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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Rights, Recognition, And Changing Borders: Latin American Activism In Post-Brexit Britain, Stephanie Aragao Medden Nov 2018

Rights, Recognition, And Changing Borders: Latin American Activism In Post-Brexit Britain, Stephanie Aragao Medden

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the advocacy work and political activism of Latin American social movement organizations based in the United Kingdom. I examine how activists working in Britain as it prepares to exit the European Union, make sense of their collective agendas, strategize to achieve their goals, and evaluate the outcomes of their advocacy efforts. In doing so, this project provides insights into the ways that identity movements are negotiated and performed during periods of increased political and public hostility toward their constituents and agendas. I illuminate the relationship between identity movements, immigration discourses, politics, and policy implementation and explore how …


Fearing, Tracking, And Loving Sharks: Ocean Conservation And The Material Rhetoric Of Human-Shark Entanglements, Camille Martinez Nov 2018

Fearing, Tracking, And Loving Sharks: Ocean Conservation And The Material Rhetoric Of Human-Shark Entanglements, Camille Martinez

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the following questions: 1) How do multispecies engagements rhetorically reconfigure the human, the shark and, to some degree, the ocean? and 2) How do such multispecies engagements refigure value relevant to conservation? These questions are explored within a framework of shark conservation as a field of biopolitics exploring the tensions inherent in the project of transforming sharks from killable enemies to valuable, living selves and the constraints and potentials that come into view when new relational possibilities emerge. Conservation practices, especially biodiversity conservation practices, are not merely management choices; they are political choices that shape future …


Cultural Practices And Social Formations In A Reforming Society: The Transnational Fandom Of European Football In China, Yuan Gong Nov 2018

Cultural Practices And Social Formations In A Reforming Society: The Transnational Fandom Of European Football In China, Yuan Gong

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the Chinese fandom of European male football and its relation to the formation of the Chinese urban middle class. I use online and offline ethnography, critical discourse analysis and textual analysis to examine the socio-cultural roots, technological conditions, and political implications of Chinese fans’ transmedia practices. My findings are twofold. First, I argue for the articulation between the European football fan identity and the subject of urban middle class emerging from the post-Maoist social restructuring. This articulation is reflected from these fans’ active reading of the European football text and their access to European football as conditioned …


Property, Postsocialism, And Post-Yugoslav Identity: A Feminist Communication Performance Ethnography, Jennifer Zenovich Jul 2018

Property, Postsocialism, And Post-Yugoslav Identity: A Feminist Communication Performance Ethnography, Jennifer Zenovich

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes how women in the postsocialist former Yugoslavia perform gender in the transition from socialism to capitalism by considering their material and symbolic relationships to property. Using performance ethnography to theorize the relational, embodied, and discursive ways in which identity has been mobilized in the former Yugoslavia, the central question is how insights from the postsocialist world can critique notions of the individual as well as global capital. Through the prism of postsocialist and postcolonial feminist theory and performance studies, I focus on three contexts: women’s feminized labor as sustaining the tourism industry in Montenegro, my rape and …


The Moral Economy Of The Networked Financial Subject: Cultures Of “Wealth-Tech” (Financial Self-Help) And Moneymaking In South Korea, Bohyeong Kim Jul 2018

The Moral Economy Of The Networked Financial Subject: Cultures Of “Wealth-Tech” (Financial Self-Help) And Moneymaking In South Korea, Bohyeong Kim

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a multi-sited ethnography on the culture of wealth-tech in South Korea. Wealth-tech (chaet'ek'ŭ) refers to techniques of personal finance and moneymaking, including investments in stocks, mutual funds, real estate, and other financial products. It entered the everyday lexicon in the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, when South Korea witnessed radical economic restructuring and neoliberal social governing. Situating the wealth-tech boom within the restructuring of the economy and subjectivity after the 1997 crisis, this dissertation explores a new mode of subject formation under the financialization of the South Korean economy. Based on 15 …


I Look To The Ground Beneath My Feet: An Insurgent Performance (Auto)Ethnography, Timothy M. L. Sutton Mar 2018

I Look To The Ground Beneath My Feet: An Insurgent Performance (Auto)Ethnography, Timothy M. L. Sutton

Doctoral Dissertations

This is a methodological dissertation written as a performance text within a performance paradigm. I use performance (auto)ethnography to turn the researchers’ gaze back on Western systems of knowledge creation. My approach is based on Diversi & Moreira’s (2009, 2016) betweener autoethnographies. While drawing on performance theory, I employ performance principally as my method (Spry, 2011). Within this performance paradigm, (auto)ethnography is a critically reflexive methodology that demands a commitment to embodiment in an ethical symbiosis with representation. This work is located at the intersection of the political, the performative and the pedagogical (Denzin, 2003a). From this center, I turn …