Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: With Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, we find both praise and blame for the scientific revolution, particularly as it affects travelers. Swift is generally supportive of human progress, but reminds his readers that they must simultaneously investigate themselves as well as the outside world, so as not to lose their essential humanity. Many philosophers and critics point to the danger of losing oneself when traveling in particular, and Swift uses Gulliver’s Travels to paint a rather startling picture of a man who denies his home in order to stay abroad. Ultimately, all of Gulliver’s scientific knowledge and experience among other cultures serves to completely strip him of his humanity, such that the reader is left with significant doubts about both the feasibility and humaneness of the empirical project inherited from Bacon. I argue that Swift’s message presents a certain qualified optimism, but doubts about the Baconian endeavor loom ever-larger on the horizon. In the end, Swift does not proclaim that we must abandon the modern project altogether, but rather that we must balance scientific pursuits with ‘humanizing’ activities like deep introspection and participation in the arts.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this study, I undertake an empirical assessment of the evolution of two key elements of the permanent campaign for the presidency by systematically examining presidential travel and fundraising from 1977 through 2004. I find that presidential travel does target large, competitive states, and such strategic targeting has increased over time. Additionally, fundraising travel has grown substantially over time and occurs throughout a president’s term, supporting the notion that the permanent campaign is on the rise. However, substantial differences between reelection and other years, as well as measures of the breadth of presidential travel and proportional attention to the states, indicate that electoral concerns do not thoroughly permeate patterns of presidential activity throughout a president’s years in office, as the logic of the permanent campaign would suggest.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Women are choosing to travel alone in increasing numbers, but often cite fear of the risks involved as limiting their experiences. Specifically, fear of anti-American and gender stereotypes contributes to this fear. Within the realm of risk communication, how can this growing population of female travelers become more culturally prepared for the possible risks inherent in travel abroad? An analysis of risk communication and intercultural communication theory lead me to believe that risk messages aimed at this demographic must combine risk communication with cultural information to create a sense of equilibrium between knowledge and efficacy. As travel guidebooks provide much of the risk literature that is available for potential travelers today, this paper critiques existing messages from a variety of travel guides across a continuum of destinations. A guide for improved risk messages with respect to this particular audience is then created. In particular, it is found that the proper manipulation of stereotypes, given a strong background of cultural knowledge, can help travelers to develop strategies for dealing with unexpected situations and behaviors.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this paper I attempt to assess empirically two elements of the permanent campaign for the U.S. presidency – presidential fundraising and the use of presidential travel to target key electoral states. I find that presidential travel for fundraising has grown over time, that presidents tend to find financial support in places in which they found electoral support, that non-fundraiser-related travel shows a sharper focus on key electoral states than does all presidential travel, and that there is evidence of increased presidential targeting of key electoral states over time. In spite of the focus on key electoral states, which are often populous, in the aggregate it is the lesser-populated states that receive disproportionate presidential attention. Additionally, presidents shift their strategic focus in reelection years from focusing more on states in which they were popular to states that are more electorally competitive. Thus I find qualified support for the concept of the permanent campaign and an increase in strategic presidential targeting over time, though patterns of presidential action are more nuanced than this theory would have us believe, as there are marked differences between election years and the rest of a president's term.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This conference paper examines the transnational activism of a group of black women radicals who traveled to Africa during the 1960s. The paper centers Vicki Garvin’s travels to Nigeria and Ghana and Pauli Murray’s work as a law professor and legal consultant in the formation of Ghanaian constitutional law. Pauli Murray, who held strong ties to the anti-Communists left in the U.S, including a brief membership in expelled Communist Party leader Jay Lovestone’s Marxist faction and a working relationship with black socialist A. Philip Randolph, lived in Ghana for almost two years. Vicki Garvin, a labor activist with the CIO’s United Office and Professional Workers of America Union and a Communist Party supporter, made the move to her imagined “homeland” in 1961. As products of 1930s radicalism, Murray and Garvin were politicized during a particularly vibrant and radicalizing moment of Pan African activism and internationalism in the United States. Garvin and Murray attempted to actualize their transnational visions by traveling to the African continent and joining a politically varied expatriate community in Ghana. As relocated African Americans living and organizing in Africa, these women participated in a range of activities from organizing campaigns against the U.S. embassy, to lending their skills to Ghana’s nation building efforts and helping to sustain black diasporic networks and political spaces.
A detailing of these women’s experiences presents an, often absent, perspective of transnational politics that reveals the cultural and economic complexities of expatriate life and underscores the range of gendered and political challenges these women faced. In addition, this paper explicates the power and limits of a transnational activisms that connected black liberation struggles in the United States to anticolonial struggles in Africa, while negotiating a range of Cold War politics. It also illustrates the ways such experiences were influenced by political alliances within the organized left. Therefore the paper’s examination of Cold War travels references not only the impact of U.S. Cold War policies internationally and African American’s relocating to Ghana, but also the ways political differences among black leftists traveled to Africa and were reframed within this context. Such inquiry suggests a new framework for understanding the legacies of 1930s U.S. radicalism as well as the relationship between left internationalism and Pan African activism in the 1960s.