Twenty-first Century US Research Articles

The Crucial Role of Race in Twenty-First Century US Political Realignment

Abstract Traditional realignment theory has fallen out of fashion among political scientists, yet the popular press talk about political realignments with great regularity. However, in this research note we show that political science should reconsider realignment theory because over the last decade American politics has dramatically realigned—but only for white Americans. Specifically, we demonstrate that income has gone from a highly polarizing factor to one in which there is little to no polarization at all, while at the same time education polarization has increased dramatically to become the prominent demographic cleavage in the white segment of the electorate. However, no such realignment has occurred among Black or Latino voters. These differences across racial groups show how it is essential to consider race in theories of realignment, particularly because of the different experiences across racial groups. Realignment theory is quite viable in the twenty-first century, but the lens of race is the key to seeing the white realignment.

Representing (Post) Human Enhancement Technologies in Twenty-First Century US Fiction by Carmen Laguarta-Bueno

<i>Representing (Post) Human Enhancement Technologies in Twenty-First Century US Fiction</i> by Carmen Laguarta-Bueno

Carceral reckoning and twenty-first century US abolition movements: Generational struggles in the fight against prisons

The spectacle of racist state violence in the middle of a global pandemic was the spark that ignited one of the largest Black led and multiracial protest movements in recent history. The George Floyd rebellion propelled abolitionist politics from the margins to the mainstream of American political life. In the span of a few months, abolitionism supplanted liberal visions of reforming the carceral state. While important academic work continues to highlight the social and historical context that produced such widespread resistance to the American punishment regime, very little attention has been paid to how and why abolitionism gained such mainstream acceptance. We argue that the successful mainstreaming of the twenty-first century abolitionist response to the crisis of the carceral state is due to generational and intergenerational experiences of mostly Black and Brown organizers fighting against policing and incarceration. As new abolitionism forces reckonings with the carceral state and its major institutions, through important shifts, methodologies, and newly imagined forms of freedom, these movements necessitate new questions in the study of punishment: What are the tensions and contradictions that twenty-first century abolitionists are contending with as they build intergenerational movements against policing and prisons? How does the abolitionist legacy inform the work that we do as scholars and activists? How does the carceral reckoning realign political education and struggle?

Preemptive Impunity: The Constituent Power of Trump's Make America Great Again Movement

AbstractHow and why have freedom and social hierarchies and exclusions become fused in Trump's America? What causative factors can explain the emergence within twenty-first century US political culture of a movement notorious for its attacks on basic norms of tolerance, civility, and human decency? In their efforts to respond to such questions, prominent historians, political commentators, and theorists have correlated Trump's rise to political power in terms of his transmogrification of a large segment of the American populace into US liberal democracy's fascist totalitarian Other. While Trump's illiberal pronouncements and actions do indeed bear a resemblance to the political behavior of European fascists, the Americanness of Trump's conquest disposition might be better understood as his resurrection of an archaic variant of liberalism practiced by American settler colonists throughout the expansionist era of US history. How did President Trump persuade or provoke a broad swath of US citizens, who were for the most part accustomed to consider the principles and institutions of liberal democracy essential components of American democracy, to regard his settler conquest disposition as representatively American? What enabled Trump to advocate with preemptive impunity the demolition of liberal institutions and principles? How could he serve simultaneously as the president of the world's most powerful liberal democracy and leader of an insurrectionary movement of latter-day settler colonists? In an effort to address these questions, this essay engages Trump's March 23, 2011, endorsement of Birtherism; Trump's unauthorized transfer of power at the January 20, 2017, inauguration; Trump's August 12–15, 2017, statements about the Charlottesville protest; and Trump's role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection as distinct but interrelated moments in Trump's production of this settler-colonist conquest disposition.

Some Insights into Electoral Campaigning in the Age of Trump and Beyond

ABSTRACTThis article examines some aspects of campaign strategies that have risen in importance in twenty-first–century US political competition that are highlighted by the events of January 6, 2021.

The Threat of Poverty Without Misery

Focusing on contemporary United States social policy, this essay makes three interrelated arguments. First, it shows how twenty-first century US social policy is organized around an aspiration to intensify the immiseration of impoverished people of color. Second, it contends that this legislative and programmatic orientation toward cruelty is at least partially galvanized by the idea that any aspect of the lives of welfare recipients in excess of bare survival, any pleasure they may enjoy, is in effect stolen from taxpayers and so-called productive members of society. The marriage promotion and “responsible father” initiatives of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) serve as the primary example for this argument. Third, in this context, the everyday practices and politics of pleasure theorized by women of color feminism and queer of color critique offer an especially indispensable resource for collective living otherwise.

The Laboratorization of Schools: Laboratory Metaphors in Twenty-first Century US Education

ABSTRACTIn twenty-first century US education, laboratory metaphors are used to frame school governance and classroom practices. To explore how non-laboratory and non-traditional laboratory settings are framed as sites for experimentation, science and technology studies (STS) has two parallel trajectories for conceptualizing the laboratorization of society: the literal implantation of laboratories into physical locations and the metaphorical application that looks at the world as if it were a laboratory, that is from a ‘laboratory perspective’. Concerning the latter, the laboratory perspective offers STS ways to study: (1) how laboratory metaphors frame social and cultural understandings of scientific knowledge production; (2) the work laboratory metaphors do when used to describe non-laboratory settings. Fieldwork in two classrooms reveals how laboratory metaphors reproduce different but coexisting images of scientific knowledge production. There is an ideal image of laboratories as orderly, with a controlled amount of outside influence. This image frames schools as places with which to experiment from the top-down. There is a more empirical image of laboratories as socially and culturally structured. This image frames schools as places to conduct experiments from the bottom-up. Though each framing positions teachers and students differently, both are useful for characterizing the dynamics of US education.

Failing States, Human (In)Security, and the American World Novel

Abstract As a growing number of contemporary American novelists take the world and its socio-cultural and geopolitical complexity as their subject matter, the contemporary novel’s form and sense of worldliness are shifting. Twenty-first century US fiction challenges normative models of the world proposed by theories of cosmopolitan relationality by projecting fragile worlds of strife and trauma, in which violence accompanies geopolitical turbulence. In these novels, discourses around human security—the everyday security needs of vulnerable populations—are increasingly prominent. Accordingly, contemporary US fiction often incorporates within its geopolitical imaginary such issues as human rights, humanitarian interventions, development, and how life is disabled by prejudice, civil war, scarcity, and health or other crises. In this essay, I range across a number of works by contemporary American novelists such as Dave Eggers, Jennifer Egan, Denis Johnson, Dana Spiotta, and Bob Shacochis in which state failures as well as human and geopolitical security concerns impact on the form given to the world by these novelists. In their novels, narratives concerning human security as well as threats to geopolitical stability produce transnational geographies in which global interconnections and circulation intensify feelings of insecurity.

Worker cooperatives: alternative governance for caring and precarious work

PurposePrecarious work, characterized by low wages, unpredictable schedules and hours, physical hazards, and stressful psychosocial conditions, is a significant problem in the twenty-first century US economy. It most harshly affects women, racial/ethnic minorities, and immigrants. Caring labor jobs often involve precarious work and home health aide jobs are among the most precarious of these. With an ageing population creating high demand and a decline in the number of available workers, a societal crisis looms. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a business form that could positively impact the home care work environment.Design/methodology/approachThis paper reviews previous research to call for closer examination of worker cooperatives as a means to reduce precarious work among home health care workers.FindingsWorker cooperatives provide opportunities for economic empowerment for impoverished and marginalized workers. Cooperative Home Care Associates, a worker cooperative in the home care industry, reports better outcomes to workers than similar conventionally governed businesses.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper reviews results of a study comparing three organizational forms in the home health industry. Although there are relatively few worker cooperatives in the USA, future research should investigate this structure both where there is a low-wage labor force, and in general.Practical implicationsBetter outcomes for employees in the worker cooperative suggest that this is a viable business form for workers in precarious work environments.Social implicationsThe paper highlights the features of an organizational form that could help alleviate social ills caused by precarious work.Originality/valueThis paper considers the structure and function of a business form little studied in the management discipline. Based on their unique features and possibilities, worker cooperatives should be of interest to equality, diversity, and inclusion scholars; and to strategy, organizational behavior, and entrepreneurship scholars.

Psychoanalysis and the academy: Reflections on undergraduate teaching

This article addresses both the rewards and the daunting complexities of teaching psychoanalysis to undergraduates in the USA, where the idea of a university as a site for the cultivation of the life of the mind is under siege. The essay recommends a close critical reading of key Freudian texts, the establishment of a classroom atmosphere of trust, genuine respect for expectable student skepticism, and the capacity to wait as dystonic ideas gradually take hold and reveal their worth. Speed, a ubiquitous feature and a questionable desideratum of twenty-first century US culture, as well as facile cleverness, a desideratum within academia, tell against the psychoanalytic process, which is long, slow, halting, laborious, and painful, but a process that can, at best, open what has heretofore been sealed.

A Twenty-First Century US Water Policy by Juliet Christian-Smith et al. Foreword by William K. Reilly (review)

A Twenty-First Century US Water Policy by Juliet Christian-Smith et al. Foreword by William K. Reilly (review)

Escaping the Bind: Comparing Twenty-First Century US Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the French Response to the Algerian Revolution, 1955–1956

Faced with a growing Algerian insurgency in 1955, French Governor-General Jacques Soustelle turned to his ethnological training to convert soldiers into amateur social scientists, hoping to better know the people of Algeria and therefore ease pacification through cultural understanding. Soustelle failed to appreciate the sophistication of revolt in Algeria, a diverse array of movements that did not fit traditional European categories. Confronting similar problems in understanding the causes of Iraqi and Afghan resistance in the years following the invasions of 2001–2003, American military planners also turned to anthropology. Though not taken to the administrative extreme seen in Soustelle's Algeria, the United States Army instituted the Human Terrain System in order to better understand native populations involved in an active insurgency. American planners can learn from the French experience by developing a more nuanced approach to study that includes more advanced anthropological techniques without the baggage of the colonial system.

A twenty-first century US water policy

Foreword by William K. Reilly List of Acronyms Chapter 1: The Water of the United States: Freshwater Availability and Use, Peter H. Gleick Chapter 2: Legal and Institutional Framework of Water Management, Juliet Christian-Smith and Lucy Allen Chapter 3: Water and Environmental Justice, Amy Vanderwarker Chapter 4: Tribes and Water, Kate A. Berry Chapter 5: Water Quality, Lucy Allen Chapter 6: Protecting Freshwater Ecosystems, Juliet Christian-Smith and Lucy Allen Chapter 7: Municipal Water Use, Heather Cooley Chapter 8: Water and Agriculture, Juliet Christian-Smith Chapter 9: Water and Energy, Heather Cooley and Juliet Christian-Smith Chapter 10: Water and Climate, Heather Cooley Chapter 11: United States International Water Policy , Peter H. Gleick Chapter 12: Summary and Recommendations Appendix : Federal Legislation Notes Bibliography About the Authors Index

Global Trauma and the Cinematic Network Society

Are we really more connected interpersonally in the age of accelerated globalization? Do global social networks principally empower connected agents, or are “powerless places” further marginalized by “placeless power”? This article examines how twenty-first century US cinema maps social networks, both international and interpersonal. Whereas communication and technology scholars often characterize the network society as a social formation promising more “symmetrical” and “co-ordinated” global relations, the past decade's most-discussed “global network” films (Traffic, 2000; Crash, 2004; Syriana, 2005; Babel, 2006 etc.) envision the network society as a complex landscape of enduring inequality. In the cinematic network society, empowered agents fail to co-ordinate or even comprehend the networks that surround them. Borrowing from social problem films, economic guilt films, and city films of the past, these network narratives illustrate how networks can link us in unwanted ways. In the 11 films examined here, privileged Westerners are often forced to confront their networked relationships with suffering others. In a neoliberal fashion, these protagonists routinely opt to privatize their affective and political responses: they act alone, even as vigilantes, despite their connections. Their portrayals by humanitarian celebrities further entwine on-screen conduct and actors' private charity work, powerfully articulating a questionable vision of what global citizenship should look like in an age when everyone is connected.

Fugue, Hip Hop and Soap Opera: Transcultural Connections and Theatrical Experimentation in Twenty-First Century US Latina Playwriting

This article examines theatrical experimentation in three plays by U.S. Latina playwrights: Quiara Alegría Hudes' Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue (2007), Caridad Svich's Tropic of X (2009) and Cusi Cram's Fuente (2009). Each playwright engages with an existing artistic form, fugue, hip hop and soap opera, as a means to develop the structure, characters and language of her play. The article argues that these playwrights' innovations, created by exploring and subverting diverse artistic models, reflect the dynamics of transculturation and that the resulting plays are not only commercially viable but vital to twenty-first century U.S. theater.

Return to the Melting Pot: An Old American Olympic Story

With the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks looming in the background, the US turned the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City into a nationalistic pageant. One of the surprises of American celebrations of ‘imagined community’ at the Salt Lake games was that an old and venerable theme in American Olympic interpretations re-emerged at the ‘white’ winter carnival in Utah. Notable performances by Mexican-American, Cuban-American, African-American, Chinese-American, Japanese-American, and other ‘hyphenated-American’ athletes rekindled the US tradition of claiming that a so-called ‘melting pot’ of immigrants produced Olympic victories and made the US a superpower. ‘Melting pot’ discourses of American Olympic prowess had been common in the early twentieth century but diminished thereafter. They had been noticeably absent before 2002 in US interpretations of winter games. The revival of this old American Olympic tradition illuminates the continuities and the breaks between twenty-first century US patriotism and earlier versions of US nationalism.