In the 1990s, three Mexican-born filmmakers, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro G. Iñárritu, began careers that would see them directing films in Mexico, the US, and Europe. The three filmmakers are known for incorporating a broad spectrum of genres and aesthetic traditions from world cinema into their own films. Despite their internationalism, scholars and critics have tended to emphasize their national identity, viewing their films as either intrinsically Mexican or not Mexican enough. I argue that their films reflect multiple national identities and address what it means to live in a global community constituted by a plurality of cultural perspectives. This dissertation reads these auteurs as constructing their films as sites of dialogue between different identities, enabling their work to appeal to global audiences. I also understand these filmmakers as being in conversation with each other through shared themes that articulate specific social scenarios while remaining broad enough to resonate with audiences around the world. Chapter 1 examines Cuarón’s Sólo con tu pareja (1991), del Toro’s Cronos (1993), and Iñárritu’s Amores perros (2000). I read the directors’ thematization of precarity, alienation, and abjection as resonating with audiences in Mexico and the US who experienced the jarring effects of neoliberalism. Chapter 2 discusses Cuarón’s A Little Princess (1995) and del Toro’s Mimic (1997), which I read as sharing a theme of dislocation that spoke to American, Indian, and Latin American societies that were being transformed at the end of the Cold War. Chapter 3 explores how del Toro, Cuarón, and Iñárritu responded to the post-9/11 political environment in Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Children of Men (2006), and Babel (2006). Through their thematic concern with chaos and order, these films spoke to viewers overwhelmed by war, the torture and detainment of terrorist suspects, mass surveillance, harsh immigration policies, and the looming threat of terrorism itself. / 2024-11-14T00:00:00Z

This study was undertaken to begin to understand better the emergence of academic capitalism in public higher education in less developed countries. How and why income-generating practices have appeared in public universities in less developed countries has not been well examined (Maldonado-Maldonado 2014, 201). I chose the Iraqi Kurdistan region as the locus for this study in part for convenience, but also because it is unique in having emerged after the Second Gulf War from an oppressive National Socialist ruling government overtly hostile to market-based economic activities (Republic of Iraq 1970, Article 28). I found several instances of academic capitalist/income generating activities at Kurdish public universities. Consulting and language centers were in place well before the study began. Evening programs and parallel education emerged over the course of the inquiry as the economy in the region declined. I also elaborate on the specific relationship between the Kurdish Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research and the region's universities in developing and fostering different types of academic capitalism. Such cooperation is previously undescribed in the literature. I used an academic capitalism theoretical framework to guide my inquiry. This model provides four observable characteristics of neoliberal educational reform on higher education: new circuits of knowledge, interstitial organizational emergence, intermediating organizations, and expanded managerial capacity (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004, 26). I collected data through semi-structured interviews and document analysis. Following on similar approaches by Hackett (1990, 249) and Kleinman and Vallas (2007, 290), this study incorporated selective sampling of institutions which were likely to be engaged in academic capitalism, and included Ministry of Higher Education officials, as well as public university administrators and faculty members who were likely to have knowledge of these academic capitalism activities. / Ph. D.

The United States prison population has grown seven-fold over the past 35 years. This dissertation looks at the impact this growth in incarceration has on crime rates and seeks to understand why this drastic change in public policy happened. Simultaneity between prison populations and crime rates makes it difficult to isolate the causal effect of changes in prison populations on crime. This dissertation uses marijuana and cocaine mandatory minimum sentencing to break that simultaneity. Using panel data for 50 states over 40 years, this dissertation finds that the marginal addition of a prisoner results in a higher, not lower, crime rate. Specifically, a 1 percent increase in the prison population results in a 0.28 percent increase in the violent crime rate and a 0.17 percent increase in the property crime rate. This counterintuitive result suggests that incarceration, already high in the U.S., may have now begun to achieve negative returns in reducing crime. As such it supports the work of a number of scholars (Western 2006, Clear 2003) who have suggested that incarceration may have begun to have a positive effect on crime because of a host of factors. Most of the empirical work on the question is undertaken at an aggregate level (county, state, or national data). Yet, criminologists (Sampson et al. 2002, Spelman 2005 and Clear 1996, 2007) have long argued that the complex intertwining of crime and punishment is best understood at the neighborhood level, where the impacts of incarceration on social relationships are most closely felt. This dissertation examines the question using a panel of neighborhoods in Tallahassee, Florida for the period 1995 to 2002. I find evidence to support the contention that the high levels of prison admissions and prison cycling (admissions plus releases) is associated with increasing crime rates in disadvantaged neighborhoods. This effect is not found in other neighborhoods. Looking more closely at the issues of race and class, I find that while marginalized neighborhoods experience slightly higher crime rates, they are faced with much higher incarceration rates. In Black neighborhoods in particular, prison admissions are an order of magnitude higher in comparison with non-Black neighborhoods even though underlying crime rates are not very different. If incarceration does not lower crime, then why did prison populations multiply seven-fold? This dissertation argues that mass incarceration is a central institution in the neoliberal social structures of accumulation. Mass incarceration as an institution plays a critical but underappreciated role in channeling class conflict in the neoliberal social structures of accumulation (SSA). Neoliberalism has produced a significant section of the working class who are largely excluded from the formal labor market, for whom the threat of unemployment is not a sufficient disciplining mechanism. At the same time, it has undermined the welfare systems that had managed such populations in earlier periods. Finally, the racial hierarchy essential to capitalist hegemony in the United States was threatened with collapse with the end of Jim Crow laws. This dissertation argues that mass incarceration has played an essential role in overcoming these barriers to stable capitalist accumulation under neoliberalism.

The requirements of European Unification, along with broader processes of globalization, including immigration, are reshaping economic and welfare priorities and reconfiguring the relationship between citizens and the state in Italy. The reorganization of the Italian welfare state around the principle of subsidiarity combines neoliberal restructuring with a commitment to social solidarity and cohesion and privileges the family as the social formation best suited to mediate between state, market, and citizens. As the state retreats from some of its former social welfare responsibilities, it simultaneously extends its reach into matters of reproduction and family-making. Biopolitics in the time of subsidiarity encompasses concerns over birth rates, the population, the rights of the unborn, and the proper composition of the family. This dissertation examines the terms of social cohesion in post-welfare Italy and the central role that matters of reproduction and the family play in its reformulation as a moral and cultural problem. I focus on three discursive sites: the politics of life; the assertion of the heteronormative family as an urgent and legitimate site of political intervention; and the parameters for the "appropriate" integration of migrants into Italian society. I draw on ethnographic inquiry with associations and individuals engaged in reproductive and migrant health and politics in Milan. Tracing the policies, practices, and discourses that seek to govern in the name of social cohesion sheds light on new citizenship projects and logics of inclusion/exclusion in the post-welfare moment and underscores the continued salience of gender, sexuality, and reproduction to processes of state building.

Critical literature on social work ethics and practice in the current neoliberal context identifies the complex tensions generated for practitioners by the restructuring of increasingly residual public programs and by the market-modelled organizations in which they work. Pressed by employing organizations’ expectations to narrow and standardize their practice, social workers face collisions between their own values and the managerial and budget-driven requirements that dominate their organizational worlds. Building on the growing body of literature in this area, the research reported here examined how social workers articulate their own values and ethical commitments, understand the value collisions they experience, and work to navigate them in the interest of those they seek to serve. A small qualitative study was conducted to explore these questions. In semi-structured interviews, five social workers were invited to share their experiences of ethical tensions generated in their organizational settings. The members of the sample all held social work degrees; their ages and length of practice experience ranged considerably and they spoke from experiences in a wide array of service sectors and settings. Analysis of participants’ experiences illuminated the texture of their struggles and their efforts to covertly and overtly challenge or evade organizational requirements that were at odds with their values and their conceptualizations of good practice. Their accounts point to the importance of politicized understandings of social work ethics. They also suggest the importance for social work education and professional development programs to foster dialogue on the complexities of ethical action and support the development of the analytical and practical skills that enable practitioners to find the ‘cracks’ in dominant neoliberal structures and create spaces for change. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

Thesis advisor: Andrew L. Prevot / This dissertation in the area of Christian Systematic Theology offers a critique of the political-economic, philosophical, and cultural framework of neoliberalism through the framework of Ignacio Ellacuría’s liberation theology. The project grounds itself in Ellacuría’s theological vision of historical soteriology, where one understands salvation as the persistence of Christ’s salvific act through history and in which all are called to participate through cooperative grace. It is through this theological lens, in conjunction with Ellacuría’s philosophical and political thought, that a full critique of neoliberalism’s various facets is accomplished. The project offers this critique through an analysis of neoliberalism’s false promises of prosperity, stability, and salvation from impoverishment. Chapter 1 offers a definition of neoliberalism as manifesting in three ways: a political-economic theory that manifested in the policies of the Reagan administration in the United States and the Thatcher Government in the United Kingdom, a philosophical high theory critiqued by thinkers in the Marxist and Foucauldian traditions, and a cultural framework that is open to theological critique. The chapter serves as a survey of significant figures of each facet of neoliberalism. Chapter 2 outlines the focal points of Ellacuría’s philosophical thought, most importantly his theory of historical reality. Using these philosophical tools, Ellacuría is put into dialogue with the philosophical critics of neoliberalism to show the philosophical claims implicit in neoliberal thought are untenable. Chapter 3 explores Ellacuría’s theology with a focus on historical soteriology and engagement with reality. The theory of historical soteriology then serves as a critical tool to examine neoliberalism’s underlying tenets that offer a false promise of salvation. Chapter 4 develops a political theology of dissent drawing from Ellacuría’s work in “Utopia and Propheticism in Latin America,” in which Ellacuría offers one of his strongest critiques of the civilization of capital. The political theology of dissent offers an alternative framework to the contemporary neoliberal conception of political economy, focusing on discernment and community. Finally, Chapter 5 synthesizes the Ellacurían Critique from Chapters 2-4 and puts it into conversation with other theological critics of neoliberalism. This dialogue shows the Ellacuría Critique to be a complimentary to other critics of neoliberalism while adding a unique Catholic liberationist voice to the conversation. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

The lack of women in historical writing has long been discussed in Sweden and could be understood as an expression of a bigger discourse of Swedish gender equality. With two existing women’s history museums and media debates about women’s representation in history books, it seems to be part of both a Swedish and a feminist discourse. With a starting point that feminism exist within a popular feminist discourse, this essay asks the question what happens when feminist history is made to be popular. By analysing the two tv-shows ‘Den fantastiska historien med Berg & Meltzer’ and ‘Drottningarna’ as well as debates about them, this thesis examines how feminism, and the female subject is created within Swedish historical media. By using a poststructuralist discourse analysis and the theories popularfeminism, postfeminism and fantasy echo, this study analyses how the media as a cultural product creates feminist values, and how ideas about the feminine and the masculine affects the way we understand history. This study shows how the fantasy of a static female identity creates the historical female subject as someone ‘we’ can identify with. Further it shows how feminist historical writing within a popular science discourse seems to leave out important critique about gender roles and structures. The study also argues how a medial feminist history tends to rely on postfeminist and neoliberal assumptions of individual success in order to become more palatable for a broader audience.

This thesis examines health promotion discourse in Ottawa during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore what it means to be a responsible citizen. Using press releases/special statements and tweets from January 2020 to November 2022 from city officials and city departments in Ottawa, this thesis employed critical discourse analysis (CDA) to explore potential changes in health promotion discourse and meaning-making, asking how citizenship was remade in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings support claims that health is increasingly neoliberalized, with a greater emphasis placed on individual health as a condition of responsible citizenship. This increased neoliberalization ultimately shifts our attention away from state responsibilities vis-à-vis citizens, and in this case, the neglected role of local governments in managing health crises.

The current study examines judicial discourse about BDSM activities within decisions rendered in Canada during the past 20 years. A recent uprise in popular culture representation has resulted in a greater uptake of Bondage / Discipline / Dominance / Submission / Sadism / Masochism (BDSM) in the sexual lives of Canadians. Little research to date has been completed to analyze the implications that the uprise may have on the legal system when BDSM cases are presented. In particular, the legal system is being tasked with interpreting many different consent standards through the narrow affirmative-based definition found under Section 273.1 (1). The current study employed a qualitative analysis of all Canadian criminal court cases and appeals available in legal software that dealt with the issues of consent and BDSM (n=23) over a 20-year time frame. The study found that judges must interpret 4 different types of consent found within sexual relationships: affirmative consent, advanced consent to unconscious acts, consent to bodily harm and mistaken consent. Finally, the current study found that the way judges interpreted BDSM consent standards reflects a wider shift in governance from legal moralist thinking to a neoliberal paternalist governance.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, a number of Latin American countries have undergone a marked shift to the left in their politics. With this, a number of Latin American countries have been pursuing economic policies that give a greater role for the state in economic affairs. Hugo Chavez has promised to build "twenty-first century socialism" in Venezuela, while Bolivia's Evo Morales often attacks the "neoliberalism" that previously guided economic reform in that country. This thesis investigates these economic institutional changes through a discursive institutionalist perspective, focusing on two Latin American countries: Bolivia and Peru. The goal is to analyze the role discourse and ideas played in impacting economic institutional change, or the lack thereof, in these two countries. This analysis suggests that institutional change in Bolivia can be explained by the skill political figures such as Evo Morales had in linking certain economic policies to notions of Bolivian sovereignty and a defense of natural resources. However, in Peru, discursive limitations presented barriers to a shift towards greater state intervention. By emphasizing the impact of discourse and ideas, this thesis aims to provide a novel theoretical interpretation of these events transpiring in Latin America.