The nexus between terrorism and narcotics is historically well documented. However, its contemporary development is rarely brought to light. Rather, narcoterrorism is often considered to be an outdated phenomenon and characteristic of only Latin America. Nevertheless, narcoterrorism continues to be a global security concern. As terrorism has evolved over the recent decade, terrorist relations to the narcotic industry have also evolved. Understanding the unique characteristics of contemporary narcoterrorism is important to effectively combating both terrorism and narcotics globally. The intent of this thesis is to comparatively analyze the differences between traditional and contemporary terrorist organizations, and how these differences will affect the international nexus between the narcotic industry and terrorist organizations. The presented research supports the argument of an increasingly strong connection between contemporary terrorist organizations and the contemporary narcotic industry. Case study examples will give testimony to the historically significant and negative effects of narcoterrorism and illustrate the future of narcoterrorism. The overall objectives of this research project is to raise awareness of the role of contemporary narcoterrorism and to promote greater acknowledgement of its potential.

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This dissertation responds to the notion that the economic success and social integration of one imaginary figure, the “model minority,” can explain the downward mobility of another, the “white working class” in post-Brexit Britain. Through intersectional readings of Black and Asian British fiction written during and after Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership, I examine the model minority myth as providing a racist explanation for rising inequality, but also as a burdensome imperative of neoliberal aspiration to which racialized British subjects are increasingly subject. I trace the origins of this exclusionary account of racialized belonging to the account in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses of the political possibilities resulting from the collapse of anti-racist solidarities under the sign of Black British identity in the 1980s. I show that the author’s non-fictional responses to the subsequent controversy known as the Rushdie Affair work to close off these possibilities, serving instead to justify Islamophobia one specific means by which racial neoliberalism functions as what David Theo Goldberg calls “racism without racism.” I develop this analysis of Islamophobia as form of racial neoliberalism by turning to two novels that depict coming of age for diasporic Muslim British women, contrasting Monica Ali’s Brick Lane as a normative narrative of feminist becoming through assimilation with Leila Aboulela’s Minaret, which complicates the agency assumed to be conferred on “Third World Women” who migrate to the Global North. In my third and final chapter, I trace the model minority trope across differences in Black and Asian British communities as evidence of the empty aspiration of “post-racial” Britain, contrasting the attempt in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani to posit the figure of the “rudeboy” as an alternative “outsider” figure of aspiration, with Zadie Smith’s “insider” depiction of the social alienation that results from approaching the embodiment of this racialized ideal in NW. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation discusses the influence of neoliberalism—the idea that capitalism represents the ideal model of organization for every aspect of human life—on Black and Asian British writing from the 1980s to the present. In the context of mainstream analysis of the June 2016 Brexit vote as an expression of “white working class” disaffection with rising inequality, I focus on how coming-of-age narratives by Black and Asian writers complicate an unspoken implication of this popular explanation: that neoliberal reforms have unduly advantaged so-called “model” racial minorities. Through readings that emphasize how the Muslim and/as racialized protagonists of these texts experience the recoding of racism either in the covert guise of Islamophobia or through the aspirational idea that Britain is “post-racial,” I demonstrate the highly tenuous nature of what social and political belonging racialized subjects can find amid the increasing individualism of contemporary British society.

A collection of poems by Juliana Ward

Despite being one of the most well-known laboratory-based tasks in psychology, certain methodological and theoretical considerations surrounding the marshmallow test have gone largely unstudied until recently. These considerations reflect gaps in the delay of gratification literature and broader contemporary issues concerning the replicability of seminal findings and the lack of an agreed upon theoretical framework in the field. Accordingly, my dissertation uses the classic marshmallow test to explore the contemporary issues of replication and theory in psychology in a series of three studies. In Study 1, the marshmallow test is at the center of a case study unpacking the nuances of direct and conceptual replication; a tool designed to support ongoing replication efforts is proposed. Study 2 executes a full-scale replication of the paradigm from the case study, and introduces a methodological extension to improve the paradigm’s experimental rigour while making it amenable to an evolutionary–developmental framework. Finally, Study 3 applies an evolutionary–developmental framework to examine how this perspective might help account for individual differences in marshmallow test behavior. Through these three studies, my dissertation provides an example of how engaging in replication and applying an evolutionary–developmental framework to the marshmallow test literature to inform outstanding theoretical questions in psychology might be mutually beneficial endeavors. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation uses an iconic measure in psychology, “the marshmallow test,” to explore issues currently relevant to the field today. The marshmallow test measures delay of gratification––how children chose between a small reward now or a larger reward later. However, despite being one of the most well-known laboratory-based tasks in psychology, certain methodological and theoretical considerations surrounding the marshmallow test have gone largely unstudied until recently. These considerations reflect two bigger issues relevant to psychology more broadly: that of how well findings in psychology can be replicated, and the lack of an overarching and unifying theory in the field. Using the marshmallow test, this dissertation 1) proposes a tool to support ongoing replication efforts, 2) executes a replication and extension of a recent well-cited study, and 3) introduces ways of exploring how a framework that takes evolutionary–developmental principles into account might help address outstanding theoretical questions in the study of delay of gratification.

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the locked Download file link and fill out the appropriate web form. / Original poetry by American poet, Dan Murphy. / 2999-01-01

This essay is a study of Yinka Shonibare MBE, London-born and Nigerian-raised contemporary artist, and his recent photographic practice that includes three series: Fake Death Pictures, William Morris Family Album, and Medusa. Exploration of the series reveals insight into Shonibare’s unique relationship to photography, in which he employs the hyper-realism and theatricality of the medium to interact with individuals from British history and reveal contemporary social and political injustices.

Perception greatly affects the way we experience and understand the world. Using self-reflective research processes and data collection, I explore how art can subjectively re-present data and what this means for research and knowledge. The artworks through which I discuss these notions are Self Checkout 2013, Bibliography of Virtual Consciousness: Uniform Resource Locator Volumes 1-12 (BOVC:URL 1-12), and Observation Box. Self Checkout 2013 is composed of all of my receipts from 2013. They not only record my transactions, but also re-present data from which one can make inferences regarding my life—my consumer identity, my needs, my desires, etc. BOVC:URL 1-12 re-presents my web history and suggests a reflection on the relationships between physical realities, virtual realities, and the consciousness that mediates experience between them. These forms of data are analyzed by me and through audience participation in Observation Box in an attempt to construct multi-perspectival knowledges from art.

Com o surgimento das mídias eletrônicas e os processos de produção digital, sobretudo com o desenvolvimento dos programas de simulação espacial e de relacionamento social em realidade virtual e a crescente utilização do ciberespaço como território de suporte a estes fenômenos de existência imaterial, abriu-se vários caminhos em direção à transformação dos resultados únicos e previsíveis, contidos nos processos analógicos de produção, para um universo de exploração de resultados latentes, cuja potencialidade produtiva está na exploração da condição do inacabado, do transitório, do não plenamente definido e sua flexibilidade para ágil transformação. Esta nova condição sócio-digital, fez surgir situações exploratórias que testam os limites da ação produtiva do design e da arquitetura, onde o meio digital é base para a construção de objetos e espaços. A partir desta nova condição de produção de objetos e espaços sem objetivar a materialidade física, a ação produtiva se torna mais complexa, uma vez que os resultados são possibilidades ao invés de certezas e a ação de intervenção do usuário é parte determinante do resultado final e da percepção sobre estes. No mesmo tempo que traz relações complexa à condição produtiva, a imaterialidade dos resultados nos meios digitais permite, ao design e à arquitetura, explorar uma reserva de possibilidades direcionadas ao sensorium humano. Dentro contexto, esta tese se desenvolve centrada na hipótese de que, se é condição básica da arquitetura prover espaços que permitam, no mínimo, a ação humana em seu interior e a possibilidade de interação com os objetos ali presentes, a partir dos conceitos de espacialização e representação associados à produção arquitetônica, os espaços obtidos por meio da simulação em realidade virtual tornam-se potencializadores agentes de novos significados e o ciberspaço, mais um território a ser explorado pela arquitetura e pelo design. / With the advent of the electronic media and the processes of digital production, especially with the development of softwares for space simulation and social networking in virtual reality, and the growing use of cyberspace as a supporting territory for these phenomena of immaterial existence, multiple paths were open toward the transformation of the single and predictable results, contained in the analogical processes of production, to a whole of latent result exploitation, whose productive power is under the unfinished condition, the transitory, the undefined and its flexibility to an agile transformation. This new social-digital condition has brought exploring situations that test the limits of the productive action of design and architecture, where the digital environment is the basis for building objects and spaces. From this new condition of producing objects and spaces without aiming the physical materiality, the productive action becomes more complex, since the results are possibilities rather than certainties, and the user intervention is determinative for the final result and perception of those. At the same time it brings complex connections to the productive action, the immateriality of the result in the digital environment allows, in the fields of architecture and design, the exploitation of a range of possibilities for the human sensorium. Within this context, this thesis focuses on the assumption that, if providing spaces that allow, at least, the human action in its interior and the possibility of interaction with the existent objects is a basic condition of architecture, from the definitions of spatiality and representation related to the architectural production, the spaces obtained by simulations in virtual reality become powering agents of the new meanings and the cyberspace, another territory to be explored by the architecture and the design.

O presente estudo volta-se ao romance Água Viva, publicado em 1973 por Clarice Lispector, compreendido como exercício de radicalização da linguagem sob influência do pensamento pictórico, no qual o rastro material do processo e a possibilidade de uma expressão não-verbal entram em questão. Será desenvolvida uma discussão sobre o romance enquanto gênero literário, que se desdobrará em uma comparação entre as linguagens literária e pictórica, suscitada pelas constantes sugestões ao universo da pintura presentes em Água Viva. Ao se estabelecer um embate entre crítica literária e crítica de arte visual, serão analisadas as tensões entre arte e realidade nos projetos estéticos da contemporaneidade, por meio de uma comparação entre o romance de nosso recorte e expressões artísticas consolidadas na década de 70, como o minimalismo, a arte-processo e a arte conceitual, que, ao colocar a pintura em xeque, desencadearam um amplo ataque ao ilusionismo. A análise do objeto deverá nos mostrar de que maneira os debates em torno da chamada morte da pintura auxiliam a compreender os movimentos dialéticos de Clarice Lispector, alternando afirmação e negação da arte em uma de suas obras de maior experimentação. É nesse contexto que será lido Água Viva, romance que se dispõe a refletir com complexidade sobre a crise das representações. / The present study is an approach to the novel Água Viva, published in 1973 by Clarice Lispector; it is understood as a radicalization of language under the influence of pictorial thought, in which the material trace of the process and the possibility of nonverbal expression are at stake. A discussion about novel as a literary genre will be developed; this will unfold into a comparison between literary and pictorial languages, implied by the constant suggestions regarding the universe of painting present in Água Viva. The confrontation of literary critic and visual arts critic settles an analysis of the tension between art and reality in the contemporary aesthetics projects, by means of a comparison between the novel in view and the consolidated art expressions from the 70s, like minimalism, process-art and conceptual art, which, challenging painting, triggered a comprehensive attack upon illusionism. The analysis of the object may show us how the debates about the so called death of the painting can aid in the understanding of Clarice Lispectors dialectic movements, in which art acceptance and denial take turns in one of her major works of experimentation. It is within this context that Agua Viva will be read, a novel that is willing to plunge with high complexity upon the crisis of representation.