Patriotism, Pandemic, and Precarity: How the Alt-Right and White Nationalist Movement Used the Pandemic

This workshop will explore how the so-called Alt-Right and White Nationalist movement used conspiracy theories around the origin and challenge of the COVID-19 Pandemic to recruit members, advance their causes, and create social and cultural discord in an effort to create legitimacy for their racist and white supremacist attacks on community. After a discussion of the current state of the Alt-Right and White Nationalist movement, the workshop will interrogate the various online tools used by these groups to attack and dismantle community and human rights initiatives. The workshop concludes with an interactive activity that helps participants explore how these efforts undermine human rights can be effectively countered in a manner that builds healthy communities

Activism in the Popular Imagination

This panel presentation will explore new forms of engagement and activism that have emerged with community transformation through social media, music, performance, and the presentation of self and identity. These changes in visual and musical landscapes have created exciting opportunities to disrupt systems and cultures of domination and oppression. This session will explore how area activists, citizens, and artists have used popular culture to interrogate and respond to anti-democratic and anti-representative initiatives in Ohio. By exploring actual music of Dayton-based artists, performance at inclusive music events (for example, For Dayton By Dayton), artwork, and social protest in Ohio, the conversation in this session will demonstrate how the intersection of popular culture, which is all too often ignored in the analysis of resistance, provides vehicles for endurance and social change to anti-democratic trends in the state of Ohio

The Pinto Legacy: The Long Term Impact on Residents of Elkhart County, Indiana

A paper presented by Paul J. Becker at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology in November of 1997 on the long term impact of two teenage girls that died following an accident involving a Ford Pinto in Elkhart County, Indiana

The pinto legacy: The community as an indirect victim of corporate deviance

In 1978, in Elkhart County Indiana, three teenage girls died following an accident in which their Ford Pinto was struck from behind and burst into flames. Two years later, in what has been described as a landmark case (Maakestad, 1987; Clinard, 1990; Frank and Lynch, 1992; Hills, 1987), a trial began in which the Ford Motor Company, as a result of this incident, found itself facing three charges of reckless homicide (State of Indiana v. Ford Motor Company, hereafter referred to as the Pinto Case). While this was not the first time an automobile manufacturer was faced with a potentially lethal faulty design (the Chevrolet Covair among others), it was the first case to result in a criminal homicide charge. The Pinto case has received considerable attention in the criminological and legal literature, ranging from journal articles (Clark, 1979; Swigert and Farrell, 1980-81; Wheeler, 1981), to discussions in textbooks (Albanese, 1995; Green, 1997), to books focusing on the case in varying degrees (Birsch and Fielder, 1994; Cullen et al., 1987; Strobel, 1980; Welty, 1982)

Does it bite? The role of stimuli characteristics on preschoolers’ interactions with robots, insects and a dog

While there is increasing interest in the impact of animal interactions upon children’s wellbeing and attitudes, there has been less attention paid to the specific characteristics of the animals which attract and engage children. We used a within-subjects design to explore how differences in animal features (such as their animacy, size, and texture) impacted upon pre-school children’s social and emotional responses. This study examined pre-schoolers’ interactions with two animal-like robots (Teksta and Scoozie), two insect types (stick insects and hissing cockroaches) and a dog (Teasel, a West Highland Terrier). Nineteen preschool participants aged 35-57 months were videoed while interacting with the experimenter, a peer and each stimulus (presented individually). We used both verbal and nonverbal behaviours to evaluate interactions and emotional responses to the stimuli and found that these two measures could be incongruent, highlighting the need for systematic approaches to evaluating children’s interactions with animals. We categorised the content of children’s dialogues in relation to psychological and biological attributes of each stimulus and their distinctions between living and non-living stimuli; the majority of comments were biological, with psychological terms largely reserved for the dog and mammal-like robot only. Comments relating to living qualities revealed ambiguity towards attributes that denote differences between living and non-living creatures. We used a range of nonverbal measures, including willingness to approach and touch stimuli, rates of self-touching, facial expressions of emotion, and touch to others. Insects (hissing cockroaches and stick insects) received the most negative verbal and nonverbal responses. The mammal-like robot (rounded, fluffy body shape, large eyes, and sympathetic sounds) was viewed much more positively than its metallic counterpart, as was the real dog. We propose that these interactions provide information on how children perceive animals and a platform for the examination of human socio-emotional and cognitive development more generally. The children engaged in social referencing to the adult experimenter rather than familiar peers when uncertain about the stimuli presented, suggesting that caregivers have a primary role in shaping children’s responses to animals

"Marx’s Writing More Relevant Today than Ever": Interview

Interview with Wolfgang Streeck, German political economist