Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The goal of this paper is to understand the dynamics of one community’s response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita. By identifying which factors help or hinder effective institutional reaction in emergency situations, problems one local community shared with the highly publicized difficulties in New Orleans, as well as local successes, will be explored. How preparedness, location and community size influence emergency responses will each be briefly mentioned. The concept of social capital will be used to understand how members of the community worked together. Social control is seen as a relatively unexplored element of social capital, but one that may help facilitate a community’s ability to create innovative responses to rapidly changing situations. In conclusion, implications for future preparedness are mentioned.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper is part of a panel # 030982 entitled :
Researching Women’s Movements and Gender Politic: Feminist
Inquiry and Methodology in Empirical Research proposed by Jean C.
Robinson
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been an explosion of
in-depth studies of postsocialist societies crucial to broadening our
understanding of postcommunist politics. While anthropologists have
been contemplating feminist ethnography in the postsocialist states
(e.g. Fieldwork Dilemmas: Anthropologists in Postsocialist Societies,
2000), little has been written by political scientists. This paper,
based on my struggles to do fieldwork in Russia, the Czech Republic,
and Armenia, will examine the limits to objectivity, the paradoxes of
activism, and the obstacles of trying to the hit the moving target that
is postcommunist civil society.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The Electoral College leads presidential candidates to focus predominantly on a relatively small number of states. I examine the effects of this campaign strategy on public perceptions of politics taking into account state-level characteristics.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The exploding spread of online peer-posted videos such as YouTube is phenomenal. The sharing and viewing of such web content are hypothesized to be influenced by the process of informational cascade, that commonly characterizes the choices of consumption by sequential patrons among (content) products of quality uncertainty. We scheme an empirical model to test the informational cascade effect on the accumulation of “views” or “hits” by videos. An entire set of 1,304 videos, uploaded to Internet Archive’s moving images section, during a 4-week period, is tracked for video-individual daily hit captures over 33 days since launch. The views distribution is vastly skewed across the videos observed. The estimation reveals that the larger cumulative viewership a video has gained at a given time, the more views it will attract next. Further, this cascading effect for videos with thumbnails (i.e., a series of pictorial preview snapshots of the video) available aside is significantly lessened vis-à-vis that for those without. This finding espouses the postulation that the rise of information about quality and thus information cascade responds to the role of quality uncertainty. The presence of textual descriptions of videos marginally intensifies the cascading effect.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Research indicates that prisoners confront a myriad of obstacles in navigating the post-release labor market. Ex-offenders struggle to secure and retain legitimate employment amid employer discrimination and their limited and outdated job skills. Job readiness programs attempt to address these barriers to employment through life and employment skills training aimed at confronting the psychological and social stigma of a criminal record. Through ethnographic observation and informal interviews at a New York City job readiness program, I discuss how ex-offenders work through their varied limitations and construct techniques to secure their own job readiness. Findings indicate that in addition to the well documented psycho-social barriers that ex-offenders face as a result of their imprisonment, they also encounter a myriad of physical challenges in acquiring job skills. I argue that in order to meet program benchmarks participants must embody employment skills. Additionally participants and program staff actively read bodies in order to gauge how well participants have addressed both the real and imagined weight of the criminal conviction. As job training programs attempt to smooth the transition between prison and work it is suggested that the physicality of employment skills training be considered as a vital aspect of reentry and reintegration.