1,721,175 research outputs found
Race Fundamentalism: Caribbean Theater and the Challenge to Black Diaspora
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2013This dissertation engages with radical Caribbean theater as a crucial literary archive that is nonetheless underexplored as an expression of political culture and thought. The theoretical grounding of the chapters emerges from the analytically generative thrust of a comment by C. L. R. James in The Black Jacobins: "to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental." While the phrase asserts that race cannot be neglected, it also cautions against ensconcing race as fundamental analytical priority, suggesting a powerfully fluid conceptualization of radical political culture. My chapters argue that radical theater projects in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic share this fluid conceptualization of radical politics with the Trinidadian James's own stage versions of the Haitian Revolution. These theater projects differ from more static paradigms within diaspora, transnational, and race studies that reduce political radicalism to race, precisely the "fundamentalist" approach to race against which James cautions. This reduction fails to register how race, diaspora, and nation continue to be fashioned within a context of persistent class struggle, colonialism and imperialism, and sexism. Furthermore, scholarly discussions of race and diaspora often are rooted fundamentally in U.S. experience, obscuring the ways race is negotiated differently in various New World diasporas, including those in the Caribbean region. The plays I analyze open up the articulations between race, class, and gender in anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-sexist struggles. Furthermore, I attend both to the intra-Caribbean differences that influence the development of radical political culture and to the important connections across areas too often analyzed along colonially fragmented lines. My pan-Caribbean approach avoids thinking of the region as exclusively understandable through linguistically-determined approaches. Across different linguistic and colonial histories, the plays I study cohere in the way they stage political agency through popular culture, collaboration, and spectator participation, all central to each play's aesthetic development and politics but irreducible to race. While race does feature in each play as the site for political radicalism, the performances of race, blackness, and diaspora in the plays are often unrecognizable to U.S. elaborations. Chapter 1, "The Tragicomedy of Anticolonial Overcoming: Toussaint Louverture and The Black Jacobins on Stage," focuses on James's 1936 and 1967 versions of his Haitian plays to disagree with David Scott's emphasis on tragedy in his reading of James's revisions to the history version of The Black Jacobins. James's use of comedy imagines possible futures in the face of tragic postcolonial failures to live up to romantic anticolonial expectations for total revolution. Comedy also challenges the reduction of both versions of the play to a single story of anticolonial black struggle, as the later version renders blackness secondary to post-independence African and West Indian class struggles. In Chapter 2, "Can a Mulatta be a Black Jacobin?" I argue that reading James as sole reviser of the 1936 play into the 1967 version elides the collaborations so important to the revisions. The most radical revision is the centrality of a militant mulatta, challenging scholarly depictions of James as, at worst, a paragon of patriarchy and, at best, a man caught between the feminist politics of the women in his life and the constraints of a male-centered revolutionary and anticolonial tradition. The next chapter, "`Listen, American Negro': Racial Performance, Dominican Street Theater, and `Global' Blackness," analyzes Reynaldo Disla's Un comercial para Máximo Gómez and Frank Disla's Ramón Arepa to counter the sense that Dominicans are "negrophobic." Such an indictment fails to account for the distance between Dominican articulations of blackness and "fundamentalist" versions of blackness, often emanating from the U.S., that masquerade as global. Both plays rely on black-affirming cultural practice in Afro-creolized Dominican carnival, a practice that is unrecognizable to those accustomed to a black-white binary and that does not depend on experiences with U.S. racism and anti-racist struggle. My final chapter, "`Teach his People the Value of Unity': Black Diaspora, Women, and Una Marson's Pocomania," engages Jamaican playwright Una Marson's play Pocomania (1938) for the way Africanness and blackness are sites of struggle that play out over middle and lower class women's power, and map onto the contrast between "proper" Christian practice and Afro-creolized religious practice in yard life. While the play connects Pocomania religious practice with African traditions, its focus is not in authenticating the Africanness of Jamaican culture. Instead, it underscores the intraracial struggles between African-descended Jamaicans, struggles marked not only by religion but also by linguistic, educational, and class-based hierarchies
The Ticket to Easy Street? The Financial Consequences of Winning the Lottery
Get PDFA fundamental question faced by policymakers is how best to help individuals who are in financial trouble. This paper examines the consequences of the most basic approach: giving people large cash transfers. To determine whether this prevents or merely postpones bankruptcy, we exploit a unique dataset of Florida Lottery winners linked to bankruptcy records. Results show that although recipients of 150,000 are 50 percent less likely to file for bankruptcy in the two years after winning relative to small winners, they are equally more likely to file three to five years afterward. Furthermore, bankruptcy records indicate that even though the median winner of a large cash prize could have paid off all of his unsecured debt or increased equity in new or existing assets, he chose not to do either. Consequently, although we cannot be sure other recipients of financial assistance would react in the same way lottery players did, our results do suggest that some skepticism regarding the long-term effect of cash transfers may be warranted.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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Building Communities of Upward Mobility
No full textAround 3.5 billion people, 44 percent of the global population, remain poor (below
$6.85 per day) (World Bank, 2022). Alleviaitng poverty requires finding ways of
upward mobility. I study 3 such ways.
The first and main paper in my dissertation found that uniting teachers, parents and
principals around the protection of children's rights is a powerful way of fostering a
loving environment for more than 200 000 children from low-income backgrounds
to thrive.
The second paper in my dissertation suggests that fostering connections between
high- and low-income individuals is essential for lower-income individuals' upward
mobility, potentially through higher income individuals acting as role models,
information sources, and providers of job referrals to lower income individuals.
The third paper in my dissertation suggests that hiring passionate young graduates
as teachers in shcools in low-income rural areas can give access to a decent
education to low-income children who might not have one otherwise.Economic
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From Community to Commencement: Analyzing the Correlation between Social Capital Variables and Graduation Rates among United States High Schools
No full textHow do the strength and interconnectedness of a community influence the education outcomes of students growing up within such a community? In this paper, I employ two novel measures of social capital--Economic Connectedness and Social Clustering, created and detailed in Chetty et al. (2022)--to study their relationship with graduation rates at the high school level. Economic Connectedness and Social Clustering measure the degree to which low and high socioeconomic individuals are friends with one another and the degree to which social networks are intertwined in a community, respectively. These variables are constructed using Facebook friendships from May, 2022 (Chetty et al. 2022). Controlling for well-known indicators of educational success, such as median parent income and student demographics, I run regressions between graduation rates and my two variables of interest. My results shows that a one standard-deviation increase in economic connectedness is associated with a 2.46 percentage point increase in graduation rates when including controls and state fixed effects in the model. An analogous increase in social clustering is associated with a 1.13 percentage point increase in graduation rates when including the same controls and fixed effects. These increases are substantial as they represent a minimum of 7.5 percent of the gap between the national average graduation rate (87 percent) and a perfect 100 percent rate. These results support increasing socioeconomic diversity and community strength in school districts to improve education outcomes in the US
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Gradualism in Coordination and Trust Building
Get PDFCoordination and cooperation on public projects, as well as trust among society members are important for economic, social and political activities. This dissertation presents essays on the role of gradualism - increasing the stakes of projects slowly over time rather than starting with large-stake projects immediately - in coordination and trust building under various settings. The first two essays are on simultaneous coordination games when there are multiple equilibria in the one-shot game; the third essay is on sequential trust games when the only subgame perfect equilibrium in the one-shot game predicts that no cooperation occurs at all. The first essay, One Step at A Time: Does Gradualism Build Coordination? (joint with Sam Asher, Lorenzo Casaburi, and Plamen Nikolov), uses a multiple-period binarychoice weakest-link coordination experiment and finds that gradualism leads to better coordination in high-stake projects. The findings point to a voluntary mechanism to promote coordination when the capacity to impose sanctions is limited. This second essay, Gradualism, Weakest Link and Information: Theory and Coordination Experiments, extends the first essay and compares the effects of gradualism under various information and payoff structures. It proposes a belief-based learning framework to explore why and when gradualism may help coordination. It compares the role of gradualism in two weakest-link games under two different information structures: a limited information structure when subjects are only informed whether all group members contribute, and a richer information structure when they are informed exactly how many group members contribute. It finds that richer information feedback facilitates later coordination for the big-bang approach when a group is close to success, thus shrinking the advantage of gradualism. Finally, in a third experiment it finds that allowing free riding worsens coordination in all treatments, and gradualism with imperfect monitoring does not perform better. The third essay, Does Gradualism Build Trust? Evidence from A Multi-round Experiment, examines the effect of gradualism in trust building using a multi-round binarychoice trust (investment) experiment. It finds that gradualism leads to higher trustworthiness at the beginning and higher subsequent trust. However, trustworthiness and trust for all treatments sharply decrease in the end; even gradualism cannot avoid this end-of-game effect
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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