Browsing by Subject "agency"

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Beauty as the Beast: Constructions of the Girl in Three Modern Variants of the Tale as Old as Time
(2018-05) Syed, Sarah
This thesis aims to answer the following question: How is the girl constructed across three modern variants of “Beauty and the Beast?” The three primary texts examined in this paper are Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Angela Carter’s short story, The Tiger’s Bride, and Salman Rushdie’s novel, Shame. Each text was analyzed specifically for how it remains consistent with and deviates from Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” published in 1756. My aim was to go beyond a sex-role theory analysis and assess how these modern variants revise a traditional plotline to construct the girl in terms of her agency, transformation, and fate. Emphasis was placed not only on comparing and contrasting the girl and the female experience across these three texts, but also on placing these texts within the context of gender studies and fairy tale scholarship at large. A major premise of this thesis is that fairy tales are in an incredibly powerful position to inform, socialize, and re-socialize both children and adults. As a result, this project strives to elucidate what each of the three primary texts conveys about the fictional girl and about the actual girl represented by the fiction. Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates how the fairy tale influences our popular conception of gendered identities and how it can play a role in remedying longstanding and often harmful portrayals of these identities. It shows also how important this research is in today’s social and political climate—where fundamental (if subconscious) misunderstandings of the woman have perpetuated the injustices she faces.
Making Method Visible: Improving the Quality of Science-Based Regulation
(The Center for Global Energy, International Arbitration, and Environmental Law, 2014-10-24) Wagner, Wendy
Scientific inferences are theories about how the world works that scientists formulate based on their observations. One of the most difficult issues at the intersection of law and science is to determine whether the weight of evidence supports one scientific inference versus other competing interpretations of the observations. In administrative law, this difficulty is exacerbated by the behavior of both the courts and regulatory agencies. Agencies seldom achieve quite the requisite visibility that explains the analytical methods they use to reach their scientific inferences. Courts – because they appreciate neither the variety of inferential methods nor their epistemic foundations – do not demand this level of visibility from the agencies. We argue that much progress can be made toward visible, coherent, science-based regulation if courts ask two deceptively simple questions: (1) have the agency’s inferential methods been identified? and (2) does the agency explain how its methods are appropriate to the information on hand and how the methods support the agency’s inferences?
Power in Community: The Cooperative Model as an Empowering Space of Refuge, Agency, and Support for Survivors of Human Trafficking
(2020-05) Kapuria, Nishtha
Human trafficking is a form of modern day slavery where traffickers use force, fraud, and coercion to control another person into engaging in commercial sex acts or soliciting labor and services against her or his will. The current rescue model is flawed because it fails to meet the basic needs of survivors, resulting in the common occurrence of re-victimization post-rescue when survivors voluntarily return to their traffickers. An examination of the issue showed that the current rescue model fails to meet the basic needs of refuge, agency, and support. I hypothesized that cooperative living could be a potential solution that provides all three. After extensive research into the background and current models of cooperative living, I tie the Rochdale Principles, which have guided co-ops since the 1800s, to the three core needs and offer recommendations for an adapted cooperative model that is modified for survivors of human trafficking, along with ideas for future research and steps towards actualization. Cooperatives have long been at the center of reformative justice movements by redistributing power to marginalized communities, like survivors of human trafficking who struggle to successfully re-integrate back into society. Co-ops can offer them a safe and consistent refuge, the ability to regain their agency, and a support system that offers them the chance at family beyond biology.
The Shape Of Ethics: Kantian Moral Agency Under Reason Holism
(2018) Barrish, Elijah
I explore the possibility of Kantian moral particularism, a moral system that would include reason holism on the one hand and the Categorical Imperative on the other.