Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This study of female engineering students attending a prominent technical college in an urban center in the southeastern United States aims to determine how these students make choices about their self-presentation and how such choices affect their interactions with professors and peers. Within this study, a grounded theory style of analysis is used to address the following specific questions: How do students make decisions about how to present themselves? How are such decisions related to their actions and behaviors? and How do such decisions intersect with their gender identity? The findings from 10 semi-structured in-depth interviews reveal the varied ways female engineering students perceive and use self-presentation as a means of navigating their way in a male-dominated environment. These choices affect and are affected by students’ sense of identity, self-efficacy, and self-esteem, all of which are determined within social institutions via interactions with others that are fundamentally shaped by gender. Furthermore, all of these aspects of self-concept are shown to have implications regarding the motivation of female students to remain in or leave male-dominated engineering programs.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this article I explore what are thought to be generational differences within contemporary American feminism. I first identify three dominant approaches to understanding “third wave” feminism: cohort-based, age-based, and theory-based. Then, I analyze empirical data to discern the extent of difference within and across “waves” of American feminism, using each of these approaches. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, I argue that third wave feminism should be understood as an identity, rather than a distinct theoretical perspective, age group, or cohort. My findings suggest that feminists of all ages share many important aspects of their gender and political ideologies. Moreover, my analysis of “third wave” feminist texts and those “second wave” texts that directly speak to generational differences reveals that, in many cases, feminist scholarship itself reproduces the very differences it aims to understand. To the extent that feminist scholarship has failed to critically and systematically analyze the dominant portrayals of feminist generations in the media, failed to recognize the diversity within all feminist generations, and failed to embrace multiplicity, feminist scholarship has in effect reified distinct, static waves of feminism.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has struggled with redefining its role in a world no longer defined by bipolar conflict. Indeed, the foreign policy of most states has undergone a significant reevaluation in the transitional era of the 1990s. One issue which has repeatedly cropped up on agendas is the question of internal nationalist conflicts. While the end of the Cold War did not create this phenomenon (Ayres, 2000a), several such cases ? Israel and the Palestinians, India and Kashmir, Northern Ireland, and the Balkans ? have created serious foreign policy problems to which the great states of the world have had to react. The initiation of a "war on terrorism" focused on the ethnically-divided Afghanistan has only emphasized the importance of these concerns.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This study seeks to explore with what consistency candidates portrayed themselves across a traditional mass medium (television) and a non-traditional mass medium (the Internet) in 2000. Utilizing the videostyle and webstyle methods of content analysis, televised advertising and candidate web sites gathered from mixed-gender races in the 2000 general election were analyzed. At this early stage in the development and use of the Internet medium by candidates' campaigns, these results suggest that current differences are more likely to be based on medium constraints--or allowances--rather than by gendered differences. Such differences suggest that female candidates may have found ground that provides an equal level on which to present the image of a political leader.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: To understand the contemporary debate over the nuclear option for stopping filibusters, it is necessary to understand why it was used in the House but not in the Senate during the 51st Congress (1889-1891). The importance of leadership in this explanation suggests that the nuclear option is still available in the U.S. Senate. Whether this availability is affected by changes in the legal environment since 1891 is examined.