While youth media production work has increased dramatically over the past two decades, researchers still lack an adequate theorization of how institutionally-mediated youth production programs instigate democratic acts. Central to this deficiency ares hortcomings in the two dominant frameworks typically used to conceptualize the democratic potential of young people's media work. In response to this, I turn to the work of Hannah Arendt and use her conceptualization of public action as framed in relation to a "pedagogy of natality" to assess the relationship between creative youth practice and democracy. While Arendt's framework offers a compelling vision of democratic action, her model is also invaluable for mapping how production work affects adolescents' democratic experience. It focuses the analytic lens on agonistic struggles that expand the way youth register and pay heed to plurality. I demonstrate this utility through a critical ethnographic study of the Summer Visions Film Institute, an initiative designed around a series of two-week digital video production programs for youth aged 14-19. In examining the Summer Visions program, I address the experience of student video producers but focus close attention on the work and experience of peer-to-peer youth mentors in the program for the following reasons. First, peer education has a role in many youth media programs but there continues to be a dearth of research on peer mentorship in media production settings. Second, while student participants take part in Summer Visions for ten days, the mentors are involved in production work on a daily basis over a seven-week period. Most are also former students of the program and so they offer a more robust set of case studies. Using Arendt, I demonstrate how media production programs contribute in contradictory but nonetheless important ways to the formation of new publics, not because such work leads to straightforward forms of position taking about specific political projects, but because it leads to forms of thoughtfulness that challenge the lure of oblivion that haunts our lives and prevents us from seeing those who are different and yet part of our worlds.

In this thesis project I explore economically disadvantaged young women's responses to notions of ideal and deviant femininity circulating within contemporary mass media. Specifically, I examine six young women's expressed accounts and critiques of particular forms of femininity in relation to their own experiences of social exclusion. Additionally, and drawing upon an experimental adaptation of Walter Benjamin's montage method, I assess the symbolic links between mass media representations of femininity and exclusion along classed and gendered lines. I use this adaptation of Benjamin's technique to historicize and contextualize dominant notions of ideal (deviant) femininity circulating in the contemporary moment and to engage in a "reflexive" (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) analysis of my own entanglement with the norms and values which proliferate within mass media. The foundational thinking which directs my aims throughout this thesis explores the analytical possibilities of joining the complementary theoretical work of Hannah Arendt and Pierre Bourdieu within an interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework.

There exist at present a broad range of environmental challenges, and there are strong and varied movements seeking to take action on these issues in a range of ways. What is deeply contested, however, is how these environmental problems should be framed, and through what means solutions ought to be developed. At the heart of these questions is the need to critically evaluate dominant political framings that seek to contain and manage, rather than engage, these ecological challenges. What is required instead is the development of viable ecopolitical practices that are able to generate practicable solutions while retaining the capacity to grow, develop, and sustain life. In addressing the challenge of theorizing such a viable ecopolitics, I work to productively combine phenomenologically-informed understandings of place with an Arendtian formulation of the conditions of political life in a way that can help to create inhabited ecological spaces of appearance. Such spaces can offer the potential to respectfully include ecological considerations in political decision-making, to foster an acknowledgement and valuing of the situatedness of particular political actions, and to open up discursive and interpretive possibilities while maintaining this openness through sustained political negotiation. In order to explore the possibilities and potential implications of such an ecopolitical space, I begin by outlining what I understand to be the current ecopolitical challenge and its associated problematic inclusive and exclusive dynamics. I move on to offer a possible response to this ecopolitical challenge through an exploration of particular characteristics of place experience and the potential for phenomenological views of place to gather various elements of the more-than-human world into an arena of common engagement or appearance. Critically examining current state-centric political framings, and their inability to adequately meet this ecopolitical challenge, I appeal instead to a richer and more dynamic Arendtian formulation of political life. Finally I work to develop an understanding of how this expanded conception of the political can be combined with phenomenological understandings of place to begin to create vibrant and creative ecopolitical spaces in practice. / Thesis (Master, Environmental Studies) -- Queen's University, 2008-10-03 10:40:41.455

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This thesis focuses on Hannah Arendt’s theory of natality, which is identified with the event of birth into a pre-existing human world. Arendt names natality the “ontological root” of political action and of human freedom, and yet, as critics of Arendt’s political writings have pointed out, this notion of identifying freedom with birth is somewhat perplexing. I return to Arendt’s phenomenological analysis of active human life in The Human Condition, focusing on the significance of natality as the disclosure of a unique “who” within a specific relational web. From there, I trace the distinct threats to natality, speech-action, and worldly relations posed by the political philosophical tradition, on the one hand, and by the modern biopolitical “rise of the social” on the other. Drawing connections between Arendt’s theory of the social and Michel Foucault’s work on the biopolitical management of populations, my thesis defends Arendt’s contentious distinction between social and political life; the Arendtian social, I argue, can fruitfully be read as biopolitical. / Graduate

This thesis explores the theme of "worldlessness" in the political thought of Hannah Arendt. / The thesis analyzes "worldlessness" by way of Arendt's reflections on the sub-themes of "contemporary crisis," the "Western tradition," the "modern age" and the modern phenomenon of "thoughtlessness." These sub-themes are examined in chapters one, two, four and five respectively. Chapter three examines Arendt's conception of politics and "the world." / The analysis proceeds on the basis of Arendt's stated conviction that political thought must take its bearings from "incidents of living experience" if it is to be adequate to its subject matter. More specifically, it investigates the basis and significance of Arendt's contention that the modern condition of "worldlessness" has produced a rupture between thought and experience which has radically altered the character of contemporary understanding. In general terms, the thesis examines the origins of modern worldlessness and the implications of this for contemporary thinking.

In this thesis project I explore economically disadvantaged young women's responses to notions of ideal and deviant femininity circulating within contemporary mass media. Specifically, I examine six young women's expressed accounts and critiques of particular forms of femininity in relation to their own experiences of social exclusion. Additionally, and drawing upon an experimental adaptation of Walter Benjamin's montage method, I assess the symbolic links between mass media representations of femininity and exclusion along classed and gendered lines. I use this adaptation of Benjamin's technique to historicize and contextualize dominant notions of ideal (deviant) femininity circulating in the contemporary moment and to engage in a "reflexive" (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) analysis of my own entanglement with the norms and values which proliferate within mass media. The foundational thinking which directs my aims throughout this thesis explores the analytical possibilities of joining the complementary theoretical work of Hannah Arendt and Pierre Bourdieu within an interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework.

Reconciliation of human plurality, with the commonality requisite for egalitarian political order, is arguably the central question confronting political thought today. The thesis is a response to Hannah Arendt’s insight that in the wake of the twentieth-century demise of metaphysical ultimates, we must affirm human capacity for autonomous judgment as fundamental to sustaining a world ‘fit for human habitation’. It consists of a theory of autonomy (or practical reason) designed to fully address pluralism, historicism and the critique of identity/difference. In the light of Onora O’Neill’s constructivist reading of Kantian reason, autonomy as ‘creative action’ is defended as the minimal human commonality which must be presupposed, to account for trans-cultural justice grounded in communication rather than coercion. The account of autonomy employs Kant’s notion of the ‘unconditioned’: freedom from determinate causes; that which is common to all by virtue of being particular to none. Kant’s merely formal concept is reconceived as a substantive experience within the world: the momentary suspension of existing cultural forms, identified as both a formal and substantive prerequisite to overcoming prejudices, and the achievement of trans-cultural communication. Building on Hans-George Gadamer’s tradition-dependent notion of hermeneutic judgment, creative action consists of first ‘receptive attention’, the suspension of existing understandings, pre-conceptions etc., and open receptivity to what is there, and second, ‘responsive judgment’, revitalisation of authoritative standards internal to a ‘vital sphere of practice’ – a realm of human activity whose authoritative standards are constituted through creative action. Creative action is defended as a minimal, generic prerequisite for the realisation of any transcendent value (such as truth, justice and beauty) within a vital sphere of practice. This ideal of autonomy coheres with a pluralist ideal of society as a web of equal, autonomous yet interdependent vital spheres of practice. A distinctive feature of the thesis is that it provides, in addition to a maximally-capacious account of autonomy, a radically pluralist ontological and epistemic framework. Contemporary political thought embracing human plurality and difference has for the most part been wary of metaphysical ultimates, opting for epistemic abstinence and avoiding explicit metaphysical commitments. I argue, however, that a substantive, philosophical account of the possibility of trans-cultural justice requires admission of that which transcends the culturally-conditioned, as well as adherence to some notion of philosophical truth. As western thought has inherited from Platonism and the Judeo-Christian tradition a view of truth as monological, universal and unchanging, radical, pluralist revisions are required. Within the proposed two-tiered epistemology, creative action takes the place of reason. This epistemic framework retains the transcendent content of truth, while fully acknowledging the cultural-relativity of particular socio-cultural forms. It allows the theory to stand as a substantive, philosophically-vindicated theory of autonomy, but without rendering it vulnerable to post-structuralist charges of cultural-imperialism. The thesis shows that the universalist, egalitarian commitments of the Kantian tradition can be reconciled with strong commitment to difference and diversity, but only if the philosophical and political realms abdicate their traditional positions of privilege vis a vis other spheres of practice.

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 96-100). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--George Mason University, 2009. / Vita: p. 60. Thesis director: Wayne Froman. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Philosophy. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed June 10, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-59). Also issued in print.