Matching Items (4)
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Description
This thesis seeks to answer the question: "What do artistic representations add to the dialogue about the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration beyond political rhetoric and popular media portrayals?" Drawing on political communications (as put forth by Edelman and Altheide), socio-political construction (particularly the White Racial Frame put forth by Feagin),

This thesis seeks to answer the question: "What do artistic representations add to the dialogue about the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration beyond political rhetoric and popular media portrayals?" Drawing on political communications (as put forth by Edelman and Altheide), socio-political construction (particularly the White Racial Frame put forth by Feagin), and collective memory theory (especially those of Halbwachs and Pollak), this thesis uses a dual-coding, content analysis to examine the linguistic and visual messages disseminated through news media. Then, interviews with and the work of six immigrant artists are examined for their contribution to the information put forth in the news media. This study finds that news reporting bias falls along a continuum from pro-immigration to extreme anti-immigration (labeled "fearful" reporting). The news media skew strongly toward anti-immigration to fearful in bias, and there is no opposite pro-immigration bias. Through observations of artists' work, the study concludes that artistic representations of the border can fill this strongly pro-immigration void on this bias continuum.
ContributorsMcCarty, Kelly Erin (Author) / Téllez, Michelle (Thesis advisor) / Stancliff, Michael (Committee member) / Segura, Joseph (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
International Relations has traditionally focused on conflict and war, but the effects of violence including dead bodies and memorialization practices have largely been considered beyond the purview of the field. This project seeks to explore the relationship between practices of statecraft at multiple levels and decisions surrounding memorialization. Exploring the

International Relations has traditionally focused on conflict and war, but the effects of violence including dead bodies and memorialization practices have largely been considered beyond the purview of the field. This project seeks to explore the relationship between practices of statecraft at multiple levels and decisions surrounding memorialization. Exploring the role of bodies and bones and the politics of display at memorial sites, as well as the construction of space, I explore how practices of statecraft often rely on an exclusionary logic which renders certain lives politically qualified and others beyond the realm of qualified politics. I draw on the Derridean notion of hauntology to explore how the line between life and death itself is a political construction which sustains particular performances of statecraft. Utilizing ethnographic field work and discourse analysis, I trace the relationship between a logic of haunting and statecraft at sites of memory in three cases. Rwandan genocide memorialization is often centered on bodies and bones, displayed as evidence of the genocide. Yet, this display invokes the specter of genocide in order to legitimate specific policymaking. Memorialization of undocumented immigrants who die crossing the US-Mexico border offers an opportunity to explore practices that grieve ungrievable lives, and how memorialization can posit a resistance to the bordering mechanisms of statecraft. 9/11 memorialization offers an interesting case because of the way in which bodies were vanished and spaces reconfigured. Using the question of vanishing as a frame, this final case explores how statecraft is dependent on vanishing: the making absent of something so as to render something else present. Several main conclusions and implications are drawn from the cases. First, labeling certain lives as politically unqualified can sustain certain conceptualizations of the state. Second, paying attention to the way statecraft is a haunted performance, being haunted by the things we perhaps ethically should be haunted by, can re-conceptualize the way International Relations thinks about concepts such as security, citizenship, and power. Finally, memorialization, while seemingly innocuous, is really a space for political contestation that can, if done in certain ways, really implicate the high politics of security conventional wisdom.
ContributorsAuchter, Jessica (Author) / Doty, Roxanne L (Thesis advisor) / Ashley, Richard K. (Committee member) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
ABSTRACT Following the tragic events of 9-11, top Federal policy makers moved to establish the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This massive realignment of federal public safety agencies also loosely centralized all U.S. civilian security organizations under a single umbrella. Designed to respond rapidly to critical security threats, the DHS

ABSTRACT Following the tragic events of 9-11, top Federal policy makers moved to establish the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This massive realignment of federal public safety agencies also loosely centralized all U.S. civilian security organizations under a single umbrella. Designed to respond rapidly to critical security threats, the DHS was vested with superseding authority and broad powers of enforcement. Serving as a cabinet member, the new agency was administered by a secretary who answered directly to the President of the United States or the national chief executive. At its creation, many touted this agency as a new security structure. This thesis argues that the formation of DHS was not innovative in nature. Rather, its formation was simply the next logical step in the tiered development of an increasingly centralized approach to policing in the United States. This development took place during the early settlement period of Texas and began with the formation of the Texas Rangers. As the nation's first border patrol, this organization greatly influenced the development of centralized policing and law enforcement culture in the United States. As such, subsequent agencies following this model frequently shared a startling number of parallel developments and experienced many of the same successes and failures. The history of this development is a contested narrative, one that connects directly to a number of current, critical social issues regarding race and police accountability. This thesis raises questions regarding the American homeland. Whose homeland was truly being protected? It also traces the origins of the power to justify the use of gratuitous violence and the casting of particular members of society as the symbolic enemy or outsiders. Lastly, this exploration hopes to bring about a better understanding of the traditional directionality of the use of coercive force towards particular members of society, while at the same time, justifying this use for the protection of the rights and safety of others. It is hoped that the culmination of this work will assist American society in learning to address the task of redressing past wrongs while building more effective and democratic public security structures. This is of the utmost importance as the United States continues to weigh the benefits of centralized security mechanisms and expanding police authority against the erosion of the tradition of states' rights and the personal civil liberties of its citizens. Because police power must continually be monitored and held in check, concerns regarding the increasing militarization of civilian policing may benefit from an objective evaluation of the rise of centralized policing as experienced through the development of the Texas Rangers and rural range policing.
ContributorsTurner, D. L., 1957- (Author) / Simpson, Brooks D. (Thesis advisor) / Decker, Scott H. (Committee member) / Gomez, Alan E. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Since the late 1990s thousands of new Border Patrol agents, hundreds of miles of fencing, and additional immigration checkpoints have been added to the Mexico-U.S. border region. This unprecedented increase in boundary enforcement has strained existing relationships and created new separations between people and places in the borderlands. Southwestern Arizona

Since the late 1990s thousands of new Border Patrol agents, hundreds of miles of fencing, and additional immigration checkpoints have been added to the Mexico-U.S. border region. This unprecedented increase in boundary enforcement has strained existing relationships and created new separations between people and places in the borderlands. Southwestern Arizona has been impacted in especially dramatic ways, as the “hardening” of the international boundary has transformed conservation and indigenous spaces into theaters of drug interdiction and immigration control. This dissertation explores this transformation in southwestern Arizona, a region that was known by Spanish Colonial administrators as the Papaguería. With the community of Ajo at the center of the narrative, this dissertation explores the ways that industry and conservation have long shaped the social relations and the landscape of the region. The destruction of old borders, the creation of new borders, and the redefinition of space has been an ongoing process that continues to define some groups of people as insiders and other groups as outsiders. In the current era of border security echoes from earlier colonial encounters reverberate into the present, shaping landscapes and the lives of local residents in the contemporary Papaguería in significant ways.
ContributorsWarren, Scott (Author) / Arreola, Daniel D (Thesis advisor) / Klett, Mark (Committee member) / Hirt, Paul (Committee member) / McHugh, Kevin E (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015