In this thesis, I bring into conversation two political theoretical frameworks -- decolonial thought and new materialism – with the South Korean novella The Vegetarian. I suggest that the novella, especially through its protagonist, performs a form of agency which calls for a reading that hinges not on the pursuit of definitive analysis but on the recognition of a personal, affective interaction with violent status quo sensibilities. I demonstrate that there exist understandings of agency within decolonial thought and new materialism which could be attuned to this call. I suggest a method that relies upon two thinkers in these frameworks for reading the novella, and after reading the novella through this method and transparently reflecting on my own role in these texts' encounter, I demonstrate that this way of simultaneously reading the novella and the theoretical texts has the capacity to affirm the open and uncertain mutual changes that happen at their encounter. / Master of Arts / In this thesis, I bring into conversation two political theoretical schools of thought -- decolonial thought and new materialism – with the South Korean novella The Vegetarian. I suggest that the novella demonstrates a unique agency which calls for a reading that is centered not on the pursuit of definitive analysis but on the recognition of a personal, affective interaction with status quo violence. I demonstrate that there exist understandings of agency within decolonial thought and new materialism which could be attuned to this call. I suggest a method that relies upon two thinkers in these frameworks for reading the novella, and after reading the novella through this method and transparently reflecting on my own role in these texts’ encounter, I demonstrate that this way of simultaneously reading the novella and the theoretical texts has the capacity to affirm the open and uncertain mutual changes that happen at their encounter.

The purpose of this project is to examine the visual rhetoric of one online community. Drawing heavily from the work of Laurie Gries (2015), I track the evolution of an image as it circulates through a forum of photo manipulators in the group “PhotoShopBattles.” While Gries’ work traced the evolution of the iconic Obama Hope poster and its iterations in various media, this project restricts its observations to the images posted to one webpage, focusing on one evolutionary chain. By narrowing the focus to one internet forum page that evolved over the course of one week, we can observe linear evolution that occurs quite rapidly. While the study of Obama Hope covered years, the works in this study were constructed in a matter of days. Additionally, the site records the step-by-step progress of the reformed work. The Obama Hope work offers guidance to the work in this project. Using this method, an image’s evolution is broken down into steps and principles noted in the life of the image or multiple-image. By recreating a slightly modified version of Gries’ method, this work seeks to decode the meanings and outcomes that are created and changed around one set of evolving images. New materialism offers a way to explore the visual rhetorical moves of members of an online community and discuss the outcomes associated with those moves. With a deeper understanding of the environment surrounding image creation and the outcomes derived from an image, we can better understand the way image is used rhetorically online.

Drawing on Butler’s (1990, 1997) concept of performativity and the new materialist work of Barad (2007), Coole and Frost (2010), Pickering (1993), and others as a theoretical framework, this dissertation presents three articles that demonstrate the new ways to envisage the agency of human, nonhuman, and material bodies in the educational environment by examining the discursive, performative, and material practices of six Latina aspiring educational leaders. Guided by Gee’s (2014) critical discourse analysis methodology, the first article examines how my participants were constrained from moving toward their career goals and how they subverted constraints as they moved towards their goals. The second article aims to show how these women use performative, material, and discursive agency to position themselves as viable leaders in their school districts. The third article provides an argument for using posthumanist and new materialist concepts as a new way of understanding women’s leadership ontology by drawing on two examples from my broader study with aspiring Latina educational leaders.

I argue that the resources for political change do not exist as already constituted entities, whether in the form of transcendent values or an already-given consensus. Instead, they must be created; constitutive political action is rooted in creativity, and requires the creation of new movements, new powers, and new values. This creativity, though, does not come from a transcendent outside, as though a bolt from the blue. Instead, political creativity, and the creativity which humans may use to transform politics are themselves rooted in the immanent creativity of the natural and material world. I bring the sciences of Complexity into relation with the philosophies of Spinoza and DeLanda in order to argue that the world is made up of only the one reality of matter-energy, but that this matter-energy is capable of creatively generating novel phenomena. This understanding of the creativity of matter-energy is then used in order to reconceptualise political creativity in materialist terms. Political orders are constituted by a set of capacities or powers in relation, but the field of powers and their possible relations vastly exceeds any one configuration that it enters, and this field of possible relations, and the possible powers that might be formed through these relations, provide boundless resources for constitutive political change.

This interdisciplinary research bridging geography and fine art (‘geo-aesthetics’) follows contemporary artwork journeys from the studio into the public domain to discover how notions of value shift as the artwork travels. It seeks transfigurative nodes and their catalysts to explore how art matters: firstly how it becomes matter in the studio, and then how it comes to matter beyond the studio door. Two case studies at key moments of revaluation, a buy-out and a buy-in, both reveal responses to uncertainty that stress different kinds of collectivity. The first case study follows artistic practice and process in four studios in a Johannesburg atelier to investigate intrinsic value and finds ‘artistic thinking’. The second case study follows the assemblage of a private art collection managed from Cape Town, initially as an art fund, to investigate extrinsic valuation and finds ‘structural thinking’. These different modalities in the production and consumption circuitry of the artworld have unexpected correlations including shared artists and three linking concepts, namely, uncertainty, mobility, and the web. These in turn inform three observations: nested capacity, derivative value, and art as a public good. Two key findings emerge: contemporary art is itself a vector of value that performs meaning as it moves; and public interest is a central characteristic from which other valuations flow. The research uses repeat interviews, site visits and visual methods, which are triangulated with artwork trajectories to surface linkages between space and imagination. It offers a performative theory of value that speaks to an expanded new materialism. Applying an ecological framework allows a final transfiguration for an artworld ecosystem that (re)values contemporary art as part of an undercommons.

The purpose of this new materialist study was to examine the subject performativity of ‘biracial’ individuals in an interview setting in order to disrupt the humanist assumptions of racial identity in psychological research. I also sought to promote critical resistance to subjectification to examine ‘race’ without reifying participants’ raced subjects. Four research questions guided this study: How does the researcher, researched, and interview intra-activity serve to instantiate the biracial subject? Under what material alterations to the interview process do different subjects come to be? Which subjects come to be or fail to come to be in the interview intra-action? How does purposeful entanglement function during the interview process? In this experimental critical qualitative inquiry study, I interviewed five ‘black-white biracial’ undergraduate students three times each while enacting a series of agential cuts within and between each interview. By altering the flow of material during the interviews, I provoked multiple identity instantiations and analyzed the process of subjectification/individuation. Grounded in Barad’s agential realism, and guided by Simondon, Foucault, and Butler my analysis of this data suggests that humanist models of ‘racial’ identity are insufficient, and findings further suggest that a posthumanist and post-qualitative account of ‘biracial’ identity offers more insight into the performativity of ‘raced’ subjects. This research provides a path for psychological identity research to ethically evolve past the linguistic and ontological turns.

In Western thought, the concept of nature has a long history in relation to the question of what or who counts as the subject of politics. This thesis works in the relatively recent body of work that engages the possibility of ‘re-vitalizing’ nature; challenging the legitimacy of mechanistic conceptions of nature with the aim of offering the possibility of consciously different behaviour in relation to the more-than-human world. I engage with Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and Jane Bennett, in their thinking on the agency or ‘subjectivity’ of the extra-human world, nonhumans, and matter itself. While each author offers an analysis of the shortcomings of current political givens, and each proposes alternative but demonstrably associated ways of conceptually, ethically, and practically relating with nonhumans, this thesis asks: when thinking about taking nature into political account, in what ways are we at risk of forgetting the history and politics that excluded, obscured, or collapsed peoples into ‘nature’, as the very operation of bringing the modern subject of politics into being? In a resonance that will gain meaning as my text proceeds, colonization (of lands and bodies), the subject, and nature can be seen to form a triad for thought. My question, specifically, is to ask if, and how, the political-ecological history of colonization is omitted in the recent ontological impetus to think an animate nature. / Graduate

This thesis examines theoretical paradigms within men and masculinities studies (MMS), introducing a new materialist lens through the work of Elizabeth Grosz and Brian Massumi. Two affective dimensions of MMS are explored through the application of this new materialist lens: the affect of wonder and flat affect. These two concepts can be understood as expressions of Spinoza’s two types of affects; joyful affects, or those affects that increase a body’s capacity for movement, and sad affects, or those affects that decrease a body’s capacity for movement. The affect of wonder, a joyful affect, is theorized in conversation with antiviolence and therapeutic masculinity initiatives. Flat affect, a sad affect, is theorized in conversation with Canadian men’s suicide rates. This thesis argues that dominant forms of masculinity orient subjects away from wonder and towards an unlivable state characterized by flat affect. Men and masculinities studies theory lacks applied engagement with affect, and this thesis contributes to efforts to address this lack. / Graduate

Wearable technologies are being adopted in increasing numbers and the market space appears poised for continued growth in virtually all areas, from medicine, to self-quantification, to sports. While the overwhelming majority of work on wearables has been done on their medical applications and their role in shaping identity, this dissertation examines the roles that wearable technologies play on the decision-making processes in athletic contexts. Using new materialism and Actor Network Theory as lenses, I attempt to break from the Cartesian model that places human subjectivity and intentionality at the center of a rhetorical situation and, rather, allow that non-human actants are agentive. I examine the interactions that age-group triathletes have with their wearable technologies and the shifting agencies that accompany those interactions. These interactions call on disparate human and non-human actors in forming a series of temporary, shifting networks that utilize a distributed agency in the decision making process.

This interdisciplinary research bridging geography and fine art (‘geo-aesthetics’) follows contemporary artwork journeys from the studio into the public domain to discover how notions of value shift as the artwork travels. It seeks transfigurative nodes and their catalysts to explore how art matters: firstly how it becomes matter in the studio, and then how it comes to matter beyond the studio door. Two case studies at key moments of revaluation, a buy-out and a buy-in, both reveal responses to uncertainty that stress different kinds of collectivity. The first case study follows artistic practice and process in four studios in a Johannesburg atelier to investigate intrinsic value and finds ‘artistic thinking’. The second case study follows the assemblage of a private art collection managed from Cape Town, initially as an art fund, to investigate extrinsic valuation and finds ‘structural thinking’. These different modalities in the production and consumption circuitry of the artworld have unexpected correlations including shared artists and three linking concepts, namely, uncertainty, mobility, and the web. These in turn inform three observations: nested capacity, derivative value, and art as a public good. Two key findings emerge: contemporary art is itself a vector of value that performs meaning as it moves; and public interest is a central characteristic from which other valuations flow. The research uses repeat interviews, site visits and visual methods, which are triangulated with artwork trajectories to surface linkages between space and imagination. It offers a performative theory of value that speaks to an expanded new materialism. Applying an ecological framework allows a final transfiguration for an artworld ecosystem that (re)values contemporary art as part of an undercommons.