Browsing by Subject "Labor"

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‘Açúcar nem Sempre Doce’: Reinvestment, Land, and Gendered Labor in a ‘New’ Mozambique
(2017-12) Lazzarini, Alicia
“'Açucar nem Sempre Doce': Reinvestment, Land, and Gendered Labor in a 'New' Mozambique” analyzes contemporary investment in Mozambique, Southern Africa. Capitalizing on the idea of the continent as ‘rising’ and a ‘last frontier’ of investment, after 16 years of civil conflict Mozambique has sought international financing to rehabilitate the nation’s sugar industry. The Xinavane Sugar Mill, a former colonial estate and today’s largest sugar producer, has played a crucial role in this effort. While lauded for its reinvestment success, the dissertation asks what the ‘re’ in Xinavane’s rehabilitation signifies, and its importance to understanding the contemporary nation. Utilizing multi-sited ethnographic and archival research, the dissertation interrogates codifications of social difference through land dispossession, forced labor migrations, and spatial divisions of raced and gendered labor in the production of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ space. Enrolling Xinavane as an entry point to explore colonial legacy in the increasingly investment oriented nation, the dissertation argues that sugar’s rehabilitation draws centrally on, and reformulates, violent forms of colonial industry and rule. Ultimately, the dissertation investigates how space and place are produced in African historical specificity, and how social inequality is reconfigured in active relationship to it.
African American women working in the Twin Cities during the mid-twentieth century: discovering their vocational identity.
(2010-03) Kelly, Sharon F
Existing scholarship has no examination of attributing the discourse on vocational identity to African American women, which in this study, has been defined as what a woman ought to be and do. African American women have been a subject of scholarly inquiry on having the longest history of paid work. This qualitative dissertation contains their narrative excerpts on working in the Twin Cities during the mid-twentieth century (1945-1985) from interviews with seventeen women aged 65 to 87. Analyzed topics were the concept of vocation, the ideology of vocation within the intersections of race, gender, and class related to paid and unpaid work. Hermeneutic philosophy advanced by Gadamer (1960/1975) formed the methodological approach to elicit themes of their perceived vocational identity.
Am I In Labor?
(2008-10-16) Smith, Tim
Understanding the signs of labor and how to seek appropriate help is important to decrease unnecessary visits as well as decreasing delay for medical treatment.
Before the Sun Rises: Contesting Power and Cultivating Nations in the Colorado Beet Fields
(2017-06) Pérez, Bernadette
This dissertation analyzes how Colorado’s sugar beet industry, one of the most important agricultural industries in the American West before World War II, was built through the expansion of an exclusionary, settler colonial American nation-state and the racialization and criminalization of migrant workers. It does not look only to elites to tell this story. Through multi-sited research in U.S. and Mexican archives, it privileges the perspectives of diverse agricultural working communities. Beet workers contested and creatively appropriated hegemonic and colonial visions of nation, land, industrial modernity, gender, labor, indigeneity, and race. From rural Colorado, they shaped the improvisational nature of state power and American capitalism.
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.
Chattel Land: Legal and Labor Histories of Reclamation in Singapore
(2020-07) Fok, Beverly
After fifty years of aggressive augmentation, reclaimed land now makes up a quarter of Singapore’s total landmass. Cut out of sea, this artificial land aspires to cut the chain of causality: to self-found and so give law to itself (auto-nomos). How to analytically capture that gesture of self-authoring? From what vantage point does one study an object like reclamation whose structure is that of recursion? This is the challenge—at once methodological and theoretical—to which my dissertation responds. I proceed first by asking: what exactly is being reclaimed in reclamation? Why should the creation of “new” land need to be enacted in the idiom of a “re,” that is, as a re-taking, a retrieval, or a return? Though reclamation purports to create land “from sea,” key to this land-making is not saltwater but sand and labor, both of which Singapore imports in vast quantities from its South, East, and Southeast Asian neighbors. Harnessing those flows, reclamation would appear to put the very ground itself in motion. Foreign coastlines are dismantled, ferried piecemeal, then reassembled into new land in Singapore by migrant workers on barges. In the process, land paradoxically becomes chattel. What then becomes of chattel—including certain forms of labor? A tentative answer might be obtained, I argue, by looking to the legal and labor histories that inform this present-day fabrication of mobile land. Thus the dissertation rehabilitates a link between today’s migrant labor and its earlier prefiguration, colonial convict labor, which was first tasked with creating new land in the island’s interior. Just as today’s reclaimed land needs labor’s upkeep to fend off the tides, interior land needed constant servicing to prevent its return to the jungle. Where convict labor’s lot was “imprisonment in transportation, beyond sea, for life,” reclamation workers, confined in vessels, trace an unending circuit between dredge sites at sea and fill sites near land. By situating reclamation within those longer-standing political economies of extraction, I show that mobile land—made here to be eternally remade against rising seas—is not “new” and cannot be claimed, but rather must always be re-claimed, even in the very first instance.
Containing the Ship of State: Managing Mobility in an Age of Logistics
(2018-07) Chua, Charmaine
This dissertation argues that global logistical circulation, although often taken for granted as a banal economic process, is a political project central to the making of world order. To make this argument, it examines the social and political economic impacts of the concomitant rise of logistical management and shipping containerization as twin operations intensifying the global circulation of commercial capital. Since the 1960s, businesses have increasingly experimented with just-in-time logistical techniques to speed the realization of surplus value, leading to the rise of global transoceanic networks of distribution that reorganize commercial circulation across distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies. As logistical management systems have sought to regularize, standardize, and create flexible networks for circulating goods across vast distances around the world, they have become crucial to the expanded reproduction of capital. Accordingly, states have also adopted logistics-oriented growth strategies, investing in organizing and securing a socio-spatial order that produces a world safe for the movement of commercial capital, often in ways that inhibit the social and spatial mobility of vulnerable populations that live and work along global supply chains. The empirical focus of the dissertation is a multi-sited ethnographic study of the Trans-Pacific shipping passage between the US and China. Understanding logistics as both a material practice and calculative rationality, this dissertation employs an ethnographic approach to interrogate the effects of logistics’ global rise through four cuts: 1) A theoretical and historical analysis of the rise of logistics management and shipping containerization in the 1960s, 2) the securitization of goods movement in US maritime cargo policy, 3) the expansion of logistical infrastructure across the world’s oceans and in Los Angeles and Singapore, and 4) the seafaring labor process. My overarching claim is that logistical practices and rationalities exacerbate growing and often contradictory tensions between the mobility of capital and the containment of people and infrastructure that facilitate global circulation. Rather than understand containment as a static process of sequestration or enclosure that impedes the ability for capital and people to circulate, processes of containment have gained fundamentally productive functions that intensify and facilitate, rather than prevent or deter the long-distance expansion of capitalist networks. In this way, logistics produces a set of relations in which moving the world’s goods across space comes to be understood as normative and desirable, while containing the human lives that do this work is seen as necessary and productive.
Essays in macroeconomic labor markets.
(2012-08) Michaud, Amanda Marie
In this thesis I study labor market dynamics in a macroeconomic context. The first chapter infers a theory of employment using the differences in wage and employment outcomes of job changers. This theory is used to understand differences in levels of unemployment and predict the effect of policy prohibiting employment discrimination against the unemployed. The second chapter examines the evolution of employment volatility relative to output in the US over the past half century. I find the increase is driven by certain demographic subgroups that can be thought of as highly skilled. I use this variation to see if a theory of increased skill transferability can account for the overall macro increase in relative employment volatility. The final chapter, joint with Jacek Rothert, proposes a link between government housing policy and savings in China. We construct a model of learning by doing in exports and find that optimal government policy restricting residential construction raises employment and output in the tradeable sector. This produces both a current account surplus and can be rationalized as benevolent because of the growth externality in learning by doing.
Essays in Macroeconomics
(2014-07) Takayama, Naoki
This thesis is composed of three separate essays. In the first essay of this thesis, I study the underlying mechanism behind the decision on living arrangements and household formation. The decisions to leave home and to marry are critical decisions that are at the foundation of family formation with tradeoffs between the benefits from parental altruism and the advantages of marriage. This research uses large-scale micro data on Japan to study both issues jointly. This paper proposes three possible drivers in the mechanism: (1) the strong economy of scale in Japan generated by high living cost, (2) the weak bargaining position of women on the living arrangements when they marry, and (3) the gender wage gap and the career interruption cost for women. The results suggest that high living cost discourage people to marry and live without parents and the bargaining structure encourage them to stay single and live with their own parents. The wage structure seems to have relatively weaker effects. In addition, the estimates on the preference suggest that individuals dislike living with parents-in-law and desire to leave parents' home, while marrying potential spouse is preferable. In the second essay of this thesis, Satoshi Tanaka and I study the implication of the child support enforcement (CSE) policy. The child support enforcement policies, aimed at protecting out-of-wedlock children from financial disadvantages, brought unexpected changes in individuals' marriage and fertility behaviors during the 1980s and the 1990s. Our estimates from state-year panel data show that in states with strict CSE there has been a significant decrease in non-marital births and a significant increase in marital births. Taking into account all these changes, what are the effects of CSE on children's welfare? To answer this question, we build a heterogeneous-agent model that features endogenous marriage and child-investment decisions. Exploiting the state-level variation in enforcement, we estimate it using the National Vital Statistics Report data. We find that men's increased willingness to marry is the driving force behind the shift from non-marital births to marital births. As evidence for the mechanism, we show that the number of marriages has risen in the states with strict CSE during the same period, consistent with the model's implication. Our model predicts that a large increase in child investment comes through a secondary effect of CSE: the shift from non-marital births to marital births increases child investment through its income effect. In the last essay of this thesis, Bernabe Lopez-Martin and I study the long-run consequences of recessions for young individuals and the impact of government taxation. Recessions generate large increases in youth unemployment rates and young unemployed workers suffer significant losses in terms of the expected present discounted value of their labor earnings. We build a life cycle model with on-the-job human capital accumulation and aggregate and idiosyncratic productivity shocks (extended to consider ex-ante heterogeneous workers). The unemployment rate for young workers is higher and we find an important quantitative impact of the tax-wedge (consistent with cross-country empirical estimates): in countries where the tax-wedge is higher, unemployment rates are amplified, particularly for young workers. We compute the long-term earnings losses of individuals that lose their job in different states of the economy and find that losses are bigger: (1) in worse aggregate states of the economy, (2) for younger individuals, (3) in economies with a higher tax wedge, (4) for ex-ante lower ability individuals.
Essays On Racial Inequality In The Labor Market
(2024-04) Treanor, Caitlin
This dissertation studies issues related to racial inequality in the labor market. The first two chapters focus on the impact of racially segregated referral networks on inequality and aggregate welfare, while the final chapter focuses on differences in returns to work experience and the supply of labor between black and white workers in recent decades. The first chapter shows that there are racial differences in the composition of referral networks and the use of referral networks by occupation. In particular, non-college black and white workers in the United States who obtain a job via referral display substantial social segregation, using same-race contacts around 90% of the time. While non-college black and white workers use referrals at a similar rate overall, black workers use referrals for higher-skill and higher-paying occupations at a lower rate than white workers. I also document racial differences in occupational choice, with white workers sorting into higher-skill occupations. The following chapter connects and rationalize these observations by incorporating a referral-based matching function into a standard search and match model with occupational choice, heterogeneous ability levels, free entry, and wages determined by Nash bargaining. Social segregation can lead to differences in occupational choice by race, and thus wage and employment inequality, in the steady state. After calibrating the model to examine black and white workers in the United States, the estimates show that racially biased networks alone can generate a black-white wage gap of 1.66 percent and an employment gap of 0.74 percentage points. Moving from the segregated to the desegregated steady state harms the majority white workers while helping the minority black workers, resulting in a decrease in aggregate welfare. In the final chapter I utilize individual fixed effects combined with an instrumental variables approach to document the extent to which returns to work experience differ for black and white workers; I then use a life-cycle model with a learning-by-doing human capital production function to assess the consequences of these differences for the supply of labor. Returns to an extra thousand hours of work experience for the typical white worker are 23 cents per hour in 2012 USD (amounting to an additional $478 per year of full time work), compared to 12 cents for an otherwise identical black worker (amounting to an additional $250 per year). Using a life-cycle model, differences in returns to experience combined with simulated differences in choices of hours worked can account for approximately 10 percent of the measured difference in average wages over the life-cycle between black and white workers.
Health Manpower for the Upper Midwest: A Study of the Needs for Physicians and Dentists in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana
(1966-06) Health Manpower Study Commission
Hobo orator union: the free speech fights of the Industrial Workers of the World, 1909-1916.
(2009-07) May, Matthew S.
From 1909 to 1916 thousands of hobos joined the Industrial Workers of the World and participated in major fights for free speech in several dozen cities in the American west. During this period, the union organized over two dozen confrontations with municipal authorities to challenge repressive speaking laws which they considered to be de facto injunctions against public organizing. The myriad tactics involved in the free speech fights transformed over time to meet the new challenges presented by various forces of repression; but the fights were always anchored in the practice of violating repressive ordinances by speaking on a soapbox. Many of the participants were arrested and barricaded in the bastilles of the American west. Some were beaten, publicly humiliated, killed, or eventually deported. This dissertation explores how the performance of soapbox oratory composed waged and unwaged workers as a class. The study is organized chronologically by date according to the major free speech fights in Spokane, Fresno, San Diego, and Everett. I argue that the hobo orators of the free speech fights demonstrate the significance of the oratorical as a revolutionary practice of class composition. In this regard, the dissertation seeks to reveal lessons about the possibilities of revolutionary unionism today.
The Impact of Increases to the Minimum Wage in the Egg Industry
(2020-08) Keller, Andrew
The United States (U.S.) egg production industry has undergone a structural change from a backyard industry in the 1940s to a highly-concentrated, large-scale production system. In large agricultural systems where production contracts are used, labor is a vital input in production. The productivity of this labor is a driver for managing profits. Thus, changes in the hourly price of labor and overall wage compensation, which includes social security, any health insurance or retirement contributions, and any variable compensation in the form of a bonus for achieving productivity or profitability targets, have an impact on the relative profitability of producers in such systems. The objective of this research is to analyze the impact of an increase in Iowa’s minimum wage for the Iowa egg industry. Labor is a significant input in egg production and Iowa is the leading egg-producing state. Knowledge of its effect on Iowa will help inform Minnesota egg producers since Minnesota is the thirteenth-leading egg producing state. The minimum wage has not been widely studied in the agricultural and applied economics literature and there are no widespread studies analyzing the policy proposals to increase the minimum wage. An Equilibrium Displacement Model (EDM) is created to analyze the welfare impacts of these proposed initiatives, and the model is consistent with long-run economic theory of production. The results show that the overall impact on the state’s egg industry is minor, especially if such a wage increase is spread out over several years. In general, for a new $15 an hour minimum wage, total egg production would likely fall by less than 1%, and the wholesale cost of eggs would increase by an amount between 1% and 1.5%. Similarly, the quantity of labor employed in the industry would decrease by an amount between 2% and 3%.
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.
Interrogating Intimacies: Asian American and Native Relations in Colonial Alaska
(2013-08) Pegues, Juliana
Interrogating Intimacies examines intersections between Asian and Native peoples in Alaska during the American territorial period in order to critically understand the formation of settler colonialism. In four case studies that touch on the historical periods of Alaskan purchase, the Gold Rush, incorporated territorial status, and World War II, I demonstrate how the colonial project racialized and gendered Native and Asian people in Alaska in different yet interdependent ways. Interrogating Intimacies utilizes an expansive archive of texts (historical documents, interviews, travel narratives, literature, and photography) to inform how settler colonialism defines and delimits its proper subject. I contend that the narrative of Alaska as a democratic state rather than a colonial territory depends upon the disavowal of both Asian labor and Native land claims, made possible through the spatial and temporal logics of settler colonialism. Tracing the multiple violences rendered by these interlocking disavowals, as well as possibilities for creative resistance, underscores the crucial benefit to bringing Asian American and Native studies into closer conversation.
An intimate world: race, migration, and Chinese and Irish domestic servants in the United States, 1850-1920.
(2009-06) Urban, Andrew Theodore
This dissertation examines the historic relationship between race, labor, and immigration in the United States, by looking at the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century cultural attitudes that surrounded domestic service. Domesticity, and the civilized values that a well-managed and functional domestic space purportedly cultivated, caused the American middle class - and women in particular - to take an active role in immigration debates. By 1850, magazines, cartoons, and novels had begun to popularize the stereotype of "Biddy" (a nickname for Bridget) in order to capture the ignorance and insubordination that employers felt characterized Irish domestic labor. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, many middle class families concluded that the solution to the crisis posed by Biddy was to bring Chinese immigrants from California to the East Coast. As numerous authors proclaimed, racially Chinese men belonged to a docile and emasculated "third sex," and, unlike violent and masculine Irish women who failed to recognize their subservient status, could be easily managed as workers. Even after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, many middle class Americans continued to praise Chinese servants as unassailably loyal and dedicated employees whose racial qualities made them indispensible to the occupation. By putting the home at the center of the potential impact of exclusionary legislation, middle class Americans sought to privilege their own vision of how racialized labor could be used to benefit the nation. The final portion of this dissertation explores the history of the "Columbus refugees," Chinese laborers living in Mexico who were allowed to enter the United States in 1917 after working with the Punitive Expeditions of the US Army during its attempt to track down Francisco "Pancho" Villa. The Department of Labor granted the Columbus refugees a special exemption from the Exclusion Act and assigned them to work as cooks and servants on military bases in the American Southwest, which military officials claimed took advantage of their racial attributes. This dissertation concludes by arguing that the belief that immigrants are naturally predisposed to work in servile roles persists, and continues to inform how contemporary Americans think about immigration policy today.
The lives of film: heritage, restoration, and the materialism of cinema
(2013-11) Stoddard, Matthew Donald
In this dissertation I argue that a new cinematic apparatus [dispositif] has appeared in the last three decades that ties the ontology of the medium to the precarious physical life of celluloid. I refer to this apparatus as the "new materialism" of cinema. The dissertation traces the development of this apparatus around film heritage and film restoration, and in the context of post-Fordism, that is, the post-industrialization of the global economy. I argue that this materialism, which centers on the conservation of celluloid as the material artifact of a fading era, points to significant new forms and functions of cinema. In the first half of the dissertation this argument is developed vis-à-vis several recent experimental films and in terms of what the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) calls "intangible heritage." As intangible heritage, the history of cinema takes the form of a living archive of values, norms, and communicative procedures. This archive, I argue, is becoming directly integrated into the production of capital, and of social life more generally, and thus forms a new nexus of economic exploitation and political struggle. The second half of the dissertation examines how the dynamics of heritage are crystallized in, and shaped by, film restoration. For example, in the "before and after" demonstrations featured on many DVDs of restored films the image is posited as a material remnant of the past that is absorbed into the present and made viable for new markets. This process occurs through the application of technical expertise, rather than the traditional processes of mechanical duplication. Alongside such promotional materials, the dissertation also examines restoration through its effects on film form, focusing on restored versions of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1996) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (2010). I contend that restoration creates an image with a peculiar ontology, which simultaneously invokes the authenticity of a photographic original and the interactive surfaces of new media. This image dramatically alters the construction of time in restored films and reflects structural shifts in the temporality of work. Overall, the dissertation provides both an original historical account of how cinema was re-imagined amidst pronouncements of the death of the medium, as well as a new type of historical materialism that links the details of cinematic form to emerging modes of labor.
Living like a wolf: predation and production in the Montana-Alberta borderlands.
(2012-02) Wise, Michael D.
This dissertation argues that economic and environmental transformations in the Montana-Alberta borderlands hinged on changes in the ways that people understood the nature of predator-prey relationships. The author's research demonstrates how interactions between wolves, Anglo-American settlers, and Blackfoot Indians resulted in new understandings of what it meant to be a predator that guided debates over labor and land use in the borderland regions of the Northern Plains and the Northern Rockies. By revealing predation as an historical idea, rather than a biological category, the dissertation offers a new perspective on the environmental, cultural, and political histories of the North American West and global processes of colonialism more broadly.
Reimagining Fathers and Sons: Race, Labor, Alienation, and Asian American Drama
(2021-06) Hyeon, Youngbin
Abstract “Reimagining Fathers and Sons: Race, Labor, Alienation, and Asian American Drama” analyzes how works of Asian American drama illuminate conflicted father-son relationships, labor, and states of alienation. Dramatic works by Asian American writers from the 1970s to the 2010s present key examples of the intersection of race and labor and the possibilities of father-son reconciliation. I look beyond previous scholarly approaches to Asian American literature and drama that focus only on the language and culture differences within families or explain the conflict between parent and child as an inevitable culture clash between different generations. This culture-oriented approach fails to consider how attitudes towards work affect the changing demographics and social expectations of Asian America. I argue instead that that these conflicts are symptomatic of U.S. race ideologies that dictate the nature of Asian American working lives and alienation that excludes Asian Americans from more fulfilling forms of labor (what Marx called the “life of the species”). Borrowing from Marxist theories, my dissertation argues that Asian Americans have been exposed to capitalistic and racialized self-alienation from their earliest histories in the U.S., and they still continue to experience it in the contemporary world. I also contend that this Asian American self-alienation informs many dramas of father-son conflict. In these intergenerational plays, the legacy of alienation and alienating work is both inherited and resisted, giving rise to serious and often violent events. Chapter One illuminates how Asian American father-son conflict is intertwined with the history of labor. I examine the historical origins of Asian stereotypes such as the “Perpetual Foreigners” and “Yellow Peril,” labor-based stereotypes about Asian Americans that have been constantly reproduced in American popular culture. These representations reinforce the self-alienation of Asian Americans by confining them into particular social roles. In this context, I analyze Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die (1988). This play presents two Asian American actors who have differing views on how the professional actor might take responsibility as a representational laborer. The play illustrates how agreeing to play a stereotype not only brings about one’s self-alienation, but also help to popularize stereotypical images in culture and media, which in turn affect new generations. Chapter Two focuses on the alienation of Asian American men through their social roles in everyday life. Specifically, I illuminate how they are alienated from their masculinity by having to take on labor that defines them as emasculated. Frank Chin’s two plays, The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) and The Year of the Dragon (1974), show how such gendered and racialized forms of work are accepted by father characters but resisted by their sons. Their defiance of their fatherly models signify a larger challenge against white America and how older immigrant generations have played into racial and ideological hierarchies. This chapter expands upon Chin’s concepts of the “real and the fake” in which he directed younger generation Asian Americans towards defying the dutiful acceptance of oppressive labor. Chapter Three examines the “model minority” myth as another form of alienation that is formative to destructive Asian American father-son relationships. I argue that this myth, which pictures Asian Americans as hard-working, uncomplaining, and family-oriented contributors to the American economy, works as a form of colonial mimicry and a method of preserving white control over Asian Americans’ upward mobility and social status. This myth was thus founded upon the presumption of compliance with racist, capitalist, and heteronormative regimes. In Chay Yew’s Wonderland (1999) and Julia Cho’s Durango (2006), older generations cope with the consequences and lack of self-fulfillment, while younger generations negotiate their autonomy. Both generations wrestle with compliance to work and heteronormative family structures. These plays show that even while a father’s specific job is not passed down to his son, the son still winds up inheriting the anxieties caused by these compulsory forms of compliance so foundational to the father’s mindset. Chapter Four questions the ways that the racialized and gendered binaries of labor are maintained and challenged in the new century. If the binary of alienating labor and non-alienating labor is itself an arbitrary distinction, how can the cycle of alienating labor can be overcome? Julia Cho’s Aubergine (2016) provides an answer, suggesting that the cycle can be broken only with the deconstruction of the dichotomous views of work and home. In this chapter, I firstly analyze how culinary labor has been racialized, gendered, and undervalued for Asian Americans, and then move on to examine how Cho restores the original meaning of the labor of cooking. Aubergine portrays a son reconciling with his dying father through cooking as an act of love; Cho turns the father-son conflict caused by labor into a father-son reconciliation enabled by the value of work. By examining the simultaneous recuperation of working lives and father-son relationships, I illuminate how Asian Americans’ understanding of labor, alienation, and family may have evolved since the days of Frank Chin. I end with an epilogue that discusses how several other examples—Aasif Mandvi’s 1998 play Sakina’s Restaurant, Lloyd Suh’s 2015 play, Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, and award-winning 2020 film Minari—show the continued preoccupation of Asian American playwrights and filmmakers with these themes.
Relieved of These Little Chores: Agricultural Neighbor Labor, Family Labor, and Kinship in the United States 1790-1940
(2018-08) Nelson, Matt
Agriculture represents an aspect of United States identity with its emphasis on independence, hard-work, and strong family networks. This Jeffersonian narrative specifically focuses on the patriarchal authority of the white male farmer taming nature and the frontier, ignoring the importance and roles of women, children, and social networks on the farm. My dissertation uses farm diaries and the Census to address these invisible forms of labor largely ignored in the traditional narrative. Andrew Peterson’s diaries described family labor and neighbor labor exchanged with nearby families. While living in a frontier area, exchanged neighbor labor worked with the Peterson household through the 1860s until Andrew’s children were old enough to work in the fields. Neighborhood exchange of labor complemented a low worker to consumer ratio within the Peterson household, and was not simply a frontier or pre-capitalist form of bartering. Farm diaries better describe the work of these invisible groups than the Census, but Andrew still underreported women’s work due to traditional narrative biases. Gendered ideologies and census procedures emphasized norms of separate work spheres and reinforced the traditional agricultural narrative at the expense of these invisible groups. While most of the bias for women occurred in planning by Census officials, enumerator practices and biases resulted in inconsistent reporting for children. Biases such as month of enumeration and sex of the respondent were small but statistically significant for women and children. Other important socio-demographic variables for occupational responses included age, school attendance, marital status, and parental occupation. The availability of new complete count census data allows for measuring kin networks beyond the household. Kin propinquity declined in the United States from 30% in 1790 to 6% by 1940, which closely mirrored long-term declines in agriculture and intergenerational coresidence due to urbanization and industrialization. Kin propinquity was especially clustered in Appalachia, Utah, and New Mexico. The convergence in kin propinquity rates for younger and elderly people between 1850 and 1940 were caused by declining fertility, declining mortality, and younger generations leaving the farm with better economic opportunities elsewhere.

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