Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Since 1962, film audiences have enjoyed the adventures of James Bond; female characters have always been pivotal to the narratives. A quantitative content analysis of Bond films assesses how female characters have been portrayed over time. This study adds to the body of communication research on the content and effects of female media images by analyzing a specific series of films that, public criticism maintains, stereotypes women.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this article I analyze how the print media frames the debate over funding new stadiums with public money.
A qualitative analysis of three newspapers, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Tampa Tribune reveals two different framing strategies. The Post-Gazette and the Tribune draw from a model of overt bias where the media construct meanings about the issue based on some clear bias. For both papers, team ownership sparked the frame. The Inquirer employed what I call a "moral rationalist" frame marked by a general watch-dog appearance. The frame focused on holding individuals accountable for their actions.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this paper I will explore how international financial markets display different reactions to the partisanship of governments across countries. The partisan hypothesis asserts that left-leaning governments are associated with higher inflation, greater government debt and government consumption, and higher tax rates, which are the features that investors generally dislike. I expect that the partisanship of governments in developed countries does not matter to the markets, whereas it significantly affects the markets when it comes to developing countries.The reason is that the markets are confident that leftist governments in developed countries know that they have to cater to the interests of the markets; those in developing countries might be less pragmatic and more ideological. More importantly, investors usually lack good information concerning political certainty of developing countries. Therefore, it is likely that left party governments in developing countries may send negative messages to the markets because of their partisan label. Given these assumptions, I propose two possible situations where left-leaning governments in developing countries fare better: first, other things being equal, those leftist governments in developing countries with a relatively longer history of having access to international capital markets are likely to have higher credit ratings, because they are more exposed to the investors; second, the shorter the duration of democratic regime the lower credit rating a leftist government may have, because left parties in new democracies might be more ideological or extreme in order to strongly appeal to their supporters. I will use the sovereign credit ratings data by Institutional Investor and Euromoney (ranging from 1980 to 1999) to conduct statistical analyses on the effects of partisanship on credit ratings.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Love constitutes a peculiarly modern basis for marriage, and placing the sentimental nuclear family at its heart emphasizes the softer side of love as marriage’s ground. In this paper I would like to explore marriage’s relation to love in extremis, as sexual passion and possession, and the history of law’s ironizing of the sexual and biopolitical aspects of passion. Using the age-old metaphor of blood to propose new ways of articulating certain conditions of inclusion and exclusion from the legal privilege of marriage, I’d like to ask: how does law circumspectly code something as ungovernable as passion in ways that legitimize and normalize certain relations and not others? If in the nineteenth century “hot blood” translated into the legal doctrine of provocation such that husbands (and husbands only) could, in some American jurisdictions, kill their wives’ lovers with impunity, it also heavily emphasized blood ties as the thread binding the procreative family to the realm of the juridical (in the guise of laws concerning legitimacy and illegitimacy, adultery, seduction, and rape, to name a few). Until early in the 20th century, as a general matter the legal relation of marriage not only protected but conflated the passion and the property rights of men. In the 21st century, this blood alchemy is masked by a shifting language of love as intimacy, the marker of privacy. Yet if male crimes of passion are no longer legally legible as a legitimate exercise of marital possessory rights, contemporary political and doctrinal debates over gay marriage underscore the law’s fundamental investment in a biopolitics of blood as a way to define marriage as “naturally” heterosexual.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This research examines the effect of adult life experiences such as marriage, parenthood, and religion on the termination of drug use and crime over the life course. There is a great deal of evidence which shows that adult social ties, such as marriage, act as turning points in an individual’s life that can produce a change in criminal offending from an offender to a non-offender or a drug user to a nonuser. While the body of literature on social bonds and desistance has grown considerably in the past 10 years, research on African American males and females has been lacking. In response to this gap in the literature, this research will draw on longitudinal data from the Woodlawn project, which is an epidemiologically-defined community cohort of African-American inner-city males and females who has been followed from childhood through adulthood (first grade, age 16, age 32, and age 42). The overarching goal of this paper is to examine the role of adult life events and their subsequent social ties on the termination from self-reported crime and drug use among this community sample of African Americans. In light of the findings, the generalizability of theories of desistance, such as Sampson and Laub's age-graded theory of informal social control, will be assessed.