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The rapid growth of Mexico's railway networks represented the crowning achievement of the Porfiriato--that is, the regime headed by Porfirio Diaz, who ruled between 1876 and 1911. Having succeeded in bringing the internal stability needed for the growth and development of the economy, government officials repeatedly used the railroad as a symbol to highlight the accomplishments of Porfirian modernization and to legitimate the regime that had shed its liberal ideals and grown increasingly authoritarian. Boosters emphasized the ability of the government's railway project to bring civilization, to promote national unity, to increase commerce, and, even to whiten the population. At the same time, opposition groups, although not opposed to railway development per se, objected to the national costs and social hardships that resulted from the railway boom. Opponents, many of whom played influential roles in the Revolution (1910), exploited the symbolic and rhetorical power of the railroad to underscore the more negative aspects of Porfirian modernization and to question the so-called universal truths that defined the regime's civilizing mission. This study offers a radically different interpretation of how Porfirio Diaz maintained control of the country, stressing the importance of his supporter's success at exploiting the iconic power of the railway--the ultimate symbol of material progress--in literature, art, and pageantry. It offers a unique perspective on the outbreak of the 1910 Revolution, arguing that opponents of the regime used the railway as a metaphor to highlight the failures of the government's modernizing and civilizing mission, ideas also disseminated among the population in a myriad of cultural expressions.

The aim of these experiments was to investigate learning and memory extensively in two nonverbal domains (olfactory and visual), and to determine similarities and differences in the function of the neural substrates that subserve these modalities. Two complementary methodological approaches were taken: (1) examination of learning and retention in patients with resection from left (LR) or right (RR) temporal lobe, and (2) study of brain function via Positron Emission Tomography (PET) of healthy subjects during memory processing. / Two parallel recognition tests were developed (one olfactory, one visual) that examined memory at three stages: following a single exposure to test stimuli, after four exposures, and following a 24hr delay interval. In the olfactory patient study, LR and RR groups performed significantly worse than the healthy control subjects, with no difference between the patient groups; thus suggesting a lack of hemispheric superiority for this task. The PET study of healthy individuals supported the bilateral participation of piriform cortex during olfactory recognition. The results from these two studies, along with findings from animal work, suggest that the piriform cortices may play a role in odor memory processing, not simply in perception. / On the face memory task, LR and RR patients showed different results. Only RR patients were impaired, while LR patients did not perform differently from controls. This unique face learning paradigm was sensitive to right temporal lobe damage, and correctly classified patients by side of resection with a sensitivity rate of 82% and specificity rate of 79%, suggesting its possible utility as a clinical tool. PET face memory findings indicated greater participation of fusiform regions during long-term recognition, and greater right prefrontal activity during short-term recognition, when these conditions are directly compared to each other. / Finally, PET was used to study the same healthy subjects performing parallel odor and face working-memory tasks, focusing on regions previously shown to be important for working memory. Results revealed similar regions of activation in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the two modalities. This indicates an overlap in the brain regions that process olfactory and visual information when the same cognitive manipulations are being carried out online.

This study investigated rowers' cognitive pain coping strategies during a 2,000 metre ergometer race. The concepts of association and dissociation were expanded upon by devising five thought categories: performance dissociation (PerfD), pain association (PaA), pain dissociation (PaD), psychological performance association (PsyA), and technical performance association (TechA). Sixteen rowers, five males and eleven females, between the ages of 19 and 27 years, rowed at maximum intensity for four race segments of 500 m, 1,000 m, and 2,000 m on separate occasions. A forty-one item Thoughts During Rowing Questionnaire was administered upon completion of each distance. Subjects' average thought category scores were analyzed by a 4 x 5 (Distance x Thought category) MANOVA. Results indicated significant (p $<$.005) effects for distance and thought category, and an interaction. Results suggest that while racing, rowers rarely dissociate from their performances. As pain awareness rises, rowers dissociate from pain and associate with the psychological or technical aspects of their performances.

Advertising is an institution of economic, cultural and spatial regulation. This thesis examines the role of the advertising industry in mediating the geographies of markets and identities. In the same way that Stuart Ewen (1976) links the structure of the advertising industry in the 1920s to its role in the consolidation of national markets, mass consumption patterns and consumer identities congruent with Fordism, I tie the restructuring of the industry in the current period to the new regime of flexible accumulation. There is an increased need for information about consumers and a heightened design-intensity in flexible production. Institutions of power/knowledge such as advertising play an important role in linking production and consumption and in establishing a “just-in-time” consumption. In addition, through the process of “branding”, advertising agencies attach images to goods. Branding involves matching consumer identities with the “identities” of products. An important component of this process encompasses the formation of “brandscapes”, places where the product is sold and consumed. Advertising both responds to the location of consumers and situates consumers in space. At the same time that advertising has grown in importance, I find that the advertising industry is experiencing a crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. This crisis reflects a weakening of the industry’s ability to regulate the formation of markets and identities. The increasingly discontinuous and fluid spatial and temporal nature of consumer identities, combined with “reflexive modernization”, have made it increasingly difficult for advertisers to locate consumers in terms of both identity and space. In response to this crisis and under new conditions of flexible accumulation, U.S. agencies have reoriented both their organizational structure and their methods of operating. In terms of the reorganization of agencies themselves, I focus on two divergent tendencies in the 1980s and 1990s: the concentration! transnationalization of agencies on one hand, and the increased polarization/flexibility of agencies on the other. I draw upon trade journal literature and 55 interviews with employees. With respect to changing methods, I examine the role of agencies in processes of globalization, market segmentation and shifting gender identities. Increasingly sophisticated methods of monitoring consumers’ use of commodities, forms of resistance and places of consumption point to an escalation of surveillance in the current period. My thesis presents a contribution to debates over both flexibility and identity. I argue that the distinction between producer and consumer has become increasingly blurred, and that the two have come closer together at the site of advertising.

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The author calls into question the primacy of the optimism/pessimism split within modern discourses on technology and suggests rather that the dominant thematic division in these discourses is that between mastery over and enslavement to technology. Each of these is criticized with respect to the faulty conception of control it implies. The author concludes with a view of technology as a social practice in order to move beyond mastery or enslavement.