The purpose of this dissertation is to study women's representation and the contention of space in contemporary Brazilian and Cuban films, in order to analyze the way in which the films reflect societal values regarding gender roles and, consequently the way the nation is represented. The Cuban films I examine are: Retrato de Teresa (1979) and De Cierta Manera (1964), the short "Julia" from Mujer Transparente (1990) and from Brazil I work with the films Gabriela (1983) and A Hora da Estrela (1984.) All of the films have a protagonist that is a woman, and all were successful in the box office and had some international recognition. The films have strong female protagonists and share similar socio-political contexts- the socialist government in Cuba and the military dictatorship in Brazil, as well as a time period marked by social unrest as women's rights groups were very active in both countries. My hypothesis is that although these films were commercially successful, groundbreaking and innovative; they ultimately were marked by some of the gendered contradictions and the feminist questionings of their time. In fact, my analysis reveals that, although they each raise many issues and questions about an egalitarian society for both men and women, they fall short in terms of a progressive politics of gender. A notable exception, the film A Hora da Estrela provides a striking difference to the other films.

This dissertation examines memory discourses about the most recent military dictatorships in Brazil and Argentina produced in two photography exhibitions (the Brazilian government sponsored A ditadura no Brasil 1964-1985 and Marcelo Brodsky's Los compañeros) and two novels (Beatriz Bracher's Não falei and Sergio Chejfec's Los planetas). My research focuses on the capacity of postdictatorial cultural production to explore the negotiated spaces of meaning in both individual memories and collective discourses about the past. Drawing from interdisciplinary theoretical considerations on such themes as memory, representation, discourse, and subjectivity, I argue that cultural production that accentuates the impossibility to fully represent the past creates the conditions of possibility for spaces of dynamic memory about the military dictatorships in Brazil and Argentina. These cultural spaces of representation offer the opportunity to destabilize the discursive logic that typically guides postdictatorial memory narratives through the reiteration of the same (counter)hegemonic political ideologies that dominated these eras of dictatorship. While I critique the A ditadura no Brasil photography exhibit for its presentation of an idealized counter-narrative about this time period, I contend that the memory discourses offered by Brodsky, Bracher, and Chejfec create spaces for a more meaningful engagement with the dictatorial past, particularly for those who did not directly experience the authoritarian governments in Brazil and Argentina. I maintain that instead of attempting to articulate a narrative "truth" about dictatorship, these works lay bare the negotiated processes of memory and meaning for the readers and spectators, which offers an opportunity to activate memory for new uses within different socio-political contexts in the present. Through this dissertation project, I seek to contribute to recent critical work calling for a new language to articulate the memory of dictatorship and innovative ways to engage traumatic experiences of the past through both literary and visual culture expressions. The continued consideration of memory discourses produced in postdictatorial cultural production is an essential component within the ongoing debates on the transmission of social memory about dictatorship in Brazil and Argentina, and for other populations attempting to engage the violence of an authoritarian past and its residual effects on the present.

This thesis explores the ways in which a municipal government in Brazil developed itself as a learning system through the support of a capacity-building project funded by the Canadian International Development Agency. The project, which began in 1998, focuses on building capacity for adaptive, community based watershed management in the municipality of Santo Andre. It involves a team of Canadian partners led by the University of British Columbia Centre for Human Settlements. Santo Andre is a city of 600,000 people in the Sao Paulo metropolitan area. The focus of the thesis is on Santo Andre's planners' perspectives about the individual learning, and related organizational changes, that were induced by the project. In-depth interviews were conducted with twenty-one staff holding a variety of planning responsibilities. The findings are that, while not planned for in the design of the project, learning occurred at three levels: learning by the planners as individuals engaging in daily practices, learning through changes in the planners' relationships with one another and with residents of Santo Andre's Watershed Protection Area, and learning through and about the organisational processes of the municipal government itself. It is concluded that international capacity-building projects can contribute to the enhancement of local planning to the extent they are structured to address the potential for learning at all three of these levels.

This dissertation studies China’s energy policy since the “Go Out” strategy became the PRC’s “overarching national strategy”, having been put forward for the first time in the 5th Plenum of the 15th CPC Central Committee in October 2000 –despite having been de facto implemented since 1993. It focuses on the evolution of the PRC’s petroleum and biofuels policy from 2000 to 2010 and on the impact it has had on Brazilian and Argentine energy policy and exports of energy resources to China. The study adopts an asymmetrical interdependent perspective within a South-South Cooperation analytical framework to argue that the role these countries have played as suppliers of fossil energy resources (petroleum) to the PRC throughout the observed period –role that can be defined as having been relatively modest in spite of having ranked as China’s top South American oil suppliers for most of it– has considerable potential to become significantly more relevant in the future, through the diversification of their energy exports to China based on the combination of fossil fuels and renewable energy resources (biofuels). As regards the former, the study highlights the game-changing discovery of enormous ultra deep-water off-shore reserves in Brazil in 2007 and 2010 (Tupi-Lula and Libra, respectively, which are already turning Brazil into a major oil exporter) and of the gigantic shale energy formation of Vaca Muerta in Argentina in 2010. Regarding the latter, both Brazil and Argentina are leading producers and exporters of biofuels (sugar cane- based ethanol and soybean-based biodiesel, respectively). The remarkable progress that the PRC has made in the energy sectors of the analyzed countries –and in Latin America in general, showing the “asymmetry of attention” paid by China and the USA to the region is emphasized. The research highlights the increasing importance that renewable energy resources are having in Chinese energy policy, due to both energy security and environmental concerns. It argues that the addition of clean energy resources to their exports to the PRC would benefit Brazil and Argentina by allowing them to diversify not only their export baskets (by adding more products to their exports to China, with the plus that these would have value added) and export destinations (adding the growing Chinese market while simultaneously reducing these countries’ dependence on traditional biofuel destinations such as the EU and the USA), but would also have positive effects for China’s fuel supply mix, contributing to make China’s transition to a low-carbon economy (or, at least, lower-carbon) shorter – as well as positive spillovers in their industrial structures.

Brazilijos lietuvių bendruomenė aptariamuoju laikotarpiu buvo antra pagal dydį po JAV lietuviška bendruomenė už lietuvos teritorijos ribų. Apie JAV, Didžiosios Britanijos ar Argentinos lietuvius informacijos pakankamai dažnai galima gauti net iš tradicinių visuomenės informacijos priemonių. Tuo tarpu Brazilijos lietuviai, nepelnytai, yra visiškai pamiršti. Keliant klausimą, kodėl apie vieną iš didžiausių užsienio lietuvių bendruomenių viešojoje erdvėje nėra pateikiama jokios informacijos, yra vienintelis atsakymas. Apie Brazilijos lietuvius Lietuvoje nėra surinktos ir apdorotos informacijos, kuri būtų prieinama plačiajai visuomenei. Niekas rimtai nėra tyrinėjęs Brazilijos lietuvių bendruomenės. Mums lietuviams, turi būti privaloma tyrinėti ir pažinti vieną iš didžiausių tautiečių bendruomenių, kuri nepelnytai užmiršta. Tikslas. Šiame darbe siekiama ištirti Brazilijos lietuvių ekonominę padėtį XX a. paradžios – XX a. ketvirtojo dešimtmečio laikotarpiu, imant San Paulo lietuvių bendruomenę pavyzdžiu, atspindinčiu visos Brazilijos lietuvių padėtį. Šio tikslo siekiant keliami uždaviniai: 1. Aptarti to laikotarpio bendrą lietuvių imigrantų ir jų imigracijos padėtį Brazilijoje; 2. Išsiaiškinti kokias ekonomines sąlygas turėjo lietuviai dirbantys žemės ūkyje; 3. Aptarti lietuvių darbininkų padėtį San Paulo mieste; 4. Išsiaiškinti smulkiojo ir stambiojo lietuvių verslo padėtį; Ištyrinėjus asamą literatūra, vietos lietuvių periodiką, tų laikų liudininkų atsiminimus bei archyvinius... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Lithuanians in Brazil in concerned period of time was the second biggest community after JAV outside Lithuania. Abaut Lithuanians in JAV, Great Britain or Argentina Lithuanians information can be often collected from traditional public media. Meanwhile Brazilian Lithuanians, wantonly, forgotten. We can ask our selves, why there isin’t almost anything abaut the second biggest Lithuanian community outside Lithuania nothing on public space, there just one answer. About Brazilian Lithuanians there isin’t infrotmation that is collected ant treated to the public masses. There isin’t any person who really started analyzing Brazilian Lithuanians community. We, Lithuanians must start knowing and analyzing one of the biggest countrymen community which is forgotten. Objective: In this work to analyze Brazilian Lithuanians economic situation in XXa. Start – XXa. during the fourth decade, taking San Paulo Lithuanian community as a example, who reflects Brazilian lithuanians situation. Knowing this objective there is tasks: 1. Discuss that period Lithuanian immigrants and their immigration situation in Brazil. 2. Find out what economic terms Lithuanians had when working soil. 3. Discuss Lithuanian workers who worked in San Paulo. 4. Find out minor and big business situation for Lithuanians. When explored exsisting literature, Lithuanians local periodic, that times witnesses who remembers that times, archived documents, it was first time analyzed San Paulo state Lithuanian economic... [to full text]

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In this critical inquiry, I look at how individuals who experience social, cultural and economic exclusion in postcolonial societies construct cultural identities and relationships with what they perceive as the dominant cultures of their countries through the process of schooling. Here, the term 'postcolonial' refers to events, places, and conditions that are situated after periods of colonization, and implicate individuals whose histories are linked to colonizers and colonized peoples. / This thesis discusses theoretical, political, philosophical and methodological issues around the design, implementation, interpretation and report of an ethnographic inquiry carried out in Brazil (Sao Paulo area) and southern France in 2004-2005. In this project, I organized focus groups of adolescents from marginalized communities in those two locations with the intention to generate critical dialogues about their experience of schooling and the dynamics between what they perceived as their cultural identity, their school's culture, and the culture of their countries. More than a mere survey of the accommodation and representation of 'minority' histories and peoples in France and Brazil, this study strives to explore and compare how the societal apparatuses of those two countries, with a particular emphasis on schooling, produce categories of cultural difference and inscribe them onto societal subjects. Thus, I carried out my inquiry with the belief that schooling is not simply a site of cultural transmission and reproduction, but also of cultural and identity production: a matrix that recreates, renegotiates, and institutionalizes hierarchical boundaries of difference that become actualized in students' subjectivities (Hall, 1999).

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