Economics Commons^™

Editor-In-Chief's Note, Surekha Rao

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Volume 28, Issue 2 Full Contents

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Mission And Editorial Policy

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

The Unsovereign Citizen: The Reconfiguration Of Rights And Belonging In Fascist Italy, Roberta Pergher

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

Modern political thought tends to associate citizenship with democracy, equality, and political participation. This article demonstrates that citizenship can be profoundly important also for authoritarian rule. In Fascist Italy, citizenship remained central to political life, not as a vehicle of democratic participation, to be sure, but as a category through which the regime redefined belonging, hierarchy, and sovereignty. Drawing on citizenship legislation, imperial ordinances, racial laws, police reports, and ministerial commentary between 1912 and 1943, this article shows how the dictatorship hollowed out liberal citizenship within the peninsula, stratified it across imperial territories, consolidated it across diasporic populations, and ultimately …

The Courts Closest To The People: The Battle Between Populism And Democracy In The U.S. District Courts, Shruti Rana

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

The U.S. district courts have emerged as a critical site of contested terrain amid the chaos and controversies consuming American law and politics since the start of the second Trump administration. This article examines these frontline courts through the theoretical lens of populism, arguing that they have become a critical institutional flashpoint in the populist assault on constitutional democracy in the United States. As the courts closest to the people, the district courts occupy a unique structural position: They are the fact-finding courts, the most geographically dispersed and professionally diverse tier of the federal judiciary, and often the first institutional …

Hurdles To Retirement Security: Exploring Race, Religion, And Savings Behavior, Mamoud A. Jalloh, Sedefka Beck

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

Retirement savings have become increasingly central to household financial security as defined contribution plans replace traditional pensions. Using nationally representative data from the 2019 Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this study applies a double‑hurdle model to examine the distinct factors shaping participation in retirement plans and contribution intensity. Results reveal persistent racial and ethnic inequalities: Hispanic, Black, and Mixed‑Race workers are significantly less likely to save and contribute markedly less than White workers, even after accounting for income, wealth, and employment characteristics. Religious affiliation also influences savings behavior, with Jewish contributors saving more and several other groups saving less than …

Author Biographical Notes

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Reviewers And Referees

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

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Editorial History

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

George C. Roberts Award Recipients

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

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Call For Papers: 97th Annual Conference Of The Indiana Academy Of The Social Sciences

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Why Publish With Mssj?

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

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Submission Guidelines

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

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Dual Mechanisms Of External Pressure: The Impact Of Sanctions And Aid On State Capacity In Iraq And Jordan, Emily P. White

Global Tides

This essay examines the influence of external economic pressures on state capacity in the Middle East through a comparative analysis of Iraq and Jordan. In the late twentieth century, both states faced fiscal shocks, including rising prices for staple goods, elevated unemployment, and revenue shortfalls that constrained regime distributive capacity. Against this backdrop of mounting domestic volatility, contrasting instruments of international economic statecraft were employed, namely, comprehensive UN sanctions against Iraq and sustained Western-led foreign aid to Jordan. Through exogenous state-building, foreign actors sought to exert punitive leverage in Iraq and pursue an agenda-setting partnership in Jordan. Despite pursuing different …

Essays Of Culture Economics: The Economic Consequences Of Cultural Change, Javier Gonzalez

Economics Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation contributes to the field of Cultural Economics by exploring the relationship between cultural transmission and economic outcomes. Across three distinct essays, this research investigates how mass media narratives shape economic preferences and labor decisions, and conversely, how economic fundamentals drive the evolution of cultural markers like language.   The first two chapters focus on the cultural and economic impact of television in Latin America, utilizing a novel dataset of telenovelas aired between 1960 and 2024. Chapter 1 extends the analysis of media influence to labor economics, studying the effect of televised female empowerment on female labor market outcomes. By …

Hitler Must Be Killed: A Wwii Case Study, Jeffrey Byford, Presley Shilling, Alisha Milam

The Councilor: A National Journal of the Social Studies

Social studies education during the 1960s experienced an educational renaissance known as the new social studies movement. Over 50 projects were funded by the National Science Foundation or private corporations to interject a student-centered curriculum into K-12 classrooms during this period. Nearly 60 years later, can student-centered decision-making activities be used in an era of high-stakes testing and planned curriculum? This article attempts to rekindle students' interest in decision-making and discussion by exploring elements in Moral Reasoning: The Value of Life from the Harvard Social Studies Project (HSSP). The activity called "Hitler Must Be Killed" helped students bring the content …

Delenda Est Norfolk: The Tidewater Revolts!, Kiera Dillman, Alise Dunham, Kristen Gary, Olivia M. Haris, Nelliel A. Herrera, Logan Holzgrefe, R. J. Lynch, Adam M. Manis, David Mogan, Luke Pickard, Shayla M. Shaw, Landon Swain, Kenny Wilcox, Bailey M. Wimberly, Tracy L. Barnett

Student Projects

Introduction to the Exhibit:

Today—exactly 250 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence—many Americans trace the origins of the nation’s revolutionary sentiment to Boston, Massachusetts or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We remember the violence of March 1770, when red-coated British soldiers fired into a crowded Boston street, massacring innocent colonists and igniting outrage. We recall the patriotic defiance of the Sons of Liberty, who boarded three East India Company ships and dumped chests of imported British tea into the Boston Harbor in December 1773. We can still hear, too, the reverberations of the “shot heard ’round the world,” when British …

From Reclamation To Restoration: Remaking Nature On Portland's Peninsula, Theus Richards

University Honors Theses

This environmental history of the North Portland Peninsula is a critical case study of a landscape in transition, where new "natures" have been constructed through shifting projects of reclamation and restoration. The Port of Portland, who controlled the Peninsula, transformed the marshy bottomlands near the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers to accommodate greater networks of industrial infrastructure and expand their capacity for global trade. Beginning in 1967, the Port began dredging operations to fill Ramsey Lake to make way for the construction of Rivergate Industrial District. Through this process, Smith & Bybee Lakes were set aside as a …

Bemerge Pop Ups: Social Media Meets Sustainable Fashion, Owen Mehring, Kyla Echols, Avery Edelbrock

SPARK Symposium Presentations

Our research into the online clothing shopping industry has revealed an opportunity to mobilize the strengths of online shopping to build an in-person community. One company we researched, Poshmark, a social, peer-to-peer resale app, uses the strengths of social media to create an online community-based secondhand clothing market. However, one of the largest problems facing society today is the ease of replacing human connection with screen time in today’s world. Online shopping provides convenience, variety, and a larger reach than traditional stores do. However, the human element is often lost. Our company seeks to take the goal of Poshmark to …

Review Of Speaking Of Trust: Religion And Mutual Aid In Southwest Kenya, Dennis Kilama

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

Opportunities, Challenges, And Conspicuous Absences: An Integrative Review Of The Social Work Literature On Artificial Intelligence, Michael J. Massey, Ian G. Williams, Grace C. Polistina, Eathan A. Breaux

Publications and Research

INTRODUCTION: Social work discourse regarding artificial intelligence (AI) in practice, research, and education has proliferated over the last 5 years, reflecting both excitement over its potential and ambivalence about its ethical challenges. However, the extent to which social work is fully engaging with the structure of AI and its enormous impacts on the environment, labour, and distribution of power remains unclear.

METHODS: An integrative review of social work literature from 2020–2024 was conducted to address two research questions: 1) What is the nature of the social work discourse related to AI? 2) To what extent is the discourse …

Markets, Agency, And Trust: Ai Agents And The Knowledge Problem, Brennan Mcdavid, Lynne Kiesling, David Chassin

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming market participation, raising key epistemological questions: Do AI agents enhance or diminish the aggregation of local, private, and tacit knowledge Hayek saw as essential to market processes? How does trust in both markets and AI shape willingness to engage in AI-mediated exchange? This paper examines these issues through market epistemology, agency relationships, and trust epistemology, analyzing how agentic AI reshapes the knowledge problem and principal-agent dynamics. Applying this framework to transactive energy markets, we show that AI shifts decision-making from human cognition to algorithmic processes that require user trust despite epistemic opacity, although it is …

Navigating Radical Indeterminacy In The Struggle For A Global Collective Consciousness: The Question Of Eco-Justice And Law Or Universalize The Pluriverse: A Manifesto, More Or Less, Omar Auf

Theses and Dissertations

The processes of interpretation, communication, and re-interpretation leads to the emergence of an approximated collective consciousness, for which it may be struggled and contested by hegemonic. The dominant forces of this contest, capitalism and nationalism, lead to an interdivided world: one that possesses the tools to empathize with each other but is instead leading people to keep their heads down and focus on surviving their own contexts, perceived as existing within different historical times on the same timeline. This leads to legal and justice systems that fail their claim to universality and/or impartiality. Incorporating an ecological lens to justice within …

Typeface: Machine-Viewing Gentrification On Storefront Imagery In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Alexander Mcquilkin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Gentrification—broadly, the replacement of a less powerful group by a more powerful one in an urban context—is oft-discussed in the popular press, but its definition is much-debated in the urban planning literature. Furthermore, academic treatments of displacement understandably focus on measurable yet fairly abstract indicators like changes in rent or income, whereas neighborhood change is often registered by residents on the ground using visual, but difficult-to-quantify markers like retail turnover. This project uses image recognition technology on a set of storefront photos to index the visual streetscape of a neighborhood, as well as to track changes to that portrait over …

Literature Review: Crowdfunding And Political Fundraising, Saiful Ahmad, Palupi Lindiasari Samputra

Journal of Strategic and Global Studies

Crowdfunding is an effort to raise relatively small amounts of money involving many individuals to support a specific project. Typically, crowdfunding is conducted online through fundraising platforms. The aim of this paper is to identify and analyse the utilisation of crowdfunding in fundraising activities that are related to or have political goals carried out by certain organisations or political groups. The method used in this paper is qualitative in the form of narrative analysis carried out through in-depth reading of several scientific literatures that discuss political fundraising through crowdfunding. The sources of scientific literature collection were obtained through the Google …

Implementation Of Zero Trust Architecture On Local Server Management In Educational Institutions, Joko Purwanto, Safar Dwi Kurniawan

Journal of Strategic and Global Studies

Educational institutions are facing increasingly complex cyber threats, particularly as they continue to rely on on-premises servers with limited cybersecurity resources. Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) offers a security model that rejects implicit trust and requires strict verification of each access request. This study aims to examine the applicability of ZTA in managing local servers within educational institutions through a qualitative literature review approach. Relevant literature from 2014 to 2025 was analyzed using thematic synthesis to identify recurring concepts, strategies, and gaps. The results show that ZTA, when integrated with Identity and Access Management (IAM), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), …

The Joy Above All Joys: Roland D. Sawyer’S Socialism For The Working Class, Maggie R. Buglino

Roland D. Sawyer Scholarship Papers

Following the Industrial Revolution, Americans were required to adapt to the nation's new capitalistic society. Witnessing the subsequent struggle of working-class families, 20th century Christian socialist Roland D. Sawyer was resolved to advocate for a reformed economic structure. This paper is dependent entirely on primary sources in the Roland D. Sawyer Collection, available in the University of New Hampshire's Milne Special Collections. Studying Sawyer's autobiography and various socialist writings illustrates his idea of a good life for the American working-class and how they were to achieve it through the adoption of a socialist doctrine. Throughout his activism, he encouraged Americans …

The Profitability Of Racial Diversity And Gender Balance In Modern Hollywood, M. Garrett Roth, William Mcandrew

The Journal of Economics and Politics

This paper investigates the effects of racial and gender diversity in modern Hollywood. The primary objective is to determine if an objectively measurable increase in diverse casting over the last two decades has had a positive or negative impact on profits, and a secondary objective to measure diversity’s impact on critic scores. The study utilizes data focusing on the fifty most expensive films from 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, and 2023. The findings indicate that profit is neither positively nor negatively affected by diversity, whether in ethnicity or gender. However, movie critic ratings are negatively affected by ethnic diversity when using …

Brute Force Branding: Variations & Repetitions Of The Almighty Dollar Banknote, Rui-Long Monico

Artl@s Bulletin

Abstract: This paper examines the U.S. dollar as a global brand and mythic icon, revealing how its stable aesthetic asserts dominance and infiltrates daily life. Through visual analysis and global comparison, it shows how banknotes are battlegrounds where art, identity, and geopolitics collide—currency as a weapon of soft power and cultural hegemony. The dollar’s visual inertia—ritualized, repeated, reappropriated—cements its supremacy as a symbolic force, where repetition enforces authority and variation sparks both resistance and conformity. Banknotes emerge as tools of statecraft and vessels of collective memory, as reflected in the author’s bespoke creation accompanying this study.

Résumé: Cet article analyse …

Can A Curator Influence Their Nation’S Art Market Value? Adriano Pedrosa, The 60th Venice Biennale, And The Global Repositioning Of Brazilian Art, Maria Joana Ventosa

MA Theses

The 60th Venice Biennale (2024), curated by Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa, the first Latin American curator, and the first curator based in the Global South to lead the Venice Biennale, revived long-standing debates concerning visibility and marginalization, who controls canon formation and, in a market where visibility directly affects value, the power of dictating the market. The curator furthered this discussion by curating a show literally titled “Strangers Everywhere”, focused on representations by artists who identify as “othered”, through, for example colonisation and erasure of native cultures, immigration or queerness.  This thesis examines the evolving role of biennials as platforms …