Browsing by Subject "Critical Theory"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Educating The Elite: Ethics, Economics, And Inequality In America’S Most Prestigious Business Schools
    (2019-10) Shamash, Rebecca
    Today the distribution of wealth in the United States has diverged to mirror levels of inequality not experienced since the early 20th century. In addition to overall wealth, the distribution of income has also become increasingly unequal. This trend has resulted in the rise of what Thomas Piketty (2014) calls supermanagers—top executives of large firms who have managed to obtain unprecedented compensation for their labor; and members of the economic elite are now much more likely to be members of the professional elite who tend to eschew a class narrative in favor of identifying as the best and brightest (Ho, 2009; Khan, 2010, Khan, 2012; Rivera, 2016). This explanation for their success, which relies heavily on notions of meritocracy and specific ideas about fairness, reflects a change in the way society determines winners and losers (Guinier, 2015). Institutions of higher education, particularly those that are most elite, play a prominent role in elite reproduction (Khan, 2012a; Khurana, 2010) as well as in the selection of members of the professional elite. This dissertation uses ethnographic methods to explore how prestigious business schools reproduce culture and social class, and how the MBA experience provides students with a worldview that justifies the existence of severe inequality. I draw upon data collected over 14 months, including 34 semi-structured interviews with students and graduates of prestigious business schools, 10 informal but in-depth conversations with business school professors, field notes related to the attendance of MBA class sessions and social events, and promotional and curricular materials. Results provide insights into the ways prestigious business schools train students to explain and justify decisions about business and ethical issues in specific ways through institutional norms related to curriculum and pedagogy; how the institutions understand and deal with diversity; and how the MBA experience beseeches students to value certain professions and lifestyles over others, despite inherent contradictions in this value system. I find that prestigious—and particularly elite—business schools meet student expectations by providing them with clear paths to high-prestige, high-paying jobs through the assignment of credibility via association with a prestigious university, as well as through access to a powerful alumni association and on-campus corporate recruitment. In addition to these transactional benefits, students typically experience a marked increase in self-confidence and make friends who come to comprise a close social network of similarly high-earners that helps to normalize the wealth most MBA graduates acquire and the lifestyles associated with high compensation. I also discuss how diversity is understood in prestigious business schools (typically as centered around national origin and prior professional experience), and how women and students of color experience MBA programs as gendered, raced, and classed individuals. Finally, I examine barriers to critical education and address curricular and pedagogical norms and their implications. Further, I find that the MBA students and graduates I spoke with referred to competing ideas about what it means to be successful; several were particularly ambivalent about the meaning of money, its relationship to their self-worth, and its significance to their professional trajectories.
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    The end, or life in the nuclear age: aesthetic form and modes of subjectivity.
    (2012-08) Gibson, Alicia
    "The End, or Life in the Nuclear Age: Modes of Subjectivity and Aesthetic Form" is a transnational study of the experiences of Americans, Japanese Americans, and Japanese in the nuclear age as expressed in post-World War II literature, television, and cinema. I use the figure of the bomb as a way of understanding the historical, political, and linguistic impacts of modernity - crystallized in the image of the nuclear bomb - on our contemporary moment. I argue that the world has become fully global, not because all peoples experience the same material conditions of life, but because the nuclear age is one in which the world is conditioned for the possibility of the end of life as such. This project responds to key cultural and literary theorists writing from the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe (in particular, Theodor W. Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Paul Virilio, and Michel Foucault), by enlarging the scope of their critique of modernity to include the atomic bombing of Japan. Crucially, I argue that nuclear war is not merely a futural event as commonly understood by most Western theorists. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demands that we account for how acts of terror committed by the West against the non-West have discursively given rise to an age in which nuclear technology functions as the symbol for both the ultimate technological triumph of Western science, and total planetary destruction. In so doing, this dissertation contributes to further development of the interdisciplinary field of nuclear criticism. "The End, or Life in the Nuclear Age: Modes of Subjectivity and Aesthetic Form" is a transnational study of the experiences of Americans, Japanese Americans, and Japanese in the nuclear age as expressed in post-World War II literature, television, and cinema. I use the figure of the bomb as a way of understanding the historical, political, and linguistic impacts of modernity - crystallized in the image of the nuclear bomb - on our contemporary moment. I argue that the world has become fully global, not because all peoples experience the same material conditions of life, but because the nuclear age is one in which the world is conditioned for the possibility of the end of life as such. This project responds to key cultural and literary theorists writing from the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe (in particular, Theodor W. Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Paul Virilio, and Michel Foucault), by enlarging the scope of their critique of modernity to include the atomic bombing of Japan. Crucially, I argue that nuclear war is not a futural event as commonly understood by most Western theorists. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demands that we account for how acts of terror committed by the West against the non-West have discursively given rise to an age in which nuclear technology functions as the symbol for both the technological triumph of Western science, and total planetary destruction. In so doing, this dissertation contributes to further development of the interdisciplinary field of nuclear criticism. Through a close reading of Japanese hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) essays, Japanese anime (animation) and cinema, American Cold War novels, and Japanese American Bildungsromane I trace the emergence of an aesthetics of the fissure that resists the structuring logic of a global nuclear modernity organizing populations according to target sites and kill zones. In order to understand this aesthetics of fissure I analyze the literary concepts of semiotic liminality, mimesis, melodrama, and Bildungsroman alongside political discourses of nuclear strategy, Hegel's philosophy of history, and feminist theory. Thus, this dissertation creates a comparativist approach that takes seriously the inextricable connection between world literature and world politics.
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    Remnants of Hope: (Re) member, (Re) claim, (Re) new
    (2023) Kpetay, Shakita
    School closure is one of the most controversial issues in education. Cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, New York City, and New Orleans have closed a large number of schools at one time while opening the doors of many charter schools (Buras, 2013; Lipman, 2012; Stovall, 2016; Watkins, 2012). Remnants of Hope: (Re) member, (Re) claim, and (Re) new is a critical ethnohistorical study that centers the experiences of students and educators who attended a public school that experienced school restructuring and later closure. Drawing from the Black heretical tradition, neoliberalism, and school closures, this dissertation examines how students and educators make sense of the school restructuring, closure, and highlights the ways that the political economy continues to shape education opportunities for Black/African American communities. Through archival analysis and interviews with students and educators who attended or worked at a school that was impacted by school closure, I explore the processes and problems associated with teaching and learning in these communities. I found that school closures are not just a one-time occurrence. It is a process that is impacted by race, gender, class, and geography. These closures can also lead to a disruption of community bonds and increased violence. I argue that scholars, educators, and policymakers need to ignite their critical historical collective consciousness and use intersectionality in the form of memory work to understand modern-day school closures and their impact on students and educators, more specifically Black/African American communities.
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    Sovereign Language: The Rhetoric of the Terror War Presidents
    (2017-08) Hiland, Alexander
    In the years following the September 11 attacks Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama expanded the power of the presidency to pursue the terror wars. This project explains how this was accomplished by performing a rhetorical criticism of the signing statements, executive orders, and presidential policy directives issued by both of the terror war Presidents. Drawing on insights from scholarship on the rhetorical presidency this project argues that the expansion of presidential powers is best understood as an attempt to incorporate the practices of public address into the exercise of personal power by the President. The implications of this tactic are manifest in the policies produced to pursue the terror wars, including enhanced interrogation, indefinite detention, continuous undeclared wars, mass surveillance, as well as other abuses of human dignity. The powers afforded to the terror war Presidents to pursue these policies have had a detrimental impact not only on the Constitution, but on the democratic practices of the United States. This project argues that the only hope for substantive change will be a fundamental change between the presidency and the public. The presentation will focus on the use of signing statements by both President George W. Bush and Obama to defend and end the practice of indefinite detention. Against legislative efforts to oppose both Presidents by Congress, both Presidents asserted the primacy of the presidency in determining how detained persons ought to be treated and how the terror wars would be fought. Although there are important policy differences between these two Presidents, they shared a commitment to defending the power of the presidency that caused both to circumvent the dictates of Congress. This example represents a microcosm of the broader trends in the presidency during the terror wars toward affording the presidency a sovereign position to unilaterally dictate policy for the country.
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    Texts as tactics: how people practice politics with books.
    (2011-07) Hengen, Nicholas
    My dissertation focuses on the uses of literature in public spaces by large groups of diverse people tied to particular political ends. I document and study these "tactical readings" in the process of arguing that in the United States, between the Great Depression and the Great Recession, literature has helped people transform their communities and their world. I document how Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn intervenes in discussions of women's rights among soldiers during World War II; how poems by William Shakespeare and Amiri Baraka, W.H. Auden and Lorna Dee Cervantes become a mass voice against racism and imperialism in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001; how John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath becomes a tool for discussing immigration reform and organizing communities against foreclosure during the "Great Recession" in 2009. In each of these chapters, I specify particular texts being used at particular times by particular actors and leading to particular ends. In linking texts, their readers, and the political consequences of reading, my critical approach runs contrary to the specter of New Critical hermeneutics that still haunts literary criticism in rarefied close readings or Derridian deconstruction. My approach also runs contrary to previous literary-critical attempts to situate literature in the world, such as reader-response theory with its focus on solitary, elite, or imagined readers. To challenge these paradigms, my sociological approach draws on the intersubjective theories of language pioneered by Jurgen Habermas. With Habermas's theory of communicative action and deliberative democracy, I produce a methodology for literary studies that allows for a focus on texts, their readers, and contexts of consumption--both particular (at the level of reader and text) and general (the way texts relate to particular cultural climates, for instance). Habermas offers a way to move between systemic analysis, institutional contexts, and the particularities of the way texts are used by everyday readers. I work to show literary studies what we might learn from such tactical readers in the hopes that working collaboratively with them, we can shape new tactical interventions.