Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0009-3027-3142

Date Available

4-24-2024

Year of Publication

2024

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Philosophy

First Advisor

Dr. Arnold Farr

Second Advisor

Dr. Robert Sandmeyer

Abstract

This project develops a praxis towards social change based on the works of Michel Foucault. It first establishes Foucault’s philosophical assumptions, methods, and political goal of countering “objectivizing” modern Western social forces. It then draws on sources from the three major phases of Foucault’s career to trace his development of a general conceptualization of experience as relational, or as non-exhaustively co-constituted by and through three indispensable kinds of social forces: knowledge, power, and ethics. It then evaluates implications of Foucauldian experience for efforts towards social change to conceptualize a general Foucauldian praxis towards social change. The praxis aims to affect the experience of subjects to cultivate forms of subjectivity that positively orient subjects towards social changes that a given social movement seeks. The project concludes with one possible, specific illustrative application of the praxis towards efforts to promote more environmentally sustainable ways of living among contemporary Western subjects. It offers a possible characterization of such efforts using the new materialist texts, The Posthuman by Rosi Braidotti, Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway, and The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing. It concludes with an application of such efforts to the practice of maintaining community gardens.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2024.258

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