Browsing by Subject "capitalism"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    The Affective Flows of Financial News Media
    (2016-11) Cormany, Diane
    Abstract At the start of the 21st century, the financial turn and the affective turn swept through critical cultural studies. The former recognized how society was being shaped by financialization—essentially the expansion of securities markets and market logics to all areas of daily life (Martin 2002). In order to understand the impact of finance capitalism’s incursion into private and social life, scholars including Brian Massumi and Lauren Berlant turned towards affect, which refers to the flow of sensations within and between bodies. At the same time, financial news media shifted to focus primarily on market movement, often replacing contextual analysis in the process. Drawing from media studies, theories and histories of financialization, affect theory, and cultural studies, my dissertation examines the intersection of these sociohistoric and contextual phenomena. I evaluate financial news media across both broadcast and print platforms: The Closing Bell (CNBC), Marketplace (American Public Media), and The Wall Street Journal as case studies for theorizing how financial news media operates as both a reflection of and a technology of financialization. My dissertation does so by situating financial news media within the context of neoliberal regulatory and ideological change that affected both the expansion of finance capital and changes in the media industry. In addition, I undertake close readings to evaluate the genre-specific aesthetics and the definitional forms of each text in order to understand how they interact with market logics. In the process I have discovered a common focus on incremental market movement across my case studies. These aesthetic forms may be considered affective by focusing on movement as productive and change-worthy (Massumi 2002). Likewise, while each of my dissertation texts imagines a different investing audience based upon their responsiveness and involvement in the market, the demographics comprise the educated and financially elite. Therefore, my project evaluates how media communicates engagement with the market as exclusive and hegemonic.
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    `The Compensation Law Put Us Out of Work': Workplace Injury Law, Commodification, and Discrimination in the Early 20th Century United States
    (2014-07) Holdren, Nate
    This dissertation traces changes in U.S. injury law and injury culture from the late 1890s through the early 1930s. I argue that workmen's compensation legislation passed in the 1910s helped create new forms of inequality. These laws valued women's injuries less than men's injuries and helped create medicalized employment discrimination against people with disabilities. Compensation legislation replaced a court-based system of injury law with an insurance-based administrative system. Under the old system, many injuries when uncompensated. Under the new system, employers had to pay a portion of the financial costs of every employee injury. Employers responded by trying to control those costs by hiring physicians to conduct medical examinations. These examinations were designed to screen out people with physical disabilities and medical conditions that might raise employers' costs in the event of employee injury. Furthermore, compensation laws encouraged what I call the moral thinning of injury, changing how injury was defined as a problem. Injury was no longer understood as a matter of morality or injustice, but as a matter of lost income, a definition of injury that ignored much of human meaning of injury. These changes occurred against the backdrop of what I call the rise of insurance as a worldview in the late 19th century. This worldview treated people as commodities and treated employee injury as an amoral matter of financial security, a problem to be solved by monetary payments. Compensation laws brought the insurance worldview into employers' hiring decisions, bringing about a re-organization of employment practices. I analyze these changes across a range of institutions using sources including trial records, published legal decisions and treatises, business records, and the records and publications of trade associations and conferences, medical associations and conferences, state commissions, and unions.
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    “It’s Really Hard to Pump as a Teacher!”: An Inquiry into the Embodied Experiences of Lactating Teachers
    (2022-09) Toedt, Elise
    This qualitative research study is the first in education to explore the daily, visceral experiences of K-12 lactating teachers in the United States. Across disciplines, scant research has been conducted that focuses on the embodied and emotional experiences of lactating people at work (Gatrell, 2019; Ryan, et al, 2011; Stearns, 1999). Bodyfeeding is a marker of “good” citizenship and “good” parenting, yet teachers, charged with reproducing state ideologies of citizenship, don’t have the space or time needed to express milk at work. This research fills a gap in cross-disciplinary literature focused on remedying the ways capitalist, patriarchal institutional structures sidestep the bodily needs of workers for the sake of workplace efficiency. It shows how lactating teachers navigate and make sense of two conflicting imperatives: On the one hand, the engrained ways they have learned to orient their time towards the reproduction of schooling norms, and on the other, their embodied need to produce milk. Informed by feminist approaches to qualitative research, I conducted 20 in-depth qualitative interviews with teachers in the Twin Cities metro who have expressed milk at work since 2010, and another 15 interviews with union leaders, administrators, and public health officials across Minnesota. I frame my study using social reproduction theory (Bhattacharya, 2017; Federici, 2014) to show how reproductive labor like expressing milk is framed as “not-work” within a capitalist understanding of production. I use poetic transcription to foreground the firsthand accounts of teachers and to demonstrate the embodied and emotional resonances across participants’ accounts (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2018; Faulkner, 2016). For data analysis, I take up cultural historical activity theory (Engeström, 2001) to argue that the need to express milk functions as a crucial moment because teachers cannot fulfill their role as professionals as mapped out by current expectations. I take up Garland-Thomson’s (2011) concept of misfits and Sarah Ahmed’s (2017) subsequent application of this concept to show how the onus is put on lactating teachers to navigate incompatibilities between their bodily needs and the school day regime and positions them as “misfits” in schools. I draw from the concepts of outlaw emotions (Jagger, 1989), pleasure activism (brown, 2019), and the uses of the erotic (Lorde, 1984) to highlight the how the emotional experiences of lactating teachers need to be considered when creating policies and practices about lactation. Findings illustrate how patriarchal, capitalist logic is at play in how time and space are organized in schools, and how lactating teachers’ bodies are positioned by this logic, while they also resist and transform the organization of schools. My study shows that a lack of structural support for lactating teachers contributes to an inequitable work environment in schools. Implications include that individuals, buildings, and districts can create more humane conditions for lactating teachers by enacting modest reforms like creating school lactation spaces and providing additional time, outside of existing break times, to pump. Yet while stop-gap reforms in schools such as creating lactation spaces are one step in the right direction, more sweeping change is necessary.
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    The Rock of the Republic: The Ten Commandments in American Life from World War II to the Culture Wars
    (2018-08) Haker, Joseph
    This dissertation examines the various movements to propagate and publicly display the Ten Commandments in the United States since the end of World War II, using that history as a window to better understand the nexus of religion, nationalism, and capitalism. It demonstrates that such displays first emerged out of the impulses and needs of postwar liberalism, which sought to construct a broad and inclusive “Judeo-Christian” consensus, but were quickly seized upon by reactionary forces working to construct a more exclusionary form of nationalism. It then documents the role the Ten Commandments played in the politics and ideology of the Christian Right for whom they symbolized the foundations of a “Christian nation” that were under siege. This dissertation argues that public displays of the Ten Commandments, and the broader fusion of religion and nationalism they came to represent, helped to reconcile two contradictory impulses within postwar religious conservatism. Specifically, the embrace of liberal capitalism as a guarantor of freedom and prosperity on the one hand, and a deep aversion toward many of its material and social effects on the other. The Ten Commandments worked to displace concerns about structural changes onto individual moral failings or cultural institutions believed to shape individual conduct. For their proponents, the Ten Commandments offered a way of ameliorating social crises, arresting cultural liberalization, and reasserting traditional patriarchal authority without necessitating a broader systemic critique. This also helps to explain how conservative Christianity became reconciled with, or even necessary to, the functioning of neoliberalism.