Matching Items (5)
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- All Subjects: American studies
- Creators: Talebi, Shahla
Description
Guantánamo: The Amen Temple of Empire connects the fetishization of the trauma of nine/eleven with the co-constitution of subjects at Guantánamo—that of the contained Muslim terrorist prisoner silhouetted against the ideal nationalistic military body—circulated as ‘afterimages’ that carry ideological narratives about U.S. Empire. These narratives in turn religiously and racially charge the new normative practices of the security state and its historically haunted symbolic order. As individuals with complex subjectivities, the prisoners and guards are, of course, not reducible to the standardizing imprimatur of the state or its narratives. Despite the circulation of these ‘afterimages’ as fixed currency, the prisoners and guards produce their own metanarratives, through their para-ethnographic accounts of containment and of self. From within the panopticon of the prison, they seek sight lines, and gaze back at the state. This dissertation is thus a meditation on US militarism, violence, torture, race, and carceral practices, revealed thematically through metaphors of hungry ghosts, nature, journey and death, liminality, time, space, community, and salvage. Based on a multi-sited, empirical and imaginary ethnography, as well as textual and discourse analysis, I draw on the writing and testimony of prisoners, and military and intelligence personnel, whom I consider insightful para-ethnographers of the haunting valence of this fetishized historical event.
ContributorsColeman, Diana (Diana Murtaugh) (Author) / Talebi, Shahla (Thesis advisor) / Matustik, Martin (Committee member) / Fessenden, Tracy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This study analyzes competing forms of Protestant Christianity within the Bible Belt of the Upper South (Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina). On one hand, a conservative “culture war” version of Christianity has dominated the South, and deeply influenced national politics, for almost fifty years. This form of Christianity is predicated on white supremacy and heteropatriarchy and regulates religious, as well as sexual, gender, and racial norms. On the other hand, an emerging movement of those once socialized in the culture war version of Protestantism is now reconfiguring the regional traditions. Through ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative interviews, and historical analysis, this study explores the ways these post-culture war Christians are navigating and negotiating relations with family, church, and politics and society more broadly. This work argues that Protestantism in the Upper South is being re-landscaped from the inside by individuals staying within the tradition who seek to reorient regional, national and religious identities. This study goes beyond generalizations about changes in American religion to shed light on the specific motivations, conflicts and dynamics inherent in shifts in lived religion in this particular region. In so doing it also contributes to deeper understanding of processes of religious change more generally.
ContributorsShoemaker, Terry (Author) / Cady, Linell (Thesis advisor) / Gereboff, Joel (Committee member) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This dissertation examines automobile title lending practices to interrogate debt as an embodied experience. Alternative financial services such as title lending provide a way to link socio-economic inequality to instruments of financial debt. The predominant research on inequality focuses on wage, income, and asset wealth; rarely is a direct connection made between socio-economic inequality and the object of debt. My interest lies beyond aggregate amounts of debt to also consider the ways in which different bodies have access to different forms of debt. This project examines how particular subprime instruments work to reinforce structural inequalities associated with race, class, and gender and how specific populations are increasingly coming to rely on debt to subsist. Using in-depth interviews, geospatial mapping, and descriptive statistical analysis I show the importance of recognizing debt not only as a conditional object but also as a lived condition of being. I conclude with discussions on dispossession and financial precarity to consider how the normative discourse of debt needs to change.
ContributorsSugata, Michihiro (Author) / Quan, H.L.T. (Thesis advisor) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Catlaw, Thomas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
In recent years, privately owned and operated residential programs for troubled youth have been at the forefront of national discussion on institutional child abuse in state-sanctioned carceral facilities. Survivors and their advocates have argued that these programs should be regulated by state agencies and closed because they are harmful to residents and divert resources from effective treatment options. In opposition to the survivor movement stand owners, practitioners, and “tough on crime” politicians, who claim that that state intervention in the Troubled Teen Industry (TTI) would curtail effective treatment options for families, and in the case of faith-based programs, violate their constitutionally protected religious freedoms. Guided by the fields of Mad Studies and Critical Prison Studies, this research offers a political history of the TTI, focused on the faith-based residential facilities of Lester Roloff and Herman Fountain. It also draws on first-person interviews with three survivors of a faith-based bootcamp called Bethel Boys Academy, of the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs to delineate how these survivors make sense of their experiences before, during, and after being held captive. I conclude by arguing that the TTI survivor movement and prison abolitionists should cooperate to dismantle white supremacist political structures and improve access to meaningful treatment options for vulnerable youth.
ContributorsBrown, Andrew Gordon (Author) / Quan, H.L.T. (Thesis advisor) / Gomez, Alan E. (Committee member) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This dissertation coheres together over a hundred insurgent testimonies published from within Arizona State Prison Complex – Perryville, the state’s only prison for women. These testimonies tell a people’s history of Arizona’s largest and most public legal intervention for prisoners’ rights: Parsons v. Ryan. In 2009, after Perryville correctional officers left Marcia Powell to bake to death in the Arizona summer sun, prisoners lit their mattresses on fire to proclaim that their lives were in danger, sparking a wave of resistance, including outside from family members and advocates, which prompted a class action lawsuit against the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Re-Entry (ADCRR). After years of prisoners’ calls for a systemic reckoning of the death-producing state punishment system, legal intervention distilled their suffering and demands into a set of discrete allegations. Meanwhile, settlement stipulations continue to implore ADCRR to meet minimum constitutional standards. While the accountability Parsons v. Ryan seeks is limited to the administration of medical care and extreme isolation, testimonies in this people’s history reveal a breadth of systemic violences that encompass and surpass the legal claims. These testimonies, which evidence strategies of care work, protest, and covert documentation, delineate the prison’s function to degrade human dignity and inflict physical and psychological harm in virtually every area of basic survival, including access to food, shelter, hygiene, and personal safety. Through use of the “rebel archive,” the resulting narrative, made possible by virtue of prisoners’ organizing for dignity, invokes a critical analysis of the sublimation of their resistance and demands for a project of liberal carceral care as prison reform.
ContributorsCooper, Ashley Ann (Author) / Quan, H.L.T. (Thesis advisor) / Swadener, Elizabeth B (Committee member) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024