2012 Theses Doctoral

On the Shores of Education: Urban Bodies, Architectural Repetitions, and the Mythic Space of End Times

Moffett, Christopher

Orienting around Plato's allegory of the cave, this dissertation looks back to earlier mythological and historical roots and forward to the spatial aesthetics of "occupation" and "No Child Left Behind," to trace the enduring connection between philosophies and practices of education and sacrificial journeys of descent and emergence. This thematic work of repetition, birth and death, is not so much knowable as it is the privileged way in which we enact and recognize knowing itself. Education, as a spatial practice and a narrative rehearsal, is a way of situating ourselves and organizing our places. Urban Education, rather than being a beleaguered branch of Education proper, cleaves to the very project of Education, emerging as it does out of cities. This is an examination of the philosophical, architectural, urban, aesthetic, and embodied conditions and strategies by which we learn to remember and forget ourselves.