“Unspoken Understanding”: The Evolution of Chinese American Adoption Communities

While scholarly work on adoption, transnational adoption, and specifically international adoption from China has been robust, it has tended to focus on studying parents and parenting. This paper analyzes the resources used by both parents and children to discuss race, culture, and adoption, and seeks to understand the effects of these parenting strategies on Chinese American adoptees, who have begun to reach young adulthood in the last ten years. Examination of the recent growth of adoptee communities reveals that a shared and complex adoptee identity is a more powerful nexus than shared Chineseness.

Media, Criminal Injustice, and the Black Freedom Struggle

Since the mid-20th century, media outlets have driven publicity for newsworthy events and shaped content for their receptive audiences. Commonly, massive movements seek publicity to attract attention and participation for protests, demonstrations, slogans, and unfortunate events. For instance, the black freedom struggle of the 1950s through the 1970s took advantage of their traumatic narratives of oppression to attract national and international attention. Many African Americans who experienced dastardly components of a racist criminal justice system were, in turn, earning respect and power from their freedom-seeking counterparts by commodifying the emotion that fueled black liberation efforts.[i] Media, therefore, became a tool for exposing the nation to racist law enforcement and legal action. Ultimately, black freedom struggle activists deployed media depictions of their policing, arrest, and imprisonment to be used as movement publicity, earning increased participation and advancing movement motives through this subsequent growing interest. [i] Colley, Zoe A. Ain't Scared of Your Jail: Arrest, Imprisonment, and the Civil Rights Movement. University Press of Florida, 2012. 4.

The Importance of Morocco in the Spanish Civil War

This paper addresses the pivotal yet forgotten role that Morocco played in the Spanish Civil War. Other histories and analyses of the Civil War limit discussion to the Spanish side of the conflict without recognizing the colonialist holdings that Spain had and the ways that those lands and people impacted the war. This leads to an incomplete history that denies the Civil War its full historical context and the foundational context for the Nationalist side of the conflict. This paper analyzes the war as well as the ideological creations behind Spanish Fascism and the ways in which Morocco was tied to the creation of the Spanish Civil War, how it was important to the fighting of the conflict, and how it was pivotal to the war's eventual outcome. This will be argued by looking at the racist and eurocentric views of the Spanish Republic and how those views lead directly to its failure in the Civil War. This article will analyze first hand accounts of people directly involved in the war and the factors that led to the involvement of Moroccans on the Nationalist side.

Attitude towards Cross-Culture Exchange in the 1685 French Embassy to the Kingdom of Siam

Traditional histories of Early Modern exchange tend to emphasize the dispersion and adoption (or rejection) of European science and culture. More recently, there has been an historiographical trend to see early modern international interactions as multi-direction exchanges in which all parties are altered in each interaction. The 1685 French-Jesuit Embassy to Siam provides an interesting opportunity to explore the implications of this multi-directional approach. Although this exchange had no significant, lasting impact on either Siam or France, the dynamics at play demonstrate how each party’s attitude towards the exchange impacted their ability to achieve their aims. This paper uses Guy Tachard’s first-hand account of the 1685 Embassy, Voyage to Siam, to explore the political, scientific, and religious exchanges that took place between the French and the Siamese. On each of these levels, the French were consistently concerned with their own perception and cultural superiority whereas the Siamese were primarily motivated by a desire for an intellectual exchange. The Siamese successfully gained scientific equipment and knowledge from the French Jesuits whereas the Jesuits failed to convert Siam to Christianity. Thus, this interaction shows how differing attitudes lead to tangible differences in the outcome of this cross-cultural interaction.

Playing with Fire: The Medieval Judicial Ordeals and their Downfall

Trials by ordeal in the Middle Ages prove to be some of the most complex secular trials in all of history. Both trial by fire, and trial by water looked to call God's judgment into play, hoping that He would make the decisions of guilt or innocence. God is all-knowing. He is all-powerful. Therefore He has all of the relevant information to determine the fates of those who go through the ordeals. Despite this, the theologians in the medieval Church looked to lessen clerical involvement in the ordeals. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council met, and the ordeals ceased to exist. Even though they were secular, the ordeals could not survive without the help of priests. Why is it that the theologians so desperately wanted to end the use of the ordeals in Europe?

The Horseshoe Theory of Mental Illness and Incarceration

This paper focuses on the relationship between historical mental illness treatment and modern incarceration, reimagining it as a horseshoe, with mental illness on one end and prison on the other. There are three reasons why the two parallel each other, these being: formulated sequestration, chronicity, and histories of failed high-minded reform. The paper then writes about the intersection of the two in a mental health ward in a prison. The last aspect discussed is the gap between the ends of the horseshoe, which is due to the role of volition.

Empire In-the-Round: The Tiered Stages of Naqsh-i Jahan Square in Isfahan

Naqsh-i Jahan Square lies at the heart of the Safavid Empire's capital city of Isfahan, and it is a remarkable unified artistic statement that renders legible Shah 'Abbas' imperial ideology in the urban landscape. It is also a complex made up of many different buildings with theater iconography: the caravanserai, coffeehouse, maydan, and palace. Though there is much existing scholarship analyzing these buildings separately, this paper proposes a new holistic conception of these stage spaces as linked and hierarchal. The stages embody the Shah's goal of centralization by facilitating ease of movement to promote urban consolidation and they invite the Safavid subject to become an actor in the imperial project through their in-the-round design, while containing dissent through the visual supremacy and exclusivity of the palace stage. Taken as a whole, the square's translated name, 'Image of the World' holds true, and this paper demonstrates how Shah 'Abbas' tiered theater spaces cast Naqsh-i Jahan Square as both a microcosm and a macrocosm of the Safavid Empire.

The Bodies of The Condemned: The Return of the Body as the Object of State Power

This paper provides a historical analysis of the genealogy of American policing and attempts to explain the return of state power to individual bodies. It argues that this return was informed by French counterinsurgency strategies in Algeria. Through engagement with Foucault's analysis of power and surveillance practices, it aims to shed light on and help us better understand and combat police brutality today.

Shikata Ga Nai: Statelessness and Sacrifice for Japanese-American Volunteers During the Second World War

Through a Philosophical analysis of the nature of Internment Camps as well as oral histories of veterans who volunteered to serve in the US military from the camps, this paper will argue that the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII was an event that the Supreme Court and surrounding legal discourse placed outside of legal jurisdiction. Those within the camps were thus condemned to a life lacking political qualification and juridical personhood. Faced with the dangers of this condition, interned Japanese Americans who served in the U.S. Army consciously laid claim to the American political community through the sacrifice of their lives. These soldiers, therefore, performed a thoroughly political act of resistance rather than of pure patriotism.

Selection from "Una Iglesia Desaparecida: The End of an Era for the Chilean Catholic Church"

This article aims to investigate the changing political alignment of the Chilean Catholic Church following the fall of the dictatorship in the early 1990’s. The author brings together a primary source collection of new articles, photographs, and interviews, as well as a secondary source collection of sociological surveys and historiography, to interrogate the process and outcome of this political transition. The article maintains that desires for hierarchical control and a rejection of past, progressive theology motivated Church leaders to transition the Church away from community based leadership, to clerical control.