Publication Type: Roundtable
Abstract: This session is designed to acquaint participants with a rationale and current model for promoting altruistic behavior in children. The model is based in an extensive review of research on altruistic behavior and theories concerning the development of altruism. Findings from a qualitative case study will also be presented along with implications for teacher training and practical applications.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper presents a critique of contemporary democratic theory, using a line of argument drawn from Locke’s Two Treatises. We argue that democracy cannot be the ultimate ground of legitimacy; it must serve some larger norm. If political legitimacy were ultimately grounded in democratic processes, no one could have authority over democratic processes – and thus no one could legitimately institute them where they did not already exist, or resolve disputes about them where they do. Democratic theory must address this problem before it can be said to provide a complete theory of political legitimacy.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Elite law schools in the United States serve a gate-keeping function into the profession of law, a profession which dominates positions of power in all branches of government as well as in the business world. As a sub-system of the legal system, elite law schools are important cites of institutional power. These historically exclusively white institutions have opened their doors to people of color in post-civil rights America, but they remain white spaces. Through an ethnographic examination of two elite law schools, I find that the dominant practices and discourses in these schools are characterized by color-blind racism. As a result, students of color within these spaces face systematic, if sometimes subtle, challenges to their ability, their intelligence, their perceptions, and their right to even be in the law school. Examining the racial hurdles faced by law students of color who must negotiate color-blind racism, reveals the mechanisms by which notions of liberal individualism and color-blind racism work within the institution of elite law schools to justify and reproduce white power and privilege, while simultaneously disavowing it.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: A recent critical tradition has made the British imperial and racial anxieties on display in Thomas DeQuincey’s _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_ (1821) difficult to miss: under the influence of a substance whose Chinese and Turkish pedigree was well known, the dreaming English narrator has nightmares that express his horror of “Asiatic” races as “all unutterable slimy things,” and the “Nilotic mud” that engulfs him. In this model, articulated by John Barrell, Barry Milligan and others, the colonizing, absorptive capacity of British imperialism poisons the modern metropolitan self from within. But little critical attention has been paid to American writers, who, fascinated with DeQuincey’s text, appropriated its trope of the psychic transcendence of spatial limits, adapting it to serve the very different cultural requirements of American imperialism. The foremost writer in this tradition was Fitzhugh Ludlow, “the American DeQuincey,” whose texts _The Hasheesh Eater_ (1857) and _The Heart of the Continent_ (1870) linked the trope of exotic mental voyaging to an abiding rhetoric of manifest destiny.

Amy Kaplan has identified a key component of American exceptionalism in an ideal of “boundless expansion” which nevertheless discloses “an anxiety about the anarchic potential of imperial distension”: “If the fantasy of American imperialism aspires to a borderless world where it finds its own reflection everywhere, then the fruition of this dream shatters the coherence of national identity, as the boundaries that distinguish it from the outside world promise to collapse.” This formation closely fits Ludlow’s hallucinogenic and narcotic writings, which revel in apparently unlimited psychic expansion, while confronting the problem of incorporating these immense experiences into a unitary identity. In this way, Ludlow adapts a Romantic concept of drug intoxication as the freedom of imaginative travel and exploration, to the new context of the opening of the American continent. At the same time, he also generates a post-Romantic concept of drug addiction as the mire of exiled abjection, rewriting the freedom of manifest destiny as compulsion. Together, these models evoke an American self keen to use chemical assistance to rove the continent, yet always anxious about falling irredeemably under the influence of the Others it meets there.

Ludlow uses the metaphor of the drug “trip” to link his investigations of an apparently limitless spiritual territory with the pioneering that opened the American continent. Indeed, his travelogue _The Heart of the Continent_, the result of a journey with the Overland Mail to California with the painter Albert Bierstadt, links the sublime, seemingly infinite mental vistas of _The Hasheesh Eater_ to the actual ones of the American west. Reading these texts together, one can see Ludlow adapting DeQuincey’s eastern visions to the paradigmatic exceptionalist experience of the American frontier. The solipsism of drug narratives also echoes the supposedly radical individualism of the American experience of the frontier: under the influence of such drugs, an individual is thought to have a unique subjective experience, but as the genre attests, the imagery of the drug trip shares familiar imperial tropes.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper looks at the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs) and asks if the Agreement is a manifestation of structural power in the global political economy. TRIPs came into being as a result of the Uruguay Round of trade talks which took place from 1986 to 1993. During that time the issue of intellectual property rights moved from the arcane area of legal analysis to the epicentre of global policy making. TRIPs has enormous implications in terms of public health, food security and state sovereignty yet was placed on the WTO agenda in a surreptitious manner. Only in the aftermath of its appearance as part of the Uruguay Round agreement was TRIPs scrutinised in a manner befitting its significance. This paper will ask why TRIPs was placed at the centre of the WTO's global remit when there were already multilateral organisations in place whose task was to ensure the implementation of intellectual property rights standards worldwide. In doing this, it will look explicitly at Susan Strange's notion of structural power, and examines if the TRIPs Agreement reflects the structural power of a single hegemon or is an example of multilateralism that promises greater global benefits than those proffered by bilateralism and regional agreements.