This thesis explores the theory and practice of sovereignty. I begin with a conceptual analysis of sovereignty, examining its theological roots in contrast with its later influence in contestations over political authority. Theological debates surrounding God’s sovereignty dealt not with the question of legitimacy, which would become important for political sovereignty, but instead with the limits of his ability. Read as an ontological capacity, sovereignty is coterminous with an existent’s activity in the world. As lived, this capacity is regularly limited by the ways in which space is produced via its representations, its symbols, and its practices. All collective appropriations of space have a nomos that characterizes their practice. Foucault’s account of “biopolitics” provides an account of how contemporary materiality is distributed, an account that can be supplemented by sociological typologies of how city space is typically produced. The collective biopolitical distribution of space expands the range of practices that representationally legibilize activity in the world, thereby expanding the conceptual limits of existents and what it means for them to act up to the borders of their capacity, i.e., to practice sovereignty. The desire for total authorial capacity expresses itself in relations of domination and subordination that never erase the fundamental precarity of subjects, even as these expressions seek to disguise it. I conclude with a close reading of narratives recounting the lives of residents in Chicago’s Englewood, reading their activity as practices of sovereignty which manifest variously as they master and produce space. / Ph. D. / For an empirical analysis the statistical model implied in the theoretical model is crucial. The statistical model is simply the set of probabilistic assumptions imposed on the data, and invalid probabilistic assumptions undermines the reliability of statistical inference, rendering the empirical analysis untrustworthy. Hence, for securing trustworthy evidence one should always validate the implicit statistical model before drawing any empirical result from a theoretical model. This perspective is used to shed light on a widely used category of macroeconometric models known as Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) Models. Using U.S. time-series data, the paper demonstrates that a widely used econometric model for the U.S. economy is severely statistically misspecified; almost all of its probabilistic assumptions are invalid for the data. The paper proceeds to respecify the implicit statistical model behind the theoretical model with a view to secure its statistical adequacy (validity of its probabilistic assumptions). Using the respecified statistical model, the paper calls into question the literature evaluating the theoretical adequacy of current DSGE models, ignoring the fact that such evaluations are untrustworthy because they are based on statistically unreliable procedures.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/83515 |
| Date | 11 June 2018 |
| Creators | Kim, Jae-yoon |
| Contributors | Economics, Science, Spanos, Aris, Ashley, Richard A., Bahel, Eric A., Tsang, Kwok Ping |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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