The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and resulting recession have brought significant challenges for organizations and revealed deep-seated inequalities for employees of color. LatinX individuals, in particular, have experienced high rates of unemployment compared to their White and Black American counterparts and returned to work at a slower rate (BLS, 2020; 2021). As a result, organizational psychologists have been called to action to help understand the economic and psychological impacts of the recession on worker outcomes (e.g., unemployment, mental well-being). The objective of (...) this collected papers dissertation is to a) take a culturally humble and strength-based approach to examine how the emerging adult LatinX community’s well-being has been affected by sudden involuntary unemployment and job insecurity due to the global pandemic and b) understand the role of sociocultural factors (e.g., familism, gender ideologies, and ethnic identity) and resilience on the effects of these work stressors. Contemporary, accurate, and interpretable methods of data analysis informed by Hair and his colleagues were employed (Hair et al., 2017; Hair et al., 2019; Hair et al., 2020). The first paper tested the moderating role of familism (e.g., familial obligation, familial support) and gender ideologies (e.g., Machismo, Caballerismo, and Marianismo), on the association between unemployment and health during the pandemic. Machismo and Caballerismo moderated the relationship, with higher traditional gender role beliefs acting as a protective factor for employed men and as a risk factor for involuntary unemployed men. The second paper implemented a longitudinal design to assess the protective role of ethnic identity and resilience on the relationship between job insecurity and well- being. Covid related job insecurity is related to lower levels of job satisfaction, and higher levels of anxiety and depression. Higher levels of individual resilience were related to lower levels of anxiety. Lastly, ethnic identity showed to exert its effects through the moderating role of resilience on the job insecurity and anxiety relationship. Taken together the findings from these studies will help inform policy and practice on how job loss and insecurity affect the working lives and well-being of those from marginalized communities and the need for culturally relevant development opportunities and interventions. (shrink)

This article explicates the political, social, economic, and cultural contribution of Barbie (2023). Through a critical and normative analysis of four different prominent reviews of the film, this essay explores the quality of discourse surrounding Barbie, with particular emphasis on its feminist critique of toxic masculinity and lack of a coherent criticism of capitalism.

Rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are at an all-time high (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2021; Kreisel et al., 2021; Merman, 2021), and disproportionately impact women of color. Understanding the factors that coalesce to create elevated risk for Black women is critical for more effective prevention/intervention to reduce risks and negative health outcomes. This study extended previous research by examining the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and the mediating influences of psychosocial factors (i.e., body image, perceived partner (...) availability, and self-efficacy for condom negotiation) on sexual-risk decision making (i.e., condom use) in Black women during emerging adulthood. The TPB model demonstrated a good fit within the whole sample and the sample of highly educated Black women, with attitudes, social norms, and perceived behavioral control predicting condom intentions and intentions predicting condom use. Perceived partner availability mediated the linkages among intentions and use in the full sample and condom negotiation self-efficacy related to condom use. Black women who are more highly educated perceived a more limited pool of partners and this may have implications for their sexual health. The findings from this study help identify patterns that may differentially impact self-protective behaviors in sexual encounters to promote diversity-affirming prevention/intervention to reduce high rates of STIs in minority women. (shrink)

This dissertation theorizes curriculum as confession and attends to questions of justice, selfhood, and the pursuit of truth. An inquiry on confession is atypical among traditional educational dissertations because the practice is normally associated with religious institutions as opposed to schools or higher education. Moreover, confession is something usually associated with guilt or shame, not with traditional educational discourses of learning, teaching, or curriculum. As a result, confession is overlooked within educational discourse. I argue, however, that confession always occurs because (...) curriculum is the site of subjective educational experience. Taking part in the reconceptualist tradition of the curriculum field, curriculum always happens because we are always already in a pedagogical world, and, therefore, are always teaching and learning. Drawing on curriculum history and continental philosophers like Foucault and Derrida, I argue that confession is an educational practice in instrumental and existential ways. I argue with Foucault that confession is instrumental and extractive and likewise can be the site of resistant responses to that extraction. Utilizing different philosophical and literary figures, I theorize with Derrida that our attempts to conceptualize the world have an irreducible uncertainty and misrepresentation. Moreover, because there is no signification without difference, there is always the threat of exclusion from representation. The question, then, is, how do we tell the truth without violating the other? How does one do justice to the world they experience? This dissertation utilizes a humanities-based approach to imagining and re-conceptualizing curriculum as confession, which I find is ultimately the autobiographical play of formation and transformation. I intend for the findings of this study to serve as a new way to think about curriculum and being, and will provide new modes of reflection and imagination for teachers and researchers. What is needed, I argue, is fewer ways to reduce the world to simply measurements and more ways to open up the pedagogical world we already inhabit with the hope that we press toward a world otherwise. (shrink)

The ancient philosophy of Stoicism, itself one of the foundations for international law, can improve contemporary just war thinking by forming a coherent set of philosophical principles to serve as a foundation for a just war theory. A Stoic approach considers justifications for moral actions to come not from an appeal to human rights, conformity to deontological rules, or from the utility of the actions themselves, but from virtuous character traits and corresponding virtuous actions. As such, a Stoic approach to (...) just war theory is a virtue ethics perspective in which metaethical incentive for moral action is the agent’s own flourishing and successful life (eudaimonia). Such a theory is concerned with ‘internal justice’ rather than the ‘external justice’ of international laws, rules, or norms. Stoic justice is based on the conception of oikeiosis, with its dual aspects: the presumed natural desire for self-preservation, leading to the selection of things appropriate to the human constitution; and the supposed social instinct, most notably exemplified by affection for those in the agent’s ‘concentric circles of concern.’ As equally a natural law theory and a virtue ethic, Stoic just war theory also attempts to answer points of contention between political realism and cosmopolitanism. This work outlines and, in a precursory way, develops other implications of Stoic philosophy for just war theory derived from relevant (and salvageable) Stoic positions on physics and metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, moral psychology, and political philosophy. This project also examines the actions of ancient Stoic- or Stoically inclined- statemen in order to demonstrate the possibility, within its historical context, of Stoic justice in warfare. The Stoic just war theory answers problems and criticisms from other positions on natural law, virtue ethics, and just war. A minor theme of this project attempts to develop an education program in Stoic just war theory based on the ancient Stoics’ own program for education. (shrink)

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. Drawing on mixed and netnographic methods, I conducted 30 semi-structured interviews and acquired 100 experience reports from online forums, using this data to demonstrate how psychedelic mushroom experiences are used as technologies of the self, or practices that individuals engage as a means of changing their subjectivity. Among the changes in subjectivity provoked by psychedelic mushroom experiences, there are sometimes reports of changes in human-environment relations based on an enhanced connection or relationship with nature. (shrink)

This review essay explores the concepts of war, ecology/human-nonhuman relations, and alienation through a critical analysis of McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin (2022).

Primitivism is a philosophical attitude and artistic view based on the search for origins. It is linked to a simpler conception of life and has been used as a strategy to critique modernity through literature and art, as well as a means to subvert traditional and academicist paradigms in cultural production. Although most scholars have considered Primitivism as a problem of Western ideology, Erik Camayd-Freixas, Marianna Torgovnick, and Ben Etherington have shown that Primitivism is present in all cultures and that (...) its strategies have been deployed to deal with racial, ecological, economic, artistic, and gender issues. My dissertation analyzes the ways in which Latin American poets Gabriela Mistral, Alfonsina Storni, and Juana de Ibarbourou employ Primitivism as a means of revolutionizing the traditional canon of women’s poetry. I make a comparison between the voices of women’s poetry of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries in the Southern Cone of South America. I examine literary work by Mercedes Marín del Solar, Josefina Pelliza de Sagasta, and Silvia Fernández to demonstrate that, in the nineteenth century, women writing poetry felt themselves forced to adhere to the rules of progress, modernity, positivism, and national ideology enforced by masculine rationality. Women writers had to negotiate with these dictates in order to have a presence in Latin American nineteenth-century literary discourse. They became great defenders of patriotic feelings, progress, technical and industrial advances, motherhood inspired by the model of the Virgin Mary, and idealized love, which were then considered important factors in a ‘civilized’ society. In contrast, women writers of the twentieth century changed this pattern using the strategies of Primitivism. Mistral, Storni, and Ibarbourou transform the paradigms of motherhood and idealized love, turning them into creative, corporeal, and sensual experiences. They prefer Nature to urban areas, imagining the natural world as free spaces in which women can express their repressed desires and transcend the limits of masculine modernity and social norms. These women poets posit their views about such issues as gender inequality and the destruction of the environment for economic purposes, making them important antecedents of Second-Wave Feminism and Ecofeminism. (shrink)

This essay presents the theoretical framework that informs my reflections on the hegemony of the slums’ poverty and human conditions, and whether art can disrupt the hegemony and also become a conduit to question our Being, hence Dasein, as per Martin Heidegger. The following pages investigate the work of Hema Upadhyay, in India, and specially, her inspiring protest work offering insights on India’s overpopulation in urban areas such as, Dharavi. She depicts slums becoming a continuum circle of human misery and (...) wealth, politically called a negative social spiral. I argue that the slums, not only destroy the harmony and promise of a city’s good life, but they generate a need for a disruption of the hegemony of poverty and overpopulation, as a democratic response. Most importantly, art can assist in the process of disarticulation of the ‘common sense’ knowledge on the slums, and generation of new hegemonies, as per the theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the pictorial representation of Frida Khalo’s “The Dream,” to unfold the nature and reflect upon the notions of joy and innocence as forms of a subtle contestation. How are they represented? By examining the visible and the non-visible as conditions of critical possibility for joy, innocence and contestation, we can reevaluate the interrelation between the notions of life and death in the Mexican culture, and Frida’s personal history. I argue that innocent joy is a quality that articulates (...) a subtle contestation or clandestine activity of freedom. (shrink)

The beautiful is unveiled and resides in the goodness that is within human beings. Beings emanate the goodness within; thus, whoever possesses goodness is able to unveil beauty.

I argue that in Postmodernism, as per Lyotard’s writings, art “…caters to the impossibility for an attainable wholeness or sense of presence”. And yet, this state of ‘unattainable wholeness’, does not deny to postmodern art the role of the experience that can carry emancipatory power. Yet, it may not be a ‘unity of experience’ as per Habermas, but still constitute a space of experience and presentations of the unpresentable that is predicated by difference. I propose that Lyotard’s theory of the (...) presentation of the unpresentable, which sees presentation of artworks oriented towards formless art language games and communication, are divergent works of art that are concerned with a formless aesthetics of the Lyotards’ ‘true sublime.’ To substantiate this theoretical analysis of the ‘presentation of the unpresentable’ in art, I show the works of Alfredo Jaar: “33 women,” 2019; and “What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears,” 2018. (shrink)

LasTesis, a Chilean performance group that choreographed a feminist dance and chant titled Un violador en tu camino gathers women of all ages and backgropunds. Their bodies dance and chant in unison echoing the tethered notions of collaboration and contamination as thinking, as a massive contamination. This article explores how contamination affects identity and how it also enables the trace of a traumatic past while imagining different futures that are imminent and important. I argue that this knowledge and assertive action (...) exemplified in the performance Un violador en tu camino involves a physical reclaiming of space, a collaborative assertion, an assemblage of bodies that create a human barricade, leading to a mass-contamination. Indeed, women not only confront the State, but they proclaim agency saying, ‘No more!’ proposing a collective re-thinking from a shifted position. (shrink)

Marta Minujín’s Leyendo las noticias is a happening that combines feminine subjectivity with the socio-political, creating a dialogue around notions of trace, the feminine, text, meaning, and impermanence. Specifically, how these notions affect the women living in an unstable and pluralistic world. It depicts a woman as a ‘participatory woman’ talking about women, in a conflicted patriarchal society. I would argue that the popular Marta Minujín’s Leyendo las noticias, represents a ‘slippage,’ for women amid a repressive culture, and a historical (...) context of a Dirty War, violence, and fear. Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Helene Cixous, Jane Bennett, and Julia Kristeva are brought in dialogue, with the selected happening, in an intertwined analysis of: the reading of Freud and meaning of text in relation to the psyche, women talking about women’s issues, the impermanence and the notion of the severed head, the concept of the thing-power and the decentering of the human experience and the concepts of Da-sein as a product of time, place and culture, and the necessity of choice. (shrink)

In a recent article appearing in Spectre Journal, Darren Roso concludes his discussion of “Weimar’s Marxist Heretic: Reading Karl Korsch Today” by stating that “It is, perhaps, a good but dark time to read authors like Korsch who articulated something timeless about revolutionary Marxism.” What Roso finds “timeless” is the importance of “timeliness” in “absolute” commitment to human liberation. One might hesitate before a timeless absolute, yet it is noteworthy that the text that is most central to the intellectual legacy (...) of Karl Korsch (1886-1961) has now reached its centenary and Roso may well be correct to claim that is indeed a good, albeit dark, time to re-read Korsch. This essay will not retread the ground covered by Roso, the reader is strongly encouraged to learn more about the life and work of Karl Korsch by accessing Roso’s timely and excellent contribution. This essay will instead focus on “Marxism and Philosophy,” and consider to what extent it remains timely for our times, mostly but not necessarily only for those who share ongoing progressive and socialist commitments. (shrink)

The objective of the paper is to solve the interpretative controversies around Comrade Detective, one of the most original TV entertainment productions of the recent years. This production is a pastiche of American buddy police films. The plot refers to the reality of the socialist Romania in the 1980s and presents in a satirical way the local militia’s fight against the American threat. We have attempted to prove that its not only deriding the reality of the political system, but the (...) series constitutes also a satire on American propaganda films. Although the humour in the series seems vulgar and absurd, it has a dialectic character as fun is made of both the capitalist and the socialist systems. Furthermore, we have attempted to solve the controversy connected with political interpretations of the series. Its ambiguity ensues from the use of an artistic strategy which is close to the postmodern artistic strategy defined as retro-avant-guard. (shrink)

Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro are widely acknowldged as groundbreaking texts across Latinx literary canons, invoking selfhood, spirituality, activism, and politics as a queer woman of color writer. Her language around self-dispersion is still undertheorized in what it owes to traumatic experiences discoverable in the self, body, world, and culture Anzaldua hails from. The extent of colonizing and kyriarchal damage in her work has been recognized; but the exact character of how these breakages (...) and corresponding imperatives to regenerate oneself resemble a traumatic shock remains to be written about. This thesis sketches frameworks appropriate to the task, employing phenomenology, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and theories of trauma and testimony alongside Anzaldua. Connections between each intellectual movement are uncovered in juxtaposition with Anzaldua’s texts, and novel readings arise with respect to Anzaldua’s worldview and the internal logic of death, pain, and rebirth unique to her experiences. (shrink)

Studies explain that participating in community service enhances relationships, positively contributes to one’s purpose, and provides life satisfaction with a specific focus on retention and degree attainment for those enrolled in college. The simultaneous increase of Black women attending colleges as universities increase outreach to drive community engagement does not align with the shift in the research of civic engagement that excludes the activity of young Black people and is counterintuitive to the historical underpinnings of political and educational transformations in (...) the United States. The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of why current Black undergraduate women volunteer in their communities and how they perceive these volunteer experiences reflect on understanding themselves as Black women. Qualitative inquiry was used to explore the similarities and differences of how Black women make meaning of their experiences and understand themselves. The 11 Black undergraduate women who participated revealed eight themes that contributed to their reason for serving their communities. Overwhelmingly, the participants felt a drive, usually before college, that motivated them to serve their communities to impact themselves and others in transformative ways. Their work in the community was not without hardships or barriers, but overcoming those barriers were also motivating to the participants to recognize their privilege and continue to serve. The university’s role is something the participants were critical about as they had little connection to the university related to volunteering except for the marketing of service opportunities but contributed that to their peers. As the institutionalization of service-learning and volunteerism in higher education has become a strategy to increase retention, the findings from the present study add to the limited research of volunteer engagement of diverse populations. The participants shared their criticism of volunteering within the university as well as the community broadly, and they confirm that intentional outreach and educational spaces should be dedicated to ensuring that the community work of students of all backgrounds is valued and that these students be given opportunities to engage in meaningful volunteer work. (shrink)

In this thesis, I propose to explain how it is that the life and work of John Keats assists us in answering the question of how we create ourselves through the presence of others. I aim to do this through an analysis of the work that his relationship with Fanny Brawne inspired. In doing so, I hope to prove that romantic love creates a sort of metaphysical sanctuary for us to inhabit as we shift through the various incarnations of our (...) identity throughout our lives. By synthesizing the theories of phenomenology and transgression, I hope to demonstrate how Keats’ rapid development as a poet was made possible through the sanctuary of acceptance that his love for Fanny Brawne afforded him. These concepts are divided into four sections. The first is a general overview of relevant definitions/terms as I understand and incorporate them. The second discusses how I perceive identity and its construction through influence. The third discusses Keats’ concept of Beauty as a philosophy of truth-making, and how that plays into identity formations. The last section explains how I see love as being necessary in perpetuating these new incarnations of self to occur due to the sanctuary of acceptance that it affords us. (shrink)

This thesis works to synthesize literary theory into an examination of socio- cultural and political factors of post-World War I Europe, as they appear in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, that led to nationalist movements in the 1930s and the current day. These concepts are divided into three sections with the first being an introduction to the formation of signifiers among the modernist writers. The second involves a differentiation of disability from gender in the expatriate (...) community. The third an investigation of disability among the veteran expatriates. The modernist novel, whilst assisting in the creation of nation-state identities, responds to nationalist and patriarchal determination by forming characters who are outside of the norm. (shrink)

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 in The Picture of Dorian Gray. (shrink)

Teachers need to be equipped with the tools necessary to evaluate content on the Internet and determine if it is a credible source, or a hoax website since they are expected to instruct and prepare students on how to evaluate the sites which is now a relevant phenomenon. The purpose of the mixed‑method study was to obtain an understanding of the web evaluation strategies of prospective teachers regarding the evaluation of hoax websites and how their epistemic beliefs may influence their (...) evaluation. Another aspect of this study was to find out what outcomes resulted from providing guidance, or not to prospective teachers before evaluating the hoax websites. Seventy‑two prospective teachers from undergraduate education courses completed an online questionnaire, where they evaluated four websites (two hoaxes and two credible) and completed questions regarding their epistemic beliefs. Two groups of prospective teachers were selected. Group A was the control group and Group B was the experiment group. Group A simply took the online questionnaire. However, Group B was provided with an overview of a specific web evaluation strategy, the WWWDOT Framework, before taking the online questionnaire. Sixteen participants were interviewed. Interestingly, almost half of the participants (48.6%), trusted at least one of the hoax websites. The study concluded that teaching the WWWDOT Framework helped to increase the number of people that did not trust the aesthetically appealing hoax website in Group B. Regarding epistemic beliefs, prospective teachers, who displayed feeling‑based epistemic beliefs, tended to trust the hoax website that was aesthetically appealing in Group A. The qualitative results provided additional insights and supported the quantitative data. The qualitative research suggests that lateral reading, spending sufficient time to read and evaluate and knowing the definition of a hoax website as being the most important web evaluation strategies displayed by those that did not trust the hoax websites. (shrink)

This polemical essay explores the meaning and function of the concept of neoliberalism, focusing on the serious theoretical and political limitations of the concept. The crux of the argument is that, for those interested in overcoming the exploitative and oppressively destructive elements of global capitalism, opposing "neoliberalism" is both insufficient and potentially self-undermining. This article also goes into some detail on the issues of health care and climate change in relation to "neoliberalism" to highlight the theoretical and political arguments made (...) throughout the article. (shrink)

This thesis examines a specific type of instance that bridges the divide between seeing sacred texts as merely vehicles for content and as objects themselves: self-reference. Doing so yielded a heuristic system of categories of self-reference in sacred texts based on the way the text self-describes: Inlibration, Necessity, and Untranslatability. I provide examples of these self-referential features as found in various sacred texts: the Vedas, Āgamas, Papyrus of Ani, Torah, Quran, Sri Guru Granth Sahib, and the Book of Mormon. I (...) then examine how different theories of sacredness interact with them. What do Durkheim, Otto, Freud, or Levinas say about these? How are their theories changed when confronted with sacred texts as objects as well as containers for content? I conclude by asserting that these self-referential features can be seen as ‘self-sacralizing’ in that they: match understandings of sacredness, speak for themselves, and do not occur in mundane texts. (shrink)

Contemporary scholars seeking to increase Tuber Melanosporum truffle production rely almost exclusively on technological advancements to increase yields, while failing to place the cultivation of truffles, trufficulture, in its historical or local landscape contexts. In this dissertation, I describe how truffle scholars’ conceptualization of trufficulture and landscapes has changed over 150 years in France, while focusing on the French département of Lot. I examine changing relations between humans and nonhumans and how they impact truffle harvests. I analyzed the history of (...) French trufficulture through a close reading of historic truffle manuals, archival research and the classification of remotely sensed images. Shifting from the past to the present, from July 2014-August 2016, I conducted semi-structured survey interviews with working truffle-growers (trufficulteurs) and participant observation at meetings of trufficulteurs, truffle hunts and truffle markets. I utilize actor-network theory (ANT) as both a theory and methodology. Actor-network theory allowed me to follow the impacts made by both humans and nonhumans on trufficulture. I found that truffle harvests in the 1880s dropped by 90%. Highly populated, intensively worked landscapes of viticulture, silvopastoralism and cereal cultivation created conditions suitable to truffles. By the 1870s the phylloxera aphid ravaged grapevines, which made trufficulture an important source of revenue. These advantageous conditions would not last. Post-WWI, yields fell for decades because of an ongoing rural population exodus and consequent agricultural abandonment, which promoted reforestation and closed canopy forests in Lot, France. By the 1960s, French trufficulteurs organized associations to share knowledge and promote local truffle markets to revive production. Trufficulteurs’ utilization of tractors, ‘inoculated’ plants and irrigation systems produced a new form of “modern” trufficulture. State subsidies helped trufficulteurs adopt “modern” practices, in hopes of increasing yields. “Modern” trufficulture has not dramatically increased yields. A few highly-capitalized trufficulteurs dominate production in Lot. Many others practice trufficulture as a hobby. Instead of relying on “modern” technological fixes, my findings suggest that trufficulteurs, farmers and states should reinvigorate extensive polyculture farming practices that maintain open canopy forests, which were beneficial to trufficulture in the past. Actor-network theory allowed me to rethink human and nonhuman relations, and to propose alternatives to “modern” trufficulture. (shrink)

This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of the Independent Living program targeting foster youths to prepare them for effective adulthood. The study employed a pre-post, two-group comparative research design. The IL group was composed of 49 young adults who participated in the IL or SIL program prior to their emancipation from foster care. The comparison was made up of 18 young adults who experienced foster care but never participated in the IL or SIL programs. Data were collected via a (...) mailed survey that included the Daniel Memorial Independent Living Assessment and an additional questionnaire developed by the researcher. The study also examined: 1) why youth in foster care do not participate in IL programs, 2) how participating youth evaluate IL services and what recommendations they make to improve services, and 3) the internal consistency of the DMILA. Results suggest that the DMILA assessment has mediocre reliability. IL program participation is associated with better educational, employment, income, housing, early parenting-prevention, transportation, anger control, criminal-prevention, and self-evaluation outcomes. However, IL participation is not associated with better social support, perceived parenting competence, substance abuse-prevention, sexual risk-prevention outcomes, increased knowledge in money management skills, job seeking and job maintenance skills, interpersonal skills, or lower depression. Results also suggest that the outreach activities of the IL program may be flawed. IL participants reported the IL program was doing best in educational preparation, criminal involvement prevention, and money management preparation and least well in parenting preparation, housing preparation, employment preparation, and substance abuse prevention. To improve services, youths recommended primarily that IL counselors develop closer relationships with youths, that IL training better address organizational skills, and that monthly subsidy be raised and SIL eligibility requirements softened. The study's political context and limitations are also discussed and implications are derived regarding prevention, intervention, outreach, mentorship, empowerment, cross-systems collaboration, and future research. (shrink)

The term entheogen refers to drugs—including the artificial substances and active principles drawn from them—which are known to produce ecstasy and have been used traditionally in certain religious and shamanic contexts. The entheogenic experiences provoked by entheogens are described by users in myriad ways, including in spiritual, religious, philosophical, and secular contexts. Entheogenic experiences have shown that they can create opportunities for individuals to generate meaning, including novel philosophical insights, which users claim to gain by way of experience. As such, (...) entheogenic experiences exhibit the ability to influence a change in a user’s fundamental philosophical commitments, or live options, including their ethical dispositions. Given that these new live options are rooted in experience, their veracity gains further credence for users than those commitments they have come to hold by way of abstraction. By philosophically investigating the phenomenology of entheogenic experiences, this work argues that entheogens have ethical import. (shrink)

In An Image of Africa, Chinua Achebe indicts Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for exemplifying the kind of purist rhetoric that has long benefited Western ontology while propagating reductive renderings of African experience. Edward Said refers to this dynamic as the way in which societies define themselves contextually against an imagined Other. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fiction exposes how, by occupying cultural dominance, Western, white male values are normalized as universal. Nevertheless, these values are de-naturalized by their inconsistencies in the lived experiences (...) of Adichie’s black, African women. Women who are at once aware of and participant in, the pretentions that underlie social interaction—pointing to the inevitability of performativity and disrupting the illusion of pure identity. These realizations interrupt Conrad’s essentialist conception of identity and reclaim diverse ontological possibilities for the Other. (shrink)

The purpose of this thesis was to explore the ways the printed word in James Joyce’s Ulysses opens new and alternative paths towards the interpretation of the text. We show how it induces multiple chains of associations beyond the act of reading, which start at the visual, spatialized sequencing and contiguity of letters, words and sentences, their layout on the page, or the persistence or absence of punctuation. After initial observations of the visual prevalence of the written word over its (...) auditory capabilities as noted in the “Aeolus” chapter (e.g.: puns that can be realized only in writing; meanings that can be accessed not by reading but by observing the spatial arrangement of text), two other chapters of the book—“Ithaca” and “Penelope”— were analyzed to determine if such assumptions could be applied to other sections of the novel. Random passages from yet other sections were used as illustration. Our analysis suggests that throughout “Ulysses” meaning derivation may take place beyond the effect of rhetorical figures, and often can be the result of a visual/spatial associative chain. (shrink)

This thesis argued that the Jain community in the diasporic context of the USA has invented a new form of Jainism. Sectarian negotiations are the distinguishing marks of the diaspora Jain community and their invented form of Jainism. Based on ethnographic study that is, interviews and observations conducted at four different sites (Jain temples/communities) from June-August 2016, the thesis examined the sectarian negotiations among the diaspora Jain community in the USA and the invented Jain tradition that is resulting from these (...) negotiations. The central questions of the research on which this thesis is based were: 1) what are the levels, processes and results of sectarian negotiations within the Jain diaspora community in the USA, and 2) what is the nature and characteristic of the new form of Jainism, the invented tradition; and how do Jains in the USA experience and use it. (shrink)

This thesis grapples with questions surrounding representation, mourning, and responsibility in relation to two literary representations of the ZONG massacre of 1781. These texts are M. NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG! and Fred D’Aguiar’s FEEDING THE GHOSTS. The only extant archival document—a record of the insurance dispute which ensued as a consequence of the massacre—does not represent the drowned as victims, nor can it represent the magnitude of the atrocity. As such, this thesis posits that the archival gaps or silences from which (...) the captives’ voices are missing become spaces of possibility for additive representation. This thesis also examines the role voice and sound play in these literary texts and the deconstructive-ethical philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida. This thesis argues that these texts invoke the sonic materiality of voice in the service of responding to the disremembered dead through mourning and acknowledgment. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that the major theories of global justice (specifically within the cosmopolitan tradition) have missed an important aspect of capitalism in their attempts to deal with the most pernicious effects of the global economic system. This is not merely a left critique of cosmopolitanism (though it is certainly that as well), but its fundamental contribution is that it applies the insights of Frankfurt School Critical Theorist Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics to offer an internal critique of cosmopolitanism. As it (...) stands, much of the global justice and cosmopolitanism literature takes global capitalism as an unsurpassable and a foundationally unproblematic system, often ignoring completely the relationship between the psycho-socially conditioned ideological aspects of capitalism and the horizon of achievable politics and social development. Using the philosophies and social theories of Adorno and Erich Fromm, I argue that there is a crucial psycho-social dimension to capitalism, or capitalistic mentality—represented in and functionally reproduced by transnational capitalism—that undermines the political aspirations of normative theories of cosmopolitanism, on their own terms. The project concludes with an exploration of Marxist, neo-Marxist, and post-Marxist theories as a potential source of alternatives to address the flaws within cosmopolitanism with respect to its general acceptance and under-theorizing of capitalism. The conclusion reached here is that even these radical approaches fail to take into account the near-pervasive influence of capitalism on the minds of radicals and activists working for progressive change or simply reject the potentials contained in existing avenues for global political and economic change (something which the cosmopolitan theories explored in earlier chapters do not do). Based again on the work of Adorno and Fromm, this dissertation argues that the best path forward, practically and theoretically, is by engaging cosmopolitanism and neo-/post-Marxism productively around this concept of the capitalistic mentality, building towards a praxeological theory of postcapitalist cosmopolitanism framed by a negative dialectical resuscitation of the concepts of class struggle and unlimited democracy. This postcapitalist cosmopolitanism emphasizes non-exploitative economic and political relations, cooperation, compassion, sustainability, and a participatory-democratic civic culture. (shrink)

This thesis seeks to bridge feminist and environmental justice movements through the literature of black women writers. These writers create an archive that contribute towards the liberation of queer, black, and transgender peoples. In the novel Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler constructs a world that highlights the pervasive effects of climate change. As climate change expedites poverty, Americans begin to blame others, such as queer people, for the destruction of their country. Butler depicts the dangers of fundamentalism as a (...) response to climate change, highlighting an imperative for a movement that does not romanticize the environment as heteronormative, but a space where queers can flourish. Just as queer and environmental justice movements are codependent on one another, feminist movements cannot be separate from black and transgender liberation. This thesis will demonstrate how writers, such as Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, and Janet Mock, help establish a feminism that resists the erasure of black and transgender people. (shrink)

One of the more beguiling films of 2016 was Matt Ross’ Captain Fantastic, a tale about a father raising a brood of children in the Pacific Northwest woods, and the challenges the family faces when it emerges into “civilization” to confront a family crisis. A much earlier film, 1942’s Tarzan’s New York Adventure, shares its narrative structure: Tarzan and Jane must leave their jungle paradise and confront a threat to their family in the canyons of New York. Both films explore (...) the problems associated with parents’ attempt at educating their children. And in both films the families’ pedagogical agenda is configured by the economic structures of their respective cultures. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to analyze the way in which multicultural studies and theory, two academic areas that traditionally have been at odds, both manifest a distinctly similar stance on the constructedness of identity in Western society and how it affects intercultural relations. Jacques Derrida’s The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe and Edwidge Danticat’s The Book of the Dead both influence the way being is perceived in society. The first is a political speech intended to open the (...) minds of Europe’s political elite to what is perhaps the root of intercultural straggle in Europe. The second is a short story intended to shed light on the trials of a Haitian-American immigrant family as they come to terms with their homeland’s sociopolitical unrest and try to integrate into a new cultural environment. Together, these texts facilitate a protean examination of the rhetoric of the essential that permeates Western culture, and provide insight into a way of conceiving of being that is both dynamic and prismatic. (shrink)

Some contemporary anarchist scholarship has rejected the Enlightenment-inspired reliance on reason that was supposedly central to classical anarchist thought and expanded the anarchist critique to address issues ignored by their classical predecessors. In making reason the object of critique, some contemporary anarchists expanded the anarchist framework to include critiques of domination residing outside the traditional power centers of the state, the capitalist firm, and the church thereby shedding light on the authoritarian tendencies inherent in the intellect itself. Though contemporary anarchist (...) scholarship has sought to apply this anti-authoritarian ethos to the realms of epistemology and ontology (by employing Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and other postfoundational thinkers), their own framework of analysis is glaringly susceptible to what Habermas called a “performative contradiction.” In questioning the authority of aspects of even our own intellect (and the epistemological and ontological presuppositions that accompany it) we call into question even the authority of our own argumentation. I answer this “contradiction” by interrogating two intellectual traditions. Firstly, I question a key postfoundational anarchist premise. Namely, I assess whether an understanding of classical anarchist thinkers as quintessential children of the Enlightenment is justified. Secondly, I offer an alternative path to reconciliation between the anti-authoritarian values of the anarchists and the anti-metaphysical values of the postfoundationalists (that I think mirrors anarchist anti-authoritarian concerns) by suggesting we are better served to think of an anti-authoritarianism of the intellect by employing three key twentieth century thinkers: Richard Rorty, Paul Feyerabend, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I do so while anchoring Rorty’s, Feyerabend’s, and Wittgenstein’s philosophies in the 19th century anti-metaphysical thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and the philosophical anarchism of Max Stirner. (shrink)

This poster will attempt to apply the techniques used in Queer Theory to explore library and information science’s use and misuse of library classification systems; and to examine how “queering” these philosophical categories can not only improve libraries, but also help change social constructs. For millennia, philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, have used and expounded upon categories and systems of classification. Their purpose is to make research and the retrieval of information easier. Unfortunately, the rules used to categorize and (...) catalog make information retrieval more challenging for some, due to social constructs such as heteronormality. The importance of this paper lies in addressing the problem that many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning library users face when they search for information regarding their sexual identity at the library. For many, the library is a sanctuary where they can discover this information in secret without “outing” themselves. Unfortunately, antiquated cataloging rules, based on deep-rooted societal views, make research difficult. For instance, some libraries still catalog books on homosexuality and transsexualism under medical and psychological disorders and deviancies. The goal of this paper is to explore the possible benefits that “queering” LGBTQ subject headings will have on users, libraries, and academia. (shrink)

The complicated issues surrounding translation studies have seen growing attention in recent years from scholars and academics that want to make it a discipline and not a minor branch of another field, such as linguistics or comparative literature. Writ large with Antigonick, Carson showcases the recent Western push towards translation studies in the American academy. By offering up a text that is chaotic in its presentation, she bypasses the rigid idea of univocality. By giving the text discordant images, she betrays (...) the failed efficacy of sign and signification, and by choosing a text to be performed and mutually participated in, she exceeds ideas of the individual subject as the site of authorship. Ultimately, Carson enacts a theory of translation that critically deconstructs translation itself. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on the development of the first project for FIU’s ICAVE, The Globe Experience, presented as part of the “First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare” exhibit during February, 2016. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part is the project itself: a virtual reality recreation of going to The Globe Theater to see a play by William Shakespeare. The second part examines the digital project and outlines how Walter Benjamin and postcolonial theorists influenced the (...) design of The Globe Experience, resulting in, what I call, a “temporally and spatially disjointed London.” From this examination, the thesis goes on to question the role of canonical literature in the humanities. I go on to make the argument that the design decisions made in recreating The Globe reveals the ways in which canonical literature can reinforce and support hierarchical ideologies which can impede student learning. (shrink)

This study aims to trace points of intersection between the too often divorced disciplines of literature, continental philosophy, and the hard sciences in Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love.” In short, this thesis will not only explore how such conversations surface within the short story, but will also serve as an explication of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of body and space, and the theory of epigenetics. Through these explications, the thesis itself will also gear one discipline towards the (...) other as both theories intimately bind the environment with the body, and the body with the environment. Thus, the body and the environment are not separate and passive, but active and intertwined in a manner much like the aforementioned disciplines I posit are. Therefore, the goal of this thesis is to first postulate that such conversations between literature, philosophy, and science are already occurring, and as such, stress that such conversations need further discussion and exploration. (shrink)

The present series of studies examine how jurors and public defenders evaluate different pieces of evidence and integrate them into a coherent conclusion within the context of a criminal case. Previous research has shown that in situations where both sides of the case are compelling, decision-makers nevertheless come to highly confident and polarized decisions, called coherence shifts. The present research sought to expand on coherence effects, improve upon the methodology of previous studies, and explore potential moderators of coherence. In Study (...) 1, mock jurors read about a criminal case and evaluated multiple pieces of evidence at various points throughout the case. Results indicated that participants exhibited pronounced coherence shifts became more consistent as the case progressed, and were evaluated in line with their initial leanings) using an improved methodology that randomized evidence order and evidence valence. Furthermore, participants’ interim leanings of guilt or innocence biased their subsequent evaluations of ambiguous evidence. The direction and magnitude of participants’ coherence shifts were predicted by their pretrial dispositions towards prosecution and defense. Participants lacked awareness of how their perceptions of the evidence have shifted. Coherence shifts were not, however, moderated by asking mock jurors to justify their decisions, or by asking mock jurors to play devil’s advocate while considering each piece of evidence, underscoring the pervasiveness of this cognitive bias. Study 2 examined whether actual public defenders experience coherence shifts and how those shifts relate to the plea bargaining process; however, no coherence shifts were observed. Study 3 examined whether the timing of the defense’s presentation of their case could reduce coherence effects; results indicated that reading about the defense’s case immediately after the prosecution’s case marginally reduced coherence effects among jurors who acquitted the defendant, suggesting one potential strategy to mitigate this bias. (shrink)

The purpose of this thesis was to explore selected works from William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Keats, in order to expose textual instances of feminist thought. This analysis was aided with feminist theorists falling under the main strains of queer theory, materialism, and gender performance. Specifically, this thesis focused on the ways in which women, particularly virgin daughters, were viewed as property by their male kin. It also looked at how these women engaged in various symbolic masquerades and/or actual (...) cross-dressing as a response to the aforementioned phenomenon. Finally, the thesis exposed how these masquerades can be construed as a queering of identity—manifested through reversals of power and rejection of patriarchal institutions like marriage. (shrink)

In line with Wittgenstein's axiom that "what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest," this thesis aims to demonstrate how the gulf between analytic and continental philosophy can best be bridged through the mediation of art. The present thesis brings attention to Markson's work, lauded in the tradition of Faulkner, Joyce, and Lowry, as exemplary of the shift from modernity to postmodernity, wherein the human heart is not only in conflict with itself, (...) but with the language out of which it is necessarily constituted. Markson limns the paradoxical condition of the subject severed from intersubjectivity, and affected not only by the grief of bereavement, which can be defined in Heideggarian terms as anxiety for the ontic negation of a being (i.e., death), but by loss, which I assert is the ontological ground for how Dasein encounters the nothing in anxiety proper. (shrink)

This non-experimental, correlational study examined the relationships among self-actualization, well-being, and metacognition. Need-satisfaction and non-defensiveness were also tested as mediators in the relationship between metacognition and self-actualization. A battery of paper-and-pencil self-report measures was administered to a sample of undergraduate and graduate students in a public university in South Florida. Correlational and hierarchical regression analyses and structural equation modeling for mediational analysis were used to test the hypotheses. The results largely supported the hypotheses with only a few exceptions. Students who (...) demonstrated higher level of self-actualization experienced higher well-being as well. Moreover, need-satisfaction and non-defensiveness were found to be significantly and positively associated with self-actualization, providing preliminary supporting evidence for Maslow’s and Rogers’ theories of self-actualization. In addition, students with higher levels of general metacognitive competence were more likely to demonstrate higher level of need-satisfaction, non-defensiveness, self-actualization, and well-being. Further, metacognition and need-satisfaction, and metacognition and non-defensiveness shared common variance in predicting self-actualization. The relationship between metacognition and self-actualization was mediated by need-satisfaction and non-defensiveness, except for non-education students, for whom no mediational effect was detected by non-defensiveness. In sum, the findings imply that general metacognitive competence, which can be taught as a set of skills, theoretically contributes to students’ self-actualization and well-being. This study provides support for a conceptual model of self-actualization, which introduces this phenomenon as a goal-oriented process that is essential to students’ well-being and can be attained by exercising metacognition. The discussion of the findings highlights implications of this study for theory, research, and practice as a guide for scholars, researchers, and practitioners in the field of education and psychology. (shrink)

Neuroaesthetics is the study of the brain’s response to artistic stimuli. The neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran contends that art is primarily “caricature” or “exaggeration.” Exaggerated forms hyperactivate neurons in viewers’ brains, which in turn produce specific, “universal” responses. Ramachandran identifies a precursor for his theory in the concept of rasa (literally “juice”) from classical Hindu aesthetics, which he associates with “exaggeration.” The canonical Sanskrit texts of Bharata Muni’s Natya Shastra and Abhinavagupta’s Abhinavabharati, however, do not support Ramachandran’s conclusions. They present audiences (...) as dynamic co-creators, not passive recipients. I believe we could more accurately model the neurology of Hindu aesthetic experiences if we took indigenous rasa theory more seriously as qualitative data that could inform future research. (shrink)

This research is a historical-exegetical analysis of Hegel’s reformulation of Kant’s regulative principle of teleology into a constitutive principle. Kant ascribes teleology to the faculty of reflective judgment where it is employed as a guide to regulate inquiry, but does not constitute actual knowledge. Hegel argues that if Kant made teleology into a constitutive principle then it would be a much more comprehensive theory capable of overcoming contingency in natural science, and hence, bridging the gap between natural science and theology. (...) In this paper I argue that Hegel’s defense of the transition from natural science to theology is ultimately unsuccessful because it is built upon on an instinct of reason, which is the instinctive feature of human rationality to transition beyond the contingency remaining in our empirical understanding of nature, to a theological understanding of nature, in which all aspects of nature are necessarily related. (shrink)

With an epic historical sweep, “Genocide in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire, Iraq, and Sudan,” reveals how the struggles by nations and empires to establish their regional supremacy resulted in the destruction of families and human groups. This book presents a new theory of the meaning and scope of the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, based on the drafting history, the case law of international criminal tribunals, and practice of the (...) states parties to the convention since the 1950s. It then paints an expansive portrait of genocide against populations on all six inhabitable continents, with a special focus on the greater Middle East and North Africa since the nineteenth century. In the Ottoman Empire, the Interior Minister issued orders describing the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek subjects of the empire as saboteurs allied to Russia who needed to be deported from their homes, and led efforts to massacre entire cities, carry out systematic rapes, and impose famine and disease on the surviving remnants. Similarly, in 1980s Iraq the Revolutionary Command Council of the Ba’ath party issued orders that served as the basis of convictions for genocide and other crimes in the Iraqi High Tribunal. These orders declared that areas serving as a base of operations for Kurdish and pro-Iranian insurgents should be rendered devoid of all life. Finally, in the Darfur region of Sudan, as in southern Sudan before it, the President and Interior Minister issued orders to the army and allied militia to kill and drive out entire communities in regions seeking independence, autonomy, or simply political equality. This book also provides cause for hope, explaining how former dictators have been tried and convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity, and how their victims have won independence and compensation for their losses after the fact in places like Armenia, Israel, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, northern Iraq, East Timor, and southern Sudan. What others are saying: “The comprehensive research is breath-takingly evident. This historical account of the lesser know genocidal conflicts is incredibly revealing. Perhaps the best thing one could say about this book is that the familiar adage—'Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it'—reverberates throughout this intensely engaging volume.” — ASIL UN21 Newsletter “This ambitious book in its research and coverage tells a sorry tale of mankind’s inhumanity and intolerance over millennia of genocidal deeds and rhetoric. A fast-moving narrative reaches from biblical times to Darfur, describing tragic events accompanied by selective quotations from their participants and observers. Genocide may be a recently invented term, but its occurrences based on a variety of causes and reasons seem to have been a deep part of the human experience of group interactions.” — Henry Steiner, Professor of Law, Emeritus, Harvard Law School, and co-author, International Human Rights in Context: Law, Politics, Morals (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 3d ed. 2007) “In Genocide in the Middle East, Hannibal Travis breaks new ground in genocide studies by unveiling the full panoply of genocidal processes in the Middle East and West Asia as no previous scholar has. But he does much more: in terms of its twentieth and twenty-first-century coverage, this is simply the most expansive, detailed, and up-to-date history of genocide we possess.” — Adam Jones, Associate Professor, Political Science, University of British Columbia Okanagan, and author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (London: Routledge, 2006) "[T]he book seeks to present a comprehensive study of genocide.... Eyewitness accounts and diplomatic reports are effectively interwoven with other documentary evidence and academic research to produce a very thorough and disturbing portrait of this history." Mark Welton, Professor of International and Comparative Law, U.S. Military Academy, West Point. (shrink)

Google Book Search (GBS) has captured the attention of many commentators and government officials, but even as they vigorously debate its legality, few of them have marshaled new facts to determine its likely effects on publishing and other information markets. This Article challenges the conventional wisdom propounded by the U.S. and German governments, as well as Microsoft and other competitors of Google, concerning the likely economic impact of mass book-digitization projects. Originally advanced by publishing industry lobbying groups, the prevailing account (...) of mass book-digitization projects is that they will devastate authors and publishers, just as Napster and its heirs have supposedly devastated musicians and music labels. Using the impact of GBS on the revenues and operating incomes of U.S. publishers believing themselves to be the most affected by it, this Article finds no evidence of a negative impact upon them. To the contrary, it provides some evidence of a positive impact, and proposes further empirical research to identify the mechanisms of digitization’s economic impact. The debate surrounding the GBS settlement is critically important to students, writers, researchers, and the general public, as it may decide whether a federal appellate court or even the U.S. Supreme Court allows the best research tool ever designed to survive. If the theory of Microsoft and some publishing trade associations is accepted, the courts may enjoin and destroy GBS, just as Napster was shut down a decade ago. The Article aims at a preliminary estimate of the economic impact of mass digitization projects, using GBS as a case in point. It finds little support for the much-discussed hypothesis of the Association of American Publishers and Google’s competitors that the mass digitization of major U.S. libraries will reduce the revenues and profits of the most-affected publishers. In fact, the revenues and profits of the publishers who believe themselves to be most aggrieved by GBS, as measured by their willingness to file suit against Google for copyright infringement, increased at a faster rate after the project began, as compared to before its commencement. The rate of growth by publishers most affected by GBS is greater than the growth of the overall U.S. economy or of retail sales. Thus, the very publishers that have sued Google have seen their revenues grow faster than retail sales or the U.S. economy as a whole (measured by gross domestic product). This finding parallels some of the research that has been done since the Napster case on the economic impact of peer-to-peer file sharing on sales of recorded music. Future studies may provide a more granular estimate of the economic impact of frequent downloads or displays of pages of particular books on the sales of such books. (shrink)

This paper will describe the drafting history of the Principles of the Law of Software Contracts, with particular attention to the extent of consumer and public-interest group representation in the process. The drafting process, I will argue, did not take adequate stock of problems identified in the late 1990s with proposed Article 2B of the Uniform Commercial Code, and then the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (“UCITA”), including provisions encouraging terms in violation of public policy, that constitute copyright or patent (...) misuse by attempting to prohibit fair use or withdraw material from the public domain, or that are not properly disclosed before the purchase. The difference between the present situation and the 1990s, however, is the much greater importance today of European Community directives on the subject of consumer protection and electronic commerce, particularly given the explosion in e-commerce between the United States and Europe. This paper will analyze whether the Principles do enough to protect the interests of consumers and the public in four key areas: (1) consistency with U.S. federal and state statutory and common law, (2) clear and conspicuous disclosure of all relevant terms and conditions prior to the sale, (3) regulation and prevention of one-sided and unconscionable contract terms, and (4) consistency with European Community and domestic European law. My thesis is that the Principles and the comments thereto appear to sanction conduct that is in tension with the federal Copyright and Patent Acts, the common law of several U.S. states, and the European Community’s directives, especially those on the Legal Protection of Software Programs (1991), Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts (1993), and Protection of Consumers in Respect of Distance Contracts (1997). To that extent, the Principles seem to be an imperfect attempt to unify the law of software contracts, codify best practices, or develop the law in a desirable direction. Finally, the paper will discuss whether and when it is appropriate to harmonize U.S. and E.C. law and public policy. (shrink)

This chapter in a forthcoming book attempts to map global patterns by which local tyrannies become sources of potentially global infringements on freedom of expression, particularly but not exclusively on the YouTube Web site. It illustrates certain parallels between the efforts to force copyright filters on YouTube and the Web in the West, and to harden the Great Firewalls of China, Arabia, and Persia in the East. The parallels include preemptive filtering, deep packet inspection, overbroad restrictions, and harms to user (...) privacy. Generally speaking, blasphemy and seditious libel are the dominant forms of censorship in the impoverished and/or dictatorial societies of Africa and central and southern Asia, with insulting the great leader similarly controversial at the fringes of Asia including China, Thailand, and Turkey, and in the South Atlantic including Colombia, Honduras, and Zimbabwe. By contrast, intellectual property is prompting many of the Web site takedowns for political and cultural speech in the North Atlantic including Europe and the United States. Resistance to censorship around the world employs both legal and extra-legal tactics. Internet freedom has worked its way into our constitutional and statutory law in the North Atlantic and Europe, and parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Therefore, a judicial consensus is emerging that freedom of expression must rein in the enforcement of corporate catalogs of intellectual property rights. In large swaths of Africa and Asia, however, constitutions often do not mandate robust judicial protection of freedom of expression, so public intolerance of censorship presents a more direct battle of forces. In these societies, self-help, surreptitious defense of new public spheres, trans-border cooperation, and voting with one’s feet are more likely to succeed than filing lawsuits or asserting constitutional rights. There, YouTube bans and shutdowns of the entire Internet with proxy servers and aid from foreign Web firms, sometimes enjoying explicit diplomatic support. (shrink)

The U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples requires states to provide an effective remedy to indigenous peoples deprived of their cultural, religious, or intellectual property (IP) without their free, prior and informed consent. The Declaration could prove to be important safeguard for the indigenous peoples of Iraq and Turkey, the victims for centuries of massacres, assaults on their religious and cultural sites, theft and deterioration of their lands and cultural objects, and forced assimilation. These peoples, among them the (...) Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Yezidis of Turkey and Turkish-occupied Cyprus, and the Armenians, Assyrians, Yezidis, and Mandaeans of Iraq, have lost more than two-thirds of their peak populations, most of their cultural and religious sites, and thousands of priceless artifacts and specimens of visual art. The European Union has probed these violations of indigenous people's rights as part of the process of bringing Turkish laws and policies into compliance with European human rights standards. The United States has investigated violations of the rights of Iraq’s indigenous peoples in reports issued by the various executive agencies and legislative committees. My paper will summarize the results of these inquiries, and propose four reforms. First, restitution or compensation should be implemented for the widespread destruction of indigenous peoples’ cultural and intellectual properties by previous Turkish and Iraqi regimes. Second, efforts to promote the security of indigenous peoples’ surviving intellectual and cultural patrimony must be adopted. Third, transnational corporations and other large enterprises such as museums and publishers should respect the rights of indigenous people to protect, access, and use their cultural and intellectual property held outside of Turkey and Iraq. Fourth, policies within Turkey and Iraq that restrict the preservation and transmission of indigenous cultural and intellectual manifestations must be reformed or abolished. This article also describes the growing body of law governing indigenous peoples' rights, particularly in Europe. Applicable general international law standards are set forth in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, the the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Hague Convention with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War on Land, the Hague Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, the Convention on Biodiversity, the ILO Convention No. 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. European standards are embodied in the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the Copenhagen principles on human rights in the EU, the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, the OSCE Oslo Recommendations Regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities, and the Council of the European Union's Framework decision on Racism and Xenophobia. In the United States, additional standards are set forth in the Foreign Relations Act of 1961, the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, the Alien Tort Claims Act, and the Torture Victims Protection Act. (shrink)

Studies on nationalism and the emergence of modern ethnic identities rarely examine sources dating from the period between 0 CE (A.D.) and 1453 CE, or the period between the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the mid-first millennium CE and the Age of Discovery in the mid-second millennium CE. Testing generally accepted theories of national and ethnic distinctiveness against these sources reveals that a similar case exists for the existence of an Assyrian identity and nation as for a Greek, Kurdish, (...) Jewish, or Persian identity or nation. Assyrian populations, religions, and political formations survived in present-day Iraq, Iran, and Turkey from 0 CE well into the 1800s CE. Commentators on modern nationalism in relation to Assyrian identity have assumed, with little evidence, that the non-Arab, non-Jewish peoples of the East lacked the agency or the intellect to maintain a consistent identity or national movement, and that these peoples relied in their ignorance and indolence on the theories of Western missionaries and colonial officials. In the 1980s, a new generation of scholars emerged who posited that nations and peoples emerged in conjunction with modern capitalistic cultural forms and secular nationalistic liberalism. The new theory of "imagined communities" represented a departure from a long tradition of historical and cultural work which assumed nations and peoples as subjects of analysis without critically examining the linguistic, cultural, or religious foundation of these groups of individuals or families. This new theory, however, has the risk of degenerating into a vulgar instrumentalism, which speculates that identity entrepreneurs can manufacture ethnic, racial, or religious identity for their own purposes and little objective foundation. Thus, more recent research points out the flaws in grounding national and ethnic distinctions in modern nationalism by compiling evidence that nations and peoples perceived themselves and were perceived as such by other collectivities, long before the rise of European humanism or the Enlightenment. This study attempts to show that the longevity and diversity of national and ethnic distinctions undermines a one-size-fits-all explanation of such distinctions in the manner of Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities.” The evidence from the Assyrian case suggests that the undifferentiated hordes of Asia did not coalesce and order themselves in modern times and under Western influence into nations created and sustained by advanced technology. This “Imagined Communities” narrative suffers from hindsight bias and an exaggerated Eurocentrism. It also insults and infantilizes the peoples and nations of premodern eras and non-Western regions by assuming they lacked the intelligence with which modern Europeans constructed national cultures, laws, literatures, schools, and economies. Historians have long since disproved such ideas. By examining translations of and academic commentary on Aramaic, Greek, Roman, and Persian literature and inscriptions, among other sources, this Essay demonstrates that the British Empire invented neither the modern Assyrians as a people, nor the territory of modern Assyria that was considered for statehood by the League of Nations after World War I. Rather, the identification of present-day northern Iraq, northwestern Persia, and southeastern Turkey as “Assyria” draws support from the Middle Assyrian and Neo-Assyrian usage of the second and third millennia BCE, and the Greek, Roman, Persian, and Aramaic usage in the first millennium CE. Finally, the contribution of ancient Assyria to the cultures, languages, and religions of the non-Muslim populations of contemporary Iran, Iraq, and Turkey may no longer be doubted, especially when it comes to the Assyrian Christians, Mandaeans, and Yezidis. This ancient contribution is present in these peoples' daily vocabularies, place-names, and indigenous beliefs. (shrink)

The purpose of my thesis is to analyze notions of the sublime in James Joyce’s Ulysses and how the sublime is evoked and presented in Joyce’s work. The present work will examine concepts of the sublime from the Classical and Medieval period, through the Enlightenment, and into the Romantic era to develop my own definition. Placing the sublime in a historical perspective allows me to discover how the sublime is at work through Joyce’s creative use of complex narrative approaches. The (...) beauty of aesthetic perfection was achieved by employing all of Joyce’s artistic faculties. My thesis investigates how Ulysses’ experimental writing technique, unique structuring, and difficult prose created a work of genius which evokes the sublime. By analyzing Joyce’s use of language, unconventional narrative, and ambiguity in Ulysses I will explore how the sublime is aroused. (shrink)

Recent studies on the economic status of women in Miami-Dade County (MDC) reveal an alarming rate of economic insecurity and significant obstacles for women to achieve economic security. Consistent barriers to women’s economic security affect not only the health and wellbeing of women and their families, but also economic prospects for the community. A key study reveals in Miami-Dade County, “Thirty-nine percent of single female-headed families with at least one child are living at or below the federal poverty level” and (...) “over half of working women do not earn adequate income to cover their basic necessities” (Brion 2009, 1). Moreover, conventional measures of poverty do not adequately capture women’s struggles to support themselves and their families, nor do they document the numbers of women seeking basic self-sufficiency. Even though there is lack of accurate data on women in the county, which is a critical problem, there is also a dearth of social science research on existing efforts to enhance women’s economic security in Miami-Dade County. My research contributes to closing the information gap by examining the characteristics and strategies of women-led community development organizations (CDOs) in MDC, working to address women’s economic insecurity. The research is informed by a framework developed by Marilyn Gittell, who pioneered an approach to study women-led CDOs in the United States. On the basis of research in nine U.S. cities, she concluded that women-led groups increased community participation and “by creating community networks and civic action, they represent a model for community development efforts” (Gittell, et al. 2000, 123). My study documents the strategies and networks of women-led CDOs in MDC that prioritize women’s economic security. Their strategies are especially important during these times of economic recession and government reductions in funding towards social services. The focus of the research is women-led CDOs that work to improve social services access, economic opportunity, civic participation and capacity, and women’s rights. Although many women-led CDOs prioritize building social infrastructures that promote change, inequalities in economic and political status for women without economic security remain a challenge (Young 2004). My research supports previous studies by Gittell, et al., finding that women-led CDOs in Miami-Dade County have key characteristics of a model of community development efforts that use networking and collaboration to strengthen their broad, integrated approach. The resulting community partnerships, coupled with participation by constituents in the development process, build a foundation to influence policy decisions for social change. In addition, my findings show that women-led CDOs in Miami-Dade County have a major focus on alleviating poverty and economic insecurity, particularly that of women. Finally, it was found that a majority of the five organizations network transnationally, using lessons learned to inform their work of expanding the agency of their constituents and placing the economic empowerment of women as central in the process of family and community development. (shrink)

The popularization of academic spaces that combine Buddhist philosophy with the literature of the Romantic period – a discipline I refer to as Buddhist Romantic Studies – have exposed the lack of scholarly attention Samuel Taylor Coleridge and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner have received within such studies. Validating Coleridge’s right to exist within Buddhist Romantic spheres, my thesis argues that Coleridge was cognizant of Buddhism through historical and textual encounters. To create a space for The Rime within Buddhist (...) Romantic Studies, my thesis provides an interpretation of the poem that centers on the concept of prajna, or wisdom, as a vital tool for cultivating the mind. Focusing on prajna, I argue that the Mariner’s didactic story traces his cognitive voyage from ignorance to enlightenment. By examining The Rime within the framework of Buddhism, readers will also be able to grasp the importance of cultivating the mind and transcending ignorance. (shrink)

This research seeks to establish a connection between the Hermetic tradition and the paranormal phenomena found in the works of Alejandro Tapia y Rivera --- “Un alma en pena” (1862), Póstumo el transmigrado (1872) and Póstumo el envirginado (1882) --- and Benito Pérez Galdós´s La sombra (1870) and “Celín” (1871). By establishing a Hegelian influence in their works, we uncover the possible origin of these paranormal events. German Idealism, so widespread during the first half of the 19th century, seems to (...) have given both authors access to new currents of thought, allowing them to explore the union of art with the metaphysical. Thought is given precedence over sensation and Idealism prevails over Empiricism. Nature is now seen to be spiritual, as well as spatial, and among the major exponents of this movement is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), whose philosophy states that human knowledge is based on the “Idea,” a concept in which nature and spirit fuse. Hegel holds the traditional hermetic conception of philosophia perennis that supposes a universal truth common to every culture, religious tradition, and belief upheld by humankind. By examining the Hegelian influence in the works of Alejandro Tapia y Rivera and Benito Pérez Galdós, and relating major passages of their works to the precepts contained in the Corpus Hermeticum, the Emerald Tablet, and the Kybalion (1908), we uncover a subtle, sometimes explicit, presence of this esoteric doctrine, which allows the authors to explore the metaphysical side of life. (shrink)

The school curriculum is a matter mandated by the educational system rather than determined by the school stakeholders of a community, as Freire suggests. At the present time, one significant vision of school is challenging the current order of curriculum practice. It focuses on school as a liberating agency grounded on the belief that the abilities to access information and to think critically about it will educate an individual capable of making independent decisions. This dissertation investigates teacher's beliefs concerning curriculum. (...) It was assumed that there is a discrepancy between what has been the position proposed by critical theorists including Freire ; Apple ; Giroux, and the position on curriculum which school systems are typically advancing. There were four purposes of this study. The major purpose of this study was to determine whether or not Brazilian and American Teachers believe that a school curriculum based on Freirean principles could be implemented in the schools in which they worked. Also, this study sought to determine the differences found between teachers' beliefs in the Brazilian and American contexts. Another purpose was to determine how Brazilian and American teachers justify their beliefs and actions when these may represent conflicting values. Finally, this study sought to determine if these teachers believe that the curriculum is in need of change or if they accept the current curriculum as adequate. This study consisted of quantitative and qualitative data collection through multiple methods involving surveys and interviews. The study involved 171 teachers from multiple settings with the majority working for public systems. Overall, it seems that Brazilian and American teachers believe that a curriculum based on Freirean principles of education can be implemented in their schools, if ongoing education is provided. The majority of Brazilian teachers believe a curriculum change is necessary while half of the American teachers believe a curriculum change is needed and the other half seems to believe curriculum is adequate. Teachers explain that it is hard to implement a curriculum they believe to be most appropriate for students because the current curriculum is mandated by the school system or by national guidelines. The majority of Brazilian teachers and those American teachers who believed a curriculum change is necessary explained their rationale for change in terms of social justice, problem-solving, collective work, student-centered and context-based curriculum. American teachers, who believed that the curriculum is adequate, explained that they are satisfied with their student's achievements. They stated that their students are doing well on tests and are learning what is required. (shrink)

Relationships between academic achievement and type of curriculum delivery system, Montessori or traditional, in a diverse group of learners from a public school district were examined in this study. In a repeated measures, within subjects design, students from an elementary Montessori program were paired with agemates from a traditional group on the basis of similar Stanford Achievement Test Scores in reading or math during the baseline year. Two subsequent administrations of the Stanford were observed for each subject to elucidate possible (...) differences which might emerge based on program affiliation over the three year duration of the study. ^ Mathematics scores for both groups were not observed to be significantly different, although following the initial observation, the Montessori group continued to produce higher mean scores than did the traditional students. Marginal significance between the groups suggests that the data analysis should continue in an effort to elucidate a possible trend toward significance at the .05 level. ^ Reading scores for the groups demonstrated marginally significant differences by one analytical method, and significant differences when analyzed with a second method. In the second and third years of the study, Montessori students produced means which consistently outperformed the traditional group. ^ Recommendations included tracking subsequent administrations of the Stanford Achievement Test for all pairs of subjects in order to evaluate emerging trends in both subject areas. ^. (shrink)