Straight from my dissertation, here are the acknowledgement and dedication pages. Thank you to everyone who’s been on this journey with me and been rooting for me.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’d like to thank UTA’s Office of Graduate Studies and the College of Liberal Arts for the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship that allowed me the dedicated time to finish my dissertation this summer. A particular thanks to Dr. Raymond L. Jackson for his help and encouragement.

There are so many people who’ve made my time with UTA’s English Department truly wonderful. I’ve grown so much as a teacher, scholar, and person because of the department we have and the opportunities it’s given me. I want to start by saying thank you to Dr. Peggy Kulesz not only for her incredible mentorship as Director of First Year Writing, but also for her support, generosity, and friendship. I was also lucky enough to get to work with Dr. Justin Lerberg as he stepped into the Directorship and am so grateful I had the opportunity to learn from him as well. Thank you to Drs. Amy Tigner, Neill Matheson, and Kathryn Warren for their work on our behalf as graduate advisors. Thank you as well to Yael Sasley and Margie Jackymack who are the reasons things get done around here and who’ve helped me countless times with things from organizing an EGSA trip to opening classrooms. Dr. Kevin Porter has also been an integral part of my growth as a scholar; his classes during coursework pushed me to think in ways I hadn’t before and I continue to wrestle with what “meaning” means.

There are so many graduate students to thank. The original CARH 409 whirlwind, where I shared my first office with three other fantastic people: Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Rod Sachs, and Sean Farrell. My original cohort: Joul Smith, Miriam Rowntree, and Stephanie. I’ve gone through each step of the process with this group and can’t thank them enough for their time, support, encouragement, and friendship. My current officemate and twin, the ever magical Rachael Mariboho who knows. She and the always wonderful Sean Farrell have been so generous with their support and encouragement as I went through all the things. Thank you to Jason Hogue and Jeffrey Marchand for many a good conversation and much laughter. To Vince Sosko, Hope McCarthy, Laruen Phelps, Christina Montgomery, and Connor Stratman for your support and inspiration. And to Bethany Shaffer for her optimism, dance moves down the hall, and just general awesomeness.

Thank you to Miriam Rowntree for the texts, the anthems, the unwavering belief and optimism, the trips, the dreamings and talking-out-louds. We’ve come a long way from Porter’s class that first semester. We might never know what meaning means, but your friendship throughout this journey has meant more than I can say.

Thank you to my committee for all their work with me on this project. Thank you to Dr. Tim Morris for serving on my Comprehensive Exams committee. To Dr. Estee Beck for serving on the Dissertation Committee and for pushing me to include other voices and fields. To Dr. Stacy Alaimo who started me on this posthumanist path with her wonderful class on Posthumanism and Science Fiction in the Anthropocene. The texts, both theory and fiction, from that class altered my scholarly trajectory, and her suggestion of reading Lenz Taguchi when I told her about my project led me back to Barad which helped me find my voice and a way to articulate what I wanted to say about education.

Finally, but never least, none of this would have been possible without Dr. Penelope Ingram. From her advice when I sat on her couch when she was our graduate adviser and I was deciding to apply to the program, to her teaching and her fantastic classes on postcolonialism and feminism, to her taking on the EGSA, to agreeing to be my Chair and helping me navigate this process, to making the call at the end of June that changed everything and made me dig deep in a way I didn’t know I could.  She is a model of the kind of invested, passionate, and resolute (in all the right ways) scholar, teacher, mentor, feminist, and person I aspire to be. Thank you, Penny, for believing I could do this, for holding me accountable to my own potential, and for always having my back.

DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to my family who, in a million ways that mattered, made this document possible. I can’t begin to thank them or to fully explain what their love and support meant and did for me on this journey.

For:

Mom and Dad

Kate and Codi

Eleanor and Shepard

Neville and Theadora

I wouldn’t have “got ‘er done” without y’all.

K&L