate epistemological problem for survivors. In chapter three, I explain that a settler colonial obfuscation of Black girl survivorhood exists such that Black girl survivors navigate a criminalizing metaphysical and socio-epistemic quagmire. I claim that punitive attributors leverage a historical construction of Black girl survivors as “fast-tailed swindlers” to override self-defense as “knowing criminal intent.” Next, I explicate an argument for third-person CPE as epistemic oppression in chapter four to bring home the main argument of this dissertation. Criminalized Black girl survivors face epistemic oppression in the US criminal injustice system in the form of state-sanctioned non-accidental epistemic burdens. This chapter extends the insights of chapter three to underscore that survivors are non-neutrally criminalized and burdened to overcome an insatiable criminal injustice system designed to maintain settler power, not healing or justice for survivors of sexual violence. I conclude with considerations for possible objections to the project and implications of the project. Ultimately, I aim to support radical Black feminist futures for survivors free from power struggles for belief, safety, and resources.
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