As the cultural diversity of the United States increases, more researchers are using socio-behavioral perspectives to explain health disparities. These studies are not unwarranted; high incidence rates in conditions like hypertension, obesity, and diabetes in given populations do suggest that cultural factors influence morbidity. But rarely does research examine how political culture affects health. I investigate this relationship using four waves of the National Survey of Black Americans. I focus on factors like political partisanship, electoral and political participation, Black socio-political beliefs, and system perception. Results from several statistical analyses show that African Americans who do not participate in mainstream politics have better health than those that do participate. Findings also suggest that the adoption of Black political orientations positively affects health satisfaction. Other results on key demographic factors are consistent with the wider literature which suggests that age, socioeconomic status, coverage, marital status, and religious identity all influence health. This study is significant because it contributes to a small, but emerging body of literature that examines the connection between political factors and wellness outcomes.

Family Systems Theory provides a framework for examining how values are transmitted between family members, and the overall impact transmission has on familial well-being. While familial emotional closeness has been linked to older-adult well-being, there is still a lack of research investigating the influence of ideological agreement between family members. This study examined grandparent-child and grandparent-grandchild dyads to assess the extent to which level of agreement on religious and political ideological beliefs moderates the relation between perceived intergenerational emotional closeness and well-being in grandparents. Affectual solidarity ratings among the generations, as well as religious ideological differences between grandparents and grandchildren, were found to influence well-being in grandparents. Model fit was excellent for both moderation models. These findings suggest that emotional closeness is a predominant factor in predicting well-being in grandparents that may not be as heavily influenced by the level of agreement on ideological beliefs, as is often assumed.

Ideology and Law Abstract In the presented work, I examine in depth the concept of ideology in its historical changes. Afterward, I relate these various forms to law. My work aims to analyze how law and ideology interact and whether there is an inherent relationship between them. I am therefore concerned with answering the question whether law is ideological, or under what conditions law and the application of law are influenced by ideology. The work is divided into three parts. In the first part, I address the notion of ideology. Here I examine how Karl Marx and his followers grasped and elaborated on this notion. I show the transformation of the Marxist conception of ideology in the works of Lenin, Gramsci and Althusser. In the second chapter of the first part, I present a different, historically relevant tradition of understanding ideology that I call, for the purposes of this work, conservative-democratic. In the second discussed tradition, I describe the ideas of Arendt, Popper, Scruton, and Pithart. Subsequently, I compare the two negative concepts of ideology to each other. The second part is devoted to how these negative concepts of ideology can be applied in legal theory. In the first chapter, I focus on the Critical Legal Studies movement, whose proponents were inspired by the previously mentioned...

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Thesis advisor: Susan M. Shell / The 21st century has witnessed jarring set-backs in the spread of the liberal democracy around the globe, as well as domestic challenges to the liberal form of government where it has been long established. By interrogating the root principles of the liberal theory of progress, this study aims to account for both the overwhelming success of the liberal progress in the latter half of the twentieth century, as well as its mounting failures in the early twenty-first century. It is argued that the liberal theory of progress rests on an unstable synthesis of two competing modern political philosophies, which are identified as ideology and the philosophy of history. The latter offers a theory of mankind’s historical development toward reason, while the former provides a blueprint for the construction of the rational state. Before these modern philosophies were synthesized in the liberal theory of progress, they emerged in opposition to one another, in the works of Thomas Hobbes and Giambattista Vico. The first chapter introduces the political philosophy of Hobbes’ Leviathan, and examines Hobbes’s teaching about nature and art, power and public opinion, culture and civil religion. On this basis, the Leviathan is shown to inaugurate the ideological form of politics, of which liberalism is one example. Chapter two defines ideology and traces its history, demonstrating the common source of all modern ideologies in a foundational egalitarianism that replaces the natural politics of rule. Chapter three addresses the modern philosophy of history, inaugurated by Vico’s New Science. An account of the genesis of this philosophy is presented and contrasted with Leo Strauss’ account. The fourth chapter considers Vico’s political teaching and his opposition to the modern theories of natural law, including especially that of Hobbes. Rejecting the view that Vico should be characterized as an enemy of the Enlightenment, this chapter examines his teaching about the historicity of human nature as reflected in religion, justice, poetry, philosophy and the political cycle of human history, and concludes with a discussion of the “barbarism of reflection,” in which all progress is said to comes to an end. These studies of Hobbes and Vico indicate the points of greatest tension within the liberal theory of progress, and prepare the way for a future critical study of liberal theory of progress in Kant and his successors. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

In this study I employ Lacanian psychoanalysis and ideological criticism to analyze the development of "gender and mathematics" research over the past fifty years. This study is motivated by the original Marxist-Lacanian claim by Valerie Walkerdine in the 1980s that women's relationship with mathematics must always be considered as fundamentally problematic, and by the complex and often contradictory claims that are made in research artifacts that report on this topic. Many approaches to this topic that focus on "closing the gender gap" or aiming for "gender equity" warrant an ideological critique to situate these motivations within the political realm of mathematics education research. Artifacts analyzed in this study were gleaned from a comprehensive electronic library search of over 600 entries, where 178 were retained as yield. A complete ideological critique was performed on a subset of these. Findings include (1) historical alignment of the ideologies evidenced in the research with the ideological influences of the political situation at the time of publication, including scientism, neoliberalism, evolutionism, and solutionism, (2) the ideology of interpellationism which indicates the role of scientific ways of knowing in capitalist political economy, and (3) theoretical foundations of what I call the feminine-quilted-speech indicate how at the present moment in the field, we have the opportunity to shift the ideological underpinnings of research on gender and mathematics. The study avows the role of gender as an agent of capitalist accumulation in school mathematics, through a notion I develop called the masculine-quilted-speech. / Doctor of Philosophy / "Gender and mathematics" is a concern for mathematics education researchers that is old as the field itself, yet it is one that continues to be an active focus for a large swath of researchers. Conundrums abound. Such research includes, for example, neurotic obsessions and phantasies about closing achievement gaps between males and females, whilst other approaches consider the social factors impacting women's and men's relationship to mathematics. I wager that one reason for this plurality of approaches (and the incommensurability of their constituent findings and results) is the inability of existing theoretical perspectives for getting to the root of the problem (the point-de-capiton of the discourse). This dissertation offers a political psychoanalytic counter-perspective to prevailing theoretical approaches on the issue of "gender and mathematics" that critiques the ideologies advanced by researchers in the field through their actions of performing and publishing research on this topic. Findings indicate the extent to which ideology structures the actions of researchers, and the role of gender in the capitalist mode of school mathematics.

This thesis examines Erasmus Darwin's poem The Loves of the Plants (1789) for its boundary crossing expression of ecological theory that takes into consideration the influence of religious cosmology on our understanding of the natural world. Darwin (1731-1802) was the grandfather of naturalist Charles Darwin, whose theories we recognize now as the foundation of an entire field of biological study. But Darwin harboured his own beliefs of evolutionary theory long before his grandson was born, those which asserted a relatedness of all forms of life and pressed against the conceptions of existence that were so deeply rooted in the Euro-Western mind. I intend to demonstrate here the originality and complexity of Darwin's work as an exploration of cosmology, wherein the animation of his vegetal world invites readers to consider both the continuities between states of organic existence and the categories which were established in an attempt to keep them apart. By investigating the origins of these conceptions, from biblical creation to the Aristotelean tradition into the time in which Darwin wrote, I explore the ways in which these ideologies pertaining to the natural order of being have come to be and continue to be. Based on his interpretation of Carl Linnaeus' system of taxonomic classification, a system which remains in use to this day, Darwin's Loves manipulates a structure shaped by European religious and ideological assumptions to unravel the binding understanding of a separate and distant nature, one that has been implemented to discourage ways of perceiving otherwise. Because of its incorporation of Linnaean thought, this early work of Darwin's is often disregarded by scholars in conversations of innovative natural philosophy. Yet, in employing a historicist rhetorical and cultural analysis, this thesis examines Darwin's botanical poem inclusively, engaging with his decentering of the Christian understanding of the hierarchy of species that has been maintained for centuries, to illustrate that in composing a realm of personified flora he is melding the believed to be distinct worlds of the human and nonhuman to unite our species with an all-encompassing naturalism. Though this research is culturally specific, its sentiment may be carried forward to acknowledge the ideological histories and inheritances that influence our conceptions of other biological beings and our understandings of our own species as well. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / This project focuses on a reading of Erasmus Darwin's The Loves of the Plants (1789) that emphasizes its purpose as an exploration of cosmology and the influence of ideological histories. Taking inspiration from the metaphors of Carl Linnaeus' system of plant classification, Darwin is able to introduce his readers to the world of botany, all the while pointing to the implications of following approaches to understanding the natural world that rely on religious conceptions. Looking specifically at Darwin's manipulation of the origins of Euro-Western ideas pertaining to our planetary natural order, those which stem from the creation myths of Genesis and were passed on through antiquity into the Age of Reason, I intend for this thesis to demonstrate how Darwin's reimagining of nonhuman beings serves to illustrate the ways in which our cosmologies, even those we believe to be removed from, are able to affect our understandings of the worlds around us and all the beings within them.

Apocalypticism is the belief in an impending large-scale catastrophic event that would threaten the survival of the human race. Despite the high level of apocalypticism among American adults, there has been little empirical research conducted to determine whether this proclivity is socially consequential. Conspiracism, a related factor, is widely studied empirically and is associated with many negative societal effects. Though research suggests a possible correlation between these variables, empirical research has not examined whether apocalypticism is a robust predictor of conspiracism. I hypothesize and test whether apocalypticism is predictive of belief in conspiracy theories using data from the 2018 Chapman Survey of American Fears, a nationally representative sample of American adults. From this data a multi-item conspiracism index was created and analyzed in relation with a measure of belief in apocalypticism. Regression analyses show that apocalyptic belief is the strongest predictor of conspiracism within the model, surpassing sociodemographic, political and religious characteristics. These results demonstrate that apocalypticism is an important factor to consider when studying conspiracism, and suggests that future researchers should further investigate apocalypticism using a variety of social scientific methods.

This study examines the ideology of white southern opposition to the civil rights movement in order to recognize the transformation of white concepts of race in the midst of racial change and how those changes impacted the emergence of new conservative political principles in the post-civil rights era. The recognition of a new racial consciousness informs historical appraisals of the significance of white resistance and suggests that this opposition made a vital contribution to the political realignments of the 1960s and 1970s. The foundation of this study rests upon the Citizens’ Council Forum, a television and radio program that aired from 1957-1966. Forum’s sponsor, the Citizens’ Council of America, has been consistently recognized as the most highly-organized and active of white resistance organizations in the South. Forum was the Council’s effort to place its organizing principles of states’ rights and racial integrity among a myriad of other pressing political problems in order to sell its campaign to preserve segregation to an audience that extended beyond the borders of the South. This effort required guests of the show to subvert questions of racial equality to broader concerns of federal power, liberal politics and foreign policy. Attention to these topics in addition to Forum discussions of the civil rights movement reveals that in the process of opposing racial change, white resistance helped usher in a new era of racial consciousness that concealed race within conservative ideas. Race became a powerful insinuation within these issues. The “colorblind” tactics of Forum guests eschewed direct denunciations of the black race but ensured that race would remain a firm component of public political discussions. This study highlights the importance of reaction to historical change as a way to understand the evolution of ideas. As the civil rights movement instigated new, more equitable ideas about race, its opponents acted in parallel ways to repackage the principles of white supremacy. They did so by leveraging principles against the actual conditions that the system of racial discrimination wrought. Less visible forms of racialized rhetoric replaced the raw language of segregation and gave segregationists and their sympathizers a home in conservative politics.

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