Ph.D. - Political Science

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

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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.
BEYOND THE JOLLY ROGER: UNDERSTANDING PIRACY'S ROLE IN DISRUPTING INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2024) Shah, Riddhi; Grove, Jairus; Political Science
The dissertation transcends the conventional understanding of piracy as the archetypal foe of all nations to expose the complex interplay between security discourses, racial politics, and economic imperatives in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). The study unveils how piracy operated as a catalyst for redefining the logic governing the IOR to allow it to emerge as a unique space of exception that facilitated the movement of goods, people, and data vital to the liberal economy. Risk technologies introduced to counter the threat of piracy contributed to the circulation of images of the modern pirate as dangerous coloured bodies in Indian Ocean further influencing political decision-making. Perceived as jobless and unemployable, ‘pirates’ were transformed into “death-subjects” - valuable only when dead.
Untamed Skies: The Science, Art, and Philosophy of Weather Analysis and Forecasting
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2021) Shieh, Owen; Grove, Jairus; Political Science
Meteorology, the science of weather, faces a technoscientific crisis in the twenty-first century. Although our understanding of the atmosphere continues to increase and weather forecasts continue to improve in accuracy, it is apparent that such scientific advances do not necessarily result in more lives saved or economic damage mitigated. Lives, livelihoods, and economies increasingly depend on weather forecasts, and while meteorology matures as a science alongside the technologies of remote sensing and numerical weather prediction, the discipline—as with the majority of modern physical sciences—remains entrenched in the assumption that technoscientific problems require only quantitative, empirical solutions. Yet, recent disasters like Hurricane Sandy and Super Typhoon Haiyan have demonstrated that the quantitative achievements of near-perfect forecasts are overshadowed by the complex challenges of communication, infrastructure, and decision-making, whereby the value and utility of a weather forecast differ not only in degree but also in kind. Through the lens of political and social theory and philosophy, this dissertation analyzes and critiques the positivistic epistemological basis upon which the institutions and methods of weather analysis and forecasting are built and proposes a new framework of transdisciplinarity that rethinks the physical-social dualities that have constrained the field of meteorology since its inception and have subsequently limited its potential to improve the human condition. Its public-facing character, widespread socioeconomic impact, and culture of amateur participation render the field of meteorology unique among the sciences yet also representative of the challenges that confront the science-society interface. Thus, from this meteorological crisis emerges an opportunity to reorient our broader scientific pursuits toward a new epistemology—a new way of scientifically thinking and doing—that more effectively unifies the objective and subjective elements of learning about our natural world to benefit the societies from whence they came.
PURSUING A RECONSTRUCTIVE PRESIDENCY: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE BARACK OBAMA PRESIDENCY
(University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2023) Zierak, Stephen Joseph; Chadwick, Richard W.; Political Science
ABSTRACTWas Barack Obama a transformational president? This study addresses that question through an elaborated version of Stephen Skowronek’s regime theory in political time, which serves as a useful lens in determining opportunity for a “reconstructive” presidency; and through comparison of the Obama presidency to five previous reconstructive presidencies. Skowronek’s presidency typology asserts linkage between disjunction and reconstruction, and the ubiquitous existence of a dominant political regime. This study demonstrates that both disjunctions and reconstructions can occur outside the frame of one presidency; and that a disjunctive presidency need not be followed by a reconstructive presidency, but rather can be followed by a competitive period of no dominant regime. Political time is a constraint, not a determinant, where contingency is an important consideration. Also, an opportune political time must be supplemented by a president’s will and skill in managing a dominant regime change and in creating a reconstructive politics. Relevant presidential skills demonstrated by successful reconstructive presidents include repudiating the corruption of the outgoing regime; communicating a mid-level reform message in simple, abbreviated terms to relevant publics (including the public-at-large); tying policy reforms to past values for purposes of legitimacy; setting effective agenda priorities and achieving early signature “wins;” and leading and expanding the party. A review of President Obama’s skills in each of these areas show weaknesses in the domestic realm that made a durable reconstruction impossible for him. Even in foreign policy, where presidents have more unilateral authority, and where Obama was more successful in communicating his foreign policy objectives, foreign policy failures, and lack of Congressional support concerning major foreign policy accomplishments, made his policy reforms transitory rather than durable. This study demonstrates that Barack Obama had reconstructive opportunity, transformational will, but lacked the requisite skills to implement a presidential reconstruction.
"We Always Find a Way": A Portrait of Indigenous Women's Activism and Intersectional Brilliance in Chiang Mai, Thailand
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2023) El-Silimy, Hannah; Silva, Noenoe K.; Political Science
This dissertation highlights the work of Indigenous women activists in Chiang Mai, Thailand who work transnationally in Northern Thailand and Shan State, Burma at the intersection of issues related to militarism, patriarchy, and land rights. It affirms and demonstrates that Indigenous women’s activist movements in this region of Southeast Asia are continuing to adapt and grow despite increasingly challenging conditions of authoritarianism. Using the Lawrence-Lightfoot method of portraiture, this thesis seeks to portray the multifaceted experience of Indigenous women’s lives as activists in Chiang Mai in the early twenty first century. Drawing upon community-engaged, Indigenous and feminist methods, my research here is based on individual and group interviews, a collaborative storytelling project, and participation in the work of a transnational women’s organization based in Chiang Mai. As well as considering the intersectional forms of oppression that Indigenous women in this region experience, I also draw attention to acts of intersectional brilliance, which are the strategies that women and people experiencing multiple forms of marginalization use to navigate and transform intersectional oppression. These strategies in Chiang Mai include leading educational and training programs, gaining strength from personal relationships, building transnational alliances, and learning how to quickly adapt to constantly changing political conditions. Further, in order to show a deeper portrait of the lived experiences of this community, I also recount here some of the emotional experiences, including my own, of trauma, healing, disconnection and connection that come with activism under authoritarian conditions. Overall, this dissertation contributes to a richer understanding of Indigenous women’s leadership and activism in Asia in the current time of authoritarianism, neoliberalism and neo-colonialism.
Debt And Resistance: A Study Of Agrarian Women’s Protests In Sri Lanka
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2023) Wedagedara, Amali C.; Krishna, Sankaran; Political Science
This dissertation foregrounds debt as a site of resistance and a site of reinventing the future incontemporary society. Based on twenty months of participatory action research alongside a women’s movement against predatory microfinance in Sri Lanka, the study explores how women became debtors and how and under what conditions they struggled against predatory microfinance. While discussing women’s lived experiences tackling a complex system of financial, family, and societal violence, the study presents a feminist reading of debt, development, and resistance. While drawing from participatory observation, the study illustrates how women in debt instrumentalize the devaluation of their ability to re-birth the eventual everyday at the household, i.e., providing for children’s education, health care, food, family’s well-being not only today but also the obligation to make things better for tomorrow, to create a space for resistance. In their quest to preserve life from predatory lending that exacerbates the labor of recreating life in the household, women bolt their doors, evade debt collectors, and postpone debt payments to disrupt the circuits of finance. Mutuality and proximity of using these weapons of the weak sometimes lead to in(formal) security arrangements in close neighborhoods to fend off debt collectors. The case study demonstrates how the ‘sociality of debt’ – collective lived realities of indebted women, enable them to unite to build a political movement from below, emboldening them to re-imagine poverty alleviation, development, and community credit. Over six chapters, the study documents the evolution of the women’s debt resistance movement with thick narrative descriptions of the women’s lived experiences and conceptualizes resistance against debt as a crisis in post-colonial development. I argue that efforts to integrate women into development without a critical appreciation of the historical roots of exclusion connected to colony capitalism have resulted in new exclusions. Rather than promoting financial inclusion and empowerment, microfinance has constituted a financial enclosure taking over women’s customary rights and credit commons and entangling them in predatory finance. Reliance on the judiciary and prosecution to recover unpayable debt related to microfinance criminalize debt with the threat of imprisonment. I point out how women expressing their anger and indignation at odious debt have forged a feminist assembly that symbolizes feminist solidarity and agency. The debtors’ movement has enabled them to transcend their victimhood and vulnerability, assume a resurgent identity, and believe they can bring about change. By repudiating debt, women in the movement refuse to pursue dreams in a foreclosed future and declare they can create new insubordinate futures.
Returning to Fo'na, Returning Home: Rematriating Education for CHamorus in Guåhan
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2021) Borja-Quichocho-Calvo, Kisha; Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Noelani; Political Science
This dissertation proposes a Fo‘na Framework to radically decolonize education in Guåhan. It begins with an analysis of how the Guam Department of Education (GDOE) has historically implemented and perpetuated a US colonial agenda through its curricula. My research then turns to ways CHamoru mothers in Guåhan are countering or supplementing GDOE curricula by rematriating education for their children through everyday acts of na‘lå‘la‘. Drawing on interviews with these parents and educators, I present the Fo‘na Framework, a framework which roots education in our ancestors and the stories, lands, and ocean waters of our mother(is)land. In addition to calling for the continued need to decolonize education for CHamorus in Guåhan, this dissertation serves as a resource for CHamoru parents and educators who seek to practice everyday acts of na‘lå‘la‘ and to elaborate Indigenous education through a Fo‘na Framework that attends to its four main parts: Fo‘na; Tåno‘ and Tåsi; Sinangan; and Inafa‘maolek.
Feeling Alternative Futures: How We Can Live A Socially Just And Sustainable Future Now
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2023) Swift, Tamara Elizabeth; Grove, Jairus; Political Science
To confront the rapidly approaching ecological and human systems collapse, I have chosen to use a critical feminist, ecological, and social justice framework to examine the ways humans could avert this collapse and build new human societies after an extinction event. I explore the epistemologies of the patriarchal Euro-American canon of scholarship and literature as well as alternative thinking found in indigenous and feminist literature to break the stranglehold of neoliberal dystopian thinking and existential brinksmanship. Using narrative and utopian guided research and community interviews, I show how grassroots activism, often led by women, is critical to building imagined futures capable of creating socially just and resource sustainable communities. Communities that are creating and feeling alternative futures now are the best hope for human survival in the impending catastrophe. Human societies must face the essential flaw that has brought them to the brink of extinction, which I argue is the subjugation of women through patriarchy. The survival of the human species hinges on a paradigm shift to matriarchy, which is not the mirror image of patriarchy, but is instead an egalitarian, gender balanced governance with matrilineal resource sharing.
The Memory War of Koreans between the Ghost of Premodern Chosŏn and the Modern Value System of Contemporary Korea
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Rhee, Youngwoo; Grove, Jairus; Political Science
The civilization of an era is a combination of contemporary elements and cultural memories. These two elements are sometimes in harmony together, but they often collide with each other in the process of new civilizations overcoming old ones. In that sense, memory war is possible at any stage of civilization since the past exists not in the material world, but in the social psyche in the form of memories. Based primarily on collective memory theory and narratology, this study aims to identify the interacting modes in which the pre-modern collective memory collides with the modern Korean value system, taking the pre-modern Chosŏn as an object of analysis. This study traces the history of contemporary Koreans’ collective memory to find the roots of the current conflicts and divisions of Korean society. It attempts to find the shape of the conflicting mechanism by quantifying the elements of conflicting memories. Finally, this study aims to identify the battlefield map of memory war through tracing the history of currently colliding memories with each other. Importantly, this study reveals the driving force of social conflicts between the old and newly emerging collective memory by mapping the contours of collective memories and values conflicting among Koreans. The results of this study will contribute to understanding the dynamic mechanisms of social conflicts as well as to expanding into the interdisciplinary research of history, sociology, and cultural anthropology.
To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth: On the Automation of Settler Colonialism in Palestine
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Musleh, Ali Hisham; Shapiro, Michael J.; Political Science
How do weapons make the colonial worlds that Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis inhabit? My dissertation attends to this question starting from an experience shared by Palestinians: that the majority of us have never encountered an Israeli settler, whether in uniform or out of uniform, who is not attached to a weapon, be it an assault rifle, a fighter jet, or a tank, etc. Taking this experience as a philosophical provocation, I subject the settler colony to a form of insurgent study exercised everyday by Palestinians that confronts the settler as contingent and transitory human-weapon ensembles. These studies are bodying and worlding. They reveal and unravel the spatialized embodiments, sensations, affective terrains, orientations and regimes of truth that weapons generate as lived world(s) of experience. In doing so, Palestinians exercise a fleshy sociality that constantly puts into question the self-evidence of the settler and the settler state.Thinking with Palestinians and alongside peoples of struggle, my dissertation is a performance in reverse engineering that moves from micrological sites, scenes and bodies of war, to macro formations of sovereignty. My itinerary focuses primarily on encounters with remote and robotic weaponry as technologies of engineering spatial and procedural distance between the settler and weapon. My task has been to show how that distance became the abyssal site from which forms of war, apartheid, and erasure emerge that consign settlers to martial automatisms that materialize and mediate their existence. The result is a work that dissects settler colonialism as a form of life inseparable from weapon power, as I also consider Palestinian rehearsals of decolonial life in the robotic age of war.
The Political Ontology of Division: An Aesthetic Theory of The Korean Division-System
(University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022) Kim , Yeonhee; Shapiro, Michael J.; Political Science
This dissertation introduces an aesthetic theory of the historical division between North and South Korea. I engage in different aesthetic approaches to Korean scholar Paik Nak-chung’s theorization of the politics between and surrounding North and South Korean relations as the “division-system.” I canvas photographic, literary, cinematic, critical, and aesthetic illustrations of the Korean division-system and argue that the Korean arts on division intervene in modes of perception and recognition that have primarily encouraged understanding relations of division through the metaphor of war and “mirror-politics.” Drawing on various neo-Kantian elaborations of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, visual perception and the role of art and media, and critically inflected readings of political subjectivities in Korea, I formulate a political ontology of division, where the relationship between North and South Koreans is framed as one of imitation, rather than of hostile opposition. This conceptual intervention aims to shed new ways of seeing and thinking about the unending Korean War. This project contests familiar modes of perception and reception of images on the Korean division and North Korea from the perspective of Korean activist artists. The works of art contemplate historical and political representations of North Korea that perpetuate ideological consciousness of division and consequently “division-images.” I argue that the critically and politically attuned arts contest ways of thinking that depend on practices of recognition and representation. They instead aim to intervene in how the image of post-war social life in Korea has become uncritically familiar to us, normalizing our relationship to the “division-system.”

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