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The thesis explores the practical, moral and intellectual forces shaping native policy making in North America. It is argued that white society is struggling with an unresolved dialectic between its economic desires and its political idealism and that this conflict is expressed in native policy making as a simultaneous affirmation and denial of aboriginal rights. This theme is traced comparatively through Canadian and American native policy making histories from 1763 to 1990, focusing on three major policy areas: Indian dispossession, Indian political incorporation and Indian economic integration.

The present dissertation reconstructs the notion of legitimacy in Ecuador between 1996 and 2007 in order to re-think our measurements and understanding of Latin American democracies. Empirically, the analysis is centered on the country`s puzzling tendency to survive institutional volatility, bad economic performance and social unrest, while the theoretical section underlines the importance of the vertical and horizontal participatory components of legitimacy. After exploring different plausible explanations of Ecuador`s puzzling mixture of political turmoil and regime endurance, this dissertation concludes that legitimacy helped democracy to endure in Ecuador. The main conclusion is that the horizontal components of political participation and the enactment of democratic values by social movements as well as new political parties played a key role in the survival of democracy. The dissertation contributes to the democratization literature by encompassing the normative elements of democracy, while at the same time contributes to democratic theory by pushing further the boundaries of a notion and a case that requires further attention.

This thesis is an investigation of the evolution of economic inequality in Guatemala. High inequality and poverty levels in the country are two widespread social problems, almost defining characteristics of Guatemalan society. Although some research has been done in an attempt to understand poverty, far less has been done with respect to inequality. Aggregated measures of both phenomena do not reveal much change, although it may well be the case that different and countervailing forces are acting behind summary indices, providing a misleading interpretation of stagnation over time. Using data from two living standards measurement surveys (LSMS) in 2000 and 2006, this investigation applies a household income generation model and a series of microeconomic decomposition techniques in order to explain some of the factors driving economic inequality. Those factors are grouped into three types of effects: price, occupational choice and endowment. The results show that three structural conditions segment the population: geographical location, gender and ethnic origin. However, they also indicate that over the course of six years, those characteristics have reduced their negative influence on the standard of living of the population. In other words, over time they show a mild equalizing effect, probably the result of changes in market conditions, state actions or a combination of both. Regarding the three types of effects identified above, the results show how market returns to individual attributes (price effects), such as years of education, can act as an equalizing force, particularly for women in the 4th and 5th quintiles of the distribution. Occupational choice effects reflect changes in the structure of the labour force, moving from the inactive to the self-employed, thus generating higher household income. Endowment effects, simulated as changes in household size and stock of education of income earners, are consistent with mild changes in fertility rates and higher public investment in education. Finally, the results leave ample room for social policy. However, for that to occur it will be necessary to increase the capacity of the State to intervene in specific areas, thus requiring higher government revenues while also addressing other institutional challenges such as better targeting of social programs, improving the quality of primary health and education, and investing in secondary schools and hospitals. A third round of LSMS survey would help corroborate whether observed reductions in expenditure and income inequality are truly a trend or just a temporary phenomena or simply a statistical artefact.

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My thesis centers on Lolita and The Crying of Lot 49 and the ways in which both novels defamiliarize our world and ways of thinking. Both novels use formal literary techniques as a way of making ordinary cultural artifacts, situations, and environments seem unfamiliar from our every day perceptions. This process of defamiliarizing the regular and everyday has the greater implications of estranging universal themes such as love, environment, and belonging. Both novels also question our precarious hold on corporeal reality by interpreting plot through two outside narrators whose trustworthiness is constantly placed into question. Unsurprisingly, Lolita and The Crying of Lot 49 unsettle the categories of truthfulness and reinvention in interpreting America's immediate cultural and environmental landscape. Both texts blur the distinction between recorded and imaginatively reconstructed worlds: just so, America has isolated our two narrators in the text from their immediate landscape. Interpretations of America are questioned in the thesis through the process of Shklovsky's theory of Defamiliarization interfaced with Freud's Uncanny in the novel. Language disobedience and discord also play a part and will be discussed through Bakhtin's theories on polyphonic language.

This study explores slave agency and slave abolitionism during amelioration in Jamaica. The amelioration period was chosen because it offered the slave opportunities to acquire their freedom and improve their condition. Therefore, slave agency and abolitionism occurred more frequently after the start of amelioration, which officially began in Jamaica in 1797 when the planters embarked on a programme designed to improve slavery and prolong its existence. Amelioration continued until the British Parliament voted to abolish slavery in 1833.