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Remittances and Development: Local Empowerment and National Dependency
Get PDFRemittances, or money that is sent by a migrant to their home country, have been increasingly viewed as a potential way to economically develop low to middle income countries. Presently, the level of remittances sent is higher than that of official developmental aid. Considering that remittances are private capital utilized by locals, the intervention of a non-profit or large international financial organization to spur developmental projects is perhaps not needed. For countries that are reliant on remittances, there are a considerable number of tradeoffs associated with this inflow of capital. Firstly, although difficult to quantify on a large scale, remittances have thus far not significantly triggered national economic development. For low to middle income countries, remittances are primarily used for basic consumption such as food, education and health care. Secondly, the innate nature of remittances requires that origin countries relinquish power to immigration countries. Origin countries are often powerless to protect their citizens abroad as many find themselves victims of xenophobia and in precarious work conditions. Thirdly, a dependency on remittances reshapes migrants’ national ties. Migrants are more likely to identify as transnational and may be reluctant to return to their origin country. Furthermore, remittances implant a social acceptance that success is only achieved through migrating, discouraging individuals to invest domestically or feel nationally tied. Finally, migration and the receiving of remittances radically impacts individuals differently based on their identity. Women are often unable to migrate and instead typically are the recipients of remittances. However, simply because they have a new access to capital does not eliminate structural barriers and therefore emancipate them from patriarchal structures, but rather may reinforce them. This thesis project is organized in three parts. The first part provides an overview of remittances and why their ramifications are complex and controversial. The second and third part utilize Morocco and Tajikistan as case studies for a deeper analysis of the implications of remittances on development. Morocco and Tajikistan were selected because they are both post-colonial countries that maintain a high dependence on remittances. Morocco is one of the world’s largest recipients of remittances and Tajikistan possesses one of the highest remittance-reliant GDPs in the world. Remittances are important to study because they illuminate how individual survival strategies can have detrimental implications for the nation. This paper argues that remittances provide some degree of individual empowerment but ultimately present problems of national dependency which hinder development. Morocco demonstrates that low to middle income countries must relinquish power over political, economic and social factors when remittances are encouraged. Tajikistan illustrates that remittances may be the most attainable solution for post- colonial countries, yet they provide longer-term problems that deeply entrench historical relations of dependency. Remittance-dependent countries must ultimately find a balance between encouraging their citizens to pursue the best economic opportunities through migration while also thinking critically about how to retain the population to induce national economic growth
LMDA New & Noteworthy, June 2020
Get PDFContents include: #LMDA2020 // Conference Wrap-Up; ECD Travel Grant Recipients Responses from LMDA#2020; Dramaturgy the Phoenix; Solomon Sir Jones Films; Contribute to the Newsletter!; Pandemic Resources for Artist (link).https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/lmdanewsletter/1035/thumbnail.jp
Civil-Military Relations in Russia
Get PDFThis policy-oriented work evaluates Russian civil-military relations with a focus on their development under Vladimir Putin. This essay examines how key events and actors have shaped civil-military relations in the context of overarching structural limitations on reform related to economic performance, institutionalized knowledge and geopolitical competition. The disparity between the military’s preferred anti-Western security policy, Russia’s economic state, and the goals of civil politicians led to the dereliction of the Russian military throughout the 1990s and early-2000s. Only with Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of political power, were these three factors slowly brought into greater alignment, thus allowing for meaningful reform of the military and the streamlining of civil-military relations. Now, given increased economic and political hardships for Russia, Putin will once again need to decide on the future direction of military reform
Body Politics and 21st Century Taboo
Get PDFAcknowledgement of the male anus’s simultaneous political and erotic possibilities, remain cast off from the idealized masculine body in heteronormative spaces due to the paranoid fear of its potential. While a taboo against anal eroticism has stood for centuries of civilization, evidence supports that passive-sodomy (understood as the act of being penetrated) was not prohibited merely for its output of fecal matter, but rather, its capability to produce an excess of pleasure without fruitful reproductive qualities (in short, satisfaction without labor). As enlightenment era thinkers disputed the repressed nature of anal eroticism which they believed to be fueled by infantile relationships with parents, sexuality, and toilet training, the anus became further understood as site of significant meaning for establishing the way in which one perceives the world. The anus has grown into the role of the achilles heel for patriarchal society becoming further concealed and privatized through the increase in rampant homophobia as the historically inflated nature of gender and sexuality started becoming unraveled
Disrupting White Fragility and Colorblind Racism: Using Games to Measure How Race and Ethnicity Courses Change Students’ Racial Ideologies
Get PDFThis research provides instructors teaching race and ethnicity a tool to assess the racial ideologies of their students in the form of “race talk.” In particular, Bonilla-Silva’s (2010) concepts denoting colorblindness and DiAngelo’s (2018) concept of white fragility were measured before and after completing one race and ethnicity course by having students play a live version of the game “Guess Who” (Hasbro Co.). At the end of the course, student responses during the game, and their subsequent reflections, revealed a significant decrease in white fragility. Using this game, instructors can assess students’ racial ideologies and whether or not they have acquired an improved understanding of systemic inequalities by analyzing changes in students’ race talk
What Moral Obligations do Healthcare Providers Have to Offer Language Services?
Get PDFThis paper analyzes the need for language services in the healthcare system. While U.S. law requires the provision of medical services, patients and families often do not receive the services they need. Even patients and family members with strong English language abilities may struggle with medical language or in an emotionally charged context. This paper uses a feminist analysis, drawing on Social Contract Theory and Kantian ethics, to argue for the ethical responsibility of healthcare providers to offer adequate interpretive services
‘Playing Hapsburg:’ The Hapsburg Monarchy and The post-Yugoslav Croatian Society
Get PDFOne of the more interesting forms of memory of the Hapsburg past, one can find in Croatia. This small European state, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s words, started to “reimagine” itself in the 1990s and reclaim its “Western” European heritage lost following admissions, first, into the South Slav Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and then authoritarian socialist state in the aftermath of World War II. Not surprising, given that many of Eastern European nations, formerly part of the Soviet sphere of influence, started to fabricate their own past and utilize nationalism as a tool of not only awakening national consciousness necessary to delegitimize communist rule but also desire to purify their nations and bring them home—to Europe, to West—where they believed they truly and historical belonged. What this article thus will attempt to do is to provide an objective analysis of how Croatian political elites, but also ordinary people, used the heritage of the Hapsburg past to narrow down the 1990s bloody divorce to binary terms—they vs. us, west vs. east, and civilized vs. uncivilized—and, in a sense, announce to the world that they should have never been put under one South Slav roof in the first place. But, most importantly, how the monarchy continued to be invoked, remembered, and preserved in the moments of national upheaval way past the 1990s. The analysis of the dominant ideology of the 1990s in conjunction with four case studies is in the center of this argument
Against Colonial Imaginaries: Rewriting Latin America in Juan José Saer’s El entenado & Bernardo Carvalho’s Nove Noites [REPORT]
Get PDFFamous for its fantastic and magical narratives, Latin American literature has been a focal point for Western perpetuation of colonial views that seek to define the region, its people, and its literature as primitive, untamed, and mystical. During this preliminary investigation, I sought to understand how the Argentine author Juan José Saer and Brazilian author Bernardo Carvalho contested the conventions of Latin American literature. In particular, I aimed to analyze how these authors used fiction to rewrite colonial imaginaries and break away from a fantasized Latin America. Within this investigation, I focused on the essays of these two authors “La selva espesa de lo real” (1994) and “Fiction as Exception” (2010) respectively, as well as two of their fictional works El entenado (1983) and Nove Noites (2002) respectively. In addition to the works of Saer and Carvalho, I also drew from the work of scholars, such as Mariano Siskind and Héctor Hoyos to understand the commodification and trends of Latin American literature within a global setting, as well as Carlos Jáuregui and Nancy Leys Stepan to understand the construction of the historical and cultural identity of Latin America by both domestic and international forces. Within this report I will discuss the following three items 1) the scholarship I used to frame and develop my research, 2) the work/essay(look) of both authors, and 3) my hypothesis for further investigation. In doing this research, I aimed to explore how these authors used works of fiction to contest Western conceptions of Latin America and to critique the exclusion of Latin American writers from the universal literary discourse that has thus far been dominated by Western authors
