Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Witnessing Climate Change In The United States Virgin Islands: Emotional Responses And Calls For Action, Thomas Bane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Climate change is one of the greatest threats facing humanity in the 21^st century. This study investigated people’s observations of climate change in the United States Virgin Islands (USVI). A qualitative study was used with a Grounded Theory approach to better understand how people witnessed climate change events, what people’s emotional responses were, and what calls for action they had to respond to climate change in the USVI. The study had two parallel arms: five focus groups (n=17) with residents of the USVI and key informant interviews with community leaders (n=10). Participants witnessed a wide …

Desde El Fuego Que En Mí Arde: Performance, Literatura Y Cine Afro-Latinoamericano Producidos Por Mujeres Afrodescendientes En Perú, Cuba Y Brasil (1960–2000), Elena Ekatherina Chavez Goycochea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines different films, literary, and performance art pieces created by contemporary afro-descendant women from Peru, Cuba, and Brazil after the sixties with emphasis on the most relevant works of Conceição Evaristo, Sara Gómez, Victoria Santa Cruz, and Lucía Charún-Illescas. I focus my research on the crucial role these artists played in the cultural identity formation of Latin America when inserting ‘race’ as a category of socio-political analysis and cultural production. How did their films, performances, and texts challenge national narratives and imaginaries after 1960? Although in the sixties, women improved their civil rights in different countries, the ‘mujer …

The Public Reckoning: Anti-Debt Futures After #Rickyrenuncia, Sarah Molinari

Publications and Research

This essay argues that the summer 2019 mobilizations in Puerto Rico and the renewed demand for a debt audit help to imagine anti-debt futures that disrupt the terms and temporalities of public debt and indebted lives. The essay discusses one form of debt resistance-a comprehensive citizen debt audit-as central to deepen the process of public reckoning marked by #RickyRenuncia and to build upon the landscapes of protest and solidarity emerging in its wake.

The Coloniality Of Disaster: Race, Empire, And The Temporal Logics Of Emergency In Puerto Rico, Usa, Yarimar Bonilla

Publications and Research

This essay uses the case of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico to discuss “the coloniality of disaster”: how catastrophic events like hurricanes, earthquakes, but also other forms political and economic crisis deepen the fault lines of long-existing racial and colonial histories. It argues that disaster capitalism needs to be understood as a form of racio-colonial capitalism and that this in turn requires us to question our understandings of both “resilience” and “recovery.” The article focuses on the “wait of disaster” as a temporal logic of state subjugation and on how Puerto Ricans responded to state abandonment through modes of autogesti� …

The Heritage Of The Spanish Antilles, Daniel Nieves

Open Educational Resources

This course seeks to explore the heritage of the Spanish Caribbean—primarily Cuba, Dominican Republic/Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico. We will place particular emphasis on the historical, cultural and ethnic forces that have shaped the character of the people of these islands. As well we will explore the variety of societies and cultures of the Spanish Caribbean in their historical and contemporary setting up to and including the (im)migration experience of Spanish Caribbean people to urban North America.

Afro-Cuba Transnational: Recordings And The Mediation Of Afro-Cuban Traditional Music, Johnny Frias

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the way audio and video recordings and the internet have impacted, shaped, and helped create a transnational Afro-Cuban music scene. My focus will be on the most popular and widely-recorded genres of Afro-Cuban music—rumba and the religious repertoire of Santería, particularly batá drumming—both of which I also perform regularly with other Cuban musicians in Miami. Incorporating interviews, online ethnographic research, and participant-observation as a musician, my research has three main arguments.

First, recordings of Afro-Cuban music helped create a transnational Afro-Cuban music scene by increasing the popularity of these traditions outside of Cuba, including their amateur performance …

‘Haciendas And Plantations’: History And Limitations Of A 60-Year-Old Taxonomy, Marc Edelman

Publications and Research

In 1957, Eric R Wolf and Sidney W Mintz published ‘Haciendas and Plantations in Middle America and the Antilles’ in the Jamaican journal Social and Economic Studies. This article discusses the production of the Wolf and Mintz article, its analytical framework and the theoretical tensions it contains, and its subsequent influence, mainly though not exclusively on anthropological and historical scholarship about large landed properties in Latin America and the Caribbean. ‘Haciendas and Plantations’ appeared at a time when anthropologists such as Elman Service, Charles Wagley, and Marvin Harris were trying to make sense of agrarian Latin America by developing typologies …

Amplifying Cuny Voices With Cuny Academic Works, Jill Cirasella, Adriana Palmer, Roxanne Shirazi

Publications and Research

While most conversations about open access literature center on journal articles and books, research takes many other forms. CUNY Academic Works provides a platform for, and public access to, a wide range of CUNY-created scholarship. In this presentation, we discuss the importance of including Women's Studies Newsletter (the predecessor of Women's Studies Quarterly), Latino Data Project Reports, and theses and dissertations in Academic Works, and report on a recent census of journals published by the CUNY community.

The Ties That Bind: Gender, Race, And Empire In Caribbean Indenture Narratives, Alison Joan Klein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the ways that oppressive gender roles and racial tensions in the Caribbean today developed out of the British imperial system of indentured labor. Between 1837 and 1920, after slavery was abolished in the British colonies and before most colonies achieved independence, approximately 750,000 laborers, primarily from India and China, traveled to the Caribbean under indenture. This is a critical but under-explored aspect of colonial history, as this immigration dramatically altered the ethnic make up of the Caribbean, the cultural norms and traditions of those who migrated, and the structure of British imperialism. I focus on depictions of …

The Historic Inability Of The Haitian Education System To Create Human Development And Its Consequences, Patrick Michael Rea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study aims to evaluate the role that a lack of literacy and education has played in Haiti's historic and presently low level of human development. The pedagogical philosophies of two educationists, Paolo Friere and Maurice Dartigue, are used throughout the study as lenses from which to read and interpret the history of Haitian education -its many failed attempts, and recurrent challenges- in creating a literate and educated population. The author concludes that mass literacy is prerequisite if the Haitian people are to achieve self-realization and actualization, which essentially equates to what the United Nations Development Program calls "Human Development". …

Leveraging Learning To Improve Disaster Management Outcomes, Denise D. P. Thompson

Publications and Research

Disaster management agencies should be exemplars of learning given the volatility of their operating environment. However, there are cognitive, social, and organizational barriers that prevent these organizations from learning. The purpose of this article is to use the Caribbean Disaster and Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) as an example of an organization that achieves double-loop learning in spite of known barriers. This research shows significant learning variations in the CDEMA organization from the regional to the national level. The results demonstrate that the CDEMA Coordinating Unit and a few national member agencies achieve double-loop learning, while the opposite is true for …

The United Nations And Gender-Mainstreaming; International Conferences On Women And The Development Of Gender Mainstreaming Policies In Caribbean States, Camasita Campo

Dissertations and Theses

"International conferences, especially UN-sponsored summits, are popular venues for political coalition around various issues of global concerns, mobilizing large audiences consisting of state representatives, NGO groups and other interested parties. Many small states participate at leading international summits. Some of these states for many obvious reasons are preoccupied with economic survival. Their limited resources are expended on economic priorities and little or none is left for the implementation of social development programs. As a result, these small states are constrained from defining contours of social development, without the cooperation of the international community. They must therefore depend on external actors …

Including Migration In The Development Calculus: The Dominican Republic And Other Caribbean Countries, Sherrie Baver

Publications and Research

Study of development in the Caribbean Basin is incomplete with- out considering the socioeconomic impact of international labor migration on this region, which is defined here as including Mexico, the Carib- bean archipelago, Central America, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. Most of the seven books under review deal with the specific case of the Dominican Republic and in doing so bring new theoretical sophistication and depth to examining the link between migration and development. In this way, they expand understanding of the present-day Dominican reality, which involves massive migration by Dominicans to the United States-mainly to New York but also …