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Publication Orienting Economics(2024-09) Sun, KevinThis thesis examines the various intellectual currents from mercantilism, Physiocracy, early Chinese nationalism and Maoist socialism, and their interrelation with various institutions of power such as that of the Orientalist archive, the institution of the State, and the practice of politics. I interrogate a particular “hall of mirrors” narrative wherein an Orientalized China was the object of economic theories by Physiocrats who proved to be influential to Marx, which through networks of imperialism those theories made their way to said Orient during the latest 19th century, underpinning the political program of revolutionaries who would then take state power in 1949. Although criticized during the Mao-era for “economism”, the milieu of economists such as Sun Yefang carried the day, as economics as theory, prescription and practice proved more difficult to reform or revolutionize than one would have imagined for a strong Party government. Using frameworks developed by Edward Said and late 20th century continental thinkers such as Sylvain Lazarus – who themselves often took the radical image of Maoist China as an object of inspiration – to examine where this inertia comes from, why economics seems so imbricated with institutions of power, how certain economic ideas come to prominence, and what we are to do with the still-lingering realities of Empire.Publication Commodifying Return: The Political Economy of Tourism and Heritage Tours for Chinese Transnational Adoptees(2024-09) Hannah KuThe long-standing practice of U.S.-Chinese transnational adoption, especially during the late 20th century, cannot be disimbricated from critical discussions of the political economy, market logic, and the rhetorical decision to describe this process as benevolent. This project will investigate the commodification of U.S.-Chinese transnational adoption networks, the tourism industry surrounding return trips, and the exploitation of adoptees themselves. By analyzing shifting parental practices from U.S.-Korean transnational adoption to U.S.-Chinese adoption practices, it reveals how governments and other various organizations create more of an emotional investment into adoptees to engender a desire to return to China. Inflected by the works of scholars such as Kimberly McKee and Sara Dorow, I intend to engage in unconventional archival material (such as tour guide websites, adoptive parent forums) and documentaries in order to bring light to this specific interplay between the political economy, the transnational adoption industrial complex, and Chinese adoptees within the United States. This research will contribute to a dearth of knowledge regarding the commodification of return to China for adoptees and how these various organizations continue to invest in the market of transnational adoption.Publication The Terrorist Doppelganger: Somoza and the Sandinistas(2013-02) Hohenstein, Thomas AThis thesis makes two arguments. First, that the analytical lens of terrorism is useful to understanding the modern state because it pits the state against its antithesis. Additionally, the discursive contest between the state and terrorists is best understood within a gendered framework. Second, the Sandinista Revolution did not revolutionize the discourse the Nicaraguan state used to legitimate itself, thus limiting the movement’s revolutionary nature.Publication Nationalism and the Public Sphere: Tracing the Development of Nineteenth-Century Latin American Identities(2013) Ponce, LisaThrough the combined usage of primary source documents and secondary source research, this thesis seeks to discern how the individual national identities of Argentina and Mexico came to fruition. This thesis will demonstrate that the early national period of each region was directly influenced by the colonial context out of which Argentina and Mexico arose. Additionally, this thesis is focused on the ways that a national identity is developed within the public sphere, and how the public sphere might be defined beyond printed newspaper accounts.Publication Si Se Puede: The United Farm Workers, Civil Rights, and the Struggle for Justice in the Fields(2012-05) Keel, Roneva CSince the system of industrial agriculture first emerged in mid-nineteenth century California, farm workers have been among the lowest-paid and ill treated workers in America’s labor force. Racism, nativism, and the entrenched political power of large-scale growers have combined to ensure that the predominantly non-white, largely foreign-born farm labor force has had little voice in the workplace. The United Farm Worker movement of the 1960s and the 1970s was the largest and most successful effort to alter the dynamics of farm worker power in the United States, giving farm workers greater autonomy in the workplace and resulting in concrete gains in terms of wages and working conditions. The UFW’s efforts culminated in the 1975 passage of California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA), the nation’s first ever law to guarantee farm workers the right to collectively bargain and form unions. But with the passage of the ALRA, the dynamics of power in farm labor relations changed once again; the future of the union would depend upon its ability to adapt to these new realities.Publication The Praxis of Horst Hoheisel: the Countermonument in an Expanded Field(2012) Hernandez, Juan FelipeThis paper examines the work of German artist Horst Hoheisel in Latin-America. I open the conversation by including Hoheisel’s provocative participation in the 2005 memory debates in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Here, I introduce the nature of Hoheisel’s reasoning and the dialectical self-reflectiveness that is at work in his artifacts. In each project, I look for the way in which Hoheisel lays down the “memorialistic substance” of a specific site together with the self-critical rationality that characterizes his creation. The second part of this essay attempts to construct the theoretical parameters for the expansion of the definition of the countermonument. This expanded definition attempts to unlock the countermonument and the memorial from the therapeutic mechanics of repetition -at the level of the subject- and release its possibilities vis-à-vis the potentiality of the event of language. Using the insights of Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, I discuss the work of two contemporary artists (Jochen Gerz and Krzysztof Wodiczko) who experiment with the use of space and language as a way to invent a new type of countermonument, one that is based on the notion of an active memory rather than a cathartic one.Publication Good News(2012-05) Williams, EeshaA movement to reform the media has grown explosively in the U.S. in the past decade. Using dramatic, real-world case studies of journalism that made a difference, Good News shows why media reform is worth fighting for. A vast, old growth redwood forest was spared the chainsaw. Thousands of Latina janitors in Houston united to boost their poverty level wages. In these and other victories for justice and nature, non-corporate journalists played a crucial role.Publication Citizens and Criminals: Mass Incarceration, "Prison Neighbors," and Fear-Based Organizing in 1980s Rural Pennsylvania(2012-05) Arthur, ErikaThroughout the 1980s, the Citizens’ Advisory Committee (CAC), a grassroots group of “prison neighbors,” organized for tighter security at the State Correctional Institution at Dallas (SCID), a medium security prison in northeast Pennsylvania. Motivated primarily by their fear of prisoner escapes, the CAC used the local media to raise awareness about security concerns and cooperated with the SCID administration to acquire state funding for projects at the prison that they believed would improve security. Their work coincided with the widespread proliferation of “tough on crime” rhetoric and policies, and the inauguration of the most intensive buildup of prisons ever witnessed in the United States. This phenomenon, now known as mass incarceration, has disproportionately impacted urban communities of color, due principally to the highly racialized nature of the War on Drugs, while the majority of prisons have been located in white rural communities. By imagining themselves as a population under threat, conceptualizing prisoners as potentially dangerous regardless of the nature of the crimes of which they had been convicted, and positioning the prison administration as a potential ally that needed constant supervision, the CAC contributed in complex ways to the solidification of a racially- and economically-skewed, intensely punitive criminal justice system. The CAC’s organizing helps expose an aspect of mass incarceration that has remained relatively unexplored thus far: the role rural communities that surround prisons played in the historical processes that moved the practice of punishment from the relative periphery of U.S. society to its present position as a central apparatus for political, economic, and social organization.Publication Eugenothenics: The Literary Connection Between Domesticity and Eugenics(2011) true, Caleb JThis is an analysis of the connection between the domestic science and eugenics. While it is made clear by historians such as Megan Elias and Kathy Cooke that there is ample connection between eugenics and euthenics, there has not been as comprehensive an analysis of the direct connections between domestic science and eugenics. Close examination of literature from the domestic science movement reveals the shared goals of domestic science and eugenics. The domestic science movement was also a necessary precursor to the euthenics movement, not simply a “re-envisioning” of home economics by Ellen Richards. When Richards died, her euthenic ideals would continue to be a part of domestic science in the early decades of the twentieth century. This analysis will contribute in part to the understanding of how, through rhetoric, nations can progress towards more unsightly policies of social engineering from seemingly benign beginnings. Eugenics may not have origins in domestic science, a field of homemaking, cookery, etiquette, and child-rearing, but eugenics certainly shares goals, purposes, and a vision with domestic science.Publication The Politics of Labor Militancy in Minneapolis, 1934-1938(2011-09) Smemo, KristofferThe militancy that helped prompt federal labor reform and the electoral incorporation of industrial workers exposed serious political fault lines within the so-called New Deal coalition. In particular, militancy and factionalism in the labor movement compromised the early electoral victories of the ruling Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota and New Deal Democrats nationally. Yet the landslide victory of Republican candidates in 1938 in Minnesota, as well as across the industrial North, was not a repudiation of the New Deal or the labor movement. These Republicans refashioned their party platform to accommodate key parts of the New Deal, including recognizing the legitimacy of collective bargaining. Liberal Republicans harnessed popular support New Deal social policy, but unlike Democrats they were free to criticize the supposed “excesses” of the New Deal- namely a militant and politicized labor movement. Minneapolis provides one case study to reconsider the impact of labor militancy on the development of New Deal liberalism.Publication "Super Successful People": Robert Schuller, Suburban Exclusion, and the Demise of the New Deal Political Order(2011) Anderson, RichardBetween 1955 and 1984, the Reverend Robert Schuller’s Garden Grove Community Church in Orange County, California, blossomed into a ten-thousand-member congregation of regional and national prominence. Straddling the line between evangelical and mainline Protestantism, the church was emblematic of conservative American Christianity in the second half of the 20th century. Likewise, Orange County was the quintessential sprawling, decentralized, postindustrial suburban region. Garden Grove Community Church and Orange County grew together at an exponential rate in the postwar era. Through participation in the devotional, social, and organizational activities of the church, Schuller’s congregation actively constructed their personal and collective identities. They made meaning out of their suburban lives in ways that had long-term political and economic implications for the county, the region, and the country. The church offered cultural, spiritual, and ideological coherence to a community of corporate, white-collar transplants with few social roots. The substance of that coherence was a theology conflating Christianity with meritocracy and entrepreneurial individualism. The message resonated with “Sun Belt” suburbanites who benefited from systemic class- and race-based metropolitan inequality. Schuller’s message of self-reliance and personal achievement dovetailed with a national conservative repudiation of the public sector and collective responsibility that originated in the suburbs. This drive to eviscerate the American New Deal political order state was nearly unstoppable by the early 1980s, and it received theological aid from institutions like Garden Grove Community Church.Publication Intellectuals and Local Reforms in Late Qing Wuxi: 1897-1904(2011) Duan, LeiThis research examines the intellectuals’ reform activities in local society at the turn of twentieth century. Focusing on Wuxi, a city in south China, this study seeks to shed light on two major issues. First, it studies the reform activities in the areas of education and print media in such a transformative era. I come to argue that differences existed between reforms at a national level and the circumstances in local society. These reformers in Wuxi provided the common people more choices besides Chinese learning, rather than following the ti-yong formula. They connected their reform proposals with the common people. Second, this study scrutinizes the complexity of their local endeavors. The most profound challenge these reformers encountered, I argue, was whether they could compete in the urban space, which had become a site of conflict and contestation.Publication An End to the “Vichy/Algeria Syndrome”?: Negotiating Traumatic Pasts in the French Republic(2011) Silvestri, Justin WWithin the past few years, France has exhibited a changing relationship in regards to its memory of its collaborationist and colonial past. The controversies of the loi du 23 février 2005 and the 2007 Guy Môquet Commemoration displayed a new openness to discuss and evaluate traumatic pasts. Public debate during the two controversies focused on the difficult process of how to incorporate these traumatic events into the national narrative. Furthermore, this process of negotiation has opened up a vibrant discussion over what parties in France possess the authority and the right to construct the nation’s history. Medical metaphors of neurosis no longer appear to fit French practices of commemoration and remembrance. The Fifth Republic’s legislative effort to dictate the content and character of France’s past encountered significant resistance from a number of historians and educators. While they stood opposed to the State’s methods, French historians and scholars came to frame their resistance to legislated history as evidence of their loyalty to republican ideals, namely those of scientific inquiry and laïcité. They too desired the creation of a shared national history, yet insisted that this history could only be formed by respecting the presence of multiple narratives. Other scholars voiced their reservations that the restoration of traumatic narratives might further social breakdown. Interestingly, these historians expressed little concern for the role of the general public in the writing of history and, at times, revealed a distinct mistrust of the public’s capacity to think historically.Publication SCAR'd Times: Maine's Prisoners' Rights Movement, 1971-1976(2011-02) Chard, Daniel S.In late 1972, prisoners and ex-convicts in Maine formed Statewide Correctional Alliance for Reform (SCAR), a radical prisoners' rights organization that provoked a thoroughgoing public discussion on the function of prisons in Maine and in American society that lasted for about two years. Working for prison reform through legislation, litigation, and community organizing, SCAR influenced a Maine public unusually receptive to new approaches to criminal justice due to the impact of nationwide prison rebellions and the widely publicized massacre of forty-three prisoners and guards in New York’s Attica State Prison on September 13, 1971. As SCAR members, frustrated by the slow pace of change, came to increasingly view crime and prisons as products of an unjust socio-economic system that could be changed only through revolutionary means, a conservative backlash against prison reform also developed in the state, led by police officers, prison guards, and others who felt that Maine’s criminal justice system did not effectively safeguard its citizens from violent crime. When SCAR disbanded in 1976 as a result of internal political divisions and intense police repression, Maine no longer had an organized constituency to push for prison reform, leaving conservatives and the forces of political inertia and public indifference to guide state correctional policy in the years since.Publication "Flying is Changing Women!": Women Popularizers of Commercial Aviation and the Renegotiation of Traditional Gender and Technological Boundaries in the 1920s-30s(2010-09) Gibson, Emily KThis thesis explores how the complex interplay between gender and technology significantly shaped the popularization of commercial aviation in the United States during the 1920s and 30s. As technological innovations improved both the safety and efficiency of airplanes during the early part of the twentieth century, commercial aviation industries increasingly worked to position flight as a viable means of mass transportation. In order to win the trust and money of potential passengers, however, industry proponents recognized the need to separate flight from its initial association with danger and masculine strength by convincing the general public of aviation’s safety and reliability. My work examines the efforts made by industry executives, pilots, and popular news sources to remake the public image of flight by specifically positioning women—as pilots, wives, and mothers—as central to the popularization of commercial aviation. More specifically, this thesis investigates the ways in which female popularizers of commercial aviation effectively mediated the boundaries between technologies and society, and how women’s positions as technological boundary workers often required them to redefine the social meanings and expectations of their gender.Publication Bolivia's Coca Headache: The Agroyungas Program, Inflation, Campesinos, Coca and Capitalism In Bolivia(2010-09) Roberts, John DBolivia in the 1980s was wracked by monetary inflation approaching levels of the German Weimar Republic. Immediately following this time of great financial crisis in Bolivia, the U.N. founded a project through the U.N.D.P. to encourage peasant farmers in Bolivia to switch from growing coca (the plant used manufacture cocaine) to growing other cash crops for market. This crop substitution and development program, called the Agroyungas Project, lasted from 1985 to 1991 and is the focus of this study. While many U.N. pundits and journalists considered the program’s initial small successes promising, it has been considered since its conclusion to be a failure. The program was poorly conceived, poorly funded and poorly executed from the start. So one question remains: why was the Agroyungas Project a failure? Additionally, was the project simply a way to steer Bolivians away from the illicit coca/cocaine economy? While on the surface this might appear to be the case, one must probe the complex situations in Bolivia deeply to uncover the true missteps behind this U.N. program. By looking at the evidence, it is apparent that crop substitution programs like the Agroyungas Project failed for a variety of reasons. Besides poor planning and execution of project plans, the project’s developers, planners and workers simply did not understand Bolivian indigenous culture and Bolivian history. However, the project was not doomed to fail. The lack of knowledge and understanding of indigenous Bolivian realities, Bolivian geography and Bolivian history directly led to the failures of the Agroyungas Project.Publication A New Vision of Local History Narrative: Writing History in Cummington, Massachusetts(2009) Pasternak, StephanieScholars who have written about local history hold no consensus on the purpose, value, and even definition of local history narrative. This thesis seeks to move the discussion away from territorial definitions of the term local history narrative and provide a framework for thinking about the field. It argues for a broad interpretation of United States local history narrative and proposes the field of local history be integrated into the academic history curriculum. Drawing on a variety of local history scholarship, the thesis first delineates the development of local history writing from the early colonial narratives, through the nineteenth-century heyday of amateur history writing, across the complicated relationship between amateur and professional history during the twentieth century, to the current spectrum of writings that include those which defy the traditional distinction between amateur and professional history. Turning next to the reflective scholarship of local history, the essay discusses issues that arise in the practice of local history such as community pressure to censor work and the challenges of sharing authority. Finally, this thesis provides a working draft of public local history narrative in a chapter investigating a suffrage convention attended by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe held in 1881 in Cummington, Massachusetts, a small remote hilltown in the foothills of the Berkshires. Seeking to provide a history that engages a nonacademic local audience while exploring historical questions, this story of Henrietta S. Nahmer and the suffrage movement in Cummington demonstrates the challenges and opportunities of contemporary local history narrative.Publication Drawing Defeat: Caricaturing War, Race, and Gender in Fin de Siglo Spain(2009) Webb, Joel CThis project uses cartoons to examine a period in Spanish history when the forces of a developing Spanish national identity met with the challenges of war and decolonization. I argue that fear of an uncertain future combined with the disaster of a collapsing empire were projected onto the images of the enemy and are preserved in the many editorial cartoons of the age. By deconstructing the iconology in these cartoons, and by exploring the dialectic of otherness present in these images, I reconstruct the turn-of-the-century Spanish identity that emerged during a period of rapid transition.Publication Aufbau-Reconstruction and the Americanization of German-Jewish immigrants 1934-1944.(1975) Schneider, DorotheePublication For Love or Money: Labor Rights and Citizenship for Working Women of 1930s Oaxaca, Mexico(2009) Haley, Sandra KThis project examines the ways in which gendered discourses were strategically deployed by working women in their own interests during the years of Cardenismo. One result of this activism is the fluorescence of a number of court cases in the capitol of Oaxaca in south-central Mexico, Ciudad Oaxaca de Juárez. Hundreds of working women sued former employers between 1929 and 1938, which were unusually high numbers not seen before or since. Offenses cited include nonpayment of wages, firing without sufficient cause, and “other offenses” – usually quite juicy in the details. The majority of the women worked as household domestic help or as shop clerks in the market, and were almost uniformly young, illiterate, and poor. Moreover, a great many of them had recently migrated to the city center from rural indigenous communities. Their testimonies cited revolutionary narratives of inclusion and labor rights. As indigenous women they embodied mexicanidad, or “authentic Mexicanness”, as promoted by the revolutionary state in a bid to create a unified national identity. Describing themselves in terms consistent with revolutionary values of womanly abnegation, they claimed labor rights as upstanding members of a revolutionary state. They simultaneously reproduced and challenged gendered discourses, which were deployed within ongoing social negotiation of the meaning and shape of revolutionary change. By citing accepted notions of gendered behavior, testifiers were able to expand official understandings of appropriate social roles for women. As poor, indigenous, and female, they testified from a multiply marginalized social position. Nevertheless, they petitioned the court for labor rights as women, as citizens, and as workers – all at once. Public understandings of proper roles for women expanded over time to include the two latter categories. This project argues that textual analysis of narratives at this formative moment within women’s labor rights in Mexico will result in a better historical understanding of their role and agency in changing social norms and structures.