Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: A number of surveys that address questions of religious attitudes and behaviors include items that ask respondents whether they identify with different religious labels. Although there is criticism about the usefulness of these items, we argue that respondents' self-identification with one religious group or another may be important in understanding their political views more fully. Using the University of Akron Religion and Politics Survey, we test the effect of self-identification on political attitudes and party affiliation, and explore the opportunity to make a contribution regarding the usefulness of the self-identification item overall. Previous studies have found that, for other religious groups, self-identification is a more powerful predictor of a close relationship between one's religious group and their political ideas, suggesting strong tendencies toward identity salience for those who feel strong group affiliations. If that is the case, then the use of self-identification for classifying evangelicals deserves further scrutiny. As evangelicals continue to garner media attention and are targeted by politicians and other leaders, a true assessment of how to classify evangelicals may also help us better understand how to reach them, especially if they are not to be found in traditionally evangelical churches. In order to more properly evaluate evangelicals and their political behaviors, it may be important to include an element of self-identification, in addition to believing evangelical orthodoxy, behaving like an orthodox evangelical, and belonging to an evangelical tradition.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: “And therefore it belonged to the Commonwealth (that is, to the sovereign only),” Hobbes wrote, “to approve or disapprove both of the places and matter of foreign traffic.” State responses to international migration and ancillary flows are reshaping the politics of
belonging and exclusion in ways that only interdisciplinary collaboration can begin to map. This paper argues that new virtual technologies that states are adopting to control “foreign traffic” on the margins are rapidly being deployed for maintaining order in the
mainstream. Overlapping flows of international migration, human trafficking, sophisticated drug and weapons cartels, and mobile terrorist cells – to name just a few – have converged to raise the importance of the migration-security nexus, prompting huge
public investments in new technologies that link the state to the flesh of its subjects. Body metaphors have long been used to “embody” the state in visceral language. Liberal states, in response to new security challenges, have now begun adopting new information technologies, such as biometrics, that codify and archive bodily and behavioral features of individuals. This return to the body – albeit in digital form – as a site of state control shifts into reverse the logic of Hobbes’s “Artificial Man” as a metaphorical body of words and images. What we are witnessing instead is the transubstantiation of the word, the body metaphor, back into the flesh. The emerging Virtual Leviathan reduces immigrants and citizens alike to “datamigrants” – flows of code – thus ushering in a new
stage in the evolution and intensification of cybernetic state control and new grounds for the politics of belonging and exclusion.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper argues that “shopping locally” isn’t always about “thinking globally,” as the popular bumpersticker suggests. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this paper makes a two-fold argument about the ways residents of a small town understand the importance of shopping “locally.” First, residents connected their sense of belonging in a rural community to a belief that membership in this community discouraged the “excessive materialism” they perceived as endemic to suburban and urban communities. Second, while many Viroquans supported the idea of shopping locally, they differed in their definitions of “local,” and in their rationales for doing so. These differences reflect both different orientations to communal belonging in Viroqua, but different orientations to the political and economic value of patronizing local businesses. The different logics of “local” residents used to organize their thinking about consumption implied different sets of political and community priorities.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In this paper, we examine the Congressional Human Rights Caucus (CHRC) and the role that it plays in the shaping of America's human rights policy. Although numerous informal organizations, or caucuses as they are called, exist in Congress and have been examined by scholars, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus has received surprisingly scant attention, either by congressional or human rights scholars. Yet, the CHRC has consistently been one of the largest caucuses within the congressional system, and it has been involved in a large array of human rights activities in the halls of Congress since its inception more than two decades ago. In this research, therefore, we begin to evaluate the role of the CHRC in two complementary ways-first, by examining who joins this caucus and who does not, and second, by describing and evaluating the activities of the CHRC in the global human rights policies and actions of the United States. With the assistance of a grant from the Dirksen Congressional Center, we have completed considerable work on both dimensions of this research and should be able to complete the paper wholly in time for the Hawaii meetings. To address the first dimension, we test some theoretical arguments about who in Congress would likely join the CHRC and who would not. These arguments focus upon some common political, ideological, and constituency characteristics that seemingly would differentiate members from non-members in the CHRC. We evaluate these arguments with data from the membership of the 106th Congress (already collected but not yet fully analyzed). Our overall aim with this part of the analysis is to evaluate how cohesive the CHRC is politically, ideologically, and demographically within the halls of Congress. To address the second dimension, we utilize some quantitative and qualitative data on CHRC activities (already collected). Some documentary evidence comes from the CHRC in which it outlines its activities over the years. Other qualitative data comes from a series of interviews that we conducted with members and staff of the CHRC and with human rights interest groups involved with the CHRC within the past year. Our overall aim with these latter types of data is to describe the CHRC activities and to assess its impact on the foreign policy process of the United States in the area of global human rights.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Within the framework of US law, much attention has been paid to citizenship as a site and a process of contestation over who belongs. Scholars have rightly focused on the power of the law to regulate, create, destroy and manage categories of persons and have noted that exclusion from citizenship is a particular exercise of legal power that has significantly shaped citizenship in racialized terms. This paper focuses on the dialectical quality of the law of citizenship noting that it is exercised both through expansion and contraction, by both inclusions and withholding, by encompassing and exclusion. Drawing on the insights of a number of scholars who have noted that control is at times exercised through the denial of sovereignty, this project attends to the status of African Americans both during slavery and after as an instance of enforced belonging and simultaneous exclusion