Melissa Wright - US grants

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
GEOGRAPHY AND REGIONAL SCIENCE PROGRAM

RESEARCH AWARD
ABSTRACT

BCS-0215522
Melissa Wright
Pennsylvania State University

Economic globalization proceeds through a dynamic co-ordination between global economic activities and the localized, non-market relationships found in civil society. Nevertheless, even as more scholars emphasize the significance of local civic institutions for global economic processes, the dominant views articulated in globalization studies recreate the bias that global entities are immune to the influence of local institutions. This bias is particularly found in the literature on multinational firms, which frequently are portrayed as globalization's principal agents, operating beyond the influence of local practices. As a result, such studies fail to consider how local organizations affect multinational corporations and their impact around the world. This research project will investigate how multinational firms and local non-profit organizations establish common ground for action through the creation of joint civic projects. These projects fall under the rubric of "corporate citizenship", which is a concept increasingly employed by corporations to describe their funding for and reliance upon local civic institutions to meet their human resource and technology needs. Despite the proliferation of references to "corporate citizenship" in the business press, this concept remains understudied and its meaning for the local civic domain is virtually unexplored. The research will be carried out in a two-year case study in Ciudad Juarez (Mexico). Three sets of questions guide the research: 1) How do corporate requirements for human resources and technological development contribute to the exercise of corporate citizenship in Ciudad Juarez? 2) How do local interpretations of gender and nationality mediate the formation of the corporate-civic alliances that constitute the practice of corporate citizenship? 3) How do these alliances affect the institutional practices and objectives of their participating organizations? Ciudad Juarez has been chosen as the study are for several reasons. It is the birthplace of the maquiladora industry (the export-processing factories in Mexico) and is representative of many Third World industrial enclaves where multinational firms seek to upgrade the labor force and social infrastructure through civic activity. The city's export-processing maquiladora industry has increased its civic participation with educational and community-based organizations over the last five years. This increased corporate activity in the Ciudad Juarez civic sector mirrors a global trend in the expansion of multinational corporate citizenship across Third World regions.

The project will investigate not only what decision-makers in the corporate and civic sectors are doing, but also how their motives change through interaction with other organizations and how such changes affect the behavior of their institutions. The research methods, therefore, are qualitative and involve both open-ended interviews and participant observation. The qualitative techniques will be combined with archival research to put the fieldwork data into a larger theoretical and empirical context. These methods will investigate how leaders in corporate and non-profit organizations make they decisions they do, how they implement and modify them and how their stated intentions sometimes diverge from their actions. While qualitative methods do not lend themselves to formal hypothesis testing, they will amplify and enrich the results derived from quantitative investigations that link corporate behavior with civic action. Further, they will provide valuable insight into processes touched upon but not investigated by quantitative studies of the maquiladora industry and its impact on the regional development of Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico border.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): [unreadable] [unreadable] The proposed studies will investigate non-conventional roles for voltage-gated ion channels in nervous system development. While voltage-gated sodium channels are well known for their roles in regulating events that occur on a millisecond time scale, such action potential generation, recent studies suggest they have much longer lasting effects on developmental processes. Previous studies demonstrate that the voltage-gated sodium channel navl .6a regulates development of ventrally-projecting secondary motor axons in zebrafish embryos. Upon knock-down of navl .6a using antisense morpholinos that bind scnSaa mRNA (which encodes the nav1.6a protein) and prevent translation of nav1.6a protein, ventrally-projecting motor axons appear branched and defasciculated and often turn before reaching their ventral targets. Interestingly, expression studies suggest that scnSaa mRNA is not expressed in ventrallyprojecting secondary motor neurons, the cells affected by loss of navl .6a. Mosaic embryos in which navl .6a is knocked down in individual cells or small groups of cells in the embryo confirmed that motor axons develop abnormally when navl .6a is knocked down in spinal cord cells other than the secondary motor neurons themselves. These results demonstrate non-cell autonomous effects of navl .6a on nervous system development, suggesting new roles for voltage-gated sodium channels. The overall goal of the proposed study is to investigate the role of navl .6a in development of ventrally-projecting secondary motor neuron axons. The three specific aims of this study are: (l)determine when defects in ventrally-projecting axons of secondary motor neurons first appear; (2)identify scnSaa-expressing cells in the developing zebrafish spinal cord; and (3)test the hypothesis that the scnSaa-expressing cells mediating effects on ventral motor axon branching and fasciculation are glia and/or spinal interneurons. The study proposes to use timelapse microscopy to determine when defects in ventral motor axons first become apparent upon knock-down of navl .6a by antisense morpholinos. In situ hybridization and immunocytochemistry will colocalize scnSaa mRNA with markers of identified spinal interneurons and glia to identify the spinal cord cells that express scnSaa mRNA during development. Furthermore, generation of embryos with mosaic embryos will be used to determine in which cells navl .6a acts to regulate ventral motor axon development. Relevance: Mice lacking Navl .6a develop dystonias and neurodegeneration, similar to human dystonias. The results of these studies have the potential to further our understanding of disease mechanisms involving Nav1.6. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

Long a space of cultural and economic convergence, the border between Mexico and the United States has increasingly become a place of division and suspicion. This transformation has resulted from the interrelated national security concerns of the Mexican and U.S. governments regarding immigration, drug trafficking, and the growth of criminal organizations. Both the Mexican and U.S. governments have chosen to address these concerns through "militarization" -- the inclusion of military ideology, tactics, technologies, and force in domestic governance and policing. This research project will investigate how militarized approaches to border governance and territorial control reconfigure everyday life for residents of the borderland. The investigators' objectives are to study how border militarization alters the form, function, and meaning of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands for resident communities and to examine how militarization is shaped by border landscapes on both sides of the divide. Special attention will be given to militarization of the borderlands as expressed and evident in the region's landscape as well as how federal militarization as a governance strategy affects the everyday experience of mobility, rights, belonging, and environment among diverse border populations. A multidisciplinary team with scholars from the U.S., Mexico, and Canada will conduct this study in two binational border metropolises of El Paso, Texas-Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua and Nogales, Arizona-Nogales, Sonora. As strategic points in federal militarization strategies, these cities regularly experience an increased presence of law enforcement as well as intensifying surveillance, interrogation, and searches. They also share some of the longest histories of joint families, communities, and economies along the border. The investigators will engage in archival research, open-ended interviews, and focus groups, all of which will be designed to investigate the multiple intersections of militarization and landscape and to mine the complexity of these intersections within daily life.

The project will enhance basic knowledge about the processes of border militarization, its impacts on residents, and its interaction with landscape. In addition to enhancing fundamental understanding, it will provide information and insights for the architects and implementers of militarization strategies who seek to rectify problems created in earlier manifestations. It also will benefit citizens' organizations, environmental organizations, and social justice groups as they react to current policies and try to shape future ones. Results will be disseminated in both English and in Spanish in academic and policy-oriented journals and will be presented at appropriate international and regional conferences.

This doctoral dissertation research project examines how gender dynamics guide the state's public response to violence that occurs within the private space of the home. The spatial distinction of public and private space is critical to the conceptualization of intimate partner violence as well as to policing practices as a matter of public security and citizen protections. The project's objective is to study the connections between public space and citizenship, the state and its role in addressing the security needs of its citizens as well as the experiences of victims in this process. Three key questions guide this research: 1) How do gendered dynamics affect policing strategies regarding intimate partner violence? 2) How does the gendering of this policing affect the experience and practice of citizenship in relation to public space and security? 3) How does the gendering of policing strategies affect women's experience as citizens in particular places and times? While critical scholarship on terrorism and violence have recently been addressing the spatiality of policing, absent from this literature is an understanding of the gendered dimensions of policing at a more local scale. With a specific focus on the policing of intimate partner violence, this research will address this gap by providing new insights into the gendered and spatial dynamics of policing strategies that affect women's access to public space and citizenship rights. Further, this project will contribute to scholarly debates on policing and governance, private space and policing, and policing and exclusion. Lastly, this research advances understandings of how political processes affect women's position as citizens within the state by examining the current relationship between the state and victims, policing practices within the US and the impact of these processes on the lived experiences of victims. This research will be conducted via a qualitative study in central Pennsylvania.

In addition to academic dissemination via geographic and feminist-based scholarly journals, results from this research will be disseminated in formats accessible to non-academic communities as they address socially-relevant community policing strategies. Project results will be presented in public symposia and results will be made available in reports to local and state community organizations as well as the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence in such a way that they will be able to make on an impact on policy-making and policing practice regarding intimate partner violence. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this project will provide support to enable a promising student to establish an independent research career while providing timely research to address the issue of intimate partner violence.

This doctoral dissertation research project will investigate the role of social service organizations within the broader dynamics of neighborhoods that have experienced high levels of illegal activity, especially the sale and distribution of illegal drugs. Whereas previous research on illicit activities in urban neighborhoods often have been framed by the larger literature on the global drug trade and the "War on Drugs" approach to policing, this project adopts an approach that strives to understand the full range of individual and organizational interactions and relationships in a community. The theoretical foundations of this project seek to describe and understand the complex social networks of support, reciprocity, power, and violence that include the drug trade and a broad range of related activities. That work has explored how individuals engage in informal economic activities as well as how they function as community members in other ways. The research project supported by this award will focus on the ways in which social service organizations function to offer programming that works to quell the drug economy, often through a range of job readiness programs that explicitly transition people from informal and illicit work to formal employment. Working in a neighborhood in south Philadelphia that has had high drug-related crime levels, the doctoral student will conduct interviews with employees and volunteers associated with these organizations in order to develop a deeper understanding of the external pressures on the illegal economy that are situated immediately in the neighborhood. Interviews will include questions about the programming, mission, goals, and measures of success as well as the experiences of organizations in the community, the ways programs are received by target populations, and perceptions of the drug trade and its role in the community. Information gathered through these interviews will be integrated with information previously gathered through ethnographic research and oral histories in order to develop more comprehensive, multi-dimensional knowledge about the complex interactions of social service organizations and others interacting in the study site and similar communities.

This project will provide a range of new theoretical perspectives. It will contribute to the growing body of scholarship that illustrates the connections linking economy, community, and identity across scales. It will help refine perspectives that consider the decision-making strategies of drug economy participants at the level of household and community relationships by assessing how they make meaningful decisions about themselves, their families, their communities, and their cities. It also will provide new insights regarding how social service programs are interpreted and used by those engaged in illicit activities and those with whom they interact. Project results will assist community organizations in addressing drug-related issues in their neighborhoods, thereby contributing new information and insights that may improve their outreach and educational efforts. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.