Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: From the 1950’s to the 1970’s, more than 17 million urban young students were sent to remote countryside and rural areas in China. In this Send-Down Movement, the Chinese state force showed tremendous power in social mobilization and organization. Using a theoretical framework of Interaction Ritual and Emotional Energy, this paper analyzes the social mobilization process of the Send-Down Movement and actors’ retrospective evaluations for this historical event as well as their personal lives. Findings suggest that in the movement, sent-down youth took conflicting roles and identities. The state force, by multiple means invaded personal decision-making process and reordered the hierarchies of felt identities/ roles, and finally boosted the social mobilization. As an important life event happening in early adulthood, the sent-down experiences greatly shaped individuals’ life courses and alter their subsequent life events. In this course, the emotional energy cumulated over time, and contributed to actors’ contradictory views on a certain historical episode: negative evaluations for the social movement and positive evaluations for personal life experiences.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The Political Economy of Mexico-US Migration: Migration and Inequality in Mexican Sending Communities (A View from the Source Country).

Publication Type: Symposium Paper
Abstract: Despite concerns about generalizability and ecological validity, past mock trial research has found few differences between undergraduate and community samples. In a mock sexual violent predator civil commitment hearing, responses of undergraduate students and representative mock jurors were gathered and compared. Results indicated that students differed from representative mock jurors on several factors, including: 1) being less confident in verdict; 2) evidencing a weaker gender bias towards commitment; 3) being less influenced by differences in expert testimony; and 4) demonstrating a stronger rational cognitive processing style in decision-making.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: From many places in the world, Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) play significant roles in both the global chain of production and the global marketplace: Filipino health care providers in suburban New Jersey, for example, cram cardboard boxes with luxury goods and ship them to siblings in Manila, while a family in Mindanao builds a house with the wages remitted from their son, a construction worker under contract in Dubai. Such acts of transnational consumption (Freeman 2000; Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001; O’Dougherty 2002) not only mark immigrants’ attempts to make “home” from abroad, or the transformation and appropriation of living labor into wages and commodities. As acts that help to fulfill Overseas Filipino Workers’ state-designated profiles as a “New Heros” [mga bagong bayani] of the Philippine nation, transnational consumption provides a window onto the complex link between consumption, workers, the market and the state in the late-20th and early-21st centuries. Consumption in the post-Fordist era of globalization, as is well known, has been shaped by a drastic expansion of global markets for durable and luxury goods, as well as an intensification of “niche marketing.” At the same time, neoliberal policies dismantle state-based social services in housing or healthcare, and compel private ownership and competition within various industries – moves that strengthen and indeed create consumer markets in more and more realms of social life. What does it mean for global consumption and niche marketing to be on the rise at the same time as states – from the Global North to the Global South – increasingly shift the burdens of social welfare, development, and job creation – to the marketplace? What are the transnational circuits and local sites on which these changes rely?
“Sending Social Welfare” examines the ways in which, for Filipino workers, aspirations and dreams of social mobility are produced within global political economic structures dominated by the United States. It takes seriously the idea that such desires are transformed into consumer demands that are met by both market actors vying for a share of Overseas Filipino Workers as a consumer market, and Philippine state actors seeking to integrate OFWs into Philippine national economic growth. Thus at the intersection of market and political interests emerges the Overseas Filipino Worker as a neoliberal citizen-consumer. This paper examines the process by which the consumer demands of Filipino health care workers in the New York metro are produced, reproduced, and appropriated by the Philippine state, market actors, and subjects themselves. It explores the experience of this process for workers, and what it can tell us about the role that consumption and desire play in neoliberal policies in the 21st century. As significant segments of the U.S. immigrant labor force and as post-colonial subjects of U.S. imperialism, Filipino overseas workers occupy an intersection of market and state forces worth exploring within transnational American Studies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: While major American allies opposed Iraq War, Prime Minister Koizumi of Japan was quick to show the support for the Bush administration and the Diet passed a law that allows the government to send military forces to Iraq. Some criticize that such decision undermines the post World War II pacifism embodied in the article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. This paper seeks to explain how pacifism and supporting American war effort peculiarly coexist in the post W.W.II Japanese security culture. The analysis breaks down the Japanese security culture into 4 major components: anti-militarism, civilian control, comprehensive security, and the reliance on America. These components have interlocked with each other and survived the changes in domestic and international political environments since the end of W.W.II. The paper concludes that sending troops overseas does not mean Japanese departure from pacifism.