Scholarly Works, Political Science
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- Author's Response: Writing from the RuinsCaraccioli, Mauro J. (Sage, 2024-12-10)
- Learning how to count: Pedagogies of accountability in the pandemic universityCaraccioli, Mauro J. (Sage, 2024-09-28)This article examines the pedagogical politics at play in the quantification of faculty labor in contemporary U.S. academia. It focuses on the author’s experiences at a large, land-grant, R1 university, going through the Promotion and Tenure (P&T) review process and reflecting on the various kinds of responsibilities that emerged from structural and personal transformations during the COVID-19 pandemic. By developing a pedagogy of accountability against quantitative compartmentalization, the essay outlines how to posit care, empowerment, and reflexivity as central to all learning, especially for teachers and particularly in times of crisis. In this context, ‘learning how to count’ means going against faceless metrics of one-to-one correspondence with other faculty or peer institutions and instead embracing what Paulo Freire called the ‘civic courage’ to teach as a commitment to others and the self.
- Climate Change Deniers versus Climate Change Decriers: The Pragmatics of Climate Defense in the Age of DisinformationLuke, Timothy W. (University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, 2024-10-29)Thirty-five years ago, Bill McKibben published his best-selling popular depiction of climate change, The End of Nature. Nearly a decade ago, Naomi Klein's global best-seller This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate presented her detailed brief: “thought leaders” must resist and reverse the degradation of Earth's climate in the face of denials that this policy change was impossible. As popular activists, McKibben and Klein both believe “more information leads to good and great change.” This gambit presumes when presented disturbing facts on how and why rising fossil fuel use is degrading the climate, like-minded readers will wisely rise, readily organize and rationally stop such destruction. Both authors have thriving careers as “thought leaders,” but the gamble that informative writing would inspire game-changing decisive actions has backfired. In fact, the intensity of their climate decrying for millions of “action laggards” is twisted into disinformation to justify climate denying. Nature has not ended, and climate change has not changed everything. Costly climate disasters are increasing; but habits of embedded symbolic action tied to moralistic decrying suggest McKibben and Klein now play new roles as artful traders in the networks of disinformation. In today’s ESG-guided climate politics, major energy companies nod appreciatively to climate decriers, pledging future perfection at carbon reduction in contrite denialist exchange for sustaining the continued present degradation of their carbon emissions. This is a puzzle. Are answers to the puzzle to be found in Klein’s latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, which explores to what degree everyday life now is not engaged with the natural world? Instead, denial and disinformation seem to ensnare it in “trips into the Mirror World” where sustainable degradation produces “digital doubles” of fulfilled future pledges of true sustainability in the 24x7 attention economy underpinned by the falsehoods of current concentrated carbon intensity.
- The Anthropocene and Freedom: Terrestrial time as political mystificationLuke, Timothy W. (2013-10)
- Black Representation and District Compactness in Southern Congressional DistrictsGoedert, Nicholas; Hildebrand, Robert; Pierson, Matthew; Travis, Laurel; Fravel, Jamie (2024-04-01)This paper explores the assumed trade-off between district compactness and Black representation in legislative districts in the American South. We perform analysis both on heuristically generated districts using current US demographics, and on historical congressional maps since the 1970s. Computations are performed using an iterative heuristic to find feasible solutions guided by multiple objectives. We find that while the trade-off has been strongly observed historically, it is possible to effectively address both goals simultaneously in most cases. We are able to demonstrate maps substantially superior to the present enacted maps on both dimensions in at least seven of nine states analyzed. Nevertheless, the trade-off appears more necessary in states with larger and/or more heavily rural Black populations than in more urbanized states, where the drawing of compact Blackinfluence districts is easier.
- Sustainabilization: A Critique of Green Economy(s)Luke, Timothy W. (2016-09-22)
- Postmodern Geopolitics in the 21st Century: Lessons from the 9.11.01 Terrorist AttacksLuke, Timothy W. (2003-11-30)
- AI and the ambiguity of the pharmakonZanotti, Laura (2024-07-05)This conference paper explores how relational approaches based on quantum social science may offer conceptual frameworks to conceptualize and evaluate AI and how the United Nations and Academia may offer avenues for engaging ethically with this borderless phenomenon.
- Towards anarchist abolitionist futures for violence prevention: Beyond 'counterterrorism'Dixit, Priya (Cambridge University Press, 2024-11-25)Recent critical scholarship on terrorism has centred on matters of race, class, and gender regarding how counterterrorism policies are connected to multiple systems of hierarchical power relations. This article builds upon this scholarship and looks towards the future. It engages with understandings of emancipatory futures in critical scholarship on terrorism while drawing upon abolitionist and anarchist political thought to expand understandings of such futures. Anarchist and abolitionist thinking are useful for considering futures beyond the 'global war on terror' (GWOT) because of their anti-state and anti-domination orientations and focus on building alternatives to prevent and manage violence apart from contemporary 'counterterrorism'. After providing an outline of anarchist and abolitionist thought, the article connects these to contemporary examples drawn from the United States and Nepal. In doing so, it theorises and imagines futures for preventing violence and building public security that are linked to anarchist and abolitionist understandings of violence and the state. In contrast to 'power politics' which centres on the state, an anarchist abolitionist approach explores how safety and security can be reimagined and remade in the absence of a state.
- More Than a Journal: Politics & Gender and the Study of Women as National LeadersJalalzai, Farida (Cambridge University Press, 2024-09-30)
- Global Cities vs. “global cities:” Rethinking Contemporary Urbanism as Public EcologyLuke, Timothy W. (Routledge, 2003-03)
- The Spyware Industrial ComplexSpens, Brooke (Tech4Humanity Lab, 2024-11-01)Over the last decade, commercial surveillance vendors (CSVs) have capitalized off the demand for full service cyber espionage tools from government customers. The demand has created an incentive model for firms to develop intrusion technologies, further proliferating the spyware industry at the risk of human rights and the security of users. Missteps of spyware companies resulting in the erroneous surveillance of civil society has been well documented by watchdog groups like University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and Amnesty International. Rather than the misapplication of surveillance tools as is often covered in the media, this report will examine the ecosystem that supports the development, selling, and sustainment of commercial spying. Reports by Steven Feldstein and Brian Kot, Google’s Threat Analysis Group, and other works will be drawn on throughout this analysis. This paper aims to define the features and patterns of cyber espionage firms that produce the spyware utilized in the “pay-to-play” model.
- An Exploratory Mixed-methods Study on General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance in Open-Source SoftwareFranke, Lucas; Liang, Huayu; Farzanehpour, Sahar; Brantly, Aaron F.; Davis, James C.; Brown, Chris (ACM, 2024-10-24)Background: Governments worldwide are considering data privacy regulations. These laws, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), require software developers to meet privacy-related requirements when interacting with users’ data. Prior research describes the impact of such laws on software development, but only for commercial software. Although opensource software is commonly integrated into regulated software, and thus must be engineered or adapted for compliance, we do not know how such laws impact open-source software development. Aims: To understand how data privacy laws affect open-source software (OSS) development, we focus on the European Union’s GDPR, as it is the most prominent such law. We investigated how GDPR compliance activities influence OSS developer activity (RQ1), how OSS developers perceive fulfilling GDPR requirements (RQ2), the most challenging GDPR requirements to implement (RQ3), and how OSS developers assess GDPR compliance (RQ4). Method:We distributed an online survey to explore perceptions of GDPR implementations from open-source developers (N=56). To augment this analysis, we further conducted a repository mining study to analyze development metrics on pull requests (N=31,462) submitted to open-source GitHub repositories. Results: Our results suggest GDPR policies complicate OSS development and introduce challenges, primarily regarding the management of users’ data, implementation costs and time, and assessments of compliance. Moreover, we observed negative perceptions of the GDPR from OSS developers and significant increases in development activity, in particular metrics related to coding and reviewing, on GitHub pull requests related to GDPR compliance. Conclusions: Our findings provide future research directions and implications for improving data privacy policies, motivating the need for relevant resources and automated tools to support data privacy regulation implementation and compliance efforts in OSS.
- A First Look at the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Open-Source SoftwareFranke, Lucas; Liang, Huayu; Brantly, Aaron F.; Davis, James C.; Brown, Chris (ACM, 2024-04-14)This poster describes work on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in open-source software. Although open-source software is commonly integrated into regulated software, and thus must be engineered or adapted for compliance, we do not know how such laws impact open-source software development. We surveyed open-source developers (N=47) to understand their experiences and perceptions of GDPR. We learned many engineering challenges, primarily regarding the management of users’ data and assessments of compliance. We call for improved policy-related resources, especially tools to support data privacy regulation implementation and compliance in open-source software.
- Opening the box of parties and party systems under autocratization: evidence from TurkeyYavuzyilmaz, Hakan; Tsarouhas, Dimitris (Routledge, 2022-10-25)Party institutionalization (PI) and party system institutionalization (PSI) are critical for processes of democratization and democratic consolidation, yet their impact and relationship have not been explored under conditions of autocratization. How does autocratization relate to party and party system stability, and how does that link manifest itself? To answer those questions, we draw evidence from Turkey to demonstrate that when autocratization occurs, stabilization at the systemic level can go hand in hand with declining levels of PI. We also conceptualize the process of stabilization at the systemic level alongside unit-level de-institutionalization as a form of systemic ossification. Ossified party systems appear stable but are continuously subject to the possibility of de-stabilization, or even implosion, due to the under-institutionalization of incumbent parties. Driving factors of such (de)stabilization are: (1) the increasing unevenness of party competition and (2) increasing levels of societal and political polarization resulting from autocratization.
- Ambiguous citizenship policies: Examining implementation gaps across levels of legislation in JordanFrost, Lillian (2024-04-10)Despite the prevalence of ambiguous citizenship policies that say one thing in law and another in implementing regulations, few studies have focused on systematically studying this type of implementation gap, particularly in contexts beyond North America and Europe. This largely has remained the case despite research on discursive policy gaps, which occur between a policy’s stated objectives and its laws, efficacy gaps, which describe when a policy’s outcomes fail to meet its goals, and compliance gaps, which reflect disparities between a state’s commitments to international law and its corresponding domestic policies. How can we advance conceptualizations of law-regulation implementation gaps? This paper proposes one approach by focusing on the content of domestic laws, on the one hand, and the content of related implementing regulations, on the other. When law-regulation discrepancies occur, they illustrate the agency of senior officials in writing this intentional ambiguity into different levels of legislation, challenging assumptions about institutional weakness and lower-level bureaucratic discretion as chief drivers of implementation gaps. The paper illustrates this concept by analyzing discrepancies between Jordan’s nationality and passports laws and their related implementing regulations, particularly regarding Gaza refugees’ access to passports, investors’ access to nationality, and Palestinian-Jordanians’ subjection to nationality withdrawals. These diverse cases of intentional ambiguity demonstrate that such gaps can serve to partially exclude or include a group and can occur with noncitizen and citizen as well as more or less vulnerable groups.
- Cyberculture’s Abstract Utopias: Silicon Valley and Cleaner, Greener, Leaner Rules for a “New Economy”Luke, Timothy W. (University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, 2023-10-20)
- The Dialectic of De-Holocenation: Waste and Wealth in the AnthropoceneLuke, Timothy W. (University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, 2022)
- Beyond Prepper Culture as Right-wing Extremism: Selling Preparedness to Everyday Consumers as How to Survive the End of the World on a BudgetLuke, Timothy W. (University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, 2021-12-01)
- Asymmetries in Potential for Partisan GerrymanderingGoedert, Nicholas; Hildebrand, Robert; Travis, Laurel; Pierson, Matthew (2024)This paper investigates the effectiveness of potential partisan gerrymandering of the U.S. House of Representatives across a range of states. We use a heuristic algorithm to generate district maps that optimize for multiple objectives, including compactness, partisan benefit, and competitiveness. While partisan gerrymandering is highly effective for both sides, we find that the majority of states are moderately biased toward Republicans when optimized for either compactness or partisan benefit, meaning that Republican gerrymanders have the potential to be more effective. However, we also find that more densely populated and more heavily Hispanic states show less Republican bias or even Democratic bias. Additionally, we find that in almost all cases we can generate reasonably compact maps with very little sacrifice to partisan objectives through a mixed objective function. This suggests that there is a strong potential for stealth partisan gerrymanders that are both compact and beneficial to one party. Nationwide, partisan gerrymandering is capable of swinging over one hundred seats in the U.S. House, even when compact districts are simultaneously sought.