From Poetry to Pedagogy: Exploring the Intersections of Disability Studies and Feminist Theories

The two chapters that make up this thesis are culmination of my master’s degree work. While I know this is the point of a thesis, I feel like this project is exceptionally representative of all of the directions my thinking has gone in the last few years. Most predominantly, my work has caused a major rift in how I think about English Studies. On one hand, I am a literature person — I have a certain attachment to literary analysis. It is where I hit my stride and decided to take the path to a doctoral degree. On the other hand, though, I found myself questioning what the point is. I wanted to be an Emily Dickinson scholar… But do we need another one? And, if so, what is the purpose? This project attempts to show how I see literary scholarship, feminist and disability theories, and composition pedagogy as intersecting. While the two chapters that make up this project are incredibly different — they were written differently, they read differently, the first chapter is all about a poet, and the second chapter is all about students — what unites the whole project is the fact that it is actually about me. It’s about me coming to understand English studies in new and dynamic ways. I don’t have to follow the rule that one must choose either the path of isolated literary scholarship or the path of being a writing teacher and researcher…yet. Even though I had planned on being a literary scholar, those plans shifted as I got further into my graduate work. And I had to be and am OK with it. I had to be comfortable with the discomfort and the chaos that graduate work introduced me to. The first chapter integrates feminist rhetorical theory into an analysis of contemporary American poet Susan Howe. The second chapter is a study of my first-year writing course in which I integrated disability studies and feminist theories in both course content and pedagogical practice

Truth is mighty & will eventually prevail Political Correctness, Neo-Confederates, and Robert E. Lee

Jefferson Davis sent Robert E. Lee an unusual note after the battle of Gettysburg. The dispatch did not contain any presidential recommendations or requests, only a clipped article from the Charleston Mercury criticizing Lee and his subordinates for failure in Pennsylvania. Why Davis sent this article is impossible to say, and Lee apparently was not interested in the president’s motivations. The General dismissed newspaper criticism of himself as “harmless,” but the Mercury’s condemnation of the army disturbed him. He considered the charges harmful to the cause, for his officers and soldiers were beyond reproach. Defeat, Lee insisted, was his responsibility alone. “No blame can be attached to the army for its failure to accomplish what was projected by me,” he wrote, “nor should it be censured for the unreasonable expectations of the public. I am alone to blame, in perhaps expecting too much of its prowess & valour. [excerpt

Moral Theology in Legal Ethics

I am talking at a Lutheran university and therefore should probably have some theses, some propositions that I could nail to the chapel door. But I\u27m afraid I have failed Martin Luther: I have only one thesis and it is not ready for a nail. It is still as much a question as a thesis. My question is whether there is any point in including moral theology in the study of legal ethics in the university. Let me be candid: I teach the typical required course in professional responsibility, and I do a lot of writing on ethics, and I do, in my fumbling way, include moral theology in both enterprises. The reason I have this question to talk with you about is because I attract a bit of gentle astonishment for my approach to the subject, and I cause a certain amount of discomfort among my colleagues and students. I need a ringing intellectual reason for doing what I do. I doubt that Professor John E. Sullivan, for whom this lecture series is named, bothers with such misgivings when he teaches criminal law or torts; he has more self confidence than that, I am sure. And if Martin Luther had misgivings like mine he had so much style that his misgivings didn\u27t show; he was not a tentative thinker

Moral Theology in Legal Ethics

I am talking at a Lutheran university and therefore should probably have some theses, some propositions that I could nail to the chapel door. But I\u27m afraid I have failed Martin Luther: I have only one thesis and it is not ready for a nail. It is still as much a question as a thesis. My question is whether there is any point in including moral theology in the study of legal ethics in the university. Let me be candid: I teach the typical required course in professional responsibility, and I do a lot of writing on ethics, and I do, in my fumbling way, include moral theology in both enterprises. The reason I have this question to talk with you about is because I attract a bit of gentle astonishment for my approach to the subject, and I cause a certain amount of discomfort among my colleagues and students. I need a ringing intellectual reason for doing what I do. I doubt that Professor John E. Sullivan, for whom this lecture series is named, bothers with such misgivings when he teaches criminal law or torts; he has more self confidence than that, I am sure. And if Martin Luther had misgivings like mine he had so much style that his misgivings didn\u27t show; he was not a tentative thinker

A study of ICT student’s views on sustainable technology development

Abstract. In this thesis, I focused on sustainable technology development and services, and how they are understood by Finnish university students in modern society. Students discussed sustainable development in technology and services, in the public system, and private sector, and used the EUs green targets as a base for it. The thesis is focusing to analyze the digital technology development inside the European market areas and takes into account the cultural, economic, and geographical aspects about the topic. The reason for writing this thesis is understanding the values of digital product users’ backgrounds, habits, and values, because these have become an important part of sustainable change strategies and sustainable technology development. For this, I am conducting Nexus Analysis, which leads our focus to three main topics: discourses in place, historical body, and interaction order, to support a deeper understanding of students’ actions and decisions. I am taking the discourses of Finnish students, future developers, into analysis on sustainable change of technology development, and also what kind of values the student discourses contain, and what kind of methods and features should be remembered in digital technology development when trying to change those values and behavior. This scientific work includes familiarizing with previous research made on the topic, analysis of 163 student essays with quantitative data analysis, as well as qualitative nexus analysis where the focus is on discourses in place, historical body, and interaction order. Quantitative data gave me an overall understanding of favored topics and opinions by the students and nexus analysis provided me a deeper understanding of these student opinions and actions. This thesis is made as a collaboration with INTERACT research group which provided me the students’ essay materials for the analysis. As a result, I provided guidelines and important factors for behavioral and background analysis, but also, what kind of values are respected by students in the sustainable change. The most highlighted aspects to remember in the future development were focusing on transparency in organization processes, respecting local habits and interests when making marketing strategies, and also what kind of features are respected by the current university students studying in the information and communication (ICT) field. Another view is taken from employers, when sustainability is wanted to be a part of the company’s strategy and what features need to be remembered to improve the sustainability change efficiency in highly competitive markets. These values and factors should be remembered when designing new sustainable products and trying to gain the most efficient change strategies, also in marketing and consumer communication sectors. In conclusion, I provided two list as guidelines for supporting companies and organizations for more efficient sustainability development strategies. It includes topics that need to be discovered before development, what features need to be assimilated into product development, and also, what kind of values are respected by the people depending on the market area location. These matters will not guarantee success but will be most likely to gain more attention and interest in local markets where the product or change is targeted. This information can be used by organization employers in their processes or researchers in further analysis and research about sustainability changes and strategies, as a regional strategy guideline or targeted sustainable technology development guideline

V is what democracy looks like: Image politics and the Guy Fawkes mask

How do political demonstrators use the Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta to persuade viewers to engage in actions of dissent in both online and corporeal environments? In seeking an answer, I identify important connections among public writing, visual rhetoric, and digital activism that allow me to understand how dissident rhetors communicate their views and construct ethos in online and corporeal spaces. Political demonstrators use the Guy Fawkes mask to construct ethos and transform spaces into protest arenas. I argue that visual rhetoric contributes to the building of activist movements by alerting potential participants to the transformative possibilities inherent in the environments they inhabit, helping to forge dwelling places for emerging dissidents. Understanding ethos as the creation (or transformation) of a rhetorical space is more effective than merely seeing it as an appeal to some platonic form of universal good character, as most textbooks still define it. For me, an appeal to ethos is better thought of as what Michael J. Hyde, in The Ethos of Rhetoric, calls a dwelling place, which refers to the way "discourse is used to transform space and time into 'dwelling places' where people can deliberate about and 'know together' some matter of interest."(xv) I add to the discussion of ethos as a dwelling place by showing how activist rhetors build a sense of dwelling through their visual rhetoric. Ethos develops visually in the concept of our appearance to others, not only in the masks we wear when we construct our persona, but also in the ways in which our personas are constructed through the masks we adopt in specific situations. The V mask as used by protesters and the hacktivist collective Anonymous has become a dwelling place, with clues as to specific ethics taking shape for the wearer in the way the mask is presented. Rather than seeking to directly persuade powerful actants to behave in certain ways, they seek to gather others into their dwelling as they slowly transform what it means to live in the environments they inhabit

Facing Death; The Desperate at its Most Beautiful

Is there a distinction between “art” and “craft,” where the former is motivated by something like “genuine” or “authentic” creativity and the latter by, at best, skill and skill alone, and at a worst, a fumbling attempt to fit in with popular modes of expression? In this paper, I suggest that there does seem to be such a distinction. In particular, I attempt to show that genuine creativity, and so, genuine art—in varying respects—is motivated by a certain recognition of what we might understand as the most universal, and perhaps the most important property of all human beings: the brutal fact that our lives are limited; in the end, we all die. To show why I think this is the case, I have divided my paper into three parts. In the first, I briefly explain why we might view mortality as our most pressing issue and concomitantly, why we might understand it to be the driving force behind not only our desire to procreate, but also, to create. In the second part of the paper, I do something that is not strictly “philosophical”—I canvas a number of remarks by poets and writers who, like myself, are convinced that death is our primary muse, but not necessarily in a morbid, or despairing respect—in fact, we see that this is quite the opposite in some cases (c.f. Nabokov, 1966). Why do I do this? Because it seems obvious to me that we should ask the actual artists about what motivates them, rather than putting words into their mouths. In the third and final part of the paper, I offer a brief philosophical explanation of why and how—in light of sections one and two—we might begin to distinguish between genuine art and craft

The Song Sparrow and the Child: Claims of Science and Humanity

For centuries public claims on behalf of science have been made about our nature and the nature of the world as a whole. Over the twentieth century such claims on behalf of science have grown deeper and stronger. More and more they are total claims, cosmological in the largest sense, and they have evoked opposition equally deep and strong. There is the scientist in all of us. There is, too, the lawyer and law in all of us, which we realize the moment we serve as a witness or citizen juror. This book explores what the legal mind and ear can contribute to resolving this deep and growing conflict within and among us. The question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them. This was the prescient epigraph William James adopted for his lectures on pragmatism at the beginning of the twentieth century. In it is why this conflict is so deep at the beginning of the twenty-first and its resolution so important for our future together. We know that conventional limits and restraints can change with belief about the ultimate nature of things. The twentieth century has its warning examples, most gruesome where total vision has appeared in social and political thought. The connection between what we think about the nature of the world, and what we allow ourselves to do, is now widely felt, and, with good reason, widely feared. Our question here will be whether there are, in fact, openings in the total visions of today. The visions are of the facts of the world. What are the facts about the visions? The juror in us might naturally ask of a person testifying to them, How am I to take what you are saying? Do you actually believe what I hear you to say? This is empirical inquiry that we all engage in all the time without much thinking how we do it. At our best, especially in important matters, we reach for all the evidence. We listen to all a person says before concluding what any part of it might mean, and we treat what a person does as evidence of the meaning of what a person says. In this way we will be addressing here how far belief about the ultimate nature of things has actually changed over the twentieth century, in scientist or nonscientist. We will try to let ourselves be told what science is, on behalf of which people speak, and we will wonder how antiscience could ever really be a stance to take. Throughout, we will be asking how any total vision of the world can claim the true allegiance of human beings living and thinking together in it. This book is also about belief-or not-in spirit. The child learns to speak. The song sparrow comes to sing a beautiful song, special not just to its kind but to its individual throat and tongue. They are often compared, the development of individual song in the song sparrow and language in the child. Experiments that would be gruesome and called atrocity in a human context are performed on the young song sparrow. What is it that holds us back from performing the same experiment on the child-or letting it be done? What really, in thought and actual belief today? On such large questions touching our basic view of each other and ourselves, and other creatures too such as the song sparrow, we should be having a conversation or open meditation. The discussion ought not to be primarily argumentative, as we tend to understand argument. Binding you to me by successful moves of my mind would lose all that can be hoped for. It cannot be merely descriptive, with us absent from the picture. Nor should it try to move from one proposition to another whose meaning or truth depends on having done with the first. In any conversation or meditation we return more than once to the questions and examples with which we begin, and we will do so here. An earlier book of mine took a form that was meant to merge with and give the reader an experience of its subject, which was the legal form of thought. The form of this book too .reflects what we are talking about, a world that really does include ourselves.https://repository.law.umich.edu/books/1112/thumbnail.jp

Leadership in Sports

In order to structure my thesis I will centralize it around the book The student leadership challenge by Kouzes and Posner. It is a book that outlines ‘The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership’ that are common when leaders are able to make amazing things happen. The goal of the book is to demonstrate how any person can be a leader regardless of age and experience. Therefore, another goal of my thesis is to investigate how much some of the top coaches in USC athletics use this model whether implicitly or explicitly for themselves and the leaders on their team. The questions will force the coaches to use examples from their past and present experiences. They will also make the coaches think and reflect about their careers in regards to their best moments, what they have learned the most and what they can improve upon. My decision to interview coaches was due to the fact that they have had the most experience with leadership personally but also with inspiring it within their players. Therefore, I thought they would have an interesting and unique view on the subject in order to ask these leadership questions. Additionally, I feel as though I can learn the most from them because of their lengthy careers as coaches and I want to learn the most possible about leadership so I can apply it in my life. Finally, being a student athlete allows me to have a certain access to some of the best coaches USC has to offer so I wanted to take advantage of this privilege

Mind in character : Shakespeare's speaker in the sonnets

Includes indexes.Bibliography: pages 187-190."This book is about poetry rather than theory. Shakespeare's poetry, I find, remains more relevant and more rewarding than any theory, however elaborate, as to who, if anyone, should read a text and, if so, how they should do it. In other words, I do not intend another prolegomena for future studies of the reader in the text and/ or the text in the reader. I simply have written what I think the sonnets are about, what they say and how they say it. I do not attempt to speak for "the reader," as I know little about him or her, but only for myself. What interests me especially is the behavior of Shakespeare's sonnet-speaker, the coherent psychological entity projected by the speaking voice in these poems. I do not identify that speaker with the historical William Shakespeare, knowing scarcely more about him than about "the reader."Ironies of awareness : the cosmic dimension ; The dry mock ; Dramatic irony -- Soliloquy sonnets : self-discovery ; Introspection ; Final statements -- Dialogue sonnets : four modes of address ; Four types of dialogue ; Sonnet 18 as dialogue -- Awareness lost : soliloquies ; Initial dialogues ; Later dialogues : the final breakdown -- Appendix. The sonnets classified by mode of address.Digitized at the University of Missouri--Columbia MU Libraries Digitization Lab in 2012. Digitized at 600 dpi with Zeutschel, OS 15000 scanner. Access copy, available in MOspace, is 400 dpi, grayscale