Ph.D. - Political Science

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10125/2142

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Pūkuʻi relational sovereignties: Binding futures, performing intimacies, and insurgent archives
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2026) Johnson, Kamalani M. F. H.; Silva, Noenoe; Political Science
This dissertation develops pūkuʻi—a Hawaiian term signifying to bind, assemble, or graft—as a Kanaka Maoli philosophical framework and method for intellectual sovereignty. Rooted in moʻolelo (narrative) and moʻokūʻauhau (genealogy), I theorize pūkuʻi as a cyclical, life-generating practice, that as a tripartite cycle of movement—kīpuka (refuge), pūkuʻi (binding), and hoʻolaupaʻi (proliferation) challenges settler-colonial logics of fragmentation, extraction, and epistemic erasure. By synthesizing archival research in the ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language) newspapers with indigenous critical, postcolonial, and biopolitical theory, the project argues that Kanaka Maoli intellectual production is a living archive that refuses the legal and pedagogical traps of the US territorial state.This research centers on the life and writings of J. W. H. I. Kihe (1854–1930), an insurgent philosopher whose prolific work in the nūpepa (newspapers) functioned as a kīpuka (epistemic refuge) for ancestral knowledge. I theorize Kihe’s literary aesthetics—specifically his use of serialized moʻolelo—as a form of relational opacity that protected Indigenous knowledge amidst settler grips while maintaining political literacy in a time of attempted epistemicide. A primary intervention of this work is the identification of a biopolitical assemblage in territorial law—Acts 22 (1901, 1905), 39 (1905), 71 (1907), and Chapter 146 (1905)—which sought to pathologize the Kanaka Maoli family, sever relations to the land, and produce docile bodies through domestic and educational enclosure. I contrast this settler grip with the pedagogical and ancestral release practiced by the kupuna wahine (grandmother) as the architect of knowledge, the advanced literacies of mele malama (ethnoecological chants), and the social ethics of hoʻāikāne (relational companionship). Ultimately, this dissertation reframes the state’s label of “delinquency” as a pathology; it is rather, evidence of ancestral literacy, asserting that sovereignty is not a legal status to be granted, but an agile, relational performance to be practiced and performed.
E kūpaʻa ma ke aloha i ka ʻāina: The Hawaiian land hui movement and collective resistance against legal dispossession
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2026) Tuteur, Nicole; Silva, Noenoe; Political Science
From the post-Māhele period through the Territorial era, Kānaka Maoli across the pae ʻāina collectively acquired and managed ʻāina through hui kūʻai ʻāina—collective land associations that represented deliberate acts of resistance, self-governance, and economic strategy within an imposed capitalist property regime.
The perpetuator: George Paele Mossman and the politics of cultural perpetuation
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2026) Hopper, Robert Michael; Ferguson, Kathy; Political Science
This dissertation presents a political biography of George Paele Mossman to examine the politics of cultural perpetuation in 20th Century Territorial Hawaiʻi. Through Mossman’s life and work as a cultural entrepreneur, educator, ʻukulele maker, and community organizer, this study analyzes the political and discursive tensions inherent in efforts to sustain Hawaiian identity, knowledge, and community amid territorial governance, religious influence, urbanization, Americanization, and the expansion of tourism.Drawing primarily from English language newspaper archives, civic records, and other archival sources, this project traces Mossman’s educational and entrepreneurial initiatives as part of a purposeful movement of cultural perpetuation facing both global and local pressures. Situating Mossman—the self-proclaimed “perpetuator”—within relational networks of ʻahahui embedded across pedagogy and commercial enterprise, this dissertation examines the struggle to maintain and adapt Hawaiian lifeways within colonial modernity. These material and discursive struggles unfolded in contested arenas of everyday life, where questions of authenticity, commercialization, pedagogy, and relational obligation were continually negotiated. Mossman’s work reveals intertwined processes of individual and collective becoming—the reconciliation of Hawaiianness with the multiple identity forms he inhabited and the embedding of Native cultural forms within emerging modern concepts, institutions, and economic structures. Cultural perpetuation is revealed not as static preservation, but as adaptive and innovative affirmation of Hawaiianness shaped through ongoing negotiation with modernity. Foregrounding quotidian micro-political processes against broader historical transformations, this project argues that from these struggles emerged a cultivated mode of being —an embodied and relational Hawaiianness that accumulates political agency generationally. By sustaining the capacity to “create, produce, and live Hawaiian,” perpetuators preserved not only cultural forms but the ethical and social conditions through which later forms of political consciousness and collective action could take shape. In doing so, the politics of perpetuation in the first half of the 20th Century created durable foundations for subsequent expressions of Indigenous political life.
Americanizing Luakini: White supremacy colonizing a nation state
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2026) Wilson, Kalaniakea N.; Goodyear-Kaopua, Noelani; Political Science
This dissertation investigates the transformation of luakini from Paao through the arrival of missionaries to the U.S. invasion of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Contrary to dominant narratives that reduce luakini to only sites of human sacrifice, this study reveals their deeper political, social, cultural, ecological, and cosmological roles as central institutions that sustained Hawaiian society based upon moral standards of governance. I argue that luakini were not eliminated by settler colonial and white Christian supremacist projects, but rather transformed. Luakini Karistiano was repurposed by Kanaka Maoli as a site of spiritual, political, and cultural resilience. Using a helu methodology grounded in Hawaiian language sources, moolelo, and oiwi epistemologies, I trace the genealogy of luakini and their evolving function in Native Hawaiian society. I also propose a new framework – Americanization genocide – to describe a structure of attack from multiple components. This framework helps articulate how Hawaiian identity, sovereignty, and religious practice were systematically targeted for erasure. Through a close reading of 19th-century newspapers and primary source documents, I demonstrate that luakini can serve as a future catalyst and center for Hawaiian religious, governance, political, cultural, and communal spiritual resurgence, thereby reclaiming our independence and self- governance over Hawaiian Kingdom territory. Hopefully, this dissertation contributes to the growing scholarship that aims to bring this belligerent occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom to an end, now, in its 133nd year.
Experiencing nothingness in a nihilistic age: A life
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2026) Werner, Griffin; Grove, Jairus; Political Science
My dissertation is an interdisciplinary account of experiences of nothingness and their relationship to the culturally dominant force of nihilism. In response to recent use of the term ‘nihilist’ to moralize extremist violence, I return to Friedrich Nietzsche’s use of the concept to describe our contemporary age of nihilism and the structures and institutions that perpetuate it. While nothingness names the abyss that reveals that there is no absolute interpretation of reality, nihilism names a reaction to such an experience of nothingness, which ideologically reduces the world to one homogenous thing. In a nihilistic age, we are compelled to choose one story or interpretation that must reign supreme while all others are demonized and overshadowed. By describing several encounters with nothingness through the social, political, and historical structures that engender them, I demonstrate how the homogenizing force of nihilism intersects with individual manifestations of the ideology of nihilism. I argue that living in our current age of nihilism requires that we contend with it as a homogenizing force rather than attempt to individually overcome it philosophically or existentially. Using the concept of nihilism to map the relationship between my experiences of nothingness and social and historical forces, I reformulate nihilism as a diagnostic tool and employ philosophy as a therapeutic to tease out how I contend with the homogenizing force of nihilism in my life. By narrativizing Experiencing Nothingness in a Nihilistic Age as a series of encounters with forces of homogenization, the dissertation itself expresses how one might contend with experiences of nothingness as a practice of living in an age of nihilism rather than theorizing it from a disinterested point of view.
Reconsidering the first space war: An ecological realist approach to space competition and strategic surprise
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2026) DeLanzo, Boyd T.; Grove, Jairus; Political Science
The consensus among academics and the space community is that the 1991 Persian Gulf War constituted the "first space war." It’s evident in many publications and popular framings of space history. However, this dissertation presents a counter view to that consensus, which is informed by empirical evidence from declassified archives of Cold War space systems, overlooked technical studies, and in the context of the Gulf War’s “first space war” claim, fairly late-released government reports that failed to correct that discourse among defense circles or reverse the general framing within the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) literature. The research reveals a different story than the formative accounts written by historians in previous decades, who did not have access to most of this information.
Allangogan ken kitakit: Ilokano women, language, and the fight against colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist oppression in settler colonial Hawaiʻi
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2026) Ortega, Nadezna; Silva, Noenoe; Political Science
This dissertation argues that the erasure of the roles and contributions of Filipinos, the homogenization of the “Filipino experience” in Hawaiʻi, and the concomitant invisibilization of Ilokano and women’s specificities obscure critical dynamics of power, complicity, and resistance within the diaspora and in relation to the settler colonial state. Centering Ilokano ethnic identity and gendered experience, this research illuminates how patriarchy, U.S. imperialism, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism converge to shape distinct modes of survival, opposition, and worldmaking among Filipinos in Hawaiʻi. Moving beyond critique of dominant narratives, this research examines how Ilokano women and Filipinx educators, labor leaders, and activists simultaneously confront internal community patriarchy and external structures of oppression through four interconnected sites of praxis: Ilokano language reclamation as anticolonial pedagogy; Filipino women’s contemporary labor organizing (with the Hawaiʻi Nurses’ Association and UNITE HERE! Local 5); Ilokano women’s leadership in disaster response following the 2023 Lahaina fires; and Filipinx organizing against gender and sexual violence. These are not merely alternative stories but offer a more nuanced and theoretically rigorous analysis that challenges the monolithic, male-centric, and depoliticized renderings of Filipino diasporic life. This research concludes that the invisibilized labor of Filipinas, Ilokanas, and Filipinx leaders, organizers, and educators is not marginal to Filipino history in Hawaiʻi but central to it. Their work has sustained communities through generations of racial capitalist patriarchal exploitation, maintained cultural knowledge against assimilative pressures, and articulated visions of justice that exceed the narrow frames of inclusion and recognition.
Waves of return: Indigenous Chamorro approaches to rematriation
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2025) Barnett, Samantha Marley; Silva, Noenoe; Political Science
Within the bowels of European museums sit boxes holding Chamorro ancestral remains that were looted from across the Mariana Islands during German and Spanish colonial occupations. The centrality of ancestors continues to shape Chamorro life, and the violence of unearthing ancestral remains puts into stark clarity how colonial dispossession lays claim to Chamorro bodies even after death. Moving from a historical analysis of how Chamorros cared for their dead, I theorize ancestral afterlives to articulate Chamorro relationships with our ancestors and the politics and practices of care that are generated by rematriation efforts. This research connects historic grave-robbing and imperial thefts of both ancestral remains and cultural belongings by colonial agents under the German and Spanish regimes with contemporary acts of desecration of Chamorro ancestral villages through US militarization. In this dissertation, I examine efforts to bring our ancestors back home to the Marianas, and the kinds of reclamations that are possible when we bring our villages to these museums.
Ginen hami i famalao'an: CHamoru women weaving reproductive liberation and resurgent poetics in Guåhan
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2025) San Nicolas, Ha'ani Lucia; Osorio, Jamaica H.; Political Science
Guåhan is the largest island of Låguas yan Gåni, the ancestral homelands of the IndigenousManCHamoru (CHamoru people). It is an unincorporated territory of the United States, a euphemistic title to conceal the reality that Guåhan remains a colonized and militarized possession in the Pacific. ManCHamoru leverage sovereignty as a political and international framework through which to pursue self-determination and decolonization at the grassroots level and at regional and international forums like the United Nations. In this dissertation, I challenge the decolonization movement’s shortcomings in meaningfully considering the intersections of gender, sexuality, patriarchy, and colonization by arguing that CHamoru sovereignty and the elimination of reproductive oppressions in Guåhan are entwined. Yet, while it has been the primary vehicle in pushing for the island’s autonomy, I interrogate the use of sovereignty, a state-centered concept, in achieving CHamoru self-governance. I contend that famalao’an CHamoru (CHamoru women) enact a discrete form of decolonial activism that centers an expansive understanding of reproduction–as regenerating children, ideas, and genealogy– in a culturally informed way, a praxis that I coin as reproductive liberation. I create and employ a method of resurgent poetics in gathering information from famalao’an CHamoru, whom I position as research partners in this work. I use the form of kåntan chamorrita, a CHamoru style of call-and-response poetry, to share the knowledge of my research partners in a deeply CHamoru and collaborative way. By doing this, I also show how resurgent poetics can activate reproductive liberation. Furthermore, this project reveals how famalao’an CHamoru are giving life to reproductive liberation, showing the people of Guåhan, the Pacific, and the global community an alternative approach to engaging decolonization and self-determination.
From a war on drugs to a war on blackness: The transversal politics and afterlives of the state’s campaign on crack
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2025) Deshpande, Shree; Ferguson, Kathy E.; Political Science
This dissertation treats the state’s campaign of warfare waged in response to the emergence and flows of crack cocaine as an event that produced, intensified, and transformed falsehoods regarding Blackness. I historicize crack war anxieties surrounding drug selling, Black women’s reproduction, and Black youth as stemming from biopolitical regimes and systems of domination inaugurated by chattel enslavement. I argue understandings of Black subjects as figures of incorrigible alterity and who accumulate negative value lend to their elimination by fashioning policing, police violence, and incarceration as necessary or otherwise quotidian and unremarkable. My dissertation intervenes by turning to the state’s victims and other gendered-racialized figures’ artistic labors, aesthetico-political thought, and practices of meaning- and relation-making to counter real-world and discursive dehumanization. Rather than treat Blackness as a category to think on, I instead endeavor to think with those caught in limbos. The fleeting and fugitive practices I examine from a selection of musical texts by rappers 03 Greedo (Jason Jamal Jackson), Freddie Gibbs (Fredrick Jamel Tipton), and hip-hop group The Souls of Mischief as well as films including Moonlight (2016), Set It Off (1996), and Clockers (1995) help me to fashion transversal connections outside of grammars engendered by racial difference.
Anchoring diplomacy in reciprocity: Scholarship programs in Palau-Taiwan relations
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2025) Li, Cheng-Cheng; Silva, Noenoe K.; Political Science
The governments of Palau and Taiwan established diplomatic relations in 1999. This dissertation focuses on Taiwan’s higher education scholarship aid to Palau. The Taiwan scholarships program was launched in 2005, and today there are over 200 Palauan students who have gained degrees in Taiwan. Taiwan-educated graduates returning to Palau have changed the political outlook of the country. While Taiwan’s relations with Oceanic nations are usually discussed in the Taiwan-China competition framework, I examine the Palau-Taiwan relations through the Indigenous Palauan epistemological principles Deleuill (relationship) and Klaingeseu (reciprocity). Doing so offers an alternative framework for understanding the intersection of diplomacy, Palau’s national development, and the lived experiences of Palauan students and alumni. Anchored in these principles, I center the voices of people, foregrounding the everyday practices that exemplify resilience and reciprocity. Using storytelling as a method, I present how Palauan students navigate multiple realms of knowledge, cultures, and worlds to contribute meaningfully to the development of their community and relationship with Taiwan. Through these narratives, I argue that the relationship between Palau and Taiwan is not merely transactional but is rooted in reciprocity—with Palauan values, perspectives, and knowledge actively contributing to the diplomatic relationship.
Reconstructive Confucianism: Resistance to Neoliberal-New Confucian Resonance
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Shirakawa, Takeshi; Grove, Jairus; Political Science
My dissertation explores resonances between neoliberalism and New Confucianism and howto resist it. Confucianism never disappears from East Asia; it has been the kernel foundation of East Asian societies (and East Asian diasporas in the world), and it is a crucial component for neoliberal subscription in Confucian societies. Confucianism has been interacting with other thoughts such as Daoism and Buddhism, and New Confucianism emerged in 20 th century to face the Western modernization for its ontological survival. While New Confucianism consists of wide ranges of Confucian scholars and approaches, many overlooks the detrimental issues of neoliberal axiomatics. My dissertation therefore focuses on such acquiescence of New Confucianism and a particular resonance between neoliberalism and New Confucianism. It explores how New Confucianism appears to compete against the West as an alternative ‘One’ yet resonates with neoliberal axiomatics in reality, which exacerbates everyday life of the ordinary people in Confucian societies. The neoliberal-New Confucian resonance, which politicizes some (mal)interpretations of Confucianism, produces docile labor, justifies soft-authoritarian states, discourages democratic spirits, and unequally distributes moral and societal responsibilities to the working-class people. Facing the plights of such resonance in Confucian societies, what I call reconstructive Confucianism seeks post-neoliberal societies by ‘rag-picking’ and refurbishing alternative interpretations of Confucian thoughts and local Confucian-based practices that survived from neoliberal reconfiguration of the societies. Through this process, reconstructive Confucianism challenges not only neoliberalism but also seeks ‘self-cultivation’ of Confucianism itself.
ʻEliʻeli ʻAikū: Igniting Abolitionary Futures Beyond Settler Sovereignty
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Johnson, Kahala Irving Andrew; Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Noelani; Political Science
Sovereignty is a carceral binary confining the futures of Kanaka Maoli to a state-based mode of domination, where liberation is presented as a struggle between the occupied, colonized Hawaiian Kingdom and the occupying, colonizing United States. My research finds that despite the apparent antagonism between the former and the latter, this state-based mode of domination is a politics that unites both Hawaiian and Haole in sovereign supremacy sustained through the incarceration of land as territory, the imprisonment of people as property, and the punishment of bodies as binary. Initiating an ethics of refusal that rejects Hawaiian and Haole state-based modes of domination, my research seeks not sovereignty within the binary but liberation from it. I therefore ask: what can a Hawaiian imagination do when no longer incarcerated within the solitary confinement that is sovereignty? In alignment with this inquiry, the purpose of my research is to transform the movement of our politics from Hawaiian sovereignty to Hawaiian liberation, where state-based modes of domination no longer confine the limits of our future. Turning to the visionary wisdom and practices of Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans anarcha-feminist abolitionists, I argue that we can prophesy in the present to dream of liberatory futures within and against, beneath and beyond the Hawaiian Kingdom and the United States.
THE CYBER PUZZLE: EXPLORING THE BOUNDARIES OF CYBERSPACE
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Newton, Keegan A.; Grove, Jairus V.; Political Science
Cyberspace, notably through information and communications technology, veers toward ubiquity and intersects with every significant area of life. Although it informs numerous futures, both harmful and empowering to individuals, it is primarily deemed consequential only when kinetic events, data exfiltration, or economic impacts occur. This dissertation critiques and problematizes an ecosystem of people and technology to identify hidden costs that are often omitted from expert discourse. By examining Meta’s “Terms and Conditions,” Apple Vision Pro, Synchron’s brain-computer interface, GamerGate, and the false missile alert in Hawai‘i, four central claims are produced. First, power and control have mutated their forms alongside cyberspace and are fueled by a fear of missing out, coercive models of user “consent,” and cyberspace access being made a prerequisite to obtaining human needs and desires. Second, cyberspace has caused a hyper-acceleration of the augmented subject, producing a soft yet novel formation of power and a distinct apparatus of horror as part of the undying project to optimize people and things. Third, there is no true digital-kinetic or digital-physical divide; instead, assemblages of avatars, memes, people, echo chambers, social connections, posts, and other objects produce a terrain of affects that inherently emerges across multiple spaces. Fourth, people are hyper-mediated by cyberspace in a manner that amplifies unpredictable, chaotic, and complex violence. Ultimately, this dissertation attempts to enrich discourse that camouflages the underlying sociotechnical operations of cyberspace.
THE PHANTOMS OF THE ARCHIVES: MAKING ANTICOLONIAL CONNECTIVITIES SENSIBLE IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Rao, Akta; Soguk, Nevzat; Political Science
This dissertation theorizes phantoms as spectral agents that haunt dominating power relations through the transfer and animation of histories otherwise obscured or silenced. It establishes phantoms as resisting normalized historical narratives and hauntology as tracing their moves epistemologically. What phantoms reveal are historical experiences – rich and textured, shaped either in trauma or affirmation – that are secreted by relations of power. In revealing silences and what is obfuscated, phantoms become a lens to witness and detect alternative visions, fantasies, and ways of being-in-the-world. Hence, this dissertation invokes and tracks phantoms as heuristics that expose marginalized histories and as paradigmatic agents that reanimate those histories. The objective is to demonstrate how colonialism still pervasively incises into contemporary postcolonial societies (e.g., India and Western societies), such as the US and Canada. Mediating on and analyzing anticolonial connectivities, this dissertation points to where/how they appear and may be sensible as “phantoms” even in their orchestrated obscurity within hegemonic histories. It names three historical moments/events/episodes – migrations, assassinations, and suicides – where it is possible to observe, investigate, and proclaim their phantoms as spectral agents restoring history to its fuller self, which, though not a complete picturing, makes previously alienated anticolonial connectivities more perceivable and visible. The dissertation, thus, argues that anticolonial activities and connectivities better mapped or remapped through a concatenation of phantoms exhibit continuing colonial paradoxes and the politics of decolonial projects. It also compels International Relations (IR) to be more responsive to its phantoms as diminished histories of global relations. Against this background, the dissertation sets out to make five interrelated moves. The first two moves are epistemological and methodological, and the latter three are historical and genealogical-cum episodic. First, the dissertation introduces the concept of phantoms, explaining what they are and how they work as spectral agents by animating alternative memories vis-ά-vis dominant historical remembrances. Second, it situates phantoms in relation to the field of hauntology as a method/approach/sensibility and shows how hauntology fuels phantoms epistemologically in support of their substantive roles. Hauntology both hosts and enlivens phantoms as heuristics and spectral agents. Third, the dissertation explores anticolonial connectivities conceptually: how to locate them – as episodes/events/moments – and detect them as “phantomatic” anticolonial connectivities despite their choreographed marginalization, erasure, or suppression. Fourth, the dissertation mines these three historical episodes/events/moments of migrations, assassinations, and suicides because of how they encapsulate forms of political action that are reflective of phantoms of colonialism and elucidate the kinds of criminalization of dissent they encounter. Fifth and finally, the dissertation tracks, recovers, and links these phantoms to “anticolonial connectivities” across both colonial and postcolonial histories and landscapes. Following this introductory chapter and the more substantial chapter on theory, Chapters 3, 4, and 5 conjure and unearth anticolonial phantoms – from the migrations of Indians to North America before and after Independence from the British, from haunting afterlives of assassinations and Indo-U.S. historical relations, and, lastly, from farm suicides as shadowing the farmers’ movements in postcolonial Indian politics. Illuminating the specters of colonialism that manifest in each of these spheres in resonance with the spectral turn in critical theory and anticolonial approaches and studies in IR, the dissertation summons phantoms to trace the presence, distortions, and erasures of anticolonialism in the imbrications of Western colonial/imperial and Indian postcolonial relations.
Creeping Bodies: Digital Mediation and Embodied Experience — A Series of Three Case Studies
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Vorsino , Zoe Simone Sofia; Grove, Jairus V.; Political Science
The modern digital experience is at once creepy yet mundane; surprising yet boring; quotidian and yet extraordinary. Mathematical equations – algorithms – guide our decisions and yet themselves are mired in obfuscated biases around race, gender, and nationality. Body parts are stitched into and around other body parts using deepfake software and puppeteered as they are disseminated along online informational highways. Biological functions are securitized, captured by machinic eyes and judged as risky if they deviate from a standardized, automated biometric system. In this environment, embodiment itself is turned into a parameter in the program of life, expected to work within the confines of any given software design, or be rewritten until it just works. This project takes the form of three chapters, each a case study through which I aim to answer a series of simple questions that seek to illuminate both the seemingly self-apparent and futuristically creepy aspects of the modern digitally embodied experience: What does it mean to be alive in a world where the boundaries between the digital and the corporeal have, for most intents and purposes, become liminal? And in that context, in this new world of digitized embodiment, how does one become entwined in power structures, both new and old? After an introduction aimed at offering foundational arguments, Chapter Two uses AVATAR as its point of entry in an attempt to complicate the notion of the “e-border” widely imagined by Western security apparati as a solution to post 9/11 security risks (Amoore 2013). Not merely, I argue, does AVATAR present as an assemblage through which the body is digitally dissected (Wilcox 2015) at the hands of a simulated proxy sovereign, but it is indicative of how digital security technologies facialize the subjectification process. In Chapter Three, I step away from the physical borders of the airport to consider Tay.Ai, a chatbot released by Microsoft on social media platform Twitter in 2016. Tay.Ai was meant to test Microsoft’s newest automated algorithmic language engine by interacting directly with internet users – as such, the chatbot was designed to look and have the linguistic habits of an “average American woman” online (Neff & Nagy 2016). Tay.Ai’s eventual non-compliance with its programmatic imperatives lets us consider how normative assumptions about gender and race play into software development and user experience, especially in the context of the digital public square that are web 2.0 social platforms. In Chapter Four, I examine the deepfake as a digital object made up, partly, I argue, of the body. Or, at least, the bodies of those captured, dissected, stitched, and edited together to create new forms of digital embodiment. Using a 2018 Buzzfeed PSA depicting President Barack Obama as voiced by comedian Jordan Peele, I consider how race is used as a technology of othering within spaces of algorithmic mediation. Finally, in a brief conclusion, I consider a politics of refusal in the face (pun intended) of pervasive embodied capture within the machine, paying special attention to current discourse as it applies to both modern conceptions of privacy and resistance.
POWER FORTIFIED BY FEAR: PATRON-CLIENT RELATIONS, IMPUNITY, AND ELECTORAL KILLING IN MAGUINDANAO, PHILIPPINES
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Yang, Changwon; Kimura, Ehito; Political Science
The objective of this research is to address the inquiry: what are the societal circumstances conducive to the perpetration of electoral killing in local Philippine politics? The fundamental argument is that within a society permeated by fear, potent political authority operates as a societal factor wherein the phenomenon of impunity, facilitated by the deployment of private militias and robust patron-client affiliations, engenders an environment conducive to electoral killings. The primary case examined in this research pertains to the 2009 Maguindanao massacre, situated in the Maguindanao province on Mindanao Island, a locale distinguished by the Ampatuan family's consolidation of political dominance spanning five decades. Leveraging the distinct social milieu of Maguindanao, the Ampatuan dynasty capitalized on and sustained political supremacy. The region's protracted history of Islamic uprisings constrained the government's capacity to uphold peace, thereby enabling the Ampatuan clan to secure approval from the central government to establish paramilitary groups. These paramilitary units, acting as the Ampatuan's private militia, employed brutal force to instill a climate of intimidation. The existence of insurgent activities and brutal private militias empowered the Ampatuan family to assert unassailable political control in the region, consequently facilitating the cultivation of entrenched patron-client ties. The robust informal network of the Ampatuans precluded state entities from effectively probing and penalizing their illicit deeds, thereby perpetuating a climate of terror in society. Meanwhile, victims responded to political violence by mobilizing civil society initiatives, including calls for public awareness regarding such violence, commemorative events, and advocacy for governmental allocation of resources for legislation addressing political violence. Thus, the collective endeavors of victims can be interpreted within the framework of individual-level psychological convalescence and the broader context of democratization, influencing the institutionalization of political violence.
He Mākaʻikaʻi no Māeaea: Becoming Kamaʻāina o ka ʻEhu Kai
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Au , Donna; Goldberg-Hiller, Jonathon; Political Science
Before the shores between Puaʻena and Kaʻena were lined with invasive ironwood trees; before the kula leading to the uplands were covered in multi-story homes and crowded neighborhoods; before roads and highways cut through vital connections between mauka and makai, the ʻehu kai churned up by the waves in Waialua traveled freely between the shores and hills. Drifting from kahakai, over the kula, and towards the kuahiwi, the ʻehu kai covered the kamaʻāina and all who passed through Waialua in a salty mist, connecting sea with land, kanaka with ʻāina. People of Waialua were ancestrally known as poʻe and kamaʻāina o ka ʻehu kai, and before settler colonial relations of power began to take-hold in Hawaiʻi, the ʻehu kai and our pilina to it was a primary way for the community of Waialua to know ourselves, our ʻāina, andone another. This dissertation uses archival and ethnographic research to ask what it means to become kamaʻāina o ka ʻehu kai today, and investigate how emergent subjectivities grounded in ʻŌiwi relationality can begin to enact new ways of belonging to place. Using moʻolelo about Waialua and the practice of mākaʻikaʻi, I analyze how pilina and kuleana to ʻāina can begin to produce new subjectivities and relations of power that are not defined and confined by settler colonial encounters with ʻāina. Mākaʻikaʻi, as a form of knowledge production and pilina-building, allows ʻŌiwi and non-ʻŌiwi to encounter ʻāina in ways that cannot be co-opted or defined by settler colonial power, and reveals that (re)turning to practices rooted in our ʻike kupuna and routed through our ancestral and contemporary moʻolelo has the potential to create new realities and practices of home-making where our abundance of pilina can thrive.
IN THE GRIP OF VIOLENCE: UKRAINE’S (RE)CAPTURE
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Levytskyy, Andriy; Soguk, Nevzat; Political Science
The dramatic expansion of the complex interaction and structural reconfiguration of power, incited by the financialization and development of new communication technologies, brought transformations that have consequences for the institutional foundations of political legitimacy and produce dilemmas for social organization. While acknowledging that the global dynamical transition into the new social paradigm delivers a significant number of possible scenarios, one of the central hypotheses of this study is that the movement towards a global techno-capitalist society is accompanied by the imposition of more complex, mutated and multilayered forms of social control and violence. This dissertation underlines the importance of understanding societal assemblages as dynamic entities with the capacity to reproduce and perpetrate the regimes or economies of violence. To underpin the argument theoretically and empirically, the dissertation offers a broader perspective on developments in Ukraine. It demonstrates the current transformations as a top-down process linked to the dynamics and logic of war in which technological, political, cultural, and economic features are twisted. The Ukrainian instance represents one of the significant and recent sites of the operation of tremendous power and serves as a case study of the causes and consequences of transnational processes. In the end, the philosophical approach allows us to demonstrate that various social structures and systems of communication can produce different effects, which define the nature of reality, the cognitive properties, and the existence of organisms.
Sovereignty, Resurgence, and Climate Change: Carving healthy, sustainable, and resilient Belauan communities
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2021) Iechad, Kora Mechelins; Aikau, Hokulani; Political Science
In Climate Change and Global Health, authors Hanna and Mclver describe Pacific Island nations as the “canaries in the coal mine of climate change and health.” Mounting threats to food and water security, infrastructure, and public health and safety due to decreasing levels of freshwater supply, increased coastal flooding and erosion, ocean acidification and coral bleaching, indicate multiple concerns for human and environmental communities in the Pacific Islands region. In Belau, an island chain in the Southwestern region of Oceania, research studies have primarily focused on how climate change effects the ocean and fisheries, a male-gendered sphere in Belauan culture. While this research is critical for understanding the broader environmental impacts of climate change very little research has been done to understand the effects of climate change on the land and land-based food sources—which is considered women’s sphere of responsibility and influence. Additionally, the focus on the environment and science fails to account for the impact of rising sea levels on the territorial sovereignty of Island nation-states. My research asks, what are the gendered dimensions of climate change and how do women contribute to mitigation, food security, and sovereignty in the face of environmental change? This dissertation is a qualitative study of how women’s organizations, such as Mechesiil Belau, are working to address the impacts of the climate crisis within the community and on a national level.This research extends the existing discussion of the climate crisis to address both the impacts these changes are having on women’s daily lives and their families as well as the strategies these women are using to address their needs. While this research focuses on how women are responding to changes in their island environment, climate change is also forcing many people to abandon their island homes often taking up residence as refugees or immigrants in other island countries. This study recognizes that migration is as much a survival strategy as is growing food and yet migration raises unique questions related to Indigenous identity in diasporic contexts. Through interviews with women who have experienced environmentally motivated migrations, this project seeks to understand the myriad ways women are working to support their families while also striving to maintain their Indigenous identities. My research approach creates a space for women to discuss issues of climate change and how they are responding to it. By placing Belauan women’s stories and experiences at the center of this project, this research will also deepen our understanding of the gendered impacts climate change has on migration, food security, and sovereignty.

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