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Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

A Veteran Welfare State: Veterans' Benefits, Coalition Politics, And Social Policy Change, 1943-1973, Melinda R. Tarsi Nov 2014

A Veteran Welfare State: Veterans' Benefits, Coalition Politics, And Social Policy Change, 1943-1973, Melinda R. Tarsi

Doctoral Dissertations

America’s commitment to the reintegration of veterans via social policy is not a recent political development; since the end of World War II, federal and state government programs have been designed (and redesigned) to successfully transition former military personnel back into civilian life. Beginning with the 1944 Serviceman’s Readjustment Act (commonly known as the G.I. Bill), the federal government has taken the primary role in this reintegration initiative, investing billions of dollars into veterans’ benefit programs for education assistance, unemployment compensation, and job placement services. Even as the legislation has been renewed after military conflicts, veterans’ education benefits have remained …


Southie Versus Roxbury: Crime, Welfare, And The Racialized Gubernatorial Politics Of Massachusetts In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Daniel T. Kirsch Nov 2014

Southie Versus Roxbury: Crime, Welfare, And The Racialized Gubernatorial Politics Of Massachusetts In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Daniel T. Kirsch

Doctoral Dissertations

Racial and ethnic divisions at the national level and their effects on politics take on an abstract character when not discussing specific communities. To obtain a reliable, consistent, and potentially reliable measure of a relationship, demographic information and voting behaviors at the small community, submetropolitan level must be examined in high-turnout, same-office elections over a protracted period, ideally in a polity with a penchant for racial tolerance. The political language of Boston has been mired in racialization since at least the Civil Rights era, particularly since the Boston anti-segregation busing crisis of the 1970s. While previous research has focused on …


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 …


The Colonial Legacies Of “Fiesta Island”: A Critical Study Of Live-Music Events Production In Puerto Rico, Anilyn Diaz Nov 2014

The Colonial Legacies Of “Fiesta Island”: A Critical Study Of Live-Music Events Production In Puerto Rico, Anilyn Diaz

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the historical relationship between the state and national culture in Puerto Rico as seen through the case of the entertainment industry, specifically live-music events production. The dissertation is located within two bodies of literature: critical post-colonial cultural studies of cultural industries and cultural policy, and cultural approaches to scholarship on collective action and state-civil society relationships in neoliberal contexts. The research design includes archival work and analysis of organizational material, supported by a cultural ethnography approach to semi-structured informant interviews and group interviews. The interviews focus on the historical development, cultural legacies, and practices of the entertainment …


Imperial Janus: Patterns Of Governance In The Western Borderlands Of The Tsarist Empire, Nicklaus Laverty Oct 2014

Imperial Janus: Patterns Of Governance In The Western Borderlands Of The Tsarist Empire, Nicklaus Laverty

Doctoral Dissertations

Why did the Tsarist Empire opt for different governance strategies in each of the territories of the Western Borderlands (here defined as Poland-Lithuania, the Baltic territories, Finland, and Hetman Ukraine)? The existing political science literature tends to reduce such a question to a distinction between direct and indirect rule, usually developing in the context of a Western European maritime empire. This literature falls short of explaining the Tsarist case and requires the addition of intervening variables concerning the role of local elites and leadership choice. Employing an interdisciplinary literature combining sources from political science, sociology and history, this dissertation develops …


Still Dirty After All These Years: Political Leadership, Knowledge, And Socialization And Regional Environmental Cooperation In Northeast Asia, Inkyoung Kim Aug 2014

Still Dirty After All These Years: Political Leadership, Knowledge, And Socialization And Regional Environmental Cooperation In Northeast Asia, Inkyoung Kim

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the microprocesses of regime creation in Northeast Asia regarding transboundary environmental problems. Despite the growing need for international environmental cooperation and policy coordination at the regional and global levels, Northeast Asia has not yet succeeded in reaching any binding regional agreement on any environmental issue, even though it has developed various environmental cooperative mechanisms regarding transboundary pollution. Rather than characterizing regional environmental cooperative mechanisms in Northeast Asia as “non-regime,” this study unpacks the varying forms of collective action in terms of the speed of development of cooperative mechanisms and the substantive content of the development undertaken by …


Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent Aug 2014

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …


U.S. Lethal Drone Policy In The Execution Of The Global War On Terrorism: The Case For Reforming The Tactics, Techniques, And Procedures For The Tactical Application Of Lethal Drone Strikes, Gordon E. Adams Jan 2014

U.S. Lethal Drone Policy In The Execution Of The Global War On Terrorism: The Case For Reforming The Tactics, Techniques, And Procedures For The Tactical Application Of Lethal Drone Strikes, Gordon E. Adams

School of Public Policy Capstones

Over the past decade-and-a-half of continuous warfare by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Africa, lethal drone strikes have assumed a critical role in the expeditious, time-sensitive environments which U.S. military personnel and private security contactors find themselves operating in. Contentious since their inception, lethal drone strikes, as a tool of war and as a center-piece of U.S. counterinsurgency tactics, require significant policy changes in the form of increasing transparency for legislatures. Equally important, lethal drone strikes also require tactical revision in their application in order to effectively apply the methods of counter insurgency, nation-building, and relationship-development …


Healthy, Wealthy, And Wise: How Corporate Power Shaped The Affordable Care Act, Kevin Young, Michael Schwartz Jan 2014

Healthy, Wealthy, And Wise: How Corporate Power Shaped The Affordable Care Act, Kevin Young, Michael Schwartz

History Department Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.