Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this study, the subjective experiences of eating problems were explored through qualitative in-depth interviews with eleven participants in the Miami, Florida metropolitan area. The purpose of the study is to offer a different perspective on eating problems, from the point of view of the sufferer. The main goal is to move beyond traditional medical and psychological definitions and explanations about the development, perpetuation and disease of eating disorders to a more comprehensive examination of how sufferers of eating problems view their everyday lives. The study was designed with three main underlying research questions: (1) What are the subjective experiences of people living with problems related to eating? (2) What is the role of food in the everyday lives of those with eating problems? (3) How do the sufferers define their eating problem? Subsequently, six main domains were identified after thorough analysis of the data. This paper will focus on two of these domains: “‘Doing’ Eating Problems,” and “Medicalizing Eating Problems.”

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The photographic exhibition of Abu Ghraib as a state of exception—a site constituted by the US liberal democratic state where the permissibility to strip prisoners of various forms of psychic, social and/or corporeal life was integral to the Global War on Terror—raises complicated questions about modes of spectating the suffering of non-American subjects. In examining modalities of viewing the Abu Ghraib photographs released to the American public, this paper considers the role of American cultural fantasies of Muslims and the Middle East in viewing the violated Abu Ghraib prisoners in the photographs. If cultural fantasies play a complex role in structuring intelligibilities, in informing and normalizing the ways subjects see each other, the assumptions subjects implicitly make, the fears and desires subjects have of each other, this paper focuses on those cultural fantasies that contributed to forms of spectatorship that 1) could not register the Abu Ghraib tortures as violations and/or 2) viewed the instrumentality of Abu Ghraib prisoners as permissible and/or justified. The American public fascination with the Abu Ghraib photographs—particularly with their representations of sexual violation—suggests that the photographs are part of a historical genealogical legacy where the public viewing of sexually violated bodies functions as a mechanism that binds collective anxieties raised by racial, gendered and national conflicts. (The public practice of lynching in the US is the first example that comes to mind.) This paper considers correlations between national and transnational scenes of spectatorship, between historical and contemporary mechanisms of viewing violated bodies. The public viewing of the Abu Ghraib photographs also raises difficult questions about forms of pleasure (individual and collective) derived from watching violated bodies. The essay interrogates the role viewing pleasures play in sustaining and (re)producing American geopolitical states of exception like Abu Ghraib; and in how such pleasures affect possibilities for developing ethical forms of witnessing others’ suffering.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In a 2002 essay misleadingly entitled “The Adequacy of the Canon,” George Kateb assesses how well the patrimony of readings accrued to political theorists over millennia helps to comprehend the atrocities committed in the 20th century. The canon is at a loss, he maintains: there is a fundamental discontinuity in the scale of atrocities in the 20th century, determined by three factors he identifies: the sheer numbers of people alive, technological advances, and the increasing secularization of societies. These factors have affected political imagination in two ways: on the one hand, imagination has been hyperactive, it has attempted to devise a radical remaking of humanity. This is what Kateb calls this the quest to “make actually present what has hitherto been absent.” On the other hand, imagination has atrophied. Together with this quest to make the absent present, he identifies a complementary activity of making the present absent, of not allowing it to be present. What has been made absent has been the suffering of millions of people.
I follow Kateb’s diagnosis and detect in the activity of theorizing suffering the potential danger of making it absent, through generalization and a purely intellectual approach to it. I turn to the philosophy existence, particularly as formulated by Karl Jaspers, to propose an alternative mode of theorizing suffering that strives to make the suffering of others present.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Trust in the national government has declined greatly over the last fifty years, and over the past decade citizens have taken direct action to limit the actions of their politicians at both the national and state levels. Might negative feelings about national-level political actors be driving some of the punitive actions taken against state politicians? Research has long shown that governors benefit from a popular President of their party, and recent preliminary research suggests that state legislators may be rewarded when feelings about the U.S. Congress improve.

This paper extends earlier research investigating whether the public’s punitive actions against state legislatures are the result of actual state-level conditions or whether the public’s negative feelings about Congress are driving these actions. Here we investigate another possible connection between attitudes about national and state actors.

Using an augmented set of available public opinion, policy, and institutional measures, we test to see whether gubernatorial approval is affected by feelings about a state’s U.S. Senators. Controlling for many factors known to impact gubernatorial ratings, we find that the public’s feelings about their U.S. Senators (junior Senators specifically) are linked to state governor approval. In addition, this study also uncovered some interesting findings concerning state level forces. One of the more interesting findings concerned lame duck governor status. This status alone leads to a substantial decrease in gubernatorial approval. However, when combined with incumbency this effect reverses.