Thesis advisor: Maia McAleavey / A time of rapid industrialization and burgeoning consumerism, the nineteenth century was full of things, a physical reality that is mirrored in the heavily material story worlds of Victorian literature. My dissertation investigates how objects do things in texts, exhibiting a mattered, agentic existence that decenters the human and proposes a materially-centered textual reality. In the writings of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and others, a particular set of objects-portraits, dresses, dolls, and letters-is characterized by their shared representation of the human body and the ways in which they act with, against, and independently of the characters they represent. These texts and objects emphasize the essential material components of textual realities and the ways in which objects have agency within the narrative to redefine the mattered framework of the text. The objects in this study operate on a spectrum of agency that emphasizes their role as active matter in their parent text. Going beyond the historical and cultural models that usually inform readings of things in Victorian literature, I investigate how these objects are active in upending the primacy of the human and constructing new assemblages of possibility and potentiality that cannot be accessed by the human alone. Each chapter traces the development of the agentic object in one or more texts as they reshape the structure of their fictional reality to allow objects to exist alongside with, rather than subservient to, their human creators and audiences. Acknowledging the ways in which things in texts have functioned historically and culturally in the nineteenth century, this dissertation examines how they operate textually, offering a differently centered narrative world that reimagines the role of objects as primary actors in constructing fictional realities. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, and Juliana Spahr employ innovative poetic practices attuned to nature and environment in order to understand their personal lives and depict these understandings for readers. My dissertation investigates how these poets enact an inclusive posture toward environment that many innovative and experimental women poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries possess, but are rarely recognized for. To this end, my dissertation provides counterarguments to characterizations of innovative or experimental poetic practices as reclusive, language-centric, opaque, and/or disconnected from the material world. I offer readings of poems, prose pieces, film, and art, to illustrate how materially innovative poetry compels an equally material framework for reading that is, at a foundational level, by and about the world.

This dissertation interrogates the ways in which place-based belongings are constituted through outdoor recreation. By applying material-discursive theories of rhetoric to spaces of outdoor recreation on the Colorado Plateau such as the Arizona Snowbowl ski resort, rock climbing landscapes in the Navajo Nation, adventure mountain biking practices that trace a 19th century stagecoach route, and ultra running trails at Monument Valley on the Navajo Nation and on ancient trails that connect Hopi Villages, and elsewhere, I examine the affective relationships between those activities, landscapes, and cultures. Drawing on spatial and environmental rhetoric and critical theories of race, gender, and sexuality, I analyze affective investments in white settler colonialism to argue that such spaces are more than recreational. The framework I have developed to better explain such spaces, Recreational Colonialism, positions outdoor recreation as the new language of colonialism. Recreational Colonialism is both a discourse and a performance that-in many ways explored in this dissertation-connect outdoor recreational discourses to a trifecta of oppressions through which white settler colonialism depends: white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.

Ongoing scholarship on the impact of speculative fiction demonstrates how science fiction and fantasy are fundamentally concerned with interrogating the socio-political networks that define contemporary life, and in constructing alternative environments that both critique and offer solutions to present-day inequalities. This project contributes to this scholarship by focusing on the ways in which recent speculative fiction re-envisions space—including urban sites, new architectural forms, and natural landscapes—to theorize innovative forms of socio-political organization. This work draws from the spatial turn in cultural studies and critical theory that has gained popularity since the 1970s, and which takes on assumption that space and politics are always intertwined. Drawing predominantly from assemblage theory, assemblage urban theory, and new materialist theory, this project examines how human and nonhuman agents—including space itself—interact to create new spaces and relations that resist hegemonic neoliberal modes of spatial, political, and social organization. Chapter Two analyzes utopian assemblages and spaces in Bruce Sterling’s novel Distraction, deploying Noah De Lissovoy’s concept of “emergency time” and David M. Bell’s theories of place-based and affective utopias. Chapter Three examines place-making tactics in Lauren Beukes’ novel Zoo City through the lens of Abdou-Maliq Simone's concept of people as infrastructure, Deleuze and Guattari's theory of nomadology, and Jane Bennett's theory of “thing power.” Chapter Four uses the work of Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett to explore the thing power of the non-human and nature in China Mieville’s Kraken and Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. In sum, this work attempts to demonstrate how examining speculative spaces through the lens of assemblage theory can illuminate new paths for political resistance. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

abstract: This study weighs the connection of environmental crisis with race and gender in different cases of environmental crisis and conflicts. The study documents how Indigenous cosmologies and cosmopolitics, and scientific arguments converge in unexpected alliances in the advent of environmental crises. This research focuses on specific instances, or situations related to environmental justice movements addressing the environmental crisis in Mexico (and its convergences to other similar cases). I examine and present a discussion of the research methodologies and methods used to study the ‘environment’ as well as indigenous cosmologies and cosmopolitics. With this, I embark on a research that includes feminist decolonial theory, eco-feminism and material feminisms into a larger project for autonomy and decoloniality. In particular, I discuss one of the concepts that have caught the attention of those studying race and ethnicity in the Americas: mestizaje as an ordinal principle in the context of Mexico. Also, I discuss the inscriptions of the mestiza body in relation to the materiality of race and gender in the context of Latin America. It is shown how the discourse of mestizaje is tangled with the idea of a modern civilization, such as in the Mexican state. Overall, this research analyzes different responses to environmental crises; from environmental activists, community organizers to plastic artists and scientific experts. Also, it includes a literary analysis of contemporary indigenous literatures to show how state sponsored violence and settler colonialism have an incidence in gender violence by placing the female body close to nature. As global environmental problems have risen, this research contributes to the understanding of the underlying factors in environmental crises and conflict that have been overlooked. Herein lies an important possibility to reach a broader audience in different disciplines, ranging from indigenous studies to the global politics of human rights. Furthermore, this research aims to contribute to the work of environmental activists, scholars and scientists with regard to the understanding of how different arguments are used in research and advocacy work, and how they can integrate an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach when addressing environmental justice cases. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Justice Studies 2016

Complex socio-technical problems such as climate change and the opioid epidemic strain current conceptions of public problem solving. Practitioners, including technical communication researchers, need methods that address immediate needs while supporting sustained community and policy response. Drawing on new materialist theory, technical communication research methods, and participatory research design, I trace the 2015 outbreak of HIV in Scott County, Indiana, and the subsequent passage of syringe exchange legislation, to craft frameworks for collaborative research calibrated to the messiness of wicked problems. My study draws on analysis of publicly available documents related to the outbreak, and interviews with public health practitioners, and community activists in order to identify sensitizing metaphors, and map how different metaphors organize work. Mapping these differences, and the networks they create for policy-making, operational response and research makes visible the embedded work of technical communication. I hope my research will help scholars and practitioners work more closely and communicate more effectively with more interdisciplinary and diverse audiences, contributing to critical scholarship that builds better communities. <br>

This thesis formulates ecological thinking in curatorial practices, as a way to act against neoliberal values, far-right politics and find ways to work in a sensitive way in a time of accelerating ecological crisis. The current socio-political landscape, and its oppressive forces, influence profoundly the art world and whole societies at large. This thesis starts by looking how those forces affect artistic and curatorial practices, and suggests, that a counter-action for these threats could be a practice, that is informed by ecological thinking. Different, ecologically motivated curatorial practices are discussed with curators Jenni Nurmenniemi and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, as well as collective Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology. Some additional examples are drawn from the work of Mustarinda association. What comes clear, is that ecological thinking is much more than thinking about the environment or sustainability, but rather, it has connection points with theories of new materialisms, post-fossil experimentation and decolonial thought, all of which are also interconnected and entangled. This thesis gathers a praxis, that is informed by said ecological thinking, which functions both as a thinking and a doing. Ecological thinking is about radical coexistence and entangled in the materialities of the more than human world. Ecologically informed practice, then, could mean paying attention to material dimensions of practices, slowing down and rethinking exhibition formats.

[pt] Trabalhando na transversalidade entre memória e memorialização, esta tese propõe um engajamento com a materialidade a fim de explorar a memória como uma fusão de corpos (humanos e não-humanos se misturando), lugares (configurações espaço-temporais frágeis e provisórias) e práticas (ações sempre permeadas por performances e traduções), formando assemblagens mnemônicas (Freeman; Nienass; Daniell, 2016) em Ruanda no pós-genocídio. Como a memorialização em Ruanda está profundamente permeada por um tipo particular de matéria - restos humanos -, adotamos um foco corpóreo, olhando para os enredamentos entre pessoas e coisas, considerando seu embaçamento. Indo além das práticas de representação, exploramos os movimentos de fricção entre uma ampla gama de entidades que se agrupam (e desmontam) em memoriais, enfatizando seu caráter imprevisível e sublinhando suas configurações espaço-temporais provisórias. Com este movimento, esperamos energizar a paisagem com outras possibilidades além da concepção da matéria e do lugar como passivo ou estável e em direção a uma transformação mais fluida encenada no encontro entre essas entidades materiais-semióticas. Explorando encontros afetivos entre corpos e lugares, argumentamos que é apenas nesse processo que os lugares memoriais são encenados. Trabalhando sob a rubrica do novo-materialismo, sugerimos uma bricolagem de abordagens, dando conta do político em uma sensibilidade mais cooperativa-experimental (Thrift, 2008) em relação à materialidade generativa. Tal esforço nos permite lembrar e esquecer com e por meio de outros corpos, reconhecendo a importância das coisas/matéria e lugares nas práticas de memorialização em Ruanda, e convidando a participar do chamado para um envolvimento teórico e metodológico com a experiência vivida em Relações Internacionais. Mais especificamente, esta dissertação se engaja com o movimento e o fluxo dos lugares e da matéria por meio de memoriais como locais de fricção e da circularidade do corpo morto. Buscando compreender diferentes modos de agrupamentos de memória, oferecemos duas assemblagens para explorar essas diferenças: memoriais nacionais cuidadosamente projetados (Kigali, Murambi e Bisesero) e um lugar de memória espontâneo – o Rio Nyabarongo. A pesquisa destes espaços heterogêneos construídos como locais de memória é baseada em trabalho de campo realizado em Ruanda em 2011 e 2014. / [en] Working within the transversality of memory and memorialization, this dissertation proposes an engagement with materiality in order to explore memory as a fusion of bodies (human and nonhuman intermingling), places (fragile and provisional spatiotemporal configurations), and practices (actions always embedded in performances and translations), forming mnemonic assemblages (Freeman; Nienass; Daniell, 2016) in post-genocide Rwanda. As memorialization in Rwanda is deeply embedded in a particular type of matter – human remains –, we adopt a corporeal focus, looking into the entanglements between persons and things considering their blurriness. Going beyond practices of representation, we explore the movements of friction between a wide range of entities assembling (and disassembling) in memorials, stressing its unpredictable character and underlining their provisional spatiotemporal configurations. With this move, we hope to energize the landscape with other beyond the conception of matter and place as passive or stable and towards a more fluid transformation enacted in the encounter between these material-semiotic entities. Exploring affective encounters between bodies and places, we argue that it is only in this co-becoming that memorial places are enacted. Working under the rubric of new materialism, we suggest a bricolage of approaches, accounting for the political in a more co-operative-cum-experimental sensibility (Thrift, 2008) towards generative matter. Such effort enables us to remember and forget with and through other bodies, acknowledging the importance of things/matter and places in memorialization practices in Rwanda, and inviting to join the call for a theoretical and methodological engagement with the lived experience in International Relations. More specifically, this dissertation engages with movement and flux of places and matter through memorials sites as places of friction and through the circularity of the dead body. Trying to grasp different modes of memory gatherings, we offer two assemblages to explore these differences: carefully designed national-level memorial sites (Kigali, Murambi, and Bisesero) and a spontaneous place of memory – Nyabarongo River. The research on these heterogeneous spaces assembled as places of memory is based on fieldwork conducted in Rwanda in 2011 and 2014.

No description available.