Browsing by Subject "nationalism"
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Item Fact, Fiction, or Fragile: The Globalization and Populism Hypothesis(2023) Eichinger, AphisithA dominant claim in political science is that globalization in advanced democracies is the culprit for the rise in populism and far right nationalism. The hypothesis has been tested dozens of times in economics and political science and with the many rigorous methodological approaches. But as advanced as the models are there are plenty that do not account for issues like worker selection into trade-exposed industries or exogenous political environments like the terrorism atmosphere of the 2010s and the creeping threat of Russia into Eastern Europe. Moreover, many of the studies confuse core concepts like populism and far right nationalism, which usually interferes with how the primary dependent variable is measured in empirical studies. I take these issues in mind and design a series of research papers that alternatively test the globalization and populism hypothesis. I study (1) voting just before and after the global financial crisis of 2008 when there was no threat of terrorism or Russian aggression, (2) decentralization and populism after 2008 but before 2013, and (3) populism, nationalism, and immigration preferences after defining “populism” in a more suitable fashion. I find overwhelmingly that globalization and populism have a fragile relationship at best and a fictional relationship at worst.Item Mohican Archival Activism: Narrating Indigenous Nationalism(2018-06) Miron, RoseThis dissertation traces the creation of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican tribal archive and related historical projects from 1968 to the present to show how the Mohican Nation has recovered and reclaimed authority over their historical materials and by extension, their history. I collectively refer to these multifaceted efforts over the last fifty years as “Mohican archival activism” and define this in the context of indigenous studies as the construction of an archival collection that assembles previously scattered sources, establishing indigenous nations as the premier resources on their own history and giving them authority over the assembly and retrieval of those historical materials. I argue that these actions are a strategic type of activism that resists settler-colonial policies that sought to separate Native peoples from their history, allows Mohican tribal members to create new historical narratives of their nation, and constitutes a form of Mohican nation-building by enabling the tribe to assert sovereignty over the collection and presentation of their own historical materials. By tracing the creation of a tribal archive and its mobilization in various projects, I demonstrate how tribal archives have the potential to challenge the control non-Native institutions often hold over indigenous histories and use newly assembled historical materials to counteract damaging representations of indigenous nations.Item The Rock of the Republic: The Ten Commandments in American Life from World War II to the Culture Wars(2018-08) Haker, JosephThis 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.