Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this paper, I examine the obstacles and opportunities surrounding the materialities of natural gas extraction and circulation. Extending regulation approaches that use theorizations of natures’ materialities, I explore the changes that have occurred within Bolivia’s natural gas sector over the past two decades. Examining the struggles and negotiations surrounding the country’s natural gas, I argue that the material characteristics of natural gas have differentially shaped the agency through which transnational firms, the Bolivian state, and Bolivia’s social movements have been able to express their different, and sometimes contradictory, demands. Enabling and constraining possibilities for action, the materialities of natural gas have influenced both the means through which these actors lay claim to the benefits of Bolivia’s natural gas and the resulting regulatory structures that now surround the country’s national gas. While transnational firms have the technology and capital to extract and control the natural gas, the communities around the natural gas have the potential to disrupt its extraction and transport.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this paper, I argued that the material structures and social identities, both at the national level, have prevented further European social integration by reinforcing the welfare state as a key constitutive element of the state. The configuration of the socio-material complex at the national level produces different policy outcomes. At the EU-level, the process of identity/difference reinforces the divergent socio-material complexes, preventing further integration of core welfare state policies. The distinct welfare state institutions generated different social identities through the disciplinary power that shape the interests and identities of those within the states. Moreover, the interactions between the social identities and the material structures of the welfare state institution form a dense socio-material complex that produce and reproduce each other. The difference in the socially constructed notions of welfare state policies among the different member states may partially explain the resistance for a common social policy. These social identities do not merely germinate from the domestic cultures. Rather, the power that permeates the relationships between these identities and material structures forms a socio-material complex that imposes its particular meaning of truth and social practices. These divergent socio-material complexes function to reinforce the demarcation between welfare state regimes and identities held by the different member states. These differences allow the individuals within society and the national governments to read the other types of welfare states as being dangerous to the prevailing socio-material complex.

Publication Type: Workshop Presentation
Abstract: The workshop highlights the use of Standards to align curriculum and develop materials for Arabic language programs. Examples highlight thematic units that can be used throughout the elementary curriculum. Participants will use a check list to determine the alignment of the curriculum and materials used in their programs.

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: This essay seeks to bring to the fore the political agency of nonhumans, using an approach to political theory that horizontalizes the relations between humans, biota, and abiota, presenting all of them as actors vying with and against each other for efficacy. I focus on the vital activity of one particular type of nonhuman: food, in particular “fat.” Fat as an active producer and inducer of salient and public effects, rather than as a passive nutritive context or an instrumentality employed by consumers. I turn then to two figures in the history of political thought, Nietzsche and Thoreau, who explore the relationship between diet and temperament and who open the door for me to think about the agentic capacity of edibles. I conclude the essay with a discussion of how an enhanced alertness to the agency of food might help more broadly to refigure the notion of materiality away from the image of “inert matter.”

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Given the centrality of the Voting Rights Act for the incorporation of ethnic /racial minorities into American electoral politics, we know remarkably little about the implementation of the act at the state and local level. This paper 1) examines voter access for language minorities under Section 203 of the VRA, which guarantees registration and election materials will be made available in select languages other than English in covered jurisdictions; and 2) analyzes original data, collected from 96 covered counties in 15 states, on the actual availability, determined by on-site field visits, of translated registration materials; and 3) determines the impact the availability of translated registration materials on minority voter registration and electoral turnout, using data on registration and voting data for Spanish-surnamed voters by county, supplemented by Census data.