Browsing by Subject "Capitalism"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Building the normal body: disability and the techno-makeover.
    (2012-04) Beitiks, Emily Smith
    By bringing science and technology studies together with disability studies and American studies, my work uses interdisciplinary methods to question popular assumptions about the normal body and what constitutes "progress." My dissertation uncovers the cultural stories we tell about disabled bodies normalized with science and technology. I ask: how does mainstream U.S. culture promote an understanding of disability as an imperfection to be corrected for the good of the nation and for technological progress? While these stories are inextricably linked to a cultural understanding of disability, I suggest there is something bigger at stake; disability helps sanitize widespread concerns about technological dependency. Technologies that normalize disabilities are promoted as icons of progress, but I argue technological progress does not equal social progress. I call these stories of people with disabilities being normalized "techno-makeovers." I situate techno-makeovers in several cultural locations: first, reality makeover television; second, news stories following the charitable "gift" of a techno-makeover to people with disabilities in the Global South; third, political discourse over stem cell research where the promise of techno-makeovers, for Michael J. Fox in particular, drives research; and fourth, in the disability technology industry, which often develops and markets wheelchairs and prostheses with a limited understanding of disability. Through these sites, my dissertation illustrates the many realms in which we repeat the same story about disability - as always in need of high tech normalcy above all else, leaving little room to prioritize social change that goes deeper than the techno-fix. As we celebrate that technology makes the body "right," it becomes harder to ask what was "wrong" to begin with.
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    I'm Not Yelling
    (2024-04-06) Polikoff, Whalen
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    Revolution in the Countryside": Shifting Financial Paradigms Amid the Rhetoric of the "Farm Crisis," 1925-1933
    (2014-07) Stevens, Shannon Victoria
    This dissertation uses historical recovery and rhetorical analysis to argue that the Farmer Labor Party in Minnesota in the 1920s and early 1930s was successful in its efforts to change the debt relationship between the farmer, banker, and the state. The party's rhetorical success helped originate a financial paradigm shift that lead to the creation in 1933 of national banking and debt structures for the agricultural sector that still exist. This dissertation fills in a significant gap in scholarship related to discussions of agricultural finance in the decade prior to the passage of the Farm Credit Act of 1933 and the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, which includes the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act of 1933. There are additional insights into early efforts at regulation-free financialization of agriculture and farm mortgages; a map for social movement scholars and practitioners interested in altering debt relations and facilitating changes at a federal legislative level; and contextualization of New Deal agricultural interventions.
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    State building, capitalism, and development: state-run industrial enterprises in Fengtian, 1920-1931.
    (2010-10) Jiang, Yu
    During the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), Western powers and Japan forced China to open its market and flooded the country with goods produced by large-scale industrial enterprises. The Chinese found that with military defeat, they lost not only political sovereignty but also economic interests. The situation was even worse in Northeast China (often called Manchuria in English), where the Russians and the Japanese built railroads and seaports and gained extraterritoriality over large stretches of land. With such advantage, the two imperialist powers, especially the Japanese, dominated the Northeastern economy. For the Chinese, the only way out was to establish native industrial enterprises. The Chinese regional state in the Northeast (known as the Fengtian Clique, 1916-1931) most urgently wanted to develop a modern economy, because it was the only viable way to generate wealth and strengthen the state in the long run. Due to the lack of a full-fledged bourgeoisie, the regional state had to be very hands-on in economic modernization - it established and managed large-scale industrial enterprises. In the process, the state became the largest business owner and the forerunner in capitalist enterprises. In this study, I investigate two industrial enterprises established under the leadership of Fengtian Civil Governor Wang Yongjiang - the Fenghai Railway Company and the Fengtian Textile Mill. These state-run enterprises were joint-stock companies strictly formulated according to the Company Law, which were based on Western laws. The provincial government, as the largest shareholder and the manager, ran the companies rigorously in a rational and profit-oriented way and competed in the open market. This phenomenon requires us to re-think capitalism - its existing paradigms and generalizations should be re-examined and new theoretical possibilities explored. I tentatively propose the concept of capitalism embedded in state bureaucracy, as I see in the two state-run companies. To wit, it was capitalism not led by the bourgeois class. The state became a capitalist in its endeavors to develop regional economy and to strengthen itself. For Karl Marx, capitalism was essentially defined by a new mode of production, in which the bourgeoisie own the means of production while the workers are deprived of it. He therefore often referred to the form of society created by capitalist mode of production "bourgeois society." For Max Weber, the fundamental nature of capitalism is rationality, mainly embodied in "rational capital accounting." Weber better grasped the essence of capitalism, because his conceptualization stripped it of the unnecessary class-based elements. Through empirical examination of two provincial enterprises in Fengtian, I demonstrate that rationality was indeed the driving force of capitalism. Under certain circumstances, rationality can bring about capitalism, without the sociopolitical and economic preconditions such as private ownership of means of production, highlighted by Marx and even Weber. The capitalism in Northeast China during 1920s is quite different from the conventional, Marxian understandings of Chinese capitalism, which have centered on the bourgeois class. To better understand capitalism, I believe, we have to make a clear distinction between its origins in Western Europe and its replication in other parts of the world - the trajectories are bound to be vastly different. If the gestation of the world's first capitalism as an economic force was a prolonged process, necessarily concomitant with profound social or cultural transitions, as elaborated by Marx and Weber, its replication around the world often takes place more quickly and easily, with only small changes in the sociopolitical context. Through this empirical study, I hope to show that capitalist development can unfold in highly distinctive and localized manners.
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    Uncovering and recovering the popular romance novel
    (2008-11) Kamble, Jayashree
    Popular romance novels are a twentieth- and twenty-first century literary form defined by a material association with pulp publishing, a conceptual one with courtship narrative, and a brand association with particular author-publisher combinations. The theme of romantic love in romance novels forms the basis of a drama involving the extra-private worlds of the protagonists (financial, civic, and familial). The framework of the romantic relationship allows the genre to study the challenges these spheres face over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A comprehensive look at the genre's history and diversity, as well as its reception in different readership communities, undergirds this analysis of three tropes involving the romance hero--capitalist, soldier, and heterosexual. The analysis proves the genre's struggle with an economic, political, and social ideology that has gathered force over the last hundred years. Though popular as well as academic critiques of the genre disparage its formulaic sexual content or its attachment to the ideology of middle class morality, its very nature as "commodity literature" helps challenge conservative thought on capitalism, national defense strategies, and sexual orientation. The dissertation also considers the impact of the dust jackets and paperback covers of romance novels on non-romance readers. A survey of this material history suggests that it has contributed to derogatory opinions on the genre; in particular, the genre has been indicted because of the "bodice-ripper" covers that adorn many romance novels rather than for the actual content. A look at reader and author discussions on the genre, alongside textual analysis of selected works, proves that romance fiction is not fixated on a clichéd plot and descriptions of sexual intercourse; it involves complex themes that are disguised as stereotypical genre elements. Readers' online debates demonstrate how this romance "formula," albeit a function of the genre's commodification, engages them in addressing quandaries related to societal preoccupations. The concluding study of romance reading in India further supports the possibility of multiple, even liberating, readings that can empower romance readers.