Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Commodities can possess use value (to satisfy a perceived need or desire), exchange value (purchased with money and can appreciate or depreciate in monetary value), and sign value (an object’s symbolic value serves as a sign of a consumer’s status, prestige, or social standing). Advertisements are seen as contributing to the cultural codes that direct a material culture which “encourages [a feeling of emptiness] because people who feel empty make great consumers” (Kilbourne, 1999, p. 29). Such codes are believed to create unintended consequences and consequent victims from the “invidious comparisons of reality to the world seen in advertisement” (Pollay, 1986, p.27).
Advertising ties an object to a dominant ritual or culture practice. Race and gender are important categories that have been presented in stereotypical ways. Traditionally, women desire diamonds and men provide them as part of the heterosexual norm of romance, one which surrounds various rituals such as marriage and anniversaries. Gender role expectations make their way into advertisement through both proscriptive and prescriptive language.
By collecting a sample of diamond advertisements from The New Yorker 1948-2000 I seek to display three codes: class representation/product credibility, gender and race representation, and heterosexual norm representation.
Advertisements are believed to be powerful though not always seen as completely determinant of the audience’s fate. Instead, advertisements provide a “vocabulary that aids the realization of self-expression in the war for social position” (Gottdiener, 2000, p.16). Thus the stereotypical depiction of minorities and women in diamond advertisements have social implications.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The environmental security field has been recently extended from scarce renewable resources to internationally traded commodities such as diamonds. This paper examines the emergence of 'blood' or 'conflict' diamonds on international agendas of conflict analysis and resolution, and compares the models in which diamonds are related to conflicts with those presented in the environmental scarcity-conflict literature.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The late David Foster Wallce writes that "irony tyrannizes us," suggesting that in a postmodern, irony-laden world it has become passe to mean what one says. In this essay, I propose that two pop cultural phenomena reflect a desire to escape from such tyranny. First, I will examine "emo," short for "emotional hardcore," a form of inward-looking post-punk music that emerged in the late 1980s that privileges sincerity as a reaction to punk's nihilism and irony. Further, I suggest that emo is a musical precursor to "mumblecore," a recent cinematic movement of sorts that dramatizes the intense desire for human connection amid the cultural logic of irony and the ubiquity of communication technologies that ultimately alienate as opposed to foster face-to-face connection. Both emo and mumblecore reflect do-it-yourself (DIY) youth cultures that reject the trappings of irony in favor of sincerity, presence, and community. Together, I argue, these outwardly disparate phenomena are bound by a Utopian sentiment that suggests a way out of postmodern schizophrenia and the potential for the creation of a better place.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper examines global legal efforts to stem the flow of conflict, or blood, diamonds from Africa. The Kimberly Process is detailed and evaluated, followed by a general critique of legal efforts to regulate trade in conflict diamonds.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Recent literature on the global diamond trade has made little effort to understand the gendered aspects of diamond consumerism. This paper critically assesses the slick, yet thoroughly effective, advertising campaigns of diamond companies. De Beers, Tiffany & Co., Cartier, and other firms have used two main advertising strategies, both of which capitalize on feminine stereotypes and prey on societal perceptions of women?s insecurities. The first of these is directed toward women as brides-to-be and future mothers. Slogans range from ?A Diamond is Forever? to ?How Else Can Two Months? Salary Last Forever??. The second, more recent advertising tactic is directed toward the ?modern? woman. This shift in advertising attempts to entice the ?independent?, ?modern? woman to buy herself a diamond that she will then wear on her right hand. The modern woman does not need a man or marriage to have the diamond. On the surface, this appears empowering; yet, it ties empowerment to material success and consumerism. There is a larger problem that bridges North and South. The global diamond trade has been criticized on a variety of fronts ranging from the conflict diamonds issue to the use of child miners to environmental degradation caused by mining. As a response to the conflict diamond issue, the Kimberley Process was established in 2000 as an international forum through which trade controls on diamonds were developed through the collaboration of state and non-state actors, including diamond firms, industry associations, and non-governmental organizations. The roles of consumers and women-as-consumers, however, have been largely absent from this global governance equation. Cross-national research on political consumerism presents compelling evidence that women are the most active political consumers, and that they make the majority of household spending decisions. Put simply, women?s purchase decisions tend to be more responsive to issues of sweatshop working conditions, child labor, and fair trade agricultural products, for example, than are men?s. This can be linked with feminist research on women?s ?ethic of care?, which traces women?s tendencies toward social justice positions to their psychological development. Ultimately, what this means for cleaning up the global diamond trade is that ingenious advertising may in fact divert the potential of women to act as ethical diamond consumers. Thus, the paper seeks to provide lessons for the Kimberley Process and the global diamond industry as a means of contributing to the larger debates on the gendered aspects of political consumerism.