Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Findings from the first study of national network news coverage of genetically modified (GM) food are reported. Evening news report from ABC, CBS, and NBC news from 1981 to 2003 were studied. News coverage of GM food was very sporadic over the period studied except for the infrequent crisis event. CBS news accounted for more stories than the two other networks combined. Explanations for this unusual finding are sought, especially through interviews with the CBS personnel responsible for many of the stories. The study also examines the tone (positive or negative toward GM food) of the on-air sources used in the networks' reports. Here, little difference was found.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Examining a 13-month period of labor militancy among professional baseball players across the Americas, this paper maps the political economy of a major transnational culture industry at a contested stage of its development. Drawing on interviews, archival research and close readings of Mexican and U.S. sports journalism, the paper interrogates ballplayers’ power and position as transnational cultural workers.

In July 1980, players in the Mexican League went on strike for higher wages, improved working conditions, and union recognition. In the face of strong resistance, the Asociación Nacional de Beisbolistas (ANABE) successfully brought team owners to the bargaining table. That winter, the Mexican ballplayers’ militancy spread, as the ANABE joined players’ unions from Venezuela, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in demanding improved wages and working conditions at the Caribbean Series, the annual tournament featuring the champions from the top Caribbean baseball circuits. Unwilling to relinquish a greater share of television profits or bargaining power, team owners and tournament officials took the drastic step of canceling the Series in early 1981.

Later that year, players in the North American Major Leagues began their own strike, galvanized by team owners’ bid to control escalating star salaries by erecting new limits to players’ bargaining power. After 51 days the owners backed down, solidifying the powerful position of the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), and securing the future of contractual “free agency” for veteran players in the industry’s most elite league.

The core actors and issues involved in the two strikes were closely related. Mexican League team owners consulted closely with their Major League counterparts, and employed North American strikebreakers, while one of ANABE’s key grievances in the strike concerned the preferential treatment of U.S. “import” players. Conversely, several of the striking Major Leaguers were former Mexican League players, including Fernando Valenzuela, who emerged as the world’s most celebrated pitcher in 1981. Indeed, the transnational phenomenon of “Fernandomania” was credited with reinvigorating fan interest in the wake of the strike.

Viewing the ANABE and MLBPA strikes together allows us to see professional baseball as a transnational system, a field of cultural production (to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s formulation) whose institutions and symbolic representations both cut across and articulate with national political and cultural formations. Analyzing a period of intense power struggle across the transnational baseball system, and interrogating the contested place of sport and cultural work in the emergence of neoliberalism in the Americas, the proposed paper presents a new approach to the political economy of sport, and to the work of transnational mass culture.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper considers the causes of international human rights violations. I consider the separate impact of ratification and signatory statuses of United Nations human rights on the level of recorded violations of human rights violations, discussing the variation in legal definitions translating into a different rate of compliance. Core UN human rights treaties, CIRI human rights violation database measures, refugee populations, and levels of US Foreign Assistance are all tested for influence on violations levels in 192 states during the times-pan of 1981-2006. This paper both updates previous studies and expands on definitions to explain violations of human rights on an international level.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The 1981 Toronto bath house raids signalled the beginning of aggressive policing interventions in terms of gay men's sexual lives. While the raids produced both public condemnation and praise of policing actions, the impact on the gay community and mens' lives was profound and widespread. This paper explores the evolution of policing of Toronto's gay and lesbian communities public and private sexuality through an exploration of several key events in the past 25 years. Specifically, the analysis focuses on police approaches to controlling sexuality in public/private institutions. Special attention is directed towards police raids on a gay men's cinema and a lesbian night at a bathouse exploring the public, police, gay community and legal response to police actions. The paper argues that there is a superficial "peace" that exists between the police and Toronto's gay/lesbian community that is subject to period assaults as reminders of police power. Proposals for both legal and political changes that would produce a two-way partnership between the police and gay communities is developed.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This study examines the trends in educational stratification during China’s economic reforms from 1981 to 2006. By using the panel data from the “China Health and Nutrition Survey”, it matches school-age children to their parents’ background information and investigates whether and how the effects of family background on children’s educational transitions change across time and across the urban-rural residential status.

Empirical results show that educational inequality in access to senior high school, measured by class differentials and urban-rural differentials, has increased during 1993-1998 and decreased in 1999-2006. Additionally, inequality at the college level has been largely strengthened since 1999: the effects of most social background measures like household income, father’s class status, and rural residential status have shifted up in the period. Results also show that, in spite of an overall quick increase in transition rates to college since 1999, accessing to higher education have become much easier than previously for urban children, but much more difficult for rural children, especially for those from low-income rural families. As going to college is one main avenue for rural children to move out of their rural origin, our results indicate that rural children’s mobility chances via higher education are actually decreased in the new century.

These findings, together with the increased inequality in the reform era, suggest that contemporary China is now experiencing a trend towards social reproduction rather than de-stratification. We also discuss how such a reproduction trend, also observed in Western societies like Ireland and Britain, might be expected to continue in the future.