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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Becoming Artifacts: Medieval Seals, Passports And The Future Of Digital Identity, Mawaki Chango Dec 2012

Becoming Artifacts: Medieval Seals, Passports And The Future Of Digital Identity, Mawaki Chango

School of Information Studies - Dissertations

What does a digital identity token have to do with medieval seals? Is the history of passports of any use for enabling the discovery of Internet users' identity when crossing virtual domain boundaries during their digital browsing and transactions? The agility of the Internet architecture and its simplicity of use have been the engines of its growth and success with the users worldwide. As it turns out, there lies also its crux. In effect, Internet industry participants have argued that the critical problem business is faced with on the Internet is the absence of an identity layer from the core …


Armor All: The Self-Conception Of Private Security Contractors, Volker Franke Nov 2012

Armor All: The Self-Conception Of Private Security Contractors, Volker Franke

Peace and Conflict Studies

Whereas the values, attitudes and motivations of soldiers serving in their countries’ armed forces have been widely studied, to date we know very little about the motivations and self-conception of individuals working for the private security industry. Using data obtained through an online survey, this article explores the values, attitudes and identity of more than 200 private security contractors with law enforcement backgrounds and operational experience with a security firm in Iraq. Contrary to media dominating images of ruthless, money-grabbing mercenaries, respondents in this sample adhered to attitudes and values very similar to those of professional soldiers serving in Western …


Cultural Assimilation: The Political Economy Of Psychology As An Evolutionary Game Theoretic Dynamic, Atin Basu Choudhary, Dave Cotting Jan 2012

Cultural Assimilation: The Political Economy Of Psychology As An Evolutionary Game Theoretic Dynamic, Atin Basu Choudhary, Dave Cotting

Atin Basu Choudhary

In this paper, we model the interaction between idiocentric and allocentric immigrants in two settings – in a society that is predominantly collectivist and in a society that is predominantly individualist. Immigrants, either allocentric or idiocentric, can also be entity theorists (fixed mindset) or incremental theorists (growth mindset). We use evolutionary game theory to model how the host country cultural environment places selective pressure on the cultures of immigrant populations. This has implications for how well immigrants assimilate into their host country. Our results show: (a) depending on the initial ratio of allocentric and idiocentric immigrants, assimilation is either complete …


Manning Up: A Look At Women In The Military And Their Sense Of Self, Kari Elizabeth Davis Jan 2012

Manning Up: A Look At Women In The Military And Their Sense Of Self, Kari Elizabeth Davis

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study is to uncover identity shaping in women of the military. I interviewed eleven women from various branches of the military to uncover changes in their sense of self, emotion management, and role person merge. Six of these my respondents were deployed to combat zones. The women of this study went to basic training and learned how to be a soldier. They go through a process of "manning up" where they leave behind prior behaviors and beliefs and display a masculine front in order to be successful in their military careers. They also demonstrate a role …


Course Syllabus: Harry Potter And International Politics - Identity, Violence And Social Control, Emma Norman Dec 2011

Course Syllabus: Harry Potter And International Politics - Identity, Violence And Social Control, Emma Norman

Emma R. Norman

The themes we draw from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series are used to illuminate parallels in contemporary world politics and to apprehend in detail some of the key problems that revolve around the three core themes of the course (identity, violence, and social control). How, for instance, does life in Hogwarts help to illuminate the multiple, crosscutting identities produced by globalization? How does the divide between wizards and muggles, or Hermione’s obsession with elvish welfare, serve to illuminate continued discrimination in current liberal democracies and do these narratives help to widen our options when it comes to minimizing it? What …


Alternative Perspectives On Conflict History: On The Methodology Of Peace Education And Dialogue, Tatsushi Arai Dec 2011

Alternative Perspectives On Conflict History: On The Methodology Of Peace Education And Dialogue, Tatsushi Arai

Tatsushi Arai

This essay, written in Japanese, is an attempt to construct an integrated framework for analyzing and engaging multi-faceted meanings of history that correspond to different communal experiences of social conflict. The concept of conflict history is introduced to describe a worldview of a conflict party in search of a coherent explanation of the conflict’s origin, evolution, and significance. Four interconnected approaches to conflict history – orthodox, different, mediative, and alternative – are explored to link the factual to the counterfactual, the manifest to the potential in an attempt to expand the scope of historical inquiry. This exercise of theory-building draws …