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The purpose of this dissertation is to study not only relations between Latin America and the United States, but also Latin American states with each other. It specifically aims to examine the extent to which the United States, the principal hegemonic power in the Americas, can play a constructive role by providing regional public goods. These goods include conflict resolution and economic progress. Although the United States has the potential to create such goods, it also has the potential to create public bads in the form of regional instability, political terror, and economic stagnation. This raises two fundamental research questions: Under what conditions can Washington play a positive role and if these conditions cannot be met, under what conditions can Latin American nations bypass the United States and create their own economic progress and conflict resolution strategies? Drawing upon qualitative research methods and case studies that have attracted scant academic attention, this dissertation finds that through regional multilateral diplomatic negotiations, the United States can play a positive role. However, due to U.S. parochial economic interests and the marginalization of diplomacy as a foreign policy tool, these conditions rarely occur. This research further finds, however, that through flexible regionalization Latin American nations can bypass the United States and create their own goods. Supported by an alternative regional power, flexible regionalization relies upon supranational institutions that exclude the United States, emphasize permanent political and economic integration, and avoid inflexible monetary unions. Through this type of regionalization, Latin America can decrease U.S. interference, sustain political and economic autonomy, and open space for alternative conflict resolution strategies and economic policies that Washington would otherwise oppose. This dissertation is academically significant and policy relevant. First, it reconsiders diplomacy as an instrumental variable for peace and offers generalizable results that can be applied to additional cases. Moreover, finding that Latin American countries can address their own regional issues, this study recognizes the positive agency of Latin America and counters the negative essentialization commonly found in U.S. academic and policy research. Finally, this research offers policy advice for both the United States and Latin America.
ContributorsRipley, Charles (Author) / Doty, Roxanne L (Thesis advisor) / Stoner, Lynn (Committee member) / Simon, Sheldon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Naming and naming practices take place at various sites associated with international politics. These sites include border crossings, migrations, diasporas, town halls, and offices of political parties representing minorities. This project is an investigation of these and other sites. It takes seriously questions of names and naming practices and particularly asks how people participate in these practices, often doing so with states and state authorities. It not only looks at and discusses how people proceed in these practices but also assesses the implications for people regarding how and when they can be at home as well as how and where they can move. Through an ethnography of Aegean Macedonians involving interviews, participant observation, and archival research, I find that naming practices occur well beyond the sites where they are expected. Names themselves are the result of negotiation and are controlled neither by their bearers nor those who would name. Similarity of demonyms with toponyms, do not ensure that bearers of such demonyms will be at home in the place that shares there name. Changes in names significance of names occur rapidly and these names turn home into abroad and hosts into guests.
ContributorsPout, Daniel (Author) / Doty, Roxanne L (Thesis advisor) / Ashley, Richard K. (Committee member) / Hjorleifur Jonsson (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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 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
Description
The call for an Inter-Civilizational Dialogue informed by cosmopolitical forms of Comparative Political Theory as a way to address our unprecedented global challenges is among the most laudable projects that students of politics and related fields across the world have put forth in centuries. Unfortunately, however, up until this point the actual and potential contributions of the Indigenous or 'Fourth' World and its civilizational manifestations have been largely ignored. This has clearly been the case in what refers to Indigenous American or Abya-Yalan cultures and civilizations. The purpose of this dissertation is to acknowledge, add to, and further foster the contributions of Indigenous American cultures and civilizations to the emerging fields of Comparative Political Theory and Inter-Civilizational Relations. Guided by a cosmopolitical concern for social and environmental justice, this work adds to the transcontinental and transdisciplinary effort to decolonize knowledges and practices by offering socio-ecologically balanced alternatives beyond the crisis of globalized Western modernity. This work draws on three broad Indigenous traditions, Mesoamerican, Andean, and Native North American, to offer some historical and contemporary examples of the many possible ways in which the recovery, revalorization, and revitalization of Indigenous modes of thought, practice, organization and planning can contribute to foster forms of comparative political theorizing that address the challenges of a global age bedeviled by the confluence of social and environmental crises of an unprecedented scale and scope. The dissertation first introduces comparative political theory as a framework for the inter-civilizational dialogue, arguing that Indigenous contributions have been marginalized and must be considered. Part I then focuses and elaborates on specifically Mesoamerican contributions; Part II is dedicated to Andean contributions; and Part III to Native North American contributions. The dissertation closes with a brief reflection of how Indigenous American contributions can help us address some of our most crucial contemporary global challenges, especially in what concerns the construction of cosmopolitical alternatives built on post-anthropocentric forms of socio-ecological justice.
ContributorsFigueroa Helland, Leonardo Esteban (Author) / Doty, Roxanne L (Thesis advisor) / Ashley, Richard K. (Committee member) / Mitchell, Michael J. (Committee member) / Killsback, Leo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Several Islamic organizations have experience major changes in their theological frames and political identities away from fundamentalist and revivalist theological orientation to one that embraces a progressive Islamic theology that synthesizes these norms with classical Islamic teachings. What are the factors that explain these theological changes? What are the causal mechanisms that help to promote them? Using the moral authority leadership theory, I argue that Islamic groups would be able to change their theological frames and political identities if the changes are promoted by religious leaders with 'moral authority' status, who are using both ideational and instrumental strategies to reconstruct the theological frames of their organizations. In addition to moral authority leadership, intermediary variables that also affect the likelihood of a theological change within Islamic groups are the institutional culture of the organization - the degree of tolerance for non-Islamic theological teachings - and the relationship between the Islamic group and the state. This study is a comparative historical analysis of two Indonesian Islamic groups: the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and the Muhammadiyah. It finds that the NU was able to successfully change its theological positions due to the presence of a charismatic moral authority leader, the tolerant institutional culture within the organization, and the ability of the organization to ally with the Suharto regime, allowing the reform to be institutionalized with little intervention from the regime. On the other hand, theological reform within the Muhammadiyah was not successful due to the lack of a leader with moral authority status who could have led the reforms within the organization, as well as to the dominance of a revivalist institutional culture that does not tolerate any challenges to their interpretation of Islamic theology. The analysis makes theoretical contributions on the role of religious leadership within Islamic movements and the likelihood of Islamic groups to adopt liberal political norms such as democracy, religion-state separation, and tolerance toward religious minorities. It identifies the mechanisms in which theological change within Islamic group become possible.
ContributorsArifianto, Alex (Author) / Iheduru, Okechukwu C (Thesis advisor) / Warner, Carolyn M (Committee member) / Rush, James R (Committee member) / Doty, Roxanne L (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
The inherent risk in testing drugs has been hotly debated since the government first started regulating the drug industry in the early 1900s. Who can assume the risks associated with trying new pharmaceuticals is unclear when looked at through society's lens. In the mid twentieth century, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published several guidance documents encouraging researchers to exclude women from early clinical drug research. The motivation to publish those documents and the subsequent guidance documents in which the FDA and other regulatory offices established their standpoints on women in drug research may have been connected to current events at the time. The problem of whether women should be involved in drug research is a question of who can assume risk and who is responsible for disseminating what specific kinds of information. The problem tends to be framed as one that juxtaposes the health of women and fetuses and sets their health as in opposition. That opposition, coupled with the inherent uncertainty in testing drugs, provides for a complex set of issues surrounding consent and access to information.
ContributorsMeek, Caroline Jane (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis director) / Brian, Jennifer (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Social-emotional learning (SEL) methods are beginning to receive global attention in primary school education, yet the dominant emphasis on implementing these curricula is in high-income, urbanized areas. Consequently, the unique features of developing and integrating such methods in middle- or low-income rural areas are unclear. Past studies suggest that students exposed to SEL programs show an increase in academic performance, improved ability to cope with stress, and better attitudes about themselves, others, and school, but these curricula are designed with an urban focus. The purpose of this study was to conduct a needs-based analysis to investigate components specific to a SEL curriculum contextualized to rural primary schools. A promising organization committed to rural educational development is Barefoot College, located in Tilonia, Rajasthan, India. In partnership with Barefoot, we designed an ethnographic study to identify and describe what teachers and school leaders consider the highest needs related to their students' social and emotional education. To do so, we interviewed 14 teachers and school leaders individually or in a focus group to explore their present understanding of “social-emotional learning” and the perception of their students’ social and emotional intelligence. Analysis of this data uncovered common themes among classroom behaviors and prevalent opportunities to address social and emotional well-being among students. These themes translated into the three overarching topics and eight sub-topics explored throughout the curriculum, and these opportunities guided the creation of the 21 modules within it. Through a design-based research methodology, we developed a 40-hour curriculum by implementing its various modules within seven Barefoot classrooms alongside continuous reiteration based on teacher feedback and participant observation. Through this process, we found that student engagement increased during contextualized SEL lessons as opposed to traditional methods. In addition, we found that teachers and students preferred and performed better with an activities-based approach. These findings suggest that rural educators must employ particular teaching strategies when addressing SEL, including localized content and an experiential-learning approach. Teachers reported that as their approach to SEL shifted, they began to unlock the potential to build self-aware, globally-minded students. This study concludes that social and emotional education cannot be treated in a generalized manner, as curriculum development is central to the teaching-learning process.
ContributorsBucker, Delaney Sue (Author) / Carrese, Susan (Thesis director) / Barab, Sasha (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor, Contributor) / School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
As of 2019, 30 US states have adopted abortion-specific informed consent laws that require state health departments to develop and disseminate written informational materials to patients seeking an abortion. Abortion is the only medical procedure for which states dictate the content of informed consent counseling. State abortion counseling materials have been criticized for containing inaccurate and misleading information, but overall, informed consent laws for abortion do not often receive national attention. The objective of this project was to determine the importance of informed consent laws to achieving the larger goal of dismantling the right to abortion. I found that informed consent counseling materials in most states contain a full timeline of fetal development, along with information about the risks of abortion, the risks of childbirth, and alternatives to abortion. In addition, informed consent laws for abortion are based on model legislation called the “Women’s Right to Know Act” developed by Americans United for Life (AUL). AUL calls itself the legal architect of the pro-life movement and works to pass laws at the state level that incrementally restrict abortion access so that it gradually becomes more difficult to exercise the right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade. The “Women’s Right to Know Act” is part of a larger package of model legislation called the “Women’s Protection Project,” a cluster of laws that place restrictions on abortion providers, purportedly to protect women, but actually to decrease abortion access. “Women’s Right to Know” counseling laws do not directly deny access to abortion, but they do reinforce key ideas important to the anti-abortion movement, like the concept of fetal personhood, distrust in medical professionals, the belief that pregnant people cannot be fully autonomous individuals, and the belief that abortion is not an ordinary medical procedure and requires special government oversight. “Women’s Right to Know” laws use the language of informed consent and the purported goal of protecting women to legitimize those ideas, and in doing so, they significantly undermine the right to abortion. The threat to abortion rights posed by laws like the “Women’s Right to Know” laws indicates the need to reevaluate and strengthen our ethical defense of the right to abortion.
ContributorsVenkatraman, Richa (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis director) / Brian, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Abboud, Carolina (Committee member) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
Turbidity is a known problem for UV water treatment systems as suspended particles can shield contaminants from the UV radiation. UV systems that utilize a reflective radiation chamber may be able to decrease the impact of turbidity on the efficacy of the system. The purpose of this study was to determine how kaolin clay and gram flour turbidity affects inactivation of Escherichia coli (E. coli) when using a UV system with a reflective chamber. Both sources of turbidity were shown to reduce the inactivation of E. coli with increasing concentrations. Overall, it was shown that increasing kaolin clay turbidity had a consistent effect on reducing UV inactivation across UV doses. Log inactivation was reduced by 1.48 log for the low UV dose and it was reduced by at least 1.31 log for the low UV dose. Gram flour had a similar effect to the clay at the lower UV dose, reducing log inactivation by 1.58 log. At the high UV dose, there was no change in UV inactivation with an increase in turbidity. In conclusion, turbidity has a significant impact on the efficacy of UV disinfection. Therefore, removing turbidity from water is an essential process to enhance UV efficiency for the disinfection of microbial pathogens.
ContributorsMalladi, Rohith (Author) / Abbaszadegan, Morteza (Thesis director) / Alum, Absar (Committee member) / Fox, Peter (Committee member) / School of Human Evolution & Social Change (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
Aquatic macroinvertebrates are important for many ecological processes within river ecosystems and, as a result, their abundance and diversity are considered indicators of water quality and ecosystem health. Macroinvertebrates can be classified into functional feeding groups (FFG) based on morphological-behavioral adaptations. FFG ratios can shift due to changes in normal disturbance patterns, such as changes in precipitation, and from human impact. Due to their increased sensitivity to environmental changes, it has become more important to protect and monitor aquatic and riparian communities in arid regions as climate change continues to intensify. Therefore, the diversity and richness of macroinvertebrate FFGs before and after monsoon and winter storm seasons were analyzed to determine the effect of flow-related disturbances. Ecosystem size was also considered, as watershed area has been shown to affect macroinvertebrate diversity. There was no strong support for flow-related disturbance or ecosystem size on macroinvertebrate diversity and richness. This may indicate a need to explore other parameters of macroinvertebrate community assembly. Establishing how disturbance affects aquatic macroinvertebrate communities will provide a key understanding as to what the stream communities will look like in the future, as anthropogenic impacts continue to affect more vulnerable ecosystems.
ContributorsSainz, Ruby (Author) / Sabo, John (Thesis director) / Grimm, Nancy (Committee member) / Lupoli, Christina (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05