Abstract

The author seeks to uncover the exceptional responses through which eleven internationally renowned leaders of human rights brought forth new worlds into existence by their discontinuous engagement with the challenging circumstances that they encountered. The dissertation undertakes an in-depth examination of the autobiographies and biographies of Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Hellen Keller, Kwame Nkrumah, Karl Marx, Harriet Tubman, Aung San Suu Kyi, Viktor Frankl, Rigoberta Menchu, Nawal El Saadawi, and Paulo Freire. The study focuses its theoretical lens on these individuals' discontinuous engagement with their challenging circumstances as manifested in their exceptional responses, and the consequences of responding exceptionally for these individuals and for the world touched by their exceptional responses. The dissertation also contains a review of the pertinent scholarly literature highlighting the perspectives of behavioral scientists on the exceptional dimensions of human behavior. The method is alternatively deductive and inductive; it is deductive inasmuch as the notion of exceptional responses embedded in the author's model guided her inquiry, but it is inductive inasmuch as specific hypotheses about exceptional responses were deferred until data collection was underway. The author adapted devices from grounded theory and from transcendental phenomenology; she used methodological devices from the former in the selection of her sample and in her analysis, and used devices from the latter in her analysis. The exceptional responses made by the individuals to the challenging circumstances they faced constitute the unit of analysis. The series of exceptional responses made by these individuals to the challenging circumstances they encountered over their lifetime-on-display-in-their-autobiography, captures the progressive unfolding of the phenomena of interest. The author integrates the uniformities underlying the particularistic aspects of exceptional responses yielded by this vertical within-autobiography analysis, as well as, the uniformities underlying the universal aspects of exceptional responses, through a horizontal across-autobiographies analysis, into a theory-in-process of Birthing New Worlds Through Exceptional Responses to Challenging Circumstances