Agriculture remains one of the most contentious issues in the ongoing negotiations of the World Trade Organization, with serious implications for food security and the livelihood of farmers in the developing world. This dissertation examines the formation of agricultural trade policy and the politics and arguments surrounding it within the context of India’s position in the World Trade Organization (WTO). The research has two components. A set of archival documents relating to India’s participation in a WTO institution called the Trade Policy Review (TPR) was analyzed. In addition, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with a number of Indian experts and officials involved in agricultural trade policy. This project suggests a number of tentative conclusions with implications for political geography and particularly for the literature on policy transfer, neoliberalism, and Neo-Gramscian models of international relations. First, it finds that the WTO Secretariat plays a key role in promoting neoliberal ideas within the TPR institution and that the forms of argumentation used here can help to explain the resiliency of neoliberalism in the face of policy failure. Second, it shows that the Indian government has not accepted neoliberal policy models wholesale, but has exercised autonomy, selectivity, and adaptation in its liberalization programs. Third, it demonstrates that neoliberal ideas do not always favor the positions of developed countries. Finally, it supports the narrative of increasing developing country bargaining in the WTO and shows that the Indian representatives bolster their arguments by articulating them as being in the interest of the developing world in general.

Nicaragua has undergone several major upheavals in the last three decades that have fundamentally shaped and reshaped society. The Sandinista government (1979-1990) ended with the election of Violeta Chamorro in 1990 that ushered in 16 years of neoliberal government. In 2006 former president and leader of the current Sandinista Party, Daniel Ortega, was reelected to the presidency. At every step, education has been an essential component of the struggle to shape the state according to certain ideological precepts. Each administration has produced its own educational reforms that are ostensibly in the name of improving quality, but more precisely about developing schools consistent with the philosophy of the ruling classes. In this study, I seek to examine the Nicaraguan educational system as a site of multiple global and local processes that interact to produce lived experiences for teachers and students in and out of the classroom. In examining the most recent iteration of educational reforms and their effects in the communities of San Marcos, Estelí and Bluefields, I ask the questions: What role or function does education play in society? How does it “work” to (in most cases) normalize certain values, ideas and beliefs? And what forms do resistance and acquiescence to these processes take in an educational system like that of Nicaragua that has numerous internal and external forces attempting to condition it in contrasting ways? Major themes that emerge from the research include the prominence of social, historical and geographical factors that people use to fashion their language and perceptions of the world and the dominant influence of local power relations in conditioning people’s behaviors and actions. Analysis of responses to the current educational reform efforts demonstrates that local social connections and networks are paramount to studies of ideology and hegemony. The overriding message from Nicaragua is that chronic underfunding and constant reform have weakened the ability of the educational system to disseminate ideas, beliefs and values, particularly when they run counter to those of other powerful institutions in society. / text

Even though aid is a cornerstone of the Egyptian-American relationship, there is little research about economic aid's role in achieving US objectives, especially in producing policy alignment that would normalize Israel. Likewise, an under-studied derivative question is how the stipulation to maintain peace with Israel affected the (1) economic and structural processes of aligning Egypt with the American vision of `market-democracy' and (2) Egyptian critical assessments of the (non-military) effects associated with alignment into the American orbit? I argue that a reforming and democratizing narrative was used to transform Egypt into a stable "market-democracy" whose prosperity entailed pursuit of a "warm" peace. The transformation depended upon a dual strategy, combining the targeting of "natural allies" among a complicit elite as well as on privatization to align businesses, territories, civil organizations, and institutions or segments therein with American interests. The strategy's success in achieving alignment was also its weakness. Dependence on an autocratic elite for the implementation of reforms had the counter-effects of facilitating corruption and of reducing regime incentives to expand its constituencies of support beyond direct beneficiaries of the neoliberal privatizing changes. Instead of debate and engagement with opposing views to build new alliances, the strategy superseded and avoided sites of opposition. Therefore, contrary to the original aim of aid provision, the peace remained cold while its normalization dimensions became discursive triggers used as prisms with which to judge aid, the neoliberal reformist agenda, as well as normalization. The new partnerships provoked the production of competing conceptualizations of the proper relationship between the state and its citizens, conveyed in legal and constitutional re-definitions and re-distributions of rights and duties, as well as in divergent nationalist visions for Egypt's future. These competing ideas ranged between a nationalism that is globalizing, free-market, US- and regime-supported and another vision that is traditional, historically-informed, and socio-culturally-sensitive. Normalization's connection with aid had the counter-theoretical effect of reducing aid's ability to engender Gramscian hegemony. The US strategy of targeting allies and of privatization to effect normalization could not overcome extant socio-political forces whose discourses charged that aid produced anything but subordination (taba'iyya) - which differed significantly from promises of "peace, stability, and growth". Ultimately, even "reforming and democratizing" aid efforts could not disguise the subordinating effects of market and political alignment, and thus were not sufficient to elicit a new "common sense."

KALMAR UNIVERSITY Department of Health and Behavioural Sciences. Education of Social Work 21-40 p. C-essay, 10 p. Title: The Accepted Adjustment – How Twelve Children Belonging to Ethnic Minority Groups Experiences Everyday Life in School. Authors: Kristin Lundin & Karin Swartling Supervisor: Jesper Andreasson Examiner: Ulf Drugge ABSTRACT The aim of this C-essay, using a qualitative method and from a child prospective, explore how children belonging to ethnic minority groups participating in the Swedish education system at an intermediate level, experience everyday life at school and the interactions with their teachers. We have interviewed twelve children between the age of eleven and thirteen years old. The children have either immigrated (adopted children are included) or are born in Sweden but have at least one parent who has immigrated. The outcome from our study is that immigrant children have a positive experience of their daily life in school and in their interactions with their teachers. The majority of children state that they view their teachers as good educationalists. The conclusion drawn is that the majority of immigrant children have conformed and integrated into the Swedish majority culture which exists in school: without questioning the cultural hegemony which we claim exist. Immigrant children appear to have conformed to the prevailing Swedish majority and accepting it as fact during school hours, whilst reserving their traditional cultural practices and customs for the home. Our interpretation is that this is the main factor responsible for the fact immigrant children seem to be content despite examples presented of situations that generate dissatisfaction. Keywords: Children, School, Teachers, Culture, Ethnicity, Hegemony.

Local and federal governments, public school boards, and higher education institutions have been promoting online courses in their commitment to accommodating public needs, widening access to materials, sharing intellectual resources, and reducing costs. However, researchers of education needs to consider the often ignored yet important issue of equity since disregarding the issue of inequity in online education may create suboptimal consequences for students. This dissertation work, therefore, investigates the issues of social justice and equity in online education. I argue that equity is situated between the tensions of various social structures in a broader cultural context and can be thought of as a fair distribution of opportunities to participate. This understanding is built upon the idea that individuals have different values, goals, and interests; nevertheless, the online learning context may not provide fair opportunities for individuals to follow their own learning trajectories. Particularly, online learning environments can reproduce inequitable learning conditions when the context requires certain individuals to assimilate mainstream beliefs and values at the expense of their own identities. Since identifications have certain social and political consequences by enabling or constraining individuals’ access to educational resources, individuals may try to be identified in line with culturally-hegemonic perspectives in order to gain or secure their access to educational resources or to legitimize their learning experiences. In this interview study, I conceptualize online courses within their broader socio-historical context and analyze how macro-level social structures, namely the concept of whiteness, can reproduce inequity in micro-level online learning practices. By questioning who has control over the conditions for the production of knowledge, values, and identification, I investigate how socially accepted bodies of thoughts, beliefs, values, and feelings that give meaning to individuals’ daily-practices may create inequitable learning conditions in day-to-day online learning practices. In specific, I analyze how those who are identified as non-White experience “double-bind” with respect to stereotypification on one hand, anonymity on the other. Building on this analysis, I illustrate how those who are identified as non-White have to constantly negotiate their legitimacy and right to be in the online environment.

Around the world, females typically represent fifteen per cent or less of registered professional engineers. They also leave the profession at significantly higher rates than their male counterparts. Incidences of sexual harassment and sexual discrimination continue to be reported in interviews with female graduate engineers. Despite many years of study and initiatives to get more females into engineering, girls and women continue to avoid this profession. Research into the workplace experiences of female engineers tends to neglect organizational and institutional contexts. In particular, there is a lack of attention paid to the ways in which engineering associations, as regulatory bodies in the profession, support their female members. To that end, Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory and concept of hegemony were used to open new empirical terrain by providing an account of the sexual harassment and sexual discrimination discourse of the Ontario professional engineering association. It was found that the discourse of sexual harassment and sexual discrimination is hegemonized by the discourses of regulation and the practice of engineering. Critical gender equality issues that academic research has reported for female practitioners inside engineering workplaces, such as sexual harassment and sexual discrimination, are considered outside of the practices of regulation and engineering. Gender work within the association is confined to supporting the female members of the profession and is performed by the female members of the association. This contributes to the maintenance of the status quo, the illusion of gender neutrality, and the privileging of one gender over another in this local setting of the profession. It is recommended that engineering associations examine the effects of hegemonized spaces created by their practices of regulation and professional engineering discourse, particularly in the area of the workplace conditions of its members. It is also recommended that the scope and range of gender equity change actions practiced by engineering associations go beyond mainly providing modes of support for females in the profession. / 2013-03

This project analyzes two sets of alien invasion films to understand lay opinions on hegemonic authority. It defines hegemonic authority along two major lines: neo-Gramscian hegemony and hegemonic stability theory. The project uses alien invasion films to study challenges to hegemonic authority because of the unique and confrontational narrative alien invasion films typically possess. Through a comparative process, the project concludes that alien invasion films reveal paradoxical relationships of power, where the hegemon encourages aggressive pre-emptive policies against its challengers but at the same time depends upon these challengers to maintain its power. It argues that despite arguments of growing globalism and cosmopolitanism in the world, the liberal hegemon remains clearly divided among notions of Us versus Them.

The cruel nature of war gives reason for its study. A crucial component of this research aims to uncover the reasons behind victory and defeat. Winning, after all, is the central attraction of organized violence. Unfortunately, political science efforts in this direction have been rare, and the few theories on offer (numerical preponderance, technology theory, and proficiency) are infrequently tested against the empirical record. This dissertation therefore not only subjected the main theories of battlefield victory to a systematic test against the historical record, but also did so with a dataset more comprehensive and with greater chronological breadth than any other in the political science literature. The range of battles included runs from Megiddo (1469 BC) to Wanat (2008). Such a historically ambitious undertaking is unfortunately fraught with a series of methodological concerns. However, fears regarding the reliability of these historical statistics are best allayed by the assortment of historiographical techniques that have been used to eliminate the more dubious estimations. Concerns regarding data validity are similarly met with a clear delineation of methodological scope: current data is both western-centric and fails to speak to combat in pre-agrarian settings; the conclusions drawn below therefore keep a recognition of these limitations in mind. Ultimately, the chief findings of this study are that neither Napoleon’s ‘big battalions’ nor armies boasting technological supremacy over their rivals are assured any guarantee of battlefield success. This result is a powerful blow to both mainstream realist theory (whose power calculations rely on raw aggregations like army size) and Western defence planners (who have predicated their strategies on the belief that technology is the chief underpinning of victory). That being said, the most compelling causal explanation for battlefield victory, combat proficiency, appears subject to a crucial caveat: even the most talented armies can be ground into dust. This finding will provide little comfort to gifted armies that find themselves involved in a costly and prolonged campaign, such as Canada and America in Afghanistan. Lastly, this project’s contribution should be seen as not only theoretical and practical in nature, but also as providing a methodological toolkit and empirical resource of use to anyone subsequently interested in tracing the evolution of organized violence over time. In short, this project is summation of how political science thinks about the most basic aspect of war: battle. As the findings of this dissertation suggest, what is distinctly troublesome is that our existing theories and assumptions about who wins and why appear to bear little resemblance to reality. If anything, this dissertation calls attention to the urgent need for further research into the matter of battle victory.

This thesis examines the disconnect between the stated intentions of mining companies and narratives of hegemonic dispossession from mining-affected communities in the Andean region of Peru. The study focuses on Barrick Gold Corporations’ operations in rural Peruvian communities to illustrate how policy decisions and corporate privilege in Canada, and globally, construct hegemonic processes of development broadly. The research question asks how the mining industry frames its intentions so that civil society in Canada subscribes to the interest of this elite group. Findings from two case studies in rural Peru show that the mining industry uses instrumental tools such as Sustainable Development (SD), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and partnerships with NGOs to create an illusion of shared values with civil society. The presence of a transnational capitalist class (TCC) is evidenced by examples of collaboration between government and corporate efforts. I argue that a TCC enables global mining to maintain an influential role in shaping economic and political agendas that hinder development behind a guise of responsible and sustainable behaviour. A local-level analysis of Barrick Gold Corporation’s actions in Peru is connected to global economic and political trends to show how hegemony serves the maintenance of neoliberal economic growth instead of social development.

This thesis is an investigation into the frames and implicit concepts that drive the current trend of corporate-led agriculture, now known as the Third Food Regime. I consider whether this neoliberal regime is hegemonic in rural Ontario, that is, whether the dominant ideology of the corporate ruling class is reflected in and perpetuated by our farmers, despite it being against their best interests. I employ a critical approach, using mixed methods – participant observation of general farm organizations, content analysis of the farm media in Ontario and in-depth interviews with farmers in Wellington County – and find strong evidence of a free market frame in rural Ontario. This thesis outlines the dimensions and dangers of the existing frame in hopes that alternative agricultural models can again be considered. / SSHRC