<p> Civil-military relations theory stresses the importance of civilian control of the military and clearly defined roles for the military in democratic societies. There are two distinct perspectives regarding military roles. Traditionalist thinkers argue that the military should be restricted solely to its traditional role of national defense. On the other hand, some scholars propose additional, diverse, non-traditional roles for the military such as humanitarian assistance, law enforcement activities, peace-keeping operations, and disaster management, as "new military roles." Guatemala serves as a case study where a military institution has received much criticism for past political involvement and lack of respect for civil authority. The 1996 Peace Accords stipulated a reduction and new mission for the Guatemalan military, which put new emphasis on disaster management, and serves as the research starting point. This study describes Guatemalan military involvement in disaster management during 1997-2002. In order to determine the nature of Guatemalan military involvement in disaster management, three indicators are examined: 1) organization, 2) training, and 3) participation in disaster response. Analysis of military compliance with Peace Accord directives, and the three indicators, is conducted to assess how well the Guatemalan military respected civil authority during the study period. This dissertation argues that the post-1996 Guatemalan military was involved in disaster management yet stayed within the bounds of civilian control of the military. The implications of these findings will add to the existing literature concerning civil-military relations, disaster management, and the controversial topic of non-traditional roles for the military. </p>

<p> This thesis argues that Mexican painter Enrique Guzm&aacute;n is a central figure in the transition between the Ruptura movement and postmodernism. Construed by many as a surrealist artist, Guzm&aacute;n employs idiosyncratic imagery not to probe inner realities, but to explore themes such as abjection and the fragmentation of self into commodity images. Inhabiting the chasm between an oppressive ultra-conservative provincial culture and the turbulent revolutionary ideology of Mexico City of the sixties and seventies, Guzm&aacute;n articulates, by fusing aesthetic categories such as, among others, the grotesque, the campy and the advertising clich&eacute; and exploring language, paradox and gaze, a deconstruction of cultural and political codes by satirizing their interlocking systems of signs and simulacra, initiating a critique of national and personal identity that will later be developed by the Neo-Mexicanists (Neomexicanistas) into a bold denouncement of sexual, socioeconomic and national marginalization.</p>

<p> Currently, research reveals a gap of knowledge about African American and Latino/a students&rsquo; experiences participating in restorative practices such as dialogue circles. In the United States, African American and Latino/a students are disciplined more harshly by teachers as well as being suspended and expelled at a higher rate. Alternatives to punitive approaches like suspension and expulsion are addressed throughout this thesis. The nine participants of this study attended a three-day camp that focused on building social justice awareness and connectedness while utilizing dialogue circles. The interviews revealed that through these dialogue circles, the participants were able to think critically about conflicts, social division, discrimination, and oppression as it relates to themselves, their community, and country. Implications and recommendations based on the findings of this study, are provided to inform educators and school personnel about alternative ways of disciplining. Future studies are recommended to further study the influences of community based programs like the Building Bridges in High Schools.</p><p>

Jamaican family structures have long felt the impact of unstable internal economic conditions and high volume of labor demands originating from England, Canada, the United States, and other larger societies. In response to the economic conditions and labor demands, increasing numbers of Jamaican women have migrated away from home, both within Jamaica and to other countries. Subsequently, many Jamaicans' households are restructured using a method called child shifting. This refers to "the relocation of children between households." Using three major theoretical paradigms: cultural diffusion, social pathology, and structural functionalism, this study explores the literature of child shifting to understand how economic conditions influence matrifocal families and in particular their child rearing practices. This study employs the structural functionalism paradigm's focus on "adaptive responses" to find plausible explanations for child shifting patterns. The primary premise of the "adaptive responses" approach is that economic marginality leads to certain adaptive responses in residential, kinship, and child rearing patterns. This study finds certain adjustment problems associated with child shifting. These include shifted children developing feelings of abandonment, of anxiety, of loss, and having difficulty trusting after the shifting occurs. These costs may outweigh the benefits of child shifting.

The thesis contributed to the growing body of knowledge and discourse on the African presence in Mexico. Long underresearched, Afromexican studies today command the attention of some of Mexico's foremost historians and anthropologists. This thesis focused on some of their ideas and gave a general overview of the history of people of African descent in Mexico, particularly in the state of Veracruz, the port of entry for most of New Spain's African slaves. Drawing on the work of these Afromexicanista scholars, this thesis demonstrated how their ideas intersect, and sometimes differ with, traditional scholarship in this neglected area. The elusive question of defining blackness within the national discourse of mestizaje formed part of the discussion. Mestizaje traditionally refers to the racial mixture of Europeans and indigenous Americans. Recent efforts seek to broaden the concept of mestizaje to include the descendants of Africans. Finally, this thesis reported on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two Afromexican towns in Veracruz, Yanga and El Coyolillo, which have widely divergent attitudes toward the concept of blackness.

abstract: Scholars have attended to paradoxes inherent in wider public discourse where subordinated groups most affected by laws and sanctions have the least political, material, and rhetorical capital to speak back to them. Such scholarship often focuses either on the subordinated status of a group or the work of subordinated groups going public as part of a collective mass movement for social change. In doing so, scholarship risks undermining the agency of subordinated rhetors or treating mass-movement rhetoric as somehow both exceptional and yet necessary for enacting cultural citizenship. What is less frequently studied is the agency that local publics demonstrate through their tenacious organizational decision-making in the face of political, material, and rhetorical sanctions. In response to this gap, this project features the Puente Movement, a mixed-documentation-status grassroots organization in Phoenix, AZ. Specifically, I’ve analyzed this organization’s public efforts from April 23rd, 2010 to September 6th, 2012 to oppose Senate Bill 1070—a state-specific measure to stop undocumented immigration across the Mexico/Arizona border and deport current undocumented residents. I situate the study in the larger context of Latino cultural citizenship. Combining a critical-incident interview technique and a rhetorically informed decision-making framework, I analyze Puente’s active construction and public circulation of argumentative appeals in relation to their decision-making that attempted to leverage Puente’s identity and membership to serve its constituents and to continue to direct wider public attention to SB 1070. Using a five-part framework to assess potential risks and benefits, the study documents the complexity of this decision-making. For instance, the study shows how Puente’s strategy of Barrio Defense Committees negotiated the tension between protecting the identification of local residents and publically protesting the injustices of immigration sanctions. It also highlights how a strategy to use member’s undocumented status as a point of publicity actively engaged tensions between the narratives Puente members wanted to present to the public about undocumented people and the images otherwise circulated. Behind these strategies and others like them is Puente’s persistent effort to re-frame immigration controversy. Findings are relevant to the study of Latino/a social movements, public-spheres scholarship, and action-research with subordinated rhetors. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2015

<p> Elevated Latin American well-being rankings are controversial. The dissertation explores the relationship between well-being and other performance measures covering 134 countries. A correlation analysis tests the relationship across country rankings, such as the Happy Planet Index, the World Development Indicators, the Global Peace Index, and the Corruption Perception Index. The empirical findings suggest that life satisfaction becomes statistically insignificant for the region when correlated with other measures including peace-security, and corruption. The findings also indicate that an increase in per-capita-income, war, and corruption tend to have little to no effect on the given HPI country ranking.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation examines how neoliberalism and immigration enforcement between 1980 and 2010 changed the nature of &lsquo;sweated&rsquo; work in the U.S. This dissertation focuses on the particular case of Latino undocumented workers in New York State and the organizations fighting to win them protections. In order to answer my research questions, I conducted 30 semi-structured interviews over the course of 2 years (2013&ndash;2015), examined immigration enforcement data, and analyzed U.S. immigration and welfare policies between 1980 and the present. Research interviews made clear that both the lack of social and legal protections alongside the threat of immigration enforcement have a definitive impact on working conditions in low-wage sectors. Staff and volunteers from worker justice centers and immigration rights organizations also emphasized the fact that some of the old protections that were hard fought and won by prior generations of labor activists are ill-suited to address the needs of low-wage, non-citizen workers who face a number of new challenges. By focusing on undocumented Latino workers and worker centers in New York State this dissertation shifts the conceptual lens from a particular &lsquo;worksite&rsquo; to the forces&mdash;historical, legal, and social&mdash;which make sweating possible once an individual enters a workplace. This dissertation contends that the specters of wagelessness and deportation collaborate to ensure the flexibility of undocumented labor and that these are the distinctive features of the contemporary U.S. sweatshop.</p><p>

Abstract not available.

One of the defining trends in international finance over the last two decades has been the unprecedented growth in the levels of international reserves accumulated by emerging nations. In a global financial system characterized by market failures and sudden stops, many developing countries have opted for the protection provided by individual accumulation of reserves as a second-best outcome. However, as suggested by Rodrik (2006), among others, the accumulation of reserves comes at a hefty opportunity cost to the nations that hold them. It is this particular aspect that brings into question—or at least merits a re-examination of—the validity and efficiency of reserve accumulation as a stabilization and development strategy, particularly in the context of some cash-strapped developing nations. This dissertation takes an in-depth look at this trend in Latin America by investigating the extent of protection of these precautionary reserves, the role of contagion risk in the accumulation process, and the outlook of regional arrangements of cooperation, such as regional reserve pooling mechanisms.