Matching Items (11)
Description
How do trees (live and representational) participate in our theatrical and performed encounters with them? If trees are not inherently scenic, as their treatment in language and on stage might reinforce, how can they be retheorized as agents and participants in dramatic encounters? Using Diana Taylor’s theory of scenario to understand embodied encounters, I propose an alternative approach to understanding environmental beings (like trees) called “synercentrism,” which takes as its central tenet the active, if not 100 percent “willed,” participation of both human and non-human beings. I begin by mapping a continuum from objecthood to agenthood to trace the different ways that plants and trees are used, represented, and included in our encounters. The continuum provides a framework that more comprehensively unpacks human-plant relationships.
My dissertation addresses the rich variety of representations and embodiments by focusing on three central chapter topics: the history of tree representation and inclusion in dramatic literature and performance; interactions with living trees in gardens, parks, and other dramatic arenas; and individual plays and plants that have a particularly strong grasp on cultural imaginaries. Each chapter is followed by one or more corresponding case studies (the first chapter is followed by case studies on plants in musical theatre; the second on performing plants and collaborative performance events; and the last on the dance drama Memory Rings and the Methuselah tree). I conclude with a discussion of how the framework of synercentrism can aid in the disruption of terministic screens and facilitate reciprocal relationships with trees and other environmental agents.
My dissertation addresses the rich variety of representations and embodiments by focusing on three central chapter topics: the history of tree representation and inclusion in dramatic literature and performance; interactions with living trees in gardens, parks, and other dramatic arenas; and individual plays and plants that have a particularly strong grasp on cultural imaginaries. Each chapter is followed by one or more corresponding case studies (the first chapter is followed by case studies on plants in musical theatre; the second on performing plants and collaborative performance events; and the last on the dance drama Memory Rings and the Methuselah tree). I conclude with a discussion of how the framework of synercentrism can aid in the disruption of terministic screens and facilitate reciprocal relationships with trees and other environmental agents.
ContributorsDe Roover, Megan Laura (Author) / Underiner, Tamara L. (Thesis advisor) / Hughes, Erika (Committee member) / Goggin, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This dissertation examines cultural representations that attend to the environmental and socio-economic dynamics of contemporary water crises. It focuses on a growing, transnational body of “hydronarratives” – work by writers, filmmakers, and artists in the United States, Canada, and the postcolonial Global South that stress the historical centrality of water to capitalism. These hydronarratives reveal the uneven impacts of droughts, floods, water contamination, and sea level rise on communities marginalized along lines of race, class, and ethnicity. In doing so, they challenge narratives of “progress” conventionally associated with colonial, imperialist, and neoliberal forms of capitalism dependent on the large-scale extraction of natural resources.
Until recently, there has been little attention paid to the ways in which literary texts and other cultural productions explore the social and ecological dimensions of water resource systems. In its examination of water, this dissertation is methodologically informed by the interdisciplinary field of the energy humanities, which explores oil and other fossil fuels as cultural objects. The hydronarratives examined in this dissertation view water as a cultural object and its extraction and manipulation, as cultural practices. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways in which power, production, and human-induced environmental change intersect to create social and environmental sacrifice zones.
This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary environmental humanities approach, drawing on fields such as indigenous studies, political ecology, energy studies, cultural geography, and economic theory. It seeks to establish a productive convergence between environmental justice studies and what might be termed “Anthropocene studies.” Dominant narratives of the Anthropocene tend to describe the human species as a universalized, undifferentiated whole broadly responsible for the global environmental crisis. However, the hydronarratives examined in this dissertation “decolonize” this narrative by accounting for the ways in which colonialism, capitalism, and other exploitative social systems render certain communities more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe than others.
By attending to these issues through problem water, this dissertation has significant implications for future research in contemporary, transnational American and postcolonial literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the energy humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on representations of resources in literary texts and other cultural productions to better grasp the inequitable distribution of environmental risk, and instances of resilience on a rapidly changing planet.
Until recently, there has been little attention paid to the ways in which literary texts and other cultural productions explore the social and ecological dimensions of water resource systems. In its examination of water, this dissertation is methodologically informed by the interdisciplinary field of the energy humanities, which explores oil and other fossil fuels as cultural objects. The hydronarratives examined in this dissertation view water as a cultural object and its extraction and manipulation, as cultural practices. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways in which power, production, and human-induced environmental change intersect to create social and environmental sacrifice zones.
This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary environmental humanities approach, drawing on fields such as indigenous studies, political ecology, energy studies, cultural geography, and economic theory. It seeks to establish a productive convergence between environmental justice studies and what might be termed “Anthropocene studies.” Dominant narratives of the Anthropocene tend to describe the human species as a universalized, undifferentiated whole broadly responsible for the global environmental crisis. However, the hydronarratives examined in this dissertation “decolonize” this narrative by accounting for the ways in which colonialism, capitalism, and other exploitative social systems render certain communities more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe than others.
By attending to these issues through problem water, this dissertation has significant implications for future research in contemporary, transnational American and postcolonial literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the energy humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on representations of resources in literary texts and other cultural productions to better grasp the inequitable distribution of environmental risk, and instances of resilience on a rapidly changing planet.
ContributorsHenry, Matthew S. (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This creative project examines identity, autonomy, and social hierarchy by manipulating the traditions and iconography of female figural painting. Female identity and autonomy is often marked by a tense relationship between the self and the body. Socially acceptable self-expression of one's behavior, body, and desires is strictly regulated within a set of often paradoxical parameters that repress abject, 'animal' behaviors. This series of three paintings reacts to this culture of restraint and repression by exposing the body to nature once more, finding catharsis in annihilation and the destruction of boundaries between the Self and the Other. The human body is depicted as a host for animal life cycles, exploring the duality of creating and supporting life while simultaneously being destroyed. Animals that embody socially unacceptable behaviors are brought crashing back into the human form, reuniting the idealized, contrived female figure with an expressive, imperfect nature and sense of self. Hybridized animal-human relationships in the paintings break down the falsely hierarchical distinction between 'humans' and 'animals' that distances and privileges humanity from that which is considered primitive. By releasing the human body to the uncomplicated consumptive and reproductive forces of ‘trash’ animals in these paintings, the work challenges how the worth of existence is socially defined, instead affirming that all life has some inherent value distinct from its transactional worth to society at large. This celebration of the grotesque shakes off repressive social constructs, offering a unique form of catharsis and agency.
ContributorsBuettner, Marie (Author) / Solis, Forrest (Thesis director) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / School of Art (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-12
ContributorsBuettner, Marie (Author) / Solis, Forrest (Thesis director) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / School of Art (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Art (Painting) (Contributor)
Created2021-12
ContributorsBuettner, Marie (Author) / Solis, Forrest (Thesis director) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / School of Art (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Art (Painting) (Contributor)
Created2021-12
ContributorsBuettner, Marie (Author) / Solis, Forrest (Thesis director) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / School of Art (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Art (Painting) (Contributor)
Created2021-12
ContributorsBuettner, Marie (Author) / Solis, Forrest (Thesis director) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / School of Art (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Art (Painting) (Contributor)
Created2021-12
Description
In this three-article dissertation, I explore the history of Western gardens in educational literature as well as the ontologies and epistemologies that underpin contemporary learning in gardens. Through a critical posthumanist and Indigenous scholarship lens, I collaborated with a school garden, a community garden and an indigenous garden to examine onto-epistemologies that permeate the relationships between humans and more-than-humans in gardens, revealing ways of being and knowing that are favored and the ones that are pushed out of gardening experiences, while exploring entryways to non-Western ways of being and learning in the garden.While each article stands on its own, taken together they paint a complex, rich and nuanced picture of more-than-human relationalities that occur in gardens and of human engagement deriving from different ontoepistemological orientations. This research contributes to the existing literature by exploring issues regarding environmental and sustainability education’s (ESE) approach to learning in gardens, specifically the salient role of gardens in ESE’s strategy in attenuating the climate crisis, by examining how gardens are conceptualized, who has agency in gardens, and what knowledges are privileged in gardens as learning spaces.
Contributorsdo Lago e Pretti, Esther (Author) / Silova, Iveta (Thesis advisor) / Koro, Mika (Committee member) / Weinberg, Andrea (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
The Desert Southwest has no shortage of representations in literature, art, and film. Its aesthetics—open horizons, strange landscapes, and vast wilderness—inform and saturate the early Western films of John Ford, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and continue in today’s popular imaginations. My work acknowledges such contributions and then it challenges them: why are those names more widely associated with the Southwest than Luis Alberto Urrea, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, or Pat Mora?
The project intersects the environmental humanities, critical theory, and cultural studies with the Desert Southwest. It explores the fullness of desert places with regard to cultures, borders, and languages, as well as nonhuman forces and intensities like heat, light, and distance. Dispelling the dominant notion of desert as void or wasteland, it sets a stage to suit the polyvocality of desert place. My work is interdisciplinary because the desert demands it. It begins with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in order to reorient readers towards the rupture of the US War With Mexico which helped set the national and cultural borders in effect today. I then explore Denis Villeneuve’s film Sicario to emphasize the correlation between political hierarchy and verticality; those who can experience the desert from above are exempt from the conditions below, where Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway and Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood take place. The novels expose the immanence and violence of being on the ground in the desert and at the lower end of said hierarchies. Analyzing Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World and Mora’s Encantado enables what I term a desert hauntology to produce a desert full of memory, myth, ancestors, and enchantment. Finally, the project puts visual artists James Turrell and Rafa Esparza in conversation to discover a desert phenomenology. The result is an instigation of how far is too far when decentering the human, and what role does place-based art play in creating and empowering community.
John Ford was from Maine. Georgia O’Keeffe, from Wisconsin. Edward Abbey, Pennsylvania. As someone born and raised in the Desert Southwest, I’ve written the project I have yet to encounter.
The project intersects the environmental humanities, critical theory, and cultural studies with the Desert Southwest. It explores the fullness of desert places with regard to cultures, borders, and languages, as well as nonhuman forces and intensities like heat, light, and distance. Dispelling the dominant notion of desert as void or wasteland, it sets a stage to suit the polyvocality of desert place. My work is interdisciplinary because the desert demands it. It begins with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in order to reorient readers towards the rupture of the US War With Mexico which helped set the national and cultural borders in effect today. I then explore Denis Villeneuve’s film Sicario to emphasize the correlation between political hierarchy and verticality; those who can experience the desert from above are exempt from the conditions below, where Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway and Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood take place. The novels expose the immanence and violence of being on the ground in the desert and at the lower end of said hierarchies. Analyzing Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World and Mora’s Encantado enables what I term a desert hauntology to produce a desert full of memory, myth, ancestors, and enchantment. Finally, the project puts visual artists James Turrell and Rafa Esparza in conversation to discover a desert phenomenology. The result is an instigation of how far is too far when decentering the human, and what role does place-based art play in creating and empowering community.
John Ford was from Maine. Georgia O’Keeffe, from Wisconsin. Edward Abbey, Pennsylvania. As someone born and raised in the Desert Southwest, I’ve written the project I have yet to encounter.
ContributorsOsuna, Celina (Author) / Broglio, Ronald (Thesis advisor) / McHugh, Kevin (Committee member) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Anthropogenic factors contributing to more frequent and extreme weather-related events are displacing vulnerable populations and increasing the global number of food-insecure climate refugees. As food sovereignty is essential to combating climate change and ensuring sustainable futures – according to the Declaration of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda – it is important to examine accepted practices in the food industry that may threaten the sovereignty of vulnerable groups. The aim of this thesis is to explore two climate fiction novels – Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl – and how they demonstrate the connection between problematic practices in the food industry and lost food sovereignty. I also examine the novels through the lens of international documents such as the 2030 Agenda. Each novel, I argue, contributes to a growing awareness about the importance of protecting first rights to indigenous and local foods and land, or food sovereignty. The environmental humanities, and climate fiction specifically, are also contributing to a better understanding of the detrimental effects that lost sovereignty has on a people’s culture and the future sustainability of the planet. Climate fiction, as these novels illustrate, can provide case studies for understanding the inextricable link between humans and nature and allow people to imagine a better future. Placed within larger contexts that illuminate the current need for global campaigns for food sovereignty and United Nations agendas such as the 2030 Agenda, literature which demonstrates the human relationship to food can be used to enrich and strengthen application of the Agenda’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. Through imagery of seeds and regeneration, Butler and Bacigalupi illuminate the critical role of seed-carriers, or bearers of food knowledge, in intergenerational food education and sustainability. Their novels demonstrate links between environmental injustices and food insecurities – violence and displacement of climate refugees in Parable of the Sower, and biopiracy and food totalitarianism in The Windup Girl – that help readers better understand the potential power of the SDGs for planning food futures.
ContributorsBoth, Natalie (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Brown, Lois (Committee member) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021