Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper explores the role of personal predispositions, mass media use, interpersonal relationships, civic behaviors and conversation as antecedents of altruistic blood donation. Path analyses show that conversations about blood donation are central to voluntary blood donation efforts. The direct effects of conversation on past and future voluntary blood donation are significant, and most importantly, talk mediates the contribution of other variables in the model including media and pro civic behaviors. Differences with a model predicting blood donation for emergencies are discussed. A talk-centered model of blood donation is proposed and its implications assessed for future blood collection programs.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Within the literature on the pro-life movement and anti-abortion politics, some have suggested a link between the size of pro-life religious communities relative to the population demographics in particular areas, lack of/perceived lack of political opportunity, and breakdowns in state social control with greater amounts of anti-abortion terrorism. The purpose of this paper is to review and analyze these assertions. Preliminary quantitative analysis indicates that there is more anti-abortion terrorism in places where pro-life religious denominations do not make up a majority of the religious adherents. These findings are in contrast with one of the most publicized examples of anti-abortion terrorism the shootings in Pensacola, FL. In this case abortion providers were shot in a city with a large pro-life religious community that has tended to be less than welcoming to providers of abortion services, and is in a state that has repeatedly attempted to place restriction on access to abortion. While this case runs counter to earlier analyses it provides an opportunity for discussion of anti-abortion violence in specific, as well as terrorism in general, as an extra-legal form of conflict resolution and inter-group social control.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Male civilians and combatants are most seriously affected by armed conflict and are most likely to be killed or wounded in fighting or summarily executed and mistreated when falling into the hands of the enemy. And, yet, male civilians are less likely to be protected during armed conflicts, and suffer the highest death tolls in armed conflicts. In this paper, I argue that the construction of the 'combatant' and the 'civilian' in international law and politics bears upon the treatment and protection offered to both. Or, to put it differently, that the discursive production of identity-combatant or civilian-has material effects. I suggest the following: a) gender is central to the constitution, not simply the implementation, of the distinction of combatant and civilian; b) that the gendering of the distinction contributes to the relative weakness, as compared to the robustness of the laws of war, of the protections offered to all ostensible civilians, be they male or female but; c) poses distinct challenges to the protection of male civilians-a phrase that, like that of female combatants, is notable for its modification of an implicit universal.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: As public support for the war in Iraq waned over time, the Bush administration consciously altered the frames associated with the U.S. military intervention there. In order to mitigate the impact of increasing U.S. casualty figures, President Bush emphasized the inherent brutality of counterinsurgency warfare and described American and allied losses as worthy “sacrifices” in the “defense of freedom.” As public disenchantment increased and critics called for withdrawal timetables, the administration described its opponents as “defeatists” and argued that a retreat from Iraq would mean that several thousand U.S. troops had died “in vain”. The rhetoric of “sunk costs” that must be redeemed through further conflict is a well-known, yet irrational, trope. The casualties-as-sunk-costs frame is believed to be particularly persuasive, given the raw emotions associated with combat losses. This paper builds on past framing research to probe the impact of sunk-cost frames on public willingness to expend additional “blood and treasure” in an ongoing war. The efficacy of these frames was explored through an experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey on attitudes about Iraq. The results reveal the limits of framing effects and the importance of modeling multiple “publics” that respond to (sunk-cost) framing in a differential manner.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: When one thinks about the archive of US nation formation, one does not usually call to mind accusations of "white conjuring" and "state magic" made by Native Americans and African Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. Yet, to the Native Americans and African Americans who made them, such accusations were real and crucial archives of esoteric information and insight into the newly forming US. In drawing on this little studied archive, I want to challenge the neat boundary between heathen/ savage populations and the so-called enlightened state by demonstrating how, from certain perspectives, conjuring and sorcerous/ magical acts were an intrinsic part of lynching and burning ceremonies, white cannibalistic practices, and necromantic rituals encoded into the law.

I unpack a number of taken for granted categories of knowledge and experience—such as folklore, folk sensibility, supernatural, superstition, and indigenous. Within the archive/arsenal of US state formation, such terms have dictated not only the subject position of occupied peoples and geographic territories, but have also reinforced norms of reality, civilized sensibility, time, and, most importantly, morality. It is one thing for us to come to terms with the unspeakable horrors of our national past, but an entirely different matter to wrestle with widespread 19th-century fears that the US was becoming a “cannibal nation” and that particular practices of “blood” and “state magic” were the esoteric underpinnings of our most cherished morals and values. These issues, of course, were never adequately treated nor given platform in the public domain, because it was thought that the savage, heathen, subaltern subject could not speak, or for that matter, that the state and representative figures of the state could not make intelligible sense of the arguments articulated. I maintain, however, that though buried and suppressed, a dialogue did take place and that this dialogue is, in compelling and socially impacting ways, still ongoing.