Browsing by Subject "Agency"
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Item Open Access Chaucer and the Disconsolations of Philosophy: Boethius, Agency, and Literary Form in Late Medieval Literature(2016) Bell, Jack HardingThis study argues that Chaucer's poetry belongs to a far-reaching conversation about the forms of consolation (philosophical, theological, and poetic) that are available to human persons. Chaucer's entry point to this conversation was Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, a sixth-century dialogue that tried to show how the Stoic ideals of autonomy and self-possession are not simply normative for human beings but remain within the grasp of every individual. Drawing on biblical commentary, consolation literature, and political theory, this study contends that Chaucer's interrogation of the moral and intellectual ideals of the Consolation took the form of philosophical disconsolations: scenes of profound poetic rupture in which a character, sometimes even Chaucer himself, turns to philosophy for solace and yet fails to be consoled. Indeed, philosophy itself becomes a source of despair. In staging these disconsolations, I contend that Chaucer asks his readers to consider the moral dimensions of the aspirations internal to ancient philosophy and the assumptions about the self that must be true if its insights are to console and instruct. For Chaucer, the self must be seen as a gift that flowers through reciprocity (both human and divine) and not as an object to be disciplined and regulated.
Chapter one focuses on the Consolation of Philosophy. I argue that recent attempts to characterize Chaucer's relationship to this text as skeptical fail to engage the Consolation on its own terms. The allegory of Lady Philosophy's revelation to a disconsolate Boethius enables philosophy to become both an agent and an object of inquiry. I argue that Boethius's initial skepticism about the pretentions of philosophy is in part what Philosophy's therapies are meant to respond to. The pressures that Chaucer's poetry exerts on the ideals of autonomy and self-possession sharpen one of the major absences of the Consolation: viz., the unanswered question of whether Philosophy's therapies have actually consoled Boethius. Chapter two considers one of the Consolation's fascinating and paradoxical afterlives: Robert Holcot's Postilla super librum sapientiae (1340-43). I argue that Holcot's Stoic conception of wisdom, a conception he explicitly links with Boethius's Consolation, relies on a model of agency that is strikingly similar to the powers of self-knowledge that Philosophy argues Boethius to posses. Chapter three examines Chaucer's fullest exploration of the Boethian model of selfhood and his ultimate rejection of it in Troilus and Criseyde. The poem, which Chaucer called his "tragedy," belonged to a genre of classical writing he knew of only from Philosophy's brief mention of it in the Consolation. Chaucer appropriates the genre to explore and recover mourning as a meaningful act. In Chapter four, I turn to Dante and the House of Fame to consider Chaucer's self-reflections about his ambitions as a poet and the demands of truth-telling.
Item Open Access Culture, Capture, and Disease: Shrimp Production in the Age of Industrial Aquaculture(2019) Dubik, Bradford AThis dissertation focuses on the relationship of industrial shrimp aquaculture and shrimp diseases, with an emphasis on the agency of disease in shaping the history of shrimp production. Shrimp aquaculture is concentrated in developing tropical economies, with the significant majority of shrimp exported to consumers in the Global North. The rise of shrimp aquaculture has been accompanied by the development of new technologies and practices, designed to facilitate and govern the growth of the industry. While successful in making aquaculture the single largest production method for shrimp, these innovations also created ideal environments for the emergence and spread of shrimp diseases, which have caused significant and persistent production losses. Disease has brought volatility and risk to producer livelihoods, while also necessitating further technological modernization and development interventions to curb disease outbreaks.
This research draws on qualitative interviews and contextual economic analyses to explore the role of disease at multiple scales. Chapter 2 examines how disease has shaped industry discourses and he practice of shrimp aquaculture across contexts. The role of the concept of biosecurity is examined to highlight the territorial nature of disease prevention. Chapter 3 explores the context of shrimp aquaculture development in Aceh, Indonesia. This chapter applies the general ideas explored in Chapter 2, to a real-world case, highlighting how the pairing of shrimp and disease is managed as a single commodity. Chapter 4 explores the reach of disease globally, and across methods of production. The economic effects of disease on U.S. wild shrimping are explored, along with the role of disease as a narrative element in resisting global aquaculture.
It is argued that shrimp disease shapes commodity relationships, influencing production decisions, and development priorities at multiple scales. The unsympathetic quality of disease makes disease prevention an ideal project for enrolling broad coalitions of human and non-human actors, and negating the politics embedded in the relationship of disease prevention with commodification more broadly.
Item Open Access Killing Iraq: A look at agency and power in relation to the U.S. mainstream media(2009-05-01T15:15:25Z) Ighile, OsagieItem Open Access "Tell Us More Grandmother!": Korean "Comfort Women" Re/constructing and Re/presenting the "Truth" and Memory of Survival through Narratives(2009-05-01T14:20:17Z) Song, Young-InThis work explores the narratives of the military sexual slavery, or “Comfort Women” survivors in South Korea. Between 1910 and 1945, Japan colonized Korea to expand to the other nations, with a dream of establishing the “Asian Empire.” During the process, they coerced or obtained “consent” to volunteer from rural poor women for this systemic rape camp. The focus of the paper is on the survivors’ narratives while the women were silent for half a century. They decided to “come out” and be an active participants in the movement that was mobilized in the early 1990s. The piece explores the issues of feminism, nationalism/patriotism, Koreanness, self-hood, agency and their mutual influences within the politics of narrative, and how the victims/survivors have been placed within the social contexts domestically and globally.Item Open Access The Dispersion of Power: Thinking Democratically in the 21st Century(2017) Bagg, Samuel ElyThis dissertation identifies a logic of “equal agency” at the heart of a great deal of contemporary thinking about politics. Scholars and citizens alike, I claim, often use some version of this logic in trying to understand what is valuable about liberal and democratic institutions. As a way of thinking democratically at the highest level, however—as a comprehensive principle for organizing our various practical and theoretical commitments, understanding the nature and value of democracy, and orienting ourselves towards a democratic future—I believe that it is deeply flawed. This dissertation demonstrates why such an alternative is needed, and proceeds to articulate one: the dispersion of power.
The introduction lays out the scope and methods before giving a chapter outline and a summary of the dissertation’s contributions. Chapter one gives an account of the logic of equal agency, demonstrating its pervasiveness in political theory and its reliance on an ideal of individual subjectivity. Chapter two employs contemporary biology and cognitive science to support Foucault’s critique of subjectivity, and chapter three demonstrates that this should lead us to abandon the logic of equal agency more generally. Chapter four articulates conceptions of agency and power that are compatible with Foucault’s critique, and chapter five demonstrates how we might “think democratically” using these concepts within a logic of dispersing power. Chapter six links a crisis in contemporary democratic theory to the logic of equal agency and suggests that the dispersion of power can help to resolve it; a promise that is followed up in chapter seven. Chapter eight concludes by employing the logic of dispersing power to advocate for a universal basic income.
Item Open Access The Mutualities of Conscience: Satire, Community, and Individual Agency in Late Medieval and Early Modern England(2014) Revere, William FThis study examines the representation of "conscience" in English literature, theology, and political theory from the late fourteenth century to the late seventeenth. In doing so it links up some prominent conceptual history of the term, from Aquinas to Hobbes, with its imaginative life in English narrative. In particular, beginning with William Langland's Piers Plowman and moving through texts in the "Piers Plowman tradition" and on to John Bunyan's allegories and polemics, I explore what I call the "satiric" dimensions of conscience in an allegorical tradition that spans a long and varied period of reform in England, medieval and early modern. As I argue, conscience in this tradition is linked up with the jolts of irony as with the solidarities of mutual recognition. Indeed, the ironies of conscience depend precisely on settled dispositions, shared practices, common moral sources and intellectual traditions, and relationships across time. As such, far from simply being a form of individualist self-assurance, conscience presupposes and advocates a social body, a vision of communal life. Accordingly, this study tracks continuities and transformations in the imagined communities in which the judgment that is conscience is articulated, and so too in the capacities of prominent medieval literary forms to go on speaking for others in the face of dramatic cultural upheaval.
After an introductory essay that examines the relationship between conscience, irony, and literary form, I set out in chapter one with a study of Langland's Piers Plowman (ca. 1388 in its final version), an ambitious, highly dialectical poem that gives a figure called Conscience a central role in its account of church and society in late medieval England. While Langland draws deeply on scholastic accounts of conscientia--an act of practical reason, as Aquinas says, that is binding as your best judgment and yet vexing in its capacity for error and need for formation in the virtues--he dramatizes error in terms of imagined practice, pressing the limits of theory. A long, recursive meditation on how one's socially embodied life constitutes distinctive forms of both blindness and vision, Langland's poem searches out the forms of recognition and mutuality that he takes a truth-seeking irony of conscience to require in his contemporary moment. My reading sets the figure of Conscience in Piers Plowman alongside the figure of Holy Church to explore some of these themes, and so also to address why the beginning of Langland's poem matters for its ending. In chapter two I turn to an anonymous early fifteenth-century poem of political complaint called Mum and the Sothsegger (ca. 1409) that was written in response to new legislation introducing capital punishment for heresy in England. In Mum I show how an early "Piers Plowman tradition" gets taken up into a rhetoric of royal counsel and so subtly, but decisively, revises aspects of Langland's political and ecclesial vision. In a final chapter moving across several of John Bunyan's works from the 1670s and 1680s, I show how Bunyan conceptualizes coercion in terms of the state and the market, and so defends a "liberty" of conscience that resists both Hobbesian assimilations of moral judgment to the legal structures of territorial sovereignty and an emergent market nominalism, in which exchange value trumps all moral reflection. In part two of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan draws surprisingly on medieval sources to display the forms of mutuality that he thinks are required to resist "consent" to such unjust forms of coercion.
Item Open Access The Practice of the Body of Christ: Human Agency in Pauline Theology After MacIntyre(2010) Miller, Colin DouglasThis dissertation begins a conversation between "apocalyptic" interpretations of the Apostle Paul and the contemporary revival in "virtue ethics." It argues that the human actor's place in Pauline theology has long been captive to theological concerns foreign to Paul and that we can discern in Paul a classical account of human action that Alasdair MacIntyre's work helps to recover. Such an account of agency helps ground an apocalyptic reading of Paul by recovering the centrality of the church and its day-to-day Christic practices, specifically, but not exclusively, the Eucharist. To demonstrate this we first offer a critique of some contemporary accounts of agency in Paul in light of MacIntyre's work. Three exegetical chapters then establish a "MacIntyrian" re-reading of central parts of the letter to the Romans. A concluding chapter offers theological syntheses and prospects for future research.
Item Open Access ‘The Secret is the Power, not the Knowledge’: Reconfiguring the Discourse of HIV/AIDS-related Stigma in Durham, NC(2014-04-28) Cheung, AngelaWhat are the conditions in which stigma is held to be a common sense factor of HIV/AIDS, yet is mutable in the ways people experience stigma? My research analyzes the terrain in which this question is precipitated, and I will evaluate stigma as a lens for understanding broader questions of politics and care that are embedded with American notions of self-hood. The national history of HIV/AIDS, Goffman’s work on stigma, and neoliberal policies, laws, and education measures have converged to create certain imaginations of attribution and individuality for those who live with the disease. People who are HIV-positive are feared, seen as immoral and tainted, and they are blamed for contracting the virus and failing to receive the proper care. The dominant discourse creates feelings of isolation and has led to beliefs that stigma is permanent and universally affects HIV/AIDS patients, so one must remain confidential about a diagnosis for protection from stigma. From policies that move towards privatized healthcare to the rationale that stigma can be localized to a body, these aspects of life rely on ideals of self-help and have precipitated perceptions of HIV/AIDS as solely individual experiences. Instead of seeking ways to confront these perceptions, society ultimately advocates for concealing diagnoses to mitigate stigma. The localization of stigma ignores the social construction of stigma that is informed by history, culture, and power, and in this very context, my participants have demonstrated agency by disclosing their stories. By illuminating social ties through dialogue, they have contested the dominant discourse that they are secluded from the rest due to their mark of stigma. In this ethnography, then, I will explore how stigma functions and is maintained in a space where discursive practices, neoliberalism, and medical intervention intersect.Item Open Access When the Poet Is a Stranger: Poetry and Agency in Tagore, Walcott, and Darwish(2009) Mattawa, KhaledABSTRACT
This study is concerned with the process of the making of a postcolonial poet persona where the poet is addressing multiple audiences and is trying to speak for, and speak to, multiple constituencies through poetry. The poets examined here, Rabindranath Tagore, Derek Walcott, and Mahmoud Darwish--arguably among the best-known poets of the modern world--sought to be heard by various sensibilities and succeeded in reaching them. Outside the fold of the Western Metropolitan world, they as a trio have much to teach us about how poets living under three different phases of colonial hegemony (colonial India, postcolonial West Indies, and neocolonial Palestine/Israel) manage to speak. Their presence in their poetry, or the pressure their life stories and their poet personae, becomes an essential part of reading their work. Desiring to speak themselves, the poets chosen here have necessarily had to speak for their regions, peoples and cultures, alternately celebrating and resisting the burden of representation, imposed on them by both their own people and by the outsiders who receive them. How does a postcolonial poet address changing contingencies--personal, social and political-- while continuing to hold the attention of a global readership? How have their formal and esthetic approaches shifted as they responded to contingencies and as they attempted intervene in local and global conversations regarding the fate and future of their societies? An examination of the genre of poetry and postcolonial agency, this study addresses these and other related questions as it looks at the emergence and evolution of Tagore, Walcott, and Darwish as postcolonial world poets.