Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Taking a line of flight from the conventional International Relations discourse, in which nation-states are understood as coherent territories populated by self-same-subjects - with that which lies in-between constituted as 'anarchy' - Barry Hindess has argued that 'citizenship' serves not only as the organizing center of political subjectivityinternally, but also as a regime between states, externally. In this formulation, the modern citizen-subject is not so much a politically-'deliberative' entity as held by Aristotle, but is instead one that is primarily administrative, the very unit through which bodies-as-such are aligned in hierarchical accordance with the existing world order, enabling thereby multiple extralegal practices directed at those coded 'non-citizen' (whether internally or externally), including surveillance, detention and extermination. While the recent transformation of immigration policymakes this clear, I bring the prescience of Hindess' argument to bear on an earlier border-skirmish; the United States' nearly genocidal response to the hundreds of 'triracial isolate' populations that emerged on its frontier during the pre-consolidation period, with an attentiveness to how this history continues to inflect the contemporary political scene. Rather than considering this process in the abstract however, I heed Walter Benjamin's assertion that such reorganizations of the 'political body' always involve parallel shifts in the deployment of the human body, through the rearrangement of sensory perception. Throughout the nation's history, such events have occurred primarily by way of ocularcentric technologies such as writing and cinema, each of which served to render static an 'inside' and 'outside' that was becoming-nomadic. What I refer to as 'national vision' then, is the spatiotemporal and sensual-specificity of the American citizen-subject, produced initially through such artifacts of imperial literacy as the US Census, then through the technological triumph of image over word in the form of 'US Cinema'. Thus, my general argument is that that in many ways, film can be understood as having remobilized 'national vision', such that outmoded biological explanations of exclusion (which were more closely tied to the appellations used in census-taking), became replaced with cultural ones. In order to demonstrate how this cohering of the modern citizen-subject functions as both 'domestic' and 'foreign' policy at once, I treat John Boorman?s Deliverance (1972) as ethnographic cinema, engaging as it does four white, heterosexual men from the Atlanta suburbs as they venture into the Appalachian 'frontier', intending to rediscover their masculinity by conquering the nature, animals and people that (after a lifetime of assimilating nationalist origin-stories) they expect to encounter there. Although the quartet initially laments the 'rape' of the land by strip-mining companies while driving through the devastated mountain scenery, later two of them are sexually violated by the very mountaineers that such practices affect most intimately, shortly before being torn asunder by the rapids they had been traversing by canoe. While the intensity of such scenes suggest that national vision requires an effeminate 'savagery' with which to contrast the masculine 'civility' of the Atlantans, the second most celebrated scene solidifies this subtext, when the supposedly 'inbred'-looking boy playing banjo on the porch challenges one of the men to a 'duel' with the other's guitar. In the process, the film renders audible what only later becomes visible, that the sound war is primarily one enacted between the ocularcentrically-derived interplay of citizen and denizen, that is, civilized and savage, city and country, region and frontier, sexually-moral and sexually-immoral, racially-pure and miscegenated. "Talk about genetic deficiency, isn?t that pitiful?" says one of the men at a key moment, wincing and turning away from the banjo-playing boy, whose epicanthic eye-folds at least as easily suggest the 'taint' of Indian blood as they do incestually-derived 'deformity'; clearly there is more than meets the eyeat work in the film, which exemplifies the political implications of the perceptual shift from word to image. While today's national vision has rendered Mexican 'illegals' and others alien in the wake of urbanization, such that it is now the city that is represented as the dangerous 'frontier', Boorman's film recalls the earliest national anxieties of this sort, in which it was actually the extranational rural frontier that was most threatening to national 'unity', at the very moment in which, as Jerry Williamson argues, 'the country was approaching majority urban status for the first time'.

Publication Type: Hands-on Sessions
Abstract: This session will provide content knowledge, teaching strategies, & resources that link economic, environmental, and social systems. Presentation and hands-on activities will offer an introduction to basic ‘eco-eco’ concepts and ways to integrate them into formal or informal educational settings.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: An examination of grassroots activation campaigns as a lobbying strategy and the effect on congressional perceptions of incoming constituent communications and the representational relationship between Representatives and their constituents.

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: It is often taken as a given that rationality is strictly a matter of adjudicating means to ends. Based on the premise that ‘feelings of worthlessness’ are a maladaptive byproduct of the evolution of rationality, I forego this convention by proposing a theory of rationality that encompasses the rationality of ends. One of the more interesting implications of this approach is that the moral maxim, ‘Love (intrinsically value) your neighbor as you love (intrinsically value) yourself’ can be construed as an imperative of an implicit theory of rationality in which ‘being rational’ is simply a matter of ‘being objective’. Furthermore, by demonstrating how this implicit theory can address various rationality paradoxes and evolutionary enigmas, its epistemic credentials can be shown to surpass those of its current competitors such as the means/end theory, rational choice theory, egoism, utilitarianism, etc. In the final section of the paper I employ some of these insights to derive a moral ‘ought’ from an epistemic ‘is’.

Publication Type: Hands-on Sessions
Abstract: Use newly developed activities to fire your students’ interest in estuaries! In this interactive session lead by educators from NOAA’s National Estuarine Research Reserve System, teachers will explore content and methods to deepen their students' understanding of estuarine science.