Where political extremists and greedy criminals meet: A comparative study of financial crimes and criminal networks in the United States
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Financial crime poses a serious threat to the integrity and security of legitimate businesses and institutions, and to the safety and prosperity of private citizens and communities. Experts argue that the profile of financial offenders is extremely diversified and includes individuals who may be motivated by greed or ideology. Islamic extremists increasingly resort to typical white-collar crimes, like credit card and financial fraud, to raise funds for their missions. In the United States, the far-right movement professes its anti-government ideology by promoting and using a variety of anti-tax strategies. There is evidence that ideologically motivated individuals who engage in financial crimes benefit from interactions with profit-driven offenders and legitimate actors that provide resources for crime in the form of knowledge, skills, and suitable co-offenders. This dissertation sheds light on the nexus between political extremism and profit-driven crime by conducting a systematic study of financial crime cases involving Islamic extremists, domestic far-rightists, and their non-extremist accomplices prosecuted by federal courts in 2004. Attribute and relational data were extracted from the U.S. Extremist Crime Database (ECDB), which is the first open-source relational database that provides information on all extremist crimes, violent and non-violent, ideological and routine crimes, since 1990. A descriptive analysis was conducted comparing schemes, crimes, and techniques used by far-rightists, Islamic extremists, and non-extremists, before moving into an in-depth social network analysis of their relational ties in co-offending, business, and family networks. The descriptive findings revealed considerable differences in the modus operandi followed by far-rightists and Islamic extremists as well as the prosecutorial strategies used against them. The subsequent exploratory and statistical network analyses, however, revealed interesting similarities, suggesting that financial schemes by political extremists occurred within similarly decentralized, self-organizing structures that facilitated exchanges between individuals acting within close-knit subsets regardless of their ideological affiliation. Meaningful interactions emerged between far-rightists and non-extremists involved in business ventures and within a tax avoidance scheme, indicating that the crime-extremism nexus was more prevalent within far-right settings compared to Islamic extremist ones. The findings were discussed in light of their implications for criminological theories, criminal justice and crime prevention policies, and methodological advances.
Pedagogies of Happiness: What and How Self-Help, Positive Psychology, and Positive Education Teach about Well-Being
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Pedagogies of Happiness: What and How Self-Help, Positive Psychology, and Positive Education Teach about Well-Being introduces humanities scholars to the rapidly expanding discipline of positive psychology, and argues that literary scholars, cultural theorists, rhetoricians, and educators must learn about and play a role in shaping the important political and social consequences of positive psychology's research on subjective well-being. The project first explores key rhetorical sites of the self-help genre and positive psychology discipline, and parses their pedagogy, potentiality, promises, and problems. While these movements claim to benefit not only individuals but also society, they are based on a number of unacknowledged--and often overlapping--values that suggest otherwise: they are individualistic, instrumentalized, decontextualized, non-dialogic, non-reflexive, politically conservative, and remedial. Therefore, self-help and positive psychology's versions of happiness, well-being, and flourishing preserve and serve the status quo.
Sex and the Nation: Sexuality and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary Mexico, 1920-1940
Author:
Ira Beltran-Garibay
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation examines the way in which notions of sexuality were interpreted and reworked by the criminal justice system and the citizens that fell under its purview during the decades immediately following the revolutionary struggle in Mexico. The dissertation examines legal and criminological literature as well as a sample of four hundred and fourteen cases drawn from Mexico City criminal and juvenile courts. The cases include criminal offenses such as rape and seduction, and homosexuality, prostitution, incest, indecent behavior and indiscipline in the home among minors. It traces the foreign and national influences that shaped the Mexican criminological establishment's views on sexuality and argues that despite major reforms to the criminal justice system after the Revolution, many continuities existed between Revolutionary legal approaches to sexuality and those of its Profirian predecessor. At the same time, the dissertation examines closely the way in which court officials during the 1920s and 1930s constructed arguments and reached court decisions. In this way, the dissertation shows the way in which old notions of honor and sexual purity were put to the test under the new Revolutionary regime. It reveals how traditional understandings of sexuality could coexist with "modern" notions. An examination of the cases reveals what conflicts could occur between reform-minded government officials and the general public that sought the intervention of the courts to solve disputes of a sexual nature. Finally, the dissertation shows how the Revolutionary criminal justice system could only be successful when the goals of the public officials coincided or, at the very least overlapped with those of the citizens that were involved in the court trials.
Experimental Detrmination of the Lacunar-Canalicular Permeability Using Cyclic Loading
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Current theoretical and experimental evidence suggests that the sensory bone cells are activated by the induced drag from fluid flowing through the lacunar-canalicular porosity, PLC. One of the most important parameters of the interstitial fluid flow is the PLC permeability. However, the reported experimental measurements of this permeability are several orders of magnitude below the values predicted by analytical studies. The discrepancy between theoretical and experimental values of PLC permeability could be due to the assumptions considered in the formulation of analytical models, the estimation of unknown parameters, the difficulty to perform experiments on the PLC without the influence of the vascular porosity, PV, as well as the lack of freshness, type and origin of samples.
From the South Bronx to Israel:Rap Music and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Political Science
Despite its origins with underprivileged youth in America's urban ghettos, popular rap music in Israel is not necessarily connected with underprivileged minorities in Israel. On the contrary, generally speaking, commercially recorded rap music in Israel is either distanced from politics and adheres to a color-blind ideology, or includes expressions of right-wing Jewish nationalism. As a whole, rap music in Israel reproduces and perpetuates the social order as is, and rarely challenge it, notwithstanding moments of subversion. This anomaly - of pro-government, hegemonic rap - is possible in Israel because both rap music and Zionism, the hegemonic ideology, are perceived as an act of resistance, as "revolutionary", and as a claim for justice.
Three Essays on Bentham
Year of Dissertation:
2009
The dissertation was written in the three essay format. In Essay One I discuss the elements of Bentham's philosophical method, both as described by Bentham and as implied or exemplified by a variety of Bentham's texts. It will show that Bentham's principles of morals and legislation, though intended to have practical (political) effect, have also methodological significance, as they are grounded in grammatical and semantic constructs (constructs that affect `method' - the form of one's enquiry).
Guided Tours: The Layered Dynamics of Self, Place and Image in Two American Neighborhoods
Author:
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This work complicates our understanding of the creation, knowledge and experience of
DOES A COURSE IN CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT AFFECT TEACHERS' SELF-PERCEIVED EFFICACY IN CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT?
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Program:
Educational Psychology
The literature on teacher burnout clearly indicates that classroom management problems are primary causes contributing to teachers leaving the field. Efficacy beliefs influence the individual's cognition and affect to mobilize the necessary psychological resources to accomplish a specific task. Lower perceived self-efficacy in classroom management directly impacts personal accomplishment. While much research has examined teacher efficacy in general, little research has looked at classroom management in particular. This study sought to contribute to the teacher efficacy in classroom management literature by investigating if a course in classroom management increased teacher efficacy in classroom management as contrasted with a comparative graduate course in the exceptional child. The investigator administered at pre and posttest the Teacher Efficacy in Classroom Management and Discipline Scale (SEBM) and used the71 graduate students' course grades along with behavior vignettes as a means to externally validate their self-perceived teacher efficacy beliefs. The current study also investigated the effect of mediating variables, such as gender, age, ethnicity, the number of years teaching, child or childless, socio-economic status, undergraduate and graduate grade-point averages on teacher efficacy in classroom management. The results indicated that students in the classroom management course were significantly better at identifying target behaviors and interventions for the behavior vignettes than were students in the exceptional child course. In addition, teaching experience for classroom management students related positively to classroom management self-efficacy scores at posttest, but not at pretest, and none of the other mediating variables related to self-efficacy scores. Participants in the classroom management course did not statistically differ in gains on classroom management self-efficacy scores as compared with participants in the exceptional child course. Moreover, there was no significant relationship between course grades and posttest self-efficacy scores for both classes. Results are discussed in terms of implications for school psychologists, study limitations, and suggestions for future research.
RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY AND THE FAMILY IN THE LIVES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ELDERLY MEN
Year of Dissertation:
2011
The purpose of this study was to provide information about the ways in which African American elderly men raised in the South in Mississippi, during the height of Segregation, managed to survive and live successful lives. The study seeks to illustrate how these men incorporated religion, spirituality and their families as sources of strength and psychological buffers against the many adversarial circumstances that they faced.
The Impact of Emotions on Stereotyping and Discrimination in Workplace Selection: The Role of Certainty Appraisals
Year of Dissertation:
2012
In the present studies, an appraisal tendency approach (e.g., Lerner & Keltner, 2000, 2001) was adopted to make predictions regarding the role of emotional certainty in the use of stereotypes in a workplace context. This approach suggests that emotional certainty increases reliance on heuristic processing strategies, as evidenced by greater use of stereotypes. The current research examined stereotypes associated with physical attractiveness (Studies 1 & 3) and age (Study 2). In Studies 1 and 2, participants completed an emotional memory task designed to induce one of four specific emotions representing two different levels of emotional certainty. They then reviewed interview footage, a résumé, and qualifying criteria before rating the hypothetical job candidate's personality and employability. In Study 3, participants completed four measures of dispositional emotion: anger, fear, happiness, and hope. All other features of the study were identical to Study 1. In Study 1, emotions high in certainty (compared to uncertainty) led to more favorable personality and employability ratings for attractive (compared to unattractive) candidates. In Study 2, the same pattern of results emerged for younger (compared to older) candidates. However, in Study 3, contrary to predictions, trait emotions characterized by high certainty (compared to uncertainty) did not lead to more favorable personality and employability ratings for attractive (compared to unattractive) candidates. Taken together, the findings contribute to a growing literature suggesting that certainty appraisals, when associated with temporary, incidental emotions, are a useful predictor of the likelihood that stereotypes will be applied in decision-making.