2007 Conference Program - Midwest Political Science Association

Paper Race, Class and the Policy Process: Social Groups as Actors
and Objects
Elizabeth Rigby, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Sarah Bruch, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Joe Soss, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Overview: This project tests association between states’
race/ethnic and class-based social diversity and their health,
welfare, and immigrant policy choices, as well as how these
relationships vary under different patterns of political
participation.
Paper Social Equity Consequences of Transportation Finance
Mechanisms
Patricia L. Scholl, University of California, Berkeley
Overview: This paper examines the equity and efficiency of
metropolitan level transit funding allocations using data on annual
funding expenditures, racial composition, poverty status, ridership
levels, and fare revenue, for 16 Bay Area transit operators in the
San Francisco.
Disc. Ismail K. White, University of Texas, Austin
Terrell L. Strayhorn, University of Tennessee
29-201 INFORMAL ROUNDTABLE: RACE, CLASS, AND
ETHNICITY I
Room State, 4 th Floor, Table 4, Fri at 4:25 pm
Presenter Coming in from the Cold?: Minorities in Minnesota Politics
Janet L. Donavan, University of Minnesota, Duluth
Overview: This paper looks at the integration of minority groups
into Minnesota politics by examining voting patterns of minority
groups, patterns in electing minorities to office and minorities
running in elections in the state.
29-202 INFORMAL ROUNDTABLE: RACE, CLASS, AND
ETHNICITY II
Room State, 4 th Floor, Table 5, Fri at 4:25 pm
Presenter Is Racism Rational?
Matthew T. Yanni, West Virginia University
Overview: In this study, I examine the conditions under which
racism is rational; and whether unconscious, race-based
perceptions correspond with reality.
30-4 RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THEORY
Room Dearborn 1, 7 th Floor, Fri at 4:25 pm
Chair Arlene Saxonhouse, University of Michigan
Paper “The Decline of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Decline:
Freedom and Speech in Tacitus’ Dialogue on Orators.”
Daniel Kapust, University of Georgia
Overview: This paper explores Tacitus’ analysis of the decline of
rhetoric and his rhetoric of decline, focusing on their implications
for republicanism, rhetoric, and contemporary understandings of
freedom and public reason.
Paper “Feeding the Demos: Rhetoric and Democratic Rule in
Aristophanes’ Knights and Plato’s Gorgias.”
John T. Lombardini, III, Georgetown University
Overview: This paper explores the literary and theoretical
connections between Aristophanes' Knights and Plato's Gorgias
while examining their respective analyses of the problems political
rhetoric poses for politics and especially for democracy.
Paper Power, Persuasion and the Patrician Perspective in
Machiavelli’s Discourses
John P. McCormick, University of Chicago
Overview: This paper argues that readers must take seriously The
Discourses' audience to understand Machiavelli's positions on: the
preeminence of liberty or empire for republics; the tribunate and
the senate; and elections and political trials as elite accountabillity.
Disc. Bryan Garsten, Yale University
Page | 190
32-301 POSTER SESSION: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY:
MODERN THEORISTS AND TEXTS
Room Exhibit Hall, 4 th Floor, Fri at 4:25 pm
Presenter Warped Individualism: A Recognition of a Communitarian
Approach to Peace
(Board 6)
Lee M. Rademacher, Purdue University, Calumet
Overview: Thomas Hobbe's philosophy creates a radical
subjectivity that can only be reconciled with a recognition of
communitarian theory if peace or social justice is to be attained.
Presenter Tradition and its Disavowal
(Board 7)
Philip J. Harold, Robert Morris University
Overview: The article will deal with the French thinker Emmanuel
Lévinas and his relation to the field of hermeneutics, and attempts
to discern how much of the hermeneutic approach Levinas can
accept.
Presenter Formidilosus
(Board 8)
Collin T. Glenn, University of Toledo
Dan Muszynski, University of Toledo
Amanda Boyd, University of Toledo
Overview: Since 9/11 terrorism has preoccupied the world. The
term has been used by both perpetrators and protectors to achieve
strategic interests; so, it is necessary to understand how the
epistemology of terrorism influences its perception and power.
Presenter Intellectual Murder: Walter Rodney's Groundings in the
Jamaica of the 1960's
(Board 9)
Fragano S. J. Ledgister, Clark Atlanta University
Overview: A consideration of Walter Rodney's "The Groundings
With My Brothers" (1969) in the context of Jamaican politics in
the 1960s.
Presenter Articulating Presences in Unsettled Places: Edward Said and
Political Space
(Board 10)
John R. LeBlanc, University of Texas, Tyler
Overview: Palestinian-American cultural critic Edward Said's
analysis of the settling/unsettling dynamic suggests that insisting
upon the articulation of all place-claims, including those which
underlie contemporary claims of sovereignty.
Presenter Frantz Fanon and the Just War Tradition
(Board 11)
Thomas C. Ellington, Wesleyan College
Overview: This paper focuses on Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of
the Earth to demonstrate that Fanon's theory of violence can be
reconciled with the tradition of just war.
Presenter Self-Knowledge and the Politics of Individuality in
Montaigne's Essays
(Board 12)
Benjamin W. Storey, Furman University
Overview: This paper presents a critical assessment of our modern
politics of individuality as a framework for the search for selfknowledge
by examining the treatment of self-knowledge in
Montaigne's Essays.
Presenter When and Why Did Leo Strauss Become a Straussian?
(Board 13)
Rodrigo Chacon, New School for Social Research
Overview: I analyze the 'turns' in Leo Strauss' thought, focusing
on his arrival in America when Strauss ceased to be a historian of
ideas and became a Straussian 'political philosopher' thus
reinterpreting and in effect reenacting the idea of political
philosophy.
Presenter Outside the Market: Symbolic Capital and Online Political
Action
(Board 14)
Tim Kersey, Indiana University
Overview: This paper uses Bourdieu’s constructs of practice and
symbolic capital to create an analytical framework for
understanding individual and group-level political action online.