International media immediately lambasted plans to build a Louvre and a Guggenheim museum in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE) as the whimsy of wealthy sheikhs using oil money to “buy culture.” The museums are part of a $27b development project called Saadiyat Island. While Saadiyat is spectacular, dismissing it...
“Speculative Justice” asks how U.S. terrorism cases with numerous indicators of entrapment prevail in federal court despite case law designed to prevent these very policing practices. Drawing on a combination of two case studies, an original archive of digital court filings from over 250 defendants, and a collection of over...
This dissertation explores the role and relation of capitalism in contemporary political life, with the aim to reveal the inherent oppression of what I refer to as capitalist culture. To this end, the project follows three main objectives: (1) to identify the widespread and pervasive nature of capitalist culture (2)...
Standard narratives on the relationship between art and urban development detail art networks as complicit agents in processes of upscaling and gentrification connected to the political and economic elite. My thesis challenges the conventional narrative by investigating the relationship between grassroots art spaces, tied to local, community- based interests, and...
This dissertation presents a program of research on cultural cognition of the natural world, involving long-term research with indigenous Ngöbe partner communities (Panama) and selected comparisons to Western samples (US). In two series of experiments focused on agency concepts, we show that cultural frameworks recruit distinct principles for inferring agency...
Researchers have proposed that the culture in which we are raised shapes the way that we attend to the objects and events that surround us. What remains unclear, however, is how early any such culturally-inflected differences emerge in development. Here, we address this issue directly, asking how 24-month-old infants from...