Sociology Commons^™

Identities And Persistence Of Family Farm Operators, Parker T. Arnold

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study focuses on the identities of family farm operators and the challenges to maintaining viable farm operations in today’s agricultural economy. Employing a grounded qualitative approach, the author conducted 18 in-depth interviews with principal farm operators from Iowa and Tennessee. Using the insights of farmers from geographically different agricultural regions, this study notes how preserving family histories, socialization processes, and farming as a moral career inform operators’ understandings of themselves and the work they do. The analysis also focuses on how family farm operators contend with a globalized agricultural economy and the moral and ethical concerns of managing ...

Optimizing The Transitional Justice Approach: A Research-Based Approach To Effective Peacebuilding, Rebecca Russavage, Mallory Matheson, Jenna Rakuita, Kjersti Hodgson

The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy

Transitional justice remains subject to continual assessment and evaluation given its developing methodology and framework in both theory and practice.

This constant development often causes practitioners to feel overwhelmed as they seek the best ways to approach its implementation while lacking an evidence-based methodology. To assist in actualizing research and practical techniques, academics can provide practitioners with research designed for immediate, direct implementation in the field. While respecting the individual needs and constrictions created by cultural differences, it is our opinion that research can isolate certain fundamental practices that are both universally applicable and beneficial to facilitating the transition between ...

The New Disappeared: Illegality, The Deportation Regime, And The Resurrection Of State Violence, Miranda Cady Hallett

The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy

President Donald J. Trump’s executive actions expanding immigration enforcement and reproducing stigmatizing discourses about immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers are not a new direction in immigration enforcement. While the racist dimensions of the approach are more unmasked in his rhetoric, current enforcement is merely the expansion of an entrenched project of state violence. The current panic, in other words, is the culmination of the buildup of the deportation regime (De Genova and Peutz 2010), an interconnected web of systems of incarceration and exile that serves as a broad mechanism of social control and repression.

In the U.S., this system ...

Silenced Agency Gains A Voice?, Katarina Lucas

The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy

Nearly twenty-three years since the Dayton Peace Accords ended the military violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia), the right to reparation for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence remains unrealized, as existing mechanisms for acquiring compensation and psycho-social services are gender-blind, decentralized, discriminatory, and nonexistent in parts of the country.

In 2012, the Bosnian government sought to begin remedying this broken system through the draft Programme for Victims of Wartime Rape, Sexual Abuse and Torture, and their Families (Programme). Today, the Programme remains stagnant as a draft policy, yet efforts by local and global actors to seek forms of reparation for ...

Where Do We Go From Here? Charting Perceptions Of The Impact Of The Human Rights City Boston Resolution, Kostas Koutsioumpas, Maggie Schneider, Matthew Annunziato

The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy

In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as a common standard of achievement and called upon every individual and organ of society to promote the rights enshrined in the document. The UDHR has been applied in many ways around the world, including by the international Human Rights Cities movement, which began in Rosario, Argentina, in 1997.

Today more than two dozen Human Rights Cities have formed around the globe, including at least nine in the United States (Washington, DC; Eugene, OR; Pittsburgh, PA; Chapel Hill, NC; Columbus, IN; Jackson, MI; Seattle, WA; Mountain View ...

Elections In The Shadow Of Ebola: Sierra Leone’S African Socialist Movement And The Struggle For Democracy, Joshua Mcdermott

The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy

The West African eEbola outbreak of 2014-15 claimed the lives of nearly 12,000 people, most of them from the Mano River region, comprising Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea-Conakry, three of the world’s poorest nations. In the wake of the outbreak, Sierra Leone’s ruling party, the All People’s Congress (APC), postponed the country’s 2017 elections for one year, under the pretext that the crisis had undermined the agenda of the president, Ernest Bai Koroma.

Authoritarianism is not new to Sierra Leone: The APC ruled the small coastal nation under a one-party state from the 1960s until ...

From Stateless To Citizen: The Struggle To Obtain Legal Status For Guatemalan Refugees In Mexico, Oscar F. Gil-Garcia

The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy

U.S. immigration enforcement practices have spread to Mexico, resulting in apprehension rates of Central American migrants that rival those of the U.S. In 2015, deportations of migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador in Mexico exceeded 165,000, more than twice the number of U.S. deportations to this region.

Enforcement-only priorities surrounding immigration policy in Mexico have reinforced discriminatory treatment, poverty, inequality, and exploitation toward the indigenous and migrant populations. These circumstances have particularly impacted indigenous Guatemalan Mayans who sought refuge in Mexico during the 1980s and continue to face obstacles for their legalization by the Mexican ...

Localizing Human Rights In Response To Global Urban Crises And Right-Wing Populism, Jackie Smith

The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy

Human rights are under increased threat as the world faces economic insecurity, financial volatility, climate change, and the rise of right-wing populist movements. At a time global interdependence demands more intensive cooperation among national governments to address economic and environmental crises, nationalist tendencies are polarizing politics within and among countries.

Although news headlines have focused on the rise of exclusionary and racist movements, there is evidence of significant popular mobilization around more inclusive human rights claims. Because these movements challenge basic elements of the capitalist system, they get less traction in electoral contests and remain marginal to mainstream media and ...

Impacts Of The Trump Administration’S Policies On Immigrants And Refugees In Dayton, Miranda Cady Hallett, Theo J. Majka

The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy

The Trump administration’s executive orders and policy changes regarding refugee resettlement and stepped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions are likely to create serious human rights and humanitarian impacts. These include separation of children from their parents, denial of due process in immigration courts, lengthy incarceration in detention centers, denial or loss of employment, denial of visas to citizens of some predominantly Muslim countries, denial of entry to previously vetted refugees scheduled for resettlement, and return (refoulment) of persons with well-founded fears of persecution or torture.

These actions will potentially impact key human rights areas and concerns, such as ...

To Be Human In A Dehumanizing World: Black Lives Matter And The Human Rights Framework, Maria Rohani

The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy

This paper explores the relationship between Black Lives Matter and the human rights regime.

First, the study contextualizes the contemporary movement within the long and complicated historical relationship between racial justice struggles and the international human rights system. Second, the paper looks at the available human rights tools that could advance the goals of Black Lives Matter, with a focus on relevant international treaties, the Inter-American System, and the Universal Periodic Review. Third, the project studies the ways in which Black Lives Matter has, on its own, already engaged with human rights discourse.

Here, a sample of Twitter content will ...

Faith-Based Resistance, Human Rights, And Emancipatory Practices, Curtis Kline

The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy

Progressive political theologies can expand and deepen both the strength and the conceptualization of human rights advocacy. However, not all political theologies are an effort to defend human dignity; neither are all understandings and practices of human rights. The validation of progressive political theologies as well as the validation of human rights conceptualizations comes from their capacity to concretely change the lived reality of poor and oppressed peoples of the world.

As with political theologies, there is a constant struggle over the control of how to conceptualize what constitutes a human rights issue. While many communities of faith find liberating ...

Overview Of Current Human Rights Challenges In The Philippines And The People’S Response, Angie M. Gonzales

The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy

The Philippines is an agricultural resource-rich country in Southeast Asia but whose economy and society remain dictated by foreign interests and local elite while the majority are steeped in worsening poverty and inequality.

It is thus not surprising that it is host to the longest-running revolution in Asia. The decades-old armed rebellion has been waged among national liberation forces, notably the Communist Party of the Philippines - New People’s Army - National Democratic Front of the Philippines (CPP-NPA-NDFP) and Moro forces — the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).

Successive Philippine regimes have employed militarist approaches ...

Displacement, Urban Populations, And The Right To Space And Place: Syrians In Istanbul And Colombians In Medellín, Stephanie Nawyn, Claudia Maria Lopez

The Social Practice of Human Rights: Charting the Frontiers of Research and Advocacy

The internal displacement of rural Colombians and displacement of Syrians in and out of Syria constitute some of the largest conflict-induced migrations in the world today.

Rural Colombians have been driven from mountainous areas of the country by conflict between the government, rebels of the the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and paramilitaries and have entered urban spaces like Medellín in search of assistance allocated to internally displaced persons.

The majority of Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war in their country reside in Turkey, and many have made their way to Istanbul for the greater economic opportunities that the ...

Essays On Economics Of Inequality, Aboozar Hadavand

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters all around the subject of inequality. The first chapter provides a novel analysis of the trend in income inequality in the United States between 1979--2013. There are two ways in which this chapter contributes to the literature. First, I analyze how much of the existing inequality in the U.S. is due to the demographic changes that happened over this period. Using microdata from Luxembourg Income Study and after decomposing inequality into within- and between-age group components, I find that the within-group share of overall inequality in the U.S. is high and steady ...

Rural Organizations And Land Utilization On Muscatine Island: A Study Of Social Adjustments, Ray E. Wakeley, J. Edwin Losey

Bulletin (Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station)

Muscatine Island was selected as the area for this investigation because it was relatively small, isolated and characterized by a distinctive type of farming (fig. 1). It was a problem area where farming offered only limited security, where income was low and success difficult to attain. Problems of land utilization and social organization had arisen frequently on the Island. Alternative choices in farm enterprises and in social organizations were few. In such an area the complicated relations between organizations and land use were relatively easy to isolate and describe.

The central problems of this study are problems of rural organizations ...

Reading Speculative Futures In A Post-Truth World, Rachel Webb Jekanowski

The Goose

Faced with the threat of a “post-truth” world and a widening chasm of exchange between climate change deniers and environmentalists, I argue that future-orientated literary and media speculative fictions—which I term “speculative futures”—offer a means of building lines of communication across social and political divisions. This thought piece on “The Environmental Humanities in a Post-Truth World” mediates upon the potentiality of speculative futures as theory, social bridge-building, and pedagogical tool. Speculative fictions (especially those that address environmental justice, and anti-colonial and feminist politics) use storytelling and future imaginaries to challenge political falsehoods and imagine more ecological, de-colonized futures.

(Another) Battle In The Clouds, Mél Hogan

The Goose

At age ten, in 1918, Rachel Carson entered a writing contest and won. In "Battle in the Clouds", Carson wrote about the sky as a battlefield, where a soldier’s life is momentarily spared because of an act of bravery undeniable even by his enemies. They watch in awe and admiration rather than shoot. For my reimagining of the present as womb rather than grave, I reflect on the current use of the cloud in “cloud computing” to discuss the role of the internet and its material infrastructures in shaping earthly possibilities. I imagine the pace and place of awe ...

The Construction Of “Discomfort Psychological”: An Exploration Of Italians Teachers' Reports, Antonio Iudici, Matteo Fabbri

The Qualitative Report

Although there are several studies on youth problems in school, there are few studies on how teachers report psychological discomfort of the students and on what criteria does their procedure. Considering that schools increasingly make such reports to social or neuropsychiatry services, we wanted to find out whether it is flawless (bias, etc.) and how it can affect a student's career. This research presents an investigation on how the practice of signaling "psychological discomfort" at school is set up. Objects of the survey are the procedures used by the teachers to submit the psychological problems. The research subjects were ...

The Insiders’ Experience Of An Undergraduate Level Ethnographic Fieldwork Training Program In India, Abhradip Banerjee, Krishnendu Polley, Arun Makal, Bhubon Mohan Das

The Qualitative Report

Research on fieldwork experiences is not something new to the discipline of Anthropology. However, undergraduate level ethnographic fieldwork training programs in India as a research area still remained unexplored. The purpose of the study described in this paper was to explore the proceedings of undergraduate level ethnographic fieldwork training programs in India. This article uses the authors’ own recollections regarding an undergraduate level ethnographic fieldwork training program carried out by a college affiliated with the University of Calcutta. All four authors along with their 21 fellow students have participated as trainees in this fieldwork training program. Through a qualitative analysis ...

Chinese And World Cultural Models Of Developmental Hierarchy, Shawn F. Dorius

Shawn Dorius

Prior research on cultural models of developmental hierarchy finds broad cross-national agreement among publics about the rank ordering of societies on perceived level of development, based on an omnibus measure of development. In this research, I use a multidimensional index of world hierarchy derived from subjective evaluations of a large number of national attributes to explore dimensionality in Chinese perceptions of global hierarchy. Statistical analysis show that the data exhibit over time stability and strong association with objective measures of development and with alternate subjective measures of world hierarchy. Irrespective of the national attributes evaluated, Chinese respondents produced a very ...