Browsing by Subject "Feminist theory"

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    The Digital Transformation of Mental Health
    (2018-08) Bedor Hiland, Emma
    The United States is experiencing a mental healthcare crisis. Alongside growing numbers of mental illness diagnoses we are also faced with the problems of practitioner scarcity, the geographic remoteness of populations in need of mental healthcare, and prohibitive costs for services that might otherwise be within reach. A potential solution to these problems, many technologists, healthcare workers, and others believe, is the integration of technology into the delivery of mental healthcare. This dissertation explores the emergence of a field that seeks to do just that, that I term the digital mental health industry, and which encompasses three areas: telemedicine, applications, and artificial intelligence. Despite the interest that the digital mental health industry attracts, as of yet there has been little study of it unto itself. This project provides not only an examination of the technologies it relies upon, but also its workers’ beliefs as well as the field’s broader social and medical effects. Methodologically this dissertation utilizes a combination of fieldwork, interviews, and textual analysis to tell the story of how the digital mental health industry came to be, how it is changing what it means to be mentally ill or healthy, and how technology mediates processes of self-care.
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    The encounter between feminism and liberalism: an itinerary of “Woman”
    (2013-02) Detournay, Diane
    This dissertation takes feminist appeals to the rights of man and the human as a critical site through which to examine the category of "woman" and its relationship to difference. Tracing how the claim for women's rights is articulated in the works of four cardinal figures in liberal feminism (Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Martha Nussbaum), this study suggests that the staging of "woman" as a sovereign, rights-bearing subject relies upon the twin concepts of race and civilization in order to constitute itself. In particular, the appeal for women's humanity is justified in the name of civilizational progress, a formulation that is predicated upon the difference of the savage--and thus race--to mark the contours of the (civilized) human. As such, the struggle to insert "woman" into the conceptual framework of natural rights emerges as inseparably bound up with the production and foreclosure of racial difference. Ending with the appeal for women's human rights that this strain of liberal feminism opens onto, this itinerary seeks to attend to the constitutive exclusions that have enabled the emergence of a universal feminist subject.