Subjectivity, phenomenology, and the expression of the human/nonhuman other are critical impasses for makers to challenge, curate, or circumvent within Posthumanism. Through an Abnatural aesthetic ungrounding of the WE as self/other/avatars, identities of a maker are infinitely reconstituted into variable signatures, logics, ethics, and moralities.Avatars exist as differentiable iterations of the perceived self, but they are also independent beings that flicker between states of the real/fake as simulacrums and contradictions embedded within the WE. This unfixity of a formal silhouette provides the self, as a maker, the opportunity to move beyond Paragonical structures toward x. Troubling in an unpredictable liminal directionality, the WE is subjected to another kind of alterity that fronts imperceivable biases. This process, rather than being extractive and intrusive, seeks expansive freedoms into the unexplored landscapes of each maker by dismantling the socio-cultural confines of practice. As an amateur, as a maker, and as an avatar, the WE is challenged to perceive otherness from within. In so doing, it becomes embedded, knowable, demystified, and embodied as a new modality for made/maker. How far can these tentacular forms reach, stray, and grasp? Pushing toward a nonhuman space, to critique the Posthuman, an Abnatural aesthetic produces elastic, generative collaborations that simultaneously critique the WE. Through case studies on Combinatorial strategies to frame objects, subjects, and making practices, an asymptote of trouble arises where subjects are entangled within their unfixable subjectivity. Experiencing as an avatar, how can an Abnatural aesthetic generate pathways toward inclusive and expansive making practices?

The geologic epoch of the Anthropocene, or the age of human domination, is a metacondition animated by unprecedented planetary change. Global warming, regular mass extinction events, and ecological disaster wrought from human activity spell crisis for all planetary life while exacerbating dominative relations among the human species. Thus, the Anthropocene may be viewed as an age wherein spheres of precarity widen and (in)direct impacts of ecological disaster differentially harm populations predicated upon their predetermined social location under dominative governmental, economic, and social structures. This metacondition poses a challenge for activists, critical scholars, and critical pedagogues working toward social emancipation. To interpret and combat the complex and scalar logics of power in the Anthropocene, this critical/cultural, rhetoric, and performance project advances a turn toward what I term critical ecological rhetoric. Drawing inspiration from Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies and Raymie McKerrow’s critical rhetoric – two modes of theorizing which sought to articulate dominative relations under the metacondition of neoliberal hegemony –this critical ecosophical turn seeks to address power as dispersed across material, social, and psychological registers and as complexly entangled within the metacondition of the Anthropocene. An integral element of critical ecological rhetorical practice is demystifying the presence, construction, and defense of borders imposed within and between ecological registers, as such bordered constructs of difference serve to justify violent domination while concealing ecological logics of interconnectedness.Across three case studies which differently privilege one of three ecological registers, I demonstrate the dynamism of critical ecological rhetoric. In “Pyropolitical Phoenix,” materialist, elemental implications of governmentality in the urban ecology of Phoenix, Arizona are examined as a rhetorical circulation synecdochic of repressive relationships in urban ecologies under worsening conditions of climate change. In “I’m Real When I Shop My Face,” the circulation of glitch feminism by pop artist Sophie across digital media ecologies is examined to demonstrate capacities for queer worldmaking within cisnormative algorithmic architectures. In “All My Happiness Is Gone,” I examine my ecology of depression as enmeshed in complex genetic, social, and material entanglement.

“(Dis)Locating the Sensual: Black Queer Placemaking in Brooklyn, New York” investigates the impact that gentrification has on Black queer subject formations and Black queer public culture. My research explores the interplay between social oppressions, the Black quotidian queer body, and lived sensations within two Black queer bars located in the epicenter of white middle class gentrification in Brooklyn, New York: Langston’s Brooklyn and Happiness Lounge. In doing so, my project expands Western conceptions of space while charging feminist and queer theories to explore interpersonal and personal dimensions of lived experiences that are conditioned by modes of normalization set by white supremacy. I use archival research and ethnographic methods to explore the way that Black queer people utilize space and the spatial dimensions that happen in and across the spaces they regularly occupy. I also collect and examine building information, such as the owners’ respective rental agreements, building permits, documented building violation(s), and incurred fees by the owners to understand who owns the land, who manages the properties, and the role of the state in regulating space. Additionally, “(Dis)Locating the Sensual” analyzes three analytic memos from my ethnographic fieldnotes including desire, spatial performance, and sensations to apprehend the implications of performance on a Black queer sense of place. Taken together, this data renders a complex picture of Black queer place-making that both resists and exceeds the structural constraints of racial capitalist expansion. My work both dialogues with and contributes to fields that are rarely drawn into conversation: Urban geography and Black queer studies. By analyzing sensations, nostalgia, and atmosphere within Langston’s and Happiness Lounge, I chart the ways in which gentrification continues to displace physical Black queer social spaces and impact the atmospheres and sensations that are unique to their vanishing social spaces. I introduce Black queer spatiality as a method that is informed by tracing Black LGBT spatial sensations and atmospheres; this analytic enables the linking of physical spatio-historical processes of extraction to the sensual geographic experiences that are emplaced in Black queer social spaces.

Performing the Electrical traces the histories and futures of electrical discovery and knowledge through cultural performances, socio-political assemblages, and the more-than-human worldmaking functions of energy in general and electricity in particular, or what I refer to as energy-as-electricity. This project seeks to transform how energy-as-electricity is perceived, and thereby to re-vision the impact that energy-rich relationships might have ecologically—in both the social and environmental senses of the word. As a practice-led inquiry I use my scenographic sensibilities in combination with performance studies and energy humanities lenses to identify how energy-scapes form through social performances, material relations, and aesthetic/ritualistic interventions. This approach allows me to synthesize vastly different scales of energy-as-electricity performatives and spatialities and propose alternative framings which work towards decolonizing and re-feminizing energy-rich relationships. This research considers the way power flows, accumulates, and transforms through performance as embodied expression, practice and eventful doings of human and more-than-human agents. It asks: if place is practiced space (Henri Lefebvre), how can decolonizing and re-feminizing energy-rich relationships transform normative power relationships (or power geometries, as cultural geographer Doreen Massey refers to such globalized interconnections)—which are formed through electricity, technologies and colonial-capitalism? I ground this inquiry as an ecological intervention in order to investigate how performing with electricity differently (both in collective imaginations and quotidian interactions), can change the ways that electricity is produced and consumed in the time of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Plasticene. The following study produces written and tacit knowledge that expands the framing of energy-rich relationships shared between human and more-than-human performatives. My provocation is that experiential encounters are critical for expanding the ontological plurality of energy-as-electricity with ecological a/effect. Drawing on the insights of performance scenographer Rachel Hann, I demonstrate that scenographic methodologies in an expanded field, along with embodied sensing, provide productive insights into this endeavor of expansion. This project both serves as a space making/space keeping provocation and offers a methodology for devising more desirable futures.

The Desert Southwest has no shortage of representations in literature, art, and film. Its aesthetics—open horizons, strange landscapes, and vast wilderness—inform and saturate the early Western films of John Ford, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and continue in today’s popular imaginations. My work acknowledges such contributions and then it challenges them: why are those names more widely associated with the Southwest than Luis Alberto Urrea, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, or Pat Mora?

The project intersects the environmental humanities, critical theory, and cultural studies with the Desert Southwest. It explores the fullness of desert places with regard to cultures, borders, and languages, as well as nonhuman forces and intensities like heat, light, and distance. Dispelling the dominant notion of desert as void or wasteland, it sets a stage to suit the polyvocality of desert place. My work is interdisciplinary because the desert demands it. It begins with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in order to reorient readers towards the rupture of the US War With Mexico which helped set the national and cultural borders in effect today. I then explore Denis Villeneuve’s film Sicario to emphasize the correlation between political hierarchy and verticality; those who can experience the desert from above are exempt from the conditions below, where Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway and Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood take place. The novels expose the immanence and violence of being on the ground in the desert and at the lower end of said hierarchies. Analyzing Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World and Mora’s Encantado enables what I term a desert hauntology to produce a desert full of memory, myth, ancestors, and enchantment. Finally, the project puts visual artists James Turrell and Rafa Esparza in conversation to discover a desert phenomenology. The result is an instigation of how far is too far when decentering the human, and what role does place-based art play in creating and empowering community.

John Ford was from Maine. Georgia O’Keeffe, from Wisconsin. Edward Abbey, Pennsylvania. As someone born and raised in the Desert Southwest, I’ve written the project I have yet to encounter.

New communication technologies have undoubtedly altered the ways in which persons interact and have had a profound impact on public life. Engaging this impact, much of the scholarly literature has focused on how these interfaces mediate interaction however, less is known about technology's modulating effects. The current project moves beyond mediation, underscoring how social relations are not only activated by technology, but are actuated by these interfaces. Through an extended case study of Portals, gold shipping containers equipped with audio-visual technology that put persons in digital face-to-face interaction with others around the globe, the current project engages such actuation, highlighting how the co-mingling of affect and technology generate new ways of noticing, living and thinking through the complex relationships of public life. The human/technology relations mediated/modulated by the Portal produce unique atmospheres that activate/actuate public space and blur the boundaries between public and private. Additionally, the atmospheres of the Portal generate a digital co-presence that allows for user/participants to feel with their interlocutors. This “feeling with” suspends user/participants in atmospheres of human connection through the emergence of an imaginative dialogue, and the curating of such atmospheres leads to dialogic transformation. As such, the Portal operates as an atmospheric interface. Engaging the concept of atmosphere attunes those interested in new communication technologies to the complex gatherings these technologies create, and the potentialities and pitfalls of these emerging interfaces on public life.

Urban planning in the neoliberal era is marred by a lack of public engagement with urban inhabitants. Henri Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ theory is often treated as a way to empower disenfranchised urban inhabitants who are lacking control over the urban spaces they occupy. Though the right to the city has seen a resurgence in recent literature, we still lack a deep understanding of how right to the city movements work in practice, and what the process looks like through the lens of the everyday urban inhabitant. This dissertation seeks to fill these gaps by examining: 1) how a minority-led grassroots movement activates their right to the city in the face of an incoming light rail extension project in South Phoenix, Arizona, USA, and 2) how their right to the city movement demonstrates the possibility of urban society beyond the current control of neoliberalism. Through the use of participant observation, interviews, and media analysis, this case reveals the methods and tactics used by the group to activate their right to the city, the intra-and inter-group dynamics in the case, and the challenges that ultimately lead to the group’s demise.Tactics used by the group included protesting, organizing against city council, and creating a ballot initiative. Intra-group dynamics were often marred by conflicts over leadership and the acceptance of outside help, while inter-group conflicts erupted between the group, politicians, and pro-light rail supporters. The primary challenge to the group’s right to the city movement included neoliberal appropriation by local politicians and outside political group. By possessing limited experience, knowledge, and resources in conducting a right to the city movement, the grassroots group in this case was left asking for help from neoliberal supporters who used their funding as a way to appropriate the urban inhabitant’s movement. Findings indicate positive possibilities of a future urban society outside of neoliberalism through autogestion, and provide areas where urban planners can improve upon the right to the city. If urban planners seek out and nurture instances of the right to the city, urban inhabitants will have greater control over planning projects that effect their neighborhoods.

During the early twentieth century, a caste dispute known as the Eki-Beki dispute erupted among a group of historically related Konkani-speaking Brahman castes on the western coast of India. A faction among the castes argued that the variously related Konkani-speaking Brahman castes were originally one caste called the Gauda Saraswat Brahman (GSB) caste, which got split into several sub-castes. They further argued that the time had come to unite all these castes into one unified GSB caste. This faction came to be known as the Eki-faction, which meant the unity-faction. The Eki-faction was opposed by the majority of the members of the above-mentioned castes who disagreed with the idea of unification. This opposing faction came to be known as the Beki-faction, i.e. the disunity-faction. Despite the opposition from the majority, the Eki-faction managed to unite these different castes to form the contemporary unified GSB caste. The Gaud Saraswat Brahman caste in its current form is the product of this dispute. The formation of the GSB caste was initiated by members of these castes who had migrated from different rural regions of the western coast of India to the urban center Bombay. The rise of the GSB caste, however, became a contested process. Dominant non-GSB Brahman groups in Bombay discredited the migrants as being outsiders of lower ritual status. The unification movement was also opposed by the majority of these Konkani-speaking castes residing in the rural regions of the west coast of India. The struggle of the urban migrants for unification involved publication of Hindu texts and changes of normative practices, such as dining regulations and marriage arrangements, that affected the long-standing norms of maintaining ritual purity. Despite the opposition, the urban migrants partially succeeded in unifying the variously related Konkani-speaking Brahman castes. My dissertation is a history of this process.

This paper examines the role of persuasive cartography in territorial conflict through the case study of Azerbaijan and Armenia's dispute of Nagorno Karabakh. In particular, the paper connects theories of critical cartography and territorial conflict to the way that maps can influence opinion and lead to negotiation breakdown. I analyze cultures of geography from both sides before analyzing how Armenian maps have changed between the period of 1994 and 2016. Focusing on Goddard's (2006) theory of how the way actors make claims to territory can result in indivisibility, I argue that the powerful rhetoric of maps can strongly influence perception of territory. I connect the shift in rhetoric about the territory to shifts in how the territory is depicted in maps. Using public survey information from other researchers working in Armenia, I find that Armenian geographic culture and use of maps almost exclusively uses the most maximalist depiction of the territory, which may explain why it is difficult for leaders to compromise on the territory. After conducting analysis, I concluded that cartography can be used by actors to argue their territorial claims, with the unexpected effect of polarizing public opinion. It is unclear if persuasive cartography is a symptom or a cause of territory negotiation breakdown. In order to study whether cartography itself plays a role in negotiation breakdown, a larger sample size of disputes is necessary.

Sound is immediate and ever-present, pushing in, around, and through physical boundaries to blend together in whichever way it best sees fit, no matter the controls we seek to impose on it. It builds associations for us: physical spaces become distinctive based on the quality and familiarity of sounds which inhabit them. With this spirit, I see sound as the central arbiter of sense of place, particularly in alternative community spaces, wherein individual and collaborative expression is not only encouraged, but essential to its experience, separating it from commonly-held mainstream and/or programmed social space. By recording the sounds of three distinctive such alternative cultural spaces in central Phoenix—The Trunk Space, Lawn Gnome Publishing, and Welcome Diner, rooted in art and music, literature, and food and drink, respectively—I captured the soundscapes in which the community around theses spaces democratically builds its sense of place. Compiling them into a soundscape composition, I installed the piece in the non-place of an art gallery, immersing listeners in fleeting glances at theses soundscapes, then inviting them to use the fluctuating sonic environment to cite their own associations with art, literature, and food-based senses of place right on the gallery walls. Through this exercise, and research on the experience of sound and meanings of sense of place, I express the intersection and essentiality sound, ambient and performative, in building sense of place.