College Catalog, 2014-2015, Graduate

https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/buffstatecatalogs/1226/thumbnail.jp

College Catalog, 2008-2010, Graduate

https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/buffstatecatalogs/1219/thumbnail.jp

College Catalog, 2017-2018, Graduate

https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/buffstatecatalogs/1232/thumbnail.jp

Entangled Stories: Reimagining Dementia, History, and Narrative in Contemporary Literature and Life Writing

This dissertation examines cultural and literary responses to dementia in narratives dealing with the personal and historical memory of trauma and violence. Rather than use dementia to signify a crisis of forgetting or the erasure of history, the authors in this study deploy dementia as a formal and ethical resource; they offer revisionary narratives that recuperate negative discourses surrounding aging and cognitive impairment, as well as enable readers’ reflections on issues across geopolitical borders, historical contexts, and different marginalized life experiences. Bringing a disability studies analytic to the examination of the politics and narrative aesthetics of dementia, "Entangled Stories" argues for a nuanced understanding of how dementia operates formally and thematically in contemporary writing as a site in which the intimate and global collide. Each chapter centers on authors’ concomitant personal encounters with dementia and their explorations of the historical memory of major 20th- and 21st-century catastrophes. As such, I probe into the corresponding tropes and metaphors of dementia appearing strategically alongside the representation of those events. Chapter 1 interrogates the discourse of environmental disaster and memory loss in Ruth Ozeki’s narration of the aftermath of Fukushima. Chapter 2 examines the contemporaneous rhetorics of the “War on Alzheimer’s” and the War on Terror in Susan M. Schultz’s experimental writing. Chapter 3 focuses on two authors’ graphic renditions of dementia and traumatic history: Dana Walrath challenges dementia as a popular metaphor for political amnesia and denial in the context of the Armenian Genocide, while Stuart Campbell visualizes the interrelations of dementia and the social traumas of World War II. Chapter 4 turns to the popular fictions of Emma Healey and Jo Walton, which take up the trope of dementia’s “alternative realities” to narrate histories of gendered postwar violence and aging differently. Together, these chapters reveal how dementia operates as a heuristic for understanding the past and connecting to others differently, thus reimagining life with dementia as one of agency and social value. For readers of these texts, the subject of dementia becomes an opportunity for thinking about transformative approaches to care, community, and conceptions of what it means to be human in time and history. Traversing the intergenerational memory of injustices surrounding environmental degradation, war, occupation, and genocide, the works featured in "Entangled Stories" generate discussions relevant to fields of literary studies bordering trauma theory, memory studies, and postcolonialism. This dissertation’s focus on Alzheimer’s and senile dementia also emphasizes age is an important intersectional identity category, bringing disability studies into conversation with work in feminist aging studies, dementia studies, and the medical humanities. The interdisciplinary nature of this project attests to how contemporary re-imaginings of dementia go beyond personal stories of loss and the pathological discourse of plaques and tangles—they are imbricated in broader representational concerns over how to remember and respond to extreme events and political conflict. Through writing about intimate encounters with dementia, these authors grapple with the increasing fear of Alzheimer’s and dementia in the 21st century—a fear bolstered by the post-9/11 injunction to “never forget.” Indeed, one of the tensions authors negotiate is the need to protect historical memory—as a form of enlightenment and intervention to preclude future tragedies—and the necessity of holding space for personal forgetting and caring for/about the experiences of aging, dementia, and embodied difference more broadly.PHDEnglish Language & LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153421/1/clie_1.pd

Psychological Engagement in Choice and Judgment Under Risk and Uncertainty

Theories of choice and judgment assume that agents behave rationally, choose the higher expected value option, and evaluate the choice consistently (Expected Utility Theory, Von Neumann, & Morgenstern, 1947). However, researchers in decision-making showed that human behaviour is different in choice and judgement tasks (Slovic & Lichtenstein, 1968; 1971; 1973). In this research, we propose that psychological engagement and control deprivation predict behavioural inconsistencies and utilitarian performance with judgment and choice. Moreover, we explore the influences of engagement and control deprivation on agent’s behaviours, while manipulating content of utility (Kusev et al., 2011, Hertwig & Gigerenzer 1999, Tversky & Khaneman, 1996) and decision reward (Kusev et al, 2013, Shafir et al., 2002)