This dissertation will argue that granting qualified AI-driven robots with legal personhood will serve as a bulwark against the dehumanization of humans. Chapter 1 will introduce the reader to the anthropological problems that Robotic Futurism present for Evangelicals. Chapter 2…
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Beginning with perestroika in the 1980s, both Moscow and Beijing have looked to the Russian Far East as a site of strategic commercial expansion. The opening up in 1991 of Vladivostok and a number of other formerly “closed” cities in a region that had been of strategic military …
Chapter 1 introduces the main research question to be answered: when does personhood begin? The chapter outlines the context of the debate, explains the importance of this issue and its relevance to Christian life, and presents the thesis and methodology of this dissertation.
Love Among the Robots offers a cultural overview of fantasies and anxieties about relations with robots between 1970 and the present. I look beyond the techno-pessimistic and techno-optimistic readings of robots and our relations with them to a set of human-machine relations tha…
In this dissertation the question addressed is the ethical protocol that should be used when enhanced, post or transhumans present themselves as patients to hospitals, or as subjects for scientific research. With the advent of the birth of four children who were genetically engi…
This study utilized a narrative inquiry model to explore the narratives-in-construction of seven Latinx students’ lived experiences in a ninth-grade social studies class. Layered and parallel narratives constructed around critical incidents and as told by the student participant…
There are competing models through which a dementia diagnosis can be understood, but what dominates the assessment process for dementia diagnosis is the medical model, which neglects the social, cultural, and political aspects of the diagnosis. In a Western society where value i…
This thesis is an organisational ethnography that seeks to make an original contribution to anthropological knowledge through an iterative interrogation of neoliberalism and personhood.Endeavour (a pseudonym) is a gap year organisation based in the UK that runs trips abroad to C…
From the personal contemporary pastoral experience of caring for dying people, and with particular attention given to the psychospiritual anguish often associated with the perceived failure of death, I argue that suffering is primarily identified in the modern West as an insult …
In the classical Christian tradition, personhood is a concept employed to distinguish the members in the Trinity while simultaneously affirming their oneness of being. Yet, this is a term applied to both human beings and God. At minimum a person is a being that exists in defined…
The following examines the development of comparative psychology and the evidence, arguments, and epistemological challenges that have characterized its approach to the question of animal rationality. I distinguish between four modes of research that come to prominence at differ…
This dissertation focuses on two generically innovative texts that represent different forms of historical writing in Medieval Europe and the Middle East and situates them in their social, religious, and historical contexts. Where Salimbene's "chronicle" attempted to present the…
Medical experts claim that Posttraumatic Stress Disorder among United States military service personnel, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan has contributed to an "epidemic of suicide" in the U.S. However, veterans, military commanders, and mental health providers argue that feel…
This dissertation examines the socio-cultural and historical contours of musical expression and identity formation in postcolonial Bamako, Mali, a sprawling West African metropolis on the upper Niger River. Specifically, this work engages with a particular community of urban art…
Do Byzantine iconoclasts and modern artists have anything in common? Looking back at the Byzantine iconoclastic debates of the eighth and ninth century, I define iconoclasm not as a negative reaction to the visual image in general, but as a rejection of pictorial human represent…
Renewed excavations in 2003–2004 at Alalakh (Tell Atchana), a regional capital of ancient Syria during the Middle and Late Bronze Age (ca. 2000–1200 BCE), exposed the burials of at least 58 people. Along with published and unpublished data from burials excavated at Alalakh by Si…
In this dissertation, I explore how competing interpretations of Islam inform the construction of identity and the experience of everyday life among Mandinga in Guinea-Bissau and among Mandinga immigrants in the country's former colonizer, Portugal. This work is based on nearly …