Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The political responses to the bombings in London on the 7th of July 2005, the subsequent “failed” bombings on the 21st of July, and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by anti-terrorist officers on the 22nd of July, show us that the idea of a community in unity continues to be the overwhelmingly dominant model we have available for how we might organise political communities. This is the idea that a community must be formed around the foundational principle of unity, representing a shared essence that goes beyond people’s membership in a society or state. It is the image of community that underpins nationalist discourses, the kind that were circulating at full speed in the aftermath of the London bombings. This paper will explore the idea of a community in unity through the case of political responses to the London bombings. In doing so, it will seek to reveal the tremendous capacity of this idea in steering out ability to conceive of possible alternatives. It will also offer a contribution to studies in international political theory that are specifically interested in exploring what might be involved in the task of forming different ideas of community, and what might be done to avoid reproducing the familiar impasses.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The Varieties of Capitalism
literature would benefit from more coherence and a model of firm
preferences will allow the many moving parts of this branch of
scholarship to more convincingly hang together. I offer a critical
review that calls for a mapping scheme that would orient and redirect a
broad swath of the literature. This review will include scholarship
that positions the firm as its core unit of analysis to trace and model
the vertical and horizontal junctures of strategic interaction. Local,
state, national, and supranational institutions and the dense webs that
tether them together comprise the vertical junctures. The cross-firm
intersections comprise the mainstay of the horizontal junctures.
Importing this simple, compact vertical and horizontal mapping scheme
braids the panoply of writing on the firm into four strands of
patterned activity. I propose a typological model of firm preferences
in (1) social and (2) competition policy arenas, which comports rather
snuggly with much of the extant writings with in the VOC branch within
these two policy spheres. This model hones in on variation in firm
level lobbying strategies, recruitment, frame, and changing repertoire
of resources throughout European integration since 1986 (Single
European Act). This mapping scheme and preference model also has
purchase on questions of agenda setting, malleable veto points, and the
configurations of corporatism and pluralism at the EU level. The paper
will include discussion of a down-stream enterprise - likely my
dissertation - that would chart the intersection of national and EU
social and competitive policy spheres through the lens of business
interest intermediation since 1986. Some regression analysis will
hopefully be presented, but my primary desire is feedback on the
precision of my critical literature review and tweaking of the
model.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper asks: Must racial hierarchy beget racial politics? Using data on non-white associations, it compares the development of non-white civil society in London and New York in order to identify the roots of racial-oriented activism.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: My paper examines how Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906) challenge monolithic, human-centered ideas of race and gender. As I assert, London argues that evolution leads to biological kinship between animals and humans. I pay particular notice to the ways that both novels depict the popularized “wild frontier” as a projection of white, masculine fantasies about dominance and control. My discussion then focuses on London’s proposal that national ideals of “whiteness” and masculinity and femininity must be tested against the dictates of a natural/national history. As a result we can read the violent endings of both novels as attempts to reconcile the conflicting themes of biological kinship and imperialism. Thus, as I observe, these novels reflect dominant cultural attitudes, such as imperialist fantasies about progress, that inform an early-twentieth-century reading of evolution. Yet I do suggest that London’s narratives provide possibilities for “rewriting” animal languages in a way that might allow for a reexamination of evolutionary theory on non-human agents. I look at these possibilities in the context of how second-order systems theory (described by Cary Wolfe as the study of “observing observation” ) allows us to explore the instability of language and meaning, shedding new light on the production of scientific knowledge about the evolutionary development of animals and humans.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: I recently published an article on George Catlin’s seven-year project in the western territories to collect, classify, and represent its “vanishing” peoples in American Studies (summer 2005). I have now begun work that examines Catlin’s efforts to commodify and objectify his experiences in the West in the cultural markets of Europe, where the realities of fickle popular tastes and erratic profit margins would eventually lead Catlin to borrow from the sideshow model of display made so successful by his contemporary P.T. Barnum. My work fits nicely with this year’s focus on “Transhemispheric Visions and Community Connections,” in that my paper will focus exclusively on Catlin’s exhibition of fourteen Iowa Indians in his traveling museum in 1844—he toured Europe with the Iowas through the summer of 1845—particularly his efforts to market and commodify the Iowa as an exemplum of American identity destined to “vanish.”

As a collector and exhibitor of Native American culture, Catlin walked a fine line between aesthetic, ethical, and entrepreneurial values, and nowhere is this better illustrated than in his association with Iowas, who were originally imported by P.T. Barnum and then managed by Catlin. After an unsuccessful run with a somewhat unruly group of Ojibwa Indians the year before, with the Iowas Catlin was much more calculating in crafting an exhibition that catered to white spectators’ expectations and desires, and his use of advertisements, newspaper reports, and marketing techniques is a study in proto-“Wild West” showmanship.

This past summer I had a research grant to study Catlin’s advertising strategies in London at the British Library’s Periodical and Newspaper library, and I focused on approximately fifteen London dailies and weeklies published over a two month period in the summer of 1844. Catlin’s travelogue, Notes on Eight Years Travels and Residence in Europe, describes two particularly public exhibitions of the Iowas in London, the first at the Lord's Cricket Grounds for one week, and the second at Vauxhall Gardens for two weeks. However, he makes little mention of the hundreds of advertisements I discovered he placed during this period, nor does he discuss his complex relationship with the media (the fact that different “reporters” wrote nearly identical stories about the exhibitions suggests that Catlin was one of the first Americans to master the art of the “press release”). Although I am still in the process of analyzing the raw data I accumulated, I made some startling and original discoveries. For instance, P.T. Barnum's Tom Thumb, who was also making the London rounds that same summer, actually made an appearance with Catlin's Iowas at Vauxhall, in the debut of his miniature carriage, purported to be the smallest ever built. This fact about Catlin was until now unknown, and part of my paper will investigate Catlin's partnership with Barnum and his use of a tiny white male in tandem with his "wild" Indians, a classic pairing of the civil and the savage.