Browsing by Author "Mao, KuoRay, advisor"
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Item Open Access Green crime, space, and place: an examination of the role of environmental victims in the treadmill of crime(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Kovacs, Julia, author; Mao, KuoRay, advisor; Opsal, Tara, committee member; Tulanowski, Elizabeth, committee memberThis project uses the concepts of "place" and "space" as defined by the geography field to examine the role of environmental victims in the treadmill of crime theoretical framework. The current roles of environmental victims within the treadmill of crime are primarily complacent actors or environmental activists. This study uses in-depth interviews, critical content analysis, and geospatial mapping to further explore how environmental victims respond to environmental harm as enacted by the treadmill of crime. Through applying space and place to the analysis of environmental victims, we find a more nuanced understanding of environmental victims' responses to environmental harm. Through examining a community's sense of place, we find that the environmental victims' role is more complex than simply abiding with exploitation or pushing against it. In this case, environmental victims employed agency through this manufactured sense of place to accept further extraction in their community.Item Open Access Immigration detention and the treadmill of production: a cycle of ecological and social disorganization(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Hagan, Alexander, author; Mao, KuoRay, advisor; Malin, Stephanie, committee member; Hausermann, Heidi, committee memberConflict and group-threat theorists consistently debate what causes threat perception towards out-groups like migrants. These back-and-forth analyses focus on economic versus cultural reasoning. However, they often ignore the environmental context and political-economic structures influencing public perception. To complicate and scale these theories, this study relies on ecological degradation, characterized by Superfund sites, to determine how it influences the local economy and public perception of immigrants. Nearly one-third of United States prisons are within 3 miles of a Superfund site. Though the existing literature has pointed to the relationship between prison siting and ecological disorganization, the proximity of the immigration detention facility (IDF) to environmental harm has not been included in the broader toxic prison scholarship. This study first finds that nearly half of IDFs are located within 10 miles of a Superfund site. Next, regressing facility proximity data on county-level economic and social conditions helps understand the likelihood of their proximity to a Superfund site. A percentage point increase in a county's unemployment rate in 2017 compared to 1990 is associated with an 8 percent decrease in distance between an IDF and Superfund NPL site. Counties with a lower percentage of White Americans tend to have IDFs situated closer to Superfund NPL sites. If IDFs are treated as locally undesirable land uses (LULUs), their development relies on establishing sites of acceptance or Please in My Backyard (PIMBY) movements towards these facilities. This study finds that PIMPY movements towards immigration detention facilities near Superfund sites are motivated more by economic precarity than perceived cultural threat. This aligns with the motivation of the citizen/worker actor in the Treadmill of Production and Law (ToP/ToL) theory. The other actors within treadmill theory include corporations and the state. To test if these actors and the relationships between them apply to immigration detention, a secondary analysis is conducted to determine the association between these corporations' annual revenue and their political campaign and lobbying expenditures. Using data from 2015 to 2020, the two largest private prison and detention corporations, CoreCivic and GEO Group annual revenue and revenue from federal contracts share strong positive correlations with their political and lobbying spending. Though treadmill theory has traditionally been reserved for environmental crime, laws, and enforcement, this study shows that incarceration and detention policies are constructed by state, corporate, and labor actors to maintain accumulation and influence threat. Immigration detention is used to reestablish the state's legitimacy through the allure of jobs in areas harmed by environmental crimes and economic precarity. These associations further reveal the cyclical relationship between ecological and social disorganization in counties harmed by environmental degradation in the United States.Item Open Access One country, two perspectives: social control through news media framing during the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Potter, Chelsey, author; Mao, KuoRay, advisor; Nowacki, Jeffrey, committee member; Long, Ziyu, committee memberIn 2014, Chinese citizens living in mainland China and Hong Kong received different narratives and interpretations of the Umbrella Movement's events based on the administrative regions they lived in and the news sources they had access to. State-controlled and market-based media outlets purposively manipulated frames of both ongoing and historical events of civil unrest in Hong Kong and China to shape citizens' perceptions of political events and the formation of particular identities and political behaviors. It is critical to understand the news frames employed by the media outlets with different political orientations in mainland China and Hong Kong to create an analytical framework that may contribute to the study of social control in post-colonial and authoritarian political settings, which may be applied to future civil unrest events across the world, such as the 2019 Hong Kong and the 2021 U.S. Capitol unrests. Using NVivo, a qualitative content analysis of 499 articles was conducted to identify common frames employed by ideologically different news media outlets in Hong Kong and China. The findings of this study revealed three unique narrative frames expressed to the public regarding the same event. This broadly resulted in Pro-Establishment, Pro-Status-Quo, and Pro-Universal Suffrage perspectives. The Pro-Establishment perspective is non-sympathetic to Hong Kong's sovereignty or dissent and movements against the Chinese Communist Party. The Pro-Universal Suffrage perspective is sympathetic to protesters, supports the movement against mainland China's authority over suffrage, and reports cases of unjust persecution of activists. The Pro-Status-Quo perspective is concerned with the economic and social stability of Hong Kong during the movement, wanting to maintain the homeostasis of economic growth. The selective framing of protest movements represents the state's attempt to impose social control through criminal selectivity, which fits the protest paradigm and moral entrepreneur perspectives in cultural criminology and frame analysis. A framework to analyze media coverage of social unrest in different political and social contexts is included in the appendix.