Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: During the Roaring Twenties and early years of the Depression, proponents of birth control, especially the American Birth Control League (ABCL), found difficulty locating broadcast stations willing to carry their messages. This narrative chronicles and analyzes the confluence of three concurrent movements: broadcast program censorship policies in the late 1920s and early 1930s, splits in feminist ranks over what women�s birth control rights should be publicly advocated, and general fears that women�s power over their own lives would have a detrimental affect on patriarchy, family values and the traditional family structure. This paper specifically reviews how the major company involved in broadcasting � the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), which owned and operated two networks � framed the issue of contraception to keep the contentious issue off their networks� airwaves. Most other broadcasters followed NBC�s lead, and the strategies they developed collectively became the underpinning for controlling non-dominant, controversial issues presented over radio.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This study argues that viewers of violent fictional narratives use moral disengagement strategies (Bandura, 1986) in the maintenance of positive affective dispositions toward fictional characters in order to enjoy the entertainment experience. The study also investigates the concept of latitude of moral sanction (Zillmann, 2000). Male and female participants were presented with a violent narrative in which the protagonist carried out four increasingly violent acts supported by moral cues in the narrative. Viewers were asked to report their moral judgments, disposition level, and enjoyment after each act. Findings indicate that moral disengagement is used to facilitate positive dispositions toward characters, and provides some support for the argument that if viewers of a narrative witness a liked protagonist engaging in a morally questionable act which has been supported by moral disengagement cues, and rate that act as less severe and more justified, and the protagonist as more good than evil, then those viewers have used the moral disengagement strategies that are being encouraged in the narrative.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper asks whether parents should avoid or delay a divorce for the sake of their kids. Specifically, I examine the average treatment effects of parental divorce, age at divorce, and duration following divorce on behavior problems for children of divorce. Using panel data from Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I estimate a series of fixed-effects/first-differencing models that are only possible with the long array of repeated measurements unique of these data. The results differ substantially between conventional OLS regressions and the fixed-effects/first-differencing models that eliminate biases due to unobserved heterogeneity. I conclude that, for children of divorce, (1) divorce slightly decreases their emotional wellbeing; (2) delaying a divorce decreases their emotional wellbeing; and (3) parental divorce has little lasting effect (although there is no sign of recovery, either). The findings suggest that parents should avoid a divorce if they could. However, if the marriage is so hopeless that they had to divorce, they should get it sooner than later for the sake of their kids. These is indirect evidence that income and residential changes after divorce contribute to the lack of recovery for children in the aftermath of divorce.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper assesses the experience of teaching a course on IR in Art and Literature for IR undergraduate students for three consecutive years. The main educational objectives of the course were to explain International Relations Theory and to discuss contemporary international relations. For doing so different materials - films, novels, cartoons as well as textbooks and readings - were employed. The paper claims that "alternative texts" can be used both as a means and as an end for teaching international relations. In other words their plot, topic or subject not only portrays a certain epoch or event, but they are themselves representatives of the international context in which they were created. The main challenges were to avoid changing the educational objectives of the course from IR studies to Art & Literature interpretation and to overemphasize the subliminal messages sent by the "alternative texts".

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this paper I intend to explore the works of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in terms of the trope of �self-othering,� a psycho-historical move in which a poet attempts to kill off his white, male, American-identified self and adopt a subaltern alter-ego, a marginalized series of fragmented identities, or an operatic, syncretic, hybridized identity, in order to create a sense of poetic freedom at the margins�a sort of �margin-envy� at work. While the poet of the traditional, privileged center is most likely to perform this identity-revision, abandoning a white, male, heteronormative identity for the promised psychological freedom of an alternative identity, even a homosexual, Jewish-American poet, such as Allen Ginsberg, may find a psychological, political, spiritual, or aesthetic sense of freedom through �self-othering.� I thus intend to explore this phenomenon in terms of Ginsberg�s conflicted relationship to his Jewish cultural and religious roots and his adoption of Buddhist and other Eastern spiritualities as his own. I will attempt to historicize Ginsberg�s adoption of a radically hybridized spiritual and poetic voice in the general milieu of the Beat movement, a fundamentally anti-essentialist and anti-authoritarian movement rooted in a rejection of univocal ideas of nation, identity, and spirituality. The Beats� radical anti-establishment, individualistic milieu may have encouraged Ginsberg�s move away from his traditional religious roots and identity in favor of what may have appeared to be a more enticing, rewarding, and hybridized or syncretic spirituality and identity, namely the more iconoclastic, esoteric, unorthodox, and hybrid spirituality and identity that Ginsberg fashioned for himself out of Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and black Jazz aesthetics.