Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1999. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references and index.

This dissertation explores the theological and ethical preoccupations of Phillis Wheatley in colonial New England. Chapter 1 frames the conversation around relevant research and states the project thesis to explain Wheatley’s background and eventual role as mother of African-American literature. Wheatley manipulates neoclassical Greek mythological images to subversively critique British-American racial hierarchicalism. Chapter 2 explains the meaning of an Afrosensitive hermeneutic, exploring the epistemological development of Afrocentric thought as a Eurocentric counterfactual. Bebbington’s quadrilateral is the exploratory portal used to discern Wheatley’s commitment to evangelical theology. Chapter 3 assesses Wheatley’s critique of exemplary or open American exceptionalism through the lens of chattel slavery. Critical race theory becomes the analytical lens to understand the intersection of religion, race, class, and gender on Wheatley sociopolitical imagination. Chapter 4 develops a conversation on social justice and neighbor love between Wheatley and St. Augustine (AD 354-430) of Hippo. Although Wheatley never directly quotes, she exemplifies Augustinian spirituality in her response to injustice. They both desire to restore the image of God through a comprehensive view of the gospel—vertical, horizontal, and cosmological. Chapter 5 addresses Wheatley’s staunch commitment to Christian orthodoxy and social activism. She honored Christ as the exclusive way of salvation through literary apologetics in select poems. She also leveraged her privilege amongst societal influencers to advocate for the immediate emancipation of African peoples. Wheatley believed that enslavers lacked a comprehensive understanding of love. Hence, she confronted inconsistent religious and philosophical beliefs through her poetry and prose. Chapter 6 summarizes the dissertation by demonstrating the theological and ethical commitments of a contemporary afrosensitive evangelical spirituality by critiquing key figures within the realm of Afrocentric spirituality, illustrating why afrosensitive evangelical spirituality reverences biblical authority while exercising cultural agency when examining African diasporic narratives.

Black Western Thought: Toward a Theory of the Black Citizen-Object troubles and challenges the philosophical category of the human, particularly the black human. Oppositionally reading Enlightenment texts like Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Emanuel Kant’s Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and Sublime, I extend Emanuel Eze and Charles Mills critiques of Kant and the Enlightenment through relinquishing the quest for a black humanity. This project embraces the abjection of blackness and posits that in the rejection of quest for humanity the black citizen-object reveals heretofore unexplored ontology, epistemology, poetics, and philosophy. Through careful close-reading of poets Phillis Wheatley, Terrance Hayes, Natasha Trethewey, and Jericho Brown, this project explores the political and aesthetic possibility of extending the democracy of subjectivity and presiding intelligence to black aesthetic and intellectual productions. Moving away from the notion of blackness as fear-inducing, funky, reprobate, and disorderly, this project constantly seeks to play with the dark rather than play in the dark. This act of ‘playing with the dark’ manifests as an interrogation of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in relationship to quantum physics and visibility / invisibility of blackness. The project hopes to shake the very stable ground of the ontology of aesthetics and academic discourse. / text

This dissertation is an examination of the characteristics of Phillis Wheatley's couplet poems in the areas of meter, rhyme, and syntax. The metrical analysis employs Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser's theory of iambic pentameter, the rhyme examination considers the various factors involved in rhyme selection and rhyme function, and the syntactic analysis is conducted within the theoretical framework of a generative grammar similar to that proposed in Noam Chomsky's "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" (1965). The findings in these three areas are compared with the characteristics of a representative sample of the works of Alexander Pope, the poet who supposedly exerted a strong influence on Wheatley, a black eighteenth century American poet.

Since Montesquie's incisive differentiation of the principal forms of governance and their components, the rate at which theories of governance have been proposed has exponenetially grown now when we have a plethora of different theories on the best way to govern, lead and /or manage. Anyone interested in this topic is confronted with many conflicting schools of thought, from Weber's theory of the 'iron cage' to Wheatley's new-age concept of leadership. This seeming maze of different theories can be seen merely as different perspectives on the overall embracing concept of governance which is essentially the holistic conception and explanation of differentiated purposive human systems - about paradigms and systems that have their inception in and are limited by, human mind. The core challenge, then, is to put some order and rationale into the understanding of this 'many-headed ' concept of governance. This thesis meets this challenge by mapping out a cognitive framework that is capable of embracing and ordering all the multitudinous differentiated conceptions of human governance experienced at the different levels of society. In essence, this thesis reformulates the concept of organizational governance in terms of the metaphor of the human mind. The cognitive model of governance are embraced by the different organizations in different circumstances and why this is appropriate and necessary, how and why governance changes over time, and how it is important to institute processes of inquiry, dialogue and reflection in order to know and choose more consciously. As a consequence of using the mind metaphor to analyse governance in Western society, the key conclusion is that there has been a substantial shift or evolution in thinking from a mangerialist mindset to the more abstract politicist mindset. This fundamental shift in mindset is pervasive and influences the perspectives taken at many levels in the human governance systems. / Doctor of Philosophy (Management)

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-61).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2000. / Title from title page screen, viewed May 4, 2006. Dissertation Committee: John Shields (chair), Lucia Getsi, Nancy Tolson. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 179-190) and abstract. Also available in print.

From the 1850s Glasgow was a major industrial, commercial and mercantile city, with notoriously poor working-class housing. During the 1915 Rent Strike many women physically resisted rent increases and prevented evictions from the tenements. The strikes ended when the Government passed the Rent Restrictions Act 1915, which returned rents to pre-war levels. This was in response to a political and working-class struggle that challenged the rule of law. Rather than focussing narrowly on the role of the women alone, or on the strike as inspiration for anti-capitalist resistance, the 2015 Centenary seemed opportune to examine why the Rent Strike was successful, its place in the longer struggle for decent housing, the role of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and its leaders, and their collaborations with labour and women’s organisations. From the 1890s the ILP was central to labour’s campaign in elections and in fostering political collaboration with many groups representing labour. John Wheatley and Patrick Dollan, former miners, were leaders in strengthening the ILP organisation and its community relations. This collaborative structure supported the women leading the rent resistance in the tenements. It was also the platform for Wheatley and Dollan, nationally and municipally, to continue their life-long work to improve the housing and living standards of working people. Wheatley became Minister of Health in 1924 in Britain’s first Labour Government, and Dollan was Lord Provost in Glasgow’s first majority Labour Council in 1938. Glasgow’s systemic anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice has, surprisingly, remained unexamined in relation to the Rent Strike. Two historians claimed, without presenting evidence, that bigotry was overcome or briefly transcended. The evidence reviewed here indicated that it did not go away, but that it had no impact on the Rent Strike as it simply offered no stimulus or opportunity to express the existing racist or religious prejudice. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / Glasgow, with notoriously poor working-class housing, was a major centre in 1915 for British engineering, munitions and shipbuilding industries during the First World War. Women who lived in Glasgow’s tenements organised rent strikes and physically resisted rent increases and evictions. They were supported by the Independent Labour Party and the collaborations it developed before and during the war with organisations representing the interests of women and labour. These strikes, the rent agitations in England, and the threat of industrial action in Glasgow, forced the Government to pass the Rent Restrictions Act 1915, which limited rents to pre-war levels. Two former miners, John Wheatley and Patrick Dollan, were leaders in organising this class victory. They recognised the Act’s limitations and then worked nationally and municipally in the longer struggle for better working-class housing. Glasgow’s systemic anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry did not disappear but played no significant role during the Rent Strike.

Through their editorial arrangements of African-American, Euro-American and European poetry, fiction and news, Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery periodicals (The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper) imagine a cosmopolitan discourse that predates the segregated realities of the antebellum United States. In spite of Southern blockades against the infiltration of Northern texts, Douglass’s material space uniquely capitalized on the limited restrictions of his reprinting culture to relocate the voice of the ‘outraged slave’ onto a global stage. From the poems of Phillis Wheatley and William Cowper to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Douglass’s own novella “The Heroic Slave,” this project considers how Douglass’s literary inclusions—and exclusions—complicate our static considerations of the historicized Douglass and exhibit his savvy insertions of black print into an exclusive, transatlantic nineteenth-century print culture.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2003. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The advent of the computer age has seen many fundamental changes in the economics. The ease with which organisations can store and transmit information in unprecedented quantities and speeds has changed the face of the economy as well as the way in which organisations conduct their day to day operations. Information has become the primary resource for organisational competitiveness and this has seen an increasing drive for efficient information generation and management in an economy that is interconnected on a global scale. The demand for better information management practices is driven by the realisation that the global economy is susceptible to sudden and unpredictable changes that can potentially have global consequences. The more information organisations have at their disposal, the better their chances are of remaining competitive and relevant in the global economy. The informational economy confronts organisations with two very significant problems, the first is information overload due to the sheer volume of information that is available to them. The second problem is that despite the volume of available information organisations still are not privy to all the information that is required to lessen the impact of uncertainty that is so characteristic of the global economy. Organisations therefore always run the' risk of becoming irrelevant if they do not change constantly. This drive for continuous change and the dependence on information has led some organisational theorists and economists to compare the global economy and organisations to nonlinear systems found in nature. Examples of nonlinear systems are living organisms, ecologies and solar systems. All of these systems are characterised by high levels of interconnectedness and interdependence among individual units within a shared environment, which they co-create. Nonlinear systems are of particular interest to organisational theorists because these systems process information about the environment to adapt in an unpredictable way to unpredictable changes. Such systems are incredibly resilient because they are able to learn and adapt to different conditions. Another notable aspect of nonlinear systems is the clear structured and complex organisation that they exhibit in the absence of centralised control mechanisms. Every unit has the liberty to experiment with new designs and from the success of individual units an organised and stable system emerges with a strong link between the success of individuals and the whole system. The order that exists within nonlinear systems is known as self-organisation because it is not superimposed but emerges instead in a spontaneous manner. Nonlinear systems are therefore more than just the sum of their parts. The notion of nonlinear systems and self-organisation has seen authors such as Stacey, Wheatley and Senge develop new ideas about organisational development, leadership and organisational strategic thinking. Their ideas are based on what is popularly known as 'The New Science'. These ideas attempt to encourage organisations realise that the global economy functions as a nonlinear system and that organisations stand a better chance of success if they learn to understand the principles of nonlinear systems and to utilise the inherent creative and organising characteristics of such systems. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die aanvang van die rekenaar era het verskeie fundamentele veranderinge in ekonomie mee gebring. Die gemak en snelheid waarmee organisasies informasie kan stoor en versprei is ongekend en het terselfde tyd die voorkoms van die ekonomie verander asook die wyse waarop organisasies op 'n daaglikse basis funksioneer. Informasie het die belangrikste hulpbron geword vir organisasies in terme van kompetering en dit het 'n groter dryfkrag vir doeltreffende informasie ontginning en bestuur mee gebring in 'n ekonomie wat op 'n wereldwye skaal in mekaar gevleg is. Die aanvraag vir beter informasie bestuur praktyke word gedryf deur die wete dat die wereld ekonomie vatbaar is vir skielike en onvoorspelbare veranderinge wat potensieel 'n wereldwye impak kan he. Hoe meer informasie organisasies tot hul beskikking het hoe beter is hul kans om relevant en kompeterend te bly in die wereld ekonomie. Die informasie ekonomie konfronteer organisasies met twee fundamentele probleme. Die eerste gevaar is dat organisasies oorlaai kan word met informasie as gevolg van die absolute volume van beskikbare informasie. Die tweede probleem spruit voort uit die feit dat ten spyte van die beskikbare informasie, lei organisasies steeds aan 'n gebrek aan algehele informasie, organisasies kan dus nooit toegang he tot al die informasie wat benodig word om die impak te verminder van die onsekerheid wat so kenmerkend is van die wereld ekonomie. Organisasies loop dus altyd die gevaar om irrelevant te raak as hulle nie konstant aanpas by nuwe omstandighede nie. Hierdie soeke na konstante verandering en die afhanklikheid op informasie het verskeie organisasie teoretici en ekonome daartoe gelei om 'n vergelyking te tref tussen die wereld ekonomie en organisasies aan die een kant en nie-Iiniere sisteme wat in die natuur voorkom. Voorbeelde van sulke sisteme sluit lewende organismes, ekostelsels en sterre stelsels in. Die komponente van al hierdie sisteme is op 'n komplekse wyse inmekaar geweef en interafhanklik op mekaar binne die raamwerk van gemeenskaplike omgewing waarvoor hierdie komponente mede verantwoordelik is. Nie-liniere sisteme is van besondere belang vir organisasie teoretici omdat die betrokke sisteme informasie verwerk aangaande hul omgewing om op 'n onvoorspelbare wyse aan te pas by onvoorspelbare veranderinge in die omgewing. Sulke sisteme is uitsonderlik standvastig deurdat hulle kan leer en aanpas by verskillende omstandighede. Nog 'n merkbare aspek van sulke sisteme is die duidelik gestruktureerde en komplekse organisasie wat bestaan ten spyte van 'n algehele gebrek aan gesentraliseerde beheer meganismes. Elke komponent is vry om met 'n nuwe ontwerp te eksperimenteer en vanuit die sukses van die komponente spruit die sukses van die sisteem. Die organisasie wat sigbaar is in nie-liniere sisteme staan bekend as self-organisasie omdat dit nie voortspruit uit 'n sentrale beheer meganisme nie maar instede spontaan onstaan as 'n gevolg van die aksies van komponente. Nie-Iiniere sisteme het die potensiaal om meer te kan wees as die somtotaal van hul komponente. Die beginsel van nie-liniere sisteme en selforganisasie het skrywers soos Stacey, Wheatley en Senge daartoe gelei om nuwe idees te ontwikkel rakende organisasie ontwikkeling, leierskap en strategiese beplanning in organisasies. Hierdie idees is gegrond in wat algemeen bekend staan as 'The New Science'. Die idees van hierdie skrywers is gemik daarop om organisasies aan te moedig om raak te sien dat die wereld ekonomie soos 'n nie-liniere sisteem funksioneer en dat organisasies as sulks 'n beter kans staan om sukses te behaal as hulle sou leer om die beginsels van nie-liniere sisteme te begryp en die inherente kreatiewe en organiserings eienskappe van sulke sisteme uit te buit.