acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

Examining state-civil society relationships within the context of social movements is vital for understanding the ways in which movements function at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels—both independently and in relation to the state. This thesis takes the case of the women's movement in Peru under the presidency of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) to provide empirical evidence for the ways in which such relationships are established, function, and evolve over time. I argue that the opening of State institutions, when combined with non-violent state repression, served as political opportunities that allowed the women's movement to expand their repertoire of contention and to contest the clientelistic and corporatist aspects of the interdependent power relationship they had established with Fujimori and the State. Chapter One offers a portrait of the social, economic, and political context in the years leading up to Fujimori's election. Chapter Two constructs a theoretical framework for the case of the women's movement by interweaving theories of clientelism, corporatism, and political opportunities. I outline, in Chapter Three, the data and methods used to analyze the discursive and institutional activities of both the State (Chapter Four) and the women's movement (Chapter Five), while Chapter Six discusses these activities of the State and the women's movement both comparatively and longitudinally. Finally, the conclusion outlines the key contributions of this study to the fields of Latin American Studies, Social Movement Studies, and Political Sociology before offering avenues for potential future research. / acase@tulane.edu

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are frequently associated with communicative impairment, regardless of IQ or mental age. The most significant feature of this impairment tends to be in the dimension of both expressive and receptive prosody, possibly due to reduced neural connectivity between disparate brain areas responsible for language. Despite extensive overlap between the auditory and structural features linking prosody and music as well as extensive shared neural resources, music listening and performance are not impaired. In fact, there is some evidence that these abilities may even be heightened in some ASD individuals. Using behavioral and EEG/ERP methods, the present study sought to investigate this dissociation. A similar electrophysiological response has been observed for both prosody and music, the Closure Positive Shift (CPS), and Music CPS, respectively. This study used language and music stimuli in order to investigate the differences between language and music processing for individuals with ASDs and neuro-typicals. While a CPS was observed for language for the ASD group, it was substantially reduced in its distribution and amplitude. Further, the presence of an offset N1 response to the onset of pauses interfered with the clarity of the CPS response. In music, no music CPS was observed, however, a sustained centrally maximal positivity was observed for both the neuro-typical and ASD groups during the phrase boundary. Additionally, the ASD group showed a similar positivity in response to phrase boundaries in the condition in which the phrase-final note was prolonged. This positivity was similar to the language CPS in duration and amplitude, and suggests similar processing responses to phrase boundaries in language and music. The positivity in response to the second condition suggests that some individuals with ASDs may indeed have heightened processing ability for music. These results support the theories of functional under-connectivity in language and local bias toward sensory features of auditory information at the expense of global prosodic processing. Possible explanations, including the presence of repetition found in music, yet generally absent in language, are considered. / acase@tulane.edu

Using postmodern techniques and slave perspectives, late 20th century African-American authors Octavia Butler, Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison, and Phyllis Alesia Perry complexify representations of enslaved women in American literature in novels termed “neo-slave narratives”. Revising sentimentalism, exoticization and appropriation, primarily by white authors, these authors emphasize slavery’s negative legacies, memorialization of slave sacrifice and culture, and female strength and agency. Contemporary white authors, wrestling with the traumatic history of slavery and white complicity, emulate neo-slave narrative authors, using communities of women and white empathy with the enslaved female body to join the reevaluation of slavery representations. In what I term “Reparational Literature”, contemporary white authors return to a slave setting to negotiate white guilt, to “repair” wrongs, and to explore modes of cross-racial interaction that recognize privilege. This involves destabilizing the white subject and emphasizing acknowledgement and empathy to resolve problems. Enslaved characters are agents rather than objects or surrogates, and their role in allowing the white women access to their wisdom, recognizing white contrition, and offering forgiveness is crucial to the novel’s resolution. Literature and art are often on the forefront of societal change; Reparational Literature signifies transformation in white consciousness as legal, economic, and symbolic reparations become more widely accepted. Reflecting Foucault’s idea of the body as a site of struggle and Womanist ideas of universalism and connection to the community, these writers present the enslaved female body as the place to remember and repair slavery’s negative impact, a locus for acknowledging and merging the violence of the past and hope for the future. In Valerie Martin’s Property, Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings, Tara Conklin’s The House Girl, and Pam Durban’s So Far Back, the white woman who is given access to the symbolic language of the enslaved woman’s natural world, to hear and see the language of her enduring body, frees herself from the artificial influences of slaveholding. These authors continue the long tradition of the black body as a symbol, but I argue that they do so with an awareness of the position of whiteness and appreciation for slave sacrifice and subjectivity. / acase@tulane.edu

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As college degrees become more common and the cost of these degrees increases, so does the debate about the worthwhileness and value of a college education, and of specific college degrees. One side of the debate uses statistical data about starting salaries and unemployment rates to claim that degrees within the humanities and liberal arts do not provide a good return on investment while the other side claims that a liberal arts education fosters the broad so-called "soft skills” that employers value most. However, both sides of the debate have neglected the perspectives of the graduates themselves, particularly as they transition from the university environment to the workforce. In this exploratory mixed-methods study I sought to understand this transition and English graduates' perceptions of their degree, first through semi-structured interviews with 8 participants who graduated between 2010 and 2019, and then through the responses of 338 graduates from the same time frame who participated in a validation survey used to determine the pervasiveness of the themes identified in the interviews. I learned that, while the initial transition from degree to employment is challenging for many English graduates, most eventually found work that they are satisfied with. Perceptions of the English degree vary over time, but most participants recognized the skills they gained in the English major and appreciate the professional value of these skills, especially later on in their careers. Participants identified some factors, such as networking, prior internship and work experience, and completing a minor that made for a more positive transition to employment. They also pointed to ways that the English department could better prepare students for and support them during this transition including encouraging more applied experiences, helping students recognize their English skills, and better identify and talk about potential career paths open to English majors.

"Not My Father's Son" explores a new generation of white southern sons in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century whose resistance to the problematic construction of masculinity and the violence needed to sustain it allows them both the freedom to acknowledge openly their same-sex desires and to embrace life, as opposed to death, in the face of a homosexual identity that lies before them. Rather than excavate queer subjects that may have been coded in earlier mid-twentieth-century texts, my dissertation examines the psychological shifts concerning white masculinity that must occur for these gay subjects to exist openly and without compromise. In addressing the struggle these sons face in revising a problematic vision of the father, I discuss selected fiction and non-fiction from southern, white male authors written in the past thirty years, including two recently published memoirs by gay, southern, white men, Kevin Jennings and Kevin Sessums; a memoir by Lewis Nordan; and selected fiction from both Nordan and Jim Grimsley. I argue that these historical and literary depictions of white, gay, southern men in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century invoke a new paradigm in which the sons' challenge to the historical forces of supremacy (racism, sexism, and homophobia) inherent in the legacy of the white southern father opens up new spaces for both gay characters and gay men to exist. / acase@tulane.edu

Traditionally, academic narratives on Irish immigration to the Americas have focused on experiences of dislocation caused by changes in geography. Settlers, they argue, clung to Old World identities, adapted to new cultural habits or mixed the two. This dissertation explores the social and cultural transitions of Irish immigrants who arrived in New Orleans between 1780 and 1820, or during the city’s late Spanish colonial and early national period. Employing an object-focused perspective, it shows that these persons inhabited a transoceanic setting that linked Ireland and the Gulf Coast together in their shared investments in commerce and conscious consumerism. This resulted in a significant overlap between travelers’ Old and New World lives, and it suggests a new migratory model focused on continuity across the Atlantic Ocean. Referencing the examples of foods, linens and enslaved persons, this dissertation shows that Irishmen and women had ample contact with the non-local, even before they moved overseas. This prepared them, in many ways, for their lives abroad. Some goods, like the South American potato, were so ingrained in island culture by the late 1700s that consumers forgot its foreign provenance. Others, like textiles, had values that changed between Ireland and Louisiana. The example of slaveholding, in particular, points to the ways that immigrants encountered human-commodities common to their visual culture but unrecognizable in practice. The many Irish immigrants who became slave-owners, ultimately, adapted material languages concerning wealth and status they brought from Europe to these new consumerism. They thus made sense of the exotic in familiar terms. By examining the growth of commercial webs and the market availabilities of early New Orleans, this project offers an intimate look at experiences of movement, materiality and cosmopolitanism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. / acase@tulane.edu

While past research has indicated that migration tends to lead to the death of ethnic marker use such as language, my research defies this traditional understanding of how migration impacts identity performance by showing that migration experiences often lead to support for the home language. The traditional understanding of migration's impacts on the use of ethnic markers also means an inadequate understanding of how migration impacts returned migrants’ relationship to indigenous social movements that also support the use of ethnic markers. This research is located in the Kaqchikel-speaking region of highland Guatemala, a place with high rates of returned migrants and an indigenous social movement known as the pan-Maya Movement struggling to reach grassroots populations to which most returned migrants belong. This work shows the complex relationships and connections between migration and indigenous social movements through migrations' impact on the use key markers in the Kaqchikel region, including language and clothing. My research first revealed high rates of internal migration and defines common migration paths for the Kaqchikel Maya, which are gendered. I show that certain experiences in migration do not lead to language death for Kaqchikel but instead create support for it through a polylinguistic stance. This work also found that men's traje use will soon enter a "sleeping" state in which it is not actively used but is documented and preserved. However, returned migrants are actively supporting women's traje use. I thus show that experiences in migration encourage returned migrants to continue the use of ethnic markers, a stance supported by the pan-Maya Movement. The Movement has had difficulty connecting to grassroots populations that include most of the migrants in this study. This research thus shows how migration aligns migrants' ideologies with the pan-Maya Movement. I conducted research in the three Kaqchikel-speaking townships of Tecpán Guatemala, San Juan Comalapa, and Santa Catarina Palopó. Each township has significantly different historical interactions with the state, connections to urban centers, rates of migration, and policies regarding language and clothing use that impact current migration paths and ethnic marker usage in each township in important ways. / acase@tulane.edu