Towards Progress (Asynchronous Session)
Price of Womanhood: Gender Roles, Violence, and Market Feminization in North Korea
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alisson Rowland
The inception of bottom-up marketization in North Korea has had an ambivalent relationship with the state. A consequence of such is the feminization of the market, as North Korean women have shouldered the dual burden of housework and bread-winning. Scholars in the past have studied the impact of these social changes on family life, gender equality, and the potential for collective action. Most have been hopeful of women’s positions vis-a-vis the state, despite refugee reports on the commonality of violence against women and dismissal from state support. This paper builds off past scholarship to create an alternative view of market feminization; one positioned in attempts by the state to consolidate power, extract rents, and further the marginalization of women. It uses analysis of DPRK’s legislation and rhetoric, refugee interviews, and changes in political and economic stability over time to elucidate the relationship between women, the economy, and the state. Findings suggest tacit state acceptance of the market are higher in periods of state instability. The implications on women’s position in the DPRK are discussed in terms of social mobility and institutional support.
The Ideologies of Global Leadership: A Socio-historical Examination View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Deatra Neal, Dontá Morrison, Weina Li Chen, Donzhella Alford
Global leadership inspires and influences the thinking, attitudes, and behavior of people around the world towards achieving a common global goal (Adler, 1997; Beechler & Javidan, 2007; Osland & Bird, 2005; Sutton, Zander, & Stamm, 2013). This research study first provides an overview of the existing literature on the definition of global leadership from both micro and macro perspectives. Most studies around global leadership are limited to a single country, a small set of neighboring countries, a single organization, or top executives (Gerring, Oncel, Morrison, & Pemstein, 2019). Yet, the filed is evolving in both significance and complexity. Caligiuri argues “as the global environment evolves, so must the ideologies of global leaders (2006). As such, the authors then argue for a broader examination, using a critical theory lens, of global leadership by examining the subject from a socio-historical and power-influence relationship. Accordingly, the study identifies the limitation of global leadership ideologies and aims to expand the scope of global leadership by introducing the ideologies from socio-historical (Arkin, 1981; Holmes, 2018; Jervis, 2017; Yarhi-Milo, 2018) and religious (Herrington, 2013) perspectives. Finally, this study examines the global leadership power structure from a power-influence approach and the colonist global lens provides an accurate picture of colonialism’s influence and whose power and qualities, post-colonialism, are deemed global leadership (Mendenhall, 2018). This examination contributes to expanding the research in the field of the ideologies of global leadership and offer a needed yet unexamined perspective on the subject.
Gender and Political Economy : A Pandemic Petri Dish View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Margaret Gonzalez-Perez
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the inequities in global society, particularly those regarding gender. Feminist scholars have studied women's roles in development and international political economy since the 1960s, revealing the extent to which nations, international institutions, and the global economy are gendered. The pandemic and our responses to it, both national and international, have reinforced this gendered assignment of women's roles. Historically, women are pushed into caregiving roles, such as childcare, elder care, care of the sick, and household management. The feminization of these roles carries with it economic devaluation and denigration as "women's work." Although such work is essential to the functioning of society, it is unpaid or poorly paid. In many households, a full-time caregiver is needed and the adult (male) earning more money must remain in the paid workforce while the adult (female) earning less is assigned the caregiving role. In the US, women's employment outside the home has dropped to levels not seen in three decades. In situations where a caregiver is needed at home, women and girls are the ones chosen to withdraw from society because they are, on average, paid less than men and are thus, economically expendable. Because it highlights these inequities in society, the pandemic also provides an opportunity to re-examine gendered norms and restructure government policies to address not only inequity but need.
Arts, Employment, and the Role of a National Theater in Addressing Global Trauma: The Abbey Theatre’s "Dear Ireland" Project View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maria Elena Doyle
When the pandemic began, many theaters moved their content into the online realm, maintaining a connection to audiences by broadcasting filmed versions of earlier productions while postponing new work. Ireland’s national theater, the Abbey, took a different approach, seeking instead to engage Irish artists and Irish audiences (both broadly defined) in an act of co-creation framed as a “national conversation” about what happens next. But the "Dear Ireland" project also had an economic motivation: commissioning new work meant employment, even if temporary, for theater professionals set adrift by lockdown. The series of fictional monologues, and, later, staged readings of letters solicited from the public, represents a unique response to a moment that has made traditional live theater impossible, and it raises important questions about the economic impact of arts organizations and the responsibility of a national theater to help coalesce a national public. Only a few years previously, the Abbey’s directors had suffered the ire of Irish theater professionals over a programming strategy that made the Theatre flush but left many Irish-based practitioners un- or under-employed, in part because of a globalizing impulse in programming decisions. This paper assesses how "Dear Ireland," a specific response to the COVID moment, materialized from this ongoing debate about the responsibility of the national theater as an institution to the imaginative life and the material welfare of “Ireland” as an evolving entity in the global picture.
Nuclear Issues and Globalized Religion: How Disparate Concepts Clash and Mesh View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Brian Muzas
In the context of globalization and the 2021 review of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, I explore permissible grounds and means for war according to the religious cultural heritage of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. I identify common elements across religious traditions as well as elements unique to particular religions. I then systematically apply relevant principles to questions to nuclear technology, weapons, force posture, and war-fighting. I argue that certain frameworks, despite containing principles that seem anti-nuclear at face value, in fact pose a challenge to truly global nuclear security and technology frameworks. I also argue that certain principles not shared in common, and which which at face value seem to have nothing to do with each other, may in fact serve as functional equivalents and thereby facilitate agreements when religious cultural heritage would have seemed an obstacle rather than a catalyst.
The Impact of Inequality Trends on the Future International Order View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Allen Hammerquist
This paper analyzes the impact of three types of power inequality -- political, economic, and information -- on the future international order, specifically quality of life as measured by the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) and social stability as measured by homicide rates per capita. It identifies “red lines” of inequality at which point countries may begin to, and then finally, break into two separate societies, causing significant social problems. Two different red lines are used. “Fracture points” are levels of inequality beyond which it’s possible for a country to experience a degradation in quality of life or stability after that line is crossed, but not before. “Breaking points” are inequality red lines beyond which countries are more likely than not to see serious degradations of quality of life and security once crossed. Both of these metrics may be useful tools for conducting predictive analysis on the impact of inequality trends in various countries on their future quality of life and social stability. It finds that political inequality is the greatest predictor of changes in quality of life as measured by the HDI while economic inequality is the greatest predictor of changes in social stability as measured by the homicide rate. The paper also uses the United States as a case study and finds that there are significant implications for the US if current inequality trends continue and the US crosses the “breaking point” red lines for quality of life and social stability in the future.
