Date of Award

Spring 5-15-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Educational Studies

First Advisor

Frank Trocco

Second Advisor

Caroline Heller

Third Advisor

Abhijit Bhattacharyya

Abstract

In this dissertation I propose a framework that emphasizes transitions between Private and Public. I argue that individuals can consciously reshape and reformulate these transitions to assert themselves in the world. How can the individual’s own internal realities, ventures, projects and selfhood assert themselves in a fraught world as an act of self-affirmation, leadership, and transformation? New approaches to this question can all be revealed by using transitions between Private and Public as actionable strategies. I re-interpret Hannah Arendt’s Private and Public as she presented them in The Human Condition (1958). I turn these into multivalent and multilayered spaces of action and being in the world. Then I generalize her definition of artistic Verwandlungen (transfigurations) and expand them to encompass all movements across Private and Public. I then propose that these transitions are mechanisms that allow humans to act and affirm their individuality and by doing so enact leadership. To illustrate how this theorizing works in practice, I harness my own lived experience in settings such as teaching, mentoring, work, healthcare, and entrepreneurship from an in-between liminal position: as a student and then as a teacher in-the-making, as a newcomer entrepreneur aspiring to be a leader in the world of startups, as a perplexed patient, later as an informed partaker searching for elusive diagnoses. I report my findings in four application chapters, with opening prefaces where I point out Arendt’s concepts and my own. I position the chapters themselves as transfigurations, i.e. as movements from my Private into the world. New ways to look at the transitions in between Private and Public provide new avenues for analysis and effective strategies of action throughout all sorts of commonplace encounters across fields such as education, medicine, and business.

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