Matching Items (83)
Description
This dissertation integrates humanities with social science methodologies within a critical framework, seeking to explore the relationship between the neoliberal restructuring and the intersection of gender, class and heteronormativity in contemporary China. In this project, neoliberalism is conceptualized as an art of governance centering on the intersection of race, gender, class and sexuality to create market subjects and sustain market competition. Focusing on China's recent socio-economic and cultural upheavals, this dissertation tries to address these questions: 1. How have class inequalities, binaristic gender and heteronormative discourses been employed intersectionally by the Chinese state to facilitate China's social transformation? 2. How has this process been justified and consolidated through the intersection of gender, class, sexuality and race? 3. How do the marginalized groups respond to these material and cultural practices? Building on the discursive analysis of China's televised 60th anniversary ceremony and If You Are the One, a popular Chinese reality show, as well as the data from the interview, focus group and participant observation of more than 100 informants, it is found that the intersection of gender, class and heteronormativity is central to China's neoliberal transition. A group of flexible and cheap laborers have been disarticulated and rearticulated from the population as the voluntary servitude to China's marketization and re-integration with the global economy. New controlling images, such as the bourgeois nucleus family, are created to legitimize this process. However, these disparate material and discursive practices have entailed contradictions and conflicts within the intersectional biopolitical system, and created contingent spaces of ungovernability for the marginalized groups. Building on these discursive analyses and empirical data, I reconceptualize intersectionality as a multi-dimensional-and-directional network to regulate and manage power for social organization and regulation, which grounds the biopolitical basics for the neoliberal economy. Thus I argue that we need to engage with the dynamics between the intersectional biopolitical structure and people's emerging experiences to construct a grounded utopia alternative to the neoliberal dominance for substantive social changes.
ContributorsZhang, Charlie Yi (Author) / Quan, H. L. T. (Thesis advisor) / Fonow, Mary Margaret (Thesis advisor) / Martinez, Jacqueline M. (Committee member) / Lee, Charles T. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Immigration courts fail to live up to courtroom ideals. Around 2009, proposals were offered to address the problems of these troubled courts. My study illustrates the inevitable linkage between court reform proposals and conceptions of fairness and efficiency, and ultimately justice. I ask: (1) From the perspective of attorneys defending immigrants' rights, what are the obstacles to justice? How should they be addressed? And (2) How do proposals speak to these attorneys' concerns and proposed resolutions? The proposals reviewed generally favor restructuring the court. On the other hand, immigration (cause) lawyers remain unconvinced that current proposals to reform the courts' structure would be successful at addressing the pivotal issues of these courts: confounding laws and problematic personnel. They are particularly concerned about the legal needs and rights of immigrants and how reforms may affect their current and potential clients. With this in mind, they prefer incremental changes - such as extending pro bono programs - to the system. These findings suggest the importance of professional location in conceptualizing justice through law. They offer rich ground for theorizing about courts and politics, and justice in immigration adjudication.
ContributorsAbbott, Katherine R (Author) / Provine, Doris M. (Thesis advisor) / Cruz, Evelyn H. (Committee member) / Johnson, John M. (Committee member) / Zatz, Marjorie S. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This thesis focuses on justice, human rights, and migration in Iraq. It explores the ideas of justice and human rights, and how they influence the migration of the Iraqi Assyrians and Chaldeans. Through the use of qualitative methodology, including a review of scholarly literature, personal experience, and semi-formal interviews with ten individuals, this research mainly focuses on the influence that justice and human rights had on migration during the U.S.-Iraq War, from 2003 until 2011. Justice, human rights, and migration before and after the War are examined. The study concludes that justice and human rights are factors that influence the migration of Iraq's Assyrian and Chaldean community throughout the U.S.-Iraq War; however justice and human rights are not the only factors.
ContributorsBiya, Diana (Author) / Romero, Mary (Thesis advisor) / Ali, Souad T. (Thesis advisor) / El Hamel, Chouki (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Amidst studies attempting to fix the U.S., China, and their relationship into preconceived frameworks of international relations, presupposed definitions, and models of reality, this dissertation adopts an identity centric approach to understanding the nature of U.S.-China relations and, more generally, international politics. This approach involves utilizing an interpretive method to understanding, analyzing the narratives of self and other expressed by political actors and how their identities--expressed through narratives--interact with one another and thus how they influence or reflect social behavior. Striving for greater understanding and a more intellectually honest approach to the study of international politics, this study seeks not theory building or generalizability in a traditional "scientific" sense. Rather, informed by thinkers from Karl Popper through those more recent, this dissertation develops and outlines an in-depth, contextual approach to understanding, applying this approach to analyzing the nature of U.S.-China relations. Ultimately, this study argues that U.S. and Chinese identities and how their identities interact influence the nature of U.S.-China relations, whether the relationship tends towards cooperation or conflict, and that in order to glimpse this nature researchers must delve into the details of their subjects of study. Attempting to do so, this study analyzes U.S.-China relations surrounding the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, relations regarding the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute between China and Japan as it pertains to U.S. relations with China, and relations regarding encounters between the U.S. and China in cyber space (paying special note to attempts to define this "space" itself).
ContributorsKoehler, Clifford Eugene (Author) / Simon, Sheldon (Thesis advisor) / Doty, Roxanne (Committee member) / Ashley, Richard (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The coastal fishing community of Barrington, Southwest Nova Scotia (SWNS), has depended on the resilience of ocean ecosystems and resource-based economic activities for centuries. But while many coastal fisheries have developed unique ways to govern their resources, global environmental and economic change presents new challenges. In this study, I examine the multi-species fishery of Barrington. My objective was to understand what makes the fishery and its governance system robust to economic and ecological change, what makes fishing households vulnerable, and how household vulnerability and system level robustness interact. I addressed these these questions by focusing on action arenas, their contexts, interactions and outcomes. I used a combination of case comparisons, ethnography, surveys, quantitative and qualitative analysis to understand what influences action arenas in Barrington, Southwest Nova Scotia (SWNS). I found that robustness of the fishery at the system level depended on the strength of feedback between the operational level, where resource users interact with the resource, and the collective-choice level, where agents develop rules to influence fishing behavior. Weak feedback in Barrington has precipitated governance mismatches. At the household level, accounts from harvesters, buyers and experts suggested that decision-making arenas lacked procedural justice. Households preferred individual strategies to acquire access to and exploit fisheries resources. But the transferability of quota and licenses has created divisions between haves and have-nots. Those who have lost their traditional access to other species, such as cod, halibut, and haddock, have become highly dependent on lobster. Based on regressions and multi-criteria decision analysis, I found that new entrants in the lobster fishery needed to maintain high effort and catches to service their debts. But harvesters who did not enter the race for higher catches were most sensitive to low demand and low prices for lobster. This study demonstrates the importance of combining multiple methods and theoretical approaches to avoid tunnel vision in fisheries policy.
ContributorsBarnett, Allain J. D (Author) / Anderies, John M (Thesis advisor) / Abbott, Joshua K (Committee member) / Bolin, Bob (Committee member) / Eakin, Hallie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Museums are gaining increasing attention throughout the world for their ability to foster social inclusion, intercultural dialogue, and collaboration in practices of heritage management, exhibition, and interpretation. This dissertation aims to contribute a critical perspective on museums as agents of social change through an exploration of new museological practices in contemporary China. Through an ethnography of the ecomuseum, I unravel the assumptions and expectations of implementing a Western concept based on notions of community participation, empowerment, and the democratization of heritage in the context of a transforming China.
In my ethnographic account of the multifaceted politics faced by ecomuseums, I question how power and authority are mediated through these civic institutions and how central aspects of museum and heritage practices are being redressed in Chinese society. This study exposes how ecomuseums in China are a result of global processes and positioned as part of a heritage protection movement and museum development boom to promote cultural nationalism, a "civilized" China, and state edicts of rural development in impoverished ethnic minority regions. Detailing the implications of government-led ecomuseum development in ethnic villages in southwest China, and the specific case of Huaili ecomuseum, in Guangxi, I interrogate the institutionalization of heritage and cultural landscapes through processes of exhibition, museumification, and the revaluing of culture. I explore the ecomuseum as a social space of cross-cultural encounter and friction through which local actors grapple with conditions of cultural governance and the entanglements cultural difference and a national heritage discourse. In my critical analysis of collected ethnographic narratives over 15 months of fieldwork from state-directed interest groups, Chinese technocrats, and villager informants involved in the institutionalization of heritage, I present the complex arrangements and interactions that take place through the ecomuseum context and how subject positionalities shift and claims to heritage, identity, and voice are negotiated, regulated, and contested. This study contributes to the anthropology of China and museum and heritage studies, and aims to push new directions in the study of community heritage and museums, in offering a critical perspective of the political nature of ecomuseums in non-Western contexts, such as China.
In my ethnographic account of the multifaceted politics faced by ecomuseums, I question how power and authority are mediated through these civic institutions and how central aspects of museum and heritage practices are being redressed in Chinese society. This study exposes how ecomuseums in China are a result of global processes and positioned as part of a heritage protection movement and museum development boom to promote cultural nationalism, a "civilized" China, and state edicts of rural development in impoverished ethnic minority regions. Detailing the implications of government-led ecomuseum development in ethnic villages in southwest China, and the specific case of Huaili ecomuseum, in Guangxi, I interrogate the institutionalization of heritage and cultural landscapes through processes of exhibition, museumification, and the revaluing of culture. I explore the ecomuseum as a social space of cross-cultural encounter and friction through which local actors grapple with conditions of cultural governance and the entanglements cultural difference and a national heritage discourse. In my critical analysis of collected ethnographic narratives over 15 months of fieldwork from state-directed interest groups, Chinese technocrats, and villager informants involved in the institutionalization of heritage, I present the complex arrangements and interactions that take place through the ecomuseum context and how subject positionalities shift and claims to heritage, identity, and voice are negotiated, regulated, and contested. This study contributes to the anthropology of China and museum and heritage studies, and aims to push new directions in the study of community heritage and museums, in offering a critical perspective of the political nature of ecomuseums in non-Western contexts, such as China.
ContributorsNitzky, William (Author) / Hjorleifur Jonsson (Thesis advisor) / Isaac, Gwyneira (Thesis advisor) / Tsuda, Takeyuki (Committee member) / Eder, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Tewa Women United (TWU) is a Native women-founded, centered and run organization located in northern New Mexico, in the original boundaries of the Tewa homelands. TWU is the only independent Native women’s non-profit organization providing direct services, advocacy and prevention services in the Pojoaque-Española Valley area within Northern Santa Fe and Rio Arriba Counties. TWU believes in building beloved families and communities to end all forms of violence against women, girls and Mother Earth and have been working for the past 25 years toward fulfillment of this vision. This dissertation, including a journal article, book chapter, and policy red paper, looks at what happens when Pueblo/ Tewa women become active agents in resistance to the Colonial-White Supremacist Capitalist Scientist Patriarchy. In these distinct dissertation pieces, I examine how TWU has developed a theory of Opide (pronounced Oh-Peh-dee) and Research Methodology to design and implement culturally responsive programs and projects which support ending violence against Pueblo/ Tewa women, girls and Mother Earth. In this instance looking at a campaign and project that Tewa Women United has developed: The Protect Those Most Vulnerable Campaign under the Environmental Justice and Health Program and A’gin Healthy Sexuality and Body Sovereignty project under the Women’s Leadership and Economic Freedom Program. Opide means braiding and weaving together, it is a theory of practice to action.
ContributorsSanchez, Corrine Monica (Author) / Brayboy, Bryan (Thesis advisor) / Sumida-Huaman, Elizabeth (Thesis advisor) / Swadener, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Trujillo, Patricia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Because of its ability to harbor social values, norms, and beliefs, heritage has always been utilized as an ideological vehicle. One prominent example of politicizing heritage is Chinese red tourism, comprised of state-promoted tours to revolutionary memorial sites. It is expected to generate political, economic, and social benefits, particularly to reinforce the legitimate leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Statistics show that dramatic market growth in red tourism has occurred over the past decade. Yet it is still heavily driven by the government and thus whether long-term sustainability can be achieved is still questionable.
This dissertation explores the dynamics of red tourism from the perspective of a meaning-making process, where tourism discourses circulate among the processes of production, transmission, and consumption. The results reveal that higher-level government primarily assumes the leading role, whereas local government is largely excluded from strategy making processes and primarily responsible for implementation and operation. Some dissonance exists between higher and lower-level governments in their goals and involvement in red tourism development. Second, intermediaries are not altruistic and attempt to maximize their own benefits. While site interpreters may provide officially authorized narratives, their primary focus is hosting higher-up administrative visitors. On the contrary, tour guides are more customer-oriented, which may lead to officially undesirable interpretations. Third, driven by multiple motives, tourists have increasingly diverse attitudes towards red heritage and participate in various political and non-political activities. A considerable degree of congruence was found between tourists' participation, motivation, memories, and perception. Quantitative results indicate that the majority of tourists have learned about the political significance and/or content of red heritage, and developed more positive attitudes towards, and support for, the CCP and the government, to a certain extent.
This dissertation contributes to current research by adopting a systematic and emic perspective to explore the dynamics of red tourism. Several conceptual frameworks were developed inductively to describe the meaning-making process. Mixed methods were used to learn about tourists' consumption and perceptions of red heritage. Implications regarding enhancing the effectiveness of the meaning-making process, limitations of the study, and potential directions for future research are also discussed.
This dissertation explores the dynamics of red tourism from the perspective of a meaning-making process, where tourism discourses circulate among the processes of production, transmission, and consumption. The results reveal that higher-level government primarily assumes the leading role, whereas local government is largely excluded from strategy making processes and primarily responsible for implementation and operation. Some dissonance exists between higher and lower-level governments in their goals and involvement in red tourism development. Second, intermediaries are not altruistic and attempt to maximize their own benefits. While site interpreters may provide officially authorized narratives, their primary focus is hosting higher-up administrative visitors. On the contrary, tour guides are more customer-oriented, which may lead to officially undesirable interpretations. Third, driven by multiple motives, tourists have increasingly diverse attitudes towards red heritage and participate in various political and non-political activities. A considerable degree of congruence was found between tourists' participation, motivation, memories, and perception. Quantitative results indicate that the majority of tourists have learned about the political significance and/or content of red heritage, and developed more positive attitudes towards, and support for, the CCP and the government, to a certain extent.
This dissertation contributes to current research by adopting a systematic and emic perspective to explore the dynamics of red tourism. Several conceptual frameworks were developed inductively to describe the meaning-making process. Mixed methods were used to learn about tourists' consumption and perceptions of red heritage. Implications regarding enhancing the effectiveness of the meaning-making process, limitations of the study, and potential directions for future research are also discussed.
ContributorsZhao, Shengnan (Author) / Timothy, Dallen J. (Thesis advisor) / Chhabra, Deepak (Committee member) / Lee, Woojin (Committee member) / Nyaupane, Gyan (Committee member) / Li, Wei (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Targeted growth is necessary for sustainable urbanization. There is a pattern in China of rapid development due to inflated projections. This creates "ghost towns" and underutilized urban services that don't support the population.
In the case of Taiyuan, this industrial third-tier city of 4.2 million people. A majority of the newer residential services and high-end commercial areas are on the older, eastern side of the city. Since 2007, major urban investments have been made in developing the corridor that leads to the airport, including building a massive hospital, a new sports stadium, and "University City". The intention of the city officials is to encourage a new image of Taiyuan- one that is a tourist destination, one that has a high standard of living for residents. However, the consequences of these major developments might be immense, because of the required shift of community, residents and capital that would be required to sustain these new areas. Much of the new development lacks the reliable and frequent public transit of the more established downtown areas.
Do these investments in medical complexes, sports stadiums and massive shopping centers create new jobs that impact the income disparity, or do these new areas take years to fill, creating vacuums of investment that remove funding from areas with established communities? Can Taiyuan move successfully to a post-industrial economy with these government interventions, or is it too much too soon?
By examining demographic data from 2000, 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2013, research on sustainability assessments in Chinese cities (Lu Jia), and translated government publications detailing the urbanization efforts in Taiyuan, I will assess the results of the urbanization changes instituted by the new mayor, Geng Yanbo. My thesis will evaluate the success and failures of these policies and the implications for Taiyuan.
In the case of Taiyuan, this industrial third-tier city of 4.2 million people. A majority of the newer residential services and high-end commercial areas are on the older, eastern side of the city. Since 2007, major urban investments have been made in developing the corridor that leads to the airport, including building a massive hospital, a new sports stadium, and "University City". The intention of the city officials is to encourage a new image of Taiyuan- one that is a tourist destination, one that has a high standard of living for residents. However, the consequences of these major developments might be immense, because of the required shift of community, residents and capital that would be required to sustain these new areas. Much of the new development lacks the reliable and frequent public transit of the more established downtown areas.
Do these investments in medical complexes, sports stadiums and massive shopping centers create new jobs that impact the income disparity, or do these new areas take years to fill, creating vacuums of investment that remove funding from areas with established communities? Can Taiyuan move successfully to a post-industrial economy with these government interventions, or is it too much too soon?
By examining demographic data from 2000, 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2013, research on sustainability assessments in Chinese cities (Lu Jia), and translated government publications detailing the urbanization efforts in Taiyuan, I will assess the results of the urbanization changes instituted by the new mayor, Geng Yanbo. My thesis will evaluate the success and failures of these policies and the implications for Taiyuan.
ContributorsDolins, Sarah-Laura (Author) / Webster, Douglas (Thesis advisor) / Golub, Aaron (Committee member) / Cai, Jianming (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Traumas are moments which disrupt a way of being, often involving death or injury and a period of recovery for its survivors. They can be personal, experienced by an individual, or collective, experienced by a group of individuals, such as a family. Others, like the bombing of Hiroshima, impact much larger communities, such as an entire town, an entire nation, or even the world. These national traumas often include large-scale death or injury and impact the lives of thousands. In addition to their immediate physical and material affects (mortalities, economic impact, creating a need for aid), these events shatter not only an individual's sense of well- being, but also larger notions of national identity, stability and security. In many cases, they also reveal the limits of prevailing concepts of national cohesiveness, citizenship and belonging while often simultaneously upholding or reconstructing newly problematic concepts of national cohesion. Traumas are documented and grappled with through various media, including literature, poetry, art, photography, and journalism. This dissertation, "Performing Nation, Performing Trauma: Theatre and Performance after September 11th, Hurricane Katrina and the Peruvian Dirty War" examines how theatre and performance are utilized to respond to, document, memorialize and represent national traumas resulting from such historical crises as the Peruvian Dirty Wars, Hurricane Katrina, and September 11th, as well as how they resist dominant narratives that construct national traumas as such. These traumas are relived and expressed through performance perhaps precisely because the members of a nation (consciously or subconsciously) recognize that nation is also performed. This dissertation focuses on both the content of and the reception of these performances and the particular implications that performances about national traumas hold for theatre critics/scholars, performance practitioners and audience members (those immediately connected and not so obviously connected to the event).
ContributorsNigh, Katherine Jean (Author) / Underiner, Tamara (Thesis advisor) / Woodson, Stephani (Committee member) / Whitaker, Matthew C. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011