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From Frankenstein to District 9: Ecocritical Readings of Classic and Contemporary Fiction and Film demonstrates how American studies methodologies, ecological literary criticism, and environmental justice theory provide both time-tested and new analytical tools for reading texts from transnational perspectives. Recently, American literary scholars have been responding to calls for collective

From Frankenstein to District 9: Ecocritical Readings of Classic and Contemporary Fiction and Film demonstrates how American studies methodologies, ecological literary criticism, and environmental justice theory provide both time-tested and new analytical tools for reading texts from transnational perspectives. Recently, American literary scholars have been responding to calls for collective interdisciplinary response to widening social disparities and species collapses caused by climate change in the new epoch recently being termed "the anthropocene." In response, I analyze canonical texts, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in juxtaposition with Neill Blomkamp's South African science fiction thriller District 9 and contemporary US American novels such as Toni Morrison's Sula, William Faulkner's "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses and Richard Power's Generosity and The Echo Maker, to show how writers, filmmakers, and academics have been calling attention to dramatic climate events that consequently challenge the public to rethink the relationships among human beings to other species, and to ecological systems of low predictability, high variability, and frequent extremes. Rather than focusing solely on the "human," I examine how the relationships and livelihoods of multi-species communities shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces. As a whole, this dissertation seeks to make abstract, often intangible global patterns and concepts accessible by providing models for what I call "readings in the anthropocene" or re-readings of classic and contemporary texts and film that offer insights into changing human behavior and suggesting alternative management practices of local and global commons as well as opportunities to imagine how to live in and beyond the anthropocene.
ContributorsTurner, Kyndra (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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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

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.
ContributorsHenry, Matthew S. (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Much research has been devoted to identifying trends in either convergence upon a neoliberal model or divergence among welfare states in connection to globalization, but most research has focused on advanced industrialized countries. This has limited our understanding of the current state of convergence or divergence, especially among welfare states

Much research has been devoted to identifying trends in either convergence upon a neoliberal model or divergence among welfare states in connection to globalization, but most research has focused on advanced industrialized countries. This has limited our understanding of the current state of convergence or divergence, especially among welfare states in developing regions. To address this research gap and contribute to the broader convergence vs. divergence debate, this research explores welfare state variation found within Latin America, in terms of the health policy domain, through the use of cross-national data from 18 countries collected between the period of 1995 to 2010 and the application of a series of descriptive and regression analysis techniques. Analyses revealed divergence within Latin America in the form of three distinct welfare states, and that among these welfare states income inequality, trust in traditional public institutions, and democratization, are significantly related to welfare state type and health performance.
ContributorsJohnson, Kory Alfred (Author) / Martin, Nathan (Thesis director) / Gonzales, Vanna (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor)
Created2014-05
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This study weighs the connection of environmental crisis with race and gender in different cases of environmental crisis and conflicts. The study documents how Indigenous cosmologies and cosmopolitics, and scientific arguments converge in unexpected alliances in the advent of environmental crises. This research focuses on specific instances, or situations related

This study weighs the connection of environmental crisis with race and gender in different cases of environmental crisis and conflicts. The study documents how Indigenous cosmologies and cosmopolitics, and scientific arguments converge in unexpected alliances in the advent of environmental crises. This research focuses on specific instances, or situations related to environmental justice movements addressing the environmental crisis in Mexico (and its convergences to other similar cases). I examine and present a discussion of the research methodologies and methods used to study the ‘environment’ as well as indigenous cosmologies and cosmopolitics. With this, I embark on a research that includes feminist decolonial theory, eco-feminism and material feminisms into a larger project for autonomy and decoloniality.

In particular, I discuss one of the concepts that have caught the attention of those studying race and ethnicity in the Americas: mestizaje as an ordinal principle in the context of Mexico. Also, I discuss the inscriptions of the mestiza body in relation to the materiality of race and gender in the context of Latin America. It is shown how the discourse of mestizaje is tangled with the idea of a modern civilization, such as in the Mexican state. Overall, this research analyzes different responses to environmental crises; from environmental activists, community organizers to plastic artists and scientific experts. Also, it includes a literary analysis of contemporary indigenous literatures to show how state sponsored violence and settler colonialism have an incidence in gender violence by placing the female body close to nature.

As global environmental problems have risen, this research contributes to the understanding of the underlying factors in environmental crises and conflict that have been overlooked. Herein lies an important possibility to reach a broader audience in different disciplines, ranging from indigenous studies to the global politics of human rights. Furthermore, this research aims to contribute to the work of environmental activists, scholars and scientists with regard to the understanding of how different arguments are used in research and advocacy work, and how they can integrate an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach when addressing environmental justice cases.
ContributorsPerez Aguilera, Abigail (Author) / Lauderdale, Pat (Thesis advisor) / Gomez, Alan (Thesis advisor) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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This thesis is an ecocritical, art historical inquiry into colonization, globalization, climate change as well as perceptions of American nationalism and Manifest Destiny through the overarching concept of the Anthropocene. The focus is on the United States specifically and entails an analysis of American society and culture from a global

This thesis is an ecocritical, art historical inquiry into colonization, globalization, climate change as well as perceptions of American nationalism and Manifest Destiny through the overarching concept of the Anthropocene. The focus is on the United States specifically and entails an analysis of American society and culture from a global standpoint. First, an overview of origins and impacts of the Anthropocene concept is given. The thesis then explores works of visual culture by ten different artists through diverse subconcepts. Colonial history, neocolonialism, and globalization are examined through the Roanoke watercolors (1585) by John White, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (May-July 2014) by African American artist Kara Walker, and the Insertions into Ideological Circuits series (1970-ongoing) by Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles. In a further step, anthropogenic environmental destruction as part of visual and conceptual art is traced over a period of 130 years. The works Lower Manhattan from Communipaw, New Jersey (1880) by Thomas Moran, Erosion No. 2 - Mother Earth Laid Bare (1936) by Alexandre Hogue, and HighWaterLine (2007) by contemporary artist Eve Mosher provide a basis for this analysis. Finally, The Consummation of Empire and Destruction from The Course of Empire series (1836) by Thomas Cole, Emanuel Leutze’s Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (1862), John Gast’s American Progress (1872), and Amy Balkin’s Sell Us Your Liberty, or We’ll Subcontract Your Death (2008) are examined to reveal how American exceptionalism and nationalism have influenced domestic policy as well as foreign policy in the past and the present. Visual works have agency while, on the one hand, functioning as a means for propagandizing Anthropocene symptoms and consequences. On the other hand, they can serve as leverage for ecocritical readings and as catalysts for social change.
ContributorsSchuenemeyer, Katleen (Author) / Sweeney, J. Gray (Thesis advisor) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Delmont, Matthew (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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ABSTRACT

Much attention has been given to food justice in both academic and activist communities as of late. This project adds to the growing discourse around food justice by using creative works produced by members of the black community as case studies to analyze the relationship between food justice and the

ABSTRACT

Much attention has been given to food justice in both academic and activist communities as of late. This project adds to the growing discourse around food justice by using creative works produced by members of the black community as case studies to analyze the relationship between food justice and the criminal justice system in their neighborhoods. In particular, this project examines two unique sources of creative expression from the black community. The first is the novel Been ‘Bout Dat, the story of a young boy Fattz, who is born into the projects of New Orleans and takes to street life in order to provide for his siblings and struggling single mother. Written in prison by Johnny Davis it offers a valuable perspective that is combined with historical context and statistical support to construct an understanding of how concepts of food and criminal justice influence each other. The second source is the lyrical content of several hip-hop songs from rappers such as Tupac Shakur, Mos Def, Nas, and Young Jeezy. Comparing the content of these works and the lived realities expressed in both brings new and useful insights about food justice and criminal justice as experienced in poor minority communities. Recognizing this relationship may illuminate solutions to food justice issues through criminal justice reform as well as inform fresh efforts at community renewal.
ContributorsDennis, Matthew (Author) / Delmont, Matthew (Thesis advisor) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Killsback, Leo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017