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Landscape architects and researchers often try to understand power by relying on allegory or symbology to interpret expressions of authority and ideology in space. This research proposes an interdisciplinary perspective and method based on Michel Foucault’s theories of power relations to empirically analyze the discursive and material power relations in built designs. This new method of daylighting power relations is called landscape genealogy, and is applied to Director Park in Portland, Oregon. Landscape genealogy demonstrates that by charting the shifting objects, subjects, concepts, and strategies of archival discourse and connecting them to the shifting material conditions of a site, landscape researchers can daylight the societal power relations and conditions of possibility that produced a design. The results of this research indicate that landscape genealogy as a method is well-suited to producing defensible analyses of power relations in landscape designs with well-documented discursive and spatial archives.

Thesis advisor: James Bernauer / 1. This dissertation explores the apparently known object of our thought that is called poverty. To do so, it attempts an analysis that begins by noting that poverty has a past, which is not history, and constitutes destitution in specific ways. More precisely, my dissertation consists of fathoming what poverty might be by identifying those elements that, at a specific moment in our history, articulated the emergence of a problematization that continues to make its presence felt today. My goal is to pinpoint and describe those specific elements that have become conditions of possibility for a problematization of poverty which, although historically contingent, has shaped our way of thinking upon and acting against poverty. In order to carry out such a task, I have used specific conceptual tools inherited from the philosophy of Michel Foucault. 2. This dissertation contends that when the police of the poor began to be established in the second half of the Spanish and American eighteenth century the emergence of a new problematization of poverty began to crystallize. This problematization implied a discontinuity regarding the knowledge encompassed in the doctrine of charity, which nevertheless bequeathed to it some essential parts. The emergence of a police problematization supposed the emergence of governmental knowledge and the slow fading away of the problematization organized around charity. Curiously, this problematization will be constituted both in opposition to and also in articulation with the Christian doctrine of charity. 3. Chapter two of this dissertation will be devoted to the doctrine of charity as it existed at the beginning of the Spanish eighteenth century. The chapter does not affirm that such Spanish-American variations of charity were particularly novel. Yet it is important to trace its forgotten truth and organize, albeit briefly, its governmental knowledge. In doing so, it will be possible for us to not only understand better the problematization of poverty that charity generated at the beginning of the eighteenth century in both Spain and América, but also the subsequent appropriation of charity by the enlightened science of the police. At the beginning of the eighteenth century in Spain and América, Catholic charity was a regime of truth whose validity concerning poverty had no serious rivals in either the Iberian Peninsula or on American soil. Charitable governmentality articulated a problematization of poverty revolving around the threat to physical life caused by material needs, the suffering provoked by pain, the hate that inclined towards revenge, and the correction of one who has fallen into sin. A distinctive type of government will be needed to tackle each one of these issues. Thus, the regime of truth of charity will be articulated by a government of material needs and the excess of goods through the exercise of almsgiving, a government of pain through the exercise of tribulation, a government of hate through the exercise of loving your enemy, and a government of correction through the exercise of fraternal correction. Almsgiving was the charitable way of governing how to deal with material needs and excess and was organized around the precept of not killing one’s neighbor. However, almsgiving was not just a precept. Its purpose was to make the subject become entirely Christian by giving life to his faith. Thus, the giver became a charitable steward who united himself with God, with the neighbor and with himself in the act of giving. Alms initially forged this threefold unification. Charity was thus a vital regime of truth which carried on its shoulders the truth of the believer, the life of the community, and the divine government of the world. 4. In the middle of the century identified with the Enlightenment, the age-old concern about poverty found a new moment of inquietude both in Spain and in Spanish America. Within the limits marked by the thought contained in Bernardo Ward’s Obra Pía (Pious Work) (1750) and the laws on the police of the poor that established the Diputaciones de Caridad (Charity Councils) (1778), destitution emerged as a State affair that the science of the police was in charge of solving. Chapter three is devoted to the forgotten science called the science of the police. The science of the police during the Enlightenment was a body of knowledge about how to know and govern the interior of the State, including the vassals. Like all of the arts of governing, the science of the police was teleological, and happiness was its end goal. The mandate of the science of the police was to increase the forces of the interior of the State, and to do so it must first identify those forces and learn about them in order to eventually multiply them. Such identification not only refers to which of the activities were to be preferred, but also concerns the objects from which riches are gained—namely, land, merchandise, and vassals. Among these three elements, the vassals stand out as the police's privileged object of the science of the police. The wealth—and therefore the international position of the State—depends, finally, on the vassals being productive forces. Thereby a permanent attempt to conserve and increase not only the number but also the usefulness of those subjects was made in order to strengthen the State. These attempts to conserve and augment the members of the State will be part of a thesis that we could call populationist. Poverty constituted an extraordinary threat for the science of the police because destitution undermined those factors that are considered necessary to make the population grow. Significantly, the poverty considered by the science of the police poses an urgency that is not exactly the same as that conceived by charity. Destitution was a problem of the conservation of the vassals and cast the State as the giver who must address this problem. Thus, the poverty characterized by the science of the police was seen primarily as a problem for the sovereign. Destitution, and with it also the poor, become an affair of the Enlightenment State. 5. After analyzing the science of the police, we might be inclined to explain the deployment of the police of the poor as a consequence of the science of the police that left behind—finally!—the charitable alethurgy used to comprehend the poor. However, charity was called again at the moment when the police writers and statesmen began to fashion a new way to think about and govern the needy—namely, once they had to shape and deploy one specific police for the poor. Chapter four will explore the peculiar relationship of these two dissimilar bodies of knowledge in the Enlightenment device called the police of the poor. The police problematization of poverty was modeled on some charitable questions, namely: Who are the faces of poverty? Should we give to them? What ought we to give? These questions will be an opening to think about poverty in the Enlightenment. To govern the poor in the truth, nevertheless, the police of the poor will answer these questions by accepting the police’s imperative to produce and circulate wealth in order to constitute a happy State. Despite the diversity of deficiencies of the poor, the vicious idleness that defines or surrounds the poor's material needs is the most pressing urgency for the police of the poor. The perils of idleness made it imperative to lead the poor towards active productivity. Thus, the police poor was constituted by the duality represented by material necessity on the one hand and inactivity—whether viciously voluntary or dangerously forced—on the other. The sovereign is on his way to becoming a king not only of justice and peace, but also of charity that assumes, as the central element of his sovereign figure, that the king should love the poor with the love of a father. Thus, the pious king who gives police alms begins to assume and to incorporate the duty of giving alms as a function of the State. The police of the poor found in alms a method of support. Almsgiving provided a well-known and mandatory way through which each vassal could contribute to sustain the poor of the State. In fact, the obligatory nature of alms seems to have made the idea of taxes that would support this public policy unnecessary. Also, almsgiving referred to a long and well-established truth: that in the act of giving you can spiritually transform the recipient. The police alms accept—with an easiness that never ceases to astonish—the possibility of delivering spiritual alms to the poor within the State under the sovereign's auspices. Even more surprising is that one of the primary ambitions of charitable giving is also a pillar in this police re-elaboration of alms—namely, the constitution of a subject through the act of giving. 6. The difficult position of charity since the middle of the eighteenth century—that is, the dispute that this dissertation will explore concerning some of its elements—puts us on the path of what Foucault called a "reflexive moment" (Foucault, OS, 242). This is a point in which the thinkers of the Enlightenment began to reflect on the truth from which they had to understand and govern poverty. The enlightened vassals lost the familiarity they used to have concerning a charitable way of governing the material necessity of the political association; they subjected charity to criticism; and, finally, they elaborated a governmental truth, which I have called police-charity truth, to govern the poor of the State in order to alleviate destitution. The police of the poor is the expression of this moment—or maybe its articulation. With the police of the poor, the enlightened subjects intervened in the politics of their time, generating—almost paradoxically—a transformation of charity and its continuity. Such an intervention was neither announced in the charitable alethurgy nor prefigured in the science of the police. It was instead an invention that articulated some of the concepts present in both bodies of knowledge, and in doing so crystallized a truth about poverty and the poor, as well as establishing a way of governing the needy towards happiness. The Enlightenment governmental knowledge on poverty was forged at its intersection with religious charity. Such a realization puts us on the path to a conclusion by Foucault, to which James Bernauer s.j. was one of the first people to call our attention. Namely, that western modernity, instead of being characterized by its dechristianization, is sometimes modeled by processes of "Christianization-in-depth." / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Thesis advisor: James Bernauer / Michel Foucault's account of power does not foreclose the possibility of ethics; on the contrary, it provides a inescapable framework within which ethics becomes possible. A clear elaboration of both the general features common to all kinds of power relations (Chapter One), as well as the evolution of particular modes of modern power (discipline and biopower, Chapters Two and Three) demonstrates how power relations both frame and require other, ethical relations. Foucault's articulation of these ethical possibilties (Chapter Four) follows several trajectories--some rooted in contemporary politics, others in ancient ethical practices--that begin with "bodies and pleasures," and move through the communal practice of friendship, to caring for oneself and others as a critical attitude. At the core of these interconected ethical trajectories are the interwoven concepts of critique and freedom, which give Foucault the resources to articulate a provisional but sufficient justification of ethical norms and values, thus answering his most incisive and significant critics. Foucault is thus a critical theorist whose work calls us not to despair but to hope in an ongoing struggle for the good and the just. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Focusing on the context of post-uprising Tunisia and using a gender lens, I explore gender and body politics through embodied social protest. I examine the post-uprising constitutional and decision-making processes as well as discursive representations in the Constitution and the role of protesting and legitimacy in shaping institutional tools and mechanisms. I draw attention to the status of women and the LGBTQI++ community as well as vulnerable individuals and their role in social change during the country’s democratic transition by analyzing narratives and discourses around protesting and bodily rights and themes such as legibility/illegibility. I complement my analysis with three qualitative, in-depth interviews with three Tunisian activists; I also reflect on my personal experience as a former reporter and student-activist during and post uprisings. I conclude that the emergence of new forms of mobilization and discourses create unique possibilities to negotiate power and gender norms

Detta är en kvalitativ studie med ett hermeneutiskt perspektiv som berör begreppen makt, interaktion och kommunikation. Vi har valt att använda oss av en abduktiv ansats då vi utgått ifrån både teori och empiri för att få fram vårt resultat. Vårt syfte med uppsatsen var att förstå hur anställda i kundorienterade yrken påverkas av makt från ledning och kunder samtidigt som interaktionen är en stor del i arbetet som de anställda inte kan bortse ifrån. I studien har vi genomfört 10 semistrukturerade intervjuer med människor från olika kundorienterade yrken. För att analysera vår empiri har vi använt oss av Foucaults teori om makt, Karasek och Theorells kravmodell samt Goffmans teori om rollbyten och interaktion. I studien går det att läsa om att de anställda påverkas mer av makten från kunderna än från ledningen samt att interaktionen som sker i kundorienterade yrken påverkar våra respondenter, vissa mer och andra mindre. Makten finns i alla relationer och den är ständigt föränderlig, makten kan från ena stunden innehas av säljaren för att snabbt skifta och övertas av kunden. Det visar sig också att respondenterna uppskattar att få arbeta under en viss frihet och ta egna beslut. Enligt kravmodellen är det optimala att ha höga krav och att själv ha befogenhet över dessa krav. Studien visar också på att respondenterna intar olika roller på sina arbetsplatser och att flera av dem har svårt för att skilja på yrkesroll och privatroll. Gränsen mellan dessa roller är hårfin och det är lätt att omedvetet falla in i en av rollerna. / Program: Organisations- och personalutvecklare i samhället

Cette thèse explore la dynamique entre la politique environnementale internationale et l’éco-philosophie, c’est-à-dire le nexus entre les entités humaines et non humaines. Sur le plan empirique, cette recherche analyse comment le REDD+, un mécanisme adopté par la communauté internationale en 2007, construit et répond à un crime environnemental spécifique, les émissions résultant du déboisement et de la dégradation des forêts. La combinaison sur le plan théorique, de l’éco-philosophie, de la criminologie verte et des concepts foucaldiens de discours, de pouvoir et de savoir, et le recours à une méthodologie inspirée de la généalogie foucaldienne permettent d’explorer et de révéler les interactions entre les réseaux de pouvoirs et de savoirs dans la production discursive. In casu, le discours du REDD+ construit les forêts comme des biens multifonctionnels à protéger en raison de leur valeur instrumentale, le déboisement et leur dégradation comme une problématique anthropique complexe et technique, et la solution à celle-ci comme un mécanisme technique à géométrie variable. En procédant de la sorte, le REDD+ établit une nouvelle norme éco-philosophique, le technocentrisme. Par conséquent, les intérêts des entités non humaines sont une nouvelle fois relégués au second plan. De plus, le discours du REDD+ est discursivement ambivalent à l’égard des entités humaines : ils renforcent les intérêts des Etats, des entreprises actives dans le secteur de la technologie et des scientifiques et déforcent particulièrement ceux des communautés locales et des peuples autochtones des pays en développement.

China has achieved extraordinary economic growth since its profound social, political and economic reformation in 1978. Housing and tourism are two manifestations of such growth. However, problems related to the development of housing and tourism have become increasingly severe: environmentally sound rural areas are now the battlefield for the ostensible economic advancement of both sectors; the supposedly beneficial local communities in such areas end up as the sufferers of worsened living conditions; the policymakers, who are self-claimed leaders of the development in benefits of the local communities, are de facto heavily dependent upon the sales of land for tax generation. Under such circumstances, second homes - the intersection between tourism and housing - have emerged as a hot topic for industry participants, researchers and policymakers. The existing body of knowledge, in what is largely Western dominated second homes research, suggests that the key theories, assumptions and conclusions cannot be adapted to explain the development model in China. This is because of China’s unique scale, patterns, and dynamics of economic and socio-political linkages. This research therefore theorises second homes in China based on key space and tourism concepts. This thesis conceptualises second homes on an actual site in China named The Aqua, which is a tourism cluster intentionally constructed around the idea of second homes. The thesis examines the actor groups that are involved in the making of The Aqua, as well as their practice, representation and experience with it. Also, in order to uncover the potential impacts of the Aqua, this research investigates how justice is recognised and practiced between different actor groups. The outcomes of this research include: 1) a new model that visualises the power relations between different actor groups that are involved in the making of the Aqua, 2) a new theory building on Foucault’s heterotopia to help explain why the Aqua was produced as the representation of the imagined Western township, 3) new terms of apotopia and limbotopia as dismissive narratives to unwanted circumstances of tourism place-making, 4) a fresh perspective to examine the potential impacts of second homes through the lens of justice, instead of the traditional dualistic thinking of second homes as the curse or the blessing.

This study sets out to establish an hegemony of light and examine its relationship to the lens in photography. Through a series of sequenced photographs presented as an exhibition 'The Light Ages' in May 2017. The photographs were 841mm x 1189 mm Giclee prints mounted on aluminum which explore the way in which difference sources of light contribute to the identity of different spaces by fracturing and separating the light and duration of the image. The thesis explores how light permeates the English language and is inscribed in terms used to define photography. As a source of energy, light provides the very essence of visibility and defines the perception of objectivity and its limits. The geometric relationship between the light axes and the lens axis is what forms the basis of my development of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Since all photographs rely on some kind of light it was important to identify one that was developed specifically for photographic use and controlled almost exclusively by the agents of photographic representation. It also appears to mark the ontology of the image, however, as this study examines it is only one of the temporal registers. The practice seeks to tear apart these temporal registers to show the dualism and hegemony of light, how it attempts to pin down one interpretation at the expense of another. One of the greatest challenges for researchers, is to consider new photographic discourses that attempt to understand how advances in technology affect the relationship between the aesthetic and the signified. Through practice, the study tests and explores the relationship between flash light and the lens axis. It questions whether our perception of the centrality of photographic representation is the defining characteristic of photography as a stable form of representation in contemporary culture.

This project looks half a century in the past to begin making sense of how and why the obese child has become visible as a significant public problem in the United States. The central argument of this dissertation is that the development of physical education as a discipline and its articulation to the physical fitness panic of the 1950s functioned rhetorically by framing physical fitness as a category necessary for performing one's citizenship. Indeed, I argue that the articulation of the fit body to American citizenship is a crucial component in the emergence of the obese child as a public problem. By examining the interrelated themes of physical education, public problems, materialist rhetoric, ambiguity, and history, I demonstrate that rhetorical practices not only function as mechanisms for disciplining the practices of citizens, but also create opportunities for re-imagining the body and its value in society. In chapter two, I address these themes through an historicization of the disciplinary development of physical education as it changed over time. Chapter three explores the ways in which McCarthyism and increased instances of juvenile delinquency in the 1950s cultivated a politico-cultural environment that necessitated a method capable of managing the behavior of deviant individuals. This need for the management of deviance along with developments in physical education contributed to the emergence of the President's Council on Youth Fitness, an institution that drew national attention to the importance of physical fitness. Finally, chapter four examines the circulation of the ways in which physical fitness' status as a public problem was made possible by the ambiguous nature of the term fitness. In making visible the contingent nature of the fitness problem, its implications, and the means by which it operates, this study provides a starting point through which alternatives for current understandings of the body and its value can be conceived. The specific route through which such a re-conceptualization of the body could occur is found within moments where the persuasive force of language leaves room for (mis)interpretation, the liminal space created through rhetorical ambiguity.