The field of critical theory within organizational theory discusses different specific situations in a middle manager´s work life. The focus often lies within the private sector and a gap can be found in research in the public sector. Universities are among the most complex environments in the public sector, and the middle manager position, the prefect, becomes even more complex than in other organizations. The purpose of this paper is to look at the dilemmas and paradoxes that middle managers in higher education, handle as prefects. We aim to uncover the conflict between interests, values and ideas that creates organizational hypocrisy. The research has an emancipatory philosophy with an inductive approach, which has led to ten interviews with prefects in the south of Sweden. The findings indicate that there are dilemmas in working as a collegial leader and that a paradoxical situation arises between what people see as valuable attributes in a prefect and what they want and need. There is also a paradoxical relationship between the feelings about a decoupled organization depending on who in the hierarchy is exploiting it. There are also findings that support the fact that the extensive amount of administrative duties for prefects generates hypocrisy. The research also found dilemmas concerning individualistic employees. Since the combination of organizational hypocrisy, paradoxes, dilemmas and prefects has not been researched before, this can be an interesting insight in how these may coexist.

This project utilized a form of arts based educational research described as analog hypertext to develop interpretative material representing multiple critical, theoretical, and disciplinary perspectives on objects in a university art museum’s object study gallery. Drawing on scholars’ recommendations for postcolonial interpretation of non-Western art, the project created a web of information, which simultaneously revealed and critiqued the underlying ideologies and power structures shaping the museum’s display in an effort to change existing interpretive practice. The project developed five color-coded thematic self-guided tours—art as commodity, spiritual practice, technology and cultural evolutionism, mortuary rituals, and postcolonial perspectives—presented to the public as an interpretive exhibition invited visitors’ contributions. This paper explores how the analog hypertext functions as both a research tool and a content delivery device for the representation of multiple critical perspectives, fostering interdisciplinary perspectives and visitor meaning-making in the process.

There is a close relationship between art and philosophy. From time to time, philosophy attempts to make art its theme. Invariably it has to acknowledge the very qualities of art that it seeks to explain - art’s elusiveness and its indeterminateness. On the other hand, it is the nature of art to philosophise within itself, about itself, and about the world. In this sense it operates as tacit philosophy. The language of art and the language of philosophy differ in form; but recent turns in philosophy have led to the expression of its truth in terms that transcend language and question its own epistemic structure. At the same time, art has always acknowledged its approach to ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ as being ‘other’ to that epistemology. This ‘otherness’ to traditional ways of knowing is recognised in philosophical discourse as ‘alterity’. The thesis posits that in art alterity has always been, and remains, tacit and integral to art’s being. Thus, by exploring the ways in which – through alterity – art and philosophy intersect and interweave, the thesis aims to reveal a new kind of knowledge that transcends the rational and the empirical but is nonetheless not only valid, but of the very highest integrity. That knowledge is transmitted through a particular critical and creative approach to philosophy and to art that opens the possibility of the ‘event’ of Alterity. The thesis uses a discourse of philosophy and critical theory to reveal Alterity in philosophy, principally through the work of Derrida, Heidegger, Adorno, and Levinas; Alterity in art through the works of Fra Angelico, Pollock, Fantin-Latour, Malevich, Vermeer, and Saitowitz; and Alterity in my own art practice through a set of six sculptures.

<p>There is a scene in Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale in which Offred, eponymous handmaid to the totalitarian theocracy that now governs America, is overwhelmed by the sudden need to laugh. Spasms wrack her body. She crams her hands into her mouth, she fears she will vomit, she imagines she is giving birth. Finally, well aware that her convulsions would register as subversion to a regime that polices bodies and supervises affects, Offred crawls into a cupboard in an effort to "compose herself." Laughter without Humor arose from this passage, from the inexplicable laughter that overwhelms Offred's disciplined body and demolishes her carefully composed self. The suspicion that laughter challenges the self-contained "I" has always been buried in our idioms: the subject "dissolves" in laughter, the individual proliferates suddenly into a "barrel" or "bundle" of laughs, ontological boundaries are breached as we "roar" or "bark" with laughter. In the twentieth-century, laughter appears across a wide variety of artistic forms as a vigorous affective force capable of convulsing being and exploding calcified structures of thought. This project examines the interrelationship between fictional depictions of humorless laughter and the dissolution and reconfiguration of the subject in poststructuralist theory.</p><p>The field of humor studies, which counts Aristotle, Kant, and Freud among its contributors, avoids laughter's irrational properties and instead offers scientific reasons--physiological, evolutionary, and psychological--as to why we laugh. In contrast, Laughter without Humor seeks to understand laughter on its own terms by posing an alternate question: what does laughter do? In four chapters, I consider four discrete strains of humorless laughter: the dankly corporeal flow of a specifically female "dangerous laughter" (Chapter 1), the blustering wave of "ecstatic laughter" associated with mystic experience (Chapter 2), an infectious "grotesque laughter" that tosses the individual back and forth between ontological categories with uncanny fervor (Chapter 3), and the shattering shriek of "atomic laughter" that indexes the experience of total nuclear annihilation (Chapter 4). In particular I focus on literary work from William James, André Breton, T.S. Eliot, Nathanael West, Henri Michaux, Kurt Vonnegut, Stanley Kubrick, Margaret Atwood, and Steven Millhauser; and on philosophical texts by Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément, Julia Kristeva, Édouard Glissant, Brian Massumi, and Eugenie Brinkema. I ultimately argue that the messy burst of laughter disturbs the intelligibility of both self and text. In so doing, it clears a space to imagine new, provisional models of personhood that are based on affective entanglement rather than rational self-containment.</p> / Dissertation

<p>Dwelling with the alterity of the deep sea, my dissertation, "Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater," considers how the ocean environment produces cognitively estranging conditions for conceptualizing media and media theory. Concepts in media theory have thus far exhibited what I call a "terrestrial bias," theorizing primarily dry technologies through a language whose metaphorics have developed through human lives lived on land, rather than in the volume of the sea. In order to better understand the "terrestrial bias" in media theory, I develop a critical method of "conceptual displacement" that involves submerging key concepts in media theory underwater, engaging both literary texts and digital media. Specifically, I turn to Vilém Flusser's speculative fiction text "Vampyroteuthis Infernalis" to rethink "inscription"; ocean data visualizations to rethink "database"; and Jacques Cousteau's diving narratives to rethink "interface." Focusing on the ocean expands the critical discussion of the relation between embodiment and knowledge taken up by feminist science studies, and necessitates the inclusion of the environmental conditions for knowing; our milieu determines the possibilities of our media, and the way that we theorize our media in language. The ocean thus serves as an epistemic environment for thought that estranges us from our terrestrial habits of perception and ways of speaking about media, providing an important check on the limits of theory and terrestrial knowledge production, compelling us to have the humility to continually try to see--and describe--differently. </p><p>Turning to the ocean to rethink concepts in media theory makes apparent the interrelation between technology, desire, ecology, and the survival of human communities. While media theory has long been oriented toward preservation and culture contexts of recording, studying media in ocean contexts requires that we consider conditions that are necessarily but contingently ephemeral. Yet to engage with the ephemeral is also to engage with issues of mortality and the desire towards preservation--of what we want to remain--a question that especially haunts coastal communities vulnerable to sea-level rise. What the ocean teaches us, then, is to reflect on what we want our media technologies to do, as well as the epistemological question of how we are habituated to see and perceive. By considering the ocean as a medium and as an estranging milieu for reconsidering media concepts, I argue for an expanded definition of "media" that accounts for the technicity of natural elements, considering how media futures are not only a matter of new digital innovations, but fundamentally imbricated with the archaic materiality of the analog.</p> / Dissertation

This study explores the phenomenon of discrimination as it pertains to the experiences of international students studying in Southeast Louisiana. This qualitative study seeks to answer the questions of where and how international students perceive discrimination, and how discrimination affects a student's overall experience as a foreign student in the United States. The intent of this research study is to address the sizable gap in the literature on perceived discrimination towards international students, and introduces specific concepts from critical theory in developing a formal conceptual framework model for continued research in this area. Utilizing the concept of sites of struggle as a conceptual framework, eleven international students studying in Southeast Louisiana were interviewed about their perceptions of discrimination from within three areas of interest: federal regulations, educational arena, and social arena. Their responses are presented using their own words via verbatim transcripts of the interview sessions. A discussion of the respondents' experiences and its significance to their perceptions of discrimination within the three areas of interest follows. Implications for policy, practice, and research, along with suggestions for future research conclude this study.

A presente dissertação de mestrado é um estudo teórico fundamentado na Teoria Crítica da Sociedade e alguns conceitos da Psicanálise freudiana acerca da questão da dominação que recaí sobre os indivíduos da Sociedade Administrada. Com o objetivo de investigar o fenômeno de apropriação do inconsciente na Sociedade Administrada, o estudo se centrou em três obras principais dos autores T. W. Adorno e M. Horkheimer; Excurso I Ulisses - ou Mito e Esclarecimento, Teoria Freudiana e o padrão da propaganda fascista e Sobre a relação entre Sociologia e Psicologia. Além dessas obras principais, outros textos dos autores, bem como uma vasta seleção de escritos de S. Freud, e de autores contemporâneos, complementaram os materiais teóricos investigados. Cada uma dessas obras protagoniza, respectivamente, um dos três capítulos que organizam o trabalho e as articulações teóricas partiram dos elementos principais presentes nesses textos. Os resultados demonstram que parte do inconsciente se constitui a partir do processo de sedimentação de conteúdos conflituosos no decorrer do desenvolvimento contraditório da civilização; um depositário de conteúdos negados pela história. Embora a sociedade não possua um inconsciente, ela carrega consigo, em suas diversas instituições, a marca das contradições do progresso, influenciando assim, o desenvolvimento de seus integrantes de forma estrutural. A pesquisa ainda revelou que devido aos diferentes processos de enfraquecimento do indivíduo, as pessoas tornam-se mais suscetíveis a integrar movimentos de massa, nos quais conteúdos de seu inconsciente são manipulados pelos agitadores e discursos ideológicos para fins de dominação. A Sociedade Administrada demonstrou possuir uma complexa rede de controle sobre as pessoas, escamoteando as possibilidades emancipatórias de seus membros, que ficam aprisionados e incapacitados de perceber os mecanismos de controle que regem suas vidas. O nível de controle que a sociedade administrada exerce sobre seus membros, regularmente depende de níveis de influência que atingem seu psiquismo também na dimensão inconsciente para garantir o seu sucesso. Dessa forma, também foi possível investigar como existem diversos níveis de controle diferentes operando nas pessoas, podendo culminar na mais alta expressão dessa dominação, o sujeito reflexo, cujas determinações psíquicas inconscientes estariam completamente integradas às sociais / This dissertation is a theoretical study based on the Critical Theory of Society and some concepts of Freudian Psychoanalysis about the question of domination that falls on the individuals of the Administered World. With the objective of investigating the phenomenon of appropriation of the unconscious in the Administered World, the study focused on three main works by the authors T. W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer; \" Excerpt I Ulysses - or Myth and Enlightenment \", \"Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda\" and \"On the Relationship between Sociology and Psychology\". In addition to these major works, other authors\' texts, as well as a wide selection of writings by S. Freud and contemporary writers, complemented the theoretical materials investigated. Each of these works receives the central spot in one of the three chapters that organize the work and the theoretical articulations of the main elements present in these texts. The results demonstrate that part of the unconscious is constituted from the sedimentation process of conflicting contents in the course of the contradictory development of civilization; a depository of contents denied by history. Although society does not possess an unconscious, it carries with it, in its various institutions, the mark of the contradictions of progress, thus influencing the development of its members in a structural way. This research has further revealed that because of the different processes of weakening the individual, people become more susceptible to integrate mass movements, in which contents of their unconscious are manipulated by agitators and ideological discourses for the purpose of domination. The Administered World has demonstrated that it has a complex network of control over the people, by concealing the emancipatory possibilities of its members, who are imprisoned and unable to perceive the control mechanisms that govern their lives. The level of control that the administered world exerts on its members regularly depends on levels of influence that reach its psyche also in the unconscious dimension to ensure its success. In this way, it was also possible to investigate how there are different levels of control operating in people, and can culminate in the highest expression of this domination, the reflex subject, whose unconscious psychic determinations would be completely integrated with the social ones

O objetivo da presente tese é apresentar o conceito de tipo antropológico autoritário tal qual exposto em A Personalidade Autoritária de Theodor W. Adorno et. al.. Esta tese defende que Adorno se baseia em noções metapsicológicas freudianas para compor uma antropologia do tipo autoritário, algo que o autor constrói a partir de conceitos próprios da primeira geração da Teoria Crítica. Para tanto, desenvolvemos dialeticamente as concepções de natureza e história, de modo que a antropologia enquanto natureza humana perde uma conotação substancialista e imutável, sendo compreendida muito mais como um diagnóstico socioeconômico crítico. Seria por uma determinação capitalista autoritária que pretende escamotear as contradições sociais mediante naturalizações que a formação de um tipo autoritário que também evita as contradições de sua própria psique seria concebida. Para defendê-lo, procuramos contrapor Fromm e Adorno no que concerne às diferentes leituras da psicanálise freudiana no Instituto de Pesquisas Sociais; descrever a antropologia exposta em Dialética do Esclarecimento, livro tomado como base para o desenvolvimento de A Personalidade Autoritária; compreender alguns elementos da crítica da economia-política de Marx, Lukács, Sohn-Rethel, Pollock e Horkheimer implicados na concepção de antropologia em questão; analisar Ideia de história natural de Adorno para o desenvolvimento de uma dialética entre natureza e história; abordar os estudos sobre o rádio e o texto sobre Martin Luther Thomas de Adorno para a exposição do clima cultural autoritário determinado pela indústria cultural que irá influenciar, por sua vez, o tipo antropológico autoritário; debater alguns dos conteúdos presentes nos capítulos assinados por Adorno em A Personalidade Autoritária; e, finalmente, contribuir com uma leitura da teoria freudiana na formulação de alguns conceitos relacionados ao tipo autoritário como representação substitutiva, objeto pulsional, narcisismo, racionalidade, sadomasoquismo, paranoia, fetichismo, inquietante, entre outros. / The purpose of this thesis is to present the concept of an \"authoritarian anthropological type\" as discussed in \"The Authoritarian Personality\" of Theodor W. Adorno et. Al.. This thesis argues that Adorno called upon Freudian metapsychological notions to compose an authoritarian anthropology and followed theories of the first generation of Critical Theory. Therefore, we develop dialectically the conceptions of \"nature\" and \"history\", so that anthropology as a human nature loses a \"substantialist\" and immutable connotation and gains a meaning of a critical socioeconomic diagnosis. The formation of an authoritarian type - which avoids the contradictions of its own psyche - is determined by an authoritarian capitalist environment - which avoids social contradictions through naturalizations. To defend it, we seek to counter Fromm and Adorno with respect to the different readings of Freudian psychoanalysis at the Institute for Social Research; to describe the anthropology exposed in \"Dialectics of Enlightenment\", book taken as a fundament for the development of \"The Authoritarian Personality\"; to understand some elements of the critique of political economy of Marx, Lukács, Sohn-Rethel, Pollock, and Horkheimer implied in the anthropology conception in question here; to analyze Adorno\'s \"Idea of natural history\" to develop a dialectic between \"nature\" and \"history\"; to approach the Adorno\'s studies on the radio and the text on \"Martin Luther Thomas\" to expose the authoritarian cultural climate determined by the cultural industry that influence the authoritarian anthropological type; to debate some of the contents presented in the chapters signed by Adorno in \"The Authoritarian Personality\"; and, finally, to contribute with a reading of the Freudian theory in regard to the formulation of some concepts related to the authoritarian type - as substitutive representation, drive object, narcissism, rationality, sadomasochism, paranoia, fetishism, uncanny, etc..

\"O que é o Esclarecimento?\" Em mais de uma oportunidade Michel Foucault retoma a célebre questão lançada no século XVIII no intuito de interpelar as imbricações entre formas de racionalidade e efeitos de poder na Modernidade. No cerne dessa conexão, enfatizará o papel das resistências que acompanham, enredam, transformam esse campo de interações múltiplas, com especial destaque à postura que virá a designar, no final dos anos 1970, como uma \"atitude crítica\" em face do presente. Esta tese confronta leituras como a de Axel Honneth que, ao considerar Foucault um \"teórico do poder\", atribui-lhe uma concepção de racionalidade como processo de extensão da dominação individual e coletiva que culminaria por inviabilizar qualquer possibilidade crítica ou de emancipação dos sujeitos. Nosso objetivo central trata de ressaltar que Foucault não promulga em suas análises qualquer concepção de racionalidade como invariante universal - meta-antropológica ou meta-histórica -, mas busca antes ressaltar a história e geografia das racionalidades promovendo uma \"crítica racional da razão\" que compreende igualmente a crítica de seus efeitos concretos de poder. Isso porque Foucault não concebe o poder em termos estritamente repressivos, como privação ou proibição da liberdade, fenômeno puro da dominação, mas como jogos estratégicos com relações de força e de resistência presentes nas configurações e transformações complexas das formas de organização social e subjetiva. A atitude crítica, como modo de pensar, como postura ética e política, como compreensão e questionamento do momento ou do tempo presente constitui-se como um dos motores dessa transformação possível. Ora, seguindo o fio subterrâneo que a liga a Kant, Foucault destaca que a atitude crítica pode tomar formas diversas, a partir de tradições filosóficas distintas e em contextos históricos variados. Em nossa análise, além de Max Weber, privilegiamos a interlocução que o pensador francês estabelece com algumas das tópicas e autores da Teoria Crítica, notadamente com questões colocadas por Adorno e Horkheimer, de modo a explorar suas afinidades, tensões e especificidades. Argumentamos que é nesse diálogo que a postura foucaultiana expressa e afirma sua singularidade ao recolocar a questão do Esclarecimento como questão atual, inconclusa, inadiável. / \"What is Enlightenment?\" Michel Foucault revisited more than once to the prominent question raised in the eighteenth century in order to challenge the imbrication between forms of rationality and effects of power in modernity. At the core of this connection, he emphasizes the role of resistances that follow, enmesh and transform this field of multiple interactions, highlighting what he called, in the late 1970s, a \"critical attitude\" towards the present. This thesis confronts interpretations - like Axel Honneth\'s one - that consider Foucault as a \"theorist of power\" and assign to his work an idea of rationality as a process of the expansion of individual and collective domination that would cause the impossibility of any critique and also of the emancipation of subjects. The main purpose of this thesis is to emphasize that Foucault does not use in his analyses any conception of rationality as an universal invariable - a meta-anthropological and meta-historical one -, instead his analyses aim at highlighting the history and geography of rationalities, encouraging a \"rational critique of reason\" that includes the critique of the actual effects of power. This is because Foucault does not conceive the power on strict repressive terms, such as deprivation or restriction of liberty or a pure phenomenon of domination, but as strategic games of power relations and resistances within the complex of configurations and transformations of the forms of social and subjective organization. The critical attitude - as a way of thinking, a political and ethical attitude, an understanding and a critique of the present - is one of the driving forces of this possible change. Following the underground thread that connect it to Kant, Foucault emphasizes that the critical attitude may assume different forms according to the different philosophical traditions and historical contexts. In addition to the dialogue with Max Weber, this thesis analyses the interlocution of the French philosopher with some authors and issues of the Critical Theory, especially those raised by Adorno and Horkheimer, in order to explore their affinities, tensions and particularities. I argue that it is in this dialogue that the foucauldian attitude manifests and affirms its singularity to reinstall the question of Enlightenment as a current, open and urgent question.

<p>This dissertation, titled “Uncertainty Discourse: Climate Models, Gender, and Environmental Literature in the Anthropocene,” takes a feminist approach to sustainability through the lens of climate science and English-language environmental fiction. I diagnose the appearance of what I call a discourse of uncertainty, which describes new constitutions of thought and social organization emerging in response to the structural uncertainties that characterize climate change. I root this discourse in the scientific practice of climate modeling, by which scientists calculate the probability, or degrees of uncertainty, of future weather scenarios. Though climate models inform socio-political preparations for a climate-changed future, their utility has gone unheeded in the humanities. I fill this gap by placing scientific and literary depictions of uncertainty into conversation to explore their epistemological and ethical implications for a climate-changing future through issues such as gender and representation, politics and sustainability, and knowledge and time. I not only trace how uncertainty is manifested in contemporary environmental literature, such as Ian McEwan’s <i>Solar</i> (2010) and Barbara Kingsolver’s <i>Flight Behavior </i>(2012), but also consider the drama of South Asian women playwrights alongside the works of feminist scholars, philosophers, and activists.</p>