Sounding Presidential: Frame Creation in the Obama Administration

Among the often-cited powers of the presidency is the power of the pulpit. Presidents attempt to influence Congress directly and indirectly through their rhetoric and its influence on national policy debates. This includes the power to shape debates through the use of frames. While much is known about framing, no past study has attempted to document all frames utilized by a policy entrepreneur in his attempt to shape the policy debate. Comprehensive understanding of frame creation is necessary to understand what frames persist and how frames are used in policymaking. This study identifies how one president, Barack Obama, framed domestic policy issues in speeches early in his administration. Identifying frames the president uses provides insights into this president's attempts to set the public agenda. The findings of this study suggest that Obama's use of specific frames is highly idiosyncratic, but that these idiosyncratic frames coalesce around identifiable policy areas, particularly macroeconomic policy. This study provides insight into how one president attempts to both frame and set his domestic policy agenda.     

The Sherrington–Cushing connection: A bench to bedside collaboration at the dawn of the twentieth century

ABSTRACT

British physiologist Charles Sherrington (1857–1952) and American neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing (1869–1939) were seminal figures in the history of neuroscience. The two came from different worlds, one laboratory-based and the other largely clinical. Their scientific intersection, beginning in July 1901, provides a glimpse into a nascent form of “bench to bedside” collaboration, which carried with it the potential to extend the arm of neurophysiological experimentation from Sherrington’s laboratory to Cushing’s operatory. I reviewed extensive primary source materials archived at Yale University School of Medicine Library. Sherrington viewed Cushing’s bedside work as an opportunity, in humans, to extend his bench-side physiological observations on higher primates, at times almost directing Cushing in the clinic. Cushing would indeed take Sherrington’s observations on apes and extend them to his patients, and the work would eventually overturn the prevailing notion that the motor and sensory cortex were intermixed across the Rolandic fissure.     

EXPLORING THE CONNECTIONS: LAND TENURE, SOCIAL IDENTITIES, AND AGROBIODIVERSITY PRACTICES IN GHANA

This article employs qualitative and quantitative evidence from primary social research in Ghana to examine the link between land tenure security and social identities (of wealth/income and gender), and how they condition farmers' investments in practices that contribute to the rehabilitation of tree biodiversity (agrobiodiversity). Statistical analyses of the significance of the effects of farmers' de jure land tenure security regimes, and income and gender on agrobiodiversity practices were inconclusive. The conventional causation link between investments and more secure formal land tenure rights, for instance, was confirmed in investments in four out of eight agrobiodiversity practices. Testimonial-based evidence of farmers provided a clearer concept of land tenure security and an explanatory framework about the interacting and complex effects of income and gender on land tenure security. The theoretical and empirical argument developed from these testimonies portrays land tenure as embodying negotiated social processes, influenced by gender and income of individuals, whereby breadth of land rights, duration of rights over land, and assurance of rights are established, sustained, enhanced or changed through a variety of strategies to shape tenure security. These processes – tenure building and renewal processes – are critical because all farmers have lingering anxiety about land tenure rights, even among farmers with more secure formal rights. Investments are made in agrobiodiversity practices as a strategy to strengthen land tenure security and thereby minimize anxiety, leading to reverse causation effects between land tenure, social identities, and investments.     

Financial Globalization,Local Debt Markets and New State Financial Activism in Middle-income Countries

Since the global financial crisis of 2008–09, there has been a renewed interest in the role of the state in processes of financial development and globalization. This article explores new forms of state economic activity via the development of debt capital markets in Southeast Asia, specifically Indonesia and Malaysia. It suggests that the expanding profile of various state-controlled entities in local capital markets constitutes a new form of state financial activism responsive to (upper) middle-class consumption preferences such as modern infrastructure, urban housing and low-risk investments. This activism highlights state agency and complicates the propositions of the emergent literature on state capitalism and financial de-risking that focuses on increasingly close alignment of the interests of states and international portfolio investors. Accordingly, the authors caution against unilinear conceptions of the state in which activism is primarily geared towards accommodating the preferences of international investors. The article posits that states are actively trying to establish new market logics for the benefit of their domestic middle classes via the development of domestic capital markets, and that the emergent role of middle-income country (upper) middle classes as financial consumers reconfigures processes of state-managed financialization.     

‘F&#% autonomy’: Houellebecq,Submission, and Enlightenment’s ‘last dismaying dregs’

ABSTRACT

This article examines the evolution of Houellebecq’s treatment of History across the span of his novels. Focusing in particular on The Elementary Particles, The Map and the Territory, and Submission, I explore a gradual but discernible movement away from a broadly Comtean understanding of historical destiny, which anticipated the decline of theology and metaphysics and the rise of positivism. Over the course of Houellebecq’s novels, this account of historical evolution yields to a circular rendering of history in which theology and metaphysics alternate as religious and secular dispensations trade power. While The Elementary Particles imagines the techno-utopian fantasy of a genetically perfected humanity, Submission abandons these Comtean-inspired utopian ambitions for a religiously grounded social order maintained under Islam. Crucially, I contend that François’ journey towards conversion in Submission, foreshadowed by the character Houellebecq’s conversion to Catholicism in The Map and the Territory, may be read as a narrative of the West’s exhaustion with Enlightenment and the burdens of personal autonomy. Submission is a novel that doubts the positivist pretention that humanity can move beyond religion and metaphysics, and instead suggests that metaphysics and its attendant doctrine of individual rights and freedom inevitably collapses back into theology.