Tesi sul tema "African American Studies / Political Science"

This project explores the constructions of gender, intimacy, and race and the ways these issues are informed by history and the law. The idea of consent, while originally described in texts as a legal concept between citizens, transformed into a way to navigate intimate relationships in the private sphere. This muddied the ways women and men were understood to form relationships and the limits of those relationships. In the same ways that gender was arbitrated through legal language, race is often ensnared in the same processes and institutions. Tolerance has been offered as one approach, but instead of mitigating this violence, it has more firmly entrenched it into the democratic process. Hannah Arendt’s description of the social frames an understanding of intimacy and narratives. Arendt’s work critically creates a space for the category of the social, something found around but outside of the public and private. Instead of working to make the private seen as a sphere for political action, I will focus on the potential of the social as a method of political action. While Arendt has obvious racial bias, I will use her own response to anti-semitism to develop a different approach to Black politics that allow for identity-based responses. Lauren Berlant’s Intimate Publics addresses the potential for coalition building in the social. Using the sorority system as a way of teasing out notions of femininity, discipline, sexual violence, and intimacy, I will describe the ways that a woman subject is produced and how this then works to shape our notions of race. Women’s identities, particularly white women, are constructed through an association with race and sexuality, by unpacking this development, its possible to see how this is socially and institutionally enforced. Part of this enforcement will focus on the narratives of sexual violence. Rape is an issue that not only confronts legal questions, but also the nature of a woman’s ability to participate in democracy. Tying this together will be the importance of political theory. This serves to define the contemporary issues, solutions that have been offered and new potential approaches to intimate violence.

This dissertation examines how poor black South African women in rural areas organize themselves to address their poverty situations and meet their practical needs – those that pertain to their responsibilities as grandmothers, mothers, and community members – and assesses their organizations' effectiveness for meeting women's goals. My research is based on two groups that are members of the South African Rural Women's Movement. They are the Sisonke Women's Club Group (SSWCG) and the Siyabonga Women's Club Group (SBWCG). A majority of these women are illiterate and were de jure or de facto heads of households. Based on interviews and participant observation, I describe and analyze the strategies that these women employ in an attempt to alleviate poverty, better their lives, and assist in the survival of their families, each other, and the most vulnerable members of their community. Their strategies involve organizing in groups to support each other's income-generating activities and to help each other in times of emergency. Their activities include making floor mats, beading, sewing, baking, and providing caregiving for members who are sick and for orphans. I conclude that, although their organizing helps meet practical needs based on their traditional roles as women, it has not contributed to meeting strategic needs – to their empowerment as citizens or as heads of households.

Understanding how race shapes the lives of individuals and transforms institutions is central to social science. Yet, for many scholars, race is widely understood as a fixed and monolithic category that is resistant to manipulation. As a result, making causal claims about ``immutable characteristics'' such as race or ethnicity has been strongly discouraged by statisticians and experts of causal inference. In contrast to previous literature, I propose a different framework that, in some cases, reconciles race and causation. Using a lab experiment and observational data about the urban uprisings of the 1960s, I test whether racialized and politicized cues from a subordinate group (in this case, blacks) can change psychological, behavioral and attitudinal measures among a dominant group (in this case, whites).

Looking at more than 750 violent protests that flared up in black neighborhoods across the United States, I examine whether increased exposure to signals of black unrest is associated with decreased support for the Democratic party. In the 1964, 1968 and 1972 presidential elections, I find a strong negative relationship between exposure to civil unrest and the county-level Democratic vote share. I find a similar negative relationship between exposure to violent protests and Democratic vote share in congressional elections between 1968 and 1972. Finally, I find that in counterfactual scenarios of fewer violent protests the Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, would have beaten the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, in the 1968 election.

In the lab experiment, I test how exposure to images of politicized and armed white and black men changes psychological, behavioral and attitudinal measures among subjects in the dominant (white) group. Methodologically, this study investigates the degree to which at least some aspects of race are better operationalized as variable, divisible, continuous and responsive to manipulation. Substantively, this experiment also attempts to assess the degree to which media representations of violence and politics might increase the salience of ethnic/racial identities, particularly in a dominant group. In the context of the 1960s urban uprisings, such a result might help explain why a significant subset of white voters switched away from the Democratic party, that had become identified with black interests, and towards candidates promising ``law and order.'.

This dissertation examines the influence of donor-driven and recipient-driven interests on foreign aid allocation.

Chapter 1 examines how the donor's trade interests together with elections and the political competitiveness of electoral processes in recipient countries are associated with bilateral foreign aid flows. US gives more aid to its non-competitive larger trade partners, but cuts their aid ahead of elections. It substitutes aid with market access for non-competitive countries for which it is an important export market, but not during election years. Germany, Japan and UK give more aid to countries with competitive electoral systems, but for these countries Japan and UK substitute aid with trade. The substitution disappears for UK during election years. Japan and UK also reward countries for which they are important export markets with more aid, but only during non-election years for Japan. During election years, Germany cuts aid to non-competitive countries, but gives more aid to non-competitive countries for which it is an export destination. There is weak evidence that France substitutes aid with market access for politically competitive countries.

Chapter 2 focuses on recipient incentives. I extend the Grossman and Helpman (1996) model of elections and special interests by adding foreign aid. I show that with conditional aid when the preferred policy of the donor and that of the special interest group are not aligned, the latter has an incentive to alter election probabilities so that the opposition party wins and implements the lobby's preferred policy. Under these circumstances, the government has an incentive to substitute away from conditional foreign aid. Furthermore, if the government has a higher probability of winning under unconditional aid, the lobby succeeds in asking the government to deviate the most in its policy stance.

In Chapter 3 I examine how China's growing importance as an export destination is related to countries' UN voting alignment with the US, and whether this relationship is different if the countries export oil and mineral resources that China. I find regional differences in UN voting alignment response. Latin American countries and Sub-Saharan African countries not heavily reliant on exports of oil and minerals show decreased political alignment with increased export dependence on China. UN voting alignment for the resource exporters from Sub-Saharan Africa do not vary with export dependence on China. Instead, they have a lower level of UN alignment with the US.

The purpose of the study was to determine the impact that community-based group mentoring had on improving academic efficacy and personal efficacy of 31 African American male participants. The study measured the influence of the group-mentoring program, which was arranged around an attribution-retraining curriculum. Participants attended a summer academy where they were exposed to a series of attribution retraining seminars allowing them to engage in activities making connections to attribution retraining concepts. The study aimed to determine if the participant's perceptions about their intelligence would be positively influenced by the attribution-retraining curriculum administered over a course of the 2-week summer academy. Survey responses from a pretest and posttest as related to motivational dimensions of attribution were analyzed. The quantitative results revealed a marginally significant change noted by t(29) = 1.82, p = 0.080, (.05 = statistically significant) for the two-tailed t-test reflecting that the participants' perceptions changed slightly regarding their ability to grow their intelligence. A correlational exploration was also conducted, which revealed that the group mentoring seminars influenced the participants' motivation to make better choices and to feel better about their ability to control their academic and personal destiny. Implications of the study include establishing attribution-retraining curriculum as part of group mentoring models in nonprofit organizations. Also, using attribution-retraining curricula with African American males as a motivational concept for academic and personal success was determined a worthwhile endeavor to mitigate the challenges African American male adolescents face including broken family structure, poverty, poor academic performance, high dropout rates, and behavioral challenges.

Decades after the term “McCarthyism” was first coined, it continues to be used to describe those who prey on the fears of Americans to discriminate against others. In the post-world War years, and well into the sixties, it was Communism. Today, it is “terrorism,” and an irrational fear of Muslims. The word is used to describe those who perpetuate unsubstantiated claims and who practice the intimidation tactics employed against those suspected of being members of a targeted group. This resurgence of the term has piqued the interest of scholars, who like me, are studying Cold War or “old wave” McCarthyism and comparing it to the “new wave” of McCarthyism that has emerged since 9-11. Similar to what transpired during “old wave” McCarthyism most research is focused on predominantly White institutions (PWI’s). The historical development of Black colleges and universities reveals how the lack of resources and finances made these schools much more susceptible to pressures of external forces such as racism and McCarthyism. This then raises the question: “What was the impact of McCarthyism at our nation’s Black institutions of higher education?” Except for two well-documented incidents that occurred at Fisk University during the McCarthy Era (see Gilpin and Gasman, 2003; Gasman, 1999; Gilpin, 1997; and Schrecker, 2002, 1994) and my case study (2008) on McCarthyism at Cheyney and Lincoln Universities in Pennsylvania, for the most part, this question has gone unanswered.

With the use of primary and secondary sources this study will begin to address this void in educational historiography by examining the impact of “old wave” McCarthyism at four existing private historically Black institutions in Georgia: Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Clark University/College, and Spelman College. With this study, I hope to expand the existing discourse on McCarthyism by making it more comprehensive, as well as more inclusive.

As the U.S. becomes more diverse, school leaders, major corporations, and areas of national defense continue to investigate science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education issues. African-American female students have historically been underrepresented in STEM fields, yet educational leadership research, examining this population is limited. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how principals support African-American female students in schools with a STEM program.

The Critical Race Theory (CRT)was used as a theoretical framework to highlight the inadequacies to support educational inequalities. The application of the CRT in this study is due to the embedded inequality practices within the educational system, that have resulted in the underrepresentation of African-American female students in STEM. To complement CRT, the transformative leadership model was also utilized to examine the emancipatory leadership practices principals utilized. These theories framed the context of this study by recognizing the need to address how support is actualized to African-American female students in STEM by their principals.

A case study approach was an appropriate method to answer the two research questions, 1) How do principals feel they support African-American female students in their STEM programs? and 2) What practices do principals engage in that support underrepresented students in STEM? This approach intended to uncover how a principal leads a multifaceted population of underrepresented students in STEM programs. Two principals of STEM schools, where more than 50% of the population were African-American, were interviewed and observed completing daily operations at community-wide events. The STEM Coordinators and a teacher were also interviewed, and test scores were examined to provide further information about the STEM program, and public records were obtained to analyze the principals’ means of communication.

I found that principals supported African-American female students by engaging the community, and exhibiting leadership practices that align with the school culture. The results of this research bring voice to principals who lead schools with thriving STEM programs with majority African American female students. Leaders that exhibit transformative leadership practices by acknowledging race, and recognizing obstacles students of color face, support negating color-blinding ideologies that could impede the progress of all students.