Individuals interacting in an environment that exacerbates fear of crime and general distrust may face erosion of democratic values and perceive authoritarian policies as a solution to restore order. In Latin America historical widespread distrust in the government apparatus as well as fear of crime, have always been a topic of interest, not only for sociologists but also for political scientists and lawmakers. This study uses the LAPOP wave 2012 (Latin American Public Opinion) survey to assess Ecuadorians’ perceptions about trust in the government and fear of crime as predictors of support for authoritarian policies (mano dura). Logistic regressions show evidence that fear of crime acts as a better predictor than level of trust in the government for predicting the likelihood of supporting authoritarian policies. Overall, this study provides a hint of how Ecuadorians support for democratic principles may have weakened by fear of crime and lack of trust in the government apparatus.

The St. Paul Redevelopment Project was unique and touted as the first-of-its-kind to feature cooperation from all three levels of government. Several government agencies helped St. Paul accomplish an “impossible dream,” spending an estimated thirty million dollars to rechannel the Clinch River in the 1970s and 1980s. The small town of 1,000 residentsrelocated 100 families from South St. Paul to carry out the project, much to the dismay of many of the residents. A primary factor in enforcing the power of eminent domain in the St. Paul Redevelopment Project was the idea of “progress,” a commonality of many redevelopment projects. The St. Paul Redevelopment Project serves as a small case study of government intervention in the Appalachian region and of resistance. St. Paul as a community and “place” has been shaped by elected officials and government agencies, but ‘place’ also belongs to individuals. The example of redevelopment in St. Paul, Virginia, and the use of eminent domain exposes a complex system of power relations at work in Appalachia, that at least in the case under study, suggests how the response of one family, the Couches, reflected both participation in the dominant system of commodification and a rejection of it.

Counselors and counselor educators must serve clients regardless of culture, race, disability, sexual orientation, and age. Counselor educators have attempted to stay abreast of new methods to enhance counselor competencies to adequately counsel lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) clients. The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine the extent of the relationship between self-perceived clinical preparedness of working with LGBT clients and self-perceived attitudinal awareness towards LGBT clients as moderated by levels of religious commitment of licensed professional counselor (LPC) using a feminist and multicultural theory framework. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) quantitative analysis software program was used to generate descriptive statistics such as frequencies, means, modes, correlations, and regression models for each research variable. According to study results, there was a statistically significant relationship between the criterion variable self-perceived clinical preparedness of working with LGBT clients, the predictor variable self-perceived attitudinal awareness towards LGBT clients, and the moderator religious commitment (F (2, 123) = 4.76, p < .05). The study findings promote insight for counselors to understand how their religious commitment moderates the relationship between clinical preparedness and attitudinal awareness when working with LGBT clients.

The University of Kentucky (UK) and University of Michigan (UM) present very different patterns in terms of black student enrollments and completions from 2000 to 2012 because of a structural explanation, a qualitative explanation, and a statistical explanation. Unfortunately, the patterns at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) are partial due to a lack of data. First, the structural explanation is that UK, as a university in the state of Kentucky, was under a mandate from the U.S. Department of Education to desegregate because they were in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education (KCPE) gave specific goals related to black student enrollment and completions. Substantial progress was made from 2000-2012, primarily during the time when Lee Todd Jr. created the President’s Commission on Diversity (PCD) which implemented strategies to achieve the goals. While the same federal laws applied to UM, as a northern state they were not under the same federal scrutiny regarding desegregation. UM was taking an aggressive approach with regards to increasing black student enrollments and completions under president Lee Bollinger, and he passed the process along to Mary Sue Coleman, but UM was faced with a negative response and resistance in terms of lawsuits in 2003 and legislation in 2006 (the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative or MCRI) which banned the consideration of race for all public colleges and universities in admissions. UM is highly selective, and a legacy of social movements by black students was stronger at UM than at UK, which may have increased media scrutiny and negative reactions. Essentially, UK’s success was based on an externally monitored topdown approach with little media scrutiny. Second, archived university websites from 2000-2012 and interviews with 21 key informants at the three universities showed a difference in the way diversity initiatives were framed. The Kentucky Plan, the desegregation mandate, had concrete and explicit language in terms of requirements related to black student enrollment at UK. The implementation at UK, although sometimes using broad and general language, was accountable to the explicit requirements of the mandate and black student enrollments and completions increased during that timeframe. At UM, during the Mary Sue Coleman administration, what began as explicit policy under Lee Bollinger became more general and vague policy after the 2003 lawsuits and 2006 legislation banning affirmative action, corresponding with a decline in black student enrollments and completions. Under Coleman, some have questioned whether the legislation was truly an obstacle, or an excuse to rationalize inaction with regards to black student enrollments and completions as they declined. In Ontario the language was typically general, and race tended to be absent, with diversity often conceptualized in terms of internationalizing the student body. Third, the statistical explanation is based on the cross-sectional examination of available National Center for Education Statistics’ Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data available for the universities in both states in the U.S.A. in 2000, 2003, 2006, 2009, and 2012. Before 2006, state-level politics do not explain enrollments or completions. In 2009 and 2012, a variable representing the MCRI for four-year public universities in Michigan is significant in explaining decreased black student completions, however it was not significant for enrollments. This applies not only to two universities, it applies to the four-year public institutions in both states, but it does not apply to community colleges since they are primarily open enrollment. Finally, the cross-national comparison between the U.S. and Canada does not have concrete data because UWO, like all Canadian universities from 2000-2012, did not collect student data based on race. However, interview data and the framing of policies in this study shows significant problems with racial incidents and low black student enrollments. So under the Canadian multiculturalist regime, the common neglect of collecting racial statistics suggest the possibility of a multiculturalist parallel to colorblind racism that I call racism-blind multiculturalism.

Rap music has been a major force in American culture since the 1970s. It can be political, uplifting, and celebratory. It can also be misogynistic and degrading to women, the focus of the current research. This paper begins with a brief history of the importance of music in the African American community. It then provides a history of rap music and major influences on its development through the decades. A systematic comparison of Billboard’s top 5 rap videos for 2004 and 2014 follows. This section, the core analysis, compares the lyrical and visual content in terms of the representation of African American women. Findings reveal three stereotypes—Jezebel, Sapphire, and Mammy/“Baby Mama”—dominate the presentation of African American women in the videos. Based on these three stereotypes, the videos present African American women as greedy, dishonest, sex objects, with no respect for themselves or others, including the children under their care. The women in the videos are scorned by men and exist to bring pleasure to them. Differences between 2004 and 2014 with respect to misogyny and degradation of a group that has historically suffered from dual disadvantage—because of both race and gender—are minimal. This research is a call to action to pay close attention to rap songs and rap music videos and to demand change both from rap artists and the companies that back them.

China has been home to some of the most prominent hackers and hacker groups of the global community throughout the last decade. In the last ten years, countless attacks globally have been linked to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or those operating within the PRC. This exploration attempts to investigate the story, ideology, institutions, actions, and motivations of the Chinese hackers collectively, as sub-groups, and as individuals. I will do this using sources ranging from basic news coverage, interviews with experts and industry veterans, secondary reportage, leaked documents from government and private sources, government white papers, legal codes, blogs and microblogs, a wide array of materials from the darker corners of the online world, and many other materials. The work will begin to sketch for the reader some of the general and specific aspects of the shadowy world of cybercrime and hacker culture in China in recent years. One of the most prevalent beliefs is that the Chinese government is in fact the one responsible, whether directly or by sponsor, for cyber-attacks on foreign systems. My careful analysis has revealed is not always the case, or at least more complex than simply labeling the group as a state actor. At the root of these attacks is a social movement of "hacktivists," a patriotic sub-culture of Chinese hackers. It is incorrect to allege that all attacks are performed by state-sponsored individuals or groups, because there are many individuals and groups that are motivated by other factors.

The Renovation Program - Ðổi Mới in Vietnam since 1986 have posed a puzzling policy question: why have some policy areas experienced radical changes while others have experienced only limited and incremental changes? This policy puzzle provided the focus for this dissertation in which a model of major policy change was developed to provide a new way of explaining the policy reforms in Vietnam over the past two decades. The model was developed based on three bodies of literature: (1) the most well-developed theories and models of policy change process created in the U.S and their application to the non-U.S policy contexts; (2) the Policy-elite model as an alternative to explain the policy reforms in developing countries; (3) critical and unique regime characteristics of Vietnam that play an important role in shaping the policy contexts for the policy processes and outcomes in Vietnam. Taken together, these bodies of literature provided the basic concepts and suggested potential causal mechanism of major policy change for a conceptual framework to build a major policy change model for Vietnam. The proposed policy model identifies four policy factors (stressor, leadership predisposition, change in policy image and consensus on the political priority) that need to occur at different stages of the policy process in Vietnam to make radical change happen. Owning to the unique regime characteristics of Vietnam, the model differs from other policy process theories and models in the way that it strongly emphasizes the role of the Communist Party and the predisposition to reform embraced by the policy elites in the process of major policy change. It also reflects the collective and consensus-based policy making style of the Vietnamese Communist Party and government in the transitional period of the country. The explanatory capacity of the proposed policy model was validated by four policy case studies in higher education, international trade liberalization, state economic sector, and legal reform in foreign investment in Vietnam. The empirical evidence drawn from the case studies has affirmed the usefulness and relevance of the policy factors and the causal flow embedded in the proposed model. Concretely, the two cases with radical policy changes witnessed the presence of all four policy factors and the processes of change followed the causal arguments of the model. Whereas, in the two cases without radical changes, the legacy of a Socialist state in Vietnam has impeded the significant changes in the policy image of the policy elites in respective policy domains. As the result, no innovative policy change alternative has been advanced to the agendas of the Vietnamese government, which in turn prohibited radical policy changes in the areas of higher education and state-owned enterprise over the past two decades. In the last chapter, the cross-case comparison has found that in all four cases, there have been strong stressors and the leaders of the Vietnamese Communist Party and government have felt great pressure to reform. The Party has shown the predisposition to reform in various guiding resolutions in the four policy sectors. Yet, in the cases of higher education policy on institutional autonomy and state-owned enterprise management policy, the lack of significant change in the policy image of the leaders has been the main reason for the absence of innovative policy change. In contrast, in the cases of international trade liberalization and legal reform in setting the level playing field for enterprises of all economic sectors, all the policy factors have occurred to produce radical policy changes in these two areas.

After the rebellion over the killing of Michael Brown, the US Justice Department reported that over-policing for the sake of monetary extraction was taking place in Ferguson, MO, with non-White and people in poverty being disproportionately targeted at the hands of the police. And while it has been shown to be present within the Ferguson community, this extraction and targeting by police is not a geographically isolated occurrence. Based on previous research, a racialized, economic-based system of oppression goes hand-in-hand with policing. But how do the qualities of these geographies affect the prominence and location of police violence on a systemic level? Through a process of identity creation and reification informed through the interaction of racial capitalism and the state, specific geographies are identified with different groups within society as a function of housing segregation. These areas are then targeted by police based on their identity and the existing social hierarchy. By using data from Fatal Encounters, an independent organization which catalogs who has been killed by police, coupled with demographic descriptors of place, I show that zip codes with higher levels of Black and Hispanic populations as well as worse-off economic measures were positively associated with an increased odds of more people being killed by police. By shedding light on the drivers of this cycle of violence, I hope to contribute to the establishment of a more just society by redefining who shall be protected from what and whose interests shall be served.

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This thesis is the first dedicated sociological attempt to offer a critical response to cultural studies and allied discourses that concern themselves with the relationship between technology and violence. A critical reconstruction is necessary because these cultural theorists have failed to adequately contextualize their arguments in relation to both the globally ascendant neoliberal policy outlook and its associated social Darwinian technoculture: the combined pernicious effects of which could be described as the logic of ???social constructionism as social psychosis???. The most prominent manifestation of this theoretical psychosis has to do with an interest in biotechnology in particular. The problem I identify in the treatment of this theme is how easily it can be used to support a technologically determinist position. One undesirable side effect is that these determinists are able to project from present trends a dystopian exhaustion of all critique through their focus on violence. In the thesis of ???bioglobalism??? this state of affairs is also deployed to take sociologists to task for insufficient recognition of processual ???network??? forms of distributed agency in technological processes. At stake therefore is the recovery of sociological critique. It follows that the core of my thesis is the radical reworking of two related heuristic devices: seriality and contingency. Seriality is taken to refer to social practices as diverse as the possible relationships between the social problem of rationality, case studies of individuals who have run amok, and the functioning of network characteristics. I use contingency to eschew seriality???s deterministic accounting of the social. Here I propose a new conceptual relationship between creativity and action. Emphasis is accordingly placed upon two related normative projects: Raymond Williams???s cultural materialism, and three of the ???problematiques??? Peter Wagner has identified as inescapable for theorizing modernity: the continuity of the acting person, the certainty of knowledge, and the viability of the political order. I conclude with a renewed conception of the role of normative critique as a form of conceptual therapy for bioglobal projections of seriality.