When a disaster the magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill takes place, is it natural for the news media stories, investigative reports, and public deliberation to focus almost exclusively on finding the person or group responsible for such a horrendous scene. Rhetorically speaking, the discourse surrounding the event can be characterized as a reductive form of praise and blame rhetoric (epideixis). However, these efforts, while well-intentioned, are troublesome because searches for the one technical cause and the sole personal culpability are thwarted by the sheer complexity of the ecological, technological, scientific, institutional, and communicative network required for such a disaster to take place. Thus, to demonstrate the insufficiency of extant models of disaster in a variety of fields, which tend to privilege human-centered approaches, Dead Man's Switch: Disaster Rhetorics in a Posthuman Age explores the ontology, technical documentation, and rhetorical theory of disasters through a posthuman lens. To find a more critical approach to understanding the nature of disasters in the twenty-first century, I ask the following questions: How do rhetoricians and technical communicators account more fully for the human and nonhuman forces at work in the precipitation of disaster? How do rhetoricians and technical communicators find an approach to ecological catastrophe that goes beyond the mere "environmentalist rhetoric" characterizing the public response? Through the application of several posthumanist theories, my project develops an approach to disaster that complicates traditional ways of approaching causality and blame. I use accident reports, news media stories, and popular literature as data for this project. By examining these texts, my project has broad implications for technical communication, rhetorical theory, and philosophy of rhetoric.

Agency is a foundational and ongoing concern for the field of Rhetoric and Composition. Long thought to be a product and possession of human action, rhetorical agency represents the most obvious connection between the educational and theoretical work of the field and the civic project of liberal arts and humanities education. Existing theories of anthropocentric rhetorical agency are insufficient, however, to account for the complex technological work of digitally enmeshed networks of humans and nonhumans. To better account for these complex networks, this project argues for the introduction of new materialist theories of distributed agency into conversations about agency within Rhetoric. Such theories eschew the distinction between rhetorical and material agency and instead offer a way of accounting for action and change that makes room for rhetorical and material interventions as well as human and nonhuman participants. I take as my site the social media aftermath of the 2013 bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The digital networks of human users and nonhuman spaces (especially Twitter and Reddit) produced specific tangible effects: #BostonHelp helped stranded runners and tourists find food, shelter, and ways of communicating with family and friends, and Reddit’s /r/findbostonbombers forum enabled and fueled hurtful speculation about an innocent missing student. The strength, impact, and endurance of these networks leads me to three important conclusions: rhetorical/material agency must be distributed across a network of human and nonhuman participants; human intention no longer functions as an appropriate measure of the success or failure of rhetorical/material agency; and responsibility – like agency – must be distributed across networks’ human and nonhuman members.

This thesis deals with professionalism in early childhood education in relation to «race» and whiteness in primarily a Norwegian landscape. The overall aim of the study is to investigate how sociomaterial «race»-events can be understood as constitutive of preschool teachers’ subjectivity. The thesis is a theoretical experimentation with strong ties to a real social landscape. One of the main problems that the study evolves around is how «race» is silenced in the dominant discourse contributing to how preschool teachers can create socially just and indiscriminating pedagogical practices in a current «multicultural society». Hence, there seem to be a lack of tools for preschool teachers to think through how «race» might be part of their pedagogical practice in preschools, and how «race» is an important issue to address when working with how to perform pedagogy ethically and politically. More specifically and in a philosophical-theoretical manner, the study explores «white» preschool teachers’ relation to «race». The philosophical-theoretical-methodological conceptual toolbox for the study is mainly constructed from the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1977, 1987). E.g. machinic assemblage, stratification, Body without Organs, nomadic subject, affect, individuation, micropolitics, becoming, actual/virtual and event. The methodological approach is highly inspired by decolonizing-, feminist poststructural- and critical methodologies. However, immersed with Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy of desire, what started out as a poststructural autoethnography transformed into a cartography of «my own» racial becomings in/with an early childhood landscape. The study shows how subjectivity, when understood as produced through sociomaterial «race»-events, offers another understanding of doing professionalism. Further, it offers an alternative understanding of how to create more socially just pedagogical practices in early childhood education.

This study focuses on how an open-ended process of learning can affect education as well as our relationship with knowledge production. Nearing the classroom as a site of important moments this work tries to exemplify what a shift from an epistemic to an ontological pedagogy can mean. The two questions at issue are, What takes place in learning processes when we center conceptual creativity? and, What can the open-ended mean for esthetic methods within educational science? The fieldwork is based in a Swedish elementary school where a group of 10-year olds take on the task of designing objects and performing them for a dinner that is sort of out of the ordinary. An imaginary menu of green beets in lava sauce, roasted earth cakes with stardust and sweet flames with lemon twigs works as an inlet for the participants creative different processes. Using an assemblage of methods and theories this study aims to research how pedagogy can become a site that centers conceptual creativity. Artistic research, design and craft offers a closeness to what Karen Barad calls ”matter that matters”. And for the pedagogical this means a closeness to material culture and how things play a part in the making of our society. It´s called ”Performing difference” because it looks at what the production of differences in relation to knowledge and creativity can mean for pedagogy. The conclusion is partly an understanding of what this setting asks from an educational context and of what happens when we introduce and work with pedagogy from a performative angle. What this study comes to is that a pedagogy that blends theory with practice by turning to new-materialism presents exciting possibilities for education. When the un-disputable is made subject to question and open to interpretation knowledge becomes something we are allowed to enact, engage and provoke. In conclusion the open-ended can mean many things for an educational discourse but I believe one thing is clear - it presents inlets for creativity and our understanding of culture and society.

Practices of sculpture and geography have collaborated ever since Stone Age humans hoisted up rocks to point them into the air. The ephemerality of life was rendered in a circle of forms and mass that celebrated the union of sky, earth and dwelling. Through the manipulation of stone, the land became a place, it became a home, it became situated and navigable. As millennia unfolded, the land was written with the story of itself. The creativity woven into the story of place is an evolution of material collaborations. In recent decades, academic geographers have explored the realms of creativity in their work, and sculptors have critically engaged with the nature of place. I have united these disciplines in the exploration of a truth of materials. The aim of the research was to investigate the relationship between making and place. The structure of my PhD focussed on the development of a transdisciplinary research environment that could host a range of creative practices around stone-working. I developed a long-term relationship with Trenoweth Dimension Granite Quarry, working as an apprentice sawman and mason. Here, I examined the everyday practices of labour and skill development, from which emerged deeper material and human interactions, that went on to inform my sculpture and modes of making. Arguing that granite has threads of relational agency embedded within its matrix, I initiated a series of practices that made use of my emerging knowledge as a granite-quarry worker, cast within experimental sculpture, texts, performance, photography and film. By formulating my methods around the vibrancy of matter, I disclosed new materialisms and more-than-human relations. This assemblage of documentation and artwork records and reflects on a series of practices and processes in tension. This productive tension arises from a re-rendering of artisanal practice as a research method; ushering in modes of representation as loops of experience and interpretation take place across different sites, spaces and times of mediation. The objective for the PhD research was to present a critically informed practice of sculpture-as-ethnography that could not only provide a model for practice-based research in general, but also significantly expand what might be meant by stone-work. This PhD by alternative submission is presented as a Commentary with an accompanying Digital Archive website.

In this Thesis, influenced by Geert’s and van der Tuin’s (2016) diffractive reading of Beauvoir and Irigaray, I propose the methodology of  diffractive watching and watching diffractively as another tool for film analysis while engaging in an exploration of the potentials and limitations presented in the process. I find the concept of diffraction to be of significant merit within feminist new materialist research and to that end, I am interested in assessing the concept’s versatility and in verifying its methodological value.  Therefore, in my analysis,  I aspire to explore  diffractive watching  as a set intention and methodology and watching diffractively as an active process and the different implications that will result  if diffractive watching is  applied as a lens and/or employed as a tool. Moreover, I consider the mapping of the films’ cartographical account to be a constituent part of diffractive watching which in this case functioned as the starting point for the analysis.  To illustrate the becoming of this methodology, I take two films, i.e., Bladerunner (1982) and Bladerunner 2049 (2017) as my case study.

Matěj Malecha, Akcident ve Stacku Abstract (in English): The master thesis explains the notion of "accident" in the book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton. First, it identifies suitable mental models within the fields of complex systems theory, philosophy of technology and theory of information. The models inform subsequent analysis and interpretation of the Stack showing that Stack's accidentality (1) is an inevitable consequence of the functional principle of digital technologies, and that (2) the accidentality differs qualitatively depending on whether it manifests at the level of a layer or within the whole. The last part examines how Bratton's remark that the book is a design brief, and the fact that the Stack is not used solely by people affects the role of designer.

In <i>Resurrection Flowers and Indigenous Ecological Knowledge </i>Kaden C. Milliren seeks to evaluate and analyze differences in perspectives and perceptions of the environment between Western and Indigenous worldviews and, consequentially, the different attitudes and ways-ofbeing with the world that emerge as a result. In so doing, Milliren discusses the sacredness of local landscape for Indigenous peoples and the role its spiritually-significant elements impact an entire cosmology. These important elements of sacred local ecologies are socially, materially, and symbolically rhetorical, ascribing meaning onto all elements of worldview from faith to ceremony, oratory to cultural tradition, physical sustenance to ancestral connection. In feedback and feedforward loops, these aspects of cosmology continue to ascribe meaning onto one another, affecting and being affected by each other, continually weaving together meaning and, therefore, rhetorical mattering.<div><br></div><div>In this case study Milliren discusses the sacredness of the landscape of Southcentral Washington State, the land of the Yakama Nation, an affiliation of 14 bands and tribes indigenous to the area. Central to the physical ecology, as well as the ecology of life for the Indigenous population, is the salmon, a food source significant to all areas of Yakama life and central to Yakama spirituality, oral tradition, ceremony, and nourishment. Tracing the impact of colonial capitalism beginning in the 19th century, Milliren discusses diminished salmon populations and its impact on the local landscape as well as the Yakama way of life. Additionally, he discusses the Yakama Nation’s response to colonial violence through acts of culturally-situated events aimed at maintaining Yakama tradition and improving its peoples’ cultural and physical health. Coining the term<i> resurrection flowers </i>Milliren analyzes the ways the government has utilized the salmon for monetary gain at the expense of Indigenous populations, and how Indigenous activists have fought to preserve the salmon population and resurrect cultural tradition through revitalized acts of decolonial cultural practices.<br></div>

This thesis examines transformations of human characters into trees, stones, and water sources in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The current climate crisis is partly the result of a view of nature as a passive object, or inert matter, that humans without consequences can exploit. Using primarily the ecocritical theory new materialism, this thesis is a study of how nonhuman organisms can be assumed to have agency in order to alter this view of nature. The characters in the Metamorphoses that transform have different forms of agency before and after transformation depending on the body they inhabit. With close reading of the transformations themselves and the portrayal of the characters after transformation, the thesis finds that the material reality of the body determines what a body can do. Thus, it is possible to use the Metamorphoses to do a contemporary ecocritical reading that shows how a narrative can portray nature and nonhuman organisms with as much importance as human organism. By understanding the agency of nature and find it to be an active subject instead of only an object, it can change the relationship humans have with nature to one that is less exploitative.

A speculative inquiry into perception regimes, ‘unlearning’, entanglements and how to discuss re-production in the realm of (art) production today. A textual crossreading of how to actively admit and amplify the colonial and imperial consequences active in all levels of society, both personal and collective, and how these ideas continues to (re)produce in ways outside (and inside) of our imagination.  An experimental essay negotiating the relations and symbioses between form an ideology, a try to undermine binary thought formations such as nature and culture, private and public. A proposed crossreading of theory and lived life; how to deal with the (im)possibility of imagining outside of neoliberal conditions, of colonial and capitalist frameworks?