"Eh, You Māhū? An Analysis of American Cultural Imperialism in Hawai’i through the Lens of Gender and Sexuality" explores the impact of American settler colonialism on Native Hawaiian culture. This thesis magnifies the gender liminal identity of māhū to understand the intricacies of gender and sexuality as it relates to cultural formation. Broadly, this thesis is a historical analysis of the impact Western colonization has on indigenous cultures. Specifically, this analysis starts from the introduction of haole foreigners to Hawai’i in 1778 and extends to the present-day American occupation of the Hawaiian nation. By analyzing the ways American cultural imperialism is a systemic process rather than a single historical event, this work shows how Hawaiian culture has evolved to accommodate this process over time. This thesis understands why traditional Native Hawaiian culture provided a space for māhūs to be celebrated, while contemporary Hawaiian society has varying degrees of visibility for māhūs.

This study investigates the Native Baptists and the dynamics between their Biblical hermeneutic and the 1865 Native Baptist War. This work outlines, for the first time, the origin, structure and development of the Native Baptists. This study also discerns the main themes of the Native Baptists as equality and justice and their Biblical hermeneutic as a hermeneutic of liberation. The main thesis is that the Native Baptists' interpretation of Scriptures and Scripture -related sources influenced the nature and scope of the 1865 Native Baptist War. To achieve the goals of this study, this writer relied heavily on archival and contemporary documents. One of the major features of this study is that, for the first time, it provides an in-depth analysis of a major original source, which the first Native Baptists wrote about themselves. Another unique feature is the meticulous analysis of Paul Bogle's marked hymns, letter and speech and George William Gordon' s speeches in the House of Assembly. In order to examine and outline the origin, structure and development of the Native Baptists, this writer was informed by the social history of religion approach. And to reflect on their themes and Biblical hermeneutic this writer attributed the use of the Reader -Response approach to the Native Baptists. Using these approaches, this writer discovered, contrary to the dominant position in scholarly writings on Native Baptists, that the Native Baptists were orthodox, well organized, engaged in marches for justice and desired the liberation of the oppressed and the oppressors. This work gives a more accurate picture of who the Native Baptists were and how their interpretation of the Bible and sacred literature contributed to the way things happened in the 1865 Native Baptist War. A further study of the Native Baptists needs to determine if there is a co-relationship between the demise of the Native Baptists' institutional structures and the seeming retreat of present-day Baptists from political activism.

Latin America has experienced scripting and digital fabrication, and the alliance between designers and artisans. Taking into account that the revival of crafts has proved very promising in Latin America (Borges, 2015), the objective of this research is to analyse the diversity of cases and select those where designers took an interest for strengthening the artisans’ jobs in the field of pottery and textiles. We found that both revitalised the identity and cultural tradition in their own countries, in a moment when craft seemed to drop in front of industrial production. By preserving traditional materials, pieces continue to be unique and customizable, transcending thus their local origin towards new global markets.

Abstract: My vanilla, Grade A, white bread, run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road, threadbare, well-worn, moth-eaten, potato sack, butterscotch, grass stained America: Mundane American life is an existence clinging to the ordinary, where a quilt of mass- mediated preferences and ingrained traditions define many people, specifically from north to south and east to west. Yet, the tastes and dialects of people within the mundane are complex. Ideological preferences are rooted in immigrant history and political persuasion. Various modes of realism have been used by American painters such as The Ash Can School, Regionalists of the 1930’s, and Pop Art. The notion of the real and mundane have an integral link to each other in art, as often the real may reveal a truth about the world, that which may be ugly or sordid. Depictions of everyday objects and common people break down the great divide between high art and popular culture. Pop Art is postmodern in its "generational refusal of the categorical certainties of high modernism." In this paper I will dissect the complexity of the mundane through the use of my own and others’ paintings and photographs. Through reference and description Americana’s well-worn customs and preferences in day-to-day life will be analyzed.

From March 2006 until March 2008 I worked and did research with young people in El Salvador. I coordinated a local youth participation project in the capital, where, at the same time, I conducted fieldwork for my PhD research. The youth project aimed at empowering young people through participatory action research (PAR) and, together with the young participants, I critically reflected on the empowering impact of this participatory process. While participatory researchers and practitioners traditionally stress the importance of critical consciousness and critical discourse as the principal motors for individual and social transformation, my research with the young people particularly confronted me with the power of emotions and embodied knowledges. This research focuses in particular on the politics of emotions; their role in confirming exclusion and oppression and in facilitating empowerment and resistance. In this thesis, I bring together different bodies of theory. I start from the critical literature on PAR and from a poststructuralist account of power and empowerment. I build on an understanding of emotions as socio-culturally constructed and, at the same time, as deeply embodied phenomena. I look into emotional geographies considering emotions as relational and as always functioning within power relations and I use non-representational theory to challenge the privilege of cognition by focussing on practical and embodied knowledges and explicitly recognising their political and empowering potential. I conclude that although participatory researchers have increasingly extended and refined their understanding of power and empowerment, they still focus too much on critical reflection, discourse and conscious/linguistic representation as key to personal and social change. This focus has distracted their attention from the way power works through emotions and embodied knowledges. I believe that participatory researchers should become more sensitive still to the subtleties of power by paying more explicit attention to how emotions and embodied knowledges function within power relations to reproduce or challenge the existing status quo. Such a focus also opens new doors to new ways of empowerment (and politics) by considering alternative methods and media directly engaging with the power of emotions and embodied knowledges to shape the social world.

Matthew Groneman explores the dynamic nature of language through a series of poems broken into three thematically-linked sections. The first section includes poems about the natural world, scientific processes and technological innovation. The second section is centered around poems exploring American culture, from the nineteenth century to contemporary times. The final section explores the speaker's perceptions of self, particularly with regards to the speaker's masculinity relative to societal expectations thereof. The poems play with concepts of fluid semiotics by employing notions of the trickster as narrator in several poem, disrupting binaries and complicating the nature of meaning. Also utilized toward this end are formal variations, homophones and various sets of jargon

The history of American philosophical thought is marked by a skepticism of epistemology and immutable truths, which is drawn under the term pragmatism. This skepticism is the genesis for the political and social attitudes that makes the United States exceptional. This thesis argues that this exceptionalism is important to the makeup of the American character and that it is being threatened by two front: ideologically driven politics, and the abuse of power by the majority. In the course of writing this essay I evaluated a large portion of the body of American philosophy as well as political and judicial writers in order to show that American exceptionalism is based upon a philosophical rejection of epistemology and immutable truth claims and that exceptionalism is integral to the progress of America as a nation.

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Memoria (licenciado en ciencias jurídicas y sociales) / El presente trabajo estará abocado al análisis de la legislación antiterrorista dictada en América Latina, lo cual presupone el examen de fenómenos que han sido catalogados como terrorismo en nuestro continente. Intentaremos enunciar las experiencias más relevantes al respecto, abordar las características fundamentales de las organizaciones armadas más conocidas del continente y las reacciones político-criminales asumidas por la autoridad, desde sus inicios hasta nuestros días. Lo que se ha manifestado en una importante respuesta legislativa alineada o en bloque de parte de los Estados, fundamentalmente a partir de los atentados terroristas verificados contra Estados Unidos el 11 de septiembre de 2001

Thesis advisor: André Brouillette / Thesis advisor: Maura Jane Farrelly / The purpose of this thesis is to better understand American colonial Catholicism through a comparative study of it with Catholicism in colonial Canada, both before and after the British defeat of the French in 1759, in the period of the American Revolution. Despite a shared faith, ecclesiastical leaders in Canada were wary of the revolutionary spirit and movement in the American colonies, participated in by American Catholics, and urged loyalty to the British crown. The central question of the study is as follows: why did the two groups, American Catholics (the Maryland Tradition) and Canadian Catholics (the Quebec Tradition), react so differently to British colonial rule in the mid eighteenth-century? Developing an understanding of the religious identities of American and Canadian Catholics and their interaction during the period will help shed light on their different approaches to political ideals of the Enlightenment and their Catholic faith / Thesis (STL) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.