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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Antigone Claimed, "I Am A Stranger": Democracy, Membership And Unauthorized Immigration, Andres Fabian Henao Castro Nov 2014

Antigone Claimed, "I Am A Stranger": Democracy, Membership And Unauthorized Immigration, Andres Fabian Henao Castro

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation offers a new framework through which to theorize contemporary democratic practices by attending to the political agency of unauthorized immigrants. I argue that unauthorized immigrants themselves, by claiming their own ambiguous legal condition as a legitimate basis for public speech, are able to open up the boundaries of political membership and to render the foundations of democracy contingent, that is to say, they are able to reopen the question about who counts as a member of the demos. I develop this argument by way of a close reading of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone[1], which allows me to …


Signs Of Wildness: Codes Of The “Primitive” In Masculine Commodity Culture, Matthew P. Ferrari Nov 2014

Signs Of Wildness: Codes Of The “Primitive” In Masculine Commodity Culture, Matthew P. Ferrari

Doctoral Dissertations

This project broadly examines articulations of the “primitive” emerging from various sites of popular cultural production, considering their operation within the wider “semioscape”– defined by Thurlow and Aiello (2007) as “the globalizing circulation of symbols, sign-systems, and meaning-making practices.” Taking my lead from Kurusawa (2002, 2004), Torgovnik (1991, 1998), Chow (1995), and Di Leonardo (1998), who have demonstrated the importance of the “primitive” as an interpretive discourse, I add to this body of thought by extending its scope into the realm of popular media and cultural production, examining cases within film, television, advertising, sports, and associated lifestyle commodities. I pose …


Project Space(S) In The Design Professions: An Intersectional Feminist Study Of The Women's School Of Planning And Architecture (1974-1981), Elizabeth Cahn Nov 2014

Project Space(S) In The Design Professions: An Intersectional Feminist Study Of The Women's School Of Planning And Architecture (1974-1981), Elizabeth Cahn

Doctoral Dissertations

The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA) was an ambitious, explicitly feminist educational program created by seven women planners and architects who used the school to introduce ideas and practices of the 1970s women’s movement into design and planning education in the United States. Between 1974 and 1981, WSPA organized five intensive, short-term residential educational sessions and a conference, each in a different geographical location in the United States, after which the organization ceased formal programming and the organizers moved on to other activities. The founders and participants involved in WSPA collectively imagined and created a feminist space for …


Beauty Through Control: Forming Pro-Anorexic Identities In Digital Spaces, Kay A.S. Mccurley Nov 2014

Beauty Through Control: Forming Pro-Anorexic Identities In Digital Spaces, Kay A.S. Mccurley

Masters Theses

Pro-anorexia is a complex, multi-layered phenomenon that exists only online. The women who participate in these websites are learning to negotiate how to manage an identity that is normalized within the group but stigmatized within larger society. Using an open-ended survey, distributed online directly to pro-ana website users, I aim to illustrate pro-anorexic experience. After a brief demographic sketch of typical pro-anorexic spaces, I examine pro-anorexia in depth by asking three primary research questions: 1) how do pro-anorexics craft their online identities within the community; 2) how do individuals interact with one another in a highly contested and heavily policed …


Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma In U.S. War Fiction, Ruth A.H. Lahti Aug 2014

Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma In U.S. War Fiction, Ruth A.H. Lahti

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the need to "world" our literary histories of U.S. war fiction, arguing that a transnational approach to this genre remaps on an enlarged scale the ethical implications of 20th and 21st century war writing. This study turns to representations of the human body to differently apprehend the ethical struggles of war fiction, thereby rethinking psychological and nationalist models of war trauma and developing a new method of reading the literature of war. To lay the ground for this analysis, I argue that the dominance of trauma theory in critical work on U.S. war fiction privileges the "authentic" …


The Cable Network In An Era Of Digital Media: Bravo And The Constraints Of Consumer Citizenship, Alison D. Brzenchek Aug 2014

The Cable Network In An Era Of Digital Media: Bravo And The Constraints Of Consumer Citizenship, Alison D. Brzenchek

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation takes a historiographical approach to the evolution of cable television over thirty years. Case analysis of archival data is used to trace the trajectory of the Bravo cable network from 1980 through 2010. My dissertation is a vital contribution to critical cultural studies, feminist studies, citizenship studies, and media history because it historicizes the role branding, commodification, and convergence played in Bravo’s evolution from a highbrow arts programmer guided by bourgeois consumer citizenship, to a affluent lifestyle network guided by nouveau riche consumer citizenship. My combination of production studies and political economic analysis gives visibility to the interpenetrating …


Negotiating Invisibility: Addressing Lgbt Prejudice In China, Hong Kong, And Thailand, Hunter Gray Jan 2014

Negotiating Invisibility: Addressing Lgbt Prejudice In China, Hong Kong, And Thailand, Hunter Gray

Master's Capstone Projects

This research serves as a consolidation of information regarding the global response to LGBT prejudice, and in particular, the response of organizations situated in China, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Interviews with activists and researchers from organizations that address LGBT prejudice served as the main form of data. Findings and subsequent analysis point to the ways in which organizations respond to the lack of visibility of the LGBT community, and how this invisibility is related to various manifestations of LGBT prejudice. Strategies that organizations have developed to respond to LGBT prejudice reveal how organizations negotiate contextual variables in their attempts to …