Featured Scholar 2018
Clara Rodriguez
America, As Seen on TV explores the global and transnational effects of US TV content on global viewers, i.e., what they take away in terms of views about race, class, gender and sexuality from their viewing of “American” TV; and, the actual, and often contrasting, realities they experience when they come to the US. It also contrasts these views with what US millennials, who have always lived in the US, take away from their viewing of US TV. Although sometimes dismissed as an earlier and no longer very relevant medium, American television content continues to be hugely consumed around the world and in the US. It is just accessed differently. It is often the first exposure to American ideals and the English language throughout the world; and, for many it continues to be the main contributor to understandings of what it means to be “American.” It also continues to be affordable, and phone access to TV content has expanded its availability. Yet, despite some changes, the research continues to show that there are continuing patterns of under and mis-representations of particular groups and gender roles in the US.
In conducting her in-depth interviews with over 70 international college students and foreign nationals working or living in the US, the author finds that many of the foreign born were surprised to learn that America is racially and economically diverse; and, that it does not reflect the “easy-breezy, happy-endings” culture portrayed in the media they watched before they came. Coming from 37 different countries and residing in the US for an average of 3.37 years, the book is filled with rich and surprising examples of the impact of American television on their views of the US and on their expectations of life in the United States. As Denise Bielby, author of Global TV: Exporting Television and Culture in the World Market, noted, the book is “engaging” and provides “a nuanced probing of the vast and complex literature on the ‘soft power’ of television here and abroad to examine how TV shapes the views of foreign born and U.S. millennials about representations of class, race, ethnicity, and gender in America.”
Interestingly, the author finds that the 171 US millennials she surveyed also share the sense that American TV does not accurately reflect racial/ethnic relations in the US; and that what American TV projects is different from what they have experienced (in this regard) in real life. However, the two groups, i.e., the US millennials and the foreign born, young adults, differ on how much they think US TV has influenced their views in other areas, e.g., in views about sexual behavior, smoking, and drinking. These differences allow us to draw a larger picture of media consumption and its effects both in the US and in other countries. It is a new approach to some very old concerns and issues. As Carlos E. Cortés, author of The Children Are Watching: How the Media Teach about Diversity, says “This is a landmark study of television’s role in shaping popular views of our nation, particularly its racial, ethnic, class, and gender diversity.” It is particularly timely in today’s political climate, where many have become aware of the role that TV has had in influencing the public’s views on past and future candidates for public office.
Clara E. Rodríguez is Professor of Sociology at Fordham University’s College at Lincoln Center. She is the author of numerous books and has been a Visiting Professor at Columbia University, MIT, and Yale University. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.
Featured Scholar 2017
Kristen Hopewell
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
The global political economy is being dramatically transformed by the rise of new powers, such as China, India and Brazil, and the corresponding decline in the dominance of the US and other Western states. My first book, Breaking the WTO: How the Emerging Powers Disrupted the Neoliberal Project, analyzes the impact of contemporary power shifts on the American-led project of neoliberal globalization. I show that the rise of new powers precipitated a crisis in one of the core governing institutions of global neoliberalism, the World Trade Organization (WTO). Paradoxically, this was not because the rising powers rejected the rules and norms of the multilateral trading system, but just the opposite, because they embraced the system and sought to lay claim to its benefits. Rising powers usurped the dominant norms, discourses and institutional tools of the WTO and used them to challenge US hegemony. Yet, when the weapons of the powerful became appropriated by formerly subordinate states, the system itself broke down. A situation of more equitable power relations among states caused the Doha Round of trade negotiations to collapse and, in the process, cut short the neoliberal project at the WTO.
My new project, funded by an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant, builds on my interest in structural changes and power struggles in the global economy to analyze an important but largely unexplored area of economic policymaking – export credit (the use of loans and other forms of financing by states to boost their exports), where we are currently witnessing a striking intensification of economic competition among states.
Dana Moss
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
As the Arab Spring revolutions erupted across the Middle East in 2011, diasporas came out to protest against dictatorships as never before. While existing research argues that diasporas in democracies are well positioned to advocate on behalf of change at home, why did the Arab Spring mark the first time that Syrians and Libyans mobilized publicly to condemn the Assad and Gaddafi regimes? My recent article in Social Problems argues that Syrian and Libyan communities had long-been subjected to “transnational repression” by home-country dictatorships. The regimes muted dissent by wielding violence, threats, exile, and surveillance against their critics abroad and by harming dissidents’ relatives at home. Yet, the Arab Spring disrupted the deterrent effects of transnational repression in three ways. First, regime violence motivated activists’ relatives in Syria and Libya to fight or flee, which lowered the costs of coming out from overseas. Second, the sacrifices of vanguard protesters compelled regime opponents abroad to go public for moral reasons and share in the costs of mobilization. Third, as the uprisings destabilized these dictatorships, diaspora members came out because they perceived that the regimes were incapable of making good on their threats. For these reasons, the Arab Spring had liberating effects on a global scale.
My current research looks beyond the coming out process in protest and explains why only some diaspora movements played a role in the Arab Spring directly. By comparing Syrian, Libyan, and Yemeni movements, this research investigates how and to what extent activists resourced rebellion and relief during the uprisings. This project aims to theorize the conditions under which diasporas contribute in social change processes underway across borders. In the future, I will extend this work by investigating the role of diaspora movements in contesting illiberalism in their host-countries. In response to the Trump administration’s Muslim Ban, for example, Arab Spring-era activists are mobilizing to defend the rights of Arabs and Muslims through boycotts and the ballot box. The effects of their collective action on minority empowerment and policy will remain a pressing topic in the years ahead.
Camilo Leslie
TULANE UNIVERSITY
My current project surveys the rise and fall of the Stanford Financial Group fraud, a decades-long Ponzi scheme that left roughly 20,000 victims with $7.2 billion in losses. It draws on in-depth interviews with 124 respondents, mostly defrauded investors, conducted in six cities in the U.S. and Venezuela (the firm’s two largest markets), as well as legal, regulatory, and corporate documents. Theoretically, it combines a novel conceptualization of “trustworthiness” with a focus on the social production of ignorance. Existing scholarship documents how organizations both cultivate ignorance internally (as a strategy to ward off culpability) and foist it on the public (to maintain advantage). My work, however, illustrates the accidental, or non-strategic, production of ignorance in expert organizations, and the active role that laypeople play in authoring their own ignorant accounts of the world. Moreover, in comparing the “expert ignorance” of U.S. federal securities regulators with the “lay ignorance” of Stanford’s U.S. and Venezuelan depositors, I show that both stem from such actors’ reliance on unstable forms of normative and epistemic authority. Though topically remote from my research on “map-mindedness,” in fact these projects share a key theme: place. In particular, my current work shows how investors imputed credibility bonuses and credibility deficits to financial firms and products from certain parts of the world, thus demonstrating the importance of “place” as an epistemic frame. In addition, it shows how the institutionalization of place, in the form of jurisdictional boundaries, impeded the flow of information about Stanford to regulators and investors alike