Este trabalho de tese trata das dinâmicas da mineração a céu aberto e seus efeitos na água da região andina de Cajamarca, ao norte do Peru. O objetivo consiste em analisar “desenhos locais” que entram em conflito com os desenhos propostos – e alguns já instalados – pela mineração moderna, que começam a proliferar no Peru a partir de 1990 como um caminho inquestionável de desenvolvimento. Por meio de pesquisa de abordagem etnográfica, realizada entre 2013 e 2014, analisam-se dois casos. No primeiro, examinam-se as diferenças ontológicas mobilizadas pelas pessoas como resultado de ações causadas pelo projeto de mineração Conga, que “sacrificará” importantes lagoas na região de Cajamarca, Peru. Nesse contexto, campesinos e ronderos do centro poblado El Tambo têm se organizado para vigiar a lagoa Mamacocha. Observa-se que a relacionalidade dos campesinos com Mamacocha é ativada pela realidade da experiência vivida com a água, que começou a desaparecer a partir dos projetos de mineração, mas que é coproduzida em “encontros” com outras concepções ontológicas. Tais encontros dinamizam histórias orais da memória local. Para além de uma representação essencialista do conhecimento indígena versus o científico, são os diferentes regimes de relação com a água que intensificam colaborações entre os coletivos. O efeito é a emergência de “Mamacocha estendida”, sinalizada nas manifestações como “obra de Deus”, “água que alimenta” e “aquíferos”, a depender das relações e dos grupos, e dos campesinos como “guardiões das lagoas”. A noção de “alimentar” aparece em diálogos com campesinos que enfatizam relações entre as colheitas, os canais de irrigação e os puquios (nascentes de água) salientando que as lagoas não podem ser substituídas por reservatórios artificiais que a empresa propõe construir. Em um segundo caso, analisa-se como o desenho de uma mina a céu aberto na cidade de Hualgayoc, região próxima à anterior, influencia as pessoas que inicialmente desenhavam na terra, os velhos mineiros de socavão. Embora os mineiros articulem a história de um passado mineiro, o seu esforço por negociar suas relações com a empresa mineira oscilam entre antagonismo e expectativas por uma ocupação neste mercado de trabalho. Muitos deles são ignorados pelas grandes empresas por não serem os “mineiros modernos” que hoje manipulam maquinarias sofisticadas, apesar de terem trabalhado por muito tempo no socavão. Quando o centro urbano de Hualgayoc se tornou uma AID (Área de Influência Direta) da mineração a céu aberto, os seus habitantes foram categorizados em classificações específicas que os reprimem. Além disso, o que mostra o caso de Hualgayoc é que o projeto mineiro somente oferece trabalho pelas falhas que ele mesmo causa ao ser implementado. Esta perda é vista como uma oportunidade de trabalho para contratar pessoas que possam trazer água de outros lugares. Os efeitos na natureza e nas pessoas são reais, e, principalmente, os efeitos nas águas andam em paralelo com os projetos de vida de muitas pessoas que resistem ao projeto mineiro. Estes dois casos na região emblemática de Cajamarca ilustram os conflitos em torno de desenhos, relações e desenvolvimento. / This PhD dissertation is about the dynamics of open-pit mining activity and related controversies around water in the Andean region of Cajamarca, Peru. The goal is to analise “local designs” that are threatened by designs - some of them are already encroached on the land used by campesinos - coming from modern mining whose proliferation started in 1990 as a non-questionable way to development. Based on ethnographic research conducted between 2013 and 2014 in the region of Cajamarca, this work analises two cases. The first one, I examine ontological differences mobilized by people when the Yanacocha Mining Company officially announced its proposal to construct an open-pit copper-gold mine and would require draining important lagoons. In this context, campesinos (peasant farmers) and ronderos (rural patrol) from the hamlet of El Tambo organized themselves in order to guard the Mamacocha lagoon. Based on fieldwork in the area of the proposed Conga Mining Project, the author argue that the relationality between the campesinos and Mamacocha results from campesinos’ lived experiences with water that started to scarce, but it is also produced through encounters with other ontological conceptions. Those encounters activate older narratives about Mamacocha. These different ways of knowing designing should not be understood as an essentialist representation of ‘Indigenous’ knowledge that stands in opposition to ‘Western’ or scientific knowledge. Different regimes of relations with water intensify collaborations bewteen collectivities. The effect is the enactment of an “extended Mamacocha” as “God’s creation”, “water that nourishes” and “aquifers” and the campesinos as “Guardians of the Lagoons”. The concept of ‘nourishment’ appeared in dialogues with campesinos, emphasizing the relationship between food crops, irrigation channels, and natural water springs, could not be replaced with artificial reservoirs that the company proposed to build. In the second case, I analise how the design of an open-pit mine in the city of Hualgayoc, close to the previous area, influences people who used to be underground miners. Even though, miners articulate a narrative that Hualgayoc is a “mining region”, their efforts to negotiate with the mining company oscilate between antagonism and expectations for jobs. Some of them are ignored for not being modern miners that manipulate sophiscated machines, even though they have worked as underground miners for decades. When the urban center of Hualagyoc became an ADI (area of direct influence), their residents were also categorized in specific classification that repress them. Besides, the case shows that the Project offers jobs because of their own failures during its implementation. This loss is seen as an oportuniuty for hiring people that could bring water from other places. The effects on the environment and people are real, they travel through parallel worlds. These two cases in the emblematic region of Cajamartca illustrate conflicts around designs, relations and development.

The good life, or a flourishing life, is a vision of how people ought to best live their lives. Though this vision is vital to the conduct of psychotherapy, it is generally overlooked, and thus unexamined. The therapist's vision of the good life for the client guides his or her implicit and explicit interventions. Despite this, there is relatively little discussion about this vital topic, and relatively little training into the various approaches to the good life. In this thesis, I argue that this relative lack of examination and training is due to the lack of perceived options regarding conceptions of the good life. As I will show, the seeming diversity of psychotherapy theories is actually uniformly underlain with individualism. I will address this lack of diversity by revealing how abstractionism is the ontology that underlies individualism in order to present a competitor. Ontological relationality is presented as an alternative ontological framework for visions of the good life, along with practical applications and therapeutic implications.

Thesis advisor: Jeffrey Bloechl, / The question of how one must relate with God today opens the door to the dialectics regarding the necessity for the supernatural, for relationality presupposes a personalistic dimension of interaction, communication and engagement, which tends to assume a being with which such interactions and engagements must proceed. But how can we talk about God in a way that is sensitive to the modern and contemporary sense of human autonomy, that is, in a manner that is not patronizing but rather, flowing from exigencies that the human condition and human data is presenting to us? In other words, is there a possibility that the reality of human experience itself can offer us the unavoidable necessity for engaging the God-question? If yes, what is the path that such a necessary engagement with God can take to the extent that it does not appear confessional and thereby, summarily dismissed by the non-religious, even before the case is made? In Kierkegaard and Blondel, I felt one could discern real possibilities to answering the question of both the necessity for the supernatural and how relationality emerges from such a necessity. With the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, relationality emerges in the prioritizing of the singular individual over the collectivism of Danish Lutheranism. In Kierkegaard’s reading of the state of things, a Christianity that had become identifiable with the reigning culture, with the zeitgeist, could no longer possess the transformative energies that must define and shape a relationship with Jesus Christ. In almost polemical tones, Kierkegaard writes: “When Christianity entered into the world, people were not Christians, and the difficulty was to become a Christian. Nowadays the difficulty in becoming a Christian is that one must cease to become a Christian.” (Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard, compiled and edited by Charles E. Moore (Walden, NY: Plough Publishing House, 2002, 211). In other words, the Christianity that was operational in Kierkegaard’s day, in his assessment, was distant from the Christianity of the New Testament. And so, ceasing to become a Christian meant that one had to eschew the cultural Christianity of Christendom and return to the New Testament Christianity, a return which was the only path capable of reinvigorating the Christian faith. In Kierkegaard’s eyes, this diagnosis meant much more that lamenting Christianity’s loss of fervor. It was indicative as well of the absence of a living relationship with God, for a faith that has lost its steam cannot bring about the intersubjectivity that ought to define religious practice, in that the individual was no longer eager to build an engaging and active relationship with the supernatural and to live out the demands of such a relationship, thanks to the help that comes from the supernatural. Kierkegaard attributes this diminishment of a living faith to Christianity’s acquiescence to a mindset of levelling that had become commonplace in society, a flattening that resulted in the forfeiture of any feel of particularity that ought to characterize the religious phenomenon. In this light, the urgency of recovering the singular individual, in his or her subjectivity, that comes to the realization of human brokenness and the human need for the forgiveness, emerges as the path to a rediscovery of the Christian élan in its beauty and transformational spirit. The subject is unable to save the self from the absence of satiety that characterizes the life of sin, estrangement and anxiety. It is the individual that must reform or be converted, becoming a Christian. It is the individual that must open the self to God, allowing the internal dispositions to be shaped. To become a Christian is to become a single individual, and no one can teach one how to become an individual. It is not something that can be communicated. It is something that can only be lived by one’s self. Christianity must therefore be lived in and through personal expressions, for, in typical Kierkegaardian fashion, human existence does not happen in the abstract. Humans live and think in the concrete situations of their lives, and not in the rational speculations and speculative systems, which, to follow the Kierkegaardian view of things, results in the vanishing of authentic individuality. But what is really wrong about generality that elicits such a consistent objection from Kierkegaard? It would appear that the answer resides in his conviction that the demands of New Testament Christianity are such that every individual as individual had to take a stand, for or against the spiritual élan that was being proposed by the New Testament. Every individual had to take up his or her daily crosses and follow Jesus [Lk 9:23]. Individuality, very much different from individualism, is therefore, central to becoming a Christian. And to the extent that generality or Hegelian collectivism shielded the individual from this responsibility of becoming a Christian by simply jumping on the bandwagon of the whole, Kierkegaard became convinced that the path towards a revived Christian spirituality and existence had to start with asserting the place of the singular individual over and even against the collective. And it is at this point that the question of the necessity and inescapability of the supernatural appears in bolder focus for Kierkegaard, in that, having ascertained the superficiality of Church, state and the communal that has swallowed up the individual, thoughts of any possible spiritual rebirth bring to sharper focus the dialectics of the relationship between the individual and God. The state of estrangement from God is the state of non-being, of the absence of fulfillment. With humble acceptance of God’s offer of forgiveness comes the rescue from the abyss of broken subjectivity. This rescue by God only takes place when the subjective, having come to terms with his or her internal discord, accepts to entrust the self into the hands of God, by a leap of faith. This leap implies that I give up on my ideals of what my life ought to be, embracing an unknown journey of faith, always conscious that God will be faithful to God’s providential promises to me as a believer, just as he was to Abraham as recounted in the book of Genesis. In this sense, a new life of freedom is borne. From my living relationality with God, I experience God’s forgiveness. From my living relationality with God, I experience an unknown freedom. And from forgiveness and freedom comes an unknown contentment, fulfillment and happiness. Summarily, for Kierkegaard, living relationality with God is realizable through the acceptance of my brokenness in the spirit of humility and faith. On the other hand, for Blondel, God’s forgiveness, faith, freedom and contentment, and living relationality with the Supernatural emerges in the unfolding of the phenomenon of human action. He captures the essence of his philosophical undertaking with the famous opening lines of L’Action (1893): “Yes or no, does human life make sense, and does man have a destiny?” (Maurice Blondel, L’Action (1893) Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, trans. Oliva Blanchette (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007, vii). In other words, how do I come to act in my life as a conscientious human being, in terms of my own existence here and now? It is by way of responding to this question that Blondel settles for action as the defining reality that explains who the human being is, for to be human is to act, for the human condition is of the necessity to act. As a human being, I am an acting person, and I can only be known when I act. Accordingly, it is thanks to my actions that my humanity manifests itself and makes me accessible to others. And this is the justification for why action cannot be peripheral to philosophy, if philosophy has to study the question of what it means to be human, and the ultimate destiny of human existence. In effect, to study who the human being is, is to study human action, for one’s person becomes translucent thanks to the way one acts. For the French philosopher, human action is always seeking for fulfillment. Moving from concentric circles from family, immediate community and nation, action is understood not as a specific activity but as an unfolding reservoir of human willing, which continues to demand more. There is a wedge between the willing will and the willed will. A perfect fit never happens between the human’s ever continuous desire and human realized action. And antecedent to the attitude before the supernatural lies the whole dynamics of human choosing, upon which resides the resolution of the impasse between finitude and infinitude that is characteristic of human existence, as has emerged in the phenomenon of human action. This impasse between the willing and willed wills must be resolved, for two reasons: First, whether human life makes sense? Second, whether the human being has a destiny. These two questions make it impossible to offer a negative solution to the impasse that faces human willing and choosing. A burden is thus imposed on human beings, from which an escape is existentially impossible. Dilettantism is not an option. And if human willing is unable to resolve the impasse between an ever-yearning for more that never matches our concrete acts, then there appears in the phenomenon of human action, what Blondel calls, the one thing necessary. This one thing necessary is the supernatural. This is the Being that comes from the outside of human action to rescue the human being. At this point, philosophy has played its role in helping to navigate the uncertain seas of human action, showing the way to what is needed, if action is not to be aborted. But philosophy, though it has raised the problem, cannot offer the solution. The rescuing of human action and by extension, the human being from the existential impossibility of a crushing human-only self-understanding, is an offer that must now be articulated by religion. Herein appears a question for every human being, a question that emerges from the human quest for satiety: to be God with and through God, or to be God without and against God? Living relationality for Blondel suggests that the former is the most fitting response, for all attempts of the latter as shown in the evolution of the phenomenon of action have proven to be futile. Summarily, for both Kierkegaard and Blondel, living relationality with the supernatural is, in the final analysis, a rescuing of the human being from the temptation of human autonomy fashioned in a way that excludes God. Both Kierkegaard and Blondel clearly do not envisage that the question about the meaning of human life, fulfillment, contentment and destiny, can be resolved without or against God. And not only that, of crucial importance, is likewise the realization that every human being is invited to take a stand regarding the question of whether human life can find contentment away from the supernatural, hence, the necessity for the subjective in the philosophical landscape of religious existentialism. By demonstrating from the absence of satiety in human life (Kierkegaard) and from the impasse that emerges in the phenomenon of the unfolding of human action (Blondel) that the supernatural is necessary to the realization of human fulfillment, Kierkegaard and Blondel emerge as necessary interlocutors to contemporary men and women in their search or pursuit of happiness, hence placing us in their debt regarding the specific question of the human search for meaning and fulfillment. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

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Yes / Adopting a Service-Dominant Logic lens, recent research within industrial marketing contexts increasingly recognizes the role of operant resources in value co-creation. Incumbent within operant resources is actor competence. Despite this, an investigation into the role of actor competence in value co-creating processes is scant and the competence literature, in general, has tended to concentrate on specialized knowledge and skills based interpretations that potentially restrict our understanding of the construct. To address this gap, this research adopts a phenomenological approach to explore perceived behavioral attributes of competent actors. Findings confirm two broad behaviorally based conceptualizations of competence: 1) extra-role behavior demonstrated through organizational citizenship behavior, and 2) in-role behavior demonstrated through understanding of work, and engagement behavior. To this end, the contribution of this research is twofold. First and from a theoretical perspective, it offers empirical insights into a relational based framework of competency within industrial marketing contexts. Second, and from a pragmatic perspective, this framework may aid managers in developing a broader understanding of actor competence and how such competencies may be enhanced within the workplace to optimize value co-creation.

Modern Western Culture (MWC) is based in a materialist and mechanistic ontology that has marginalized spiritual relationality with the natural world. Awe of the Earth once maintained respectful relations between humans and Nature, where shared community existence was a primary concern. Through the rise of the MWC, reverence for the spirit of the Earth has gradually been lost and has altered the way humans situate themselves in the world. Many claim that as the divide between humans and Nature grows, significant barriers to thoughtful and sustainable ways of living have emerged, and reconnecting, or healing this divide is essential in the movement toward environmental sustainability. To address this divide, this research uses the reflective and iterative processes of action research together with feminist post-structural analysis to examine barriers to human-Nature relations at a spiritual level. It explores dominant discourses that act on middle years students and determine what is possible for student-Nature relations in a public school setting. The dominant discourses are embedded in three main themes: role of the city, social acceptance, and technology. Discourses within each theme have been deconstructed, identifying how they are reproduced or disrupted, the implications of adopting the discourses, and how alternatives may be encouraged in school to support spiritual relations with Nature. This research takes a small step toward broadening the possibilities of how people relate with Nature by including spiritual relations with Nature, and begins to erode a clearly identified barrier to achieving sustainability.

Following a call from Linton (2010) to think more relationally about water this thesis seeks to explore the infolding and unfolding relations that take-form between bodies around particular characteristics of freshwater. There is a tradition of exploration regarding the sustainability, quality, monitoring and management of water when we encounter research on human associations with fluvial hydrology, and whilst this work is important, this project looks to enrol more nascent and contemporary geographical themes to broaden our understanding of encounters with freshwater landscapes, and take a more relational approach to fluvial geographies. These works then shall address a gap in the geographical literature and describe the personal, pre-personal and affective worlds that emerge when bodies become down by the river. Whilst this is not specifically a walking project, walking the course of the River Severn serves as a trajectory along which processual ideas of bodies on the move shall be mobilised. A series of creatively written segues will link together a sequence of theoretical and conceptually driven site ontologies (Marston et al 2005; Woodward et al 2010) and relations associated with the Severn and freshwater more broadly. The flow and form of the thesis will reflect the multivariant characteristics of water and its varying speeds and slownesses. The chapters will step into puddles, mooch about in a ships graveyard, rethink the source of a river, paddle a coracle and set the scene for how an ontological, relational approach to fluvial landscapes can contribute to geographical thinking. The works will focus on human-nonhuman relations, vibrant materialities and elemental mobilities, in so doing enable further understanding of how we can apprehend sites as moments of coherence in a turbulent world, and contribute to broadening our scope of knowledge of the more-than-human.

Are artists autonomous agents? Are they individuals? Engaging with these seemingly commonsensical questions is the objective of this doctoral dissertation. Moreover, my answer to both questions is: no. My objective herein, then, will be to develop the following argument: that because the individual elements of creative, art-producing networks are so profoundly relational, to speak of individual elements or of agents or artists at all is to describe an incomplete picture. After all, how can any individual action occur or individual element exist in the absence of that upon which that action is enacted, or without that action being made possible by another element or "individual"? By engaging with these questions this dissertation challenges conventional notions of creativity, individuality, and agency by suggesting that creative forms of expression for example: artistic, technological, social, political are always collective enunciations that issue forth and come into being as products of interdependent relationships. I dismantle and then recast how we think about artistic creativity by arguing that if individuals are so intertwined with their networks that their very capacities are produced by the networks relationality itself, they (individuals) might be able to be (categorically) dispensed with entirely. In other words, I begin to ponder the question: How can we think about networks without thinking or making assumptions about individuals? I suggest that emphasizing that relationships are the generative actors that produce actuality compels us to rethink anthropocentric assumptions, and can lead to more open and creative ways of relating to the world around us. I conclude by arguing that since our fate, existence, and identity as creators is inextricably linked to, and determined by, our relations with others, we must predispose ourselves to this co-fatedness by recalling Nietzsches invocation that we embrace and be open to our fate by loving it that we amor fati. In other words, in order to attune ourselves to the fullest range of possibilities in a situation in order to be truly creative and to become-artist we must become open to the creative potential of relationality itself, even if it requires that we assume a more modest view of ourselves. / Cultural Theory and Visual Art

This thesis looks into autobiographical representations of disability and illness in life writing, a flexible form of creative nonfiction, and Contact Improvisation, a postmodern dance form, to argue how the structure of representation must incorporate the physical and emotional/intellectual in order to convey the necessary overlap between the mind and body. Chapter One looks at Plaintext, by Nancy Mairs, to analyze the way her sporadic writing style mirrors the unpredictability of her multiple sclerosis. Chapter Two focuses on Autobiography of a Face, by Lucy Grealy, and examines how the irregularity of the author's face--and the various roles that she takes on throughout her life--undermine the idea of any singular self in life-writing and otherwise. Analysis of Grealy's text is paired with Truth and Beauty, a memoir written by the author's best friend, Ann Patchett, in order to demonstrate the linguistic/cultural distinction--but significant overlap--between dependency and independence. Chapter Three expands upon this idea in relation to disabled dance companies, and highlights Contact Improvisation--a dance form based on the transfer of weight--as a revolutionary forum that incorporates mind and body in an "intratext" of representation. Because it is based on exchange of impulse and a blurring of bodies, CI allows for a fluid negotiation between multiple identities, accommodating the moment-to-moment nature of living with or without a disability.