In 1999, the World Bank launched the K4D initiative as part of its new development agenda. The Bank also established itself as the global development knowledge bank suggesting that these moves would yield more pro-poor development results. This thesis examines the Bank’s knowledge ventures and contends that they are part of the apparatus of advancing the Bank’s neoliberal agenda. The governmentality approach is used to argue that the knowledge ventures are a move away from the direct and interventionist mechanisms of control prominent in the earlier development agenda, but at the same time, representative of new, more subtle and indirect mechanisms of control. Furthermore, a close investigation of the literature published in connection to the knowledge ventures and the practical projects created as part of these ventures, reveals that neoliberal policies traditionally promoted by the Bank feature prominently in the propaganda surrounding the Bank’s knowledge ventures.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2006. Graduate Programme in Political Science. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 415-455). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR19765

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, August, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 245-251).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 160-177).

<p>Abstract</p><p>Writers: Karl-Johan Arnér, student</p><p>Mentor: Karl Loxbo</p><p>Institution: Social studies 91-120p at the institution of human and social studies at the university of Kalmar.</p><p>Title: Taxpayers Association – An analyse during 1975-2007</p><p>Background: The organisation was founded 1921 and has today over 100 000 members. They are critical to a large welferestate and work intensive to decrease the taxes in Sweden. They have a paper for the members and the study explores the message in this paper. The purpose is to se if the message is an express for the neoliberal ideology.</p><p>Question formulation:</p><p>• In which ways have the Taxpayers association expressed neoliberal ideas during 1975-2007?</p><p>• Does the organisation have the same opinions 1975-2007?</p><p>Results: The organisation writes mostly about taxes. They think the taxes in Sweden are too high and think that it would be a good idea to decrease the taxes. They also think that the public service is too ineffective and costs too much money. The message is very critical to the society in Sweden particular between 1996-2005. The critical decrease when socialist lose the election the national parlament. 75 % of all the message in the paper is an expression for the neoliberal ideology.</p>

Concentrating on six representative media sites, 28 Days Later (2002), Dawn of the Dead (2004), Land of the Dead (2005), Children of Men (2007), Snowpiercer (2013), and one television series The Walking Dead (2010-present), this dissertation examines the strain of post-millennial apocalyptic media emphasizing a neo-liberal form of collaboration as the path to survival. Unlike traditional collaboration, the neo-liberal construction centers on the individual’s responsibility in maintaining harmony through intra-group homogeny. Through close textual analysis, critical race theory, and feminist media studies, this project seeks to understand how post-racial and post-feminist representational strategies elide inequality and ignore tensions surrounding racial or gender differences to create harmony-through-homogeny in popular apocalyptic film and television.

This dissertation investigates the intersection between political rhetoric and popular ideas about the Greek debt crisis and processes of identification and differentiation within a Greek diasporic community. It documents the significant role the economic crisis has assumed in local political rhetoric and explores the ways in which it has enriched previously existing discourses of identification, reshaping long-standing political debates, and engendering opportunities for transnational mobilization. The researcher's aim is to link culturally specific discursive strategies, interpretative trajectories, personal histories and wider moral economies, showcasing some of the complexities in processes of ethnic identification and intra-group differentiation. In short, this dissertation uses the advances of critical anthropological theory on place, objects, discursive and sensory practices to frame the plurality of ideas and rhetoric about the crisis within political, economic, and cultural contexts.

Using the 2014 State of the Union Address as an example, I show that the public honoring of physically wounded veterans hides the emotional, psychological, social, and moral wounds of military service, creating a normative veteran identity based on mental toughness, and essentializes all veterans as honorable by default. Using Michel Foucault’s notion of Panopticism from <i>Discipline and Punish</i>, I argue that this unquestioned heroism of the veteran disciplines the nation, disengages the population from involvement, and enables unchecked, perpetual war. In response, I propose that we avoid thanking veterans publicly and abstractly, instead approaching each and every veteran personally in full recognition of their unique set of relations. This would improve veteran reintegration, politically engage the population in discourse regarding military conflict, and ultimately serve as a check on the use of state violence.

In my dissertation, I argue that the neoliberalization of higher education results in the university becoming less and less a place of wonder, self-cultivation and thinking and instead more and more a place to specialize, strategize and produce. This is a result of the volatile infusion and mixing of the logic of calculative rationality at work in consumer capitalism with the logic of scientific instrumental rationality already hegemonic in academia. This adds to the demands of the academic world of production the demands of the world of consumption. Now the academic (and also the student) is interpellated not only as a producer of knowledge but also as an object of consumption (to be consumed by others). These new pressures, previously kept at a distance from academia, explosively accelerate the already rapid process of rationalization of which science is already a key part and increasingly structure higher education as a field of strategic action in which students no longer have the time to think and to develop good judgment. I worry this undermines the opportunity for students to develop into good citizens that can truly think critically and judge carefully. Thinking and judgment are, according to Arendt, the only things that can save us if the powerful machines of science or capitalism begin to work in ways they should not. Arendt saw Nazi Germany use the newest science and the best economic management to systematically kill six million Jews. She saw the disturbing inability of the populace and the intellectuals to capably resist the Nazi machine once it got rolling. I argue than unless checked, neoliberalization threatens to turn the university into a place that discourages thinking and the development of judgment in favor of hyperspecialization and strategic action.