Insecure Hegemony: The Cultural Construction of \u27Righteous Retaliation\u27 in the Hunt for Osama bin Laden

This study examines the American “authorized discourse” about the hunt for and killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to better understand it as an episode in American cultural hegemony maintenance. Through a structural hermeneutic analysis of presidential speeches and widely-circulated national strategy documents, high distribution news coverage, and entertainment media, alongside one-on-one interviews and focus groups, I illuminate the symbolic mechanics by which the death of Osama bin Laden was constructed as righteous and legitimate retaliatory violence in response to the unprompted, offensive violence of the 9/11 attacks. Drawing on an array of theoretical approaches including classical sociologists Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Marxist thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci and Edward Sa’id, strong program cultural sociologists such as Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith, as well as the work of critical race and feminist scholars, I retell the story and analyze its plot and characters, attending especially to the gendered and racialized cultural underpinnings, placing it historically and within the media landscape. This research demonstrates that the dominant narrative presents bin Laden’s death as resolution of a melodramatic plot where moral heroes, in the name of innocent victims, eliminated the evil villain. This case offers one example of the unrelenting cultural work undertaken by hegemonic agents to reconcile America’s self-professed commitment to democracy, freedom, and equality, with the legacies of genocide, settler colonialism, slavery, and empire. The dissertation concludes with ideas for future research tying the findings and observations about this case to special forces operations more broadly, mass shootings and gun fundamentalism, and mass detentions and deportations

A Student Primer on Intersectionality: Not Just A Buzzword

This book: ● lays out the objectives of WS 166, Gender, Race, and Class, taught in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Pace University, New York City campus; ● provides a structure for any course addressing intersectionality, feminism, and oppression; ● describes the framework of intersectionality, which examines societal issues by analyzing the interlocking systems of oppression that shape people’s lives; ● argues for a transnational application of intersectionality that also centers U.S. Black feminists’ contributions to understanding oppression; ● includes journal articles, TED Talks, and class exercises that are generally accessible for most students or interested readers without previous exposure to these topics. We designed this book to illustrate that intersectionality is a powerful tool for learning about and addressing injustice and inequity. When we analyze the world using an intersectionality framework, we learn about people’s lives and experiences in ways that we may never have considered, or wanted to consider. And the mere act of examining multiple systems of oppression is not enough, either, as the point of understanding oppression is to end it in all forms. As you read, be thankful for the discomfort, anger, and compassion that may arise; learning about oppression is never easy, but it is a worthwhile and meaningful task

Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (4th edition)

In 2008, we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, this topic has received increasing attention, and many scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Thus, it is important to formulate on a regular basis updated guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Despite numerous reviews, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to evaluate autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. Here, we present a set of guidelines for investigators to select and interpret methods to examine autophagy and related processes, and for reviewers to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of reports that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a dogmatic set of rules, because the appropriateness of any assay largely depends on the question being asked and the system being used. Moreover, no individual assay is perfect for every situation, calling for the use of multiple techniques to properly monitor autophagy in each experimental setting. Finally, several core components of the autophagy machinery have been implicated in distinct autophagic processes (canonical and noncanonical autophagy), implying that genetic approaches to block autophagy should rely on targeting two or more autophagy-related genes that ideally participate in distinct steps of the pathway. Along similar lines, because multiple proteins involved in autophagy also regulate other cellular pathways including apoptosis, not all of them can be used as a specific marker for bona fide autophagic responses. Here, we critically discuss current methods of assessing autophagy and the information they can, or cannot, provide. Our ultimate goal is to encourage intellectual and technical innovation in the field