Politics and Social Change Commons^™

Developing A Measure Of Virtual Community Citizenship Behavior, Luman Yong, Daniel Sachau, Andrea L. Lassiter

Psychology Department Publications

This study examines the kinds of behaviors that constitute virtual community citizenship behaviors (VCCB) and tests three factors that may influence community members’ willingness to engage in VCCB. More specifically, the authors propose a multi-dimensional VCCB construct (altruism, civic virtue, consciousness, courtesy, and sportsmanship) and three antecedents of VCCB (affective commitment, structural embeddedness and membership tenure). Four dimensions including altruism, civic virtue, courtesy and loyalty emerged as a result of behavioral examples collection from SMEs using critical incident technique and a VCCB survey with 19 Likert type items reflecting the behavioral examples within each dimension was created. Data was collected …

Torch (January 2011), Brandon Baldwin, Civil Rights Team Project

Torch: The Civil Rights Team Project Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Pledge Your Body For Your Bread: Welfare, Drug Testing, And The Inferior Fourth Amendment, Jordan C. Budd

Law Faculty Scholarship

Proposals to subject welfare recipients to periodic drug testing have emerged over the last three years as a significant legislative trend across the United States. Since 2007, over half of the states have considered bills requiring aid recipients to submit to invasive extraction procedures as an ongoing condition of public assistance. The vast majority of the legislation imposes testing without regard to suspected drug use, reflecting the implicit assumption that the poor are inherently predisposed to culpable conduct and thus may be subject to class-based intrusions that would be inarguably impermissible if inflicted on the less destitute. These proposals are …

Finding The Human In Society, Lien Centre For Social Innovation

Social Space

Prior to the Singaporean General Elections in May 2011, not many had heard of Vincent Wijeysingha, executive director of TWC2. By the time he’d stood, and lost, as an opposition candidate, his profile had been firmly catapulted into the news and blogosphere. Wijeysingha recently sat down with Social Space to talk about his concern for the plight of migrant workers, social justice and how Singapore needs to change.

Ua23 Spirit Of Engagement 2011, Aurelia Spaulding, Alive Center, Western Kentucky University

ALIVE Center Publications

No abstract provided.

Environmental Challenge And Animal Agency, Marek Špinka, Françoise Wemelsfelder

Sentience Collection

Challenges are there to be overcome – seen usually as problems to avoid rather than as opportunities to enjoy. However, for humans a life without challenge would be likely to be dull and boring, lacking the enthusiasm and satisfaction that come with individual development. Could this also be true for animals? This chapter looks at the positive value of engaging with environmental challenges for animal welfare, proposing that this value lies in an animal’s expression of agency and the enhanced functional competence that it gains through this. It explores the different facets of agency, and provides more detailed discussion of …

Resisting The Globalization Of Speciesism: Vegan Abolitionism As A Site For Consumer-Based Social Change, Corey Lee Wrenn

Globalization and Social Movements Collection

Globalization has exacerbated speciesism both socially and economically. Veganism and its subsequent labeling schemes have arisen as an important political site of resistance to growing non-human animal inequality. This paper explores globalization‘s impact on non-human animals, veganism and vegan labeling, as well as important divides within the modern non-human animal rights movement in regards to utopian and pragmatic approaches to alleviating growing speciesism.

Oppositional Identities: The Military Peace Movement’S Challenge To Pro-Iraq War Frames, Lisa A. Leitz

Peace Studies Faculty Articles and Research

In the United States, rhetoric in support of the Iraq War often focuses on discourses of patriotism and supporting the troops. These discourses hold enormous sway over the American public because of the discursive legacies of the Vietnam War and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In response, members of the peace movement who are veterans, soldiers, and military families stress their military identities during activism. These individuals have organized as an important branch of the U.S. antiwar movement that challenges the pro-war framing of patriotism and troop support by strategically deploying 'oppositional identities.' The oppositional identity strategy involves highlighting …

Palestinian Women: Mothers, Martyrs And Agents Of Political Change, Rebecca Ann Otis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to understand the role of women as political actors in the rise of Islamo-nationalist movement in Palestine. Using a historical and ethnographic approach, it examines the changing opportunity structures available to Palestinian women in the nationalist struggle between 1987 and 2007. It looks into the sites of political engagement of Palestinian women as mothers, organizers and political candidates, suicide bombers, and nonviolent activists with attention paid to the evolution of the Islamist ideology within these four pathways for political participation. The goal of this work is to engage the question of how some Palestinian women who appear …

Nonvoters: Doing Nothing To Change The Government They Hate, Geoffrey N. Mciver

Political Science Theses and Capstones

The sporadic and often dismal voter turnout of the American public is often regarded as a hole in the democratic model. This research examines the influence of an individual‘s attitude about their government and how it affects their voting habits. Literature in the past has isolated demographic makeup as the reason for nonvoting, i.e. education or income. However, the nonvoter‘s state of mind in relation to their general feelings toward government and the social contract has been broadly overlooked. A new measure of an individual‘s attitude toward government was created using a collection of survey questions centered on a person‘s …

Vincent Druliolle On Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves And The Recovery Of Historical Memory In Spain. Edited By Carlos Jerez-Farrán And Samuel Amago. Notre Dame, In: University Of Notre Dame Press, 2010. 410pp., Vincent Druliolle

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain. Edited by Carlos Jerez-Farrán and Samuel Amago. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. 410pp.

Importing Trust: An Experimental Analysis On The Fiscal Behavior Of North Korean Refugees And Indian Citizens, Dane Thorley

Library Research Grants

No abstract provided.

Democratic Strength And Terrorism: An Economic Approach, Brian P. Winter

CMC Senior Theses

There has been much literature about the economic effects of terrorism in democratic countries, but this literature often considers democracy to be a binary variable. This paper sought to explore how the effects might differ depending on the strength of a democracy. In the end, I found that the numbers of attacks and the effects of those attacks do not follow a linear path. The results for autocracies and anocracies require further analysis, but democracies have revealed interesting results. It seems that democracies as a whole have more terrorist attacks, but, within this group, the more democratic a country is …

Filibustero, Rizal, And The Manilamen Of The Nineteenth Century, Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr

History Department Faculty Publications

This article traces the provenance and the multiple layers of meaning, as well as the contradictions encoded, in the word filibustero from its origins among pirates in the Caribbean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the American military adventurers in the nineteenth century, whose complex politics intersected with proindependence Cuban exiles. This history illumines the word’s specific meaning as it entered the Philippines before 1872. At the same time, filibustero can be linked to the Manilamen, natives of the Spanish Philippines who worked as international seafarers, who became involved in mercenary activities, especially in Shanghai. This seaborne genealogy contextualizes …

"Like An Ox Yoke": Challenging The Intrinsic Virtuosity Of A Grassroots Social Movement, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

Since the 1980s, neoliberal globalization fostered an upsurge of grassroots social movements in Latin America that sought alternatives to increasing poverty and social exclusion. Social movement scholars often interpret these movements as morally noble models of democracy given their claims to social justice and equity. My research examines the forced seizure of a closed Mexican sugar mill and establishment of a cooperative, worker-run factory by a grassroots movement whose cultural politics aimed at creating more democratic processes. Yet in 2009, after 11 years of success, movement leaders declared the mill bankrupt and shut it down. The façade of unity presented …

How Does A Battleground Become Common Ground? Lessons From Post-Conflict Countries, Mary Fran T. Malone

The University Dialogue

No abstract provided.

The Power Of Definition: Brazil's Contribution To Universal Concepts Of Indigeneity, Jan Hoffman French

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

This article builds on discussions about the potential benefits and difficulties with developing a universal definition of indigenous peoples. It explores the spaces made available for theorizing indigeneity by the lack of a definition in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007. Specifically, this article addresses the challenge presented by the diversity of groups claiming indigenous status in Brazil. To what extent do distinct cosmologies and languages that mark Amazonian Indians as unquestionably indigenous affect newly recognized tribes in the rest of Brazil who share none of the indicia of authenticity? This article theorizes …

Attitudes, William A. Cunningham, Ingrid J. Haas, Andrew Jahn

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

This chapter reviews social neuroscience research that links social psychological attitudes and evaluative processes to their presumed neural bases. The chapter is organized into four parts. The first section discusses how attitude representations are transformed into evaluative states that can be used to guide thought and action. The next two sections address the related processes of attitude learning and change. The final section discusses applications of these concepts for the study of prejudice and political behavior.

Securing The Homeland: A Risk-Cost-Benefit Analysis Of U.S. Anti-Terrorism Expenditures, Anne-Elise Martin

CMC Senior Theses

An analysis of risk, cost and benefit associated with U.S. domestic anti-terrorism expenditures.

The Coalition Of The Unwilling: Contentious Politics, Political Opportunity Structures, And Challenges For The Contemporary Peace Movement, Victoria Carty

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

The Bush Doctrine, which was installed after the 9-11 attacks on the United States under the guise of the war on terrorism, postulated a vision of the United States as the world’s unchallenged superpower and the invasion of Iraq became one of the central fronts of this war. After failing to get approval by the United Nations for the invasion, the Bush Administration’s attempt to assemble a coalition of the willing became critical to the battle for public opinion to back the war. While the administration was able to garner some support, the coalition eventually unravelled and all troops are …