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- All Subjects: Phenomenology
- Creators: Blumenfeld-Jones, Donald
Description
ABSTRACT There is a body of literature--albeit largely from the UK and Australia--that examines the ways in which class and gender influence life course, including educational attainment; however, much of this literature offers explanations and analyses for why individuals choose the life course they do. By assuming a cause-effect relationship between class and gender and life course, these studies perpetuate the idea that life can be predicted and controlled. Such an approach implies there is but one way of viewing--or an "official reading" of--the experience of class and gender. This silences other readings. This study goes beneath these "interpretations" and explores the phenomenon of identity and identity making in women who grew up working-class. Included is an investigation into how these women recognize and participate in their own identity making, identifying the interpretations they created and apply to their experience and the ways in which they juxtapose their educative experience. Using semi-structured interview I interviewed 21 women with working-class habitués. The strategy of inquiry that corresponded best to the goal of this project was heuristics, a variant of empathetic phenomenology. Heuristics distinguishes itself by including the life experience of the researcher while still showing how different people may participate in an event in their lives and how these individuals may give it radically different meanings. This has two effects: (1) the researcher recognizes that their own life experience affects their interpretations of these stories and (2) it elucidates the researcher's own life as it relates to identity formation and educational experience. Two, heuristics encourages different ways of presenting findings through a variety of art forms meant to enhance the immediacy and impact of an experience rather than offer any explanation of it. As a result of the research, four themes essential to locating the experience of women who grew up working class were discovered: making, paying attention, taking care, and up. These themes have pedagogic significance as women with working-class habitués navigate from this social space: the downstream effect of which is how and what these women take up as education.
ContributorsDecker, Shannon Irene (Author) / Blumenfeld-Jones, Donald (Thesis advisor) / Richards-Young, Gillian (Committee member) / Sandlin, Jennifer (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The world of speculative fiction infuses the soul with the hope of the imaginary. My dissertation examines Afrofuturistic liminal imaginary space and the ways it is experienced as life-giving spaces. The imaginary and the aesthetics it births are formularies for art forms that speak to the hope of a transformed future. Speculative fiction, although in the realm of the imaginary, is an enlivened approach to express in the present collective possibilities and hopes of the people within those very imagined futures. During the past three decades, particularly, Black speculative fiction has been increasingly at the core of the new cultural productions of literature, film, horror, comics, fantasy, and music which tell the story of African descendant people. Afrofuturism is an analytic for exploration of the liberative revisioning of Black humanity in the face of persistent practices of structural injustice. My project presents the phenomenological exploration of Black Speculative Thought (ST) as it comes alive through artistic liminal spaces of Afrofuturist comic and science fiction conventions. I argue that Black imaginary liminal spaces such as Comicon Culture offer respite, renewal, and locales for creative resistance to thwart persistent alienation and nihilism of Black humanity. Furthermore, it is within these spaces where intersubjective agency can be taken up as a countermeasure to the existential realities and dominant hegemonic existences of everyday life. I examine the process, events, and experience of Black imaginary as it comes alive as potentiated hope for alternative futures. My intention is to marshal the theoretical specters of Critical Afrofuturism, Africana Philosophy, and Womanist Thought in this task.
ContributorsYoung-Scaggs, Sakena De (Author) / Martinez, Jacqueline M (Thesis advisor) / Anderson, Lisa M. (Committee member) / Anokye, Akua D (Committee member) / James, Stanlie M (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019