Subtitle/Alternate Title

Distributed Agency in CAFO Communities

First Advisor

Anandita Mukherji, PhD

Thesis Committee Member(s)

Thomas J. Howe, PhD & Lara Narcisi, PhD

Reader

Eric Fretz, PhD

College

Regis College

Degree Name

BA

Document Type

Thesis - Open Access

Number of Pages

63 pages

Abstract

The thesis appropriates the Vital Materialist thought of political theorist Jane Bennett working in the philosophy of new materialism. Informed by a Deleuzian tradition, Bennett’s reading of Spinoza cements an understanding of materiality as lively and vibrant, wherein things demonstrate a thing-power along lines of effect that correspond to inert tendencies of persistence and activity in the object itself. This account of physical matter as vibrant, or lively, accommodates a distributed image of agency; that is to say, vital materialism seeks to take seriously the political activity and power of non-human bodies within an ecology, interrogating a traditionally anthropocentric privileging of ‘the human’ in ontology and metaphysics. A distributed image of agency rewrites traditional discourses on political thought and political problem-posing. The thesis contests that distributed agency in the form of an assemblage structure pulls politics out of prototypically human concerns—where political thought can become constipated with questions of permissibility, responsibility, and culpability—and towards an account of political thought that rests in the relationships between humans and non-human physical actants. The unique political ecology of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and their surrounding communities provides a useful scenario for analyzing the ways in which emergent causality and conatus are better suited for political analysis than traditional models of thought. In this framework we can seriously consider the political liveliness and impacts of cattle fecal dust, pollutants, chemical run-off and various other non-human bodies within the framework of a political ecology.

Date of Award

Spring 2021

Location (Creation)

Colorado (state); Denver (county); Denver (inhabited place)

Rights Statement

All content in this Collection is owned by and subject to the exclusive control of Regis University and the authors of the materials. It is available only for research purposes and may not be used in violation of copyright laws or for unlawful purposes. The materials may not be downloaded in whole or in part without permission of the copyright holder or as otherwise authorized in the “fair use” standards of the U.S. copyright laws and regulations.

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