Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: In social network sites, friendship is a feature. It allows users to acknowledge other people on the system and to have their connection permanently cemented into the structure of the system... that is, until a breakup prompts an explicit destruction of the friend relationship both on and offline. This explicit articulation requires participants to consciously consider the social complications of adding or deleting someone. While friendship may seem like a simple matter, having to publicly list who is in and who is out is not that easy.

In this paper, I will examine how friendship is constructed in social network sites, how it differs from traditional understandings of friendship, and how friendship technology has complicated the negotiation of relationships between people. I will focus primarily on the friending process in Friendster and MySpace, drawing on three years of ethnographic data.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Is ethnic mobilization simply a consequence of elite strategies to foment and exploit populist sentiment for private agenda? Or do ?followers? have their own individual agenda that instead drive or give birth to leaders who organize and agitate for their interests? Put succinctly where does the impetus for mobilization originate? The literature is divided here between mostly theory-driven work favoring top-down, that is elite-centric explanations that assume malleability and homogeneity of ?the masses?, and work that perhaps has less currency and instead examines the individual agency and heterogeneity of those at the bottom. This project, based on extensive fieldwork in Rwanda, steers a course through this debate by instead identifying some of the mechanisms that were at play in the years leading up to and during the genocide in 1994. As an instance of ethnic mobilization the genocide is remarkable for its scale ? nation-wide - and its speed ? one hundred days in which the bulk of the estimated 800,000 deaths occurred. Through a research design that compared two regions of Rwanda, I show that mobilization followed different trajectories in these two regions but that there were common mechanisms underlying both processes. In this paper I examine one mechanism - the strategic use of framed messages to construct a security dilemma. I look at the nature of the threat as it was understood by both ordinary farmers and the ethnic and political entrepreneurs who led them as well as the extent to which it was or was not internalized by them all. I also probe the collective memory against which these messages resonated to define the threat in historical, ethnic, and adversarial terms. Finally I construct socio-demographic profiles of both the ?mobilized? and the ?mobilizers? to show that there was considerable diversity within both groups and that one cannot generalize that the genocide was the result of self-interested elites cynically manipulating unquestioning peasants.

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: Individual Paper
Abstract: The paper wants to shed light on the two organizations, The Committee against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training and the The League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience,
and their activism that have not garnered much attention in historical research.
On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981 that was intended to establish “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the Armed Services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin” and eventually led to the integration of the American armed forces foremost during the Korean War.
The aforementioned organizations played an essential role in achieving the issuing of Truman’s order. In late 1947 and in mid-1948 respectively, A. Philip Randolph, the President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Grant Reynolds, an army chaplain during World War II and New York State Commissioner of Correction, founded the two civil rights groups to fight for the integration of the armed services.
Among other questions, it wants to consider ho and why these two organizations fought for their aims, how they overlapped and complemented each other, in what relation they stood e.g. to the NAACP. Whereas Truman’s executive order provoked Randolph’s and Reynolds’ abandonment of the League, which was continued by Bayard Rustin under a new name, the two continued their activities within Committee. The paper also wants to look at the impending conflicts and developments between their members following the executive order.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Some historians have noted that the modern, mainstream aversion to fat had become increasingly salient by the 1880s. The beginnings of America’s obsession with combating corpulence--whether for health or aesthetic purposes--certainly owed in part to the machinations of advertisers, the fashion industry, life insurance companies, pharmaceutical interests, and food manufacturers. But an account of how Americans went from aspiring to leanness rather than corpulence is incomplete without an examination into the function of nutrition advocates—physicians, chemists, and un-credentialed, but self-styled experts--in the creation of norms about food consumption and body size.

This paper traces the development and popularization of the calorie from the advent of technological innovations that measured the calorie value of foodstuffs and people’s caloric needs to the ways in which knowledge about the nexus between calories, fat, and weight gain percolated from scientific and medical authorities to the general public. I argue that the calorie facilitated a new way of disciplining the body and became the center of a corporeal regulation in which characterizations of the calorie as a fail-proof product of modern science reinforced the notion that one’s body size was determined by individual behavior rather than ascribable to other considerations beyond one’s control. Moreover, the calorie, a hitherto invisible dimension of food, resulted in a reconstitution of food as calories and body fat and contributed to dieters’ changing perceptions of their entitlement to food, especially to calorie-dense aliments.

Lulu Hunt Peters (1873-1930), a syndicated medical advice newspaper columnist and the author of the nation’s first best-selling diet book, Diet and Health, with Key to the Calories (1918), was indispensable to the dissemination of popular knowledge about the calorie. To Peters and her devotees, a knowledge of calories combined with the practice of calorie-counting seemed to offer the most precise, effective means of vanquishing corporeal bulge in a putatively modern and scientific early-twentieth century America. Dieters who previously felt powerless to change their bodies because they were uncertain of the relationship between food consumption and body size were imbued with a newfound sense of control over their corporeal selves. But recording every calorie consumed also meant that if calorie-counters failed to achieve desired weight loss, they could only fault themselves for lacking the willpower to abide by their calorie restriction programs.