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Descending the Animal Slope:
No full textThesis advisor: Jeffrey BloechlThis dissertation addresses the first and most fundamental question in environmental philosophy: how should we conceive of the human place within nature? The title derives from the moment in Descartes’ second meditation when he considers what he believed himself formerly to be: a rational animal. Inquiring into what animality and rationality are would send him down a slippery slope, and he decides that he does not have the time to waste on such questions. Prioritizing the rational over the empirical, the metaphysical distinctions that follow precipitate a pivotal episode in the rise of modern science and technology: a disembodied intellect is freed to discover and manipulate the laws and forces at work in nature, conceived mechanistically. While generating many positive advances, for instance in anatomy and medicine, that break with Aristotelian ontological suppositions also marks the beginning of centuries of violence toward the animal within, not to mention the animals, or animal-machines, without. In response, many contemporary environmental thinkers swing the metaphysical pendulum in the opposite direction. Troubled by the consequences of an implicit mind-body dualism, they assume some rendition of its early modern antithesis, Spinozist ontological monism. God, or Nature is understood as comprising a single substance, with all other beings conceived as modifications of that substance. Such ontological humbling is supposed to produce an ethical humility, putting the human back in its place as one humbled part of the larger whole. Our concern is that without important qualifications, such ontological humbling merely provides another justification for man’s modern conquest of nature, in accordance with instrumentalizing, human-centered ends. If the human is conceived as merely one more species among others, we boast an equal right to act in accordance with the powers of our own natures. In response, we develop a thesis that builds from insights in the works of Maurice Merleau- Ponty. We argue that Merleau-Ponty’s thought is characterized by an “archeological,” or origin-directed orientation, according to which he eventually theorizes a phenomenological analogue to Spinoza’s ontological monism: his instigating insight is that both the perceiver, or the subject, and the perceived, or the object, derive from a common ontological fabric. Beginning from insights indicative of a contrary, but complimentary orientation present in Merleau-Ponty’s early works, we begin to construct a “developmental” account to balance out his increasingly “archeological” path, introducing qualifications that orient his thought in an ethical direction. The integrative ethical ideal that we propose entails a developmental, rather than regressive “descent” of the animal slope (le versant animal), without undermining or denying ethical capacities and responsibilities that are specifically human. Drawing from the works of Schelling’s middle period to which Merleau-Ponty turns in his late lectures on Nature, we argue that we must acknowledge tendencies toward violence and domination present within nature itself—and, consequently, present within us, as part of nature—such that becoming fully human would demand the overcoming of those tendencies in the service of a higher ethical ideal. Taking a cue from Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, we propose an integrative ideal of self-giving love.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Philosophy
Capital Improvements to Principal Leadership: The Individual Journey of the Building Principal and its Impact on Recruitment
Get PDFThesis advisor: Vincent ChoThis individual case study is part of a larger group study examining how principals benefit from and shape professional capital to improve schools. Limited studies consider how the recruiting principal’s individual pathway may impact who they chose to recruit. Accordingly, this qualitative study examined the factors that influence educators to become principals and how these factors influence principals' decisions to recruit other potential candidates into the principalship. This study explored the professional journeys of eight school principals from one large urban school district in Massachusetts and how their principal pathways impacted their recruitment strategies. Findings revealed that building principals often credited their collegial relationship and interactions as playing an important role in their pathway to the principalship. Another finding from this study revealed that principals recruited potential leaders with the same qualifications or characteristics as themselves through the informal recruitment practices of tapping and their narrow definition of fit. Recommendations of this study suggest that districts should develop more formal social networks that ensure all educators have access to the necessary support and pipelines to consider the principal pathway. And, principals must reflect on their own principal pathway and potential bias to disrupt the cycle of recruiting a homophilous leadership workforce.Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Anti-Racist Educational Leadership in Times of Crisis: Asian Women Sympathetic Instructional Leadership
No full textThesis advisor: Andrew MillerThe purpose of this study is to investigate how Asian women educational leaders perceive their instructional leadership and the ways in which their racialized and gendered experiences impact their practices. This qualitative case study is anchored by the sympathetic instructional leadership framework that includes holding high expectations in a community context, keeping a focus on instruction, and managing critical negotiations with staff. This study was conducted in a predominantly white school district with stated goals for equity. Six semi-structured interviews were conducted with Asian women building leaders and education leaders. Additionally, a survey was conducted across the district about how race and gender during the pandemic and our nation’s reckoning have either posed obstacles or opened opportunities for anti-racist work. The qualitative evidence collected about instructional leadership navigation led to the emergence of three main themes: these leaders lead by empowerment and mobilization, they lead through racism, and they focus on adult learning for instructional leadership. While the district survey found a high rate of anti-racist preparation and study on the part of the participants, Asian women leaders conducted more critical negotiations with colleagues than those surveyed across the district.Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Reinventing the Museum: Textured Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Women’s Elegies
No full textThesis advisor: Marjorie HowesFocusing on elegiac dimensions of the museum, Reinventing the Museum: Textured Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Women’s Elegies contends that Eavan Boland, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks help us conceive a new spatial imaginary, which addresses traditionally underrepresented subject matters and historiographies with ethical alertness. Reading their works and their affective-experiential modes through an interdisciplinary feminist lens, this dissertation explores the ways in which the four women poets revise and update Julia Kristeva’s foundational concept of women’s time. Their decision to draw from museums—both physical and metaphorical—foregrounds woman’s embodied self and its relational ontology, ultimately to challenge the dominant dynamics of historiographical, literary canon formation. Functioning as bookends are my chapters on Boland and Brooks whose writings about Irish and Black experiences respectively explore tactics of space-making at the face of postcolonial, post-slavery displacements and diasporas. Taking Boland’s museum elegies as a point of departure, I move on to Plath’s plastic self-elegies where an inquiry into the plasticity of the self and theatrics of self-exhibit happens. Next, I examine Bishop’s shift from Enlightenment taxonomization to love as a possible antidote to enlightenment culture. Straddling between love poetry and elegy, Bishop’s prismatic love elegies often cast a discursive journey to proto-museums with the beloved as a figure for love. Her occasional superimposition of the lover on the racial other gestures towards Brooks’s necropolitical elegies and elegies of necropolitics, the latter of which resonate with the mission of Black neighborhood museums. Each assigned with a textured materiality—textile, plastic, light, and firmness, respectively—the chapters are divided into three sections that proceed from the poets’ problem posing to their attempt to think through the identified problem. On a broader scale, the chapters progress from the most concrete, fungible, and tangible materiality to the least, which points to a way of being, an attitude towards life. Assigning textured materialities to each chapter additionally draws attention to the interstices between the formal materiality of poetic language and nonlinguistic gestures and speech sounds. In this manner, my project actively builds on the momentum of and expand current debates in and around genre theory, phenomenology, affect studies, a version of historical materialism, postcolonial/Black studies, and museum studies.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: English
Trying to Change the Science Conversation in Schools: A Case Study of Teacher Preparation at the American Museum of Natural History
Get PDFThesis advisor: Marilyn Cochran-SmithThis dissertation focuses on how the MAT program in Earth Science at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH MAT), a one-of-a-kind, museum-based urban teacher residency, conceptualized and enacted the project of learning to teach science for urban school contexts. The AMNH MAT is situated within the two nested contexts. The first context is its emergence as one of a number of new, state-approved graduate schools of education that offer teacher preparation, endorse teachers for certification, and grant master’s degrees but are not part of or connected to universities. The larger study of which this case study is part termed this phenomenon “new graduate schools of education,” or nGSEs. The second context is the program’s mission of preparing teachers for urban schools, a goal that is shared by other teacher preparation programs within the domain of nGSEs. This descriptive, interpretive case study analysis poses two major questions: How and to what extent does the American Museum of Natural History infuse its long-standing beliefs about science learning and public service into a teacher preparation program? How and to what extent does the museum conceptualize and enact science teacher preparation for the specific context of urban high needs public secondary schools? Analysis of multiple data sources revealed that theAMNH’s mission of disseminating science knowledge in service of a more science-literate public was instantiated in a teacher preparation program that centralized and continually reinforced a vision of preparing science teachers but had a less central and more limited approach to preparing urban teachers. This case study analysis of an innovative teacher preparation program in one of our nation’s largest cities has important implications for urban science teacher education research and practice. First, the AMNH MAT’s model of science teacher preparation offered two key features that are useful for the field. The first feature was its coherence around the developmentof a science teacher identity that included deep science content knowledge and a commitment to bringing informal science teaching and learning practices into schools. The second model feature was the MAT program’s required four-residency structure, which essentially reinvented the “field” in teacher preparation fieldwork. At the same time, the project of learning to teach at the AMNH MAT, like that of many other urban teacher preparation programs, revealed the difficulties and dilemmas involved in preparing teachers for urban contexts, particularly the responsibility of developing a new generation of antiracist educators.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction
Utilitarian Thinkers in Two Worlds:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Sarah Gwyneth RossThis study investigates the political thoughts of two thinkers, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) from Renaissance Italy and Chen Liang (1143-1194) from Song China. Both thinkers argue against the popular of moral philosophy in state politics. They tried to use the idea of consequentialism, statecraft, and public interest to create their own utilitarian philosophy. This micro-comparison study will parallel two thinkers’ views on history, politics, and military in a similar historical context. These views are essential to the modernization of two civilizations.Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: History
Teachers' Perspectives on the Purposes of Social Studies Education: A Critical Analysis
Get PDFThesis advisor: Dennis ShirleyThroughout the relatively short history of American social studies education, its purposes have shifted in response to social and educational changes. The contest for the American social studies curriculum has continued since its inception, influenced by various stakeholders and educational theorists. Given widespread socio-political turbulence, particularly in the years following the 2016 election, this dissertation takes place at an opportune time to revisit the purposes of social studies. This dissertation explores the perceptions of 21 pre-service and in-service teachers and asks the question, “how do teachers perceive the purposes of social studies education?” To approach this question I adopted a constructivist grounded theory methodology. I conducted 21 interviews and allowed theory to emerge from the data to answer two sub-research questions: “How do pre-service and in-service teachers perceive the purposes of social studies education?”, and “How do teachers make sense of complex internal and external pressures and relate to the purposes of social studies education?” Several notable findings emerged from the results. I found teachers adhered to no singular, unifying purpose of social studies education. I argue for a fluid approach to purpose that allows for greater teacher professionalism and autonomy. When faced with pressures such as state policy, teachers exhibited varying degrees of resistance and prioritized their autonomy and the needs of their students. Teachers that resisted state policy were most commonly experienced in-service teachers. Notably, teachers perceived a debate between the importance of skills versus content in social studies education which I framed within existing educational sociology debates on the various dichotomies underpinning educational purpose; between neoconservatism and postmodernism, between instrumentalism and intrinsic meaning, between top-down policy and bottom-up context-driven instruction, between teacher alienation and self-actualization. The majority of teachers believed that developing specific social studies related skills was more important than content knowledge which highlighted a trend away from the intrinsic value of social studies knowledge and towards the instrumentalization of education. Social studies was increasingly defined by its utility. Finally, teachers noted the changing ontology of teaching itself given the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and rapid technological change.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction
Essays in Labor and Development Economics:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Anant NyshadhamThesis advisor: Kit BaumThe dissertation consists of three independent explorations of labor market dynamics in developing countries. I first investigate how minimum wages affect employment and investment decision of firms in India and how they can lead to accelerated automation and offshoring. Then, I investigate how managers of garment production lines in India's largest ready-made garment producer establish informal agreements to deal with worker absenteeism shocks. Finally, I study how Indonesian households learn about their productivity in different sectors of the economy and show that they often spend years, if not decades, in sectors where they are less productive which depresses their earning potentials, but they converge to their most productive sector over time. In the first chapter, "Effect of Minimum Wages on Automation and Offshoring Decisions of Firms: Evidence from India", I study the effect of India's local minimum wages on the production structure of firms in the formal economy. I compile data on the country's numerous minimum wages which vary at the state, year, and industry level, and show that changes to these wages have important effects on firm-level capital investment and employment of different types of employees. The effects depend on the firms' ability to automate and offshore certain tasks. Using a difference-in-difference approach, I show that firms in the average industry, that is, firms in industries neither intensive in routine nor offshorable tasks, continue to invest in machinery and computers at a rate of 8% per year following a minimum wage hike. However, they substitute payroll workers with managers and contract workers less likely to be bound by the minimum wage. Firms in industries intensive in routine tasks that are easier to automate invest 6.1% more in machinery and 4% more in computers, at the expense of payroll workers. Firms in industries intensive in tasks easier to do remotely continue to invest in machinery and computers, but the rate of investment in computers falls by 6.2% following a minimum wage hike, and payroll worker employment falls as well. This suggests that some tasks that combine workers and computers, like data analysis, may be offshored. These results support the predictions of a task-based production model, and indicate that minimum wages have a strong effect on the structure of production at the firm level, leading some towards increased rates of automation and offshoring. In the second chapter, "Absenteeism, Productivity, and Relational Contracts Inside the Firm", joint with other researchers, we study relational contracts among managers using unique data that tracks transfers of workers across teams in Indian ready-made garment factories. We focus on how relational contracts help managers cope with worker absenteeism shocks, which are frequent, often large, weakly correlated across teams, and which substantially reduce team productivity. Together these facts imply gains from sharing workers. We show that managers respond to shocks by lending and borrowing workers in a manner consistent with relational contracting, but many potentially beneficial transfers are unrealized. This is because managers' primary relationships are with a very small subset of potential partners. A borrowing event study around main trading partners' separations from the firm reinforces the importance of relationships. We show robustness to excluding worker moves least likely to reflect relational borrowing responses to idiosyncratic absenteeism shocks. Counterfactual simulations reveal large gains to reducing costs associated with forming and maintaining additional relationships among managers. In the last chapter, "Learning, Selection, and the Misallocation of Households Across Sectors", joint with other researchers, we study the role of labor misallocation (i.e., suboptimal sorting of households across sectors) in explaining low productivity in developing countries. We estimate a generalized earnings equation with dynamic correlated random coefficients, allowing households to learn about their relative productivity across the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. Estimates show that households sort across sectors on comparative advantage, but learn and converge slowly over time, with many households spending substantial time in a suboptimal sector. Roughly 33% of households are misallocated to start, earning 64% less on average than they could have if they were properly sorted across sectors. Our approach nests several alternative models which can be ruled out, including those without dynamics and/or heterogeneity in relative productivity across sectors. We also evaluate alternative interpretations for the dynamic sorting we observe in the data such as saving out of financial constraints and skill accumulation or learning by doing.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Economics
Essays in Empirical Asset Pricing and Investments:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Jeffrey PontiffMy thesis contains four essays on the pricing of financial assets and the role of non-professional investors. The first two essays describe the legal framework governing Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) and the liquidity transformation functions of ETFs. The third essay examines how trading by nine different types of market participants are related to characteristics that have previously documented to predict the cross-section of equity returns. The fourth and final essay examines whether and how orders originating from retail brokerages respond to analyst recommendations. In my first essay, I describe the legal framework that governs ETFs and theoretical benefits of the ETF security design relative to two other popular investment management security structures: open-end and close-end mutual funds. To do so, I briefly describe the history of the modern investment management industry. I describe the role of Authorized Participants (APs), the main security design innovation of ETFs, and highlight the key theoretical differences between the three classes of funds. Lastly, I describe SEC rulemaking that governs the behavior of ETF Managers and their APs. In the second essay, I document a hidden but substantial cost associated with the liquidity transformation that corporate bond exchange-traded funds (ETFs) provide. When creating new shares, authorized participants (APs) deliver a subset of the portfolio of bonds that underlie a corporate bond ETF. This subset contains bonds that realize low future returns, reducing ETF performance by 48 basis points per annum. This loss in performance cannot be attributed to forgone compensation for risk or illiquidity, but instead results from APs utilizing information regarding future changes in net asset values to strategically deliver bonds when those bonds are expected to realize poor performance in the near future. My third essay is joint work with Jeff Pontiff and David McLean. We provide the most comprehensive study of market participation to date. We assess the informativeness of 9 different participants’ trades, and how each participant’s trades relate to 130 different variables that together reflect the cross-section of expected stock returns. Firms and short sellers tend to be the smart money—both sell stocks with low expected returns, and their trades predict returns in the intended direction. Firms, however, also seem to possess private information, while short sellers do not. Retail investors buy (sell) stocks with low (high) expected returns and their trades predict returns opposite to the intended direction. All 6 types of institutional investors are weighted towards stocks with low expected returns, but none of their trades robustly predict returns. My fourth essay is joint work with Jeff Pontiff and David McLean. We ask whether retail investors are responsive to analysts’ revisions. We consider revisions in recommendations, price targets, and EPS forecasts, all of which predict returns. Revisions in recommendations and price targets portend greater retail trading in the direction of the revision. The effects are stronger for All-Star Analysts’ revisions, and retail investors also respond to All-Star’s revisions in EPS forecasts. Retail investors trade in anticipation of revisions in price targets and recommendations, consistent with analysts or brokers “tipping” some retail investors. Retail trades earn higher returns when aligned with analysts’ revision. The results show that retail investors are one channel through which analysts’ information gets into prices. Our findings also support the idea that spikes in retail trading reflect informed trading, some of which is informed by analysts.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management.Discipline: Finance
Microaggressions, racial identity, and coping: An examination of Black graduates of elite universities
Get PDFThesis advisor: David L. BlusteinEducation is often thought of as the great equalizer that is capable of offsetting societal inequities (Holmes & Zajacova, 2014). Elite universities are characterized by the most selective admissions criteria, and attendance at these universities often provides access to the social capital necessary to pursue prestigious careers. Research shows that Black students attending elite universities experience racism while on campus (Torres & Charles, 2004; Warikoo, 2018). Scholars have also found that the experience of racism negatively impacts Black student’s well-being (Neville et al., 2004). However, little is known about what happens when Black students at elite universities graduate and enter the workforce, especially the ways in which they experience racism at work. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to better understand the ways in which experiences of racism at work impact on well-being and work-fulfillment for Black graduates at elite universities and to examine potential factors that may protect against racism. Black graduates of elite universities (N= 1,010) were invited to complete measures that assessed racial microaggressions (Racial and Ethnic Microaggressions Scale), racial identity (Black Racial Identity Attitudes Scale), racism-related coping strategies (Racism-Related Coping Scale) well-being outcomes (Mental Health Inventory and Satisfaction with Life), and work-fulfillment outcomes (Work Engagement and Job Satisfaction). The present study used structural equation modeling and findings were mixed. However, the results revealed that particular experiences of racism at work negatively impact both well-being and work-fulfillment. The results of moderation analyses showed that racial identity may serve as a protective factor against experiences of racism at work for Black graduates of elite universities. Implications for research, practice and policy, as well as study limitations are presented.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology