Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper explores American conceptions of race, citizenship and national identity against the backdrop of the US colonial project in the Philippines c. 1898-1910. This article locates the racialization of Filipinos within the geo-politics of the capitalist world economy, exploring how intersecting discourses of national and racial supremacy bolstered colonial power relations between the United States and the Philippines. I argue that the politics of racial formation in the United States was dialectically linked to the process of nation building, demonstrating how the rituals of boundary construction and social closure inherent to both phenomena were mutually constitutive. This paper examines how racial ideology was mobilized by supporters and opponents of the American colonial project in the Philippines. The final section of the paper looks at attempts by American colonial officials to develop a rational system of racial classification in the Philippines based on American racial categories.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper proposes a theoretical framework for understanding emergent disciplines as knowledge-focused social movement phenomena called New Knowledge Movements, or NKMs. The proposed theoretical framework is developed through a synthesis of new social movement theory and Frickel and Gross’s Scientific/Intellectual Movements (SIMs) model. In contrast to the SIMs model, this paper argues that many new disciplines emerge through contentious collective action on the part of political and intellectual outsiders rather than through the action of intellectual elites. The framework is demonstrated and tested through a narrative exploration based on secondary sources and scholar-activist tests of the emergence of two disciplines, women’s studies and Asian American studies, in the United States. Suggestions for future applications are provided.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: By focusing on a narrative framework, this essay explores the prime narrative of breast cancer that is prevalent in American social discourse. Through an analysis of SELF magazine’s 1999 series, “Diane’s Diary,” which follows one woman’s real time account of her battle with breast cancer, it is possible to demonstrate the role of narrative in context, action, and interaction. Diane’s Diary both reproduces and resists the metaphors of war and hope that shape our prime narrative of breast cancer, thereby reshaping understandings of this disease for the author, her readers, and the medical community. As an investigation of how our communication about health and illness influence our understanding of a disease like breast cancer, this essay seeks to demonstrate both the power and importance of narrative ways of knowing.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The use of broad but unsubstantiated principles has recently dominated the reasoning in cases under the religion clauses of the U.S. Constitution. I will assert that courts have failed to substantiate the use of universal principles such as neutrality, and interpretive principles such as original intent, upon which they often rely. Courts have also tended to reflexively analyze the “traditional” principles of separation and accommodation. By reflexively relying on unsubstantiated principles the courts, and especially the U.S. Supreme Court, are able to impose majoritarian understandings through their interpretation of the religion clauses, while at the same time obfuscating the reasons for this imposition. The decisions tend to favor secularized, christocentric experience. These two biases are often treated as antithetical, yet when one looks closely at the cases both biases appear to effect outcomes (even in the same opinion). Thus, we end up with doctrines that appear at the same time to favor Christianity and secularism. Such results seem to be watered down and secularized to devout Christians and at the same time seem to religious minorities and dissenters to favor the dominant Christian culture. This bias is consistent with aspects of American culture and judges who are culturally and historically situated are influenced by such bias. Yet the principles and tests used by courts in religion clause cases are inadequate to deal with this social and legal reality.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed