Matching Items (17)
Description
Experiential evidence leads specific individuals and groups within India to believe that individuals with disabilities are marginalized due to a Hindu value system that stigmatizes disability and relegates individuals with disabilities to below average social positions. I experienced this perspective firsthand by spending two months volunteering at an orphanage in India that cares for individuals (primarily children) with disabilities and significant health issues. The orphanage identifies with a Christian tradition, framing their perspective in a worldview that declares that all human beings have equal value regardless of their physical health situations. The orphanage perspective declares that there is a Hindu religious paradigm that stigmatizes individuals with disability in a manner so extreme that it leads parents to abandon their children with disabilities. From the orphanage perspective, this Hindu religious belief is what inevitably leads to the need for orphanages for children with special needs because the stigma that the orphanage perceives leads to abandonment. This premise led me to an investigation of perceived cultural and societal norms and Hindu beliefs within India that may lead to the marginalization of individuals with disabilities. In order to do this, I first had to contextualize the perspective of the orphanage. From there I looked to Indian disability policy and sought to connect stigma and disability in the secular and social realm, evaluating whether or not secular policies can be said to contribute to or detract from a stigma of disability. I then looked to Hindu beliefs, to determine whether or not Hinduism can truly be said to, in a generalized manner, marginalize individuals with disability, and furthermore the caste system, to evaluate what India's social hierarchy might have to say about disability. The goals of this thesis are to evaluate the popular Hindu beliefs that are often blamed for the stigmatization of disability, and to analyze policies regarding disability and examine how these policies are affected by the religious context in which they are situated. To what extent does Hinduism encourage or contribute to a society or culture in which individuals with disabilities are treated badly, and how do Indian policies regarding disability respond to that? I come to the conclusion that the stigma related to disability in India is far more complex than simply a Hindu belief that mandates it as so. There are social and economic factors that play into it, as well as deep-rooted cultural ideologies in both the tradition of the orphanage that perceives Hinduism as stigmatizing of disability, and Indian religion and social hierarchy. I furthermore find that, though there are numerous disability policies in place to provide human rights to individuals with disabilities, these policies ultimately do not work to tear down the stigma and the roots it does have in ancient religious tradition and social hierarchy.
ContributorsWristen, Julia Kalila (Author) / Henn, Alexander (Thesis director) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
With games an increasing various industry and cultural form, there are still many myths that surround the medium and restrict its potentials. When this often happens at the expense of marginalized audiences and creators who are already present within the space of games and the future realities of games, steps must be take to understand the nature of games and why these myths prove so insidious. By applying the approaches of Structuralism and Game Studies to the videogame Celeste, the ways that myths surrounding games can be picked away to give space to new ideologies of play, design, and consumption.
ContributorsStickell, James Donald (Author) / Moran, Stacey (Thesis director) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / Arts, Media and Engineering Sch T (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12
Description
This essay explores the role of religion, science, and the secular in contemporary society by showing their connection to social and political legitimacy as a result of historical processes. In Chapter One, the essay presents historical arguments, particularly linguistic, which confirm science and religion as historically created categories without timeless or essential differences. Additionally, the current institutional separation of science and religion was politically motivated by the changing power structures following the Protestant Reformation. In Chapter Two, the essay employs the concept of the modern social imaginary to show how our modern concept of the political and the secular subtly reproduce the objectified territories of science and religion and thus the boundary maintenance dialectic which dominates science-religion discourse. Chapter Three argues that ‘religious’ worldviews contain genuine metaphysical claims which do not recognizably fit into these modern social categories. Given the destabilizing forces of globalization and information technology upon the political authority of the nation-state, the way many conceptualize of these objects religion, science, and the secular will change as well.
ContributorsBianchi, Joseph Anthony (Author) / Bennett, Gaymon (Thesis director) / Wetmore, Jameson (Committee member) / School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (Contributor) / College of Integrative Sciences and Arts (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
In the 1980s Jose Casanova wrote a book called Public Religions in the Modern World. He noticed that, although religion was seen a private matter for some time, it was now becoming more de-privatized, which he believes was strongly compelled by the rise of the Moral Majority. Moreover, Talal Asad, also, agrees that religion is definitely not disappearing but becoming more identifiable in the public realm. Casanova's theory contends that the privatization and the de-privatization of religion appeared to be happening simultaneously. Assuming Casanova is correct, it is now approximately 35 years later and the question is "where are we now in the process of the de-privatization of religion?" I chose to use the Evangelical Community as an example due to the fact that the majority of people that live in the United States are very familiar with this particular religion. It has become evident that the Evangelical Community has had a strong voice in the political arena. Focusing mainly on politics and using Billy and Franklin Graham as a lens, who have been both visible and influential in the process of the de-privatization of religion, I try to determine where the United States is in this process. I look at how the Grahams see God fitting into politics and how each of them views their participation in politics. In addition, I utilize present-day examples of what, both, the privatizing and de-privatizing of religion looks like while examining some areas that religion has been asserted into the public sphere. Moreover, I discuss the role of the secular in relationship to religion. Finally, I conclude with answering the question, "is religion still a private matter?"
ContributorsElliott, Tracy Lynn (Author) / Bennett, Gaymon (Thesis director) / Ali, Souad (Committee member) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Transhumanist concepts and themes increasingly occupy a prominent place in contemporary visions of the future, particularly with regard to technology. A growing number of scholars, including some self-described transhumanists, see transhumanism as functioning like a religion for secular people, in that it fulfills many of the same desires and impulses without reference to any supernatural forces. For this reason there is a growing discussion of transhumanism in comparison with major religious traditions, but one which has heretofore been underappreciated is Protestant pietism. Pietism grew out of a need among Protestants after the Reformation to realize a better Christian community and better prepare individual believers for the afterlife. It had a significant influence over the European Enlightenment, of which transhumanists claim to be the successors. In its understanding of human improvement, human nature, and ultimate human destiny in death and the end-point of history, pietism has multiple interesting points of comparison with transhumanism. Both ideologies begin by improving individual human beings as the primary means to the end of eliminating suffering, especially death and disease, and building the ideal human community. Transhumanism accomplishes its goals for humanity through the use of advanced technologies which enable human beings to transcend their natural limitations. Pietism focuses, as its name suggests, on moral and spiritual improvement according to practical guidelines that lead a Christian believer to take an active role in his or her own sanctification. This essay concludes that pietism reveals certain key limitations in transhumanism as a comprehensive life philosophy, especially in its ability to organize society according to its system of values.
ContributorsDepew, Mason James (Author) / Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava (Thesis director) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
The transformation of Christianity from a small sect of Judaism into a stabilized and powerful multinational political structure has been the topic of a tremendous amount of research and study over the last several hundred years. The question on how, or in what cultural situation was the Christian movement able to grow and stabilize, has been answered in a variety of different ways, by a variety of eminent scholars. In this thesis I apply traditional academic explanations for Christian growth, specifically those of Princeton Historian Peter Brown, to the Syriac-speaking regions of the East during the fourth and fifth centuries. Within this cultural situation, I explore the life and works of the influential Syrian theologian Ephrem the Syrian as a reflection of the concerns of Christians in the East. I provide rich historical information, as well as analysis of Ephrem's many theological concerns. I make use of a myriad of other resources and historical figures relevant to the thesis, and use the vivid picture of Syriac Christianity to answer the fundamental question of how Syriac Christianity grew, and how wealth, poverty, and the changing role of the Christian clergy contributed to this growth. In this investigation, I argue that Syriac Christianity promoted the same radical attitude concerning charity, renunciation of wealth, and the role of the clergy as Mediterranean Christianity according to Brown, but that many cultural and societal impediments faced in Persia prevented the same growth from occurring. The cultural situation faced by Christians in the East was radically different from that of the Mediterranean. This distinction, and all of its implications, is shown to be the reason for the historically underwhelming growth of Christianity during these centuries and beyond.
ContributorsWright, Aidan Eugene (Author) / Bruner, Jason (Thesis director) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
This dissertation investigates the relationship between the universal aspirationsof technology and the particularity of place, by way of close participant observation with biotechnology companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its central claim is that the aspiration to placelessness in the development of science and technology operates as material configurations, modes of subjectivation, and historical conditions particular to places. Following Foucault’s late work in ethics, I conduct a series of sustained investigations into the reflective modes of critique biotechnologists make in thinking of and being in the San Francisco Bay Area. I show the ways the aspiration to placelessness exists in place at four different vantage points: the organization, the city, the broader cultural history of the region, and the practices of self-cultivation undertaken by technologists. Within biotechnology organizations, biological work is digitized and automated only through an intensification of bespoke material infrastructures, physical labor, and tacit institutional knowledge. Biotechnology organizations have come into existence through a history of settler colonial erasure, industrial devastation, post-war industrial decay, and urban renewal in Bay Area industrial suburbs and neighborhoods. A nostalgic imagination of the broader San Francisco Bay Area and its history of counterculture become mobilized as an antidote to the felt lifelessness of these forms of urban renewal and technological order and incorporated back into engineering practice. Finally, the technologist themselves must aspire to placelessness, in ways critiqued by local landless people’s movements who offer an alternative ethic to place in their imperative to gentrifiers to “move home with your parents.” I conclude by reflecting on the ways interlocutors at each of these vantage points are actively exploring the creation of more enduring relationships to place in the face of the unintended but intensified forms of social suffering in zones of technological innovation.
ContributorsHammang, Anne (Author) / Bennett, Gaymon (Thesis advisor) / Hurlbut, J. Benjamin (Committee member) / Frow, Emma (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
By utilizing words, photographs, and motion pictures, this multimodal and multisited project traces a rhizomatic genealogy of Russian Cosmism—a nineteenth century political theology promoting a universal human program for overcoming death, resurrecting ancestors, and traveling through the cosmos—amongst post-Soviet techno-utopian projects and imaginaries. I illustrate how Cosmist techno-utopian, futurist, and other-than-human discourse exist as Weberian “elective affinities” within diverse ecologies of the imagination, transmitting a variety of philosophies and political programs throughout trans-temporal, yet philosophically bounded, communities. With a particular focus on the United States and Ukraine, and taking an apophatic analytical position, I dissect how different groups of philosophers, technologists, and publics interact(ed) with Cosmism, as well as how seemingly disparate communities (re)shape and deterritorialize Cosmist political theology in an attempt to legitimize their constructed political imaginaries.
ContributorsGenovese, Taylor (Author) / Bennett, Gaymon (Thesis advisor) / Avina, Alexander (Committee member) / Messeri, Lisa (Committee member) / Josephson Storm, Jason Ā (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
This study analyzes competing forms of Protestant Christianity within the Bible Belt of the Upper South (Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina). On one hand, a conservative “culture war” version of Christianity has dominated the South, and deeply influenced national politics, for almost fifty years. This form of Christianity is predicated on white supremacy and heteropatriarchy and regulates religious, as well as sexual, gender, and racial norms. On the other hand, an emerging movement of those once socialized in the culture war version of Protestantism is now reconfiguring the regional traditions. Through ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative interviews, and historical analysis, this study explores the ways these post-culture war Christians are navigating and negotiating relations with family, church, and politics and society more broadly. This work argues that Protestantism in the Upper South is being re-landscaped from the inside by individuals staying within the tradition who seek to reorient regional, national and religious identities. This study goes beyond generalizations about changes in American religion to shed light on the specific motivations, conflicts and dynamics inherent in shifts in lived religion in this particular region. In so doing it also contributes to deeper understanding of processes of religious change more generally.
ContributorsShoemaker, Terry (Author) / Cady, Linell (Thesis advisor) / Gereboff, Joel (Committee member) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
A new sect of Swaminarayan Hinduism emerged in the late eightieth century. This sect rapidly grew into a global organization due their highly structuralized nature. Fascinatingly, the new sect was able to create the feeling of home away from home in multiple countries. Through the establishments of mandirs, Hindu place of worship, practitioners were able to solidify the feeling of home away from home. Through books, magazine articles and letters the evidence of the new sect creating this feeling is overwhelming. Diaspora theory is woven within the thesis due to the global nature of the sect. This thesis uses a broad definition of diaspora to encompass the change in literature due to the ability of one to maintain close ties to their old homeland. The Swaminarayan sect treaded through diaspora by assimilating to their new homeland all the while keeping a close tie with their old homeland.
ContributorsPatel, Amisha (Author) / Bruner, Jason (Thesis advisor) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / Henn, Alexander (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016