Browsing by Subject "Violence"
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Item (2016-2017) Joint Resolution 4: In Support of Incentivizing Students in First-Year and Transfer-Year Interest Groups to Attend Voices Against Violence Theater For Dialogue Programs(2017-03-07) Osmond, Cameron; Jaquette, Raphael; Kang, Angela; Goldstein, MiaItem A long quavering chant : peonage labor camps in the rural-industrial South, 1905-1965(2013-05) Reynolds, Aaron Kyle; Jones, Jacqueline, 1948-; Bsumek, Erika; Sidbury, James; Falola, Toyin; Bremen, BrianThis dissertation is a study of social and environmental conditions inside rural industrial labor camps throughout the U.S. South between 1905 and 1965. The use of peonage labor, i.e., the coercion of labor against ones’ will through indebtedness or violence impacted nearly a fourth of rural workers in the postbellum south, particularly in isolated railroad construction sites, lumber operations, turpentine camps, and commercial vegetable farms. Though employers’ various peonage labor regimes changed within the context of the camps’ physical environment and evolved over time, they continually took advantage of marginalized social groups, immigrants, African-Americans, and the poor. The relative inability of workers, their families, and reformers to prosecute employers and foremen for labor abuses stemmed from the collusion of local law enforcement and the indifference of federal government officials. Ultimately, broader market forces of globalization and technology changed peonage labor regimes, not the enforcement of federal statues outlawing the practice.Item Affecting change : death, violence and protest in Manipur, Northeastern India(2015-05) Kshetrimayum, Jogendro Singh; Stewart, Kathleen, 1953-This dissertation explores some of the ways in which precarity takes form in a reeling present. Many social and political analysts have described the contemporary socio-economic and political situation in the Northeastern states of India, marked by a situation of civil war for more than half-a-century, as an “impasse.” With particular focus on Manipur, one of the eight Northeastern states, this dissertation looks at some of the ways in which people live through this “impasse.” Through a series of extraordinary and ordinary scenes, brief encounters, public testimonies, biographical sketches and autobiographical accounts it speaks of the precariousness of life, relationships, rituals and cultural categories even as people suffer and respond to the ongoing “crisis” of law and order, a defining feature of the “impasse.” Inspired by the affective turn in Critical Theory, this dissertation does not see precarity as necessarily traumatizing, thereby keeping the trope of trauma at a critical distance while attending to the lives of people in a situation of low-intensity armed conflict of long duration. It does not claim to provide any final explanation of what is happening in Manipur today rather it offers an innovative way to revisit anew some of the old anthropological questions about people and places undergoing dramatic changes.Item Affecting violence : narratives of Los feminicidios and their ethical and political reception(2012-12) Huerta Moreno, Lydia Cristina; Robbins, Jill, 1962-; Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Héctor, 1962-; Arroyo, Jossianna; Chapelle-Wojciehowski, Hannah; Ravelo-Blancas, Patricia; Pia Lara, MariaIn Mexico there is an increasing lack of engagement of the Mexican government and its citizens towards resolving violence. In the 20th century alone events such as the Revolution of 1910, La Guerra Cristera, La Guerra Sucia, and most recently Los Feminicidios and Calderon’s War on Drugs are representative of an ethos of violence withstood and inflicted by Mexicans towards women, men, youth, and marginalized groups. This dissertation examines Los Feminicidios in Ciudad Juarez and the cultural production surrounding them: chronicles, novels, documentaries and films. In it I draw on Aristotle’s influential Nicomachean Ethics, Victoria Camps’ El gobierno de las emociones (2011), María Pía Lara’s Narrating Evil (2007), Vittorio Gallese’s and other scientists’ research on neuroscience empathy and neurohumanism, and socio-political essays in order to theorize how a pathos-infused understanding of ethos might engage a reading and viewing public in what has become a discourse about violence determined by a sense of fatalism. Specifically, I argue that narrative and its interpretations play a significant role in people’s emotional engagement and subsequent cognitive processes. I stress the importance of creating an approach that considers both pathos and logos as a way of understanding this ethos of violence. I argue that by combining pathos and logos in the analysis of a cultural text, we can break through the theoretical impasse, which thus far has resulted in exceptionalisms and has been limited to categorizing as evil the social and political mechanisms that may cause this violence.Item “American” state of exception : reimagining the Puerto Rican colony and the nationalist enemy under United States rule, 1900-1940(2015-05) Jimenez, Monica Alexandra; Guridy, Frank Andre; Arroyo-Martinez, Jossianna; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia; Brower, Benjamin; Engle, KarenThis dissertation reexamines the first forty years of the United States’ dominion over the island of Puerto Rico through the lens of the state of exception in order to analyze the role of race, nationalism and violence in the formation of the Puerto Rican nation. Focusing on the period before the creation of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the project first engages in a legal historical analysis in order to understand how U.S. Supreme Court decisions concerning race, citizenship and the application of the U.S. Constitution served to create a state of exception on the island. These early pronouncements, known as the Insular Cases, were steeped in white supremacist and social Darwinian ideas about race and civic readiness. Through these decisions the Court left the island in an uncertain position in which certain natural, unspecified rights were granted to its inhabitants but the protections of the U.S. Constitution were not. This exclusion from the established legal order opened up a space for the proliferation of violence. The second part of the project turns to an examination of the workings of violence and the rise of nationalism in response to U.S. policies. I argue that the state of exception led to both the growth of nationalism on the island and to its violent suppression. Though much has been written with respect to the colonial status of the island and its legal uncertainty during the first half of the twentieth century, a reexamination of this history using the state of exception helps further our understandings of the role of race and violence in that dynamic. Finally, this discussion also deepens our understanding of contemporary U.S. states of exception created in pursuit of both global markets and the purported “War on Terror.”Item The animal at the scene of writing : narrative subjectivities of the Lebanese civil war(2010-08) Miller, Alyssa Marie; El-Ariss, Tarek; Ali, Kamran A.This thesis inquires into anti-humanist trends in Lebanese literature of the civil war and post-war period by examining the limit concept of the animal in three novelistic works: Beirut Nightmares [Kawābīs Bayrūt] (1976) by Ghādah Sammān, Yalo (2002) by Elias Khoury, and The Tiller of Waters [Ḥārith al-miyāh] (1998) by Hudá Barakāt. Marking a departure in previous critical work done on this body of literature, which has been dominated by trauma theory as an analytical framework, this thesis employs an innovative synthesis of narrative theory and affect theory to describe how the authors utilize narrative to humanize the war experience, thereby mitigating the effects of contingency and fragmentation on the narrative subject. After the collapse of the state, the human being is separated from its political form, leaving it perilously exposed to acts of violence. It may also, however, carry out aggressions on its fellow man with impunity. Both of these terrible aspects of man’s nature in wartime are understood conventionally as exposing a beast within man, since they radically undermine the precepts of moral value and self-sovereignty that constitute the pillars of humanism. Through acts of “composition” the first person narrators of these novels strive to insulate their affective core from participating in ambient currents of violence, which are viewed as a kind of contamination understood as “becoming-animal.” While implicating the subject in a participation that is other-than-human, these animal becomings are also, following Deleuze and Guttari, ways of attaining a new vitality and escaping the hierarchical symbolic power of logos. Use of this animal figure allows the authors to rethink the human in ways that does not assume a fixed humanist ontology. For Sammān, the animal represents a principle of vitality that allows her protagonist to overcome human sources of inertia, such as melancholic memories or ingrained habit, thereby preserving the authentic voice of the writerly self. For Khoury and Barakāt, the animal permits them to foreground the figure of the subaltern who stands in a minoritarian relation to logos. They also propose a post-humanist ethos of co-presence based on the affective subject’s receptivity and vulnerability; its capacity to both affect and be affected.Item Archive of memories : a journey through the discursive construction and cultural silencing of Mexico’s Dirty War(2022-08-30) Castro Villarreal, Mario Nicolás; Dominguez-Ruvalcaba, Hector, 1962-; Hartigan, John; Merabet, Sofian; Menchaca, MarthaMexico's "Dirty War" or guerra sucia refers to the historical period covering the seventies and early eighties, when the federal governments of presidents Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and Luis Echeverría Álvarez waged open warfare and counterintelligence assaults on urban leftist guerrillas. Once a taboo topic and a historical moment erased and silenced in Mexican historiography, the past fifteen years brought a new wave of historians and activists spearheading attempts at memorializing this bloody event under the frameworks of human rights, archival research, and the recovery of oral history. This research project analyzes three case studies focused on historical and mnemonic reconstructions of guerrilla history and the human rights violations that occurred during the Dirty War; with a particular focus on the two most famous leftist armed movements of that time: the Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (FLN) and the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre (LC23S). The first part delves into Mexico's failed attempt at building a legal framework for transitional justice after Mexico’s “democratic turn” in 2000s. The second case moves to the question of recuperating "spaces of terror" and the successes and failures at building new forms of collective memory. The final chapter focuses on the controversial and infamous murder of Monterrey businessman Eugenio Garza Sada in 1973 and the competing historical and moral interpretations surrounding guerrilla violence. Through a methodology combining discursive analysis, anthropological approaches to memory, and auto-ethnographic vignettes, this dissertation attempts to grasp the current challenges of transforming what once was a marginal countermemory into an accepted and integral part of Mexico's political history. The author expands these questions through the study of guerrilla literature, testimonios, documentaries, and his familial connections to the regional histories of urban guerrillas.Item "Are you getting angry Doctor?" : Madea, strategy and the fictional rejection of black female containment(2014-05) Faust, Mitchell R.; Richardson, Matt, 1969-Within the scope of this thesis, I provide close textual and visual readings of director/actor/producer Tyler Perry's most well-known character, Mable "Madea" Simmons -- a performance he does in full female drag attire -- focusing on his mainstream hit film, Madea Goes to Jail (2009). My reading of the character of Madea veers against the common narrative her existence being just another recycled trope of men disguised as women only to perform in stereotypical and demonizing behavior. I argue Madea represents what I refer to as a "trans*female character", within the space of Perry's popular film that feature her. Read through the lens of being trans*female character, I propose this shift in analysis and critique of cinematic displays of drag helps to transgress beyond male/female binaries of acceptable and possible visual gender representations. More in-depth, using the theoretical concept of Gwendolyn Pough's "bringing wreck", I make the argument that while ostensibly representing the "angry black woman" stereotype, Madea's characterization and actions within the film represent strategies and efforts to not be contained within hegemonic ideals of black female respectability politics and the law efforts to put her behind bars. By "bringing wreck", Madea's fictional acts of violence and talking back are read as a strategy that reflects a historical trend of misrecognition that renders black women's concerns and discontent with marginalization as irrational anger.Item Art education as violence : Western European influence upon the Mandan(2011-05) Timme, Matthew Robert; Bolin, Paul Erik, 1954-; Adejumo, Christopher O.This thesis attempts to complicate the solely positive nature most often attributed to art education. This complication occurs through a deconstruction of an episode of art education and subsequent interpretation and analysis through both poststructural literary theory and postcolonial theory. By conducting a close reading of a colonial interaction, between two artists trained in the Western canon and two Native American artists, the study begins to view the process of art education as an act of violence, manifested in the rapid shift in artistic style away from a traditional Mandan technique towards one that reflects a Western European tradition. This violence is in turn viewed as typical in the systematic destruction of the culture of a colonized group, as a means for the West to gain, and maintain, authority through the use, and the controlling, of both knowledge and education. Ultimately the field of art education is described as being central within this struggle, in that ideology is both created and promoted within the field at the expense of supplanting previous cultural knowledge. This process of ideological struggle, while inherently violent, is not automatically negative. The struggle between violence and negativity within the field of art education forms the final section of the study.Item Bleeding Mexico : an analysis of cartels evolution and drug-related bloodshed(2012-08) Medel, Monica Cristina; Dietz, Henry A.Drug-related violence in Mexico has increased exponentially in the last five years, killing near 50,000 people. Even though the country has been a producer of marijuana and opium poppy for nearly a century, it was not until the beginning of the new millennium that drug violence skyrocketed. Up until now, academic studies and policy papers have focused primarily on the political changes Mexico underwent over the last decade and on ingrained corruption as the central factors in explaining the increased violence. But such a jump in homicides rates, as well as the sheer brutality of the violence involved, also reflects the evolution of the country's drug organizations -- which went from being merely feared and ruthless drug producers and smugglers to far-reaching criminal empires that now dominate all aspects of the illicit drug underworld in the Americas. Many have become so powerful that they have formed their own armies of hit men and foot soldiers that operate like full-fledged paramilitary groups protecting their territories and smuggling routes to American soil. Further feeding the cycle of murders in Mexico is an increasing diversification of drug gangs' businesses, which now range from drug production and smuggling to extortion, kidnapping and human trafficking. Through an historical, spatial and statistical analysis, this study sets out to deconstruct the current wave of Mexican drug violence, show how it is spreading and why, and how that reflects the evolution of Mexican drug organizations.Item Broken (his)tories inside restored walls : Kurds, Armenians and the cultural politics of reconstruction in urban Diyarbakir, Turkey(2014-06-25) Sengul, Serap Ruken; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-; Visweswaran, Kamala; Stewart, Kathleen C; Speed, Shannon; Cvetkovich, AnnAn old and long-contested city located in Northern Mesopotamia, Diyarbakır was multiply decimated and refashioned throughout the twentieth century. After serving as a coordinating center of the Armenian Genocide, the city became a strategic target of Turkish Republican policies of Turkifying history, space and the Kurds, and then the epicenter of Kurdish struggle as of 1970s. Since the 2000s, a comprehensive politics of reconstruction organized around an oppositional idiom of multiculturalism has brought Diyarbakır’s ancient urban historical heritage to the fore of the conflict between the Kurds and the Turkish state. In this process, a wide range of critical actors, including Kurdish dissidents, articulated for Diyarbakır a powerful “city of culture” image for reclaiming the city’s violently foreclosed non-Turkish (Kurdish) and non-Muslim (Armenian) heritages. However, the revelatory promise of this new representational regime was limited by rendering the meaning and significance of all phenomena that circulated in the city as witness to Diyarbakir’s cosmopolitan cultural heritage. As a result, the disquieting histories of political violence of the recent past often remained suppressed. Furthermore, because the city as exterior space is typically coded as male, this narrative put forward an archive of Diyarbakir’s past and present as essentially male, imagined and narrated through a middle-class male gaze, experience and voice. Based on eighteen-months of fieldwork begun in August 2006 followed by archival and secondary research at multiple sites, this dissertation critically analyzes the cultural politics of reconstruction in Diyarbakır by unpacking its culturalist and classed overdeterminations. Specifically, I take this politics as an entry point into differently embodied histories and experiences of Kurdishness, Armeniannes, and manhood involved in the processes of Turkish state-making and Kurdish nation-building in the city for the past century. I do this by tracing alternative genealogies of four gendered figures, namely Kirve, “the uncircumcised terrorist,” șehir çocuğu, and qirix, which have effectively marked male experiences of violence, oppression and struggle from time of the Armenian genocide to the present. This work contributes to ethnography of the Kurds, Armenians and the Turkish state, as well as to literatures on state sovereignty, nationalism, gender and masculinity, and urban geographies of (post)conflict.Item Checkpoint : a deconstruction of the video game violence debate and proposed strategies to create solutions(2013-05) Hamilton, Grayson Lee; Coleman, Renita; Quigley, Robert J. (Senior lecturer)In the months following the Sandy Hook elementary school tragedy, there has been increased attention and debate regarding violent video games and how they affect those who play them. While some lobby for increased regulation of their sale, others argue that video games are not the reason such tragedies continue to happen. In this report, I approach the debate from social, personal and political dimensions to better identify the inconsistencies regarding how violent video games are presented to and received by the public. I also interview video game developers, critics, and researchers to uncover solutions and new strategies to increase video game education and perception about the use of violence in a video game.Item The children are always watching : violence, distressed children, and signs of hope in the cinema of Michael Haneke(2011-05) Tate, Adam Wyatt; Staiger, Janet; Kearney, Mary C.This thesis is an analysis of director Michael Haneke’s theatrically-released films. Using a neoformalist approach, it is a dissection of how the director uniquely employs violence and child and youth characters in his films to critique society while looking for potential signs of hope. I argue that Haneke is a successor to those filmmakers who have taken violence to a new extreme in the cinema. However, Haneke has created a signature form of depicting violence in his films. I also argue that although Haneke typically places child characters in peril, a narrative facet that perhaps turns away some viewers, their placement in such scenarios serves to reflect his consistent view of a crumbling, insensitive society. Despite these representations of violence and children in peril, Haneke still finds places to infuse glimmers of hope in his narratives.Item Cultivation Theory And Violence In Media: Correlations And Observations(2019-05-01) Obert-Hong, Christine; Lewis, RobertCultivation Theory represents the idea that people’s perceptions of the real world are unconsciously influenced by their consumption of media. As technology has improved and increased, so too has the amount of information various platforms are able to spread. However, there is an imbalance between the amount of violence depicted in media and the amount that occurs in real life, leading to unrealistic perceptions of a mean world. Most cultivation research is not experimental. For my thesis, I decided to conduct an experiment of my own using YouTube clips emphasizing violent or fearful content, using a variety of established practices and questions, as well as some of my own. Although result were not conclusive, a few patterns consistent with Cultivation Theory were observed in this online context.Item Drawing crime and justice in Latin American crime comics and graphic novels 1970-2015(2017-05) Cannon, Samuel Scott; Arroyo, Jossianna; Borge, Jason; Polit, Gabriela; Moore, Lorraine; Merino, AnaThis project investigates contemporary Latin American crime comics in order to interrogate how these popular culture texts represent concepts of crime and justice. This study looks to crime comics that fall into the detective or private investigator genre between 1970 and 2015 from Mexico and Chile, precisely because they confront crime directly. In particular, the Mexican comic character El Pantera, created by Daniel Muñoz, and Ramón Díaz Eterovic’s detective Heredia from Chile are the primary focuses of this investigation. These two characters have formed a part of their respective cultural imaginaries over the last four decades and as such they serve as reference points for how concepts of crime and justice have evolved in Mexico and Chile. The investigation of these comic narratives brings to light that economic and political policies related to neoliberalism are seen as sources of crime and violence. This investigation proposes that Mexican and Chilean comics reveal that neoliberalism is criminal through the lens of popular criminology and that these comic texts are means of processing neoliberal violence and disappearance in the realm of popular culture. This research proposes new approaches to the study of Latin America comics by putting Mexican and Chilean crime comics into dialogue with comic theories by Scott McCloud, Thierry Groensteen, and Nick Souanis, as well as Latin American comic research by Bruce Campbell, Ana Merino, Anne Rubenstein, Harold Hinds and Charles Tatum. In addition, these comic texts are investigated through critical theories by Giorgio Agamben, Michel De Cearteau, Pierre Nora, Slavoj Žižek, and Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott. This research represents a unique approach to Latin American comics that take the contextual realities of contemporary neoliberal practices into consideration, and offers new comic theories such as the multibraid network, new gutter spaces, and the idea of “Ashes in the Gutter” to bring McCloud’s writings in touch with Mexican and Chilean realities. In addition, this dissertation provides one of the only histories of the Chilean comic industry written in English.Item Employing handicrafts to communicate the course of trauma : a test in using handicrafts as an explanatory method(2010-05) Willman, Lisa Anne; Olsen, Daniel M., 1963-; Hall, Peter A.This report contains discussion of four design projects aimed to investigate the ability of handicrafts to communicate complicated subject matter. In this exploration, handicrafts are used to present the experience of recovering from a traumatic experience by challenging commonly held stereotypes about handicrafts. By breaking the trauma and recovery process into four distinct stages, each stage can be discussed in detail via the corresponding design piece. Consequently, each stage also allows for new opportunities to apply handicraft practices in new ways. Through this line of questioning, the four pieces expand upon the imagery, materiality, subject matter, and formal creation techniques typically used in handicraft projects. This collection adds to a greater body of work that intersects traumatic experiences with art and design and that explores the power of design as a communication tool. It opens the door for further investigation into the application’s potential as a teaching tool for trauma victims, nontraditional applications of the craft, its ability to aid in the recovery process, and the potential risk and benefit victims have from such work being done and from creating such pieces themselves.Item Estudios Sociales: Revista de Investigación Científica, Número 26, Junio-Diciembre 2005(Centro de Investigación en Alimentación y Desarrollo, 2005-06) Centro de Investigación en Alimentación y DesarrolloItem Everything is liquid(2014-05) Swan, Taylor; Rifkin, Ned; Higgins, Kathleen MarieIf we are to imagine universal reality--a reality where both subjectivity and objectivity exist--mapped as a hollow sphere, the outer shell that defines its physical presence would be the objective reality and the vacuum of space encased would be subjectivity. The hollow core is not defined by--or representative of--a singular piece of the shell, but only of the shell in its entirety. The human subject solely roams this inner space since they are nothing outside themselves. Their task is to wander the spectrum of subjectivity completely until they have reached objectivity. The objective reality only defines shape and mass. It is concrete and monolithic. Energy is distributed equally along its surface and each point reinforces the structural existence of the adjacent points. All of humanity is a varying degree of subjectivity, but the spectrum is finite with objectivity always at one end; objectivity is subjectivity's ultimate experience. Death is the crystallization into the shell of objectivity for the subject becomes pure matter and form that is severed from will. It seems then the only real limit to an individual’s experience is death, the human's subjective experience permeating into objectivity and transforms from a state that is on the inside perceiving out, to a state that is outside of itself, which is to say nothing. It is possible to observe this transformation as a continuous seam of reality with varying degrees of transformation, and not a bold division of two states.Item Exceptional feelings, ordinary violence(2013-05) Pascual, Michael Aaron; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (2009) and the work of LGBTQ activists in the U.S. I argue that the act consolidates the U.S. nation-state’s monopoly on violence by relying on criminal law as a cognitive apparatus and stifles the work of LGBTQ activists and cultural labor to expand or challenge sensibilities regarding violence. I look to the work of trans and queer activists and how they frame “minor” hate crime cases in relationship to space and systems of criminalization. The activism surrounding Sakia Gunn, the New Jersey 7, Chrissy Lee Polis, and CeCe McDonald broaden theoretical account of violence provided by hate crime protections by attending to affect, the body, and space, and make political demands that move beyond criminal law. This thesis attempts to follow those trajectories and provide alternative grammars and methods for addressing violence.Item Fear and discipline in a permanent state of exception : Mexicans, their families, and U.S. immigrant processing in Ciudad Juarez(2011-05) Bosquez, Monica Dolores; Sletto, Bjørn; Hale, CharlesThe United States recently completed the construction of a new Consulate compound in an underdeveloped site in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Mexican applicants for U.S. Immigrant Visas, particularly those who had previously entered the United States without inspection, are sent to the facility to apply through a mandatory personal interview. The interview process necessitates highly invasive medical exams at designated militarized facilities, followed by a series of interviews with consular officers. Applicants, many of whom are visiting Juarez for the first time, must wait in the city for days or weeks as they attempt to navigate the requirements. Even as the city has become more violent, the U.S. Consulate mission in Juarez has become an economic driver as it processes more immigrant visas than any other U.S. Consular office in the world. It is also the largest U.S. Consulate building on the planet and the immigration complex is drawing new migrants who are both seeking asylum through it and aiding in its construction. U.S. immigration policies and the administrative procedures that accompany them also serve to discipline immigrant visa applicants long before they arrive in Juarez as they navigate a system built on penalties and waivers. The effects of these policies transcend borders and citizenship, impacting not only the immigrant applicant, but their U.S. families as well. The normalization of violence towards Mexicans and their families is becoming entrenched in a culture of impunity, both in Mexico and the United States. The immigrant processing and maquiladora manufacturing that take place in Ciudad Juarez play a specific role in U.S. / Mexico relations and are representative of the intersection of immigration policy, labor desires, and neoliberal and post-neoliberal policies of structural violence. The United States has developed, in Juarez, an economic development and security program and immigrant processing center concomitantly and Mexico has worked lockstep to fortify this position. I examine this historical occurrence, and the experiences of immigrant applicants and their families, using Foucault’s theories of discipline.
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