Browsing by Subject "affect"
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Item The Affective Flows of Financial News Media(2016-11) Cormany, DianeAbstract At the start of the 21st century, the financial turn and the affective turn swept through critical cultural studies. The former recognized how society was being shaped by financialization—essentially the expansion of securities markets and market logics to all areas of daily life (Martin 2002). In order to understand the impact of finance capitalism’s incursion into private and social life, scholars including Brian Massumi and Lauren Berlant turned towards affect, which refers to the flow of sensations within and between bodies. At the same time, financial news media shifted to focus primarily on market movement, often replacing contextual analysis in the process. Drawing from media studies, theories and histories of financialization, affect theory, and cultural studies, my dissertation examines the intersection of these sociohistoric and contextual phenomena. I evaluate financial news media across both broadcast and print platforms: The Closing Bell (CNBC), Marketplace (American Public Media), and The Wall Street Journal as case studies for theorizing how financial news media operates as both a reflection of and a technology of financialization. My dissertation does so by situating financial news media within the context of neoliberal regulatory and ideological change that affected both the expansion of finance capital and changes in the media industry. In addition, I undertake close readings to evaluate the genre-specific aesthetics and the definitional forms of each text in order to understand how they interact with market logics. In the process I have discovered a common focus on incremental market movement across my case studies. These aesthetic forms may be considered affective by focusing on movement as productive and change-worthy (Massumi 2002). Likewise, while each of my dissertation texts imagines a different investing audience based upon their responsiveness and involvement in the market, the demographics comprise the educated and financially elite. Therefore, my project evaluates how media communicates engagement with the market as exclusive and hegemonic.Item Cultivating Everyday Life: Yards, Nature and Time in the City(2015-09) Lang, UrsulaThis dissertation focuses on everyday practices in residential yards, in the context of recent shifts towards urban sustainability policies and projects. Yards, and the variegated access to these private landscapes, are deeply political, and shaped by fundamentally racialized histories of home ownership and urbanization in US cities and suburbs. Yards are also an arena in which people are confronted with an array of contemporary social and environmental issues. Through qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork with residents in three diverse Minneapolis neighborhoods, I studied how yards are inhabited, experienced, and cultivated. I also analyzed municipal sustainability policies and environmental advocacy projects, to situate residents’ experiences within regimes of urban governance. I found yards are experienced and understood by residents in much more diverse and complex ways than is generally considered from scholarly and policy perspectives. Engagement with yards often involves decades of maintenance, cultivation, and care. I have found a surprisingly diverse range of informal property arrangements and sharing economies, with varying forms and meanings across and within study areas. Engagement with yards also depends on embodied skills, socioeconomic positions, and capacities to pause and attune to more-than-human rhythms. I argue yards and yard practices contribute to the reinforcement of certain fundamental urban logics such as private property and the production of a discrete and manageable nature. But everyday yard practices also provide disruptions to these logics and create the conditions for new social relations to emerge, such as urban commons in variegated forms. Furthermore, cultivating yards entail affective attunements between human practice and encounters with more-than-human organisms, within the context of sociopolitical relations at multiple scales. Thus, the research contributes to debates about urban environmentalisms by considering sustainability in terms of experiential and affective registers beyond best practices and measure. The research also reveals diverse and collective practices of property ownership and stewardship, in the midst of what is often considered the most iconic landscape of American private property – neighborhoods of single family houses. Finally, the research contributes to recent calls within geography about the possibilities and limitations of a renovated phenomenology in the ways geographers study and represent diverse human experiences.Item The Effect of Mirrors on Women's Body Image and Affective Responses to Yoga(2015-05) Frayeh, AmandaYoga is a promising strategy for promoting positive body image. However, certain social-environmental variables might undermine yoga’s benefits. Previous research indicates that mirrors alter women’s psychological responses to exercise, but the effects of practicing yoga with mirrors are unknown. The present study examined the effect of mirrors on women’s state body image, affect, and self-efficacy in a yoga class. A secondary aim was to examine the effect of mirrors on social comparison and mindfulness. Potential moderators were also examined. Ninety-seven college-aged females were randomly assigned to complete a 60-minute beginner level yoga class in either a mirrored or non-mirrored setting. Surveys were completed prior to and immediately after class. As hypothesized, the non-mirrored condition had significantly lower state social physique anxiety (SPA) after yoga than the mirrored condition. The mirrored condition reported significantly higher appearance-based social comparison than the non-mirrored condition, and social comparison mediated the relationship between mirrors and state SPA. There were no significant moderator effects. Mirrors appeared to lead to higher levels of state SPA in the mirrored vs. non-mirrored condition by fostering appearance comparisons with other participants and the yoga instructor. To encourage internal body awareness and minimize appearance comparisons in yoga classes, instructors in mirrored studios may want to consider structuring classes so students face away from mirrors, and reminding students to focus on how poses feel rather than how they look. Additional research examining the longer-term psychological effects of regularly practicing yoga with mirrors is merited.Item Empathic Imagination: Performing Interracial Intimacy in Contemporary Women's Drama(2016-06) Na, Eunha“Empathic Imagination: Performing Interracial Intimacy in Contemporary Women’s Theatre” interrogates the centrality of emotion in the representation of race and gender relations, focusing on contemporary drama. It investigates American women’s theatre from the 1980s to the present as key sites by which to examine empathy, a social feeling often seen as a necessary basis for liberal multicultural communities. Through examination of works by writers including Velina Hasu Houston, Suzan-Lori Parks, Diana Son, and Lynn Nottage, the dissertation argues that these plays reveal the fractured and illusory nature of an empathic community, where the desire for interracial affinities is intertwined with failures and anxieties that these plays make palpable through various performance strategies.Item Flooded in Sludge, Fueling the Nation: Generating Power, Waste, and Change in East Tennessee(2014-05) Hatmaker, MelissaThis project is a genealogy of the largest coal ash flood in US history that traces the intersecting forces that brought it into existence. And, it is a material analysis of the psychological, social, and geological processes that render this matter and this event largely invisible. At the intersections of environmental history, cultural geography, anthropology, and affect theory, this work centers on an analysis of power across multiple scales of social organization and through the development of the US electric grid. It is a layered account of the multiple ways desire for power and change produce a residue that perpetually accumulates. The project aims to enact a way of seeing that challenges and subtly alters the processes of knowledge production that render the ash flood invisible and outside of history. By drawing attention to the coal ash flood as a node of connection among multiple groups, ideas, and pasts, it explores how the excess production of coal ash physically and metaphorically emerges out of that which is forgotten or excluded from everyday life and the modes of knowledge production that condition it in the contemporary US.Item I'Ve Got A Bad, Bad Feeling: Epistemology And Affect In Literary Studies(2020-04) Fairgrieve, AmyThis dissertation intervenes on an ongoing conversation in literary studies about the connection between literary-critical epistemology—what constitutes knowledge in literary studies?—and literary-critical affect—what subjective emotional experiences do our interpretations produce? Starting from the work of critics like Rita Felski, Lisa Ruddick, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, all of whom take one particular epistemological assumption—the assumption that texts harbor ideological underpinnings that must be exposed—and connect it with a set of similar affective outcomes—paranoia, suspicion, etc.—I intervene on the critical conversation by moving beyond a focus on ideological critique. Literary criticism is broader and more varied than critique, and the many types of assumptions we find there about literary knowledge help shape the affective possibilities of the field. Using the work of Ann Radcliffe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, and Thomas Carlyle, I consider connections between objectivity and certainty, social critique and pleasure, intellectual rigor and nostalgia, and accumulated knowledge and neurosis. This dissertation proceeds from the assumption that literary texts meaningfully theorize about what literature is and how we should read and interpret it, and therefore brings major works by each of the above-cited authors to bear on a contemporary critical conversation. In taking on a broader range of epistemological assumptions and their counterparts in primary literature, I both include more of the kinds of work being done in literary studies today and push against the assumption that a simple modification of literary studies’ central methodological practices will necessarily solve problems of negative affect.Item In Search of New Riders: Affective Exclusions and Bicycle Planning in Minneapolis/Saint Paul(2015-09) Lindeke, WilliamRiding a bike is typically viewed as something most people can simply do without thinking, an automatic response latent inside one’s body from childhood. Thus, in a useful way, the cliché “it’s just like riding a bike” refers to the connection between technology and the body, which can bypass the consciousness-based model of behavior in provocative ways. But at the same time, the phrase subsumes a complex relationship within a seemingly automatic response. The fact that riding a bicycle is often taken for granted erases subtle differences between how and why people ride. Rather than an innate human capacity, for many people riding a bike is an experience that offers a wide range of emotional dynamics. By examining how “riding a bike” differs depending on specific bodies, spaces, and technological relationships, we can learn how subjectivity forms in relation to social and material environments. The complex relationship the body, bicycle, and space challenges assumptions that govern urban systems. Current bicycling trends have shifted debates around bicycling in ways that challenge traditional approaches of bike planners and advocates, particularly in attempts to attract new riders. Yet without a careful understanding of how and why bicycling differs from dominant automobile-centered transportation, urban decision makers risk re-inscribing existing patterns of mobility at the expense of a more impactful future. In this dissertation, I examine how differences emerge around everyday bicycling as a relational capacity to act, locating my approach within the field of “mobilities studies.” I use the concept of the affective assemblage, a concept that describes the relational dynamics of the bicycle, bodies, and diverse kinds of urban space. I then describe how bicycle planning debates that emerged in the 1970s pivoted around assumptions that privileged specific age, gender, race, and class positions at the expense of others. I extend these debates into the present by looking at how contemporary approaches frame design debates in ways that simultaneously include and exclude certain ways of moving. Next, drawing on urban spatial theory and qualitative research, I examine how bicycle riders employ tactics based on social capacities for feeling “in place to negotiate pathways through changing urban terrain. These spatial practices are connected with a nonlinear urban landscape that displays spatial gaps fundamental to developing bicycling habits in different ways, and lay the foundation for affective difference. Next, drawing on crowd theory, I outline how patterns form around particular aspects of the bicycle assemblage, so that clothing or riding style signify a larger affective connections, combinations of emotional attitudes and capacities for action. Using interviews, I show how these patterns form an affective taxonomy that describes how different modes of experience and capacities sort bicyclists. Finally, I look at how affective difference relates to current planning policies that attempt to appeal to new riders. As decision makers have begun to recognize the limitations of traditional bicycle planning, they are experimenting with design and policy approaches aimed at diversifying the affective range of bicyclists, for example, bicycle boulevards, “open streets” events, and bike share systems Yet in practice, while these approaches circumvent automobility logics in specific ways, they remain limited by both political and institutional constraints, and the affective assumptions made by advocates.Item Iron Deficiency, Depression, and Other Affective Disorders in Female State Fair Attendees(2018-05) Price, KathleenIron deficiency persists as the most prevalent nutrient deficiency on the planet, and women of menstruating age are at high risk due to menstrual blood loss. Recent data suggests that iron deficiency in the absence of anemia impacts quality of life, and currently the prevalence of menstruating females with inadequate ferritin values in the US is high. Although the literature on iron status and depression is conflicting, a relationship is suggested with a proposed mechanism of altered neurotransmitter functioning. This cross-sectional study gathered survey data and blood samples from 182 female subjects at the Minnesota State Fair in August of 2015. Whole blood hemoglobin, hematocrit, serum ferritin and serum TIBC were determined and correlated to survey data detailing reported iron deficiency symptoms and their severity, including the PHQ9, a validated depression screen. 15% of subjects were anemic as defined by a hematocrit value under 38% or a hemoglobin value below 12 g/dL. Additionally, 74% had low ferritin status as defined by a value less than 20 g/L. Overall, 10% of subjects reported moderate to severe depression as defined by the PHQ9. Although independent relationships between anemia, low ferritin values, or elevated TIBC values and depression were not seen, inclusion of symptomatic iron deficiency, a variable combining iron deficiency symptoms of dizziness and shortness of breath to assess whether deficiency was exerting a physiological effect, improved the correlation between the biochemical measures of iron status and depression (p < 0.0001), as well as self-reported incidence of other affective and executive functioning disorders, including stress or moodiness, ease of anger, emotional unresponsiveness, and alertness or concentration. This data suggests that iron deficiency must be symptomatic for the association with depression and other affective or executive functioning disorders to be apparent.Item Shadow Feminism: Disavowed Feminized Labor in Postwar American Art(2015-05) Joseph, LauraThis dissertation examines the ways in which postwar art historical discourses routinely trivialize feminine creative, emotional, and physical labor, as well as the artists whose work is associated with this labor. It takes form of five case studies, each of which coheres around a different type of feminized laborer, including the domestic, the cook, the entertainer, the hostess, and the widow. It asserts that the labor that characterizes these roles gets written over by art historical practices that cannot conceive of time as doing anything but moving forward, of radicality as involving anything other than rejection of the past and of artistic and social conventions, and of the art object as anything other than autonomously authored and produced. These case studies do not correspond with an examination of four independent artists. Rather, they emulate the gendered work of American kin-work, a set of sustaining practices identified and studied by social scientists since the eighties. Each chapter traces a network of relations between artists whose affiliations are not legible within traditional art historical narratives. The artists who populate this study include a selection of those whose work has been trivialized on the basis of its affiliation with feminized labor, such as Janet Sobel, Lee Krasner, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Charlotte Moorman, and J Morgan Puett. These artist's careers span the transition from modernist to postmodernist art practices and several generations of feminist thought. These figures do not just serve to represent exclusion, however. Nor is it this project's goal to rescue them from obscurity. When we hold back, in order to survey what art historical narratives have left behind, we find that these remains offer alternative methods of meaning making, methods that abide by, rather than seek to dispel, obscurity. This project looks to other contemporary artists whose work addresses itself to the erasure of feminized creative, emotional, and physical labor--including Theaster Gates, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, and Dario Robleto--to develop these historical methods.