A partir de dezenove textos publicados por Otto Kirchheimer no período final da República de Weimar, o presente trabalho investiga as possibilidades oferecidas por uma forma específica de organização política o Estado Constitucional Parlamentar para a realização da democracia e, ao mesmo tempo, para a promoção de transformações sociais. Amálgama inconstante entre a crítica de Carl Schmitt às instituições liberais e a crítica marxista da sociedade, a obra weimariana de Kirchheimer apresenta uma análise instigante do ordenamento jurídico e da realidade histórica na qual ele está inserido. Constituição, Estado Parlamentar, separação de poderes e a legitimidade de diferentes meios de ação política são alguns dos temas abordados. O trabalho discute, assim, uma importante ruptura teórica na obra de Kirchheimer nesse período: o progressivo reconhecimento de que o direito pode e deve servir como limitador do poder político, garantindo certo conteúdo mínimo de liberdade. Das falhas no funcionamento do Parlamento e das instituições da democracia formal passa a decorrer, para ele, a necessidade de aperfeiçoá-los e não mais de rejeitá-los. / Based on nineteen texts written by Otto Kirchheimer during the final period of the Weimar Republic, the present work wishes to investigate the possibilities opened by a specific form of political organization the Parliamentary Constitutional State for the implementation of democracy and, at the same time, for the promotion of social change. Shifting combination of Carl Schmitt criticism of liberal institutions and Marxist criticism of society, the weimarian work of Kirchheimer offers a compelling analysis of the legal system and the historical reality in which it inheres. Constitution, Parliamentary State, separation of powers, and the legitimacy of different ways of political actions are some of his main themes. We detect, then, an important cleavage appearing in the writings of Kirchheimer during this period: his progressive conscience that the legal system can and should serve as a counterweight to political power, in order to guarantee a minimum of liberties. From the deficiencies detected in the working of Parliament and, more generally, of democratic institutions, he now arrives at the necessity of enhancing them not anymore of rejecting them.

This dissertation project seeks to address the sociological processes, dynamics, and mechanisms inflecting how and why U.S. society reproduces a sexually dimorphic, binary gender structure. The project builds upon the work of sociologists of gender on the doing gender framework, intersectional feminist approaches to identity formation, and hegemonic masculinity and relational theories of gender. In a 2012 article in Social Science and Medicine presenting contemporary concepts in gender theory to the health-oriented readers of the journal, R. W. Connell argues that much public policy on gender and health relies on categorical understandings of gender that are now inadequate. Connell contends that poststructuralist theories highlighting the performativity of gender improve on the assumption of a categorical binary typical in public policy, but they ignore the insights of sociological theories emphasizing gender as a structure comprising emotional and material constraints of the complex inter-relations among social institutions in which performances of gender are embedded. According to Connell, it is the task of social scientists to uncover “the processes by which social worlds are brought into being through time – the ontoformativity, not just the performativity, of gender.” This project explores the ontoformativity of gender in consideration of Patricia Hill Collins’ concept of the four domains of power. According to Collins, matrices of domination are intersecting and interlocking axes of oppression including but not limited to race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, ability, place, and religion that reproduce social inequalities through their interoperation in the cultural, interpersonal, structural, and disciplinary domains of power. West and Zimmerman contrast gender as an axis in the matrix of oppression with site-specific roles, arguing that gender is a master status that is omnirelevant to all situations such that a person is assessed in terms of their competences in performing activities as a man or a woman. The doing gender approach has been accused of theorizing gender as an immutably monolithic social inequality. This project seeks to explicate the dynamics of gender ideology by probing its weaknesses in the interpersonal and cultural domains of power. As Collins and coauthor Sirma Bilge posit, for people oppressed along axes of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, place, ability, and other binaries that constrain their actions in the structural and disciplinary domains of power, “the music, dance, poetry, and art of the cultural domain of power and personal politics of the interpersonal domain grow in significance.” Each of the three components of the dissertation project addresses a facet of mechanisms and processes of the interpersonal and cultural domains of power in (re)producing the binary gender structure in U.S. society. Paper #1, titled, “Integrating Black Feminist Thought into Canonical Social Change Theory,” explicates how people in marginalized social locations mount definitional challenges to their received classifications in the cultural domain of power by rejecting the consciousness of the oppressor and wielding rearticulated collective identity-based standpoints as contextually attuned technologies of power to recast historical narratives. Paper #2, with teenaged co-researcher Emma Draper, titled “Ordering Gender: Interactional Accountability and the Social Accomplishment of Gender Among Adolescents in the U.S. South,” maps how youth theorize interactional accountability processes to binary gender expectations in the interlocking social institutions of medicine, the family, schools, and peer social networks. Paper #3 is a book proposal comprising an introductory chapter. The book will tell the story of how young feminist arts-activists challenge the binary gender structure through resistance in the cultural and interpersonal domains.

This study seeks to understand how local and national newspaper articles and African American residents frame obstacles to returning to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. It explores how recovery planning processes and policy changes influenced the decision-making processes of African Americans displaced to Houston through a content analysis of the media and qualitative interviews with displaced and returned residents. The study shows the media and participants framed disaster recovery policies as creating opportunities and gaps in assistance that varied by location. Participants described how policy decisions that created gaps in assistance compounded the difficulty of returning for working- and middle-class African Americans. The findings suggest planners and policy makers need to consider how disaster recovery policy changes may intersect to create obstacles that impede residents' ability to return and rebuild after disasters. Contact Dr. Mosby at kmosby517@gmail.com.

Louisiana developed an extensive system of levees throughout the Atchafalaya Basin and along its territorial Mississippi River. This system reached its zenith on the eve of the American Civil War. It went into dramatic decline following the conflict due to the confluence of military activity, protracted irregular warfare, and neglect stemming from labor and capital revolution. These shifts intensified with the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and finally consolidated after the ratification of Louisiana’s Constitution of 1879. The shift of responsibility for the construction and maintenance of levees during the Reconstruction Era led to many significant changes in the character and function of many of the State’s institutions as it struggled to adapt to the postwar order it confronted.

As the largest island in the Caribbean, Cuba boasts beautiful scenery, as well as a rich and diverse culture. Yet, throughout Cuban history, the beauty of this famous socialist nation has been marred by social inequalities, primarily affecting class, gender, and race. In the Cuban tourism sector in particular, the three aforementioned components have been prevalent since the island’s inception of tourism in the early 20th Century. With the recent political changes marked by the attempt to restore relations with the United States, this thesis will critically analyze the theories of Black Marxism, Intersectionality, and World Systems Analysis (WSA), to explain how racism has affected the overall quality of life for Afro-Cubans. In addition, the theories applied to Cuban tourism also cause the tourist sector to be racialized in the 21st Century. Furthermore, this thesis will analyze how Cuban tourism is maintained from a Socialist perspective, as well demonstrate that the tourism advertisements in the 21st Century are greatly racialized, depicting Afro-Cubans in the mode of servitude to the tourist. In addition, it will reveal that gender also plays a significant role in the way Afro-Cubans are perceived by society. This thesis will conclude with how the WSA theory can be hypothetically applied to the recent changes in U.S. policy, promoting greater interaction with Cuba and American tourism, after more than five decades of travel ban.

Changes in American healthcare over the last half century have created social and economic crises, presenting challenges for doctors and patients. The recently-implemented Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is an incremental reform that does little to change the complex multi-payer financing characterizing American healthcare. There have been growing demands for more equitable financing arrangements, notably, a single-payer healthcare system in which medical care is financed through a single, non-profit payer and in which medical care is treated as a public good and medically-necessary care is available to everyone. Nationally-representative surveys have demonstrated widespread physician support for single-payer legislation. Yet, very little scholarship has examined physician activism and virtually no studies have examined physician activism for single-payer healthcare. It is important to examine physician activism for single-payer because their participation is considered fundamental to achieving the goals of the movement. If the movement is successful in implementing single-payer financing , more efficient use of healthcare resources will ensure that all residents have access to needed medical care without being saddled by financial burdens from their care. Oregon is one of several US states with a growing grassroots movement to enact single-payer healthcare at the state level. This study seeks to examine the determinants of collective action for physicians in the Oregon movement for single-payer healthcare by answering two research questions. First, what accounts for differences in activism among physicians who support single-payer healthcare system? And second, for those physicians who are active, what activities do they do and what shapes those choices of activities? Data includes 21 semi-structured interviews with physicians around the state of Oregon supplemented with participant observation data. The interview data was analyzed using techniques from grounded theory and thematic analysis. I find that among collective action theories, collective identity theory best accounts for whether or not a physician engages in single-payer activism. A strength of collective identity theory is that it brings to light the importance of subjective interpretations of structural conditions by movement actors. The findings suggest that differences in interpretation shape the influence of motivators for and barriers to an individual's decision to engage in activism. Physicians that become active are primed to engage in single-payer activism because of their moral value sets and frustrating work experiences. They seek out groups of like-minded physicians who then are part of the process of socially-constructing a collective identity. This collective identity is emotionally-laden, is a reaction to state policies, serves to distinguish insiders from outsiders, and facilitates activism. Activist physicians engaging in the process of collective identity come to believe that altering financing is the only way to solve healthcare system issues. The activists view the political and cultural barriers to single-payer as surmountable by their activism. In contrast, non-activists interpret structural conditions like American politics and American culture as immutable barriers that will prevent the attainment of single-payer at the national or state level. In addition, non-activists lack the collective identity activists share because their beliefs contradict key beliefs of activists. The combination of the lack of collective identity and the perception of immutable barriers results in their non-participation.

On April 4, 2011, the U.S. Department of Education issued a Dear Colleague Letter on campus sexual assault reaffirming the intent of Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits discrimination sex-based under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. In response to growing concern over due process rights for defendants, in September 2017 the guidance was rescinded. Public policy continues to evolve, leading to potentially lasting institutional changes on many college campuses. These developments include the formalization of campus investigations and adjudications, the development of campus coordinating committees and expanded support mechanisms for victims. In Virginia, laws passed in 2015 require transcript notations and notification to law enforcement prosecutors’ offices of certain sexual assault offenses reported to colleges and universities. To date, no research exists on how prosecutors, as the presumed gateway to justice, make sense of and navigate these emerging developments when making decisions about cases. The present study helps to fill that void by using inductive qualitative methods through a symbolic interactionism theoretical framework. The findings are based on in-depth interviews with prosecutors across Virginia to examine how they create meaning based on case elements in campus sexual assault cases including legal considerations and victim and offender characteristics, as well as their perceptions of the influence of internal and external relationships on their decision-making. A modified grounded theory approach informed data coding and analysis, which yielded the development of a theory that explains the ways various factors and interactions with campus officials, and survivors that influence prosecutors’ action including decisions to charge, to take a case to trial and to collaborate. Results of the study inform the development of public policy to ultimately improve practice, collaboration and information sharing processes in both campus and criminal justice-prosecution systems.

This correlation research study was used to investigate the impact of the Dodd-Frank legislation on the U.S. bank industry. The economic crisis of 2007-2009 had a global and significant financial impact, some of which still reverberates. In the United States, the reaction was The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which took effect July 21, 2010. This act has recently been the subject of academic research and remains debated in congress, with discussion focused on its repeal. The publicly available, secondary data set from banks' quarterly filed regulatory reporting provided the data used in this study. Every FDIC insured bank in the United States was included in the study. The research question for the study examined the unintended consequences of Dodd-Frank legislation as posited by the theories of Bexley (2014) and Barth, Prabha, and Swagel (2012) that Dodd-Frank was a regulatory overreaction and could have a long-term impact on a substantial number of financial institutions. From 2007 through 2013, the number of banks declined by over 1,753 institutions; a 19.82% decline. The structure of the research presumed that banks that relied heavily on consumer fees for depository services would be negatively impacted by rule changes and regulation regarding such fees. There were two research questions. The first focused on the role of the new rules in the decline of the number of banks. The second explored the role of the legislation in the financial performance of banks. Regression results resulted in not being able to reject the null hypotheses. The implication of the study for social change is that policy makers who understand these relationships may construct better regulation to mitigate unfair and deceptive consumer fees for banking services.

O projeto Observatório de sustentabilidade - aprendizagem e inovação para a gestão urbana é uma pesquisa aplicada, multidisciplinar, que investiga a questão da efetividade das ações na interface academia-sociedade, sob pesquisa-ação no município. Realizou o objetivo de desenvolver e testar um modelo dialógico para contribuir com a sustentabilidade urbana por meio da relação IES/Municípios buscando a efetividade nos resultados para as políticas públicas. Utilizou abordagem interdisciplinar no processo de construção coletiva do seu modelo a partir de uma rede de atores nas IES em ações e práticas intraorganizacionais multidisciplinares e interorganizacionais em colaboração com atores nos municípios. Comprovou a hipótese que qualificar modelos dialógicos na relação IES/Municípios resulta maior efetividade às práticas para a sustentabilidade municipal, para o estabelecimento de novas políticas, alcance à continuidade das ações e condições de replicabilidade do modelo nessa dialógica. Alcançou resultados de estímulo à participação em ações transversais e integradas entre as divisões no executivo e legislativo do governo local para a gestão que privilegia a sustentabilidade e apoio à formulação de políticas públicas municipais para o desenvolvimento sustentável; da estruturação de uma rede de atores extraorganizacional às universidades para a colaboração em ações para a sustentabilidade municipal; de aprendizagem recíproca no desafio do diálogo participativo com contribuições ao ensino, à pesquisa, à extensão e à qualificação dos gestores municipais que promove a transformação social. Verificou três questões-chave na educação e na gestão do município, para a sustentabilidade urbana. Compreendendo sustentabilidade para a melhoria na qualidade de vida orientada às necessidades humanas. / The Sustainability\'s Observatory project - learning and innovation for urban management is a multidisciplinary research, applied, which investigates the question of the effectiveness of actions of the society-academia interface in Brazilian municipalities, in action research. Focused in to study of the aspects that try promote the municipal sustainability in HEIs/municipalities dialogue, seeking greater effectiveness in process results for public policies. Uses interdisciplinary approach in the process of the cooperative learning process of your model from a network of actors in HEIs in the actions multidisciplinary and interorganizational within organizational practices in collaboration with actors in the municipalities. It reached results on the prove that effectively the betterment in this relationship in society-academia dialogue, of the actors and the model reach the continuity of actions and possibility activities their replication. It reached results on the assumption that the betterment in this relationship in HEIs/Municipalities dialogue, of the actors and the model reach effectively for the sustainability\'s action, the continuity of actions and activities and possibility their replication. It has achieved results to stimulate participation in cross-cutting and integrated actions between the executive and legislative divisions of local government for management that favors sustainability and support to the formulation of municipal public policies for sustainable development; structuring a network organizational outside actors to universities for collaboration in practice for municipal sustainability for sustainability in the municipalities and models that incorporate the challenge of participatory dialogue with contributions to teaching, research, extension the extension and qualification of municipal managers promoting social transformation. Were verified three key issues for urban sustainability in the education and management of the municipality, understanding sustainability for the improvement in the quality of life oriented to human needs.

醫學在當代受到社會科學的青睞，一般被認為是自1980年來，學術潮流中社會科學對所謂「人的科學」的省思和再出發，包括心理學、社會心理學、文化研究和文學理論等都有新的研究取向，而醫學社會學亦屬於這一潮流，並特別是受到傅科對現代醫學的研究和貢獻的影響。(D. Lupton, 1994:5-6)。本篇論文屬於這新興的醫學社會學思潮中批判性的觀點，主要是在古典社會學的社會變遷理論中，尋找「傅科吊詭」(the Focault paradox)的問題意識的位置。 　　在第一章中，除了回顧和整理醫學社會學的發展和脈絡外，主要的工作還是回應八零年代之後對醫學社會學重返社會學的呼籲，建議將醫學社會學回歸到宗教社會學、法律社會學地位。以此，我們提出了一個分析計畫，也就是用社會學理論中「社會性的」(social)以及「社會的」(Societal)分析層級，討論醫學和社會變遷的問題。也就是將健康(Health)視為一種救贖財，放在西方社會宗教世俗化的過程中來看待醫學的發展；以及將健康作為一種財富(Wealth)的形式，放在政治經濟學的範疇中的分析策略。 　　第二章，論述現代醫學的社會歷程，主要將健康作為救贖財放進「以社會道德、倫理和價值為核心的宗教社會學」中來討論。主要是將醫學放在理性化的洪流中來看待，以及醫學作為新的道德控制機構的過程，在本章中我們討論了韋伯(Weber)理性化的牢籠、以及傅科環形監獄(panopticon)的凝視以及帕森思(Parsons)對美國醫療體系成為重要的價值系統的分析，並在此社會變遷的過程中討論醫學的社會歷程。 　　第三章，採用「將健康作為財富形式的分析路徑」，在這章中我們比較了馬克思和盧梭等兩種對健康和財富的辯證典範。也就是在民主的進程中和資本的積累的歷史趨勢裡，詢問醫學如何來到我們的生活，在本章中除了馬克思主義，我們還討論了美國式民主和醫療社會學的關係。 　　在第四章中我們檢討將醫學社會學作為一般理論的侷限，並以傅科吊詭－也就是公民權的擴張和國家的限制之間的矛盾，在社會變遷中的未來趨勢作總結。 　　最後，本篇論文還附錄一篇現代醫學在臺灣的發展，以十九世紀末的防疫和抗爭事件為例，往國家意識和認同的過程中，討論民族的身體和國家的身體的抗衡。