Browsing by Subject "Crisis"
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Item Archival poetics : ordinary crisis in contemporary poetry(2017-05) Macmillan, Rebecca Anne; Bennett, Chad, 1976-; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Wilks, Jennifer M; Moore, Lisa L; Houser, Heather“Archival Poetics: Ordinary Crisis in Contemporary Poetry” analyzes how present-day writing by poet-scholars registers urgent conditions of structural crisis such as racialized violence, settler colonialism, and environmental degradation. I examine how poets index the systemic and quotidian aspects of these realities through formal strategies of assemblage. Through readings of book-length works by Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, Juliana Spahr, and Harryette Mullen, I reveal their shared contribution to what I term an “archival poetics.” An archival poetics names the collection of textual and visual materials, which not only documents the present, but also accentuates the limit points of this process. While assembling diverse forms of documentation, writers who practice an archival poetics expose the shortcomings of conventional documentary and its effects. An archival poetics intersects with current interests in multi-genre writing, while, at the same time, engaging and inhabiting received poetic forms—extending and reworking these forms’ traditional archival functions. My first chapter analyzes Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004), showing how it records violence against black Americans while exposing the incompleteness of any documentary method. Her book also showcases the elasticity of the lyric as an archival practice that emphasizes race and racism as key structural conditions of the American present. Chapter Two examines Carson’s Nox (2010). I illustrate how Nox locates a relational ethics through its archival practices: exhibiting the limits of understanding and the labor of constructing narrative and elegy. Chapter Three explores Spahr’s well then there now (2011) as a work of ecopoetics that relies on archival modes and materials. I argue that Spahr’s writing catalogs colonial settlement in Hawai‘i to foreground the convergent legacies of place. Highlighting the contours of her perspective as a white Midwesterner, Spahr underscores how subjectivity shapes accounts of the present. The final chapter considers Mullen’s Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary (2014), an assemblage of poems conceived through a daily walking practice. Mullen’s verses stress the significance of racialized experience to the genre of the walk poem, and they demonstrate how a sharpened awareness of body and place affords attention to social inequity and ecological devastation.Item Breaking the cycle : evidence-based diversion for homeless individuals with mental illness(2019-09-17) Gray, Bailey Douglas; Springer, David W.; Streeter, Calvin L.The resources and infrastructure in place to serve our nation’s homeless is spread thin. Issues of capacity, funding, and lack of individualized treatment plans create limited opportunities for individuals to escape their current, often cyclical circumstances. For many, this results in continuous interactions with the justice system and physical-behavioral health systems. This Professional Report seeks to examine the effectiveness of evidence-based diversion strategies used to keep individuals experiencing homelessness from cycling in and out of correctional facilities and unnecessary hospitalization, in both general and psychiatric settings. As a community, we have an ethical and moral responsibility to support homeless individuals suffering with mental illness who may require additional support. This report seeks to determine the most effective way to meet this obligation. Austin is rapidly changing its approach to solving homelessness, which has the potential to increase the number of unsheltered individuals experiencing homelessness, even if only for a brief amount of time. This can in turn lead to negative social determinants of health and an increased need for diversion from crisis settings. Individuals experiencing homelessness are unique—their needs, conditions, and mitigating circumstances are different. In order for successful diversion to take place, Austin must be robust in its approach. This report surveyed diversion strategies used nationwide in order to examine strategies and resources currently available in Austin and Travis County. Although Austin has a strong capacity for diversion, findings show there is room for improvement. Recommendations to improve Austin’s ability to divert homeless individuals with mental illness from unnecessary crisis system interactions include: increased outreach capacity; expansion of the Combined Transportation, Emergency, & Communications Center, Austin’s current central dispatch center; creation of a crisis stabilization unit; and 24/7 availability of Integral Care’s Expanded Mobile Crisis Outreach TeamItem Manufacturing crisis : rhetorical new materialism, political discourse, and the ‘crisis’ at the U.S.-Mexico border(2023-07-03) Scott, Maclain Bernabei; Boyle, Casey Andrew; Roberts-Miller, Patricia; Davis, Diane; Graham, S. Scott; Rice, Jennifer“Manufacturing Crisis: Rhetorical New Materialism, Political Discourse, and the ‘Crisis’ at the U.S.-Mexico Border” examines the rhetorical life of crisis as a concept and term, particularly in its fraught application to the U.S.-Mexico border. Grounded in rhetorical new materialism and informed by border rhetorics scholarship, this project examines how dominant, representationalist discourses and digital practices circulate and sediment “crisis” as a normalized designation for the border. Using Karen Barad’s posthumanist critique of representationalism, I analyze how public declarations of the so-called 2019 border crisis became rhetorically weighted and advantageous for the Trump administration, as “crisis” resonated with the belief that the safety and (white) hegemony of the U.S. was being threatened by migrants of color. While much new materialist scholarship has a somewhat antagonistic relationship with discourse, I show that Barad’s critique of representationalism coupled with her understanding of representations as material-discursive phenomena offer a useful framework for analyzing political discourse. In doing so, I also argue that rhetorical new materialist scholars are well-served to consider how our critiques of representationalism nonetheless rely on and reinforce the very Cartesian orientation we seek to complicate. While this complicity is perhaps inevitable, it’s not a contradiction nor unproductive, and instead offers scholars an opportunity to recognize our entanglements with our objects of study.Item Master of none : my adventures in the realm of greater academia(2010-05) Gentry, Donovan Lee; Stone, Allucquére Rosanne; Radio-Television-Film; Straubhaar, Joseph D.This report attempts to trace a path through my time in higher education, from an undergraduate degree in English to the completion of my Master's degree in Media studies. The report will focus on examining how school has differed from my expectations, and how my difficulties and struggles therein led me through various class models and modes of learning. In the course of retelling the projects and studies I worked on, I will compare different methods of pedagogy, from the typical grad school class to the free-form space of the ACTLab. I close by reflecting on how a report on my own time here at UT might be useful to others unsure of how grad school is supposed to go, much I was when I started out.Item Organizational resilience in the face of crisis : communal coping in family businesses(2023-04-19) Powers, Courtney J.; Stephens, Keri K.; Ballard, Dawna I; Dailey, René M; Dailey, Stephanie LWhen crises like the COVID-19 pandemic arise and leave devastating impacts on family businesses, the economy, and our world at large, there is an appeal to organizational communication scholars to not only explore the impact of these crises on organizations, but to also understand what can contribute to building resilience in the face of these crises. Given that coping with others is fundamentally a communicative behavior that can have implications for business resilience in a crisis, this study investigates how family business members appraise work-related stress and communally cope together for the sake of their business’s success and resilience during an extended crisis. Guided by Afifi et al.’s (2020) extended model of communal coping, organizational and crisis-specific variables such as crisis self-efficacy, organizational identification, and perceived severity of the crisis were explored as they relate to communal coping in an extended crisis impacting family businesses. Finally, organizational resilience was investigated as an outcome of communal coping. Using quantitative survey data collected from more than 500 family business member participants whose family businesses have continued to operate after the COVID-19 Pandemic, this study found that communal coping significantly contributed to organizational resilience for family businesses, above and beyond other variables. Additionally, this study found evidence of “independent” coping coexisting alongside communal coping behaviors for the family business participants in this study. While both communal coping and “independent” coping behaviors were linked to an increase in organizational resilience, communal coping was a much stronger predictor of organizational resilience. Furthermore, organizational identification and crisis self-efficacy were each found to partially mediate the relationship between communal coping and organizational resilience, and participants’ perceptions of the severity of the crisis impacting their family businesses were found to be an influential predictor of engagement in communal coping behaviors overall. Not only do key findings from this study offer useful recommendations for family businesses, and potentially even organizations at large that are facing a crisis, but this research ultimately makes theoretical contributions to the intersection of organizational and interpersonal communication by extending the communal coping theory to family businesses.Item Re-humanizando al sujeto alienado : extrañamientos de lo masculino en la narrativa existencial cubana(2015-05) Watlington, Francis David; Salgado, César Augusto; Arroyo, Jossianna; Afolabi, Omoniyi; Borge, Jason; Roncador, Sonia; Perez-Ortiz, MelanieMy dissertation Re-Humanizing the Alien: Estranged Masculinities in Cuban Existentialist Fiction examines the role of alienation in the construction of compensatory masculine subjectivities during the social, cultural and industrial modernization of Cuba, dating from the mid-19th century until the initial stages of the Cuban Revolution, in the 1960s. In this project I analyze, primarily from the perspective of gender studies, transcontinental philosophy (European and Latin American) and the history of ideas in the Hispanic-American world, the shifts in masculine identity formation among Cuban intellectuals and writers whose work deals with the relation between angst and freedom in the context of crisis tendencies in the developing colonial/postcolonial state. For this purpose, I will analyze the works of the following Cuban authors: José Antonio Saco (1797-1879), Juan Francisco Manzano (1797-1854), Enrique Labrador Ruiz (1902-1991), Virgilio Piñera (1912-1979), Edmundo Desnoes (1930-) and Calvert Casey (1924-1969). Studying these writers and their literary production, I will be able to contribute to current debates on existentialism with regard to the role of masculinities in generating forms of resistance against patriarchal and colonial oppression. Moreover, I demonstrate how these gender constructs interrogate traditional notions of Cuban and Spanish Caribbean modernity by deploying existential narratives in the service of fashioning a literary-grounded decolonial ethics. Consequently, I provide a critical reading of the topic of existentialism which demonstrates the validity of the notion of gender as a useful category of analysis for understanding the role of affect in destabilizing cultural gender norms. This project ultimately aims to analyze alternative ways of expressing masculinity which have emerged from within literary negotiations of identity, thus allowing for a more inclusive and comprehensive evaluation of Cuban male subjectivities, and a deeper understanding of the historical development of social and economic relations in the nation-state, as well as its engagement with ideology, race, national character and politics.Item 'So they can see all we’ve suffered!' : understanding the roles of the citizen witness in the visual economy of crisis images(2019-05) Montiel Valle, Dominique A.; Bock, Mary AngelaThis project examines the various roles of mobile-clad citizen witnesses of crisis as well as how their produced content is used in the news, based on a critical discourse analysis of 140 tweets shared during the first week of Nicaragua’s current socio-political crisis. This corpus was developed through data cleaning to include only those shared by news organizations that showcased citizen visuals. The analysis showed that citizen witnesses enacted four distinguishable roles: that of verifier, watchdog, unifier, and dissenter, and that news organizations tended to incorporate citizen content through re-tweeting with no added contextItem Strategic communication issues for nonprofits : targeting donors, utilizing new media, and planning for crises(2012-12) Garcia, Lauren Elizabeth; Drumwright, Minette E.; Eastin, MatthewThe purpose of this paper is to examine the growing nonprofit sector in the marketplace and the challenges and opportunities involved with attracting and maintaining donor relations and charitable giving. Nonprofit organizations have a number challenges relating to marketing and communications but I have chosen to focus on three dominant areas: targeting donors for support and greatly needed funds, the use of emerging media tools, and crisis management. These issues have a significant impact on an organization’s ability to effectively communicate their brand as compelling to their public. First, I will briefly go over the branding process and what makes a nonprofit brand so unique. I will discuss the target market of donors, the importance of understanding them and their mindset, and finally provide some variables that relate to successful recruiting and maintaining of those relations. Additionally, my research will cover not only methods that could best attract donors but also why many nonprofits do not have marketing or communications plans in place already and the consequences for such a choice. Following that research, I will go into the actual marketing and communication tactics that can be used, not only through traditional but also in new or emerging media communications. Then, I will transition into research of crisis management, linking to the necessity of implementation of marketing plans and the consequences that can occur when nonprofits deal with crises ineffectively. Based on the research, I will conclude my own set of guidelines for how nonprofits should proceed should they want to be successful in a competitive marketplace.Item The subprime object of ideology(2010-05) McDonald, Robert Olen, 1986-; Cloud, Dana L.; Gunn, JoshuaThis investigation combines contemporary Marxian political economy with Lacanian psychoanalysis to understand the discourse of finance capitalism, and to understand the dialectical seeds of the industry’s eventual destruction that were inherent within the hegemonic commodities of the era. These commodities, which include derivatives, futures, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and subprime mortgage loans, were ideological and communicative as well as profitable, and thus do a double duty under finance capitalism’s dominance. Lacan’s concepts of metaphor, fantasy, the quilting point, and the master signifier are extended in order to understand how subjects come to know themselves and their world through the terms given to them by capital. In addition, the rhetorical interventions of two chief ideologists for finance capitalism in the 1990s, Thomas Friedman and Alan Greenspan, are interrogated as exemplifications of the fantastical nature of late capitalism.Item Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America : a framework for non-profits beginning and ending a relationship with another organization(2013-05) Clemons, Althea Nicole; Anderson, Ronald B.; Greiner, Corinne LThis Professional Report explores the history of the relationship between Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and ways in which this can inform other non-profits attempting to enter into a relationship. The report starts with an analysis of the history of both organizations, their relationship, as well as the environment for non-profits at the time. The report then outlines the details of the Public Relations crisis faced by Susan G. Komen for the Cure when they attempted to end their relationship with Planned Parenthood on January 31, 2012. The report concludes with recommendations for steps to follow for any organization attempting to commence or terminate a relationship with another organization.Item The GCC joint regional security effort : utopia or possibility?(2018-05-03) Krylov, Aleksandr, M.A.; Barany, Zoltan D.Today, the Gulf Cooperation Council (the GCC) is often praised to be the most successfully integrated economic/political union after the European Union. A considerable number of scholars devoted their works to this union. However, a large part of the analysis overlooks or does not pay enough attention to the fact that historically the GCC’s main purpose was not economic integration but maintaining regional security by means of a joint effort. Since its establishment in the year 1981 the GCC has faced several issues those became “litmus tests” for these efforts’ success. Before studying these issues closely, the thesis quickly analyzes the background of the union, examining the threats which brought it into being and the first patterns of maintaining regional security. Further on, it discusses the main conflicts and contradictions within the GCC, including the recent Qatari conflict. It continues by analyzing the condition of each country’s army (arms, doctrine, and competency) and evaluating the success of the GCC’s joint effort in Yemen. In this thesis, I argue that that due to the contradictions between the states, lack of flexibility in the mechanisms of coordination and relatively low effectiveness of very expensive armies, the purpose of maintaining regional security solely by means of the GCC has not been reached yet.Item Water supply issues in the Valle de Mexico : user side perceptions(2018-06-19) Canals López Velarde, Regina Montserrat; Pierce, Suzanne Alise, 1969-Mexico’s center territory, Valle de Mexico, is the most populated and developed area in the country. Although it is also the wealthiest area of the country, its unreasonable size gives rise to issues that require prompt attention. The problem of supplying water to the urban region of Mexico City and the metropolitan area is extremely complex due to the interconnection it has with different factors such as public affairs, social conflicts, consequences for the environment, energy – water nexus, economic investments, among others. This research evaluates the problem of water supply by examining the key driving forces that impact reliability of the supply as perceived by residents. A literature review revealed that the water crisis in the region is closely coupled with many social and economic issues. Energy-water nexus connections are a significant driver in water governance activities because the majority of water agency budgets, estimated to be 80%, is directed to electric bills rather than mitigation, monitoring or maintenance. Yet these relationships are based on limited information from the field and, therefore this study takes initial steps to fill the gap in knowledge about water supply conditions by collecting ground truth data related to the observations and perceptions of resident via interviews and surveys. Results of surveys and responses from approximately 192 participants completed between July and August 2017 indicate that there are two different categories of water shortage in the Valle de Mexico. The first is related to non-mitigation of infrastructure failures, such as leaks and broken pipes, while the second is that water users do not conserve the resource when it is available. Interestingly, the second type of water shortage is exacerbated by the beliefs and perceptions of residents in the region because their behaviors reflect a pattern of overconsumption when water is present in the system. The result is an increase in periods without water supply in the system driven purely by use patterns. This result highlights the urgent need to better understand the mindset of users to guide future urban development. Improving understanding about the drivers behind water scarcity in the Valle de Mexico is useful in relation to the water sector, as well as all of the other sectors and aspects that will negatively impact the lives of residents. All the inhabitants of Mexico, regardless of their actual role, must become primary actors working together on this complex and often intimidating issue.Item When NATO adapts : case studies in institutional crisis(2022-06-02) Frizzelle, Bryan W.; Inboden, William, 1972-; Barany, Zoltan; Goldgeier, James; Hutchings, Robert; Suri, JeremiWhy does NATO adapt to crisis as it does? This dissertation makes three principal arguments. First, I find that NATO is an adaptive institution during and after a crisis, particularly in comparison to other international institutions. However, alliance adaptation efficacy earns a mixed review, and the scale of change has also frequently underwhelmed. Further, while NATO routinely changes, its ability to adapt is bounded by specific circumstances and thus to finite windows of time. Second, I find that the state-centric approach favored by many historians is not sufficient to understand NATO adaptation during a crisis. State-level actors certainly matter in understanding why NATO adapts as it does. However, the institution itself matters, too. I will leverage a historical institutionalism theoretical framework to demonstrate how NATO's alliance-level norms, processes and personalities are vital in shaping adaptation, for better or worse. There is one more underappreciated group of actors that influences NATO adaptation: Transnational Interpersonal Networks (TINs). The subsequent case studies will demonstrate that former NATO elites leverage their past relationships to help solve alliance problems long after they serve the alliance in any official capacity—a phenomenon which this dissertation will document and refer to as TINs. Cumulatively these groups of non-state actors influence outcomes in ways that simply are not accounted for by state-centric approaches. Instead, I propose new models which moves beyond traditional state-centric scholarship to understand alliance adaptation in new ways. These models leverage elements of alliance, punctuated equilibrium, and critical junctures theories. Third, I argue that fresh ideas are required to position NATO for a successful future in an exponentially changing world—adaptations that will best posture NATO for a successful future and ideally prevent the next crisis before it happens. Chapter Eight of this dissertation will frame the five primary thrusts of these ideas. Underpinning the ability to make these adaptations is intra-alliance unity, the true foundation on which the house of NATO continues to stand. One of these five thrusts is to further strengthen the political dimension of NATO through a series of initiatives. I also recommend that NATO evolves how it holds itself accountable to fairly burden-sharing. Third, I propose ways that NATO can promote national resiliency, from protecting democratic processes to increasing energy independence. Next, I outline how NATO should aggressively build its military training and exercises program to expand to additional domains and with increased interoperability targets. Finally, I argue that NATO should exploit opportunities in emergent and disruptive technologies (EDTs) while protecting its members from rivals’ asymmetric advantages