Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between death and political philosophy. It is premised on the idea that political theory is � first and foremost � an exercise in addressing the unsettling nature of our own mortality; therefore, by examining the underlying themes of death within the canon we have the potential to establish a new framework for theoretical analysis. First, it draws out explicit themes of death within the canon, providing a brief, yet comprehensive overview of how death and death-like themes play a central role within the canon, and how they inform the overall development of each theory. Second, it examines how popular views of death and the afterlife can be seen as informing the overall logic of each piece. Ultimately, it concludes that popular conceptions of death (often derived from dominant faith structures and/or religious institutions) drive the formation of political theory, and thus form the foundation for politics.
The interesting trend discovered as the paper unfolds is the increasing disappearance of death within the central works of the discipline. Further, this decline seems to be mirrored by a decline in qualitative analyses of �the good life�. The paper looks to develop this link where it exists, questioning whether the decline of death within the works of the discipline can accurately be regarded as a decline of the discipline itself. In other words, whether denying death in our work denies what it is we do as political theorists.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: ABSTRACT
This paper examines how offenders interact with a state parole board. Using conversation analysis, I examine the excuses and justifications offenders employ as they attempt to achieve parole release. The vocabularies of motive offenders rely on in their appeals to the board materialize not as individual assertions that are unquestiongly accepted. Rather, the socially approved vocabularies are generated and altered in real time interaction. Analyzing regular parole and parole violation hearings, I provide illustrations of how offenders and the parole board negotiate vocabularies of motive (excuses and justifications) throughout the parole hearing.

Publication Type: Works in Progress
Abstract: Technology is central to our lives today. It helps deconstruct our identity. In �Chocolat� (1988), Claire Denis argues that cinema makes a great intervention in capturing characters secrets and inner lives and transcribing their desire for the audience. She uses film technology to recreate important moments and events of her childhood in Cameroon. She turns her camera to investigate her family history and the patriarchal colonial ideology that sustained it, structured the behavior and feelings of its members and marked their personality for life. She also challenges the simplistic idea that colonial power only enforced its hegemony through force. She demonstrates how the search for sexual love and intimacy is a powerful driving force that can either oppress the individual or free him .
Through her memory, Denis debate taboos, sexual desire and power relation as mediated through technology to argue that these emotions can be traced at the level of the visual, through movements and gestures. She provides a visual field of racialized gaze to complicate the participants� longing, desire and sex with their notions of self-worth and integrity. The movie is a visual metaphor to discuss colonization, taboos, desire and racism, the place of women and their desire in patriarchal society, individual agency and the role of children in a society that considers them invisible. The movie moves forward from memories of colonization to meditate on its legacy by inferring the taboos that still between France and Cameroon to this day.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: History is the documentation of the past. When historians intentionally or unintentionally omit an event from their writings or describe it in a distorted way, it is as if that event has never happened or it occurred differently than it truly did. This paper will discuss the rising trend of underestimation or even denial of the Jewish Holocaust. This paper argues that these efforts are part of an attempt to establish Holocaust denial as an accepted norm in the academia and in international politics. Although most Western democracies still perceive the Holocaust as the manifestation of ultimate evil, this perception is increasingly challenged by some academics and so-called historians, which the paper refers to as Holocaust deniers and falsifiers. It appears that Holocaust deniers and falsifiers are trying to replace the existing knowledge, narrative history, and norms related to the Holocaust with new ones based on lies, in order to re-establish Nazism as an accepted ideology again. Despite their lies and distorted interpretation of historic events, Holocaust deniers gain more and more supporters. One can not dismiss the phenomenon as a marginal, insignificant, and ephemeral trend. The paper will begin by discussing the meaning of international norms and their relations to networks of knowledge; it will define two key concepts: collective memory and historical narrative and will discuss their importance. It will then describe the historical roots of Holocaust denial and its development. In addition, the paper will distinguish between various forms of denial, and will discuss the motives for denial in the West and in the Middle East, using such examples as Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadininejad, rhetoric.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This research tracks the issue evolution of agricultural support programs for African-American farmers between 1935 and 2006.The paper is essentially descriptive, tracking the issue over time, the changing definition of the issue, and identifying key institutional players active in the congressional venue.