Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The ambition of North Korea to develop and possess nuclear capabilities has changed in response to internal and external political circumstances. This paper explores the reasons for these changes. In the late 1980s, Pyongyang started its nuclear program in earnest by constructing nuclear facilities with the goal of acquiring nuclear capabilities, due mostly to its post-Cold War security concerns. During the 1990s, however, confronting with the United States and the international community, North Korea changed its policy, and began to use the nuclear program as a ?bargaining chip? to be traded away for security assurances and economic aid. Since the end of 1990s, Pyongyang has returned to its initial ambition of developing nuclear weapons in response to the reluctance of the United States to guarantee North Korea?s security. Historical case studies of these three periods will confirm that North Korean policy has depended to a large degree on these constraints. This paper thus takes issue with two different camps of North Korea experts ? those convinced that Pyongyang?s policies are exclusively of its own design and those who see them as externally constrained ? by arguing for an oscillation between these concerns. The success of the Bush administration's effort to prevent a nuclear North Korea is dependent on the appropriate understanding of Pyongyang?s security concerns and the careful analysis of these changes of North Korean nuclear policy.Keywords: North Korea, Nuclear policy, The Bush administration, Nuclear Non-proliferation

Publication Type: Poetry
Abstract: It would be my delight to read an excerpt from my recent book, The Errant Thread. This first book of poems, published in April of 2006, was chosen by Eavan Boland to receive the Kore Press First Book Award. Kore is a feminist press that exclusively publishes women. It felt like a perfect fit to be published by Kore, as my book's themes refract gender through numerous lenses, consider what it means to be a feminist woman, and explore a female speaker's voice as she travels to understand her own cultural identity and a matrilineal heritage.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: We discuss having students make temari balls (Japanese embroidered thread balls) to reify their understanding of Platonic solids and Euler's formula in a mathematics for liberal arts class. The presenter has used this activity successfully in three different semesters.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Marijuana-related argot provides socially constructed ways of talking, thinking, expressing, communicating, and interacting among marijuana users and distributors. Such argot also provides the verbal threads by which the marijuana subculture integrates use practices among diverse individuals, groups, and regions. An ethnographic study of blunt and marijuana users in NYC identified 180 argot words that are commonly used to maintain the subculture secrecy. Such argot is an even more important means to convey the dynamic expressiveness involved in the consumption experience and as a comprehensive communication system among subculture participants. Argot terms are created and spread by subculture participants. Argot also delineates important distinctions within and helps organize how the marijuana subculture structures use practices, networks, and markets. Argot also maintains boundaries with other related drug subcultures. The resulting dynamic use of argot constitutes a relatively unique communication system that is largely hidden from the mainstream of American culture. Such argot also integrates the marijuana subculture and is widely understood and regularly used by most marijuana users and sellers in American society.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Since the December 2005 revelations of domestic wire tapping by the National Security Agency (NSA), considerable public and media attention has been given to the surveillance program authorized by President Bush. While the political fallout still rains down from the revelations, and upcoming congressional hearings promise greater scrutiny, the process revealed the significance of presidential signing statements accompanying executive signatures for legislation coming into law. Further, recent congressional legislation aimed at prohibiting the torture of those imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay Cuba reveal the complex and complicated meanings of the statements and their effect on legislation. While the meaning, use and scope of the statements has historically been a legally ambiguous proposition, the Bush administration?s proliferated use of the statements provides a profound opportunity for critics to engage in discussion of policy making and the role of the public in the deliberation over and implication of laws accompanied by those statements. The statements and the legal justifications behind their use and implications warrant further examination and critical engagement as part of the larger corpus of discourse surrounding the war and its implications on public policy making and public resistance strategies to the war. This paper aims to bring a critical vocabulary to the intelligence studies literature by exploring the interconnection of deliberative democratic theory and the justifications of the prosecution of war and intelligence gathering.