A Foucauldian Theory of American Islamophobia

With the emergence of ISIS andAmerican public furor over allowing Syrian refugees safe haven, Muslim Americans find themselves once again in the cross-hairs of a nation obsessed with searching for answers and someone to blame. I argue that the premise behind American anti-Muslim sentiment is rooted in two of Michel Foucault’s concepts -“biopower” and “pastoral power.” This article is divided in two halves. In the first, I argue that American nationalism is articulated in a unique way, particularly through “pastoral power.” In conjunction with an “imagined” American nationhood (Anderson 1983), it has created a state that is often viewed as secular, but is quite Christian ideologically and structurally. Drawing on Göle (1996), I surmise that the Western “culture of confession,” an extension of pastoral power, is incompatible with Islam – or at least is viewed as such. In the second half, I present my main argument towards a new understanding of Foucault’s (1990) biopower in the context of the sovereign and its ability to designate who is “sacred,” a la Agamben (1998). I suggest that a new evaluation of Agamben (1998) should be undertaken to account for the renewed racialization of and discrimination towards American Muslims

What trigger laws tell us about abortion policy and politics in the United States

Following the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the right to an abortion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, many US states’ trigger laws banning abortions in almost all circumstances have or are about to come into effect. Shyam K. Sriram, Maddie Sontag, Caroline Corker, and Emma Randich discuss states’ use of trigger laws to restrict abortion and how they show the wide-reaching effects of overturning of Roe v Wade in the US

Donald Trump talks very differently about the Jewish people compared to past presidents.

Over the last two years, President Trump has repeatedly questioned the loyalty of Jewish people in America, claiming that voting for a Democrat would be a “great disloyalty”. In new research which looks at nearly 150 years of presidential communications, Shyam K. Sriram, Victoria Combs and Cole McNamara look at how presidents have talked about the Jewish people over the years, and find that Trump’s rhetoric is a significant departure from what has gone before

State mask mandates to address COVID-19 have been complicated by anti-mask measures often dating back to the 19th century.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, governors, attorneys general, and public health officials have scrambled to enforce social-distancing guidelines and mask wearing. Their efforts were opposed in several states by those who argue that mandatory face-coverings are unconstitutional. Efforts to enforce mask wearing have been complicated by legacy anti-mask legislation in almost 40 percent of states (and the District of Columbia), which was passed in the 19th– and 20th-centuries in response to organizations like the KKK. Shyam K. Sriram, Will Gigerich, Meet Patel and Kayla Miller discuss the origins, evolution and current impact of anti-mask legislation in the United States

How a patchwork of state taxes contributes to menstrual inequity in the US

Federalism in the United States means that many policies are the responsibility of individual states rather than, or in addition to, the federal government. Shyam K. Sriram, Stacy Cavanaugh, Annie Faulkner, and Mackenzie Winchester-Daniel take a close look at state tax policies on menstrual products, finding that 26 states still impose such taxes, though many have tried and failed to repeal or reduce them. They write that these taxes imposing an often-significant burden on the physical and mental health of young girls, women, and people who menstruate, while at the same time generating very little revenue for the states who impose them

In-orbit Performance of UVIT on ASTROSAT

We present the in-orbit performance and the first results from the ultra-violet Imaging telescope (UVIT) on ASTROSAT. UVIT consists of two identical 38cm coaligned telescopes, one for the FUV channel (130-180nm) and the other for the NUV (200-300nm) and VIS (320-550nm) channels, with a field of view of 28 $arcmin$. The FUV and the NUV detectors are operated in the high gain photon counting mode whereas the VIS detector is operated in the low gain integration mode. The FUV and NUV channels have filters and gratings, whereas the VIS channel has filters. The ASTROSAT was launched on 28th September 2015. The performance verification of UVIT was carried out after the opening of the UVIT doors on 30th November 2015, till the end of March 2016 within the allotted time of 50 days for calibration. All the on-board systems were found to be working satisfactorily. During the PV phase, the UVIT observed several calibration sources to characterise the instrument and a few objects to demonstrate the capability of the UVIT. The resolution of the UVIT was found to be about 1.4 - 1.7 $arcsec$ in the FUV and NUV. The sensitivity in various filters were calibrated using standard stars (white dwarfs), to estimate the zero-point magnitudes as well as the flux conversion factor. The gratings were also calibrated to estimate their resolution as well as effective area. The sensitivity of the filters were found to be reduced up to 15\% with respect to the ground calibrations. The sensitivity variation is monitored on a monthly basis. UVIT is all set to roll out science results with its imaging capability with good resolution and large field of view, capability to sample the UV spectral region using different filters and capability to perform variability studies in the UV.Comment: 10 pages, To appear in SPIE conference proceedings, SPIE conference paper, 201

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

The Politics of Refugee Resettlement

The United States has a long and varied history of accepting refugees though a national admissions and resettlement program was not codified until 1980, primarily in response to the refugee crisis generated by the Vietnam War. Since that time, over three million people have come to the United States bearing the official designation as refugees and have become part of the fabric of this country. Yet the refugee resettlement program has mostly existed out of the public eye and has developed into a complicated power-sharing system of public and private actors and institutions, layered on the existing system of American federalism. Lost in the development of the resettlement program was a focus on the quality of the integration outcomes demanded by the federal government. The focus of this dissertation is a study on the politics of refugee resettlement through an analysis of policies and their implementation. In particular, I am interested in the differences between two very different states, Georgia and California, to understand how each carries out their respective resettlement programs. In order to achieve this goal, I have conducted extensive interviews with 18 policy implementers and 26 Bhutanese refugees in both states. While resettlement and integration have been studied before, this dissertation makes an important contribution in the field of American Politics by focusing on the qualitative experiences of integration through the lived experiences and opinions of those who implement policy, and those who are the recipients of it. I have three sets of findings collapsed into two empirical chapters. First, while Georgia and California both oversee their respective resettlement programs, which is only a feature of 28 of the 49 states that accept refugees, the frameworks are remarkably different. Resettlement is carried out mostly at the county level in California whereas the local affiliates of the national refugee resettlement organizations (RROs) do the heavy lifting in Georgia. An important and overlooked aspect of the frameworks is also the role of the state refugee coordinator (SRC). In California, it is a former refugee, whose leadership and expertise are appreciated by everyone who comes into contact with him. In Georgia, by contrast, it is someone who has little faith amongst other policy implementers and by his own account is not actually in charge of resettlement. The importance of the SRC becomes more pronounced when one considers the role of veto points or areas where policy disagreement can quickly give way to abrupt stoppages and even reformulation of existing statutory objectives. When the SRC can minimize veto points despite a more complicated resettlement structure, as in California, the program is implemented more effectively. The second major finding is how implementers view resettlement. While disagreements amongst implementers should not be a surprise to anyone, it was unexpected to see just how little connection there was between the hierarchical integration that was so strong in California with the implementers’ perspective in that state towards resettlement. The implementers in Georgia also had similarly desultory perspectives on integration. So should it be any surprise that refugees in both states had poor perceptions of the integration efforts and the resettlement process? Not at all, I argue. The program of subnational, sub-federal refugee resettlement is implemented with so little care to the actual benefit of refugees, and it shows. Refugees in both states suffered what I have termed “integration distress” due to a slipshod, haphazard, and poorly implemented resettlement paradig

Imperative Patriotism and Minority Candidacies: Examining the Role of Military Status in Racial Evaluations of South Asian Candidates

South Asians have seen an increase in representation at all levels of US government, from Congress to the Vice Presidency, yet a paucity of work has been done examining South Asian candidates in America. The distinct nature of South Asian candidacies allows us to examine the intersection between race and religious identity and how emphasizing different social and political identities impact minority candidate evaluations. We theorize the potential effects of racial-political stereotyping of South Asians, focusing specifically on how a Hindu or Muslim background may negatively influence candidate evaluation. Additionally, we consider whether military service has any effect on evaluations of South Asian candidates as dangerous or deficient. We test this theory with a survey experiment that varies both South Asian religious identity, political ideology, and military service. Our findings indicate that white respondents are more hostile to South Asian candidates when compared to white candidates with similar biographies, and that respondents are particularly hostile to Muslim candidates. Cueing military service alleviates this handicap for Muslim candidates, but further analysis reveals that military service only improves perceptions among Democratic respondents