The Argentine Dilemma: “Vulture Funds” and the Risks Posed to Developing Economies

Post-crisis Argentina is a case study of crisis management through debt restructuring. This article examines how Argentina negotiated the external debt in the wake of the sovereign default in December 2001 and now confronts challenges posed by holdout creditors—the so called “vulture funds”. It argues that debt restructuring has put a straitjacket on the national economy, making it virtually impossible for healthy growth short of a break with the international economic order. While Argentina has successfully restructured a $95 billion debt with an unprecedented “hair cut” (around 70% reduction in “net value of debt”), a sustainable growth appears out of reach as long as reliance on the government debt market prevails. In this cycle, the transmission belt of financial crisis to developing countries is characterized by the entry of highly speculative players such as hedge funds, conflicts of interests embedded in “sovereign debt restructuring” (SDR) and vulnerabilities associated with “emerging market debt”.

Automatons, Robots, and Capitalism in a Very Wrong Twenty-First Century: A Review Essay on Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie

Contrary to prevailing opinions, Neill Blomkamp’s recent feature film Chappie is not a movie about robots or artificial intelligence. It is not Robocop. It is not Short Circuit. It is also not District 9 or Elysium. Chappie is a movie about humanity’s dialectically creative and destructive potential. It is a movie about how it is that humans come to behave how they do through their social and material circumstances, as well as the barbaric results when the two are mixed under the thoroughly undemocratic conditions of neoliberal capitalism.

The Bankruptcy of Liberalism and Social Democracy in the Neoliberal Age

The increasing similarity between the economic policies of center-left and center-right political parties has effectively diminished the legitimacy of governments in relationship to their citizenry in Western Europe and the U.S. Capitalist democracies during the period of managed capitalism gained legitimacy by the appearance of the separation of capitalist ownership rights in the marketplace from the political institutions that govern capitalism. During this period, Social Democratic parties in Western Europe, and to a lesser extent the Democratic Party in the U.S., paid some amount of attention to labor unions and mass constituents in formulating their policy agendas. The era of neoliberalism (late 1970s to the present) has broken any such appearances, with the dominant political parties, regardless of party label, moving rightward to embrace many of the same economic policy agendas.

400 Parts Per Million: An Eco-Political Music Video

400 ppm is an eco-political music video which encapsulates climate crisis and climate justice in three minutes flat. It is an intervention in popular political ecology/economy, aimed at those who are uneasy with the increasingly obvious deterioration of the living systems of which we are an inextricable part.

"New" Social Movements: Alternative Modernities, (Trans)local Nationalisms, and Solidarity Economies

My dissertation is the first project on the Haitian Platform for Advocacy for an Alternative Development- PAPDA, a nation-building coalition founded by activists from varying sectors to coordinate one comprehensive nationalist movement against what they are calling an Occupation. My work not only provides information on this under-theorized popular movement but also situates it within the broader literature on the postcolonial nation-state as well as Latin American and Caribbean social movements. The dissertation analyzes the contentious relationship between local and global discourses and practices of citizenship. Furthermore, the research draws on transnational feminist theory to underline the scattered hegemonies that intersect to produce varied spaces and practices of sovereignty within the Haitian postcolonial nation-state. The dissertation highlights how race and class, gender and sexuality, education and language, and religion have been imagined and co-constituted by Haitian social movements in constructing ‘new’ collective identities that collapse the private and the public, the rural and the urban, the traditional and the modern. My project complements the scholarship on social movements and the postcolonial nation-state and pushes it forward by emphasizing its spatial dimensions. Moreover, the dissertation de-centers the state to underline the movement of capital, goods, resources, and populations that shape the postcolonial experience. I re-define the postcolonial nation-state as a network of local, regional, international, and transnational arrangements between different political agents, including social movement actors. To conduct this interdisciplinary research project, I employed ethnographic methods, discourse and textual analysis, as well as basic mapping and statistical descriptions in order to present a historically-rooted interpretation of individual and organizational negotiations for community-based autonomy and regional development.

Stereotype Threat and the Standardized Testing Experiences of African American Children at an Urban Elementary School

Stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995) refers to the risk of confirming a negative stereotype about one’s group in a particular performance domain. The theory assumes that performance in the stereotyped domain is most negatively affected when individuals are more highly identified with the domain in question. As federal law has increased the importance of standardized testing at the elementary level, it can be reasonably hypothesized that the standardized test performance of African American children will be depressed when they are aware of negative societal stereotypes about the academic competence of African Americans. This sequential mixed-methods study investigated whether the standardized testing experiences of African American children in an urban elementary school are related to their level of stereotype awareness. The quantitative phase utilized data from 198 African American children at an urban elementary school. Both ex-post facto and experimental designs were employed. Experimental conditions were diagnostic and non-diagnostic testing experiences. The qualitative phase utilized data from a series of six focus group interviews conducted with a purposefully selected group of 4 African American children. The interview data were supplemented with data from 30 hours of classroom observations. Quantitative findings indicated that the stereotype threat condition evoked by diagnostic testing depresses the reading test performance of stereotype-aware African American children (F[1, 194] = 2.21, p < .01). This was particularly true of students who are most highly domain-identified with reading (F[1, 91] = 19.18, p < .01). Moreover, findings indicated that only stereotype-aware African American children who were highly domain-identified were more likely to experience anxiety in the diagnostic condition (F[1, 91] = 5.97, p < .025). Qualitative findings revealed 4 themes regarding how African American children perceive and experience the factors related to stereotype threat: (1) a narrow perception of education as strictly test preparation, (2) feelings of stress and anxiety related to the state test, (3) concern with what “others” think (racial salience), and (4) stereotypes. A new conceptual model for stereotype threat is presented, and future directions including implications for practice and policy are discussed.

Turkey and Neo-Ottomanism: Domestic Sources, Dynamics and Foreign Policy

This study examined the relationship between the Turkish Islamic movements and the present government of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AK Party). Since the AK Party came to power in 2002 it implemented unparalleled political reforms and pursued to improve Turkey’s relations with the EU. Opponents argued that because of the dominance of the secular military in Turkish politics, the AK Party is forced to secretly advance its Islamic agenda using the language and symbolism of democracy and human rights. This study argued that the ideas of the AK Party show similarities with the “Ottomanist” thought of the late Ottoman era. With special reference to the preservation of the Ottoman State, Ottomanism in an eclectic way was able to incorporate Islamic principles like freedom, justice and consultation into the political arena which was increasingly dominated by the secular European concepts. Literature on Islam and politics in Turkey, however, disregards the Ottoman roots of freedom and pluralism and tends to reduce the relationship between religion and state into exclusively confrontational struggles. This conceptualization of the political process relies on particular non-Turkish Muslim experiences which do not necessarily represent Islam’s venture in Turkey. Contrary to the prevailing scholarship, Islamic movements in Turkey, namely, Naqshbandi, National View and Nur, which are discussed in detail in this study, are not monolithic. They all uphold the same creedal tenets of Islam but they have sharp differences in terms of how they conceptualize the role of religious agency in politics. I argue that this diversity is a result of three distinct methodologies of Islamic religious life which are the Tariqah (Tarikat), Shariah (Şeriat), and Haqiqah (Hakikat). The differences between these three approaches represent a typological hierarchy in the formation of the Muslim/believer as an agent of Islamic identity. Through these different if not conflicting modes, the AK Party reconnected itself with Turkey’s Ottoman heritage in a post-Ottoman, secular setting and was able to develop an eclectic political identity of Neo-Ottomanism that is evident in the flexibility if not inconsistency of its domestic and foreign policy preferences.

The effects of required/sequenced preparatory courses on academic success and retention at a community college

This dissertation had two purposes: first, to analyze how required sequenced college preparatory courses in mathematics, reading, and writing affect students' academic success and, second, to add to a theoretical model for predicting student retention at a community college. Grade point average, number of degree credits earned, and reenrollment rate were measured as determinants of academic success. The treatment group had a significantly higher grade point average than the control group. There was no significant difference in the number of degree credits earned or re-enrollment rate for the groups. A series of logistic regressions used the independent variables E-ASSET scores in math, reading, and writing; number of college prep areas required; credits earned; grade point average; students' status; academic restrictions/required course sequencing; sex; race; and socio-economic status to determine the predictor variables for retention. The academic variable that showed the greatest potential as a predictor for retention was grade point average. Overall, receiving financial aid was the greatest predictor for reenrollment. For a financial aid recipient the odds of reenrollment were 2.70 times more likely than if no financial aid was received.

Hiearchies of Eating Disorders: Fat-Phobia and Internalized Beauty Ideals in Online Communities

Research and discourse on Eating Disorders (ED) have a tendency to perpetuate certain stereotypes regarding women of color, however unintentional or innocuous it may appear. The research conducted, does show that the prominent ED within communities of minorities or of lower social status is Binge Eating Disorder (BED). A Foucauldian discourse analysis of online forums by young women with ED, such as myproana.com, would be the primary method of documenting how these women form a hierarchy of the community's ED, and analyze if it correlates with the social status primarily associated with the Eating Disorder. Within these forums, and ED based communities, a clear hierarchy is formed, with Anorexia Nervosa at the top and BED at the bottom. From the minimal research available on women of color and ED, it is clear that, for Black women at least, BED is the most common—and thus it is my goal to explore any possible correlation if applicable. Because so little exists that focuses on EDs in women of color, this analysis may help to promote more research in race and class dynamics of Eating Disorders, as well on how those factors affect how women view their own bodies.

University City or Little Managua? Studentification and Housing Renewal in Sweetwater, Florida

The “University City project” is a public-private partnership between Florida International University (FIU), the City of Sweetwater, and private investors. The project focuses on redeveloping certain areas of Sweetwater near FIU with the goal of enticing members of the university community to become residents. Building on previous research findings regarding how redevelopment prospects in the City of Sweetwater are affecting residents of the Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park, I examine how these changes are affecting residents in the immediate vicinity of the University. Using a combination of semi-structured interviews and participant observation, I seek to answer the following questions: How do Sweetwater residents feel about development projects in the community of Sweetwater? In what ways do these changes affect their lives? How powerful or powerless do they feel in the face of these changes, or how much say do they believe they have in their implementation? This research will add depth and context to the emerging interdisciplinary study of the “studentification” phenomenon, a form of gentrification that is centered on students, which has received little attention in the United States.

Work-life Balance and Gender Regime After the Economic Transition

Work-life balance (WLB) is a key issue in our societies in which there is increasing pressure to be permanently available on demand and to work more intensively, and when due to technological change the borders between work and private life appear to be dissolving. However, the social, institutional and normative frames of a region have a huge impact on how people experience work and private life, where the borders between these spheres lie and how much control individuals have in managing these borders. Based on these arguments, this editorial to the special issue Work-life balance/imbalance: individual, organisational and social experiences in Intersections. EEJSP draws attention to the social institutions, frameworks and norms which have an effect on experience, practices and expectations about work-life balance. Concerning the time horizon, this editorial focuses on the change of regime as a reference point since socialist and post-socialist eras differ significantly, although there is still some continuity between them. The authors of this introduction offer an overview of the situation in CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) based mainly on examples of Visegrad countries.

The Politics of Gender Socialization

This manuscript is comprised of three papers that examine the far-reaching and often invisible political outcomes of gender role socialization in the United States. These papers focus primarily on two areas: political confidence amongst girls and women, and the effects of gender on survey measurement and data quality.

Chapter one focuses on political confidence, and the likelihood that women will run for political office. Women continue to be underrepresented at all levels of political leadership, and their lack of political ambition, relative to men, has been identified as a primary cause. In this paper, I explore the relationship between an individual's masculinity and femininity and her development of political ambition. Using original survey data from the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), I first empirically demonstrate that gender (masculinity/femininity) and sex (male/female) are unique elements of identity and, moreover, are both independently related to political ambition. I then explore the relevance of gender for the study of candidate emergence, testing whether and how masculinity and femininity might be related to political ambition are supported empirically. While the results suggest that masculinity is positively associated with the development of political ambition, the relationship between femininity and candidate emergence seems to be more complicated and not what prevailing stereotypes might lead us to expect. Moreover, while the relationship between masculinity and political ambition is the same for men and women, the relationship between femininity and political ambition is very different for women than it is for men. This study suggests that gender role socialization is highly related with both men's and women's desire to seek positions of political leadership.

Chapter two continues this exploration of gendered differences in the development of political ambition, this time exploring how social attractiveness and gendered perceptions of political leadership impact the desire to hold political office.Women are persistently underrepresented as candidates for public office and remain underrepresented at all levels of government in the United States. Previous literature suggests that the gendered ambition gap, gender socialization, insufficient recruitment, media scrutiny, family responsibilities, modern campaign strategies, and political opportunity structures all contribute to the gender imbalance in pools of officeholders and candidates. To explain women's reticence to run, scholars have offered explanations addressing structural, institutional, and individual-level factors that deter women from becoming candidates, especially for high positions in the U.S. government. This paper examines a previously unexplored factor: how dating and socialized norms of sexual attraction affect political ambition. This study investigates whether young, single, and heterosexual women's desire for male attention and fear of being perceived as unattractive or "too ambitious" present obstacles to running for office. The results of these experiments suggest that social expectations about gender, attraction and sexuality, and political office-holding may contribute to women's reticence to pursue political leadership. Chapter two is a co-authored work and represents the joint efforts of Laura Lazarus Frankel, Shauna Shames, and Nadia Farjood.

Chapter 3 bridges survey methodology and gender socialization, focusing on how interviewer sex affects survey measurement and data quality. Specifically, this paper examines whether and how matching interviewer and respondent sex affects panel attrition--respondents dropping out of the study after participating in the first wave. While the majority of research on interviewer effects suggests that matching interviewer and respondent characteristics (homophily) yields higher quality data, little work has examined whether this pattern holds true in the area of panel attrition. Using paradata from the General Social Survey (GSS), I explore this question. My analysis reveals that, despite its broader positive effects on data quality, matching interviewer and respondent sex increases likelihood to attrit. Interestingly, this phenomenon only emerges amongst male respondents. However, while assigning female interviewers to male respondents decreases their propensity to attrit, it also increases the likelihood of biased responses on gender related items. These conflicting outcomes represent a tradeoff for scholars and survey researchers, requiring careful consideration of mode, content, and study goals when designing surveys and/or analyzing survey data. The implications of these patterns and areas for further research are discussed.

Together, these papers illustrate two ways that gender norms are related to political outcomes: they contribute to patterns of candidate emergence and affect the measurement of political attitudes and behaviors.

Other Than a Citizen: Vernacular Poetics in Postwar America

Few symbols of 1950s-1960s America remain as central to our contemporary conception of Cold War culture as the iconic ranch-style suburban home. While the house took center stage in the Nixon/Khrushchev kitchen debates as a symbol of modern efficiency and capitalist values, its popularity depended largely upon its obvious appropriation of vernacular architecture from the 19th century, those California haciendas and Texas dogtrots that dotted the American west. Contractors like William Levitt modernized the historical common houses, hermetically sealing their porous construction, all while using the ranch-style roots of the dwelling to galvanize a myth of an indigenous American culture. At a moment of intense occupational bureaucracy, political uncertainty and atomized social life, the rancher gave a self-identifying white consumer base reason to believe they could master their own plot in the expansive frontier. Only one example of America’s mid-century love affair with commodified vernacular forms, the ranch-style home represents a broad effort on the part of corporate and governmental interest groups to transform the vernacular into a style that expresses a distinctly homogenous vision of American culture. “Other than a Citizen” begins with an anatomy of that transformation, and then turns to the work of four poets who sought to reclaim the vernacular from that process of standardization and use it to countermand the containment-era strategies of Cold War America.

In four chapters, I trace references to common speech and verbal expressivity in the poetry and poetic theory of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, against the historical backdrop of the Free-Speech Movement and the rise of mass-culture. When poets frame nonliterary speech within the literary page, they encounter the inability of writing to capture the vital ephemerality of verbal expression. Rather than treat this limitation as an impediment, the writers in my study use the poem to dramatize the fugitivity of speech, emphasizing it as a disruptive counterpoint to the technologies of capture. Where critics such as Houston Baker interpret the vernacular strictly in terms of resistance, I take a cue from the poets and argue that the vernacular, rooted etymologically at the intersection of domestic security and enslaved margin, represents a gestalt form, capable at once of establishing centralized power and sparking minor protest. My argument also expands upon Michael North’s exploration of the influence of minstrelsy and regionalism on the development of modernist literary technique in The Dialect of Modernism. As he focuses on writers from the early 20th century, I account for the next generation, whose America was not a culturally inferior collection of immigrants but an imperial power, replete with economic, political and artistic dominance. Instead of settling for an essentially American idiom, the poets in my study saw in the vernacular not phonetic misspellings, slang terminology and fragmented syntax, but the potential to provoke and thereby frame a more ethical mode of social life, straining against the regimentation of citizenship.

My attention to the vernacular argues for an alignment among writers who have been segregated by the assumption that race and aesthetics are mutually exclusive categories. In reading these writers alongside one another, “Other than a Citizen” shows how the avant-garde concepts of projective poetics and composition by field develop out of an interest in black expressivity. Conversely, I trace black radicalism and its emphasis on sociality back to the communalism practiced at the experimental arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Olson and Duncan taught. In pressing for this connection, my work reveals the racial politics embedded within the speech-based aesthetics of the postwar era, while foregrounding the aesthetic dimension of militant protest.

Not unlike today, the popular rhetoric of the Cold War insists that to be a citizen involves defending one’s status as a rightful member of an exclusionary nation. To be other than a citizen, as the poets in my study make clear, begins with eschewing the false certainty that accompanies categorical nominalization. In promoting a model of mutually dependent participation, these poets lay the groundwork for an alternative model of civic belonging, where volition and reciprocity replace compliance and self-sufficiency. In reading their lines, we become all the more aware of the cracks that run the length of our load-bearing walls.

The Catholic Church and revolution in Ireland

Despite the involvement of radical socialists like James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army in the 1916 Rising and the unanimous passing of the Democratic Programme (a socialist manifesto for the new Government) by the First Dáil in 1919, the Irish state has since its inception exhibited a highly conservative approach to social and economic policy, and politics generally in Ireland, North or South, have never faced a serious challenge from those seeking radical change. Several factors have played a part in this and this article focuses on one of these - the power and conservatism of the Catholic Church and its influence in shaping the political landscape. Despite a decline in recent years, the Church remains influential north and south of the Border in education provision, the current debates in relation to abortion and in culturally important aspects of life - baptism, communion and burial. In the past the Church’s political influence among Ireland’s majority Catholic community had been even more pronounced. The article begins by looking at the Church’s attitude to revolutionary change in Ireland historically before focusing on its influence in the North during the Stormont years and during the more recent ‘Troubles’ – 1969 - 98. It shows how the Church attempted to influence political thought and discourse in Ireland when it was at the height of its power. Whilst it is true that the Church was not a monolith, and there have always been individual priests who have adopted a more radical approach, the general thrust of the Church was conservative, attempting to ally itself with the power elites of the day where possible. It is this influence which appears to have stood the test of time despite attempts in past generations to radicalise the Irish population.

Reckoning With Apartheid: The Conundrum of Working Through the Past, An Introduction

From April 26-29, 1994, South Africa held its first universal, democratic elections. Witnessed by the world, South Africans of all races waited patiently in line to cast their ballots, signaling the official and symbolic birth of the “new” South Africa. The subsequent years, marked initially with euphoric hopes for racial healing enabled by institutional processes such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), have instead, most recently, inspired deep concern about epidemic levels of HIV/AIDS, violent crime, state corruption, and unbridled market reforms directed at everything from property to bodies to babies. Now, seemingly beleaguered state officials deploy the mantra “TINA” (There Is No Alternative [to neoliberal development]) to fend off criticism of growing income and wealth disparities. To coincide, more or less, with the anniversary of 1994—less to commemorate than to signal something about the trajectory of the past twenty years—we are proposing an interdisciplinary, special theme section of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME) entitled “The Haunted Present: Reckoning After Apartheid” (tentative title). The special theme section is framed around questions of reckoning in the double sense of both a moral and practical accounting for historical injury alongside the challenges and failures of the no-longer “new” South Africa. Against accounts depicting the liberation era as non-violent and peaceable, more nuanced analysis we argue suggests not only that South Africa’s “revolution” was marked by both collective and individual violence—on the part of the state and the liberation movements—but that reckoning with the present demands of scholars, the media, and cultural commentators that they begin to grapple more fully with the dimensions and different figurations of South Africa’s violent colonial history. Indeed, violence and reckoning appear as two central forces in contemporary South African political, economic, and social life. In response, we are driven to pose the following questions: In the post-apartheid period, what forms of (individual, structural) violence have come to bear on South African life? How does this violence reckon with apartheid and its legacies? Does it in fact reckon with the past? How can we or should we think about violence as a response to the (failed?) reckoning of state initiatives like the TRC? What has enabled or enables aesthetic forms—literature, photography, plastic arts, and other modes of expressive culture—to respond to the difficulties of South Africa’s ongoing transition? What, in fact, would a practice or ethic of reckoning defined in the following way look like? ˈrekəniNG/ noun: • the action or process of calculating or estimating something: last year was not, by any reckoning, a particularly good one; the system of time reckoning in Babylon • a person’s view, opinion, or judgment: by ancient reckoning, bacteria are plants • archaic, a bill or account, or its settlement • the avenging or punishing of past mistakes or misdeeds: the fear of being brought to reckoning there will be a terrible reckoning (Oxford English Dictionary) Looking back on the period, just before 1994, is sobering indeed. At the time, many saw in the energies and courage of those fighting for liberation the possibilities of a post-racial, post-conflict society. Yet as much as the new was ushered in, old apartheid forms lingered. Recalling Nadine Gordimer’s invocation of Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms” more and more it seems “the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (Gramsci cited in Gordimer 1982). And even as the new began to emerge other forces—both internal and external to South Africa—redefined the conditions for transformation. The so-called “new” South Africa, as Jennifer Wenzel has argued, was really more than anything “the changing face of old oppressions” (Wenzel 2009:159). The implications for our special theme section of CSSAAME are many. We begin by exploring the gender, race, and class dimensions of contemporary South African life by way of its literatures, histories, and politics, its reversion to custom, the claims of ancestors on the living, in brief, the various cultural expressive modes in which contemporary South Africa reckons with its past and in so doing accounts, day by day, for the ways in which the present can be lived, pragmatically. This moves us some distance from the exercise in “truth and reconciliation” of the earlier post-transition years to consider more fully the nature of post-conflict, the suturing of old enmities in the present, and the ways of resolving those lingering suspicions both ordinary and the stuff of the dark night of the soul (Nelson 2009:xv).