Thesiss

This dissertation argues that representations of economic experience as epitomized by heightened states of feeling—the despair following a bad day at the stock market, the panic set off by reports of an impending bubble, the excitement around rapid gains in a company’s valuation…

In this dissertation I examine the role played by “unease” in the Homeric epics, the Ancient Near Eastern Gilgamesh texts, and the Indian Rigveda. I position unease as an affect that the texts can provoke in their audiences through poetic devices that interrupt the narrative, dr…

This dissertation develops a feminist materialist interpretation of the role the neuroendocrine system plays in the development of gender/sex differences in religion. Data emerging from psychology, sociology, and cognitive science have continually indicated that women are more r…

Studies of cinema and urban modernity in Europe and America typically foreground movement, vision, and sensation as the categories of correlation between cinema and the city. Lagos Never Spoils: The Aesthetics, Affect, and Politics of the City in Nigerian Cinema , argues that in…

Social controversy is a sustained, mediated debate between at least two oppositional parties which is more than just a difference of opinion; rather it is a persistent conflict over the political and cultural implications that dominant forms of communicative reasoning, practices…

While Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others try to bring into relief our current political situation by depicting an original, "natural" condition that preceded the "conventional" state of politics, Spinoza brings that natural state forward and shows how we never truly leave it. W…

A challenge of second language learning for the 21st century is to incorporate affect into second language learning. The current emphasis on empowering Saudi second language learners into self-directed students underscores the role of affect has for the future of second language…

This dissertation argues that American autobiographies from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries typically promote ideological programs, and that with the rise of secularism these programs are often haunted by the negative affects they must necessarily disavow. Throug…

In this paper I consider work in the cognitive science of religion in light of anthropological work by Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind on the formation of religious subjects in contemporary Egypt to highlight how Foucault's historical constitution of the subject involves the…

This study investigated factors that affect parents' decisions to send their girls to school, in contrast to their boys, in a rural area of The Gambia, West Africa. Though arguments for girls' education are compelling, more girls are still out of school in most developing countr…

This study investigates a multilingual, multi-genre data set of 13 post-9/11 popular culture videos, produced by performative artists from across global society, which use digital media aesthetics to defy hegemonic narratives relating to Islam and the War on Terror. The language…

This thesis provides an ethnography of the final year at an emerging middle-class private high school in the Northeast of Brazil. It draws on 15 months of fieldwork, including participant observation in the classroom wherein I followed students whilst they prepared for vestibula…

This thesis explores the ideology of collaboration from the context of the consultant-client relationship. The ideology is contrasted with the actual experience of collaboration in everyday organizational life, taking a micro-perspective on human interaction. The research questi…

This thesis reflects on the development of a practice of sociality that takes the realm of use as a rich terrain of political experimentation. The point of departure for this undertaking is a critique of what has been named “possessive individualism”: a seemingly innocent force …

This thesis explores EU borders and bordering in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in the context of the 2004 EU enlargement, the 2007 extension of the Schengen zone and the 2004 Eastern Dimension of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) that, in 2009, was upgraded to the Easte…

This thesis seeks to investigate the ways in which late medieval English drama produces and theorises emotions, in order to engage with the complex nexus of ideas about the links between sensation, emotion, and cognition in contemporary philosophical and theologial thought. It c…

Two contrasting forms of advice for decision-makers are to either follow one’s heart (emotions) or one’s head (reason). This is a false dichotomy – but how should decision-makers combine heart and head? Decisions can be fruitfully analysed as a set of components: a decision-prob…

This study examined the effect of beginner therapists work with client emotions on client experiences in therapy. Specifically, it investigated the role of therapist intentional focusing on client internal experiences on clients' actual level of experience and expression of emot…

This study was a provocative examination of leadership through the worldview of participants in an emotionally charged situation that is considered deviant by the parent organization. The focus of this study and the research strategy encompassed generating a greater understandin…

This dissertation seeks to expand our understanding of variation in foreign policy. Although we have a series of large, extant literatures dealing with the sources of foreign policy, there has been less attention paid over the last decade to understanding why states change their…