Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This essay argues that the Heroism within J.K. Rolwing's Harry Potter series reinforces democratic norms necessary for self-government.

Publication Type: Roundtable
Abstract: Dependent variable is the global attitudes of Korean American juveniles toward the American police, and the independent variable is the birthplace. Two groups are created: US- and Korea-born. T-test is conducted in order to know whether there is any significant attidudinal difference between two gorups.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper considers Harry Belafonte’s music career in the period when he was most popular, the ‘50s and ‘60s. I argue that while Belafonte was a crossover star who was seen as an exemplar of the black bourgeois produced by the nation's embrace of the Civil Right Movement, his concert repertoire and albums critiqued the exploitation of workers that continued even under the most liberal ideals of U.S. democratic capitalism.
Belafonte’s political work has been largely forgotten. When he criticized the Bush Whitehouse’s plan to invade Iraq, many people thought it was incongruous for the “King of Calypso” to comment on government policy. He described Colin Powell’s work in making a case for war as “service in the master’s house.” Newspaper editorials focused less on his criticism of the U.S. invasion and occupation as empire building and more on his reference to slavery in our “Post-Civil Rights” moment. When critics demanded that he apologize to Colin Powell for using a “demeaning” epithet, Belafonte responded:

Why are references to slavery demeaning? . . . Slavery is an important part of this nation's history. An absolutely critical part of any analysis that is done in defining black Americans. Not only the oppression and degradation of it. But our character, our courage, our spirit, our language, our songs and our culture are all born in that environment.
This nation has never really confronted, debated or had any fair exchange on this issue of slavery. We went from the strict confinement of physical slavery -- with chains, shackles and whips -- to the spiritual and psychological chains of slavery in the following century of legal segregation in this country. (“Belafonte Won’t Back Down.” Vancouver Sun 23 October 2002)

Like his critique of Powell, the songs Belafonte performed, including “Cotton Fields,” “John Henry,” and “The Banana Boat Song,” made mainstream audiences confront the history of U.S. slavery and the continued subjugation of workers of color. Belafonte recorded over thirty albums in the ‘50s and ‘60s. His music presented a range of diasporic black music including call and response spirituals, work songs, chain-gang songs, and calypsos (West Indian work songs.)

In Historical Capitalism, Immanuel Wallerstein argues that capitalism sustains itself by recycling the myth that capitalism represents progress over all previous economic systems. Wallerstein doesn’t argue that people were better off under, say, feudalism, but that the progress myth, as expressed by the culture industries, often obscures how working people suffer the same brutal exploitation under capitalism that they experienced in previous systems. This paper will look closely at how Belafonte was used by the music industry to perpetuate the myth and how he used the industry to critique the myth.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Through an analysis of the social documentary photography of Charles “One Shot” Harris, this individual paper proposal considers one of the fundamental tensions that scholars face when studying U.S. racial and ethnic groups and formations through the rubrics of transhemispheric relations and postcolonial studies. Particularly in the field of African American studies, many scholars and students struggle to articulate the relevance and the place of black descendants of U.S. slavery within early twenty-first century paradigms of transhemispheric movement, transnationalism, and post-coloniality. While scholars studying populations of West Africans and Afro-Caribbeans in the United States have found these frameworks useful for articulating social and economic development within black ethnic and immigrant populations, the question still remains: how do we make sense of long-standing, multi-generational, localized African American working-class communities within these frameworks? And of course, this question can be posed of other localized, rooted ethnic communities in the United States.
My paper, “One Shot” Harris and the Photographic Practice of Black Non-Iconicity,” is rooted in this tension. Black Pittsburgh photographer Charles “Teenie” One Shot Harris spent over fifty years, from the 1930s through the 1980s, documenting Pittsburgh’s black communities, while working as a photojournalist and running his own photo studio in the Hills district of the city. Harris, who left behind over 100,000 negatives when he died in 1998, is considered to have built the largest photographic archive of blacks in any community of the United States. What sets Harris’ work apart from many better known black social documentary photographers is the non-iconic nature of his work, as well as his technique of only taking one shot of any particular subject matter. Additionally, many of his images and negatives were not labeled.
In 2001, the Carnegie Museum of Art began the Teenie Harris Archive Project, which will eventually be an online archive of all of Harris’ images that the museum has in its possession. One purpose of the project is to have the residents of the Hills district involved in helping the museum identify and label the 80,000 images acquired from Harris’ family. In doing this, the museum presumes that many of the descendants of Harris’ photographic subjects are still residents of the Hills district. My interest in Harris’ work and practice center around his practice of non-iconicity and the simultaneous specificity of his project, meticulously documenting the everyday-ness of a black community in a Midwestern steel town over the course of five decades.
In considering Harris’ practice and the archive that he left behind, I pose the question to my colleagues and to myself of the significance of documenting localized, fairly homogenous communities, such as the Hills district, in light of these larger paradigm shifts.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The U.S. Supreme Court decided Scott v. Harris on April 30, 2006. Video evidence from dashboard cameras was crucial to the Court's decision that, as matter of law, police had acted reasonably by using life-threatening force to end a car
chase. The Court even posted the videos for public viewing on its website so that we might all see how the evidence "speaks for itself." This paper is about how the Court read the video evidence -- about the different visual epistemologies employed in Justice Scalia's majority opinion and Justice Stevens's dissent. Starting with a close analysis of the videos, the paper will suggest some questions about the cultural and geographic backstory of the case which may have influenced the actors' behavior and the Justices' viewing. With video increasingly in the hands of citizens as well
as authorities, courts will increasingly have to deal not only with competing interpretations of video evidence but with competing videos. How the videos are read will thus become a central concern for the law.

PLEASE NOTE:This work is very interdisciplinary and doesn't fit any of the key words very well. It will touch on many but not belong squarely within a single category: it's about a court case plus technology plus culture plus judgment.