This dissertation interrogates correlations between imperial expansion and the history paintings produced for London audiences by the American-born artist Benjamin West (1738-1820) during his first decade in England (1764-1774). Within that ten-year span, Grand Manner academic history painting shaped and reflected the imperial anxieties that elite Britons experienced as a result of dramatic territorial gains, consolidations and losses in North America and South Asia. To follow the trajectory of history painting’s rise, relevance and obsolescence is to track Britons’ negotiation of their global status as a “free though conquering people.” As England’s pre-eminent history painter, West secured for himself a place within the discourses of the imperial self-imaginary by developing two types of iconographic program. First, the selective appropriation of narratives from classical antiquity allowed West and his patrons to inculcate their audiences with visual models for British imperial virtue. Advancing the cause of imperial self-ratification through classical narrative, West cast the English as the natural heirs to the Roman empire. The resulting images paralleled and buoyed contemporary textual discourses of empire and intersected with antiquarian collecting practices, both of which were based on the notion of modern British proprietorship of classical antiquity. Second, developing and refining a model introduced by Francis Hayman (1708-1776) at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in 1761, West contrived a pictorial format which introduced persons living and recently dead into a realm of visual expression formally reserved for characters from biblical and classical textual sources. Invoking some of history painting’s most familiar compositional and figural conventions, West recombined history painting, portraiture, landscape and genre to formulate the iconographically hybrid heroics of empire, complete with its own set of pictorial motifs through which West and his followers styled their subjects exemplars of classical imperial virtue. Imperial anxiety afforded history painting its short-lived relevance among English-speaking audiences during the second half of the eighteenth and first quarter of the nineteenth centuries, and imperial self-acceptance rendered that most highly-esteemed of artistic genres obsolete. Through the visual heroics of empire, Benjamin West established history painting as a viable form of Anglophone cultural production during his first decade in London.
Archive for December, 2011:
The experience of anticipatory grief among individuals living with cancer, their primary caregivers, and families
This researcher explored the experience of anticipatory grief among individuals living with cancer, their primary caregivers, and their families. Whereas conventional research into the experience of anticipatory grief tends to address its psychological, social, and physical responses, this dissertation includes exploration of the spiritual aspects of grief, dying, and death. Three primary questions were addressed: What is the experience of anticipatory grief as it relates to one’s illness? What is the experience of living with cancer? What is the experience of participating in Hospice Calgary’s Living with Cancer day program? An exploration of these questions utilizing heuristic research methods enabled the researcher to gain insight into the challenges, fears, and hopes of individuals and families affected by impending loss. Coresearchers reported that the initial diagnosis of palliative cancer triggers the experience of anticipatory grief, not just in the individuals receiving the diagnosis, but for their primary caregivers and families as well. The anticipatory grief trajectory, as responses to a series of multidimensional and multileveled changes and losses, is represented with a roller coaster metaphor. In the beginning it appears sharply spiked with shock, fear, anxiety, sadness, depression, feelings of overwhelm, emotional ups and downs, and feelings of helplessness by all coresearchers. Yet once the shock of the initial diagnosis was absorbed, all individuals began to move out of denial, adapted, and developed coping strategies. All individuals began to manage their illness and live with cancer. The most reported coping strategy was emotional and social support. When approached from a transpersonal perspective that embraces death as a transition rather than a final exit, the opportunity to experience conscious living and conscious dying begins to emerge. When death is accepted, anticipated, and prepared for, the fear and suffering experienced by those who are dying and their loved ones may be significantly alleviated.
“The social responsibility of the administrator”: Mordecai Wyatt Johnson and the dilemma of Black leadership, 1890–1976
During the first half of the twentieth century, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson was one of the most notable leaders and orators in the African American community. He was best known as the first Black president of Howard University, a post he held from 1926 to 1960. But throughout this public life, he was also a forceful defender of Black civil rights, a vocal critic of colonialism in Africa and Asia, and an opponent of American militarism during the Cold War. This dissertation examines the intersections between Johnsons roles as an educator at a federally-funded Black institution and his political stances on behalf of civil rights, economic justice, and self-determination. In particular, it seeks to determine the extent to which the competing demands from Johnsons various constituencies—White federal officials, Howard University students, faculty and alumni, the larger African American community, and other Black leaders—affected the expression of his political ideas during his tenure as Howard president. Given Johnsons long public career as a Baptist preacher, civil rights activist, orator, and educator, this dissertation will examine a number of important themes, including the role of the Black church in early civil rights movements； the effect of anti-Communism on African American protest； academic freedom in historically-Black colleges and universities； African American perspectives on United States foreign policy； and the impact of White funding on Black institutions of higher education. In this manner, the career of Mordecai Johnson is used to illustrate a number of important themes in the development of Black political movements from the 1910s through the 1960s.
How does a politician’s personal faith inform the experience of political decision-making
The role of personal faith in the decision-making process of politicians has at various times throughout American history assumed greater or lesser degrees of prominence in the eyes of the public. Yet, little is known about the relationship between personal faith and the actual lived experience of political decision-making. Using the faith-based themes of divine will, moral principles, living faith, and separation of church and state, hermeneutically derived from an examination of the autobiographical texts of seven historical politicians, this qualitative phenomenological study explored the lived experience of political decision-making and the role of personal faith in the lives of four recent politicians. Long interviews were conducted of former and current members of the U.S. Congress and a former high ranking elected State government official, evenly representing the Democratic and Republican political parties. The phenomenological data analysis discovered four essential elements of the lived experience of political decision-making and the role of personal faith, correlating with the hermeneutically derived themes from texts. These were (a) assurance, (b) caring, (c) duty, and (d) caution. Personal faith was found to inform political decision-making routinely in the lives of the co-researchers, and a focus on moral principles was found to be a bridge across parties and value constructs. Implications exist for organizational leadership, including foundational understanding of the parameters personal faith extends into the political decision-making process, providing guidelines for further research.
Monetary policy and the term structure of interest rates
There are two separate literatures studying the bidirectional relationship between monetary policy and the term structure of interest rates: the New Keynesian Monetary models and the Affine Term Structure models. This study presents four essays that analyze the interaction between the yield curve and the monetary policy utilizing and marrying both frameworks. Chapter 2 utilizes an affine term structure model in order to answer a simple but challenging question: can real time macroeconomic and policy information tell us anything about the yield curve movements? The main finding is that indeed macroeconomic data releases and policy announcements explain persistent jumps in the euro area yield curve. Chapter 3 develops an affine term structure model that the ECBs policy rate is modeled as a jump diffusion with a predetermined timing of the jumps that coincide with the actual Governing Council meeting days. The message reflected in the results is that the policy rate is indeed an important driving factor of the term structure of the yield curve, while the information contained in the yield curve vastly improves the accuracy of the estimated policy rule. Chapter 4 presents a novel extension of the New Keynesian Monetary model that the central bank intervenes at regular points in time. Moreover, it presents an estimation technique which utilizes an information structure with more than one frequency. The empirical results suggest that the presence of the non-intervention subperiods force the central bank to over-respond to inflation； the lack of information on output during subperiods leads to lower estimates for the policy rules response to output which indicates that the CB gives less weight to the unobservable information. Chapters 5 main contribution is that it extends the periodic New Keynesian model introduced in Chapter 4 in order to account for the information-rich environment delivered by the yield curve and focuses on identifying the effects that the term structure of interest rates and the seasonal central bank intervention have on the NK model. The empirical results indicate the term structure information identifies a more conservative policy rule in terms of inflation responses, and more aggressive, in terms of output responses.
Efficiency in energy production and consumption
This dissertation deals with economic efficiency in the energy industry and consists of three parts. The first examines how joint experience between pairs of firms working together in oil and gas drilling improves productivity. Part two asks whether oil producers time their drilling optimally by taking real options effects into consideration. Finally, I investigate the efficiency with which energy is consumed, asking whether extending Daylight Saving Time DST) reduces electricity use. The chapter “Learning by Drilling: Inter-Firm Learning and Relationship Persistence in the Texas Oilpatch” examines how oil production companies and the drilling rigs they hire improve drilling productivity by learning through joint experience. I find that the joint productivity of a lead firm and its drilling contractor is enhanced significantly as they accumulate experience working together. Moreover, this result is robust to other relationship specificities and standard firm-specific learning-by-doing effects. The second chapter, “Drill Now or Drill Later: The Effect of Expected Volatility on Investment,” investigates the extent to which firms drilling behavior accords with a key prescription of real options theory: irreversible investments such as drilling should be deferred when the expected volatility of the investments payoffs increases. I combine detailed data on oil drilling with expectations of future oil price volatility that I derive from the NYMEX futures options market. Conditioning on expected price levels, I find that oil production companies significantly reduce the number of wells they drill when expected price volatility is high. I conclude with “Daylight Time and Energy: Evidence from an Australian Experiment,” co-authored with Hendrik Wolff. This chapter assesses DSTs impact on electricity demand using a quasi-experiment in which parts of Australia extended DST in 2000 to facilitate the Sydney Olympics. We show that the extension did not reduce overall electricity consumption, but did cause a substantial intra-day shift in demand consistent with activity patterns that are tied to the clock rather than sunrise and sunset.
Forest politics in colonial and postcolonial Kenya, 1940–1990s
In the period 1940-1990s, the Kenyan forestry policy evolved from an emphasis on preservation to a combination of programs which embodied both rural Africans’ interests and practices and state interests in environmental issues. Using four cases from the western Kenya region, this dissertation explains how and why this shift took place. It examines the significance of local processes in the form of struggles over preserved rural landscapes in the shift of the policy. The struggles were manifested in contests and negotiations between officials and rural people from the affected areas. Through these contests and negotiations, compromises that led to the preservation of the landscapes materialized. The compromises allowed rural Africans’ interests and uses of the landscapes to insinuate themselves into the preservation policy reshaping it in the process in different contexts. Despite the compromises, contests against the preservation continued due to its restrictive effects on local ways of using the landscapes. Rural Africans made persistent claims for usufruct and ownership rights to the preserved landscapes which compelled government officials in some cases to give back substantial acres of the preserved forests to the claimants and in other cases to allow regulated uses of the forests. These official responses incorporated local ways of using the landscapes into conventional agendas for the forest preservation. To expand forests in rural areas in the face of such incessant claims for land, the government adopted social forestry and agroforestry programs that aimed at integrating forests, crops, livestock, and people. The programs appropriated certain local land-and tree-use practices which transformed the forestry policy into a mixture of local uses of landscapes and conventional discourses on forests. The constitution of the forestry policy was thus more complex than the high modernist model used for environmental policies generally.
Global visions and urban infrastructure: Analyzing the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) extension to San Francisco Airport (SFO)
The contemporary trend of connecting airports and their surrounding regions with rail infrastructure is examined through a research case study of the recent extension of the Bay Area Rapid Transit BART) system to the San Francisco Airport SFO). These air-rail links represent the latest round of civic boosterism intending to competitively position cities within the global economy through transportation infrastructure investments. This case research examines one of the key tensions in contemporary planning: how to balance the provision of effective infrastructure for urban activity and growth while preserving the quality of life and the sustainability of places. As an attempt to better connect the regional transit system with the regions primary airport, the extension project represents the regions biggest single transit investment since the completion of the original BART system in the early 1970s. A mixed methods approach is utilized in assembling the evidence. Research methods include a review of historical documents and the existing secondary literature, an analysis of primary planning documents involved in the project, interviews with relevant officials, and a quantitative analysis of collected performance data. In examining the complex evolution of the 35-year planning process of building the BART extension to San Francisco Airport, several narratives of evaluation are assembled: 1) the historical context of the involved institutions and their inter-relationships； 2) the tension between technically grounded decision-making and decisions based upon symbolic politics； and 3) the implications of an increasingly complicated planning process within multi-jurisdictional environments. Precisely because transportation infrastructure is durable and capital-intensive, the history of institutional decision-making regarding airports, transit networks, and other facilities is primary to an understanding of contemporary policy. Due to its strong promotional appeal, the symbolism of urban design plays a crucial role, and contemporary transportation projects must also be interpreted in this light. Decisions based upon symbolic politics greatly affected the functional integrity of the project and led to significant cost escalations. In particular, the decision to extend the BART system to the airports international terminal proved to be especially costly and resulted in an inefficient functional design.
Preparing teachers for partnering with families: Examining the impact of a specifically designed curriculum on professionals
This case study documents the curriculum building and delivery of the content of a graduate level course K548, Families, School, and the Society) offered at Indiana University and examines the impact on teachers of a curriculum specifically designed to prepare them for effective family-professional partnerships. Based on a preliminary study conducted in 2003, this course K548) was restructured. This dissertation study was conducted to evaluate the impact of this restructuring on the effectiveness of the course. Data collected from field notes, interviews, and course artifacts were analyzed using constant comparative methods to analyze the impact the curriculum had on teacher learning and professional identity development in terms of partnering with families. This dissertation study documented that the course studied had a reasonable structure because it was effective in achieving its overall goals of preparing teachers to partner with families. Overall, it could be concluded that the comprehensive course curriculum with Family Systems Theory component as a solid conceptual framework, provided the much needed direction in teacher preparation and the solid information base that could be used by others in the search for improvement of similar programs. The study facilitated the emergence of a conceptual framework related to knowledge, skills, and attitudes essential for the preparation of teachers in partnering with families. Finally, the study made recommendations for future practice and pointed out the issues to be resolved in future research.
Resiliency factors among juvenile offenders
Enhancing strengths may decrease the effects of weaknesses and risk factors to help juvenile offenders to become less vulnerable to negative outcomes. In addition, assisting juvenile offenders in overcoming the risk factors present in their lives may assist them to integrate successfully into the community following release and ultimately to meaningfully contribute to society. Focusing on enhancing success, by recognizing and utilizing existing strengths, could provide a productive avenue for lowering recidivism rates as well as promoting delinquency prevention. The goal of the present study is to examine juvenile offenders’ positive characteristics (e.g., adaptability, optimism, self-efficacy, tolerance of differences). In this study, 214 male and female participants completed surveys. The Resiliency Scales for Children and Adolescents (Prince-Embury, 2007) was used to assess the positive characteristics present in the population of juvenile offenders. Participants also completed the Negative Life Events Inventory (NLEI), a Positive Life Events Inventory (PLEI), and two screeners for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to determine the life circumstances, behaviors, cognitions, and emotions present indicating both situational and psychological adversity experienced by juvenile offenders. Other data include: education (e.g., grade point average, grade, special education placement) individual offending statistics (e.g., length of current incarceration, times arrested, age at first arrest), in-facility behavior indicators (e.g., number of major rule violations, number of times to segregation), and demographic data (e.g., age, ethnicity, gender, guardianship). K-means cluster analysis identified a four-cluster resiliency profile existing among the sample of juvenile offenders. The RSCA scales and the external variables associated with the clusters were then analyzed using ANOVA analysis of variance. The four clusters differ notably from each other in age, age at incarceration, number of months incarcerated before completing the surveys, number of major violations while incarcerated, number of times to segregation, number of negative life events, symptoms of psychological adversity, facility risk and need assessment scores, parenting practices, peer relationships, independent living skills, intellectual and educational functioning, and substance abuse. The aim of examining resilience through determining profiles of juvenile offenders is to further tailor evidence based treatment and prevention efforts that utilize and develop areas of strengths to compensate for the numerous risk factors faced by juvenile offenders.