UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Wanenchak, Sarah

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    DARK MIRROR: HETEROTOPIA, UTOPIA, AND THE EXTERMINATION CAMPS OF OPERATION REINHARD
    (2019) Wanenchak, Sarah; Korzeniewicz, Roberto P; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In Michel Foucault's body of work, the notion of heterotopia stands out as both particularly intriguing and particularly underdeveloped. Introduced in the introduction of The Order of Things (first published 1966) and further described in the lecture “Of Other Spaces” (1967), heterotopia has been used by scholars in a variety of fields, from social theory to architecture. Of special interest is the way Foucault describes the relationship between heterotopia and utopia, one defined by its liminal nature and the other by its unreality. This work seeks to shed new light on that relationship, by focusing on heterotopias as threshold spaces between the real social world and the perfected but unreal world to come. I approach the concept of utopia with an eye toward its eliminationist implications, and use three extermination camps established as part of the Nazi regime’s Operation Reinhard as cases through which to explore significant features of a heterotopia, how those features manifest in these cases, and what connects these spaces to the world that can be glimpsed in the mirror they create. Although I primarily use historical cases as a way to expand existing theory, I aim to build upon that expansion by pointing the way toward the development of new theoretical tools for historical-comparative analysis of spaces of both extermination and detention. Finally, I suggest that work might be done focusing on embodied identities as themselves forms of heterotopia, which introduces possibilities for additional analysis of the roles of bodies and identity in cases of certain kinds of mass violence and death.