This study examines maracatu nação, a working-class, Afro-Brazilian carnival pageant from the city of Recife in Pernambuco state, and its relationship to the transnational circuits of knowledge production created by elite artists and intellectuals interested in the practice. Mar…
International development nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) are a particularly good example of how transnational accountability commitments present challenges to producing credible accounts to diverse and at times competing stakeholder groups. This dissertation examines acco…
This PhD thesis examines the status of ‘expert knowledge’ in the history of U.S. asymmetric, or ‘counterinsurgency’ (COIN), warfare during the last century. The historical rise of expert influence has so far been neglected in the study of wars within the field of International R…
During its lifetime, the League of Nations aspired to gather reliable facts and produce accurate knowledge that could transform the conduct of international politics. Inquiry was one of many techniques the League actively deployed to find more rational means in which diplomacy w…
The notion of Mode 2, as a shift from Mode 1 science-as-we-know-it, depicts science as practically relevant, socially distributed and democratic. Debates remain over the empirical substantiation of Mode 2. In particular, our understanding has been impeded by the mutually exclusi…
This study critically examines the digital knowledge production of one Iranian and one Cuban diasporic social movement organization in transnational solidarity with democracy movements in Iran and Cuba respectively, with an eye to the (geo)politics of transnational knowledge pro…
This dissertation explores the significance of Africa (both as a literal geographic space and as an imagined or symbolic space) in 19th century American intellectual and literary culture. I argue that when nineteenth-century intellectuals grappled with the institution of slavery…
Re-evaluating classic work in the sociology of the visual arts, this Ph.D. thesis explores the tacit and practical bases of artistic mediation with reference to curatorial exhibition making in contemporary art. Data presented here derive from a visual microethnographic study of …
This study seeks to understand what affects knowledge production in introductory women’s studies courses. Using critical discourse analysis, the study looks at the archives of two very different programs within the Chicago area. The two programs studied, Loyola University Chicag…
In my dissertation, I seek to understand contemporary ‘suicide’ as a scientific and a political object. In this endeavor, I focus on the features of suicide that make it morally and socially problematic, and the way the discourse on and knowledge production about suicide work to…