College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item Does Interacting with Women Encourage Civic and Prosocial Attitudes? Evidence from Simulated Contact Experiments in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait(Cambridge University Press, 2023-06-22) Jones, Clavert W.Research suggests that interacting with women may encourage civic and prosocial attitudes, yet findings to date have been limited to democracies notable for their egalitarian norms. Using simulated contact experiments under controlled conditions, this article tests hypotheses for the first time in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, arguably “hard cases” given persistent norms of patriarchy and gender segregation. Yet, despite stronger contexts for male dominance, results suggest that interacting with women may indeed steer Saudi and Kuwaiti men toward more civic and other-regarding orientations, including aspects of tolerance, egalitarianism, openness, and community rule-following. These findings add much-needed comparative perspective to experimental research on mixed-gender dynamics and align with broader work highlighting the benefits of diverse interactions for groups and nations.Item For the End is a Limit: The Question Concerning the Environment(2007-06-04) Orhan, Ozguc; Conca, Ken; Butterworth, Charles E.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that Aristotle's philosophy of praxis (i.e., ethics and politics) can contribute to our understanding of the contemporary question concerning the environment. Thinking seriously about the environment today calls for resisting the temptation to jump to conclusions about Aristotle's irrelevance to the environment on historicist grounds of incommensurability or the fact that Aristotle did not write specifically on environmental issues as we know them. It is true that environmental problems are basically twentieth-century phenomena, but the larger normative discourses in which the terms "environmental" and "ecological" and their cognates are situated should be approached philosophically, namely, as cross-cultural and trans-historical phenomena that touch human experience at a deeper level. The philosophical perspective exploring the discursive meaning behind contemporary environmental praxis can reveal to us that certain aspects of Aristotle's thought are relevant, or can be adapted, to the ends of environmentalists concerned with developmental problems. I argue that Aristotle's views are already accepted and adopted in political theory and the praxis of the environment in many respects. In the first half of the dissertation, I explore the common ground between contemporary theorizing on the ethical and political aspects of environmental issues and Aristotelian ethics and politics. The second half of the dissertation locates the contemporary relevance of Aristotle in the recently emerging studies of "environmental virtue ethics" as well as "environmental citizenship" and "conservative environmentalism."