Thesiss

The confluence of feminist scholar Karen Barad’s critical theories (agential realism, posthumanist performativity, posthumanism, new materialism) and Greek-French composer Georges Aperghis’ solo harp work Fidélité: pour harpiste seule regardée par un homme (“for female harpist w…

This practice research study explores the law as a medium of art and performance-making in order to gain insights into how aesthetics is part of, or characterises aspects of, law. The research was conducted through creating a series of performative artworks culminating in two ma…

Acting upon Livestock's Long Shadow to mitigate climate change, mass extinction, and other social-ecological crises requires fundamental changes in food practices. Labelled as "ethical consumers", vegans, vegetarians, and meat-reducing carnists already attract considerable atten…

I argue that the resources for political change do not exist as already constituted entities, whether in the form of transcendent values or an already-given consensus. Instead, they must be created; constitutive political action is rooted in creativity, and requires the creation…

The Anthropocene is the name proposed by scientists for a new geological epoch in which human activity has become a dominant influence on planetary processes. More specifically, the concept of the Anthropocene alerts us to the fact that the environmentally destructive activities…

While every public school in the United States has to accommodate the bathroom needs of those who work and learn there, the bathroom spaces themselves are understudied in education research. Simultaneously, school bathrooms occupy a distinct place in the social consciousness. Ne…

In the eighteenth-century, the novel grew from a new medium to a dominant form of expression. This space, where readers and authors come to grips with the nature of fictionality, serves as a theoretical proving ground for New Materialist, agency-first reading practices. Caught U…

Death, Discipline, and the Dead: Biopolitical Rhetoric in Early Modern English Texts locates allusions to the biopolitical culture of Early Modern England within popular English texts. Through my examination of the period’s fascination with death—public executions, newly-authori…

This dissertation seeks to define the theory of rhetorical dynamism and illustrate how this theory can be applied to studies of rhetoric and place. The study builds on current rhetorical scholarship and adds to it with the four characteristics of rhetorical dynamism: that places…