Learning the Ropes: One Year in the Life of a Congressional Staffer

1998 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-35
Author(s):  
Tanya Price
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
Research Priority ◽  
Congressional Black Caucus ◽  
Black Caucus ◽  
One Year

Anthropologists have often been accused of indulging in the exotic and esoteric. As the criticism goes, such research priority diverts us from investigating issues with direct relevance to our society's most pressing problems—racism, economic inequality, and the seeming inability of our governmental system to address these issues as we cross the metaphorical "bridge to the twenty-first century." As the following case study asserts, anthropologists who possess the tools to address inequality in the United States and can access research money and tools of scholastic research also have the responsibility to make field data available to legislators and others in the position to affect positive social change. From 1990-91, I used my skills of participant observation to study members of the United States Congress. With the help of a Graduate Legislative Fellowship awarded by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, I was able to observe legislators in the act of making laws that tend to maintain social inequality in the United States. So, while gathering information for my doctoral dissertation in anthropology, I have also been able to call attention to the role of Congress in reinforcing economic and racial inequalities.

The Inclusion Solution? The Use of Blackface in Jordan Peele’s "Get Out"

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karolina Toka
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
The Us ◽  
Black Bodies

Jordan Peele’s 2017 social thriller Get Out depicts a peculiar form of body swap resulting from the uncanny desires of the Armitage family to seize captured black bodies and use them as carriers of their white minds. This paper offers a reading of the movie’s disturbing plot through the lens of the origins and cultural significance of blackface. For the sake of argument, in this article blackface is to be understood as a cultural phenomenon encompassing the symbolic role of black people basic to the US society, which articulates the ambiguity of celebration and exploitation of blackness in American popular culture. This article draws on the theoretical framework of blackface developed by Lott, Rogin, Ellison, and Gubar, in order to explore the Get Out’s complex commentary on the twenty-first century race relations in the United States. As a result, this paper turns the spotlight on the mechanisms of racist thinking in the United States, by showing the movie’s use of the apparatus underpinning blackface.

scholarly journals Ronald Reagan, the Modern Right, and…the Rise of the Fem-Crits

Laws ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baumgardner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Critical Legal Studies ◽  
Valuable Source ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Law Professors ◽  
Trump Administration

Activists and academics are returning to the 1980s for clues and context concerning the modern Right in the United States, oftentimes with the hope of deriving insights that can be wielded against the legal agenda of the Trump administration. This is a worthwhile historical endeavor, which must not ignore the essential position of feminist legal theorists. This article reveals the foundational role of feminist critical legal scholars, or “Fem-Crits”, to the progressive resistance against conservative legal thought during the 1980s. By highlighting the work of Fem-Crits in the academy and within the critical legal studies movement, this article identifies the Fem-Crits as a valuable source of movement inspiration and theoretical influence for leftist law professors, lawyers, and activists in the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals A Quixotic Venture: Spanish-Philippine Poetry at the Turn of the 19th Century, or Resistance against Oblivion

HUMANIS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 426
Author(s):  
Mario Sánchez Gumiel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
First Century ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Spanish Colonization ◽  
The 19Th Century

This essay explores, by means of three Philippine poems written in Spanish during the first half of the twentieth century, the claim of a Philippine cultural identity sustained in the Spanish heritage. After a short overview of the Spanish colonization in the Philippines and the presence of the Spanish language in the archipelago, I will use Paul Friedrich’s theoretical approach on poetry as a source for the study of a culture. Then I will proceed to the examination of three poems written by Philippine writers: Fernando María Guerreros’ “A Hispania” (1913), Claro Mayo Recto’s “Las dalagas Filipinas” (1911), and Jesús Balmori’s “Blasón” (undated) by means of the close reading approach. In the exploration of this claim of a Philippine cultural identity rooted in the Spanish heritage, I additionally consider the role of the United States, and take into account some initiatives that have tried to continue the study of this literature throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. I conclude that poetry is a valuable way to analyse culture, and, for the specific case of Spanish and the Philippines, I suggest that Spanish-Philippine poetry helps know the heritage of Spanish in the archipelago

A Twenty-First-Century World

Laura Nader ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 255-346
Author(s):  
Laura Nader
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Dispute Resolution ◽  
Alternative Dispute Resolution ◽  
Family Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Globalized World

This chapter reviews letters from the twenty-first century. It explains how the letters covered a scattered number of familiar issues, such as mindsets in science, arguments over Alternative Dispute Resolution mediation, and the need to regulate family law mediators. It also discusses a short letter from an eighty-five-year old Californian farmer, George Woegell, on the male proclivity to go to war. The chapter analyzes letters on war and violence, such as the United States' prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It looks at other letters about the continued conflict in Israel and Palestine, jihadism, terrorism, anthropology and militarism, silencing, and the role of politics and its problems in a globalized world in search of “modernity.”

Congressional Hispanic Caucus

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Jiménez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Legislative Action ◽  
Congressional Black Caucus ◽  
Black Caucus ◽  
New Generation ◽  
National Legislature

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) is a Congressional Member Organization, namely a coalition of members of Congress that includes representatives and senators who have Hispanic descent. Originally nonpartisan and today composed of only members of the Democratic Party, this group aims to give voice to and advance the interests of the Hispanic population of the United States in the context of the national legislature. The creation of the caucus as a legislative service organization in 1976, reflected the increasing relevance, enfranchisement, and incorporation of Hispanics into the political life of the United States; it was then celebrated by analysts and activists as an important event in the process of the representation of a demographic group that had been politically marginalized for most of the 20th century. In subsequent years, however, the caucus faced difficulties in striving to take coordinated and noteworthy legislative action and failed to attract much scholarly attention. Analysts who compared the Congressional Hispanic Caucus with the previously created Congressional Black Caucus, for example, often underlined the heterogeneity of the CHC membership, its lower level of cohesion, and its low legislative success record. Nevertheless, this has been changing recently: a new generation of scholars is introducing different perspectives to study the activities of minority congresspersons. The new wave of studies has revealed more complex ways to assess the importance of the work that the caucus and its members do. Beyond the record of modest legislative achievements, it is clear that the Congressional Hispanic Caucus has been able to lobby presidents to appoint Hispanics to executive positions and has exerted influence in some immigration debates and bills. Furthermore, it has advanced the institutionalization of initiatives to educate Hispanic leaders (through the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, CHCI) and provided coalitional support to newly elected Hispanic congresspersons. Overall, the caucus has contributed to the fundamental task of advancing legislative agendas that reflect the interests of Hispanics in the Congress.

Coming Full Circle: The Study of Big Business since 1950

2001 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maury Klein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Business History ◽  
Big Business ◽  
Full Circle ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Shed Light

Taking a broad view of historians' work on the rise of big business in the United States over the last half-century, this article attempts to assess both where business history has been and where it may go in the future. The analysis recognizes the centrality of the impact made by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., but it also delves into other paths, including some not taken, of interest to historians. This wide-ranging interpretation also maintains the importance of big business itself as a subject worthy of historical attention and argues that its crucial role in the development of American society has not yet been considered by mainstream historians with the intensity it deserves. Musing over the nearly constant preoccupation of practitioners with defining the scope of business history as a field, the essay highlights a number of topics needing attention, suggesting that historians of business are well positioned to shed light on the growing role of business in all aspects of life in the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals Reflections on Research in Romania

2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
Sam Beck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Participatory Research ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
Moral Imperative ◽  
Biographical Account ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Participatory Research Approach

Abstract This is a biographical account of my work in Romania and the influence it had on my research that followed. I focus on the impact that my almost five years in Romania had on the framework and orientation of my anthropological practice that I employed in the United States. I suggest that anthropologists have a moral imperative we must carry out when we choose to conduct research among the most vulnerable in society. In doing so, we must also come to understand the conditions that have made them vulnerable in the first place (Nader 1969). I assert here that as anthropologists of the twenty-first century we no longer may stay on the sidelines, but we must engage our work as allies with the vulnerable, supporting them in their self-identified struggles for dignity, liberation, and sustainability as part of a unified global effort. This entails the transformation of participant observation into a participatory research approach.

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