The purpose of this study was to investigate undergraduate sustainability students' engagement with sustainability in relation to their sense of place in the broader Salt River Valley community. The study was guided by two research questions 1) How do undergraduate Sustainability students explain their sense of place in the Valley with relation to their perceptions of sustainability? 2) Does residency in a different city, town, or state prior to entering the Sustainability program influence students' sense of place in the Valley? The study consisted of two distinct parts. In the first part, twenty students were interviewed using a narrative inquiry process to understand their perceptions of sustainability, their sense of place in the Valley, and how those two components influenced their engagement with sustainability in their communities. In the second part, these narratives were analyzed, synthesized, and samples of the stories were placed into a creative nonfiction collection to express an overall picture of sustainability in the Valley. Results showed that students generally relied on academic, professional, and social factors to identify places in which they could practice or engage with sustainability. Regardless of previous residencies, students expressed similar frustrations or limitations in expressing their sense of place, as related to sustainability, in the Valley.

In this paper, I analyze representations of nature in popular film, using the feminist / deconstructionist concept of a dualism to structure my critique. Using Val Plumwood’s analysis of the logical structure of dualism and the 5 ‘features of a dualism’ that she identifies, I critique 5 popular movies – Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Brave, Grizzly Man, and Planet Earth – by locating within each of them one of the 5 features and explaining how the movie functions to reinforce the Nature/Culture dualism . By showing how the Nature/Culture dualism shapes and is shaped by popular cinema, I show how “Nature” is a social construct, created as part of this very dualism, and reified through popular culture. I conclude with the introduction of a number of ‘subversive’ pieces of visual art that undermine and actively deconstruct the Nature/Culture dualism and show to the viewer a more honest presentation of the non-human world.

This dissertation explores discourses in the contemporary United States surrounding the creation, coding, sterilization, and general keeping of canines in order to interrogate how sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, and species together serve biopolitical formations of social control, patriarchal white supremacy, and heteronormativity. Interrogating these socially constructed and oftentimes stereotypical narratives through an interspecies lens demonstrates how taxonomies of power and systems of oppression and privilege become situated across species. This project utilizes interviews and ethnography, as well as analysis of popular culture, legislation and news media.

Interspeciesism is informed by feminist influences, functioning as a framing paradigm that engages with a politicized question of the animal that explicitly acknowledges human-animal entanglements across sites that are shaped by imperialism and colonialism. This interspecies project considers the political nature of relationships between humans and canines. It suggests that people situate their own identities and power not only in relation to other humans but also to other species. Simultaneously, the interspeciesm I engage with extends analyses of biopolitics, or the regulations of living bodies, beyond humans to all species. It interrogates how contemporary U.S. society has organized and identified itself in part through the ways in which it controls and monitors canines, often in relationship to the multiple ways dogs in the U.S. are racialized, classed and gendered by specific breeds. This coding of canine bodies with various taxonomies of power is not about dog breeds’ in-and-of themselves, but instead indicates that dominant U.S. society seeks to assert control over certain populations that are constructed as undesirable and unproductive.

Canines exist in a unique space in the U.S. cultural imaginary where they have multiple and oftentimes contradictory meanings that are influenced by a variety of power relations that transcend species. At stake is a critical concern regarding how interspecies bodies are made, controlled, formed, and refigured together under heteropatriarchal white supremacist modes of power. It draws attention to what these corporeal un(makings) imply for an ethics of being with, and thinking of, the other—human and animal.

This dissertation considers the potential of desire to protect humans, animals, and the environment in the biopolitical times of late capitalism. Through readings of recent South African Literature in English from a postcolonial ecocritical perspective, this project theorizes desire as a mode of resistance to the neocolonial and capitalist instrumentalization of communities of humans and nonhumans, where they are often seen as mere "resources" awaiting consumption and transformation into profit. Deleuze and Guattari posit this overconsumption as stemming in part from capitalism's deployment of the psychoanalytic definition of desire as lack, where all desires are defined according to the same tragedy and brought into a money economy. By defining desire, capitalism seeks to limit the productive unconscious and attempts to create manageable subjects who perform the work of the capitalist machine--subjects that facilitate the extraction of surplus value and pleasure for themselves and the dominant classes. Thinking desire differently as positive and as potentially revolutionary, after Deleuze and Guattari, offers possible resistances to this biopolitical management. This different, positive desire can also change views of others and the world as existing solely for human consumption: views which so often risk bodies towards death and render communities unsustainable. The representations of human and animal desires (and often their cross-species desires) in this literature imagine relationships to the world otherwise, outside of a colonial legacy, where ethical response obtains instead of the consumption of others and the environment by the dominant subjects of capitalism. This project also considers other attempts to protect communities such as animal rights, arguing that rethinking desire is a necessary corollary in the effort to protect communities and lives that are made available for a "non-criminal putting to death" since positive desire precedes the passing of any such laws and must exist for their proper administration. These texts often demonstrate the law's failures to protect communities through portraying corrupt officials who risk the communities they are charged with protecting when their protection competes with government officials' personal capitalist ambitions. Desire offers opportunities for imagining other creative options towards protecting communities, outside of legal discourse.

This dissertation considers the literary and cultural response of the labor-class poets to the emerging forces of Foucauldian biopolitics in early modern Britain to shed new light on the cultural impacts of biopower upon the rural community in early modern Britain. The analysis demonstrates how the labor class literary response is characterized by an exterior experience with the nonhuman in an alternative mode to the Wordsworthian experience of the interior. I then use labor-class poets to counter Wordsworthian notions of the immaterial State population through a critical expose of state-Subject, subject-object, and human nonhuman exterior relations as they are depicted in the labor-class poetry of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. Employing an object-ontological reading of community, I explore how the effects of biopower were inscribed in the literary artifacts of the labor-class. As a final consideration, I explore the response to postcolonial biopolitics in J.M. Coetzee's 1999 novel, Disgrace. The research takes a focused historical view, surveying a range of literary, political, and historical texts between 1760-1840 to offer new readings of Robert Bloomfield, Robert Burns, John Clare, William Cobbett, Ebenezer Elliott, Olivier Goldsmith, James Hogg, and William Wordsworth. In complement, the research offers a new reading of postcolonial biopolitics in the contemporary work of J.M Coetzee.

John Herdman provides a brief explanation for neglecting the Victorian sensational double in his work The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, "Nor have I ventured into the vast hinterland of Victorian popular fiction in which doubles roam in abundance, as these are invariably derivative in origin and break no distinctive new territory of their own" (xi). To be sure the popular fiction of the Victorian Era would not produce such penetrating and resonate doubles found in the continental, and even American, literature of the same period until the works of Scottish writers James Hogg and later Robert Louis Stevenson; and while popular English writers have been rightly accused of "exploit[ing] it [the double] for sensational effects," (Herdman 19) the indictment of possessing "no distinctive new territory of their own" is hardly adequate. In particular, two immensely popular works of fiction in the 1860's, Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), employ the convention of the double for a simultaneous sensational and sociological effect. However, the sociological influence of the double in these two texts is not achieved alone: the "guise of lunacy" deployed as a cover-up for criminality acts symbiotically with the sensational double. The double motif provides female characters within these works the opportunity to manipulate the "guise of lunacy" to transgress patriarchal boundaries cemented within the socio-economic hierarchy as well as within other patriarchal institutions: marriage and the sanatorium. Overall this presentation formulates "new distinctive territory" in the land of the Victorian sensational double through the works of Collins and Braddon.