Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons^™

A Trauma-Informed Socially Just Approach To Working With Juvenile Justice-Involved Youth Utilizing Expressive Arts Therapy, Ciara Carr

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Youth involved with the juvenile justice system often have a history of trauma and oppression resulting from their positionality and circumstances. Most juvenile justice-involved youth are boys, youth of color, low-income, LGBTQIA2S+, disabled, and traumatized. This literature review explores the history of the juvenile justice system, issues with the present-day model, and trauma-informed and transformative justice approaches to practice. The implementation of socially just, trauma-informed expressive arts therapy programs is proposed as a more equitable practice to replace commonly used punitive practices across the United States. More research is needed to understand the impact of such programs on this population …

Governance And Islam In East Africa: Muslims And The State In Kenya And Tanzania, Farouk Topan, Kai Kresse, Erin E. Stiles, Hassan Mwakimako

Exploring Muslim Contexts

Explores the relationship between Muslim communities and the State in East Africa in political, institutional and legal contexts

• Focuses on the relationship between Muslims and the State in Kenya and Tanzania
• Asks which factors, both within and outside the Muslim community, shape and affect this relationship in contemporary times
• Presents 13 case studies exploring governance issues within and across the categories of politics, institutions and law in Kenya and Tanzania
• Identifies cross-cutting issues of governance and Muslim communities which are relevant beyond East Africa

Recent studies of Muslims in Kenya and Tanzania have tended either to examine governance of Muslims …

U.S. Government Agency Podcasts, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Presents podcasts from U.S. Government agencies which can be discovered through the U.S. Government Publishing Office's Catalog of Government Publications. Agencies whose podcasts are presented include the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Peace Corps, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Government Accountability Office (GAO), National Park Service, Department of Justice, Federal Reserve System, and U.S. Naval War College.

“Because I Said So”: How National Leaders Use Rhetoric To Frame The Issues Of National Security And The War On Drugs, Saul Valle

History and Political Science | Senior Theses

In the preamble of the 2024 presidential election seasons in both the United States and Mexico, there has been an increase in aggressive outspoken expression by national leaders regarding how to best handle the issue of drugs and drug use across the Western hemisphere. These types of sweeping policies are often credited to President Richard Nixon, who on June 18th, 1971, initiated his “War on Drugs,” a global policy campaign intended to address the production, distribution, and consumption of the illicit drug trade. Existing scholarship on this topic has extensively analyzed the early years of the American war on drugs …

Let Your Head Hang Down: A Narrative Examination Of Cultic & Conspiratorial Romance, Kyle Macy

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

A response to recent cultural trends of radicalization, extremism, and violence in American society, this dissertation, a novel rendered in ephemeral fragments of oral histories, interrogates the romanticist postures that compel a community of musical artists, the so-called “Folk Revival Revival,” toward infamy and tragedy. Where more traditional sociological approaches to cultic formations stress the importance of centralized charismatic authority, and more traditional psychological approaches rely upon a conspiratorial Cold War ethos of cognitive bias and coercive control (i.e. “brainwashing”), this project meets such assumptions with incredulity, asserting instead that cultic and conspiratorial entrancement awakens first from within, and may …

Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …

Reimagining The Theory Of Necropolitics In A Modern Lens: Hate Crimes And Violence, Salma Ahmed Abdulmagied Gheita

Future Journal of Social Science

This research paper is testing the validity of the Necropolitics theory and how we can reintroduce its definitions in a modern lens. Though the theory of Necropolitics is extreme and historically was a terminology and paradigm that was used towards more catastrophic and traumatizing events. The main argument that this paper is discussing is how did the idea of Necropolitics evolved into a more institutional, systematic, and legalized manors of exclusion. This is made through critical discourse analysis of the text presented on the term Necropolitics to highlight on the history of this term and what it stood for in …

The Rise Of Russian Peasant Witchcraft: A Response To Social Unrest In Imperial Russia, Katrina Sommer

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

Imperial Russia became home to a unique form of witchcraft from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Combining its religious history, patterns of imperial expansion and governance, and social hierarchies, witchcraft accusations arose during especially troublesome economic and political times. Differing from eighteenth-century America Witchcraft trials, these trials were not only femicide. Targeting anyone who might subvert established social or cultural norms, these accusations often led to violent expungement, ending with a ritual of communal bonding.

The Politics Of The Self: Psychedelic Assemblages, Psilocybin, And Subjectivity In The Anthropocene, Joshua Falcon

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how psychedelic substances become drawn into particular sociohistorical and political arrangements, and how psychedelic experiences with psilocybin ‘magic mushrooms’ are used as tools of subjectivation. Guided by literatures in philosophy, critical theory, and the social sciences that focus on subjectivity, assemblage theory, and critical posthumanism, I argue that psychedelics are drawn into variegated assemblages, each of which conceptualizes the nature of psychedelics in highly specific ways that reflect implicit conceptions of the world and the self. In developing the concept of psychedelic assemblages, this research provides a window onto the politics of the self in the Anthropocene. …

Contextualizing The 2019 “Chile Despertó” Movement: The Impact Of Historical Relational Processes On Mobilization And Repression, Tanya Leon

International Studies (MA) Theses

To expand our theoretical and empirical understanding of mobilization and repression in Latin America, this thesis asks three critical questions. Are economic indicators sufficient predictors of social movement emergence in Latin America? What other factors contribute to large-scale mobilization in Latin America? How do government’s respond to large-scale Latin American social movements? Specifically, when, and why do democratic governments choose to employ repression against social movements? Accordingly, I construct a quantitative model to test the correlation between rise in protest and worsened economic conditions. I apply it to a comprehensive dataset of political events in multiple South American countries throughout …

Towards A Psychological Science Of Abolition Democracy: Insights For Improving Theory And Research On Race And Public Safety, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Phillip Atiba Goff

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

We call for psychologists to expand their thinking on fair and just public safety by engaging with the “Abolition Democracy” framework that Du Bois (1935) articulated as the need to dissolve slavery while simultaneously taking affirmative steps to rid its toxic consequences from the body politic. Because the legacies of slavery continue to produce disparities in public safety in the U.S, both harming Black people and the institutions that could keep them safe, psychologists must take seriously questions of history and structure in addition to immediate situations. In the present article, we consider the state of knowledge regarding psychological processes …

Behind The Steel Bars Of History: The Post-Civil Rights Era Radical Prison Movement, Stephen Perez Jr.

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

The resistance and political action taken by the incarcerated in prisons like Attica Correctional Facility during the post-civil rights era (1968 -1972) faced an unprecedented state-led, counterinsurgent force. The socio-historical context of this suppression is a time of crisis for the U.S. as it struggled to maintain capitalist hegemony in the face of anti-systemic movements from the New Left. The post-civil rights era was a moment in US history that saw the strongest and most radical challenge to racial capitalism to date in the form of a social movement led by prisoners, yet the historical legacy of radical prison organizing …

The Alt-Right Movement And National Security, Matthew Valasik, Shannon E. Reid

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

Identifying the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol as an inflection point, this article analyzes the historical relationship between White supremacy and the US military from Reconstruction after the Civil War to the present. The article posits causes for the disproportionate number of current and former members of the military associated with White power groups and proposes steps the Department of Defense can take to combat the problems posed by the association of the US military with these groups.

Victim Impact: The Manson Murders And The Rise Of The Victims’ Rights Movement, Merrill W. Steeg

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Understanding The Complexities And Origins Of Gun Violence In Chicago, Christopher Bilicic

Senior Theses and Projects

This thesis attempts to re-think the way lawmakers, policy makers, and everyday Chicagoans look at and talk about gun violence in Chicago. I attempt to do this by taking a historical approach where Chicago's history of housing and police discrimination against its black communities is outlined. In doing this, I seek to show that many of the factors that are driving violence in the city's black neighborhoods - such as legal cynicism and concentrated inequalities - were created by this discriminatory past. Urban gun violence in Chicago is heavily concentrated in and driven by its black neighborhoods. After taking a …

The One-Armed Viewer: Voyeurism And Masturbation In Nudist Imagery And Film Spectatorship, Benjamin Eleanor Adam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nudist magazines and newsletters were among the first commercial, legal, and widely-available images of nudity which circulated in the late Comstock Era. To evade censorship, producers developed framing strategies that obscured the sexualized nature of these images, even as they also enabled the viewing practices their sales relied upon. This dissertation traces these framing strategies as they evolved through nudist still-imagery, camp films, and nudie cuties, and considers the evolution of spectatorial pleasures associated with Russ Meyer's early nudie cuties.

The Basha's Tools? Imagining Alternative Justice Futures In Egypt, Farah Ghazal

Theses and Dissertations

The dominant approach to addressing violence against women in Egypt today is carceral, or relying on the punitive instruments of the state to achieve justice (most visibly represented by the prison and police). While carceral responses are perhaps unsurprisingly advocated by state feminism, they are also promoted by what would typically be described as anti-state actors. This paradoxical entanglement takes place during what I identify as the 'carceral moment', a period marked by the intensification of political and social repression and during which incarceration appears more readily available as a solution to remedy perceived problems of governance. I argue that, …

Re-Assessing The Genocide Of Kurdish Alevis In Dersim, 1937-38, Dilşa Deniz

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This article discusses a century-long denial of historic genocide targeting Kurdish Alevis in Turkey. Firstly, I argue that the state-sponsored killings and forced displacements that occurred in Dersim in 1937-38 constitute genocide. Secondly, I use census numbers and other available documentation to suggest a possible figure for the causalities, while pointing out the methods by which the state has tried to cover up these numbers, indicating state planning and preparation. Finally, I show that as a part of the continued denial of such genocide, Turkish leftist organizations have been manipulated by the state, and thus have ended up supporting much …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

Marginalization And Criminalization Of People With Mental Illness, Ariana Walker

Student Writing

It is worth noting that people with a mental illness or disorder have a stigma around them that dictates how others treat them. With this stigma comes discrimination stemming from an already established opinion and experience with a person who has a mental illness. People who have a mental illness that affects their life are marginalized within our society, which means they get treated differently than the majority. This essay will serve as a discussion of the treatment history of mental disorders, forced institutionalization of the people, the impact deinstitutionalization had, and how this led to today’s problem of criminalization. …

Fomo, Liquid Courage, And The Intoxicated Self, Lindsay Pressman

Senior Theses and Projects

“Binge-drinking” cannot simply be recognized as a feature of campus culture, but as the product of a profoundly alienating one, made strikingly evident by our creation of a separate world (“drunk world”). We have created a small world of impossible possibles that exists in the corners of the actual; a separate world, in which the imagining of the self, other, and the world, is not only permissible but promoted. At the heart of college students’ “partying hard” is a longing, hope, and dogged determination that the liberating and unifying aspects of this world can overwhelm the actual...and in the meantime …

"A Pressure Not To Be Resisted Or Evaded": Military Occupation, Reform, And The Incorporation Of Northern Montana, 1879-1916, Hayden Nelson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis explores Fort Assinniboine’s role as an extension of the federal government’s military arm in the Northern Plains. It argues that the military occupation of northern Montana served to incorporate the northern borderland region and peoples into the American mainstream as a part of the national reconstruction processes following the Civil War into the twentieth century. In a period of half a century, north-central Montana transformed from a Native American common hunting ground lacking any major white settlement to a rapidly developing agricultural region. Fort Assinniboine played a central role in this transformation, hastening the economic collapse of the …

Human Rights? What A Good Idea! From Universal Jurisdiction To Crime Prevention, Daniel Feierstein

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Over the last decades, Genocide Studies has entered in a “comfort zone.” With fellowships and support from governments or NGOs, we have developed a very comfortable environment in which the knowledge we produce about genocide prevention is neither critical nor useful. We have become trapped by assumptions we have never checked against reality and many of us have chosen to work inside the circle of those assumptions: genocide and mass violence are horrible acts committed by horrible people; we cannot stand by and do nothing; we have the responsibility to protect civilian populations and that responsibility takes the form, as …

The Notions Of The "Closet" And The "Secret" In Oscar Wilde's, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Jessica Maria Oliveira

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will discuss the notions of the “closet” and “secret” within Oscar Wilde’s, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as offer a clear and precise definition of queer theory to assist in elucidating many of the concepts being discussed. Close reading techniques will be utilized to further uncover the metaphoric, symbolic, and otherwise figurative importance of certain aspects of The Picture of Dorian Gray and supporting texts. Through Judith Butler’s conceptualization of sex and gender, as well as Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of the “secret”, this paper will explicate the intricacies of Wilde’s work and unveil queered aspects …

Thinging : Powerful Objects., Tammy M. Burke

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The works in "Thinging” are inspired by desire, the genuine and the false, systems of real and perceived values, the quest for immortality, the allure of things, our use of them to make ourselves, and imagining pasts and futures via objects. The following concepts are threaded through the work: cathexis, ritual as a value builder, collections, hoarding, display, object history, exchange, use, and sign values, and vibrant materiality. At the heart of my investigation is the quest to examine the origins of object power, and by what measures it can be evaluated: value from belief, market value, and something perhaps …

Local Perceptions Of Cannabis And Cannabis Laws In Morocco: Unpacking Past Laws, Moroccans' Perceptions, And Exploring Organizational Efforts, Shadae Tingman

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

In Morocco, cannabis production and consumption are illegal, both medicinally and recreationally. The cultivation of the plant is among the top five in the world. This research will explore many aspects of cannabis in Morocco. There is much literature that exists surrounding the agricultural, economic, and political implications of cannabis, but this research will focus on social perceptions of cannabis and cannabis laws of local Moroccans. This research will explore past government attempts to legalize marijuana and why they did not pass. It will also explore the work of local youth organizations (that focus on cannabis) to understand what they …

When A Stone Is Not A Stone: Memories Of Clerical Abuse, Charles V. Sords

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

From the fourth to the sixth grades, Charles V. Sords suffered traumatic sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. He suppressed these memories, yet the pain of what happened impacted every aspect of his life. As an adult, several strong, sensory experiences brought the truth of his childhood into focus. He confronted the Church—and the system that protected clerical criminals. This memoir is an account of childhood sexual abuse, the particularly shameful nature of being raped by priests, and how the Catholic Church’s method of handling this and similarly horrifying revelations has re-traumatized survivors.

"Baby Factories": Exploitation Of Women In Southern Nigeria, Jacinta Chiamaka Nwaka, Akachi Odoemene

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Despite the writings of feminist thinkers and efforts of other advocates of feminism to change the dominant narratives on women, exploitation of women is a fact that has remained endemic in various parts of the world, and particularly in Africa. Nigeria is one of those countries in Africa where women are largely exposed to varying degrees of exploitation. This paper examines the development and proliferation of baby-selling centers in southern Nigeria and its impacts on and implication for women in Nigeria. It demonstrates how an attempt to give protection to unwed pregnant girls has metamorphosed into “baby harvesting” and selling …

The Justice System Is Criminal, Raven Delfina Otero-Symphony

2020 Award Winners

No abstract provided.

Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Foreword, I make the case for an abolition constitutionalism that attends to the theorizing of prison abolitionists. In Part I, I provide a summary of prison abolition theory and highlight its foundational tenets that engage with the institution of slavery and its eradication. I discuss how abolition theorists view the current prison industrial complex as originating in, though distinct from, racialized chattel slavery and the racial capitalist regime that relied on and sustained it, and their movement as completing the “unfinished liberation” sought by slavery abolitionists in the past. Part II considers whether the U.S. Constitution is an …