University of Macau / Faculty of Business Administration / Department of Finance and Business Economics

University of Macau / Faculty of Business Administration / Department of Finance and Business Economics

University of Macau / Faculty of Business Administration / Department of Finance and Business Economics

University of Macau / Faculty of Business Administration / Department of Finance and Business Economics

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Government and Public Administration

Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation has struggled to construct a new foreign policy paradigm in a world that is no longer bipolar. Instead of the Cold War era arms stockpiles, Moscow has signed multiple Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START), and instead of physically taking over neighboring territories, increasing diplomacy and economic incentives have become Moscow’s primary tool to garner and maintain influence in its near abroad. Soft power initiatives, that can all roughly fit into a foreign aid model, from the Russian Federation to the near abroad come in different forms: oil subsidies, aid in kind, and direct financial investment. The Russian Federation has used all three of these strategies in Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union in an attempt to keep the country in its sphere of influence. The use of foreign aid, be it oil subsides, aid in kind, or direct financial aid, all work towards the same goal of promoting Russian policies and interests in the near abroad. Ukraine, with its unique political, cultural and geographical importance, demonstrates the new struggle between Russia and the West. The struggle’s main actors are the Russian Federation against the eastern half of NATO and the EU, and the conclusion is unclear. Foreign aid and soft power are now playing a critical role in the outcome.

On the basis of extended field research in Sofia, Bulgaria, between 2004 and 2006, this project provides an ethnographic account of the predicament of art and culture producers after the end of socialism. The end of socialism deprived the Bulgarian intelligentsia from its economic security, prestige, and a sense of clear moral mission. Now young cutting-edge artists, writers, designers, theater directors and other culture producers seek a way out of this predicament and aspire to become moral leaders of the nation. Through ethnographic participant-observation at the lifestyle magazine Edno, a mouthpiece for this social segment, and through research radiating from the offices of the magazine to the fringes of contemporary Bulgarian art and culture, this project demonstrates that the new culture producers comprise a social segment in a state of flux, an elite in-the-making. While its future is uncertain---it could solidify in a new dominant faction of the intelligentsia, could disintegrate or could take the shape of a qualitatively new configuration---its present condition sheds light on post-socialist debates about artistic merit, the importance of national versus international recognition, and the changing value of cultural capital. The dissertation investigates how the young culture producers strategically code their artistic preferences and ways of life as "European," and demonstrates that they strategically capitalize on a historical local anxiety that Bulgaria is deficient and less modern than an imagined "Europe." The project is indebted to a Bourdieusian understanding of the relationship between taste and social class, and pays close attention to aesthetic preferences in two fields: lifestyle and creative work. At the same time, it departs from Bourdieu in recognizing that while well-suited to account for social reproduction, his model is less successful in explaining social production: the emergence of new social groups and the re-ordering of existing social relations in the context of rapid social change. The project addresses this problem through the prism of Foucauldian ethics. It suggests that the young culture producers have an at least partially correct understanding of their objective circumstances and consciously reflect on the mismatch between their expectations, and the reality of post-socialist Bulgaria.

<p>This dissertation theorizes the complex contemporary phenomenon of literature produced in French by writers of allophone origins, which is to say, writers born in non-Francophone countries. Vassilis Alexakis, Gao Xingjian, Andreï Makine, Nancy Huston, Dai Sijie, Brina Svit, Amin Maalouf, Shan Sa, Agota Kristof, Milan Kundera, Ya Ding, François Cheng, Eduardo Manet, Hector Bianciotti, Jorge Semprun or Jonathan Littell, are frequently classified as "Francophone singularities," even though their number has now surpassed a few hundred. By closely looking at cultural and geo-political realities underpinning these writers' literature, La République réinventée reconceptualizes notions of "exile," "migrant," "diaspora," and even certain areas of "postcolonial" literary praxis as a transcultural model of literary production that is emblematic for our globalized society. Intended to reframe the debate around the transcultural literature, this study uses a sociological paradigm of methodological or reflexive cosmopolitanism (Ulrich Beck) in order to define transcultural ideologies and networks, reinforced by unlimited axes of reworked local, transnational, and global focalization.</p> / Dissertation

<p> Immigrant communities in Massachusetts Gateway Cities face a number of economic and social challenges that can be difficult to understand or quantify through traditional research methods. This thesis explores the use of sentiment analysis of microblogging data as an alternative method for assessing well-being of immigrant communities, with a focus on Portuguese speaking immigrants. I collected Tweets from four key cities in Massachusetts and analyzed them using two sentiment lexicons, one in Portuguese and one in English. I compared results between languages as well as correlated with a number of traditional indicators of well-being gathered from U.S. Census data. I found that the results from the English analysis were overall more positive than those from the Portuguese analysis, but most differences were not statistically significant. I also found some correlations between the demographic data and the sentiment analysis results with promising implications for further research. </p>

This dissertation seeks to abolish the inherited cliché that the Modernist writers and artists rejected earlier art and literature, particularly that of the classical tradition. In fact, both literature and art of the early 20th century made widespread use of the inherited Greco-Roman tradition in a myriad of ways. Moreover, beginning after the First World War and maturing in the 1920s, a demonstrative Neoclassical “movement” appeared across different types of art and different nations. A neoclassical or classicizing style or form is inherently malleable, an empty signifier that can, through an artist or writer’s emphasis, point towards any number of meanings. This allowed a classical style to become widespread along with its seeming resiliency as the ordered, traditional bedrock of the West. In the 1930s, however, the fascist parties of Germany, France, and Italy began to appropriate the neoclassical as a state- or party-style because of the ease with which politics could be incorporated into a relatively vacant form. Their systematic use of the classical tradition in large part “tainted” classical subjects and styles, which allowed for the post-World War II institutionalization of the avant garde. I argue that texts which used the classical tradition could do so in four distinct manners—four types of classicism. Symbolic Classicism controls its classical material by using it only at the level of hollow icon which pregnantly gestures towards antiquity. Traditional Classicism, like an adaptation of a classical narrative particularly in drama, becomes completely dependent on its borrowings. Formal Classicism borrows an inherited, vacant form which can then be injected with Modernity. Finally, Synthetic Classicism necessitates a careful balancing of the classical material, not reducing it to symbolic meaning, but producing a novel narrative or mirroring-effect, that controls its various elements designed into a modern theme or objective. / text