Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This study examines the effects of September 11 on Locus of Control (LOC) and its consequences among university students in Florida. Ninety-four students participated in the study prior September 11 while 129 participated in the months following the attack. There are no significant differences between the two groups of students in terms of demographic characteristics often associated with LOC and/or depression. Findings indicate, however, that the two groups differ in important ways in terms of both levels of internality and the impact of internality on depression. The average level of internality is significantly lower in the group participating after September 11. In addition, results of multiple regression analysis indicate that, as expected from previous research, in the pre-tragedy group, internality exerts a significant main affect on depression while powerful others is significantly positively related to depression. Among students who participated after September 11, the patterns of relationships are startlingly different. None of the LOC dimensions has a significant main affect on depression. When the interaction terms are added to the equation, however, both internality and powerful others are associated with increased depression. Further, the internality X powerful others interaction term is significant and negative--indicating that the positive impact of internality on depression is strongest when belief in powerful others is low. These findings have important implications for the application of Locus of Control theory in situations in which the life experiences of individuals have been dramatically affected by the actions of others.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: There has been little empirical research on the economic organization of the household. Those studies that do exist use qualitative data to study only how earned income is divided between spouses. In this paper, I use financial assets as a more comprehensive lens through which to study patterns of financial allocation among couples. Using data from a nationally representative survey of married couples, I develop and test models of financial asset ownership in marriage using insights from resource pooling, exchange, gender display, and gendered exchange theories. Results find most families to be unequal in the division of financial assets, with wives lacking ownership over less than half of the family’s financial assets. In accounting for this inequality, predictions made by gendered exchange theory are supported. In light of gendered exchange theory, it is argued that these economic conditions reflect broad cultural devaluations of women’s paid employment and wages and show the household to be a locus of economic stratification along gendered lines.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Poor people are increasingly targeted by the state under a system of constructed illegality (including immigration status) and forced to labor under worsening conditions unleashed by deregulated market forces. The current structure of public interest law in the United States is ill-equipped to support nascent movements of the poor attempting to challenge the conditions of neoliberal globalization. This paper will examine the current context of public interest law practice and argue that law school clinics are well-positioned to support poor people's organizing at the grassroots through litigation and policy advocacy work. Further, this paper will survey the critical pedagogical benefits of such a role.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This essay seeks to fill the ‘gap’ in current Cold War rhetorical scholarship by articulating the specific rhetorical obstacles that President Nixon faced while attempting to establish relations with the People’s Republic and by illuminating and evaluating the effectiveness of various rhetorical strategies embedded within Nixon’s remarks immediately before, during, and immediately after his historic visit to the People’s Republic of China.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Although there is an abundance of literature quantifiably assessing interpersonal communication, this paper takes a distinctive communicological approach by focusing on those qualitative aspects and dimensions of communication that critically depend upon the absolute once-occurrence and uniqueness of the involved individuals. Drawing upon a large range of phenomenologists, semioticians, and systems theorists, the question of agency and efficacy is exposed as an on-going issue of communicative praxis grounded in existential particularity.