ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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Description
The call for an Inter-Civilizational Dialogue informed by cosmopolitical forms of Comparative Political Theory as a way to address our unprecedented global challenges is among the most laudable projects that students of politics and related fields across the world have put forth in centuries. Unfortunately, however, up until this point the actual and potential contributions of the Indigenous or 'Fourth' World and its civilizational manifestations have been largely ignored. This has clearly been the case in what refers to Indigenous American or Abya-Yalan cultures and civilizations. The purpose of this dissertation is to acknowledge, add to, and further foster the contributions of Indigenous American cultures and civilizations to the emerging fields of Comparative Political Theory and Inter-Civilizational Relations. Guided by a cosmopolitical concern for social and environmental justice, this work adds to the transcontinental and transdisciplinary effort to decolonize knowledges and practices by offering socio-ecologically balanced alternatives beyond the crisis of globalized Western modernity. This work draws on three broad Indigenous traditions, Mesoamerican, Andean, and Native North American, to offer some historical and contemporary examples of the many possible ways in which the recovery, revalorization, and revitalization of Indigenous modes of thought, practice, organization and planning can contribute to foster forms of comparative political theorizing that address the challenges of a global age bedeviled by the confluence of social and environmental crises of an unprecedented scale and scope. The dissertation first introduces comparative political theory as a framework for the inter-civilizational dialogue, arguing that Indigenous contributions have been marginalized and must be considered. Part I then focuses and elaborates on specifically Mesoamerican contributions; Part II is dedicated to Andean contributions; and Part III to Native North American contributions. The dissertation closes with a brief reflection of how Indigenous American contributions can help us address some of our most crucial contemporary global challenges, especially in what concerns the construction of cosmopolitical alternatives built on post-anthropocentric forms of socio-ecological justice.
ContributorsFigueroa Helland, Leonardo Esteban (Author) / Doty, Roxanne L (Thesis advisor) / Ashley, Richard K. (Committee member) / Mitchell, Michael J. (Committee member) / Killsback, Leo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Heroism is a phenomenon central to the development of Western Society. It is present at the core of understanding history, it is the basis for all literature, and exists in many forms in contemporary society, including the celebrity. As a result of its pervasiveness, the philosophy by which heroism ought to be understood has been left out of its contemporary iterations. Through an investigation of a provocative real person, rather than a literary character, the being of the hero in the everydayness of life can be more readily understood. The character in question is Leila Khaled, provocative because she is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and participated in two airplane hijackings. The general public understands her to be a terrorist; however, she is a hero among her own people and as a hero has much to teach. Through an inspection of her story, the hero presents itself as acting with courage and being motivated by love toward a greater good. Thus, an investigation of these phenomena - courage, love, and the greater good - will result in a better understanding of the hero that works toward the philosophic discussion about heroism that has been largely ignored over the last several hundred years.
ContributorsMorris, Christopher (Author) / Ramsey, Ramsey (Thesis advisor) / Jordan, Elaine (Committee member) / Gruber, Diane (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
In this discussion I will state fundamental principles of Kelsen's Legal Positivism in International Law and explain four problems with his theory. I will then propose two suggestions in the light of which Kelsen's theory is modified in this discussion and explain how these two suggestions address the four problems and help the theory account for regime change. Finally, I will address possible objections to the view advanced in this discussion.
ContributorsIoannidis, Christoforos (Author) / de Marneffe, Peter (Thesis advisor) / French, Peter (Committee member) / Fellmeth, Aaron (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Given the success of science, weak forms of mind-brain dependence are commonly treated as uncontroversial within contemporary philosophies of mind. More controversial are the different metaphysical claims inferred from this dependence, many ascribing ontological priority to the brain. Consider the following three propositions: (i) neurological events are essentially identified by their role in material systems, laws, and causes that are constitutively non-rational; (ii) at least some mental events are essentially identified in virtue of their role in the use of reason; (iii) all mental events are realized by, identical to, or composed out of, neurological events. (i) is uncontroversial. However, (iii) is strictly materialistic. (i), (ii) and (iii) taken together appear incoherent. A fruitful task for philosophy is to resolve this apparent incoherence. In his 1997 book The Last Word Thomas Nagel offers an explication of reason that conceptually transcends the nature of material substrate. In his 2010 article "Modest Dualism" Tyler Burge offers reasons to think of propositional thought as irreducible to the concepts of the material sciences. Both focus on rationality as a unique form of intentionality. Both philosophers also reject materialism (iii). On their accounts it's reasonable to take 'rational intentionality' as exhibiting a logical priority of the mind with respect to the brain in inquiries into the nature of mind. Granting this, the diminished conception of mind presupposed by prevailing contemporary theories is seen to be the result of a more general failure to recognize the logical priority and intricate nature of rationality. The robust views of rationality expressed by Nagel and Burge constitute grounds for argument against even the weakest form of materialism. I develop such an argument in this thesis, showing that the propositional attitudes exhibited in thought and speech preclude all materialistic notions of mind. Furthermore, I take the nature of propositional attitudes to suggest a perspective for exploring the fundamental nature of mind, one that focuses not on composition but on rational powers.
ContributorsGoodrich, Gregory (Author) / Kobes, Bernard W (Thesis advisor) / White, Michael J. (Committee member) / Anderson, Owen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Above all else, this project is about parentage in the modern American legal system and culture. Advanced reproductive technologies require our courts to reconsider the long-standing presumption that a child has only one female mother and one male father. We now have children of choice, rather than chance. Assisted Reproductive Technology and its widespread availability and use and changed the landscape of parentage maybe forever. And the children of such efforts remain largely unprotected by our current legal system that favors reproduction by chance within a recognized marriage or at the least, a traditional two-parent paradigm. However, assisted reproduction calls into question the current legal framework for determinations of parentage based in marriage and/or biology. Based on a long and convoluted history, our current legal system conflates marriage and parentage. Moreover, in many circumstances the law restricts both the number and gender of the parties to a marriage or possible parents. One of the more compelling historical and still salient justifications for doing so is to accord the "Best Interest of the Child" standard which purports to underpin all such determinations. Unfortunately, that standard cannot best be met when weighed in a balance against a constitutionally protected exclusive right to parent vested in an adult either by a determination of a genetic link to the child or marriage to another parent. Children of choice, who result from the affirmative and purposive engagement in assisted reproduction, should be entitled to the same protections as children of chance born to a man and woman who are married. Once we look beyond marriage and biology as determiners of parentage, a better way for our legal system to serve the best interests of children, and their parents, is to identify and protect those adult relationships that are parental in nature and that benefit the child irrespective of a marriage between parents or genetic links to the child. Fortunately, the tools to accomplish this paradigm shift already are in existence. The expansion of our commonly used definitions and broader view of our current statutes will allow the legal system to better protect both children of choice and children of chance by making better parentage determinations. To that end, this project also takes on the ambitious task of praxis; of applying the theories to the law as it stands and demonstrating how the new paradigm might look as it is implemented with all of its far-reaching tentacles.
ContributorsRoss, Jane (Author) / Johnson, John (Thesis advisor) / Hepburn, John (Committee member) / Stinson, Judith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This dissertation examines the influential relationships between popular culture depictions of superheroes and the substantive, malleable, and real possibilities of human body transformation. Cultural discourses condition and constrain the ways in which identity and bodies are formed and expressed. This includes popular culture texts that, through their evocative narratives, provide guidance or solutions for dealing with real world problems. From the perspective of communication studies, this project involves examining ways people project and perform fantastic future versions of humanity in relation to popular culture artifacts, like superheroes, but also examines how such projections are borne out of and get expressed through our everyday, less than extraordinary experiences. Key theoretical tensions regarding identity and culture are elucidated. These tensions are then developed discursively into a genealogy of body transcendence that features the historicizing of social functions to determine from where such tensions and changes manifest, and how they ultimately affect us. Several key artifacts are introduced to help inform the investigation, including eight specific superhero body types that provide an ideal perspective through which transformative power can be observed. The superhero discourse is particularly relevant because it offers a utopian/dystopian tension regarding how the splendor and seduction of the discourse materializes in both liberating and problematic ways. Another aspect of this embodied approach involves adopting the alternate superhero persona of Ethnography Man. By undertaking my own identity transformations, I am better able to investigate spaces that encourage such identity slippage and play, such as the annual San Diego Comic Con International. The once strongly held perception that our bodies are fixed and stable is fast disappearing. In bridging the body with culture through a genealogy, it becomes much more apparent how body transformations will continue to manifest in the future. Therefore, from the experiences and analysis contained herein, implications regarding powerful discursive conditions and constraints that influence our ability to change take form in revealing, problematic, and sometimes unexpected ways. More specifically, implications of who has power, how it is exercised, and the effects of power will materialize and indicate whether or not everyday humans have the potential to become superheroes.
ContributorsBoras, Scott Daniel (Author) / McDonald, Kelly (Thesis advisor) / Goodall, Jr., H. L. (Committee member) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Authenticity has been conceived of in several different ways with various meanings and implications. The existential conception has the advantage of tracking authenticity from the phenomenology of human beings and their lived, social experience. From Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger’s criteria for existentialist authenticity, I develop the argument that authentic, feminist projects are necessarily one mode of being authentic within a patriarchal society. In defining a conception of authenticity out of Sartre and Heidegger’s terms, the question of what qualifies as an authentic feminist project arises as well as the question of what sort of content qualifies as authentic. While Simone De Beauvoir does not focus on authenticity in her ethics, she does give a basis for a value oriented, content relevant aspect of existentialism generally. Insofar as authenticity is an existentialist concept, feminist authenticity is one valuable and worthwhile project within a social patriarchy, as it promotes existence as freedom.
ContributorsScott, Siera Aubrey Lee (Author) / Huntington, Patricia (Thesis advisor) / Calhoun, Cheshire (Thesis advisor) / Reynolds, Steven (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
In this thesis, I discuss the philosophical problem of evil and, as a response, John Hick's soul making theodicy. First, I discuss the transformation of the problem. I examine how the problem has shifted from logical to evidential in recent history. Next, I offer a faithful rendition of Hick's position - one which states the existence of evil does not provide evidence against the existence of God. After reconstructing his argument, I go on to exposes its logical faults. I present four main contentions to Hick's theodicy. First, I analyze the psychology of dehumanization to question whether we have any evidence that soul making is happening in response to the suffering in the world. Second, I argue that Hick's theodicy is self-defeating if accepted because it undermines the central point on which his argument depends. Third, I claim that Hick's theodicy is self-defeating given his eschatological views. Finally, I discuss how Hick's theodicy does not account for the animal suffering that widely exists in the world now, and that exists in our evolutionary history. My hope is to show that Hick's theodicy fails to solve the problem of evil. I claim that the amount of gratuitous suffering in the world does provide evidence against the existence of God.
ContributorsScarpa, Frank Vincent (Author) / Manninen, Bertha (Thesis advisor) / Kobes, Bernard W. (Committee member) / Pinillos, Angel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Guantánamo: The Amen Temple of Empire connects the fetishization of the trauma of nine/eleven with the co-constitution of subjects at Guantánamo—that of the contained Muslim terrorist prisoner silhouetted against the ideal nationalistic military body—circulated as ‘afterimages’ that carry ideological narratives about U.S. Empire. These narratives in turn religiously and racially charge the new normative practices of the security state and its historically haunted symbolic order. As individuals with complex subjectivities, the prisoners and guards are, of course, not reducible to the standardizing imprimatur of the state or its narratives. Despite the circulation of these ‘afterimages’ as fixed currency, the prisoners and guards produce their own metanarratives, through their para-ethnographic accounts of containment and of self. From within the panopticon of the prison, they seek sight lines, and gaze back at the state. This dissertation is thus a meditation on US militarism, violence, torture, race, and carceral practices, revealed thematically through metaphors of hungry ghosts, nature, journey and death, liminality, time, space, community, and salvage. Based on a multi-sited, empirical and imaginary ethnography, as well as textual and discourse analysis, I draw on the writing and testimony of prisoners, and military and intelligence personnel, whom I consider insightful para-ethnographers of the haunting valence of this fetishized historical event.
ContributorsColeman, Diana (Diana Murtaugh) (Author) / Talebi, Shahla (Thesis advisor) / Matustik, Martin (Committee member) / Fessenden, Tracy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This paper examines the strength of a recent argument made against democracy. The notion of epistocracy, a system of government where the wise or the knowers rule, has garnered some attention of late. These theories of epistocracy have traditionally struggled with questions of political legitimacy and authority. In Against Democracy, Jason Brennan articulates an alternative theory for epistocracy which may prove more promising. Brennan argues instead that democracy faces objections of political legitimacy which epistocracy avoids because democracy either harms or violates rights as a result of granting political power to the incompetent. This negative argument against democracy hopes to make epistocracy the preferable option in comparison. I will argue, however, that if we take this comparative approach then we ought to prefer democracy---or, rather, democratic reform---over epistocracy as the best solution in addressing the concerns which Brennan raises. It is not enough to merely point to flaws in democracy. For this argument to be successful, it must also be shown that epistocracy avoids those flaws at an acceptable cost. I claim that, upon examination, epistocratic theories fail to make this case. Rather, it is evident from this examination that there are various institutional mechanisms available with which democracy may manage the risks and harms which might arise from imbuing the incompetent with political power. This in turn suggests ways by which we might reform democracy to achieve similar results hoped for by epistocrats without the effort, risk, and cost of tearing down and rebuilding our fundamental political institutions.
ContributorsZhang, Alexander (Author) / Brake, Elizabeth (Thesis advisor) / Portmore, Douglas (Committee member) / Calhoun, Cheshire (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018