Suchergebnisse

Policy failures impacted, sickened, and killed disabled New Jerseyans from the beginning of New Jersey's reign as an epicenter in the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a qualitative content analysis of Governor Phil Murphy's coronavirus press briefings, I argue that New Jersey's public health messaging relies on ableist and eugenicist conceptions of intelligence through both an insistence on individual "smartness" to combat the pandemic and a shaming of individual actions which are rhetorically connected to "stupidity." The official state government messages reflect a moralizing, individualizing focus on behavior and shaming of "unintelligent" actions, which shifts attention from leadership and statewide policies to personal responsibility for safety during a public health crisis. In this way, the State of New Jersey abdicates responsibility for illness and death, no matter the personal cost to marginalized populations.

Autism and romance occupy a space of discomfort in mainstream media conversation. Employing post-structuralist textual analysis, I explore themes arising from mainstream media representations of autism and dating, sexuality, and romance through eleven feature articles from major American newspapers. The United States mainstream media applies a medical model lens to autism, associates immaturity and a lack of empathy with autistic people, and positions autistic sexuality as disruptive and dangerous. Because autistic sexuality representation counters conventional concepts of romance, autism and romance are positioned as opposing forces. The mainstream media portrays autistic people who date through supercrip narratives. Rather than showing the vast diversity of autism communities, mainstream news articles present autistic people through a heterosexualized, gendered, and whitewashed lens. As a disability studies scholar and autistic writer, I advocate for mainstream news coverage that takes a social model approach to autism, incorporates multiple identities, and provides accurate reflections of autistic people as loving adults, as well as disability rights activism that addresses underlying sexual ableism in American society.

This dissertation explores the regional ecological politics of water scarcity during the 2011-2017 California drought. Based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, I center my coordinated case study on Southern California's underserved peripheral zones: small, groundwater-dependent communities in the rural desert, which have (at most) 50 years of viable water left. My ethnography follows community activists, policy makers, water scientists, technicians, and resource managers as they work to understand, protect, and sustain their local water. By examining water socialities in a region notorious for drought, I show that our existing explanatory models of water scarcity are insufficient to understand the lived reality of contemporary water politics in the Western United States. Instead, I apprehend California water through I call "ecology building": a process incorporating scientific knowledge production, historical practices, political projects, and the changing material qualities of the environment itself. Scientific and policy experts have used the term "hidden drought" to call attention to California's rapidly decreasing groundwater. I argue that hidden drought is not just about unseen water depletion. Instead, hiddenness emerges through more complex forms of invisibility or absence: remotely sensed water data, unseen hydrological infrastructure, deep histories, archival laws, secretive political regimes, and exclusionary policies. In so doing, I show how the problem of a perpetual lack of water shapes social and political life in a diverse cross section of communities. Here, an ad-hoc regional network of activists and water experts must navigate a constantly shifting, highly technical process involving diverse stakeholders, deep political allegiances, tangled regulatory agencies, millions of dollars of scientific research, and decades of litigation. My data draw from a broad cross-section of groundwater cases, linked by a shared environment and a shared network of water experts. My longterm engagement with the region, and the breadth of my work with water scientists, technicians, policy makers, and activists, allow me to provide analysis that cuts across normally disparate registers of water expertise, drawing together the complex community politics of water governance with the highly scaled technological politics of water monitoring and modeling.

"A surprising history unfolded in New Deal- and World War II-era New York City under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of the NYPD had worked to enforce partisan political power rather than focus on crime. That changed when La Guardia took office in 1934 and shifted the city's priorities toward liberal reform. La Guardia's approach to low-level policing anticipated later trends in law enforcement, including 'broken windows' theory and 'stop and frisk' policy. Police officers worked to preserve urban order by controlling vice, including juvenile delinquency, prostitution, gambling, and the 'disorderly' establishments that officials believed housed these activities. This mode of policing was central to La Guardia's influential vision of urban governance, but it was met with resistance from the Black New Yorkers, youth, and working-class women it primarily targeted. The mobilization for World War II introduced new opportunities for the NYPD to intensify policing and criminalize these groups with federal support. In the 1930s these communities were framed as perils to urban order; during the militarized war years, they became a supposed threat to national security itself. Brooks recasts the evolution of urban policing by revealing that the rise of law-and-order liberalism was inseparable from the surveillance, militarism, and nationalism of war"--