Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Genealogy Of Open, Betsy Yoon

Publications and Research

The term open has become a familiar part of library and education practice and discourse, with open source software being a common referent. However, the conditions surrounding the emergence of the open source movement are not well understood within librarianship. After identifying capitalism and neoliberalism as structures that shape library and open practice, this article contextualizes the term open by delineating the discursive struggle within the free software movement that led to the emergence of the open source movement. An understanding of the genealogy of open can lend clarity to many of the contradictions that have been grappled with in …

The Bracero Program And The Exploitability Of Migrant Workers, Kayla E. Dantona

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the exploitability of migrants working in the United States. Historically, the United States government has emphasized the economic utility of migrant workers, while ignoring their basic human rights. Policymakers have viewed these people as a disposable work force and seek to control them by generating widespread fear of deportation, racialized segregation, discriminatory treatment, and with the help of governing and policing entities willing to turn a blind eye to these injustices, as long as they continue to profit financially.

This thesis will look at the Bracero Program with a historic lens to exemplify the system of exploitation …

The Problem Of Blackness In America: Becoming When The Being Never Comes To Be, Nkiru Anyaegbunam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The problem of Blackness in America is a consequence of the historical reality and continued legacies of colonialism, the triangular trade and chattel slavery that have been facilitated through violence and capitalism. This thesis will argue that this problem that is pronounced through racialized institutional systems of violence such as mass incarceration and housing inequality, which disproportionately negatively impacts Black Americans is part of a larger discourse on the human and (mis)recognition. This violence has created a quintessential incompleteness for Black Americans who neither are recognized as citizens nor human. The problem of Blackness will be continuously grounded in this …

Scarcity Or Economic Insecurity? Two Yardsticks For Measuring Capitalism’S Performance, Costas Panayotakis

Publications and Research

This article argues that capitalism’s relationship to economic insecurity is as important for the evaluation of that system as its relationship to scarcity. Critically analyzing the neoclassical and Marxist focus on capitalism’s relationship to scarcity, the article describes how capitalism’s relationship to economic insecurity offers a more cogent elaboration of these traditions’ shared belief that the economic system should serve people. In particular, while critical of the neoclassical portrayal of capitalism as a system using scarce resources efficiently, this paper also argues, against Marxism, that an alternative to capitalism might be preferable even if scarcity is not abolished.

Dream City: Post-Millennials And Millennials Navigate School, Work, And Housing In New York City, Omar Montana

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the experiences of the “Post-Millennial” (those born after 1996) and “Millennial” (those born between 1981 - 1996) generations, as they pursue their dreams of studying, working and living in New York City. According to Karl Mannheim’s (1923) classic formulation, a “generation” can be perceived as a particular type of social location typified by common “patterns of experience and thought”. Through seventy-five in-depth interviews, the qualitative data revealed a social location characterized by a common pattern of “time is money” – as the German theorist Georg Simmel (1903) postulated more than a century ago – and stress as …

The Material Culture Of Temperature: Measurement, Capital And Semiotics, Scott W. Schwartz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Temperature was invented in the 17th century. While cosmologists affirm that fluctuations in heat are as old as the universe, the intensive quantified scale marking these fluctuations has a relatively short history. This dissertation analyzes why temperature developed when it did and what temperature does for and to its users. I demonstrate that the ubiquitous and quotidian epistemological artifact temperature epitomizes capitalized methods of seeing, measuring, and knowing. At its broadest, the concern of this dissertation is the material culture of knowledge production among capitalizing populations—those that believe in and practice the perpetually accelerating asymmetrical growth of wealth.

In this …

Economic Insecurity And Social Stability: An Exploration Of One Of Capitalism’S Vicious Cycles, Costas Panayotakis

Publications and Research

This article analyzes how capitalism’s connection to economic insecurity can, rather than fomenting social unrest, facilitate its reproduction. Also responding to contrasts in the literature between rising insecurity in recent decades and the containment of insecurity in capitalism’s post-war ‘golden age,’ this article explains why growing insecurity is more consistent with capitalism’s normal operation. Underlining the difficulty of replicating post-war efforts to mitigate insecurity through social and welfare policies, this article also sketches how the vicious cycle between capitalism and economic insecurity contributes to other serious social problems, including racism, sexism, xenophobia, the hollowing out of political democracy and a …

Red Sea, White Tides, And Blue Horizons, John P. Devine

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Eric Hobsbawm, in his effort to explain the fundamental divide which produced the Second World War, convincingly argues that “the crucial lines in this civil war were not drawn between capitalism as such and communist social revolution, but between ideological families: on the one hand the descendants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the great revolutions including, obviously the Russian revolution’, on the other hand, its opponents.” This thesis argues that the American Civil War was a “great revolution” that represented a crucial transformative point in the formation of these two waring factions. The struggle was especially influential on the theory …

Capitalism And The Immigrant Rights Movement In The United States, Marcel Paret, Sofya Aptekar, Shannon Gleeson

Publications and Research

Social movements are full of contradictions, and an inherent tension often emerges between reformist and radical flanks. This becomes especially true as activists attempt to draw connections between varied aims such as opposition to globalization and support for immigrants. During the 1999 Battle of Seattle, the movement focused on opposing neoliberalism (Graeber 2002) and advocating for alternative visions of globalization (Reitan 2012). Some activists also noted the hypocrisy of opening borders to capital while militarizing the borders for migrants. Yet, in the end, immigrant rights movements and their central issues did not feature prominently in Seattle or later anti-globalization efforts. …

The Coloniality Of Disaster: Race, Empire, And The Temporal Logics Of Emergency In Puerto Rico, Usa, Yarimar Bonilla

Publications and Research

This essay uses the case of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico to discuss “the coloniality of disaster”: how catastrophic events like hurricanes, earthquakes, but also other forms political and economic crisis deepen the fault lines of long-existing racial and colonial histories. It argues that disaster capitalism needs to be understood as a form of racio-colonial capitalism and that this in turn requires us to question our understandings of both “resilience” and “recovery.” The article focuses on the “wait of disaster” as a temporal logic of state subjugation and on how Puerto Ricans responded to state abandonment through modes of autogesti� …

Caring Without Sharing: Philanthropy's Creation And Destruction Of The Common World, Amy B. Schiller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores multiple ways philanthropy builds and undermines the common world. Political science treatments of philanthropy have focused mainly on its role in the development of civil society, with a recent turn towards critiques of philanthropy as an instrument of elite power and tension between private wealth and democratic governance. In this dissertation, I examine how philanthropy can foster enduring spaces of human flourishing, or reduce beneficiaries to objects of pity, surveillance and domination. I trace philanthropy's evolution from ancient to contemporary contexts and propose a framework for philanthropy to, under certain conditions, build and care for the common …

Commmunity, Ecology, And Modernity: Faunal Analysis Of Skútustaðir In Mývatnssveit, Northern Iceland, Megan Hicks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the archaeofaunal remains from Skútustaðir, a middle to high-status farm in Mývatnssveit, Northern Iceland, to understand the experience of rural communities and their ecologies during Iceland’s transition from regulated colonial exchange to a capitalist economy during the 17^th through 19^th centuries. Archaeofaunal analysis is used to reconstruct changes in the ways that people herded, hunted, and fished, providing insights into how they managed their local environments for subsistence and novel contexts of exchange. In addition to archaeofaunal analysis, primary textual sources are explored to assess how the Skútustaðir household and its rural community mobilized long-term …

Runaway: A History Of Postwar New York In Four Factories, Andy Battle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At midcentury, New York City was among the preeminent manufacturing centers in the United States. Within a generation, this manufacturing economy suffered an extraordinary collapse. Beginning in the 1950s, workers and their unions began to use the term “runaway” to describe factories that pulled up stakes in New York and set them back down in other climes. This dissertation explores the deindustrialization of New York City through case studies of “runaway” plants, or factories that left New York for the American South or abroad between the years 1945 and 1975.

In general, the manufacturers that remained in New York at …

Teoria Da Crise E A Queda Da Taxa De Lucro, David Harvey

Publications and Research

Abstract:

David Harvey’s article argues against the importance given to the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF), suggest­ing that Marx derived the « law » under « draconian » assumptions and that Engels was far more enthusiastic about it than Marx, who never went back to the theory later in his life despite its evident incompleteness. Therefore, he argues, we should not take his the­oretical conclusions too far. In his view, Marx perceived crises as momentary and violent eruptions that resolve the existing contra­dictions which can be considered as opportunities of capitalist re­construction rather …

Universal Alienation And The Real Subsumption Of Daily Life Under Capital: A Response To Hardt And Negri, David Harvey

Publications and Research

This contribution is part of a debate between Michael Hardt/Toni Negri and David Harvey on the occasion of Marx’s bicentenary (May 5, 2018). The discussion focuses on the question of what capitalism looks like today and how it can best be challenged. In this article, David Harvey responds to Hardt and Negri’s previous debate-contributions.

The Bourgeois Crown: Capitalism And The Monarchy In Thailand, 1946–2016, Puangchon Unchanam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the age of capitalism, monarchy has been treated as if it were an irrelevant institution. Once capitalism becomes the dominant mode of production in a state, it is argued, monarchy must be either abolished or transformed into a constitutional monarchy, a ceremonial institution that plays no significant role in a capitalist state that is ruled by the bourgeoisie. The monarchy of Thailand, however, fits neither of those two narratives, as it enjoys hegemonic status in the capitalist state, preeminent status in the market, and popular support from the urban bourgeoisie. What explains the resilience of the Thai monarchy in …

The New American Slavery: Capitalism And The Ghettoization Of American Prisons As A Profitable Corporate Business, David A. Liburd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The labor of enslaved Africans and Black Americans played a large part in the history of colonial America, with the American plantation being the epicenter for all that was to be produced. While the two have never been completely tied together, capitalism and modern day slavery have been linked with one another. Some analysis sees slavery as a remote form of capitalism, a substitute, to an antiquated form of labor in the modern world.

Slave plantations adopted a new concentration in size and management, referred to by W.E. DuBois as a change "from a family institution to an industrial system."1 …

By Beauty Damned: Millennial Feminism And The Exploitation Of Women's Empowerment In Pop Culture And Corporate Advertising, Maria L. Carreon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Feminism has become a trendy cultural identity, leaving it open to exploitation by capitalists. Notions relating to “women’s empowerment” are used by capitalists to sell products to women, and yet many of those capitalists fund political campaigns that directly seek to quash or inhibit the advancement of women’s rights. With a little effort, any consumer can find out who their big purveyors are supporting politically. For example, Procter Gamble, who makes many products bought by women, gives the majority of its political contributions to republicans who oppose women’s reproductive rights. The same is true of McAndrews & Forbes, the parent …

Discourses Of "Cruelty-Free" Consumerism: Peta, The Vegan Society And Examples Of Contemporary Activism, Andrea Springirth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper draws upon the principles of critical discourse analysis in order to examine the production of capitalist and consumerist discourses within contemporary nonhuman animal rights activism. The analysis presents evidence to suggest that the discourses being produced via the websites of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and The Vegan Society are consistently being constructed through market-centric ideologies that treat activists mainly as middle-class consumers. This paper argues that the consistent presence of neoliberal discourse signals an instructive entanglement with broader sociopolitical issues. Specifically, there are concerns as to how this discourse relates to what is thought …

Madison Vanguard: A Novel, Berni Moestafa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project takes the form of a popular fiction novel that introduces parts of the academic discussion on capitalism to a wider audience through storytelling. Using a fictional fiscal crisis in New York as its setting, the novel discusses the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It therefore aims to address the underrepresentation of the debate on capitalism in popular entertainment and raise awareness about some of the debate’s key issues.

Popular culture be that music, film, books, media, videogames or advertisement surround our lives and expose us to a plethora of messages that help shape our understanding of the …

The Shadow Banking System In The United States, Bhakti Joshi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 2008 the United States suffered a devastating economic collapse. Millions of Americans were unemployed; families lost their homes; and long time businesses were forced to shut down. These events put the United States into an economic depression so deep that the country has yet to fully recover. The crisis was not a natural disaster but varieties of private sector agents such as banks and hedge funds were responsible for its efficient cause. Even though the housing and stock bubbles were generated largely by market forces rather than by government policies, the US government policies and institutions also played a …

Planetary Improvement: Discourses And Practices Of Green Capitalism In The Cleantech Space, Jesse Adam Goldstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is money to be made in saving the planet. A whole host of actors, such as investors, entrepreneurs, engineers, and policy makers have mobilized around our ecological problems, seeking to innovate new `green' and `clean' technologies that can serve a rapidly changing environment. The presumption that such technologies are both necessary and necessarily profitable anchors visions of a `green' capitalism that can and must be brought into existence.

However, just as free markets have never been all that free, why should we presume that green capitalism would be all that green? Instead of attempting to arbit whether or not …

Neoliberalism And Library & Information Science: Using Karl Polanyi’S Fictitious Commodity As An Alternative To Neoliberal Conceptions Of Information, Jonathan Cope

Publications and Research

This paper examines the Library & Information Science (LIS) and Knowledge Organization (KO) literature on neoliberalism and argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the neoliberal conception of information’s relationship to the market. After an examination of the LIS and KO literature on neoliberalism, the key claims of neoliberalism with regards to information and markets are scrutinized and the role of the Internet is discussed. Karl Polanyi’s concept of the fictitious commodity is used to examine the ways in which markets are embedded within society and to provide an alternative to neoliberalism.

Joseph Reflects On Residency, Miranda Joseph

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

This year I have worked primarily on two sections of my book project, Performing Community. The paper I presented at my CLAGS colloquium, a version of the first chapter of the book, focused on the "discourse of community." The idealization of community as a site of identity, commonality, communion, communication, and consensus was heavily critiqued in the 1980s by feminist and poststrucutralist theorists who recognized that identity-based communities are, in fact, quite exclusionary and oppressive, defining themselves in opposition to others, universalizing the particularities upon which they are based, and erasing differences among community members.