Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The Garden of Grand Vision was a jerrybuilt building in the Chinese slums in Harbin, Manchuria. It housed a warren of flophouses and makeshift businesses for the dispossessed during the Japanese occupation of Manchukuo in the years leading to the Second World War in the Pacific. In 1942 a 300 page police survey was filed with the Japanese military intelligence services describing the residents, their origins and occupations. Of the 2,000 or so living in the Garden flophouses, nearly half were women, all of whom worked as prostitutes. These women were victims, yet their services provided more than sex for the floating population of the slum. The Japanese police officer who wrote the report claimed that these women acted as a safety valve in the desperate atmosphere of the Garden. They became a surrogate family to the dispossessed. Many of the women entered the sex trade to support drug addiction. Others became prostitutes because their earnings served as interest on loans taken out by their families. This paper will describe the lives of these women, their strategies for survival and the larger conditions of migrtation, invasion and war that led them into prostitution in the Garden of Grand vision.

Publication Type: Poster Sessions
Abstract: In 2005 a Texas Wildscape and garden were constructed at a local school. A Shared Local Resources Model (SLRM) was used to involve numerous partners. Data from this highly successful project and the elements of the SLRM will be presented.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Following the waves of anti-immigrant sentiment that enveloped California in the early 1990s and the concomitant expansion of a Latino based informal economy, in 1997 Los Angeles residents, along with key public officials pressured the city council to issue a legal injunction banning the use of leaf blowers within 500 feet of residential property. In response, Latina/o gardeners mobilized against what they understood to be a racist attempt to further control their livelihood and diminish their informal economic stronghold in the city's landscape industry. In this presentation I will discuss the ways in which the blower ban was constituted by particular investments in whiteness and privatized citizenship. I will interrogate how a variety of discursive and ideological mechanisms make up the leaf blower ban as a moment of white injury in order to blame the imagined or real social problems on the very Latino labor the global city of Los Angeles relies on to sustain its daily functioning. Moreover, I will uncover how jardineros employed culture as a source of autonomous political self-activity in order to bustle power against the impending attacks on their livelihood while articulating a struggle for dignity. I will also interrogate how, as a result of forced migration, lived meanings and practices are de-territorialized from their sites of origin and re-territorialized in the spatial and power contexts of work and a new home weighted with intense racial hostility. More specifically, I will reflect on how jardineros mobilized specific cultural forms to the strategic and tactical ends of launching and sustaining a campaign against the racist excesses of the Los Angeles’ leaf blower ban. This presentation will conclude by suggesting that cultural dignity is not only an antagonistic modality against specific systems of domination but also a protagonistic composition of being always expanding its potentiality beneath the corridors of power. More broadly, this study will be informed by how forms of Latina/o cultural dignity draw upon the accumulated memories of solidarity learned from historical micro-struggles such as the Los Angeles blower ban that eventually erupt into contemporary national mobilizations for justice, human rights and citizenship.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Previous research suggests that presidents expand their public appeals in an effort to "go public" in the face of sagging approval. This paper uses Richard Nixon's private polls to investigate two issues of analytic importance: first, whether public approval ratings have a significant influence on presidential rhetoric and, second, whether sagging popularity increases or decreases presidential appeals. Our analysis examines archival records and multivariate models that control for the influence of economic and real-world conditions. It finds evidence that approval exerts an independent influence on presidential rhetoric and reveals a pattern of three quite different rhetoric strategies depending on format, audience, and policy content of presidential statements. We conclude that core assumptions of the Public Presidency model - including the expectation of consistent presidential incentives to expand their public appeal - should be reexamined and greater attention given to the strategic value of
restrictng public appeals.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The current understandings of the global culture industry and specifically the role of technology in the global culture industry have been extensively influenced by the early works of the Frankfurt school. However, this area has not been significantly engaged by feminist theorists or even by the technoscience area of feminist theory. A feminist engagement of the theorizing of technology as it relates to the global culture industry is over due. Marcuse’s paper “Some social implications of modern Technology” (Marcuse, 2002) and Habermas’s paper “Technology and Science as Ideology” (Habermas, 1970) are examined for their theoretical treatements of technology. The perspectives on technology in these ‘classical’ texts are then compared and contrasted with the perspective of leading feminist technoscience theorist Donna Haraway using her paper “A Cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century” (Haraway, 1991). Her paper is used to provide both critique and to suggest possible ways that a blended theoretical position might move us forward in our understandings of technology and our understandings of technology as it relates to the global culture industry.