Inequality and Stratification Commons^™

Migrant Remittances In Rural Nepal: A Mixed Methods Household-Level Analysis, Evan Skamarock

Summer Research

This paper aspires to add to the bourgeoning field of interest concerning migration practices in the Gulf States. Based upon first hand ethnographic experience conducted in Bhairawah, southern Nepal, this paper hopes to encourage a deeper, more humanistic exploration of migratory practices that are currently approached from a political and economic lens. This paper begins with a chronological analysis and description of individual and household experience with migration. Moving further, this paper touches on a change over time of traditional gender roles for women.

When The Abyss Looks Back: Treatments Of Human Trafficking In Superhero Comic Books., Bond Benton, Daniela Peterka-Benton

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Superhero comic book characters have historically engaged issues of social concern. From Superman’s opposition to the Ku Klux Klan in 1947 (Bowers, 2011) to Captain America’s acceptance of a gay soldier in 1982 (Witt, Sherry, & Marcus, 1995) to Batman’s stance against landmines in 1996 (O’Neil, 1996), stories involving superheroes have frequently demonstrated a developed social awareness on national and international problems. Given that the audience for superhero characters is often composed of young people, this engagement has served as a vehicle for raising understanding of issues and as tool for encouraging activism on the part of readers (McAllister, 1992; …

Occupying America: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The American Dream, And The Challenge Of Socio-Economic Inequality, Trina Jones

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Undo Undue Hardship: An Objective Approach To Discharging Federal Students Loans In Bankruptcy, Aaron N. Taylor

All Faculty Scholarship

A debtor seeking to discharge student loans in bankruptcy must prove that paying the debt would cause an undue hardship upon him and his dependents. Undue hardship, however, is an undefined concept, flummoxing debtors, creditors and judges alike. The result of this ambiguity is rampant inconsistency in the manners in which similarly-situated debtors (and creditors) are treated by the courts. This article argues that the undue hardship standard should be replaced by a framework that uses debt service thresholds to determine the propriety of federal student loan bankruptcy discharges. Eligibility for discharge would depend on outstanding loan amounts, debtor income …

Human Trafficking And Slavery: Towards A New Framework For Prevention And Responsibility, Dana S. Hathaway

Dissertations and Theses

Human trafficking and slavery are horrific crimes that require strict penalties for perpetrators and effective protections for survivors, but these crimes are in part facilitated by a system of laws and norms that effectively marginalize certain populations--the "unskilled" migrant. In this thesis I aim to reexamine and reinterpret the problem of human trafficking and slavery in a way that highlights the background conditions to the problem. I argue that the framework used as a conceptual foundation for addressing the problem limits the scope of responsibility. Specifically, the framework fails to acknowledge structural contributing factors I show to be relevant: law, …

Getting The Foundations Right: The Social Protection Floor Initiative, Braema Mathi

Social Space

For a serious shot at reducing poverty, Braema Mathi urges societies, especially those in Asia, to implement the Social Protection Floor Initiative.

Korean-American Divided Families: Catalyst For Changing The Course Of The Usa Policy On North Korea, Jungyoung Park

Capstone Collection

The Korea War has left deep scars on the psyches of Koreans in Korea and throughout the world. Among many ordeals that Korean citizens had to suffer during and after the war, the separation of the family was one of the most tragic continuing results of the war. Countless individuals were forcibly severed from their family members in North Korea and most haven’t seen their separated relatives for over six decades. There have been 18 rounds of reunions between North and South Koreans since a historic summit talk in June 2000. However, Korean-American members of divided families cannot participate in …

Addressing The Learning Needs At Occupy Dc, Andrew J. Batcher

Capstone Collection

The purpose of this paper is to examine how learning can help the Occupy movement in Washington DC. It explores three questions. What are the learning needs of the movement? What educational content can help meet those needs? And how can education be practiced in a way that most effectively addresses the learning needs within the real world circumstances of the movement? Research methods include participant observation, surveys, interviews, focus groups, literature review, and primary document review. Data was coded into 11 outcome oriented learning needs and 3 educational orientations which are geared towards meeting those needs. This paper is …

The Paradox Of Political Power: Post-Racialism, Equal Protection, And Democracy, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

Racial minorities have achieved unparalleled electoral success in recent years. Simultaneously, they have continued to rank at or near the bottom in terms of health, wealth, income, education, and the effects of the criminal justice system. Social conservatives, including those on the Supreme Court, have latched onto evidence of isolated electoral success as proof of “post-racialism,” while ignoring the evidence of continued disparities for the vast majority of people of color.

This Essay will examine the tension between the Court's conservatives' repeated calls for minorities to achieve their goals through the political process and the Supreme Court's increasingly restrictive "colorblind" …

Household Labor, Gender Roles, And Family Satisfaction: A Cross-National Comparison, Renata Forste, Kiira Fox

Faculty Publications

Due to the interrelation of work and family domains recent scholarship has been devoted to determining the impact of women's rising employment in the home. More specifically, research has focused on what happens to the division of domestic labor in the wake of mother's paid employment and how the new arrangements are determined. In general, women have responded by dedicating less time to housework and men have responded by increasing their participation in unpaid labor. That said, male contributions do not compensate for the decrease in time by women in the home, and women still maintain responsibility for the majority …

Slavery In The United States: Persons Or Property?, Paul Finkelman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Citizen Bunker: Archie Bunker As Working-Class Icon., Kathleen Collins

Publications and Research

Archie Bunker, the central character and patriarch of Norman Lear’s “All in the Family,” (1971-1979) has been referred to as an “everyman” and an “angry-man prototype” with “hard had prejudice.” The name Archie Bunker itself has become synonymous with a blue-collar, racially chauvinistic mentality. The title of the show’s pilot and theme song, “Those Were the Days,” emphasized Archie’s dream of a simpler (though idealized) time, a world that he could understand and upon which he could exert some control. In 1970s America, Archie seemed to feel that the world was against him – economically, socially, politically and culturally – …

Families With Hungry Children And The Transition From Preschool To Kindergarten, Colleen Heflin, Irma Arteaga, Sara Gable

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

This paper exploits a source of variation in the eligibility for federal nutrition programs to identify the program effects on food insecurity. Children are eligible for the WIC program until the day before they turn 61 months old. The result is an age discontinuity in program participation at the 61-month cutoff. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Birth-cohort dataset, we find strong evidence of a sizeable increase in household food insecurity at the 61- month cutoff. Our findings are robust to different model specifications, datasets, and various bandwidth choices using various non-parametric estimations.

On Persistent Poverty In A Rich Country, T.M. Tonmoy Islam, Jenny Minier, James P. Ziliak

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

We examine differences in income within the U.S., and the regions of persistent poverty that have arisen, using a newly assembled dataset of counties that links historical 19th century Census data with contemporaneous data. The data, along with an augmented human capital growth model, permit us to identify the roles of contemporaneous differences in aggregate production technologies and factor endowments, in conjunction with the historical roles of institutions, culture, geography, and human capital. We allow for possible cross-county factor mobility via a correlated random effects GMM estimator that identifies simultaneously the coefficients on time varying and time-invariant determinants of income. …

How The "Unintended Consequences" Story Promotes Unjust Intent And Impact., Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

In the guise of critical analysis of the limits of law reform, the familiar phrase “unintended consequences” serves to rationalize rising inequality and to undermine democratic accountability. This paper examines how the phrase promotes a story of disentitlement, using the recent financial crisis as an example. By naturalizing inequality as power beyond law’s reach, this phrase’s message that benign law is likely to bring unequal consequences dovetails with a seemingly contradictory message that benign intent, rather than harmful impact, is what primarily counts for evaluating inequality.

As part of a LatCrit XV symposium taking a “bottom-up” view of the recent …

The Emergence Of A Standards Market: Multiplicity Of Sustainability Standards In The Global Coffee Industry, Juliane Reinecke, Stephan Manning, Oliver Von Hagen

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

The growing number of voluntary standards for governing transnational arenas is presenting standards organizations with a problem. While claiming that they are pursuing shared, overarching objectives, at the same time, they are promoting their own respective standards that are increasingly similar. By developing the notion of ‘standards markets,’ this paper examines this tension and studies how different social movement and industry-driven standards organizations compete as well as collaborate over governance in transnational arenas. Based on an in-depth case study of sustainability standards in the global coffee industry, we find that the ongoing co-existence of multiple standards is being promoted by …

Is Early Childhood Care And Education A Good Investment For Egypt? Estimates Of Educational Impacts, Costs, And Benefits [Arabic], Caroline Krafft

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

This summary details the impact of early childhood education in Egypt. The results show that early childhood care and education has an impact on educational attainment that is both statistically significant and sizeable. Such interventions increase overall educational attainment by approximately one year, primarily due to decreased primary and preparatory drop out. The impact on educational attainment is reflected in improved school performance, such as higher test scores, decreased grade repetition, and improvements in school tracking, during the early years. Investments in early childhood education can be a powerful approach to improving educational outcomes, and the research suggests that increases …

Challenges Facing The Egyptian Education System: Access, Quality, And Inequality [Arabic], Caroline Krafft

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

This brief analyzes and summarizes young people's responses to the 2009 Survey of Young People in Egypt (SYPE) to identify the greatest challenges facing the Egyptian educational system, focusing specifically on primary through secondary schooling. Results show that access to school has improved, but some youth, especially females in rural Upper Egypt, remain outside the school system and are increasingly marginalized. The Egyptian school system is delivering low-quality education that is irrelevant to the labor market and has problems with repetition, absenteeism, and drop out which reduce the efficiency of the education system. Unequal distribution of resources in the education …

West Coast Antiwar Nonprofit Collaboration, Rosalind Sipe

Capstone Collection

While collaboration among nonprofit organizations is happening in both San Francisco and Los Angeles on issues ranging from breast cancer to saving the whales, and while 75% of Americans are opposed to the war in Afghanistan (CNN, 2010), the antiwar movement on the West Coast has come to a standstill. This paper examines the dynamics of West Coast antiwar nonprofits, whether or not they are collaborating, and the advantages and disadvantages of collaboration. A successful collaboration among several antiwar nonprofits, and the combined use of their resources, might stand a better chance of creating a sustainable antiwar movement on the …

Homeless Mothers As Parent Leaders, Dorothy Ann Milligan

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

Presents a qualitative study examining the general conditions that lead to single mother homelessness and the impact of being homeless on their ability to parent effectively, based on interviews with mothers who are clients of First Place, a Seattle, Washington, social service agency. The purpose of the study is to identify different paths of life stabilizing strategies and parenting of women who have been in touch with the same agency. The research attempts to determine how the mothers achieved stability amid daily stress through examination of how the stories reflect decisions, initiatives, and commitments that helped them reach a level …