Browsing by Subject "Globalization"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 23

Branding a global identity: labor anxieties, conspicuous consumption, and middle class culture in Hyderabad, India.
(2012-07) Aaftaab, Naheed Gina
Since India's economic liberalization in the1980s, corporations in the U.S. and Europe have been outsourcing service and computer programming jobs to urban centers in India such as Hyderabad. In this period, numerous Indian national as well as international processes have gone into making Hyderabad a "global city," where information technology (IT) jobs in multinational corporations provide new kinds of cultural capital and prestige that are shaping global Indian middle class identities. In this dissertation, I critically analyze how global neoliberal discourses encounter established, local practices, changing the previous calculus of social relations as well as refashioning particular meanings of the "global." IT professionals have to adapt quickly to take advantage of opportunities in the new economy, while also conforming to social benchmarks of job security set by previous generations. IT professionals have found ways to "brand" themselves and their careers to find a more solid foothold in a transient, transnational job sector. The process of branding involves specific kinds of soft skill training, resume building, networking, and practices outside of the professional space to be recognized as a "quality IT professional." New urban spaces of consumption such as malls, theme parks, and consumer showrooms have become iconic sites of global consumerism that seek to cater to these global, IT professionals. The significance of these landscapes is dependent on everyday, repetitive actions and narratives about consumption that highlight the city's present international role. Consumer practices play a dual role, at once the site of claiming to be globally Indian and the site of accusatory assertions of the loss of Indian traditional culture and the incursion of Western frivolity. Instead of looking at "traditional" and "Western" as opposing influences, I investigate how these concepts are produced through consumer practices and narratives of consumption. Furthermore, processes of professionalization and consumerism are incorporated into a global, modern, Indian middle class and the politics of exclusion that they deploy; a politics that recognizes some as being in synch with global and national growth, and renders large sections of the population invisible or outside of the citizenry of the Indian nation.
A comparative study of international student engagement and success based on race/ethnicity, gender, and institutional type
(2013-08) Phillips, Gareth Carlington
The study examined international students' engagement and success using NSSE 2007 data. The sample consisted of 1996 first years and 2158 seniors. These students were compared by race/ethnicity, gender, and institutional type. The study found that students' engagement differed by race/ethnicity as well as type of institution. The null hypotheses were rejected at p < .001. Blacks and Hispanics, more so than other racial/ethnic groups, exhibited different levels of success especially when using engagement and satisfaction as predictors. Males, more than females, were engaged in enriching educational experiences. Overall, institutions that are serious about improving international student success are encouraged to engage these students in meaningful on campus activities and cater to them as separate groups rather than a homogenous group.
Dictatorships and the Globalization of Repression
(2020-07) Kaire De Francisco, Jose
Dictatorships today are as violent as they were during the Cold War. This has surprised international observers, who a few years ago thought globalization would help protect human rights in these countries. Despite international efforts to hold abusive dictators accountable, human rights appear to have gotten worse in many dictatorships. To explain this puzzle, I first note how globalization threatens the political and economic interests of elites in dictatorships. In turn, elites demand compensation from the dictator. Where elites can credibly threaten the dictator with removal, the dictator is likely to increase repression to placate allies and avoid a coup. This compensation dynamic between autocrats and their ruling coalition explains why some dictatorships respond with increased violence to globalization while others do not. It also helps explain how different elements of globalization interact with each other in the domestic politics of autocracies to improve or weaken human rights.
Essays on labor mMarkets and globalization
(2014-08) Waddle, Andrea Lynn
My dissertation consists of three chapters. The common theme that unifies the chapters is the analysis of how globalization and trade impact labor market outcomes. In the first chapter, I summarize the literature on this theme and analyze the shortcomings that are present in existing works. In the early 1990s, a large body of work was developed that showed that many of the predictions of the standard Heckscher-Ohlin theory failed to hold in the data. As a result, many authors disregarded increased trade and globalization as a possible driving force behind the observed changes in labor market outcomes. However, in more recent years, authors have begun modifying new trade theories to begin to explore how trade and globalization might impact wages and unemployment through different channels. In this chapter, I summarize the innovations that have occurred along these lines, as well as the empirical support that exists for the proposed theories. The second chapter of my dissertation explores the business cycle effects of increased globalization. Over the past 20 years, following recessions, recoveries in labor markets have been slow and weak relative to their post-war average. Over the same period, the United States has become increasingly open to trade and global forces. In this chapter of the thesis, I argue that changes in labor market outcomes can be tied to increased globalization. I build a model in which increased openness to growing economies generates a downward trend in employment which is amplified by recessions, thus generating jobless recoveries. I provide empirical evidence for the relationship between globalization and labor market outcomes and I show that the model is able to qualitatively match not only the targeted changes in labor markets, but also a persistent negative trade balance and increasing income inequality. In the third chapter of my dissertation, I explore the impact that trade has upon in- vestment in technologies that are skill-augmenting and how this, in turn, impacts the relative return to skilled labor. In the decade following the Mexico-U.S. trade integration, the manufacturing skill premium rose by almost 60 percent in Mexico and by only 12 percent in the U.S. Standard trade theory predicts that when countries with different levels of skilled labor integrate, the skill premium should fall - not rise - in the skill- scarce country. In the third chapter, I reconcile theory and data by building a model in which intermediate goods are produced using rented technology. After integration, producers in Mexico begin to rent technologies from the United States, which are more advanced and, hence, more skill-intensive. This has two effects: The skill premium in Mexico rises due to adoption of the more advanced technology and the skill premium in the U.S. rises due to increased investment in this technology, which is driven by the increased marginal return on technology arising from to its adoption in Mexico. The mechanism is supported by industry-level evidence: Mexican industries which are integrated into the U.S. supply chain have higher skill premia than their non-integrated counterparts. The calibrated model can account for about two-thirds of the increase in the skill premium in each country.
Foundations of global giving
(2011-12) Longhofer, Wesley Adam
Sociologists have long been interested in the origins of generosity, altruism, and solidarity in society. Similarly, this dissertation examines the global origins of philanthropic activity and its consequences. More specifically, I situate philanthropic and charitable activity in what Boli (2006) has called a global moral order that champions virtue and positions voluntary associations, including foundations and charities, as legitimate moral actors for solving global problems (see also Schofer and Longhofer 2011). I begin by using multilevel modeling techniques to examine the effects of national context on membership in charitable and humanitarian organizations in 35 countries. I find that charitable membership is shaped by connections to world society at the country level and cosmopolitanism at the individual level. The next empirical chapter explores the global origins of philanthropic organizations. Through a statistical analysis of grantmaking foundations in a large number of countries from 1970 to 2005, I suggest that philanthropic activity derives in part from ties to world society and the rationalization of the domestic philanthropic sector through local "bridging" organizations. The final empirical chapter examines the impact foundations have on the social sectors in which they operate. Again adopting a global purview, I find that foundations have a positive impact on promoting arts institutions, improving health outcomes for children, and reducing carbon emissions. I conclude the dissertation with a discussion of what these three studies tell us about world society and the role philanthropic organizations play in its construction and enactment.
Globalizing through the vernacular: gender/sexual transnationalism and the making of sexual minorities in Eastern India
(2013-05) Dutta, Aniruddha
The dissertation explores how the globalizing expansion of LGBT and HIV-AIDS activism into global south locations such as India relies on transregional and translocal communities of gender/sexually variant persons, and yet subordinates them and associated discourses of gender/sexual difference within the tiered hierarchies of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender; particularly GTB) organizations and transnationally-funded HIV-AIDS intervention projects. Engaging with conversations and debates across transnational sexuality studies, transnational feminism, Marxist theories of capital, and literary approaches to cross-cultural translation, I argue that the globalizing expansion of gender/sexual identity and rights based politics in India takes place through mutually transformative, yet structurally constrained, intersections and translations between institutions such as funders, non-governmental organizations and the state on one hand, and networks, communities and subcultures of socio-economically marginalized gender/sexually variant persons (such as kothis, dhuranis and hijras) on the other. Such transformative interactions both create new political possibilities, and reproduce hierarchies related to location, class, caste, gender/sexual marginality and social respectability. Even as translations with subcultural languages of gender/sexual variance enable the transnational expansion and hegemony of institutional categories of identity and representation, lower class/caste communities and discourses become positioned as `local' or `vernacular' relative to national and transnational formations of activism and discourse. On one hand, the reification of communities as `sexual minorities' and as local variants of transnational categories like transgender or `men who have sex with men' results in identitarian distinctions such as the homosexual/transgender divide that selectively enable certain political possibilities, but constrain many contextually flexible lived practices and fluid subject positions that become unintelligible in terms of emerging cartographies of identity. On the other hand, liberal discourses that valorize individual choice and gender/sexual fluidity may also elide mobile negotiations with privilege and power (such as locally variable distinctions between feminine insiders and masculine outsiders) in kothi, dhurani and hijra communities. Further, dominant forms of activism based on discourses of equal rights and the private/public divide often cast lower class/caste persons and related practices as uncivil and/or criminal. Drawing upon five years of ethnographic research in eastern India, the dissertation critiques how hegemonic forms of identity and rights based politics produces lower class/caste groups as a victimized minorities and exploitable labor pools, rather than as active and full participants in the transnational movement for LGBT rights.
Health care supply chain design for emerging economies.
(2010-08) Kohnke, Emily Jane
This dissertation research is motivated by the global mismatch in the supply and demand of quality health care for underserved communities. To begin addressing the identified need for additional health care services in many communities, this dissertation unfolds a design for the health care supply chain. This design is based on the coordination constructs of access, awareness and affordability and will advance our understanding of how to increase the quality and volume of care in underserved communities by connecting the development of care to the delivery of care. The dissertation is comprised of three studies that are designed to: (i) uncover the nature, measurement and relationships between the three mechanisms (affordability, awareness and access) and propose an integrative framework to inform supply chain design for delivering quality health care to underserved communities; (ii) empirically analyze the relationships in the proposed framework and, (iii) extend the framework by examining inter-organizational relationships and roles between partners in the health care supply chain and how they influence the delivery of care. This research was conducted in collaboration with Children's HeartLink, a medical non-profit organization which partners with health care organizations in developing countries around the globe to provide health care services for individuals suffering from congenital heart conditions. The research setting for this study was the First Hospital of Lanzhou University, located in the Gansu province of China.
How to Approach and Reduce Society's Problems
(2011) Smith, Harlan M.
The insolence of the Filipinas: mothering nationalism, globalization, and literature.
(2010-12) Suarez, Harrod J
My dissertation reads diasporic Filipina/o literatures that destabilize the dominant representations which position Filipinas as "mothers" in and of the global economy and Philippine nationalism. The project is situated after the moment of US imperialism, as attempts to deliver a materially prosperous and psychologically uplifting national identity coincided with the rise of post-fordist global economic strategies, the results of which were the brokering and exporting of Filipina/os overseas. As the nation struggled to assert itself under poor and corrupt leaders, as the social unrest of anti-imperialist organizing did not wane but transformed into anti-capitalist critiques, establishing a formal global visibility for Filipina/o workers became imperative to assuage political, economic, and cultural uncertainties. The turmoil would culminate in the 1974 Presidential Decree 442, which authorized and institutionalized overseas employment as a state-managed program. The role diasporic Filipina/os play in the global economy--participating in older, traditional industries such as logging, manufacturing, and shipping, to newer service industries such as nursing, domestic help, and call centers--has been well-documented in recent scholarship, identifying the national service being performed. As numerous reports indicate, Filipina/os send more than ten billion dollars in remittances not just to families, but also to the nation. Such financing is so critical for the national economy that Philippine presidents have hailed them as both "national heroes" and "overseas investors." This workforce is not only highly gendered insofar as it is predominantly feminized, but it may be further specified as having a maternal character--literally but also, more broadly, symbolically. If nationalism and globalization work in tandem to inscribe Filipinas as a transnational, maternal underclass, what is the significance of texts that do not cohere with this inscription? My dissertation contends that in order to disrupt the authority of nationalism and globalization, which despite their differences collude to represent and employ Filipinas, one must destabilize those racialized, gendered, and sexualized representations. My dissertation thus seeks to bring to crisis the transparent and empiricist epistemologies that underwrite nationalism and globalization, outlining the ways that diasporic Filipina/o literatures critique these state-sanctioned ways of knowing and being. My first chapter, "Mother, Navel, Nation: Disseminating the Dictionary of Philippine Heteronationalist Globalization," lays out the theoretico-political scope of the project by reading Nick Joaquin's short story, "The Woman Who Had Two Navels." It is an appropriate text with which to begin, given both Joaquin's role as a leading nationalist writer in the early phase of independence as well as given the dubious rumor that circulates in the story, spread by a young woman who, along with her mother, entices and repulses various male suitors. The story represents the postwar Philippines as a gendered landscape, newly independent and luring Filipino men who have left for other shores to return--only to offend and threaten them, driving them back overseas. While it explicitly negates the role of Filipina mothers, I draw on certain moments that reveal a more complex theorization of gender and sexuality for both nationalism and global capitalism. The contemporary neoliberal consensus collaborates with Philippine nationalism to produce Filipina-as-mothers as ideal subjects according to particular racial, gender, and sexual categories. This reading contributes to the genealogy of hetero-masculinist nationalism I trace within the chapter. As many scholars have analyzed and often reproduced, "revolution" has circulated as an "unfinished" discourse emerging from within anti-imperialist mobilizing in the Philippines. Not unlike both liberal and revolutionary nationalisms around the globe, the dominant character of such discourse has proven to be profoundly and constitutively heteropatriarchal. The mourning that is concomitant with the notion of an "unfinished" or "incomplete" "revolution" can thus be understood as a mourning and failure of native masculinities to protect their families, women, and land. Building on postcolonial feminist critiques of nationalism as well as recent conceptualizations of the rhizomatic, biopolitical field of global empire, the chapter critiques nationalism not only for its unexamined heteropatriarchy, but also its potential obsolescence given the complicity of revolutionary and liberal Philippine nationalisms with global capital. My second chapter, "Letting the Cat(achresis) Out of the Bag: Transnational Filipina Motherhood," reads two texts that represent motherhood in distinct ways. In Eleanor Coppola's published diary of the filming of Apocalypse Now, the narrator aspires to overcome the inequality between her and her husband's professional work by conceptualizing an ambitious marriage dependent on imperialist strategies and settings. Her writings probe the assertion of an empowered identity that, strikingly, only seeks that liberation in the Philippines; when returning to the national-domestic space, she appears content to return to her own national-domestic-maternal duties. Rizalina, the young Filipina mother of Jessica Hagedorn's novel Dream Jungle, the second half of which fictionalizes the Apocalypse Now film production, distances herself from maternal, nationalist, and imperialist norms. In this way, she resists being recodified into a visible, legible, rational representation that reproduces either Coppola's imperialist feminism or an equally unexamined nationalist feminism. The terms of her liberation are not spelled out, but neither can one deny the happiness she claims; what can be specified is her obsession with a white tiger that is flown in for the film shoot. That cat, rather than a Filipina elder or Coppola's fictional counterpart, inspires Lina most of all. In doing so, Lina performs a catachresis on the production of racialized, gendered freedom. My third chapter, "Carlos in Medford and Gabe in Meridan: Attempted Erasures of the Filipina Mother for Hetero/Homonational Masculinity," examines two novels, Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart and Brian Ascalon Roley's American Son, to consider how multiple efforts to represent freedom and agency draw from and reproduce imperialist and heteronormative authority. Even as Roley's novel stages an unannounced but noticeable homonationalism--which can be understood as a contemporary revision of the heteronationalism of Bulosan's novel--it is quickly rescinded back into a heteropatriarchal space. Neither narrator can liberate themselves on the grounds of masculinist identifications, whether heteronational or homonational. Whereas the masculine characters of both texts thus struggle in the attempt to speak for themselves, the mother in the second text recognizes the dilemmas representational strategies pose. Many characters try to speak for her, on her behalf, but she renders their attempts futile and does not aspire to represent herself. She rejects representations that interpret her as a redemptive figure for either national heteronormativity or globalization. Such a move does not mean she accepts invisibility; to the contrary, her presence persistently disrupts the text and stymies its efforts at resolution. The fourth and final chapter, "Learning to Listen: Nation, Film, and Children in Kidlat Tahimik's Mababangong Bangungot," reads the eponymous film, which demands critical audiences who listen as well as they watch. I argue that listening to a film is just as significant as watching it; in spite of what seems like a formalist argument, I examine in what ways such an approach intervenes in the production of Philippine history and Filipina/o bodies, especially as those bodies get translated for the interests of nationalism and globalization. In the film, an overprivileging of the visual aids and abets the film's masculinist nationalism, which is promoted as a liberatory alternative to globalization and imperialism. In this chapter, the visual pathos of the Filipina mother--neglected, then remembered, by her son after warning him of the seductions of the west--fails to complicate her identity, employing her strictly for the purposes of nationalist mourning. But in the aural rendering of Filipina/o children, which works in sharp contrast to their visual rendering, it is possible to discern a critique of the film's heteronormative nationalism. That is, by listening to the film, one can hear a moment of liberatory potential not in the service of heteronationalist global empire.
International News Production and Globalization
(Global Media Journal -- Canadian Edition, 2011) Belair-Gagnon, Valerie
Internationalization of the MBA curriculum and its impact on building students' global competencies
(2014-08) Carlson, Oksana
With the expansion of international business activities, business schools' leaders and administrators come to a higher understanding of the needs of employers and explore multiple strategies for MBA curriculum internationalization. The process of globalization has changed the skills, knowledge, and competencies expected of the MBA graduates. Studies suggest that corporate leaders expect MBA graduates to not only have technical expertise, but also to understand the dynamics of the globalized business world, to communicate and manage effectively across cultures, and to create innovative solutions for global business challenges (AACSB International, 2011; Ghemawat, 2008; Pitt, Berthon, & Robson, 1997).While many business schools define their mission as educating global business leaders who will make a difference in the world, little or no agreement has been achieved in defining the aspects and components of the MBA curriculum that would help to achieve this goal. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods, this study provides a macro- and micro level analysis of the curriculum internationalization strategies adopted by leading business schools in the U.S. By employing a benchmarking analysis of the top MBA programs in the U.S., this study examines the current trends and best practices in MBA curriculum internationalization. The study also employs the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in a more detailed analysis of curriculum internationalization. The new innovative curriculum of the Global MBA program was developed with the insights and recommendations of employers and academic leaders to reflect the needs of the ever-changing globalized business world. By employing a tracer study methodology and a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods, this study examines the impact of the internationalized curriculum on building students' global competencies.The data suggest that MBA graduates perceived a significant change in their global competency level before and after the MBA program, and that this change is largely a result of the MBA curriculum and their experiences in the program.Through the combination of the benchmarking survey, analysis of the curricula documents of the leading MBA programs in the U.S., the survey of the MBA graduates in the selected business school, and a series of interviews, a deeper understanding is developed of the importance of the global competencies for MBA graduates. Subsequently the impact of the internationalized MBA curriculum on building students' global competencies is investigated. Broader implications of the study recommend that business schools consider the employers' needs and expectations, and use a systems approach in developing curriculum internationalization strategies.
Interrogating utopia: the science fiction of the German Democratic Republic in an age of globalization.
(2012-04) David, Thomas P.
The science fiction of the GDR addresses the nature of the technologically-advanced society that has emerged since the end of the Cold War and the concomitant economic, social, and political processes that today are collectively designated by the concept of globalization. It does so, because science fiction is a genre of modernity that innately considers issues of technology, science, and progress through the technique of temporal dislocation. GDR science fiction is one national variant of this modern genre that maintains the prerequisites and conventions that define it across national borders and on the global scale that is this genre's traditionally acknowledged ambit. This dissertation comparatively investigates the thematic and formal ways in which specific science fiction novels and short stories from the period 1979 - 2000 by GDR authors narrativize key elements of the discourse of globalization. By examining the correspondence in theoretical understanding of the genre between East and West, and providing comparative literary examples, it shows how these works are representative examples of the SF genre that utilize the concepts of temporal contraction and technological dependence that are also manifest in the discourse of globalization. Systematically treating both discourses through the juxtaposition of science fiction text and globalization theory, it demonstrates how these socialist narratives both foreshadow and explore the discourse of globalization from the local perspective of the GDR in a global world that was not yet determined by the events of 1989 and the end of the Cold War. The dissertation consists of three core chapters in which a specific GDR story is examined in relation to a particular aspect of globalization. These aspects are surveillance, access, and annexation. Alternately, they could be described as globalization as a political project, as a chimerical projection, and as an imperialistic project of transnational Americanization. Through close textual analysis that employs examples from the commercial media landscape, it illustrates the ways in which these themes are manifested in GDR SF and examines how science fiction has become a customary practice and general hallmark of the era. Science fiction and globalization are not only mutually compatible, but are also logically analogous.
Lindo y Querido: Nationalism, Latin American Modernity, and the Contested Terrain of the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games
(2022-05) Campos, Edgar
My dissertation illustrates the intertwining of sport, culture, and politics between the Olympic platform and the cultural politics surrounding the legitimacy of the imagined community of México. The México City 1968 Olympic Games marks an unparalleled case study of the lengths and challenges that a post-colonial nation experiences in their attempts for legitimation, modernization, and acceptance on the world stage. Exploring the Olympic journey of México, from the bidding process, hosting, and reception (internal and external) to the present-day memories and legacies, illustrate how a post-colonial nation navigates international relations and engages with the socio-political forces of nationalism, modernity, and globalization. My dissertation and work are grounded in the broader literature of cultural and political sociology. Culture is a central focus of my research, and I care to understand the real material consequences of political decisions made by leaders in México and the West. Within these traditions, I pay special attention to and study ideas, knowledge, and popular culture as they operate as fields of contested terrain. I engage with symbolic interactionism at the macroscale to help situate the cultural-political work being done by elites with Goffman’s work of presentation of self/stigma helping understand how Mexican elites navigated Mexico’s stigmatized image. In this instance, nation-states are social actors whose government leaders operate in meaningful interaction on behalf of their citizens. Drawing from historical methods, semiotics, textual analysis, site analysis, visual analysis, and extensive secondary literature help paint a nuanced picture of an event that impacted not just Méxican and Olympic history but also global history. Situating the research in the multifaceted context of the Cold War and the Grand Historical Narrative was key. I argue that nations’ stigma and impression management elucidate how nation-states participate in symbolic interactionism to distract, alter, and change their spoiled identities by interacting in key institutional spaces such as the Olympics. México City 1968 is an example of a post-colonial participating in rather than being a recipient of nationalism, modernity, and globalization and demonstrates how their participation was or was not legitimated.
Literary cartographies: Lu Xun and the production of world literature.
(2011-03) Dooghan, Daniel M.
This dissertation addresses three critical issues in the emergence of world literature as both a scholarly discipline and a pedagogical project. Using the prominent modern Chinese writer Lu Xun as a case study, the project challenges the unstated assumptions that have thus far undergirded world literature. First, it probes the tacit acceptance of translation as a necessity for the teaching of world literature. However, rather than predictably but pointlessly calling for the necessity of reading in the original, I instead argue that the history of a text's translation can be as instructive as the text itself. Looking at both Lu Xun's translations of Western works into Chinese, and translations of Lu Xun's works into Western languages reveals compelling stories about the influence of imperialism and the Cold War on the bidirectional reception of these texts. Second, the dissertation interrogates the aims of world literature as an area of study. Rather than casting it as an inclusive mode of representation, I envision world literature as a means of theorizing globalization on a cultural level, free of crassly economic paradigms. I analyze Lu Xun's exceptionally broad reading of both Chinese and Western texts to articulate an aesthetic epistemology that enables the development of high-resolution models to chart the movement of texts and ideas. Finally, I position Lu Xun neither as a Chinese writer, nor as an ill-defined "world" author, but as an active participant in both national and transnational literary discourses. As such, he serves as a counterexample to the tacit reliance on national categories found in many anthologies of world literature.
Local Implications of Globalization
(Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, 2013-05-14) Amevor, Ameido; Clancy, Kevin; Winger, Rachael
Modernity, Gender And “Missing” Women: A Holistic Examination Of Development And Son Preference Connections
(2018-07) Svec, Joseph
Asia’s “missing” women, estimated to over 100 million, is a demographic manifestation of economic and cultural forces that collide in urban and industrial development transitions. National modernization or economic development is thought to undermine the social premise of pre-natal sex selection as urban and industrial development transforms rigid patriarchal family structures toward more gender egalitarian systems. Yet, the ratio of boys to girls born has experienced increasing skews in many contexts that undergo such modern development transitions. Thus, the dynamics of social normative change in a context of economic development transitions remains relatively ambiguous. In this research, I problematize key assumptions in modernization theory by distinguishing economic and gender normative contexts as overlapping but unique systems. I first conduct a time-series regression analysis of sex ratio skews for 170 countries from 1970 to 2012. This global analysis examines the extent to which national socioeconomic contexts and ties to global discourses on population and development correspond with sex ratio dynamics. I find that economic factors are mostly unrelated with sex ratio dynamics and contrary to expectations, increasing global ties are positively related with sex ratio skews. While the global-historical analysis shows little support for modernization hypotheses, economic structural associations with sex selective behaviors may be obscured by the nuanced dynamics of economic change and gender normative change. Thus, the second study employs a multilevel logistic regression of sex selective fertility behaviors nested within economic and gender-based violence contexts. Using six Demographic and Health Surveys in the Balkan and south Caucasus regions, I specifically link son preference behaviors with intimate partner violence based on the theoretical parallels between son preference foundations and justifications for wife-beating. I find that son preference fertility behavior is positively linked with increased normalization of wife-beating but negatively related with higher levels of women’s labor force participation. The third and final empirical study uses household data from the China Family Panel Studies to assess the connection between modernization and son preference attitudes for individuals. Using an ordinal logistic regression model for a self-reported importance of carrying the family name, I observe stronger support for modernization hypotheses, particularly that support for patrilineal traditions is lower when women have higher levels of education. Overall, the multidimensional approach in this dissertation highlights some of the tensions in the modernity and missing women phenomenon. Mainly, I observe that sex ratio and son preference dynamics are sensitive to the level of analysis. This indicates that individual attitudes and behaviors that contribute to sex ratio skews are a multidimensional phenomenon that is a function of individuals, contexts and institutions.
Non-Aligned Features: The Coincidence of Modernity and the Screen in Indonesia
(2016-12) Yngvesson, Dag
In Non-Aligned Features: The Coincidence of Modernity and the Screen in Indonesia, I deploy extensive archival, ethnographic, and participatory research on Indonesian mass media as a critical intervention in the study of cinema. Examining Indonesian cinema from independence in 1949 until the present, I focus in particular on complicating understandings of how Western technologies, techniques and ideas have functioned as catalysts or determinants for the development of both nationalism and national cinemas worldwide. I examine local cinematic canons that bear the imprint of centuries of engagement with various transnational networks and forces. In the view that emerges, the pervasive politics of left-right alignment specific to the Cold War appear radically shifted – not simply, however, to a place “between” the binary poles of the United States and the Soviet Union, or within the triad of classical, oppositional, and Third cinemas that articulate their struggle as an epic of superpowers. Instead, following many of the Indonesian cineastes and critics I study, I endeavor to open the reading, viewing, present to an older domain of aesthetics and commodity exchange in which the linear arrangement of events leading to and from the rise of capitalism in Europe is made to coincide with other probable causes of the modern. In this regard, I engage in particular with the discourses and modes of address of Javanese wayang – the conceptual-textual center of shadow play and a critical platform for Indonesian art, politics and historiography, whose narratives and screens are always positioned to “coincide” with the present state of affairs. Far from buried or brushed aside in contemporary geopolitics, I argue that the methods and perspectives underpinning media like wayang continue to act as filters that critically influence the circulation and absorption of aesthetic and political ideas. The lineage of cinema’s development in Indonesia thus defined a form and sphere of influence neither here nor there, then nor now in the broadest terms of film theory and practice.
Post-Soviet Americans: Familial and National Belonging for Russian Adoptees in the U.S.
(2023-08) Gulya, Lisa
This dissertation focuses on the following research questions about Russian adoption in the U.S.: First, how do disputes to claim and care for children play out in national politics? Second, how do adoptive parents and adoptees do family across differences of age and national origin, particularly with older child adoptees? Finally, where and to whom do adoptees feel they belong? In Chapter 3, I demonstrate that the figure of the disabled or “special needs” Russian child as belonging in the U.S. appeared in both the U.S. and Russia press responses to the Dima Yakovlev Law banning adoptions to the U.S. Focusing on disabled children’s supposedly happy lives served as a rallying cry to continue international adoptions. This focus on disabled children perpetuated an approach of being child-centered that was objectifying rather than inviting children and adoptees to participate in discussions and policy decisions affecting their lives. In Chapter 4, I highlight parents’ experiences of adopting from Russia, analyzing how they give accounts (1) of the process of drawing boundaries around who now counts as family and (2) what activities the family shares as adoptive parents work to transform adoptees into American children and to do culture-keeping (or not) as a family now putatively Russian-American. I demonstrate the complexity in how adoptive families decide who counts as family in the cases in which adoptees have biological siblings. In Chapter 5, I forefront the stories of Russian adoptees on their own journeys and negotiations within U.S. families and highlight a counterhegemonic discourse of some adoptees’ ambivalence in coming to the U.S. Adoptees may have been most familiar with and preferred communal living with children and caregivers who shared their culture and language. While their life chances may have been limited were they to have stayed in institutional care and then aged out, childhood studies encourages taking seriously children’s own perspectives. I suggest continuing to ask how adoptees can be invited to participate as decision-makers in their own lives, defining family, care, and belonging for themselves and having meaningful opportunities to connect with and critique their countries and cultures of origin and adoption.
Producing the global imaginary: academic knowledge, globalization and the making of the world.
(2010-05) Kamola, Isaac Alexander
My dissertation examines how the concept of globalization has transformed the way social scientists think about the world. I argue that while globalization is often studied as an empirical fact, it should instead be studied as a social imaginary produced within asymmetrical relations of academic knowledge production. I develop this argument by diagnosing a set of contradictions and tensions within the globalization literature. For example, scholars based in the U.S. and Europe typically claim that globalization is a universal trend--even while treating Africa and African states as anomalous. I argue that Africa is often represented as "not globalized" because African scholars have been structurally excluded from the production of knowledge about globalization. On the one hand, the U.S. academy is a key site for the mass production of knowledge about globalization--as exemplified by changes in research funding, the flourishing of Global Studies departments, and the proliferation of study abroad programs in colleges and universities across the country. In contrast, African universities--including relatively resource-rich South African universities--are being remade into development institutions designed to respond to a world already imagined as "global." These asymmetrical relations of knowledge production mean that Africa is represented as particular, exceptional and "local." Studying "the global" as an imaginary produced within a highly stratified political economy of higher education makes it possible to investigate the power relations at work and the political stakes in the academic production of concepts like "global governance," "global economy," and "global development
The quality of women's employment around the globe
(2012-10) Kim, Min Zee
Considering women's increased levels of employment globally, this project addresses a crucial question: When, if ever, is women's increased employment linked to women getting good jobs? Extensive research shows that women-friendly policies at the national level and national integration into the global economy increase women's employment. However, it is unclear if either or both of these factors are linked to the quality of women's employment. This dissertation research argues that the way women are incorporated into the labor force is critical in determining if increased female labor force participation is linked to women's representation in higher status positions. This dissertation research integrates global and national policy theories to examine their implications on the quality of women's employment, utilizing quantitative pooled time-series analyses on women's relative chances to be employed in two higher-status occupational groups--managerial/administrative and professional/technical occupations. As key independent variables, original indicators of anti-discrimination and maternity leave policies that are comparable across developed and developing countries are created. This study not only provides a crucial test of those theories that suggest women's increased labor force participation leads to women's employment in high quality jobs and those that suggest the opposite, but also explains the factors that make one or the other outcome more likely. This research also advances sociological theories about the links between globalization, state policies, and actual employment outcomes on the ground by integrating state-centered and global theories of women's employment and testing the scope of theories in both developed and developing countries.This research finds that women's employment policies are important to the quality of women's employment, particularly in developing countries, as well as the levels of gender prejudice. Then, I discuss academic and policy implications of the main findings. The cross-national, historical research design makes findings from this project particularly applicable to diverse national contexts.

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