Browsing by Subject "Affect"
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Item Academic and social influences of underrepresented adolescents' perceptions of opportunity and plans for the future(2016-08) Kyte, Sarah Blanchard; Riegle-Crumb, Catherine; Callahan, Rebecca M; Crosnoe, Robert; Muller, Chandra; Raley, KellySociologists of education have long stressed the importance of students’ expectations for their subsequent success. Yet, an insufficient amount of previous work has considered how academic and social psychological factors guide when and how students develop their expectations for the future, particularly for the socioeconomically disadvantaged and minority students attending our cities’ schools. By using rich survey and administrative data from a large, urban district serving low income and predominantly Hispanic and African American students, this dissertation identifies how these students develop expectations related to higher education in general as well as science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in particular at the start of high school. Chapter 2 examines whether Hispanic girls hold higher college expectations than Hispanic boys because they acquire a superior toolkit of academic resources including achievement, attitudes, and relationships, and/or whether girls are better able to leverage these resources. Further, it considers the potentially gendered role of nativity, language-minority, and socioeconomic status in shaping college expectations among Hispanic students. Chapter 3 analyzes how students’ perceptions of the relevance of science outside of school contribute to gender differences in expectations to major in specific areas of STEM, namely the biological and physical sciences as compared with computer science and engineering. Chapter 4 unpacks the extent to which minority students expecting to major in STEM anticipate that gender- or race-based discrimination may act as a barrier to their goals. Taken together, the findings of these studies underscore the importance of perceptions related to schools, society, and opportunity at the intersection of gender and race/ethnicity for guiding students’ expectations, an important precursor to subsequent behavior and success.Item Affecting change : death, violence and protest in Manipur, Northeastern India(2015-05) Kshetrimayum, Jogendro Singh; Stewart, Kathleen, 1953-This dissertation explores some of the ways in which precarity takes form in a reeling present. Many social and political analysts have described the contemporary socio-economic and political situation in the Northeastern states of India, marked by a situation of civil war for more than half-a-century, as an “impasse.” With particular focus on Manipur, one of the eight Northeastern states, this dissertation looks at some of the ways in which people live through this “impasse.” Through a series of extraordinary and ordinary scenes, brief encounters, public testimonies, biographical sketches and autobiographical accounts it speaks of the precariousness of life, relationships, rituals and cultural categories even as people suffer and respond to the ongoing “crisis” of law and order, a defining feature of the “impasse.” Inspired by the affective turn in Critical Theory, this dissertation does not see precarity as necessarily traumatizing, thereby keeping the trope of trauma at a critical distance while attending to the lives of people in a situation of low-intensity armed conflict of long duration. It does not claim to provide any final explanation of what is happening in Manipur today rather it offers an innovative way to revisit anew some of the old anthropological questions about people and places undergoing dramatic changes.Item Against against affect (again) : æffect in Kenneth Goldsmith's Seven American deaths and disasters(2014-05) Boruszak, Jeffrey Kyle; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne)Recent scholarship on conceptual writing has turned to the role of affect in poetry. Critics such as Calvin Bedient claim that by using appropriated text and appealing to intellectual encounters with poetry based around a central “concept,” conceptual writing diminishes or even ignores affect. Bedient in particular is concerned with affect's relationship with political efficacy, a relationship I call “æffect.” I make the case that because of its use of appropriated material, we must examine the transformation from source text to poetic work when discussing affect in conceptual writing. Kenneth Goldsmith's Seven American Deaths and Disasters, which consists of transcriptions of audio recordings made during and immediately following major American tragedies, involves a specific kind of affective transformation: the cliché. I discuss what makes a cliché, especially in relation to affect, before turning to Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings and her concept of “stuplimity.” Stuplimity is an often ignored and not easily articulated affect that arises from boredom and repetition. Stuplimity is critical for Seven American Deaths and Disasters, especially for the “open feeling” that it produces in its wake. This uncanny feeling indicates a changing tide in conversations about conceptual writing. Rather than focus on the affect of æffect, we should instead turn to the effect.Item An Archive of Shame: Gender, Embodiment, and Citizenship in Contemporary American Culture(2012-07-16) Harris, RebeccaIn this dissertation, "An Archive of Shame: Gender, Embodiment, and Citizenship in Contemporary American Culture," I use the affect of shame in its multiple forms and manifestations as a category of analysis in order to examine complex relationships between gender, sexuality, the body, and citizenship. Through chapters on incest, gender normalization, and disease, I build an "archive" of the feeling of shame that consists of literary texts such as Sapphire's Push: A Novel, Jeffrey Eugenides?s Middlesex, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and Katherine Dunn?s Geek Love, as well as materials from popular culture, films such as Philadelphia, court cases, and other ephemera such as pamphlets and news coverage. In order to construct this archive, I bring together seemingly disparate materials and create readings of American culture that illustrate how the category of citizen is produced by the shaming of women, the gender non-conforming, and the diseased. Using feminist theoretical models, I critique previous discussions of citizenship, the state, and the body in queer theory, which have reified the privilege of whiteness and maleness by evacuating the bodies of women, the gender non-conforming, and the diseased of their radical potential to undermine oppressive state institutions. The texts I analyze in this project interrogate normalized processes of documentation and archiving, and through their subject matter as well as their form, these texts participate in the archival process?theorizing and exploring alternative methods of documentation, collecting, and historicizing and so illustrate how the discourses produced by mainstream history are built upon the maintenance of social hierarchies. By bringing these texts together, I am developing a theory of the archive and its processes, its bodies, and its feelings. Archiving as a practice collects and documents, and in that collection, develops a coherent narrative about a particular event or history. Critical theory is also a process of making meaning through the collection of events, documents, and texts into a cohesive set of terms in order to make particular abstract claims. This process is often obscured both in archiving and in theorizing by naturalizing the selection of the materials that matter. The alternative archives in this dissertation make that process explicit in order to foreground its erasures and elisions; they register material difference and the ways in which the archive is reproductive of social relations. The transient and unstable nature of the archives produced within the texts of this project makes them difficult to pin down and make coherent, but that is what makes them powerful and transformative. I read these materials as sites where questions about the official histories of the nation, which are constructed through race, gender, and sex, might be played out. The archive of shame I compile in this project, therefore, can be read as a collection of partial sites of struggle against oppressive power relationships.Item Bosniak sentiments : poetic and mundane life of impossible longings(2011-05) Velioglu, Halide; Strong, Pauline Turner, 1953-; Stewart, Kathleen, 1953-; Keating, Elizabeth L.; Ali, Kamran A.; Neuburger, Mary; Downing, JohnThis ethnographic work is about the aesthetic, habitual, and sentimental registers of some Bosnian Muslims’ (Bosniaks) daily lives in post-war Sarajevo. It addresses the ages-old themes of Bosnians’ multiple belongings and the question of political subjectivity through lived experience with a particular focus on the contemporary urgency to generate Bosniak national and religious subjectivity. It attends to the affective surplus of mundane scenes that convey the disconcerting drama of conversion to Islam, the nervous accumulation of new Islamic sensibilities, the vibrant ethos of Yugoslavism, the politically vulnerable but habitually engrained identity of Bosniannes, shared memories of the recent war, and the sustenance of the material and sentimental textures of domestic and communal life. Attending to the eventful character of the daily life enables the work to detail and test the existing frames of understanding Bosniaks (such as Nationalization and Islamization) and to further explore the potentialities of lived experience that escape existing regimes of representation.Item The city of living garbage : improvisational ecologies of Austin, Texas(2010-05) Webel, Scott Michael; Stewart, Kathleen, 1953-; Ali, Kamran A.; Hartigan, John; Davis, Janet M.; Stone, Allucqu�re R.“The city of living garbage” tours private houses in Austin transformed by their inhabitants into quasi-public places – art environments and permaculture systems made possible by urban waste. The creators of these micro-utopias collect and improvise with salvaged materials like roadside junk, greywater, unwanted animals, and half-forgotten cultural forms to cultivate habitats where undervalued things flourish. They revalue waste through a variety of practices like caring for, teaching, learning, enjoying, and tinkering. Becoming part of these relational patterns is a way to slow down and find wonder and pleasure in the ordinary, but also to act on ecological problems in the larger world. The landscape patches that emerge are lively but vulnerable assemblages that artists, activists, and their nonhuman allies belong to as local characters. By being open for tours, the places loosely connect publics that share modes of attention set on urban natures, salvageable garbage, and vernacular aesthetics. These informal institutions, non-profits, and vulnerable for-profit businesses are caught up in Austin’s current sustainable and cultural development strategies, but also share in an informal economy through their use of valueless wastes. Some articulate with contemporary localization movements that seek to reconfigure water, food, and energy production to decrease their precarious dependence on globalized economies. Others refuse the boundary between art and everyday life by recasting houses as never-ending aesthetic projects. Similarly, as wildlife habitats and urban gardens, they are thriving examples of cultivated places that disrupt an assumed antithesis between cities and ecosystems. These embodied critiques or dreams are small-scale manifestations of what urban natures might become. Borrowing from Deleuze & Guattari, Haraway, Latour, and Thrift, I attend to these places’ ecological and aesthetic relational dynamics that communicate directly through bodies, senses, and forms. This non-representational approach recognizes the contributions of nonhuman agents like plants, animals, microbes, and machines in composing affective landscapes. The writing strives to be a mode of research that is isomorphic with the phenomena it describes. It is impelled by a love of the places, people, and beings it researches; it aspires to preserve a little bit of them by redoubling their presence in the world.Item Conversation with an Apple : play development as movement-building against mass incarceration(2015-05) Goodnow, Natalie Marlena; Gutierrez, Laura G., 1968-; Alrutz, Megan; Jones, Omi Osun Joni L.This reflective practitioner research project explores if and how viewing and responding to drafts of my original solo play in development, "Conversation with an Apple," contributes to efforts to build a movement against mass incarceration, with a particular focus on dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. I draw upon Michelle Alexander's theorization of mass incarceration in the United States, social movement theory elaborated and archived by contemporary activists, and theories in performance and affect studies to contextualize my investigation. I describe how I utilized Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process to elicit audience responses to staged readings of "Conversation with an Apple," and also how I employed modified grounded theory techniques to analyze those responses. I then explain how insights gained through these methodologies informed revisions of the "Conversation with an Apple" script and my plans for future post-show workshops. I conclude with an evaluation of the usefulness of these play development and research methodologies in my artistic practice. I find that both Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process and the modified grounded theory analysis I utilized, along with a return to my guiding theoretical frameworks, contributed meaningfully to my reflective practice, yielding several key insights. First, I discovered that the play does seem to have the potential to raise consciousness among audience members regarding multiple manifestations of mass incarceration as it affects young people, although I decided that a few key mechanisms of mass incarceration might be more fully elaborated through script revisions. Second, I found that when audiences responded to the play, the shared experience of viewing the performance functioned as a springboard for conversation about other shared experiences in their lives, thus building a sense of community in at least a small way. I also theorize that the act of transmitting heightened affect together while viewing this play built community. Finally, my analyses revealed that although some audience members felt outraged at the realities of mass incarceration and inspired to make a change, many felt hopeless after viewing the play. These analyses informed my most significant revisions to the "Conversation with an Apple" script and plans for post-show workshops.Item Coping with perceived future stressors : the effects of a proactive coping writing intervention(2010-08) Kenney, Brent Allen; Holahan, Charles J.The present study proposed an integrated coping framework that included both personal and social resources and explored the interaction of these constructs with future-oriented, proactive coping processes. Expressive writing was utilized as a cost-effective and minimally intrusive intervention to encourage individuals to facilitate proactive coping in cognitive and behavioral domains. One-hundred and eighty five participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: 1) Proactive Writing (N = 63) to facilitate processing of a significant future stressor that is anticipated but is not certain to occur in the immediate future, 2) Expressive Writing (N = 53) to facilitate processing of the most difficult problem or situation experienced in the previous twelve months, or 3) Control Writing (N = 69) regarding time management as a credible placebo condition. The current study had three empirical aims. First, the current study experimentally tested whether implementing expressive writing as a proactive coping intervention increased proactive coping. Second, the current study tested whether proactive coping was positively related to adaptive functioning. Third, the current study vii examined reactive coping and perceived social support as mediators of the proactive coping to adaptive functioning relationship. Findings indicated that proactive coping and cognitive and behavioral coping efforts were associated with several clinical outcomes in the domains of psychological affect, life satisfaction, and physical health. Significant group differences in days per week of exercise and overeating behavior were present following the intervention, with a marginally significant trend found for social network size. Percentage of approach-oriented cognitive and behavioral coping towards anticipated and extant stressors, and perceptions of available support, enacted support, and satisfaction with one's social network were examined for mediational properties. Overall findings did not support the proposed mediation model of proactive coping. Implications of findings, limitations and future directions are discussed.Item The effects of resistance training on mood following an autonomous vs. yoked protocol(2015-05) Cheshire, Philip Andrew; Bartholomew, John B.; Jowers, EsbelleBackground. Previous research has shown that an individual’s post-exercise mood plays an important role in their likelihood to participate in that exercise activity in the future (Emmons & Diener, 1986; Williams et al., 2008; Williams et al., 2012). Of the possible moderating variables in the exercise-affect relationship, exercise intensity shows the most support. However, an uncoupling effect manifested in Parffit, Rose, & Burgess (2006) showed that self-selecting the intensity acted as an affective buffer and essentially allowed participants to exercise at higher intensity without the expected drop in affect. It may be, therefore, that autonomy may further serve to moderate the impact of exercise on mood. Design. To explore this issue, we employed a "yoked" design (Dickerson & Creedon, 1981). Participants were randomly assignment to either a free-choice resistance exercise, or a yoked control. The yoked participant performs a bout of exercise that matches the selection of their autonomous counterpart. In this study, 14 college-aged students participated in a testing session to estimate 1-repetition maximums, and a resistance exercise session that was either autonomous (self-selected) or a relative replication (yoked). Participants completed mood questionnaires following the resistance exercise session. Results. A 2 (group) x 3 (time) with repeated measures on the second factor showed significant main effects of time for the Felt Arousal Scale F(2, 13) = 4.15, p = .05 and Negative Affect F(2, 11) = 4.28, p = .05 such that arousal and negative affect both declined during recovery. Additionally, five of the seven yoked participants were unable to progress through their relative resistance exercise bout without a decrease in weight in order to achieve the prescribed number of repetitions. Conclusion. Autonomy does not appear to be a critical component of affect following resistance training. Further research is needed to explore resistance training as a model of autonomy manipulation, and to test the possibility of a performance detriment accompanying a loss of autonomy.Item Exceptional feelings, ordinary violence(2013-05) Pascual, Michael Aaron; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (2009) and the work of LGBTQ activists in the U.S. I argue that the act consolidates the U.S. nation-state’s monopoly on violence by relying on criminal law as a cognitive apparatus and stifles the work of LGBTQ activists and cultural labor to expand or challenge sensibilities regarding violence. I look to the work of trans and queer activists and how they frame “minor” hate crime cases in relationship to space and systems of criminalization. The activism surrounding Sakia Gunn, the New Jersey 7, Chrissy Lee Polis, and CeCe McDonald broaden theoretical account of violence provided by hate crime protections by attending to affect, the body, and space, and make political demands that move beyond criminal law. This thesis attempts to follow those trajectories and provide alternative grammars and methods for addressing violence.Item Identification of sentence emotional content in individuals with traumatic brain injury(2013-05) Schwartz, Lauren Brooke; Marquardt, Thomas P.In the following study, a lexical emotion recognition test via written stimuli was administered to 10 (8 male and 2 female) brain injured participants. Performance of brain injured individuals was compared to 30 non brain injured adults. A two way analysis of variance (groups, conditions) revealed significant effects for groups, conditions, and the interaction of groups and conditions. Implications and significance of the present results for future research are discussed.Item Information triage : dual-process theory in credibility judgments of web-based resources(2010-05) Aumer-Ryan, Paul R.; Dillon, Andrew; Robinson, Daniel H.; Bias, Randolph G.; Rice-Lively, Mary Lynn; Geisler, GaryThis dissertation describes the credibility judgment process using social psychological theories of dual-processing, which state that information processing outcomes are the result of an interaction “between a fast, associative information- processing mode based on low-effort heuristics, and a slow, rule-based information processing mode based on high-effort systematic reasoning” (Chaiken & Trope, 1999, p. ix). Further, this interaction is illustrated by describing credibility judgments as a choice between examining easily identified peripheral cues (the messenger) and content (the message), leading to different evaluations in different settings. The focus here is on the domain of the Web, where ambiguous authorship, peer- produced content, and the lack of gatekeepers create an environment where credibility judgments are a necessary routine in triaging information. It reviews the relevant literature on existing credibility frameworks and the component factors that affect credibility judgments. The online encyclopedia (instantiated as Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica) is then proposed as a canonical form to examine the credibility judgment process. The two main claims advanced here are (1) that information sources are composed of both message (the content) and messenger (the way the message is delivered), and that the messenger impacts perceived credibility; and (2) that perceived credibility is tempered by information need (individual engagement). These claims were framed by the models proposed by Wathen & Burkell (2002) and Chaiken (1980) to forward a composite dual process theory of credibility judgments, which was tested by two experimental studies. The independent variables of interest were: media format (print or electronic); reputation of source (Wikipedia or Britannica); and the participant’s individual involvement in the research task (high or low). The results of these studies encourage a more nuanced understanding of the credibility judgment process by framing it as a dual-process model, and showing that certain mediating variables can affect the relative use of low-effort evaluation and high- effort reasoning when forming a perception of credibility. Finally, the results support the importance of messenger effects on perceived credibility, implying that credibility judgments, especially in the online environment, and especially in cases of low individual engagement, are based on peripheral cues rather than an informed evaluation of content.Item I’ve got a strange feeling : a grimoire of affective materiality and situated weirdness(2012-05) Thompson, Joseph Benjamin; Lewis, Randolph, 1966-; Reckson, LindsayThis paper seeks to forge a grounds for conversation between the affective turn in contemporary theory and a vital materialist ontology. This conversation focuses on materials and their affects through the experience of weirdness. I use weirdness to describe a register of enchantment which is disruptive and alienating, rather than enticing and delightful. The project is motivated by a desire for ways to think about our relationship to the natural world that afford for fuller experiences of perception. The paper works through four major sections; the first three form a conceptual framework while the fourth is an exercise in mobilizing the concepts through subjective readings of affect. It begins by establishing a concept of vitalism with which to think about interactions with a moving, active world and, in following vitalism across borders of embodied flora and fauna, agitates the notion of what constitutes life. To put vitalism into a dynamic of engagement between entities, I then chart processes of affect through various conditions and situations, such as haunting, hallucination, anticipation and psychotropics. I then address the concept of the event in order to trace the contours of affect as it manifests through situated, temporal passages of force. This conceptual netting culminates in episodic readings of affective experiences, taking a kaleidoscopic form oriented toward anxious fascination.Item La afectividad como contra-discurso de la poesía comprometida de Daisy Zamora, Otto René Castillo y Roque Dalton(2010-08) García Núñez de Cáceres, Jorge Federico; Arias, Arturo, 1950-; Shumway, Nicolas; Robbins, Jill; Salgado, César; Rodríguez, Ana PatriciaIn this work, I explain that the focus of criticism on the Central American poetry of the second half of the twentieth century has emphasized its political content. I argue, however, that such a limited view obscures the broader import of this poetry and its place in Latin American literature. By reading the work of Nicaraguan Daisy Zamora, Guatemalan Otto René Castillo, and Salvadoran Roque Dalton with an emphasis on affectivity rather than revolution, I suggest a different relationship between the poet and society, one that is not limited to the marginal figure of the mujer soldado, the poeta guerrillero or the poeta marxista in conflict with all societal norms. Rather, I argue that my study portrays the complex subjectivity of the speaker/poet not unlike that of non-revolutionary poets, as well as his or her multi-dimensional affective connections to family and society. At the same time, an analysis of affect in this poetry allows us to reconsider the nature of the revolutionary figure itself, no longer a myth or a romantic hero, but an individual inserted in society in a more complex way. In Chapter 1, “Daisy Zamora: De la mujer-soldado a la mujer-mujer”, I contend that an analysis of affectivity of her poetic work reveals how personal memory constructs an individualized subjectivity different from that of a woman-soldier. In the second chapter, “Otto René Castillo: De la lucha revolucionaria a la soledad del poema,” I argue that a negative connotation of romantic love is projected in his poems bringing about traces of existential solitude in the lyric subjectivity. Furthermore, Castillo’s poetry elicits a binary opposition between “the people” and the guerrillero in which the former is portrayed as lacking of agency. The third chapter, “Roque Dalton: y/o subjetividad en crisis,” reveals the ways in which the Salvadoran poet textualizes a poetic of disenchantment by way of projecting disdain and contempt to the “motherland.” In conclusion, my approach pinpoints how Zamora, Castillo and Dalton share the same preoccupations, affects and ways to conceive reality, which are also similar to the practices of those poets whose works are better-known given their national origin or because their poetic production has been widely studied by academia. This document has been written in Spanish.Item Mood, food, traits, and restraint: an experimental investigation of negative affect, borderline personality, and disordered eating(2009-05-15) Ambwani, SumanEating disorders and borderline personality disorder involve several overlapping features, such as impulsivity, negative affectivity, and dissociation. However, few studies have specifically assessed how eating pathology and borderline personality may be related. The present study sought to evaluate this relationship by focusing on one particular area of overlap, negative affectivity. A pilot study assessed the psychometric properties of a dietary restraint measure among undergraduate women (N = 149). In the main study, undergraduate women (N = 307) completed a baseline mood assessment, then viewed a 39-minute sad film either with or without concurrent food presentation. Participants then completed a second mood assessment, and those who received food completed a third mood assessment following a 10-minute post-reflection delay. Results suggest that women reporting more borderline features exhibited greater negative affect across three different time points (baseline, post-movie/food, and post-reflection period), and were more reactive to the sad film. Food presentation appeared to have a small tempering effect on sadness, such that individuals who received food reported relatively less sadness after viewing the film when compared to those who did not receive food. However, actual quantity of food consumption was associated with improvements in mood only for women reporting higher levels of borderline features. Finally, highscorers on dietary restraint measures consumed greater quantities of food than their lowscoring counterparts. In sum, these data suggest that women with borderline personality features may be at elevated risk for developing problems with binge-eating, as consuming larger quantities of food appeared to have a tempering effect on their negative mood and specific feelings of sadness. Further, results are consistent with earlier findings in that reported efforts to restrain dietary intake were associated with greater food consumption in response to negative affect, and this relationship may need to be addressed in treating individuals with problematic eating behaviors.Item Queer enchantments : walking between the worlds with male witches in North America(2016-05) Batiste, Dominique Pierre; Stewart, Kathleen, 1953-; Campbell, Craig; Hartigan, John; Cvetkovich, Ann; Johnson, MichaelThe overall goal of this project is to follow the ways in which enchantment can become a central component, embedded within daily practices, by which people make an effort to bring meaning into their lives. Scholars, from a range of disciplines, have studied enchantment in an effort to theorize the psychological, aesthetic, and social characteristics of modernity. They argue that the world is either completely disenchanted, or, that there are short-lived, immobilizing, moments of enchantment, that slip through the cracks of modernity, briefly capturing individuals, before the enchantment breaks, and ‘returns’ a person, once again, to ‘normal’ life. This project follows the lines of what I call a ‘queer ecology of enchantment,’ co-created by men practicing forms of witchcraft in The United States, who produce an empirical and epistemological space in which human and non-human forces and forms coalesce. This enchanted state, which I call coalescence, is not momentary and fleeting, but is an enchanted refrain that is consistently inhabited, as an affective state of being, a form of know-how, a co-production of space, and facilitates the unfolding of queer worlds, and produces the daily practices required for navigating these worlds. Academically, witchcraft in the U.S. has been explored as a religion, a magical system, and a set of ceremonial performances, that focuses upon predominantly female participants in a predominantly female-centered spirituality; this project focuses upon men in the witchcraft movement, and looks closely at the informal daily practices of male witches, in order to trace the ways in which human and non-human objects are given value and intensified through orientations and attunements to enchantment. I argue that it is the daily practices of witchcraft, and not formalized magical or ceremonial settings, that constitute the subjectivity of ‘witch,’ producing a particular relationship between witches and their environments that manifests as intensely political, without being couched in terms of politics or political activism. This project is an experimental, ethnography-based contribution to affect studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology, religious studies, new materialism, cultural geography, and the emerging field of pagan studies, that situates enchantment, and witchcraft, in relation to social strategies connected to health movement, American spirituality, and queer forms of sociality.Item The edge of obscurity : affect, precarity, and culture in rural Japan(2016-12) Bruce, Chad Richard; Stalker, Nancy K., 1962-; Hindman, HeatherJapan has recently faced the threat of cultural continuity, a result of factors ranging from demographic issues to economics ones. A variety of methods have been employed to combat some of the negative economic effects and the potential disappearance of cultural heritage and tradition, especially in rural areas. Some of these methods include attracting domestic tourism through various media, encouraging young, urban individuals to move to rural towns and villages, and increased international recognition through the designation of important cultural heritage using organizations like UNESCO. However, underlying these ostensibly optimistic endeavors run intense feelings of anxiety, uncertainty, and hopelessness, feelings often associated with a sense of precarity. This paper argues that while such attempts at revitalization and recognition do have positive effects, they often come with significant downsides. The laws and policies forming the framework of UNESCO's “intangible cultural heritage” designation come from colonialist policies that continue to shape understanding of “cultural heritage” through the designation system and its governing body. In many ways, the system also implicitly encourages Orientalism among consumers of non-Western cultural heritage, some of which may be the result of intentional exoticism and essentialism on the part of the designation-seeking entities. These practices, inherited from colonial governments and bureaucracies, work in conjunction with preexisting conceptions of “heritage” and “tradition,” often linking them to rural, implicitly pre-modern areas and peoples, which perpetuates modernist lines of thought about successful designees. Abstractions of the rural from real places and objects significantly contributes to the feelings of a “vanishing” experienced by nations like Japan, but especially in declining rural areas. This, in turn, leads to further feelings of precarity, and this narrative of precariousness becomes embedded in national consciousness and discourse through media exposure. While attention needs to be paid to the potential instability of cultural heritage and precarity, the ways in which people approach these things warrant serious reconsideration.Item The effects of exposure to attractive and unattractive infant faces on self-reported and psychophysiological affect(2016-05) Schein, Stevie Scarlett; Langlois, Judith H.; Bigler, Rebecca; Woolley, Jacqueline; Echols, Catharine; Trujillo, LoganThe primary aim of this study was to determine the trajectory of self-reported liking ratings and psychophysiological affective responses to attractive and unattractive infant stimuli over multiple exposures to determine whether these trajectories would conform to the predictions of mere exposure theory or negativity bias. Participants viewed a block of attractive and unattractive infant photographs, repeated 25 times, while their liking ratings and corrugator supercilli, levator labii superioris, and zygomaticus major muscle responses were recorded. Overall, self-reported liking ratings decreased as a function of exposure to the unattractive infant faces, indicating that repeated exposure intensifies the initial negative evaluation of those faces, rather than increasing liking for all stimuli.Item The generation and effects of a stigma in small groups: a formal theory and test(2009-05-15) Compton, D'Lane RebeccaDrawing from the vast literature on stigmas, theories of status generalizations and affect, this study employs a formal framework to delineate among different kinds of stigmas and different processes by which they might operate. This study then considers the case of a particular type of stigma, a behavioral stigma, a label that is obtained from past behavior. The formalization distinguishes how knowledge of a particular type of stigma operates through group members who then cast an ?other? into a stigmatized role with special attention to affect and behavior of the stigmatized individual and the other group members. Additionally, I am able to study the developmental process of stigma because, in the particular theoretical case I consider, the stigmatized individual is initially unaware of the stigma. The findings indicate that stigma were created and did have an effect on individuals and groups. While the observable power and prestige effects were much more pronounced for measures of content versus measures of amount of interaction stigmatized groups were characterized by more disapproval, fewer agreements and more interruptions than were nonstigmatized groups. Further, those who were stigmatized had less influence than other group members. In terms of feelings, there was support for the hypotheses suggesting that stigmatized individuals rate both themselves and their groups more negatively than do nonstigmatized group members. Also, those who were not stigmatized rated the stigmatized person more negatively than others. While there were no significant differences between Stigmatized and Control groups relative to happiness or group cohesion and efficiency, those in the Control groups were more committed to their groups than were those in the Stigmatized groups. This study contributes to the large literature on stigma by examining one kind of stigma. It also contributes to several established literatures in social psychological theory. This study has implications for the power of the social construction of stigma and consequently for the power of social construction in the dismantling of stigma.Item Unruly energies : provocations of renewable energy development in a northern German village(2014-08) Carlson, Jennifer D.; Stewart, Kathleen, 1953-This dissertation asks how inhabitants of a sustainable village are living out Germany’s transition from nuclear to renewable energy. The sustainable village remains a locus of optimistic attachments for renewable energy advocates, who argue that a decentralized power grid will enable people to more directly participate in power production and politics as “energy citizens.” Yet while rural areas have become sites of speculation, innovation and growth, few rural-dwellers are enfranchised in (or profiting from) the technoscientific projects in their midst. I draw upon 13 months of fieldwork in a northern German village transformed by wind turbines, photovoltaics and biofuels to consider why, asking what kinds of public life flourish in the absence of democratic engagement with renewable technologies. This ethnography engages the village as multiply constituted across domains of everyday life, including transit, farming, waste management, domestic life, and social gatherings. I found that environmental policy, everyday practices, and the area’s material histories combined to produce ontologies—senses of what exists—that circumscribe citizen participation in the energy sector, affording more formal opportunities to men than to women, and privileging farmers’ interests in plans that impacted the larger community. These findings illuminate how many villagers become ambivalent toward the project of the energy transition and disenfranchised from its implementation. Yet many who were excluded from formal participation also engaged with renewable technologies as they sensed out their worlds, using tropes of sustainable energy and technoscientific materials to place themselves in this emerging energy polity. Their everyday worldmaking brimmed with what I call unruly energies, structures of feeling that registered more as affects than as discourse. In the village, these took form as sensory disturbances, disquiet among neighbors, technoscientific optimism and skepticism toward environmental policy. These affective modes of attention, investment and participation were vital aspects of public life that shaped the transition’s unfolding. They exceeded liberal models of renewable energy citizenship, which presume that socioeconomic interest and environmental commitment are universal among citizens. In this way, unruly energies compel more nuanced attention to the multiple, contingent, site-specific ways in which citizenship takes form in the making of eco-capitalist energy infrastructure.