Pathways: a journal of humanistic and social inquiry
Pathways: A Journal of Humanistic and Social Inquiry is a peer-reviewed journal associated with the HSI Pathways to the Professoriate Program, which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. To learn more about the HSI Pathways to the Professoriate Program, visit our website.
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Publication Securitizing Immigrants: Applying Securitization Theory in German Politics(2021-02-17) Uranga, Aaron AThis manuscript demonstrates how the use of securitization by the German political party the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has gained them votes in the German federal elections. The securitization focused on the refugee crisis and the effects that the refugees would have on Germany and its citizens. While mainstream German political parties adopted a neutral stance towards the crisis, the AfD separated themselves by adopting a strong anti-immigrant stance. The concept of securitization has not been fully applied to the German political parties. As a proxy for the political party, the paper analyzes the policy platforms and statements regarding immigration, designed to gain popularity and votes. In order to do this, the paper first defines securitization and then analyzes a variety of sources, including the political parties’ manifestos, in order to show how they have developed and changed their political agendas and beliefs between the years of 2013-2019. This paper compares voting polls and statistics to examine how the party’s use of securitization has garnered them popularity and votes and to find which groups tend to vote for them. The research showed that the party’s shift to securitizing the refugee crisis resulted in the increase of votes in the German federal elections. The AfD placed a sizable focus on their campaign towards immigration after the beginning of the crisis in 2015. For the AfD whose whole campaign focused on immigration, it saw a huge boost of votes during the 2017 German Federal election, managing to reach third place in the number of votes it received.Publication No Estoy Sola (I Am Not Alone): Addressing Gender-Based Violence through Community-Based Theater(2021-02-17) Mena, Annel AIn this article, I analyze how women at the border city of El Paso address the #MeToo movement and gender-based violence through community-based theatre. By using testimonios and performance ethnography, I analyze the power of storytelling to create awareness of gender-based violence on the border and ability to create solidarity. The theater has become an effective way of addressing such a stigmatized topic. The performance of the theater has inspired a workshop that is now used to help survivors heal their wounds by understanding that they are not alone.Publication The Shame Framework: Queer Faith in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God(2021-02-17) Montes, Isabella MThis work focuses on queer faith and how queer persons who have struggled with traditional values, public opinion, and lingering violence due to their sexuality, can reclaim their space and voices within religious communities. By redefining purity, exploring an alternative belief system though hybrid spirituality, and understanding the connection between pride and shame, queer persons can establish a dynamic framework, that allows for queer faith to be employed as a method of agency. This is analyzed through a literary perspective, focusing on the work of Ana Castillo’s novel, So Far From God.Publication Filipina Caregivers and the Colonial Construction of their Identities in the U.S.(2021-02-17) Monton, AshleeExisting literature has noted how a disproportionate percentage of Filipina women are employed in personal care and service positions, especially within caregiving positions (Ezquerra, 2007). Their relative invisibility and lack of access to adequate economic and labor protections potentially feeds into a black market of caregiving positions (Ezquerra, 2007). Due to their precarious status, these women are vulnerable to exploitation, abuse, and various types of harassment. While globalization certainly plays a role in Filipina women’s participation within this labor sector, this study explores the concept that colonial gender hierarchies are being reinforced through Philippine media, thus affecting how Filipina caregivers perceive their identities and their position in the caregiving work sector. Filipina women’s contributions to the economy of the Philippines is substantial given current remittances rates. In popular media representations, the recurring image of the maternal OFW (Overseas Filipino Worker) portrayed in TV campaigns and advertisements is testament to Filipina workers’ contributions. In this essay, I argue that these depictions may be amplified by a historical colonial mentality that has idealized life abroad, and simultaneously, idealized the role of caregivers. For this study, I conducted qualitative, semi-structured interviews with eight current or former Filipina caregivers born in the Philippines to examine to what extent colonial mindframes inform Filipina caregivers’ identity formation in the United States. Results from this qualitative study suggest that participants derive empowerment from their work and familial duties, which reframe capitalistic ideas of caregiving. Drawing from Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales’ concept of Pinayism, I suggest the importance of amplifying how Filipina caregivers account for experiences of newfound agency and independence within their context in the United States, regardless of the nature of their work.Publication The Jewish Migration to Mexico during Nazi Germany(2021-02-17) Argote, Gisela AIn response to antisemitic persecution from Nazi Germany and allied states, Jews from Central and Eastern Europe sought asylum, emigrated, applied for visas, and faced deportation. Mexico, under the leadership of President Lázaro Cardenas, a vocal opponent of Fascism who allowed tens of thousands of Spanish-Republican exiles to emigrate to the country, was one potential destination for Central and Eastern European Jews. In fact, the Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Affairs, received thousands of applications from asylum seekers. This paper challenges the image of Mexico as a country offering hospitality to European refugees and evaluates the state’s reluctance to accept Jews during the presidencies of Cárdenas and his successor, Manuel Ávila Camacho. By highlighting the very different receptions given to Spaniards, on the one hand, and Central and Eastern European Jews on the other, I argue that Mexico’s immigration and refugee policy was influenced by racism rather than antifascism alone. Examining immigration policies of the 1930s and 1940s has possible implications for today’s immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers and how contemporary governments accept or exclude them.Publication Symbol, Signification, and Hashtags as Violence Against Black Bodies; A Comparative Analysis of Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen(2021-02-17) Edouard, Lynn SIn Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American lyric the concept of Black subjectivity rendered as symbol is represented through the narratives of Harriet and Trayvon Martin. By using Harriet’s explanation of becoming symbolic in Cliff’s No Telephone To Heaven as a lens to examine Trayvon Martin’s life and death as narrated in Rankine’s Citizen, I expand the conversation of symbolic rendering. In Cliff’s work, symbolic rendering is achieved through sexual violence in the post-colonial Caribbean context. For Rankine, the post-colonial carceral state in U.S. society becomes the site for the symbolic rendering of policy brutality and racial profiling. Using Saussure’s General Linguistics, Foucault’s concept of the PanOpticon, and bell hooks’s Loving Blackness as Political Action, I argue that Cliff and Rankine’s works illuminate how symbolism becomes violence against Black bodies by rendering the lived experiences of the individual as an object.Publication Establishing a Fixed Home: The Attempt at Identity Completion in Alvarez’s "Antojos" and Menéndez’s "Her Mother's House"(2021-02-17) Molina, Anaridia RImmigrant experiences are often characterized by identity anxiety and a corresponding longing to identify a single place to call “home.” In Julia Alvarez’s "Antojos" and Ana Menéndez’s "Her Mother's House," the main characters return to their native or ancestral land in search of a space to claim as home, and relatedly, a permanent location for a fixed identity in the Caribbean. This paper examines how in these works, typically unbeknownst to the protagonists themselves, establishing a home regularly takes the form of securing what they perceive to be “wholeness” and “completion.” I argue that the texts reveal that the protagonists’ search for a fixed and static place to call home, derived from desires of identity completion, cannot be found, and rather their place of arrival can solely exist in the ambiguity of language and memory. As such, eventually, the reader is prompted to understand that not having a traditional essentialized notion of home to guide the protagonists frees them and allows them to embrace rather than reject their linguistic and spatial multiplicities.Publication Traditional and Nontraditional Activism: Literary and Political Pedagogies of La Chicana(2021-02-17) Ponce, AnahiYxta Maya Murray’s Locas and Felicia Luna Lemus’s Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties both grapple with themes relating to the impact of Malinchismo experienced by real-life Chicanas in both political and cultural discourses. Despite this parallel, these texts and their characters have not received critical attention in the field of Chicana Literature when compared with texts such as Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. The womxn in these texts have similarly been stripped from narratives of activism because of their evocation of nontraditional forms of activism, which are often overlooked in comparison to more traditional ones, as a result of the application of respectability politics. While the womxn in these novels challenge the status quo through nontraditional activism and resistance, it is significant to consider how the systems of oppression that they are forced to navigate are intrinsic with those experienced by their real-life counterparts, as well as throughout the history and establishment of Chicana feminism and activism at large. This article is not meant to dichotomize Chicanas who partake in traditional versus nontraditional activism, but rather to provide insight as to how Chicanas have continuously acted as agents of change, in the face of colonization’s enduring legacies.Publication Internet Memes and Desensitization(2020-01-13) Sanchez, Barbara CInternet memes (IMs) have been used as a visual form of online rhetoric since the early 2000s. With hundreds of thousands now in circulation, IMs have become a prominent method of communication across the Internet. In this essay, I analyze the characteristics that have made IMs a mainstay in online communication. Understanding the definitions and structures of IMs aid in explaining their online success, especially on social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. I use these understandings as a basis from which to theorize how both the creative process in making IMs and the prominence of IMs that utilize images of originally violent or sensitive contexts may relate to existing research correlating violent media and desensitization. The use of these images often involves a disconnection from their original contexts in order to create a new and distinct— in many cases irrelevant— message and meaning. These IMs, in turn, exemplify the belittlement of distress depicted in such images—often for the sake of humor. This essay’s main goal is to propose a new theoretical lens from which to analyze the social and cultural influences on IMs.Publication An Autopsy of the Black Revolution: Looking at Henri Christophe through the Césairean lens(2020-01-13) Piard, Johanna MIn his play The Tragedy of King Christophe, Aimé Césaire shows how Henri Christophe is incapable of establishing an anti-colonial black state because he adopts the colonial structure where his subjects are forced into free labor therefore perpetuating slavery. Instead of considering the immediate needs of the country, Christophe attempts to bring Haiti up as an equal competitor in the industrialized West despite its embargo and looming threat of reoccupation. Christophe becomes a slave master (the ultimate capitalist), thriving on the exploitation of his subjects to build the Citadel. This article looks at how Césaire's play brings nuance to "post-colonial" discourse, showing how the initial victims of colonialism can perpetuate this framework if they profit from it.It also highlights the significance this piece of Haitian Revolutionary literature has on global black liberation literary movement. While the play goes beyond the accuracy of true historical events, Césaire contextualizes what dismantling colonialism potentially means.
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