Drawing from a cultural studies perspective, this dissertation examines digital, visual, and idiomatic expressions and platforms that both create and inform youth culture in Chile. In what ways have globalized media trends influenced cultural production, class-consciousness, and identity formation in Chilean youth culture, and how do these expressions mirror a global neoliberal agenda and shed light on a history of economic, political, and religious globalization in Chile? In order to answer these questions, this dissertation provides an interdisciplinary approach to evaluate changing media trends in Latin American youth culture. I argue that cultural influence of the United States and the rise of global neoliberalism have informed the production, reception, dissemination, and identity formation of this segment of Chilean society. This dissertation is organized into four chapters. Chapter 1 provides a historical contextualization of political and economic changes in Chile as well as the literature review and theoretical foundation for my analysis. Chapter 2 contends that the class-consciousness spectrum in Chilean television and film works as a reflection of consumption behavior and identity formation in youth that has been informed by a U.S. neoliberal agenda. Chapter 3 studies one particular young Chilean, Germán Garmendia, and his popular YouTube channel, "Hola Soy German," to argue that the spreadable and invisible factors that inform his global success as a grassroots, "latino" vlogger can be traced to U.S. digital commercialism. And lastly, Chapter 4 highlights digital texts of the student organization, "Chile Siempre," and their stylized performance of moral values through mediatized and digitalized spaces in order to reveal U.S. religious and cultural interventionism through evangelical missionaries in Chile. The triangulation and interdisciplinary approach of these texts expose a consistent history of political, economic, and religious transculturation and calls into question U.S. cultural influence in Chile that continues, while not overtly, to manifest in new media forms.

This dissertation presents three manuscripts that examine how present unity policies in education conflict with an increasingly pluralistic student population. Using a nuanced theoretical grounding and multifaceted research methodology, I deconstruct this tension to uncover a paradox in educational policymaking and practice, wherein policies and structures that claim to create 'equality' essentially lead to inequitable outcomes. Two empirical examples from Arizona schools illustrate the challenges of multicultural education amidst demands for unity; the first paper draws on a study of the enactment of Arizona's language policy within one low-performing high school with a high population of multilingual and immigrant students, and illustrates how the policy restricts both educators and students. The second study examines the leadership and curricular structures in a high-performing school with shifting demographics, and how those structures lead to misrecognition of culturally diverse students. In response to the challenges posed in the two empirical pieces, I present a paper in which I draw from both studies to illustrate the unity/plurality paradox in education, and then present an educational response to the challenges of that paradox in an increasingly global world, which focuses on forming a new, reflective approach to understanding policy and curriculum beyond normative binaries.

This dissertation argues that urban neoliberal programs currently formulating in the Global South are unprecedented in historical México as well as in examined practices of gentrification and globalization. In this dissertation I specifically focus on the Programa de Rescate – an urban policy being amassed in México City’s Centro Histórico as a nexus of processes of gentrification, neoliberalization, and globalization. This work re-theorizes how gentrification functions when it is implemented in the Global South – as the neoliberalization of space.

This dissertation looks into the processes by which neoliberalism is mutating with various local and global discourses in order to transform urban space for marginalized street hawkers in the Global South, specifically Delhi, India. Following the current engagements in geographic literature on neoliberalism that focus on the contextually embedded character and the path-dependent process of the spread of free market ideas, I make free market advocacy think tanks--a rather unknown and under-investigated accomplice to this process--my main entry point. Corporate funded think tanks are often found advocating a neoliberal doctrine of free markets, minimal government intervention, and privatization. A self-professed civil society organization, the Center for Civil Society (CCS) in Delhi is one of the first neoliberal, national and foreign corporation funded, advocacy think tanks in India and one of its many agendas is to counter the popular belief that neoliberalism is harmful for the urban poor such as street hawkers. Various NGOs, social workers, scholars, academicians, and think tanks including CCS came together to form the National Policy of Street Vendors, 2009 (NPSV), one of the first policy proposals in modern India to tackle the problems of urban spaces of street vending. Through my investigations I wish to highlight the neoliberal attitudes that are concealed in this policy regarding street hawkers. By bringing these neoliberal undertones to the forefront, this dissertation discusses how this so called “pro-hawking” policy that is being pushed to be implemented in the majority of Indian cities is in fact hostile to hawkers. I demonstrate this fact by explaining that NPSV and its proponents view space as a capitalist commodity and are attempting to transform the rich social spaces of Indian city streets into hollow container spaces of capitalist production and consumption. In this way, this dissertation connects macro spaces of governance such as city streets to the micro spaces of governmentality such as think tanks like CCS.

<p>Med denna uppsats måste jag verkligen betona att jag ökat min förståelse för Takashi Murakami och hans konstnärskap. Gradvis tog jag mig in i hans konstnärskap. Till en början är det väldigt lätt att fastna vid spektakulära uttryck i hans konst och grubblerier kring hur hans varor blivit konst, men glappet däremellan är alldeles för stort för att sådana tankar skall kunna mynna ut i något fruktbart. Men genom att först försöka förstå sig på hans verksamhet mot ljuset av den ekonomiska kontexten framhävdes gradvis detaljerna kring hur hans varor blivit konst. Jag kom fram till att hans konst egentligen handlar om symboler i relation till andra symboler, där spänningen ligger i att Murakamis är beständiga/ fixerade medan de övriga är rörliga/ dynamiska. Utan Murakamis beständiga/ fixerade symboler som retar den så tillsynes naturliga harmonin i det rörliga/ dynamiska hav av övriga ekonomiskt knutna symboler hade jag definitivt inte förstått att dem är rörliga.</p>

In the last 30 years the World has been swept by neoliberal doctrine. Under neoliberal conceptions, freedom of the market mechanism has precedence in the process of development. Neoliberalism has had a major impact on the mindset of policymakers, on government strategies for development and on economic performance. This thesis is about the economic consequences of neoliberalism in Brazil. It approaches the problem from a historical perspective. By examining government economic strategies in Brazil from the 1930s through the 1970s it undermines a central neoliberal argument that government interventions in the economy are either inimical or irrelevant to economic development. While government failures did occur indeed, in the Brazilian case it is shown that the government performed a crucial role in this period in building key institutions that guided market forces towards industrial transformation. Since the mid-1970s, Brazil has been a laboratory for neoliberal economic policymaking. Restrictive macroeconomic policies alongside liberalised markets have been the cornerstones of policymaking. The second line of argument developed here is that neoliberalism has since constrained economic development in Brazil. During this period the country has been through several financial crises and has experienced low economic growth and unprecedented unemployment. Compared with the previous period of government-led development, neoliberal policies and institutions fall far behind in terms of overall economic performance. Thirdly, it is argued that under neoliberalism government policy and institutions in Brazil have been directed to satisfy rentiers’ interests at the expense of a socially acceptable economic development. Finally, this thesis calls for the reinstatement of discussion over the government’s role as an agent of a democratic, economic and social ransformation. This is a discussion that has been obstructed by neoliberal doctrine for too long.

Alternative food networks (AFNs) have become a common response to the socioecological injustices generated by the industrialized food system. Using a political ecology framework, this paper evaluates the emergence of an AFN in Chiapas, Mexico. While the Mexican context presents a particular set of challenges, the case study also reveals the strength the alternative food movement derives from a diverse network of actors committed to building a “community economy” that reasserts the multifunctional values of organic agriculture and local commodity chains. Nonetheless, just as the AFN functions as an important livelihood strategy for otherwise disenfranchised producers it simultaneously encounters similar limitations as those observed in other market-driven approaches to sustainable food governance.

Being a low-income person of color trying to survive in a society that subscribes to a colorblind ideology can be more than difficult, it can be impossible. This thesis seeks to examine the racial implications of the racial project of HOPE VI. To demonstrate that impact, I perform a Critical Discourse Analysis on the "The Final Report of the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing: A Report to the Congress and the Secretary of housing and Urban Development" and the United States Housing Act of 1937 as it was amended by the "Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998." I plan to demonstrate how removing race and racism from the national conversation only aids in furthering racial discrimination and inequality.

This study takes the changing role of the military as a starting point for exploring a set of broader ongoing processes at the intersection of security and humanitarianism. The focus is on one particular assemblage, described here as conflict preventionism. This notion brings together the transformation of the military, the proliferation of civil-military cooperation, and the increasing interest in managing and preventing violent conflicts within a single framework. As such, conflict preventionism helps render visible how various actors, concepts, and organizational techniques converge in emergent forms of intervention. The research was carried out during the planning, execution, and evaluation of Viking 03, a civil-military exercise organized in 2003 by the Swedish Armed Forces. An examination of Viking 03 evinces intriguing resemblances between conflict preventionism and organizational facets of neoliberalism, epitomized by increasingly ubiquitous concepts such as “partnership,” “transparency,” and “evaluation.” Also, it shows that conflict preventionism does not settle on one particular understanding of conflict, but rather imposes directionality on contemporary engagements with the world.

Degrowth is an emerging field of research and a social movement founded on the premise that perpetual economic growth is incompatible with the biophysical limits of our finite planet (D’Alisa, Demaria & Kallis, 2014a; Asara, Otero, Demaria & Corbera, 2015). Despite the important work that degrowth scholars and activists have done to broadcast the fundamental contradiction between endless compound growth and a finite resource base, degrowth remains politically marginal, having received little mainstream attention or policy uptake. This thesis explores why. In particular, I examine barriers to and pathways towards the uptake of degrowth in Canada, a country that disproportionately contributes to climate breakdown. To do so I ask: 1) What barriers exist to advancing a degrowth agenda in Canada?; 2) How specifically do those barriers block degrowth from taking hold in contemporary Canadian policy and political discourse?; 3) How (if at all) are Canadian activists seeking to address these barriers? This research reveals that the political economy in Canada, and the way that is expressed in concentrations of elite and corporate power has given certain actors, particularly the fossil fuel industry, immense economic and political power. These concentrations of power, and the ways they are maintained reinforce a politics and discourse that is highly antithetical to the politics of degrowth, and thus serve as a major barrier to the emergence of degrowth. I argue, in order to move towards a degrowth politics, the hegemony of fossil capitalism in Canada, and the specific class interests that support it needs to be challenged. While degrowth has a strong critique of economic growth and capitalism, this alone is not enough. Any movement towards degrowth will require transforming power relations. This means continuing to explore the concrete ways specific institutions continue to create the political economic conditions that support fossil fueled growth as its main priority, and prioritizing building broad based movements to counter them. / Graduate