The Philippine Sea refers to the East and West Philippine Sea that are within the sovereign territory of the 7,641 islands of the Philippine archipelago. Historically, Spain, the United States, and Japan have colonized the islands, and the United States and China continue to maintain imperial interests in the area. Filipino/a/x diasporic activists in the U.S. and allies have participated in the anti-imperial struggle in support of demilitarization of the Pacific and of neo-colonized states across the globe. Responding to the problematics of anti-imperialism and solidarity, this dissertation advances the concept of agos or moving relations to attune to the sea as an analytic in theorizing activism, communication, and performance. This project was written on the unceded ancestral homelands of the Onk Akimel O’odham and Xalychidom Piipash, was inspired by the works of Black and Indigenous communities and scholars, and was influenced by Kale Fajardo’s notion of crosscurrents and Loma Cuevas-Hewitt’s concept of archipelagic poetics. Across critical organizational communication, critical intercultural communication, and performance studies, agos theorizes the relationalities of movements and the movements of relationalities. Utilizing critical qualitative, rhetorical, and performance methods, this project develops three instantiations of agos. In “Whirlpool Organizing,” the processes of anti-imperial organizers’ relationship and coalition building are examined to demonstrate the liquidities that animate dialectics and differences. In “Anchored Relationality,” U.S. diasporic Filipino/a/x’ varied and complex reconnections with Philippine waters are explored to illustrate the fluidities of positions and relations. In “Archipelagic Performance,” the staged production of “What sounds do turtles make?” is analyzed to showcase the flows of a decolonial and relational mode of performance.

Female celebrities are commodified by the entertainment industry at every stage of their lives. The industry's expectations of female celebrities reflect society's expectations for women. From girlhood to adulthood, women are expected to follow particular scripts of femininity. These scripts are promoted and perpetuated by the entertainment industry. Women are used as commodities for consumerism by both the industry and the media alike. Female celebrities have higher expectations today than ever. With the modern phenomena of reality television and social media, the public demands a new level of authenticity and transparency from celebrities. In this thesis, I explore three womens' lives and careers: Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, and Demi Lovato. I discuss the ways in which these three women have been commodified by the industry at each stage of their lives, as well as how they have, over the course of their careers, attempted to regain control of their images.

Non-Natives and Nativists is a relational analysis of contemporary multiethnic literatures in two countries formed by settler colonialism, the process of nation-building by which colonizers attempt to permanently invade Indigenous lands and develop their own beliefs and practices as governing principles. This dissertation focuses on narratives that establish and sustain settlers’ claims to belonging in the US and Australia and counter-narratives that problematize, subvert, and disavow such claims. The primary focus of my critique is on settler-authored works and the ways they engage with, perpetuate, and occasionally challenge normalized conditions of belonging in the US and Australia; however, every chapter discusses works by Indigenous writers or non-Indigenous writers of color that put forward alternative, overlapping, and often competing claims to belonging. Naming settler narrative strategies and juxtaposing them against those of Indigenous and arrivant populations is meant to unsettle the common sense logic of settler belonging. In other words, the specific features of settler colonialism promulgate and govern a range of devices and motifs through which settler storytellers in both nations respond to related desires, anxieties, and perceived crises. Narrative devices such as author-perpetrated identity hoax, settings imbued with uncanny hauntings, and plots driven by fear of invasion recur to the point of becoming recognizable tropes. Their perpetuation supports the notion that the logics underwriting settler colonialism persist beyond periods of initial colonization and historical frontier violence. These logics—elimination and possession—still shape present-day societies in settler nations, and literature is one of the primary vehicles by which they are operationalized.

The purpose of this mixed methods case study was to evaluate a dramatic arts curriculum focused on building protective factors including resiliency, cognitive flexibility, self-efficacy, and hope in eight to ten adolescent male sex offenders undergoing treatment at a residential behavioral health facility in Mesa, Arizona. The impetus for this research was suicide prevention efforts. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for ages 15-24 in the United States (CDC 2013), and prevention efforts demand complex approaches targeting major risk factors like lack of belonging and hopelessness. Arts-based prevention efforts have shown promise for building pro-social preventative factors.