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This study examines the rise and fall of the modern Belarusian national movement during the quarter century between 1906, the year when the first Belarusian paper appeared, until its demise around 1931, as a result of political repression in the Soviet Union and Poland. While the first steps towards a modern, ethnic definition of the nation, were taken around the turn of the century era, the February Revolution and the German occupation energized the national movement. The 1920s Soviet nationalities policies brought about a Belarusian cultural renaissance, but also highlighted the difficulties of introducing new concepts of nationality in a relatively underdeveloped region. The results of these experimental policies were not what Moscow had expected. In the BSSR the local population often misunderstood the Soviet nationalities policies, resisting the new and unknown taxonomies. While the Belarusization had strengthened the nationally conscious elites in the republic, it failed to generate popular support for Soviet rule among the Belarusian peasantry. In Western Belarus, which was under Polish rule from 1921 to 1939, the peasantry was often alienated from the nationalist intelligentsia. After Pilsudski's coup d'etat established authoritarian rule in Poland in 1926, the Soviet government again became concerned about the threat of a Polish invasion. After a brief experimentation with liberalization of its nationalities policies, the Pilsudski's regime stepped up the efforts to Polonize Western Belarus. At the same time, from 1927 it suppressed, jailed and deported to the Soviet Union many leading Belarusian activists, accusing them for irredentism and pro-Soviet sentiments. By 1929-1930, opposition to unpopular Soviet polices brought the borderlands of the BSSR close to a popular uprising. This, in turn prompted Moscow to crack down on the national communists in Minsk. The purges of the BSSR elites were more thorough than in any other republic, leading to the demise of 90 per cent of the Belarusian intelligentsia. The national mobilization was interrupted. For the next six decades the Soviet Belarusian nation building was carried out from above, increasingly in the Russian language, and with little autonomy for the government in Minsk.

<p> This thesis explores the intersection of nationalism, popular music, and sport as they collided with German identity politics and discourses of twentieth-century history. I contextualize public performances of German national identity during the 2006 World Cup within the broader historical context of national identity construction through music and sport in the last two hundred. I contextualize Germans' public performance of national pride and hospitality during the World Cup as the latest in a long line of cultural performances of German identity that have shaped and been shaped by historical circumstances and socially conditioned discourses of national identity. Taking a broad historical and conceptual perspective on cultural performance, I argue that cultural performances of German national identity&mdash;communicated in music, sport, and visual symbolism in the public landscape (i.e., through the use of posters, ads, popular press, etc)&mdash;have been tailored to and contingent on the social and discursive exigencies of particular historical and political junctures of the past two hundred years. Likewise, cultural performances during the 2006 World Cup must be seen as particular to twenty-first-century German society. Analyzing the Germans' public performance of national identity as well as popular songs and their audio-visual texts (i.e., music videos), I argue that some supposedly nationalist performances of German identity gained traction and popular support during the World Cup because of the strong role played by popular music and sport in framing the terms of their performance and interpretation.</p>

<p> Bulgaria has repeatedly been ranked as 1 of the most pessimistic and unhappy nations in the world in surveys conducted over the last 15 years. The transition to a democratic form of government and a free market economy that began in 1989 has been difficult, even traumatic. Young urban adults who have grown up during this period of uncertainty were the focus of this study. Because of Bulgaria's extremely low birth rate and high rate of emigration, this generation is small in demographic terms, but their contribution to the country's future is critical. </p><p> The purpose of this grounded theory study was to explore and describe the sources of hope that enable these young Bulgarians to survive and cope. Data were gathered through focus group discussions that involved the viewing of a contemporary Bulgarian film. 3 major themes emerged from the focus group data: power, the nature goodness, and the act of believing (as opposed to belief in a supernatural or religious object). Analysis of these themes and an extensive review of available literature, including many local Bulgarian-language sources, led to the development of a theory of disempowerment as the best explanation of participants' perception their environment, themselves, and how they choose to cope. Participants' primary coping strategy is withdrawal. Because they are convinced that their environment is hostile and unjust and that they do not possess sufficient power to protect themselves, their primary source of hope is to avoid further loss through maintaining a limited number of close personal relationships, avoiding civic involvement, and utilizing the act of believing as a form of rationalization. Participants show virtually no interest in or reliance on religious faith, belief in supernatural power, or existential meaning as sources of hope for their lives. </p><p> Though the theory of disempowerment is helpful in describing and understanding participants' lives, the sources of hope identified are ineffectual. This study suggests potential paths of application for churches and Christian organizations and recommends further research concerning the form that the search for existential meaning may take in the Bulgarian context.</p>

<p> This study examines the discourse of Beppe Grillo, founder of the Five Star Movement, a populist political movement created on his personal blog in 2009. It analyzes three of the texts published on Grillo&rsquo;s blog about the constitutional referendum proposed by the ex-Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in 2016 by applying various linguistic models from the field of Critical Discourse Analysis to demonstrate some of the most salient linguistic patterns that coincide with characteristics commonly found in populist discourse. By examining the socio-political background of the movement, this study also aims to reveal the significance of the blog as a tool in the success of their campaign against the referendum. We seek to place Grillo&rsquo;s discourse within the realm of populist discourse by observing how he utilizes the referendum to promote his movement and challenge the established parties of Italy.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation explores the role of the concept of flourishing as it moves toward sustainability by examining a theoretical case study of the Aeolian Islands, and in particular, the island of Lipari. Lipari is challenged by four core problems: lack of potable water, lack of collaboration on policymaking, lack of a shared vision, and lack of a sustainable economy. Each core problem is evaluated as a set of complex and interrelated systems. Through this analysis, the leading qualities associated with a flourishing society are explored to determine the potential levers that would be most effective in shifting the islands from unsustainable to sustainably flourishing. Using the framework of complexity, this paper integrates a variety of fields such as ecology, economics, public policy, and sociology in developing a more comprehensive definition of the concept of sustainable flourishing.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation analyzes an unusual grammatical pattern that I call locative determiner omission, which is found in several languages belonging to the Slavic, Romance, and Albanian families, but which does not appear to have been directly inherited from any individual genetic ancestor of these languages. Locative determiner omission involves the omission of a definite article in the context of a locative prepositional phrase, and stands out as a feature of the Balkan linguistic area for which there are few, if any crosslinguistic parallels. This investigation of the origin and diachronic spread of locative determiner omission serves the particular goal of revealing how the social context of language contact could have resulted in a pattern of grammatical borrowing without lexical borrowing, yielding a present distribution in which locative determiner omission appears in several Balkan languages no longer in direct contact with one another. A detailed structural and historical analysis of locative determiner omission in Albanian, Romanian, Aromanian, and Macedonian is used as a basis for comparison with other Balkan languages. The analysis pays particular attention to the sequence of grammatical changes necessary for the outcome of locative determiner omission in each language, and the specific sociocultural configurations between speaker communities at relevant historical stages that allowed for the spread of locative determiner omission without direct lexical borrowing. This makes it possible to establish that locative determiner omission arose from a period of early contact between proto-Albanian and Late Latin, resulting in the generalization of the structure across all branches of Balkan Romance. During a later period, contact between Aromanian and individual dialects of Albanian and Macedonian resulted in the transfer of this feature, which then spread throughout most, but not all dialects of these latter languages.</p><p> A methodological contribution of this dissertation is the demonstration that in-depth study of a grammatical feature that is suspected to have developed through language contact can yield important insights into the historical and social dynamics of a linguistic area that cannot be determined through synchronic observation of broad similarities alone. Even in the absence of documentation, careful reconstruction of the structural accommodations required for the adoption of a grammatical innovation can reveal new information about the process of language contact. This is particularly true for features that are not uniformly distributed across a linguistic area, as is the case with locative determiner omission in the Balkans. As a consequence, my proposal argues for an approach to linguistic areas that views them as an outcome of localized, layered clusters of convergence.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation studies the survival, or resistance, of regional languages in France through the use of two case studies: Picard in Picardy and Proven&ccedil;al in Provence. In order to create the French nation, the revolutionaries of 1789 decided upon the necessity of political unity. In order to facilitate, or to create, this unity, the cultural provinces were abolished and generic <i> d&eacute;partements</i> were created in their stead. However, when political unity did not occur immediately after the territorial change, the revolutionaries determined that national unity, both political and cultural, would be attained through the imposition of the French language. It was thus language that was deemed to be the greatest separating factor of the French at this period. In 1794, Abb&eacute; Gr&eacute;goire called for the &ldquo;programmed demise&rdquo; of the regional languages through education in and of French. While this program was not officially enacted until the Third Republic (1870&ndash;1914), due to numerous factors, these languages were supposed to have died long ago. While their numbers of speakers have decreased, and there are no longer any monolingual regional language speakers, they still exist. How is this fact possible? Despite explanations attributed to enduring diglossia, the extended process of language shift or time itself, this study focuses on regional identity and posits that the durable bond between regional identity and language is the explanation.</p><p>