This paper seeks engage in the controversy over genetically engineered [GE] chiles in New Mexico and the ways it connects to postcolonial and feminist tensions. It calls into question the context and processes required to appropriate indigenous knowledge into capitalist structures.
Digital Imagined Communities: The Role of the Internet in Creating, Maintaining, and Spreading the Resurgence of Transcontinental and Transitional Far Right Ideas: Kevin Weiskirch
It is perhaps stating the obvious to say that contemporary geopolitical issues are largely shaped by the role of the internet and of a global resurgence of far-right, nationalist […]
Citizenship and Work: Space in El Paso del Norte: Veda Kamra
Through the structures of “citizenship” and “the city,” this essay seeks to develop a rooted understanding of the maquiladoras in Ciudad Juárez, in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico. The paper will focus on this space as a site of production along the US-Mexico Border, and how this concentration of manufacturing affects the cultural, political, economic, and social dynamics of the region.
Dubai’s Sustainable City and the False Promise of Universality: Shanti Escalante-De Mattei
This paper concludes that the Sustainable City represents an “island” of specialized consumption and lifestyle (such as the indoor ski resort) that does not actually take on the challenge of sustainability, given its exclusivity and reliance on highly carbon-intensive systems of resource procurement.
African American English (AAE) in Key Peele’s “Obama’s Anger Translator”: Elizabeth Grace Cheshire
In their videos, the comedy team Key & Peele display incredible linguistic competence as they code switch or use distinctive varieties of English to create characters. The language they use often takes center stage as integral to their jokes. Their characters use African American English (AAE) to engage with black culture as well as Standard American English (SAE) to produce a commentary on mainstream culture.
Malayalee Women in Cinema: Boundaries of Constraint and Disruption: Priya Prasad
Narratives within Malayalam cinema feature incredible anxiety around the bodies of women. The films analyzed demonstrate how cultural norms attributed to womanhood and the portrayal of sexuality have fluctuated between respectability and unease.
Creative Marketing or Creative Placemaking? Culture-led Revitalization in Paris’s Plaine Commune: Ian Berman
Paris’s artistic heritage, willingness to invest in public infrastructure, and urban-rural divide make it a unique case study in larger debates surrounding creative city marketing and sustainable development projects… Parisian artists have largely remained embedded within the middle and working-class milieu.
Feminist-Branded Commodities and Capitalist Constraints: Lindsay Karchin
In this paper I explore a recent development in capitalist production: the simultaneous commodification and subversion of women’s language. I approach this topic through a sociolinguistic analysis of feminist-branded products at Bulletin, a female-run company that features products by female-owned brands and donates ten percent of in-store profits to Planned Parenthood.
Freedom from Below: Revisiting Emancipation and the Construction of Black Citizenship: Frank McShane
While it is true that the federal government played a necessary role in bringing about the destruction of slavery, historical scholarship makes clear that it was the daring, political actions of enslaved people themselves, which forced the State to adopt not only emancipation, but also the extension of citizenship to African-Americans over the course of the 1860s.
An Etiology of Climate: Oscillations Between Recognition and Disavowal: Benjamin Weinger
The impervious western production of everyday life provokes and prevents humanity from confronting unprecedented climate change. Despite scientific consensus on anthropogenic forcings that destabilize climatic conditions and the awareness of its potential impacts, the industrialized global North continues to live far from a sustainable reality.
Constructivism: Fashioning Socialist Modernity: Joseph Weinger
Constructivism endeavored in the early 1900s to modify and radically restructure the value of material goods through the transfiguration of aesthetics, as well as through attempts at mass production… An analysis of Constructivist fashion as material culture, through which facets of production, consumption, and materiality are considered, allows this movement to be evaluated for its contribution to Soviet sociopolitical life.