Oct 29, 2017 | 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM | Loft 2

Katrina Lacher, PhD

“Diamond Pipeline: The Intersection of Environmental and Indigenous Protest”

Examines the protests (and counter-actions) against a proposed pipeline that would run from Cushing, Oklahoma, to Memphis, Tennessee. A Valero Energy Corporation project, this $900 million, 440-mile pipeline traverses sacred Native American sites as well as 500 waterways (lakes, streams, rivers, etc.). It will address several key questions: How did the events at Standing Rock affect the actions and arguments of both those opposed to the pipeline (indigenous activists, environmentalists, and some residents along the proposed route) and those for the pipeline (Valero Energy Corporation, Plains All American Pipeline, and state elected officials)? What can the evolution of the Standing Rock protests, together with the Diamond Rock actions, tell us about the potential for collaboration between indigenous activists (such as Bold Oklahoma and the American Indian Movement) and environmental activists (such as Arkansas Water Guardians, the Oklahoma Chapter of the Sierra Club, and Earth First!)? How has governmental reaction (local, state, and federal) changed since the installment of the new presidential administration?

Joseph Tohill, PhD

"Consumer Activism in the Age of Trump: A Historical Perspective"

Explores the proliferation of consumer boycotts in recent years, especially in response to the election of Donald Trump, which spawned a wave of anti-Trump boycotts and counter-boycotts. Social media has helped connect political aroused consumers as never before. The anti-Trump boycott has been spearheaded by campaigns like Grab Your Wallet, which has attracted considerable grassroots support and media attention for its campaign against retailers carrying Ivanka Trump products, and Sleeping Giants, which went after companies advertising on Brietbart News, the alt-right media platform associated with Trump adviser, Steve Bannon. The recent Trump phenomena notwithstanding, consuming with a conscience—using individual and collective purchasing power for political ends—has been on the rise over past few decades, and is among the fastest growing forms of political participation worldwide. This paper places the recent upsurge in social-media driven consumer activism in a historical perspective, exploring how consumer activism has helped to make a more just society in the past and how it can continue to do so today. It provides a critical exploration of the limits and possibilities of consumer activism, in both its past and present forms.

Nicholas Napolio

Administrative Action against Sexual Orientation Discrimination: A Study of the EEOC

How and why did the EEOC expand employment discrimination protections to cover sexual orientation without an explicit legislative mandate? This project explores competing theories of public bureaucracy, and develops a theory of bureaucratic federalism that examines the interplay between state and federal agencies with overlapping jurisdictions.  Prior methodologies are replicated with EEOC data to present a novel analysis of agency behavior and accountability.  I conclude that the EEOC is a differentiated political actor that expanded Title VII through subregulatory procedures to compel compliance without securing prior external support, and in furtherance of its own institutional aims with influence from both the constitutional branches and state-level analogues. Bureaucratic behavior in the American political system is generally idealized as the actions of a machine-like staff that administers the law in a morally neutral manner.  Ideal bureaucrats are seen as functional experts in a network of institutional functions.  Weber wrote that bureaucracy “is devoted to impersonal and functional purposes,” and “demands the personally detached and strictly objective expert.” Despite this idealized conception of the public bureaucracy, bureaucratic discretion is ubiquitous in American politics. Bureaucrats often act politically on their own prerogatives and in furtherance of their own institutional aims. The literature disagrees as to how autonomous or independent executive agencies are.  Principal-agent theory posits that agencies are largely responsible to the elected branches, whereas bureaucratic autonomy theory and agency avoidance theory postulate that agencies act outside the bounds of the elected branches’ wants.  This project reconciles and evaluates those theories.  To study the EEOC’s behavior, this project relies mainly on qualitative data; however, it utilizes quantitative data to test the relationship between the EEOC and other governmental bodies. I end by comparing EEOC’s interpretation to DOJ’s on transgender rights in bathrooms to explain why DOJ rescinded its guidance post-Trump, but EEOC did not.