Publication Type: Extended Abstract
Abstract: In this conversation anaytic paper we analyze some interactional methods used by people to avoid the quantification of one’s habits (primarily but not exclusively one’s tobacco or alcohol use). Of particular interest are the ways that interactants can resist the effort to quantify their habits, while still paying deference to the question. Interactants do this via various methods of accounting for their resistance. Fundamental to most of the methods for resisting quantification is the effort to invoke or appeal to the situated lived context of one’s habit. That is, most of these methods of resistance involve an appeal that the de-contextualized count is not an adequate or appropriate representation of one’s habit.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Examining how control-resistance are mutually constitutive through organizational discourse, this paper presumes a dialectal approach to studying organizational narratives. A published narrative in a freshman success handbook demonstrates how students resisted rules by streaking while simultaneously submitting to rules concerning how to express resistance. This study extends control-resistance and organizational narrative research by examining the ebb and flow of control-resistance and its contextually-bound entertainment discourse. Discursive and material consequences of foregrounding entertainment is explored.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript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: This research examines the systems of powers evident between actors of resistance and adversaries to the Brazilian landless movement. Specifically, this research addresses fragmented powers amongst the landless groups and decentralized state power evident in the system of opposition. I theorize that the fragmentation amongst the landless groups allows for spaces vulnerable to violence, as well as diminishes the revolutionary strength capable of a united front. The decentralized state power evident amongst the system of opposition allows for the criminalization of the landless movement, while the impunity enjoyed by those guilty of crimes against humanity fosters a system favorable to violence and the exclusion of a “disposable population.”

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: To speak of resistance is to speak of language. To speak of language is to speak of voice and silence—those who have voice and those who are forced to silence. A number of early African American writers, abolitionists, have used the symbolic and signifying practice of language to create voice and combat the denigration of African people. According to Black, the mask “exposes black writers as ‘mask manipulators’ and ‘double talkers…” Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Frances W. Harper don the mask and provide new conceptualizations and interpretations of what it means to transition from enslavement to freedom. These authors are in no way exhaustive of the contributions of African people to the Eurocentric hegemonic discourse, but they provide a glimpse into the revised hermeneutics of African American experience and expression. Each author uses language and the literary tradition to upset binary oppositions, to highlight the discrepancy between white perceptions and African realities, and to confront African American destructive behaviors (slave syndrome, flawed morality). Each writer’s resistance, often masked and sometimes overt, sets precedence for the resistance seen today by such scholars as Cheikh Anta Diop, Asa Hilliard, Amos Wilson, Frances Cress Welsing, Neely Fuller, Marimba Ani. Through their cautious and confrontational unveiling of racist practices, Africans/African Americans have begun to see the flaw in Eurocentric thought and to critique it in order to debunk destructive practices; it is through reading, writing and speaking that Africans have begun to reclaim their subjectivity and agency.