BA, Oberlin College, 2012, Politics

In the first section, I begin with an account of action within the context of the vita activa as laid out by Arendt in The Human Condition. I then proceed to identify some of the more perplexing features of her account, and suggest that they are confounding enough to throw the coherency of what Arendt is saying into question. Taking my cue from Hanna Pitkin, I then argue that we can understand action as activity informed by thinking, by drawing upon Arendt's posthumously published work The Life of the Mind. This account, however, though illuminating with regard to some aspects of political action, will be shown to possess serious deficiencies in others. Thus, I will proceed in section two to explicate Heidegger's conception of "worldhood," and will demonstrate that Arendt's conception of "the world of appearances" in The Life of the Mind is essentially derivative of this account. I will then go on in section three to show that Arendt's conception of the "world" in The Human Condition is fundamentally a critique of Heidegger's account, and that far from being derivative, Arendt actually exposes major deficiencies in Heidegger's notion of worldhood. I will then conclude by giving an account of action as taking responsibility for the world, with the world understood as a space for action and freedom.

Committee: Harlan Wilson PhD (Advisor); Sonia Kruks PhD (Advisor) Subjects: Political Science

PHD, Kent State University, 2022, College of Business and Entrepreneurship, Ambassador Crawford / Department of Finance

This dissertation consists of two chapters that aim to understand the effect of borrower political connections on lenders, borrowers, and borrowers' top executives. In the first chapter, I study the effect of borrower political connections on the loan syndication activity of the lead arrangers. Using passive political influence from a geography-based measure and active political connections from lobbying activities and election contributions, I find that, for loans to politically connected borrowers, the lead arrangers sell a larger proportion of the loan to participating lenders, are more likely to syndicate loans, and attract more participant lenders to the loan syndicate. The results are robust to matched sample and instrumental variable approach as well as to various robustness tests. Additional tests reveal that political connections are particularly valuable for opaque borrowers. And, politically connected firms experience improved creditworthiness, performance, capital expenditure, and cash flow in the next two years following loan origination. My findings are consistent with the literature on the value of political connections. In the second chapter, I examine the effect of borrower political connections on connected firms and their CEOs following poor performance related to financial covenant violations. I find that firms with political connections have less strict covenants at loan origination, are less likely to violate financial covenants over the life of the loan even controlling for original covenant strictness, and lenders are less likely to enforce a material covenant violation following the breach of a financial covenant. In terms of the effect of political connections on a firm's executives, I find that CEOs in politically connected firms are less likely to experience turnover or forced turnover following financial covenant violations. In addition, after firms have financial covenant violations, politically connected CEOs receive less reduc (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lindsay Baran (Committee Chair); Dandan Liu (Committee Member); Steven Dennis (Committee Member); Saiying Deng (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration; Finance

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2005, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Doctor of Education , University of Dayton, 2023, Educational Administration

The problem explored in this study addresses the disparity in community outreach efforts for the Latinx community in Aventura County (pseudonym). Considering the growth in the American South and the growth of the Latinx community in Aventura County specifically, there is a need to analyze Latinx engagement in community outreach programs. Further analyzing integration and acculturation practices, an understanding of the importance of political trust, and cultural awareness in community outreach initiatives (Brenner, 2009) is equally necessary. This study applied an emancipatory action research approach in tandem with Yosso's (2005) community cultural wealth framework to answer the central research question: How can community outreach programs be more inclusive of the county's Latinx community? A connecting mixed methods approach was utilized in this study to provide insight into how community members feel about Aventura County efforts via one-on-one semi-structured interviews and a public community survey. The qualitative data revealed that there were numerous gaps in Aventura County's outreach efforts to include the Latinx community. The quantitative data revealed similar findings, highlighting the Latinx community's reliance on each other to navigate county offices mostly when necessary and not participating in outreach efforts due to time, language, and awareness barriers. This study's concluding Action Plan outlines steps to address the opportunity gaps discussed. The Action Plan steps include assembling a Latinx affairs committee, candidly and publicly discussing the 287(g) program, providing cultural competence training for staff, establishing satellite offices throughout the community, and prioritizing language access.

Committee: Ricardo García (Committee Member); James Olive (Committee Chair) Subjects: Education; Education Policy; Educational Leadership

Psy. D., Antioch University, 2022, Antioch Santa Barbara: Clinical Psychology

This dissertation aims to prove the necessity of a social movement focused on combating Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA) in the United States and to provide a blueprint for future activists seeking to reduce CSA nationally. The following questions were asked: (1) What makes a socio-political movement successful? (2) What are the factors that sustain activists when movement success is not obvious? (3) How can the field of psychology incorporate research on CSA, historical socio-political activism, and current activism research to promote movements geared towards combating Childhood Sexual Abuse? To answer these questions, a review and synthesis of current literature on social movements and CSA was conducted in order to propose a program (a social movement) to combat CSA. The available research revealed that a successful social movement can be modeled after the Movement Action Plan (MAP) by Bill Moyer and identified several long- and short-term goals for the movement based on current research. The main focus of a social movement aiming to combat CSA should be to increase funding for CSA prevention and treatment efforts for both CSA survivors and individuals with pedophilia, increase school education programs, and create CSA task forces dedicated to locating and managing sex offenders. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA, https://aura.antioch.edu/ and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu

Committee: Brett Kia-Keating Ed.D (Committee Chair); Peter Dunlap Ph.D. (Committee Member); Monique Levermore Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Clinical Psychology; Counseling Psychology; Mental Health; Psychology; Social Psychology; Social Research

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2012, East Asian Languages and Literatures

China's sociological world is somewhat lacking of research that explores the collective consciousness during collective rights defense of the manufacturing industry's internal migrant workers. This is even truer of research that looks at the collective consciousness of Qingdao's internal migrant workers. Additionally, Chinese civil society organizations are in their infancy, and there are few organizations that aid internal migrant workers in their rights defense, especially in China's northeast region. There is even less research that attempts to understand the effectiveness of these organizations in aiding workers' right defense. Using Political Process Theory as its analytical framework, this study has two main aspects: 1) survey methodology that explores the collective consciousness in rights defense of internal migrant workers in Qingdao's manufacturing sector and 2) case analysis methodology that seeks to understand effects of Qingdao's LMN Organization on Internal migrant workers' rights defense. This study has found that the regional consciousness of Qingdao's internal migrant workers possesses a dualistic quality, they have a strong rights defense consciousness, and their collective action has shown a trend toward cross-factory cooperation. LMN Organization, the subject of the case analysis, has not only played a large role in the success of internal migrant workers' right defense, but it has also played a role in mobilizing workers for rights defense. However, LMN Organization exists in an exploitable crack in the surrounding political environment, and because of this, its future development is uncertain.

Committee: Galal Walker (Committee Chair); Xiaobin Jian (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology

BA, Kent State University, 2010, College of Arts and Sciences / School of Peace and Conflict Studies

Violent wars have long occupied a prominent place in the history of the world. Struggles waged with strategic nonviolence including psychological, social, economic, spiritual and political methods are much less prominent in the Western world. Likewise, humor has often been overlooked by historians and social scientists up until recently. With this thesis, I bring these two under-studied topics together, descriptively analyzing humor's ability to aide in the development of strategic nonviolent campaigns. Using the example of the Serbian resistance group, Otpor, I demonstrate how humor played important roles in the relationships between Otpor activists, between Otpor and oppressed Serbian bystanders and between Otpor and oppressive authorities, mainly government leaders and police who I collectively refer to as the ‘opponent.' Otpor is widely attributed for playing a pivotal role in the nonviolent overthrow of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in October 2000. Milosevic subsequently became the first major political leader to be put on trial at the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. This thesis is comprised of a three-part framework that details Otpor's use of humor including the elements of provocation, transformation and collaboration. Provocation refers to tactics that encourage members of the opponent group to incriminate themselves such as Otpor's renowned dilemma actions. Because of Otpor's provocative humor, members of the opponent group lost face both with the public and with one another, particularly with police officers distrusting their commanders. Transformation refers to the use of sardonic and other types of humor to birth intellectual, emotional, spiritual and social change, from a paradigm dominated by apathy, fear and rationality to a paradigm characterized by hope and the ability to mobilize resources for social change. Collaboration refers to th (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Patrick Coy PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Landon Hancock PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Babacar M'baye PhD (Committee Member); Sara Newman PhD (Committee Member); Richard Stanislaw ABD (Committee Member) Subjects: Behavioral Psychology; Behaviorial Sciences; Cultural Anthropology; Education; European History; European Studies; International Relations; Military History; Military Studies; Modern History; Organizational Behavior; Peace Studies; Political Science; Social Psychology