Browsing by Author "Haberski, Raymond J."

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Afraid of AIDS: AIDS Panic and Gay Discrimination through State of Indiana v. Herb Robbins
    (2024-09) Gackle, Dalton; Haberski, Raymond J.; Guiliano, Jennifer; Minor, Kyle
    In 1988 Herb J. Robbins, a 17-year-old male prostitute, murdered prominent Indianapolis attorney Donald L. Jackson. Robbins then used a “fear of AIDS” defense in court to escape murder charges. This defense highlighted the discrimination faced by gay men and the heightened fear of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) then a little-understood disease. This story fits into larger discussions about AIDS and our cultural and governmental response to it. For Indiana’s population in the 1980s, a fear of AIDS meant a fear of gay men, as gay men were the first people identified with AIDS – in 1981 and 1982 AIDS was known as GRID: gay-related immunodeficiency disease. This opened the door for discrimination in all facets of society – including in the courts – leading to the successful ‘fear of AIDS’ defense in 1988. That ingrained discrimination has had lasting effects on Indiana’s residents and especially on its gay communities including, but not limited to, the criminalization of persons with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). In 1985, many states, including Indiana responded to HIV in the blood supply by closing blood banks and passing laws making it illegal for people with HIV/AIDS to donate. The Food and Drug Administration, as well, banned gay or bisexual men from donating blood for fear they might have HIV/AIDS. Indiana also passed a law requiring people with HIV to notify any potential sexual partner about their HIV positive status. The laws criminalizing people living with HIV were created in direct response to a fear of AIDS in the blood supply, which was only amplified by Ryan White’s infamous story. Connecting gay and bisexual men in Indiana’s HIV laws and the FDA’s policy on HIV/AIDS only further stigmatized gay men and people living with HIV by associating them with criminal activity, including the criminalization of Donald Jackson when Herb Robbins testified that he killed Jackson for fear he could have gotten AIDS from him. This paper seeks to understand 1) Why was Indianapolis a place where this “fear of AIDS” defense could succeed? and 2) How does this defense reflect broader discrimination and stigmatization directed toward the gay community?
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    Black Women as the Critical Link Between Traditional Institutions and Minoritized Communities
    (2024-12) Murphy, Stacia N.; Scheurich, James Joseph; Hyatt, Susan B.; Steensland, Brian; Haberski, Raymond J.
    Poverty plagues many U.S. urban communities, particularly Black and brown populations. Gaps in wealth accumulation continue to widen between whites and Blacks, and neighborhoods are increasingly segregated by race and income with Black and brown populations more frequently living in concentrated poverty. Unfortunately, these factors combine to negatively influence other quality of life outcomes such as economic mobility, food security, health disparities and medical costs, infant and maternal health, life spans, education, discriminatory policing practices, and environmental health issues, factors that have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, development continues to play an integral role in the way that urban cities attempt to solve their problems. In Indianapolis, the primary practitioners of urban development are housed within several key intuitions, and ultimately, typically held by white men or women, who make economic decisions that shape the lives of Indianapolis residents. Unfortunately, these institutions are often disconnected from populations at the margins and, thus, community engagement is the mechanism through which institutions attempt to connect with these communities. Consequently, it is common to see individuals who look like the populations that institutions want to serve in these positions. These individuals can be thought of as bridges between these communities and the institutions in which they work. Utilizing Black Feminist Thought (BFT) and Critical Race Theory (CRT), this study explores the lived experiences, knowledges, and practices associated with the role of bridge between institutions and community with a focus solely on Black women in these roles. Through textual analysis of transcribed interviews based in grounded theory with some mix of deductive and inductive coding, this study will help us better understand local perspectives about community engagement specifically and urban development more generally.
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    Christian Personalism and Human Rights Prior to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Philosophical and Theological Exploration
    (2024-12) Williams, Andrew Lloyd; King, David P.; Badertscher, Katherine; Haberski, Raymond J.; Steensland, Brian
    The high tide of modern transnational institution-building occurred in the immediate aftermath of two profound crises: the Great Depression and World War II. No document better captures the aspirations for a post-war era of greater human welfare than the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The UDHR elevated the rights of individual humans above the doctrine of state-sovereignty and embodied the burgeoning view that states have a responsibility to secure the welfare and rights of all persons. A “new” school of human rights historiography has shown that Christian personalists were among the few advocates of “human rights” in this period. Moreover, Jacques Maritain and Charles Malik, prominent Christian personalists, were directly involved in United Nations efforts to codify universal human rights. Yet new-school historiography has over-corrected for “classical” historiography’s penchant to rely heavily on arcane philosophical and theological developments dating centuries and even millennia into the past. New-school historiography deracinates Christian personalism form its nineteenth century forebearers: philosophical personalism, phenomenology, existentialism, and neo-classicism. It also underplays the orthogonal character of a movement that aspired to create a third way between established polarities. The very term “personalism” connotes a middle position between individualism and collectivism: individual human beings have inviolable dignity and are inherently relational. As such, the current picture of the advent of human rights discourse in the mid-twentieth century is incomplete. By connecting Christian personalism to its nineteenth-century philosophical roots and contextualizing its views of the relationship between the individual and the state in the crisis milieu of the transwar era, I fill an important gap in the history of “human rights” discourse in the buildup to the UDHR.
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    Course of Life: A Transformative Design Inquiry into the Modern Academic CV
    (2023-08) Ganci, Aaron M.; Wheeler, Rachel; Dombrowski, Lynn; Hong, Youngbok; Haberski, Raymond J.
    This project addresses the growing issue of burnout among U.S. higher education faculty. An inquiry into the causes of faculty burnout points to weaknesses within the American higher education system that have been exacerbated by a network of external and internal pressures. From the outside, institutions are being pressured to act more like corporations and embrace neoliberal values. At the same time, the societal pressure to democratize American institutions by asking them to become inclusive in their policies and practices is felt acutely in academia. These aims—productivity and inclusive democratization– are often in tension in academia, with overseeing bodies like trustees and legislatures prizing measurable, economic productivity, and faculty and administrative bodies prioritizing gender and racial inclusivity. There is one place where all these pressures play out: the academic CV. The CV is an ideal lens through which to examine these dynamics as it struggles to link faculty, administrators, universities, and funding agencies, in their attempt to convey both neoliberal and inclusive values. Many stakeholders trying to construct different narratives leads to an inherent tension and leaves no one satisfied. To make matters worse, the growing use of digital analytic software in place of traditional CVs has led to an imbalance, with neoliberal success indicators overshadowing inclusive ones. This disparity negatively impacts faculty wellbeing, especially faculty in underrepresented demographics, as their sense of personal achievement is diminished under these criteria and raises the question: how might the CV evolve to balance the needs of all of its stakeholders? Doing so may ease some of the tension within academic life and enhance faculty wellbeing. This study employs a transformative research design to explore whether the CV can be reformed to rebalance the tensions within academia. The mixed-method qualitative study draws on interviews and participatory co-design activities, and a constructive design process to explore divergent ways the CV might evolve to benefit faculty more. After evaluating the designs through transformative criteria, new insights are developed about the nature of modern academic work and spheres of action that can lead to faculty wellbeing.
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    HBO and the Holocaust: Conspiracy, the historical film, and public history at Wannsee
    (2016-12) Johnson, Nicholas K.; Haberski, Raymond J.; Carstensen, Thorsten; Cramer, Kevin
    In 2001, Home Box Office aired Conspiracy, a dramatization of the infamous Wannsee Conference organized by Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann. The Conference took place in Berlin on 20 January 1942 and was intended to coordinate the Final Solution by asserting the dominance of Heydrich and the SS over other governmental departments. The surviving Wannsee Protocol stands as one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the Third Reich’s genocidal intent and emblematic of its shift from mass shootings in the occupied East to industrial-scale murder. Conspiracy, written by Loring Mandel and directed by Frank Pierson, is an unusual historical film because it reenacts the Wannsee Conference in real time, devoid of the usual clichés prevalent throughout Holocaust films. It also engages with historiographical arguments and makes a few of its own. This thesis argues that dramatic film has been relatively ignored by the public history field and uses Conspiracy as a case study for how dramatic film and television can be used to further the goals of public history, especially that of making complex and difficult histories accessible to wide audiences. Grounded in a thorough reading of script drafts, production notes, HBO meeting minutes, and correspondence, this thesis examines Conspiracy from the vantage point of scholarship in public history, film studies, and Holocaust studies. It details the film’s production history, the sources used for the film, the claims it makes, and advocates for dramatic film as a powerful public history outlet. Ultimately, this thesis argues that Conspiracy is exactly the type of historical film that historians should be making themselves.
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    The Legacy, Life, and Lynching of George Tompkins
    (2022-10) Brinker, Haley Renee; Shrum, Rebecca K.; Haberski, Raymond J.; Kelly, Jason M.
    In 1922, George Tompkins was found dead in an isolated area of Riverside Park. Though the media and evidence present pointed to Tompkins having been the victim of a lynching, the official ruling was that of suicide. Almost a century later, a multiracial, driven group of individuals set out to memorialize Tompkins as a victim of lynching and challenge the ruling that he had taken his own life. In discussing deaths such as George Tompkins’, it is vital to remind oneself that the victims of lynchings were more than just statistics in the ongoing epidemic of anti-Black violence that has permeated the history of the United States. By employing a victim-centered methodology, we can examine the lives of these victims before the worst happened to them and recognize the three-dimensionality of their lived experiences. This work examines the lived experience, lynching death, and memorialization process one hundred years later of George Tompkins. In understanding the means by which he lived, died, and was remembered, we can better understand the ways that this process can play a role in multiple contemporary communities.
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    Playing patsy: film as public history and the image of enslaved African American women in post-civil rights era cinema
    (2017-12) Mitchell, Amber N.; Haberski, Raymond J.
    The goal of this thesis is to understand the relationship between the evolving representations of African American women in post-Civil Rights era films about the Transatlantic slave trade; the portraits these images present of black women and their history; and how these films approach the issues of difficult heritage and re-presenting atrocity in entertainment. Film shapes the ways in which we understand the past, leaving a lifelong impression about historical events and the groups involved. By analyzing the stories, directorial processes, and the public responses to four films of 20th and 21st centuries focused on the controversial historical topic of American chattel slavery and its representation of the most underrepresented and misunderstood victims of the Peculiar Institution, this work will argue that, when supplemented with historiography and criticism rooted in historical thinking, cinematic depictions of the past make history more accessible to the public and serve as a form of public memory, shaping the way the public thinks about our collective past.