Publication Type: Abstract
Abstract: Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have become a popular marine management tool in response to global declines in fishery species. However, there are few empirical studies of fishery responses to MPAs and the debate between fisheries scientists, fishermen and conservationists regarding MPA applicability in fishery management ensues. This study of the Santa Barbara regional commercial spiny lobster fishery employs fishery dependent catch and effort logbook data and individual fisherman interviews to assess short term socioeconomic impacts of the 2003 Channel Islands State Marine Reserves. We use multi-level regression models to evaluate the role of marine reserves in predicting effort, catch and profits amid climatic and ecological variability. Individual and reef-specific effort and catch data for 69,120 fishing events over 8 fishing seasons (5 before and 3 after reserve establishment) provide the basis for the regression models. Ecological variables are reef-specific such as bottom type, distance from reserve, and kelp density. Additional social and economic variables include fishing experience, dependency, and daily market price. We test hypotheses regarding changes in fishing effort, catch and profits after marine closures for recommendation and application in future MPA planning and managing fisheries affected by marine protected areas.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: It is now commonplace to note that for white Americans, white racial identity is largely invisible and undefined. Yet scholars have still done surprisingly little to identify whiteness in contemporary art and culture.

White writers are all too ready to discuss race when dealing with the art of nonwhite artists (even if those artists strive to explore universal themes through nonwhite subjects). And white writers can see race and whiteness in art that presents them with contrasts among races. But when whiteness is present on its own, white writers remain virtually mute on the subject.

This paper will address white racial identity in the art of Barbara Kruger, an artist whose work has not only attracted universal attention in the art world but has also become instantly recognizable to a large mainstream audience.

It is Kruger’s intent, as she puts it, to “interrupt the stunned silence” of mass media photographs and to examine the way these images cast viewers in stereotyped gender roles and other fixed positions in the capitalist power structure. As a writer and thinker, Kruger is also sensitive to issues of race and whiteness. And although she offers no specific readings of her art, it clearly lends itself to racialized interpretations.

Kruger’s critics acknowledge in passing that her art refers to race, but they say nothing more than this. They treat the racial issues in her work as if they were self-evident. But if Kruger’s art is about anything, it is about the fact that imagery is not self-evident and that muteness is acquiescence to power.

Kruger’s art deals with white privilege, the white standard of beauty, the constructed and contested nature of white identity, and white fear of racial extinction. These are familiar issues to those who study whiteness but issues that even white liberal members of the art world must still learn to recognize and spell out, especially when not prompted by the presence of nonwhites.

To see and discuss whiteness explicitly in Kruger’s art without that prompting is not only to expand and enrich the interpretation of her art, but also to help bring the art of nonwhites into perspective. Only when white writers are able to recognize whiteness in the work of white artists (while understanding that race is not all the art is about) will they be able both to acknowledge and to see beyond race in the work of nonwhite artists. And more broadly, only when whites are able to see, understand, and discuss whiteness in the culture at large will they be able to engage race and racism effectively, to build a concept of a nonracist white person, to regard race as a myriad of individual, shifting, and multiplex identities (what Stuart Hall describes as the on-going process of identification), or to choose to abandon the concept of whiteness entirely as an uninhabitable vestige of racial oppression.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The mobile home community is prevalent along the south coast of California as an alternative to street or shelter living, yet it has been given little attention in sociological literature on homelessness. My focus is on the city of Santa Barbara, noted for its reputation as a tourist's paradise and for its restrictive policies towards the homeless, which regulate appearance, behavior and the occupation of public space. My data include three years of fieldwork, including 200 hours of recorded interviews, survey data on over 300 vehicles and their inhabitants, and municipal court trials and city council meetings. My analysis for this presentation will focus on how the RV community and their advocates legally challenge the city's regulation procedures. Two central questions guide my analysis (1) How does the regulation of RV living differ from that of shelter or street homelessness? And (2) To what extent have those in RVs been successful in avoiding or challenging regulation?

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: *Bean Trees* follows the adventures of a young woman who escapes the confines of bad relationships, finding empowerment through the creation of a new community. A key part of her empowerment is her adoption of an abandoned Native American child – a plot element that opened Kingsolver to criticism, which she addresses in her sequel *Pigs in Heaven*. This essay will read Kingsolver’s two novels against contemporary debates on the politics of cross-cultural adoption.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: A comparative textual analysis was used in this study to explore how Barbara Walters was portrayed in words and images in the news coverage of Walters’ departures from NBC and ABC. The purpose of this study attempted to find out how the contextual factors in several major media outlets, the New York Times, Newsweek, and Time Magazine were shaped and affected by the portrayal of this powerful female journalist. The results indicated that the professional ability of female journalists was ignored in U.S. news workplaces. Mainstream news media intended to employ a commercial perspective to look at the event of Barbara Walters’ departures, but did not neutrally report on this event in terms of pure journalism. Moreover, the current study also supported the argument that the professional inequality between male and female journalists in U.S. newsrooms continuously took place.