The ‘affective security curriculum’: breeding JBs through the marriage of the academic and the jingoistic

How does the US recruit its citizen spies used to maintain and proliferate coercive power? I use an interdisciplinary approach and a framework of affect theory to argue that there is an ‘affective security curriculum’ (ASC) that assists in explaining the tendencies towards jingoism used in the recruitment and indoctrination of students – as future security workers – in certain academic disciplines. The ASC is precisely the phenomenon that works to construct this expert class and is produced by order words, the most crucial of which is ‘terrorism’, as well as larger cultural norms linked to neoliberalism that have achieved near total dominance since the 1980s. The ASC works by intensifying the (in)ability to act for those in its domain. The necessity of linguistically proficient security workers to the US’ hegemonic project makes this a question of considerable political importance. The ASC is a different approach to answering questions of how US hegemony is maintained. Whereas positivist research agendas, such as content analysis, and postpositivist approaches, such as critical discourse analysis, certainly have their uses (and to which my notion of ASC is indebted), paradigms such as these fail to focus on the engendering processes at work vis-à-vis the expert class, without which the discursive frames such methodologies analyse would simply dissipate. My overarching purpose in this paper is to develop the concept of the ASC, its quiddity, and to present at least an incipient methodology for analysing its critical duties. As my primary intent is to introduce and conceptualize the theoretical framework of the affective security curriculum, the applied segment of this endeavour will be relatively brief – and is designed as a primer for further research.     

Public Relations as a Maturing Discipline: An Update on Research Networks

Pasadeos, Renfro and Hanily (1999) investigated the public relations literature's most-cited works in the 1990s and identified research networks. In the present study we expand that work by examining public relations scholarship ten years later. We identify current authors and their publication outlets, taxonomize most-cited works, and draw a co-citation network. Further, we compare current findings with those of ten years earlier and speculate on the state of public relations as a scholarly discipline.     

The Student Watershed Research Project (SWRP): collecting watershed data for use by resource management agencies

From 1992 to 1994, Saturday Academy and the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology instituted the pilot phase of a long-term monitoring program called the Student Watershed Research Project (SWRP). The SWRP program was developed to create and maintain collaboration among eighth through twelfth grade teachers and students, scientists, businesses, governmental agencies, and community members which would couple environmental education with the collection of high quality, reproducible watershed health data.The original authors of this paper set out to evaluate the impacts of the SWRP program in terms of changes in educational attitudes of participants and collection of accurate data. Findings demonstrate that assuring accuracy of student collected data was challenging, that teachers and students benefited greatly from a hands-on research approach to science education, and that such an approach would be difficult without the support of a program like SWRP.The SWRP program is entering its seventh year in the Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington metropolitan areas with approximately half of the pilot phase participants still involved. A Quality Assurance Project Plan has been developed to assure data accuracy. Evaluation student science education attitudes documents improved results on a yearly basis.