Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In the last fifteen years, the European Union has repeatedly revised its founding treaties in a way that makes its provisions for foreign policy cooperation increasingly more like ?hard? international law rather than the ?soft? international law that usually characterizes foreign policy cooperation. Trends in formal foreign policy cooperation through the institutions, and also those on cooperation between members *outside* of the formal structures, suggest a different story. These show a substantial tension between the desire to increase their level of integration ? as represented by the increasingly hard provisions of the treaties ? and the desire to increase their level of cooperation on foreign policy itself. This paper examines these trends and attempts to discern both the causes of these divergent trends and also their effect on further European integration.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines the choices made by the Homeric heroes at the end of Plato's Myth of Er, in view of both the poetic and the political ramifications of the heroes' selections. Of particular significance are the choices of Odysseus and Ajax.

Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: This paper looks at how various cultural texts and cultural performances create a particular understanding of self and ‘home’—a metaphorical space of belonging—among diasporic communities in the United States and Europe. More specifically, it seeks to understand how newer technologies, such as web based blogs and websites connect to the more widely documented practices of consuming conventional media, such as film, music, and TV programs imported from ‘home’, in order to maintain some metaphorical familial relationship with a distant geography. In doing so, it seeks to understand how new technologies converge with, and diverge from, previously documented cultural practices and performances. And questions what these shifts tell us about changing attitudes toward both their ‘new’ homes, and their understanding of technology, among second and third generation immigrants. Through a combination of textual analysis, and ethnography, I attempt to theorize and discuss how the uses of particular technologies, and their related practices, act as markers of belonging, assimilation and the ‘west’. In essence, I argue that the technology itself separates the new immigrant from the citizen.

Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: In the early 1930s a feisty and heterogeneous broadcast reform movement challenged the emerging hegemony of commercial radio broadcasting and its two dominant networks, NBC and CBS. This movement made a strong critique of the limitations of commercial media for a free and self-governing society and attempted to pass legislation establishing a vibrant noncommercial broadcasting sector. In this contest the reformers went up against corporate media lobbying power and the emergence of highly sophisticated public relations. The movement was flustered by the PR and overwhelmed by the corporate lobby. It collapsed with the passage of the Communications Act of 1934.

In the past five years there has emerged a modern media reform movement that is attempting to do similar work as the 1930s broadcast reform movement, only extended to media writ large. This movement has successfully organized literally millions of Americans on issues ranging from media ownership and public broadcasting to stopping government propaganda efforts, hypercommercialism and keeping the Internet from being privatized. What is striking about the new media reform movement is how it has consciously learned from the experiences of the 1930s, in particular in addressing the corporate lobbying and PR juggernaut. This paper will draw out these connections.