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Coping With Democracy, Coping with the Culture War: A Policy History of the National Endowment for the HumanitiesGeary, Daniel Francis January 2018 (has links)
Thesis advisor: Rowell S. Melnick / In 1965, at the height of the Great Society, when there was also a consensus about the importance of the humanities to edify American life, Congress established a federal agency to support them: the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH). Shortly thereafter arose a sea change in scholarship and education in the humanities, which by the 1980s became an issue in the broader U.S. culture wars. Many scholars and intellectuals became sharply divided over such questions as the authors and books to prioritize and include in liberal arts curricula, modes of interpretation of texts, and perspectives on the goodness (or lack thereof) to be found in Western civilization and American history. This policy history examines how, in this changing context, the NEH has managed to endure and how it has interpreted and carried out its mandate to support the humanities. It is divided into two parts. Part I tells the story of how the NEH has maintained itself; how it has survived attempts at termination, achieved budget increases and sustained losses, and how it has set its budgetary priorities. This analysis of organizational maintenance traces the evolution of the national debate over federal funding for culture, looking at how the major political parties have changed position on this issue over time. It examines how the NEH built a clientele, the state humanities councils, to bolster its support in Congress. And it looks at how changes in party positioning and related developments in the culture war effectively empowered that clientele—with the effect of helping save the agency when threatened with abolishment, but also giving that clientele greater influence over the NEH’s policies and budgetary priorities. Part II explains how the NEH’s internal bureaucratic structure has operated during the culture wars. When the agency was founded, Congress established a structure with the goal of empowering the NEH to make decisions on the basis of nonpolitical expertise in the humanities, assuming that the agency would need to be able to resist pressures to award grants to favored constituencies at the expense of merit. Part II analyzes how that structure has operated in a different and wholly unanticipated context, one in which many of those who could claim the mantle of expertise have become polarized on issues such as multiculturalism and the importance of “great books.” It compares the bureaucratic structure at the NEH with the structures and practices that have evolved at other federal grant-making agencies: the National Endowment for the Arts and National Science Foundation. The analysis shows how the structure at NEH has enabled Democratic and Republican appointed chairmen to push the substance of grant-making in progressive and traditional directions, respectively, despite continuity of formal rules, procedures, and professional staff. This dissertation concludes with an assessment of what can be expected from the NEH in regard to its durability, budgetary priorities, and grant-making under Republican and Democratic administrations. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.
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Urban/Rural Differences and the Culture War in the United States and CanadaSegaert, Aaron A. 09 1900 (has links)
<p>Recent national elections in the United States and Canada reveal an urban/rural cleavage in vote choice. This cleavage has been overshadowed by the red state/blue state analysis in the United States and dismissed as an artifact of demographic and regional differences in Canada; however, this voting gap appears to have emerged with the increasing salience of "culture war" issues in North American politics. Sociological theory suggests that there may be an affinity between urban and rural place of residence and the progressivist and traditionalist poles of the culture war which may explain urban/rural differences in vote choice. In the present study, urban/rural voting differences are assessed using election surveys from the Canadian Federal and United States Presidential Elections of 2004 and using aggregate data from Canadian Federal and United States Presidential Elections since 1920. The results show that the urban/rural gap has grown to its widest point in recent elections in both countries, coinciding with the reorganization of the right wing of Canadian party politics and the domination of the Republican Party by social conservatives in the United States. After controlling for demographic and social characteristics, rural residents are found to be on average more socially and morally traditional than urban residents. Individual attitudes on gay marriage, abortion and gun control contributed to the urban/rural voting differences observed in both countries. It is concluded that the high profile of moral and social issues associated with the culture war has led to the manifestation of urban/rural cultural differences as a political cleavage in recent Canadian and American national elections.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
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TRADITIONAL AUTHORITY ATTITUDES, MORAL WORLDVIEWS AND THE CULTURE WARENRIGHT, NANCY K. 07 October 2004 (has links)
No description available.
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Religious Differences in Attitudes about Divisive Social Issues, 1972 to 2010: A Test of the Polarization HypothesisAnderson, Paul D., Jr. 19 April 2012 (has links)
No description available.
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The "M" Word: An Analysis of Gay Marriage in the United StatesMadigan, Corinne James January 2009 (has links)
Thesis advisor: Donald Hafner / There is perhaps no issue more controversial in the so-called American culture war than that of gay marriage. In the last five years, four states have legalized same-sex marriages and several more appear poised to follow suit. This paper creates an analytical framework with which to evaluate the chances of successful gay marriage initiatives in any given state. Demographics, political institutions, and state-specific variables make up the three parts of the framework, which is then applied to three case studies in which gay marriage has already been addressed: Massachusetts, Vermont, and California. A fourth case, Maine, serves as a prediction state to test the validity of the framework. The paper’s conclusions indicate that, in the current political and cultural domain, there is a set of factors that tend to promote the legalization of gay marriage. The demographics of a population need to be such that they qualify as a “tolerant citizenry,” people who are hesitatingly accepting of gay marriage and can be persuaded to support that legalization. On the political side, a positive evaluation of gay marriage by the state supreme court that then passes on responsibility to the state legislature is the most conducive to legalization. The court provides the constitutional and legal grounds for gay marriage, while the legislature acts as an intermediary between the justices and the wider population. Finally, states in which the constitutions are difficult to amend, and which amendment procedures are controlled by the legislature, are the most likely to legalize gay marriage. The application of the framework to the three case studies illustrates this complex process. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science Honors Program. / Discipline: Political Science.
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Citizens without borders American identity and the cultural politics of globalization /Ta, Lynn M. January 2007 (has links)
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed June 26, 2007). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 175-181).
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Competing Christianities: Social Dynamics of Religious Change in the Upper SouthJanuary 2018 (has links)
abstract: This study analyzes competing forms of Protestant Christianity within the Bible Belt of the Upper South (Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina). On one hand, a conservative “culture war” version of Christianity has dominated the South, and deeply influenced national politics, for almost fifty years. This form of Christianity is predicated on white supremacy and heteropatriarchy and regulates religious, as well as sexual, gender, and racial norms. On the other hand, an emerging movement of those once socialized in the culture war version of Protestantism is now reconfiguring the regional traditions. Through ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative interviews, and historical analysis, this study explores the ways these post-culture war Christians are navigating and negotiating relations with family, church, and politics and society more broadly. This work argues that Protestantism in the Upper South is being re-landscaped from the inside by individuals staying within the tradition who seek to reorient regional, national and religious identities. This study goes beyond generalizations about changes in American religion to shed light on the specific motivations, conflicts and dynamics inherent in shifts in lived religion in this particular region. In so doing it also contributes to deeper understanding of processes of religious change more generally. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Religious Studies 2018
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A Culture War in Swedish Politics? : Cultural policy discourse from a perspective of securitisation theoryDegerfeldt, Dennis January 2023 (has links)
Relating to issues of democracy and security, the thesis examines suggested parallels inSwedish politics to the culture war phenomenon in the United States. Are there signs of asimilar development in Sweden? By examining political rhetoric by the political parties in theRiksdag, the aim is to find out how the parties relate to the concept of culture, what purposecultural policy should have and whether there are indications of securitisation in the discourseand potential implications for cultural polarisation. Utilising a theoretical frameworkconsisting of discourse theory and securitisation theory, various party programs andparliamentary documents are analysed with a focus on comparing discursive articulations,with a starting point in the ideological positioning around the creation of a culture canon. Thefindings show that the parties are divided in how they view culture along three differentscales, with several parties expressing securitising tendencies. Discursive polarisation isapparent in the material, with one party in particular articulated as a threat to the survival ofSwedish culture. Increasing polarisation in cultural rhetoric may lead to a culture war, thoughno such phenomenon is found at the moment in the current political discourse.
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EXPLORING THE INFLUENCE OF FAITH ON FOREIGN POLICY ATTITUDES IN THE UNITED STATESRoy, Oindrila 24 November 2014 (has links)
No description available.
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Returning culture to peacebuilding : contesting the liberal peace in Sierra LeoneViktorova Milne, Jevgenia January 2010 (has links)
This thesis investigates the advantages and limitations of applying culture to the analysis of violent conflict and peacebuilding, with a particular focus on liberal peacebuilding in Sierra Leone. While fully aware of the critique of the concept of culture in terms of its uses for the production of difference and ‘otherness,’ it also seeks to respond to the critique of liberal peacebuilding on the account of its low sensitivity towards local culture, which allegedly undermines the peace effort. After a careful examination of the terms of discussion about culture enabled by theoretical approaches to conflict in Chapter 2, the thesis presents a theoretical framework for the analysis of cultural aspects of conflict and peace based on the processes and effects of meaning-generation (Chapter 3), developing the conceptual apparatus and vocabulary for the subsequent empirical study. Instead of bracketing out the recursive nature of cultural theorising, the developed approach embraces the recursive dynamics which arise as a result of cultural ‘embeddedness’ of the analyst and the processes which s/he seeks to elucidate, mirroring similar dynamics in the cultural production of meaning and knowledge. The framework of ‘embedded cultural enquiry’ is then used to analyse the practices of liberal peacebuilding as a particular culture, which shapes the interaction of the liberal peace with its ‘subjects’ and critics as well as framing its reception of the cultural problematic generally (Chapter 4). The application of the analytical framework to the case study investigates the interaction between the liberal peace and ‘local culture,’ offering an alternative reading of the conflict and peace process in Sierra Leone (Chapter 5). The study concludes that a greater attention to cultural meaning-making offers a largely untapped potential for peacebuilding, although any decisions with regard to its deployment will inevitably be made from within an inherently biased cultural perspective.
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