This research explores the changing role of the private sector in provincial prison infrastructure expansion in Ontario. After contracting out the operations of a new prison and facing much resistance, the provincial government began delivering prisons by maintaining public operations but financing them privately through public-private partnerships. To understand the political and economic impacts of these changes, I analyzed relevant government documents and interviews I conducted with 15 key informants from government agencies, firms and other organizations involved in creating, implementing and resisting prison expansion policies between 1995 and today. I show how changes in infrastructure governance were shaped by contestation between the state, international financial investors, private firms in Canada, labour and others involved in prison systems. Through public-private partnerships, the role of government shifted towards that of market facilitator, and as infrastructure was placed on global debt markets, international financial capital played a new part in prison development.

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This research explores the changing role of the private sector in provincial prison infrastructure expansion in Ontario. After contracting out the operations of a new prison and facing much resistance, the provincial government began delivering prisons by maintaining public operations but financing them privately through public-private partnerships. To understand the political and economic impacts of these changes, I analyzed relevant government documents and interviews I conducted with 15 key informants from government agencies, firms and other organizations involved in creating, implementing and resisting prison expansion policies between 1995 and today. I show how changes in infrastructure governance were shaped by contestation between the state, international financial investors, private firms in Canada, labour and others involved in prison systems. Through public-private partnerships, the role of government shifted towards that of market facilitator, and as infrastructure was placed on global debt markets, international financial capital played a new part in prison development.

<p>This dissertation offers an account of precarious neoliberal subjectivity by examining the suffering of the privileged as it relates to the practice of Western yoga in California's Silicon Valley. Yoga culture underlines creating connections and community. But my research, based on twenty-seven month fieldwork in an epicenter of the global high-tech economy, reveals that yoga practitioners actually seek to experience and create "space." I suggest that yoga practitioners often cultivate an interiority aimed at giving themselves room from the judgment and expectations of others. </p><p>This dissertation portrays the complicated lives of people who are more privileged than most. In so doing, this study questions the separation between "real" and "privileged" suffering; and it explores the ethical and political implications of the problems of the well-off. I suggest that the destructive aspects of neoliberal capitalism and late modernity do not hurt only the marginalized traditionally studied by anthropologists, but also--albeit in very different ways--those who supposedly benefit from them. The social scenes of modern yoga are sites of ambivalently embodied neoliberal logic, where clusters of promises and recipes for an "art of living" are critical about aspects of capitalism while enjoying its comfort. Even though the yogic ethic and politics do not adhere to the anthropological ideals of political action, Western yoga is often an ethical practice that does not simply reproduce neoliberal logic, but also shifts it slightly from within. By creating disruption of subjectivity and gaining space from old and habitual ways of being, yoga sometimes opens up a new territory of change and reflection.</p> / Dissertation

Through an analysis of the Danish Immigration Law and asylum system, this research illustrates how the Danish state through state practices and policies permeates and produces the everyday space of humanitarian migrants. Furthermore, it examines how humanitarian migrants experience their everyday life in the Danish asylum system. An examination of state practices in conjunction with humanitarian migrants’ narratives of space and everyday practices, offers an opportunity to explore what kind of politics and political subjectivities that can emerge in the space of humanitarian migrants. This research contribute to our understanding of first, how the securitization of migration has direct impact on the everyday life of humanitarian migrants, second, second, how the state through practices and space governs and de-politicizes humanitarian migrants, and third, humanitarian migrants are able to act politically. Furthermore, this research problematizes the categorization of humanitarian migrants as “asylum seeker” in order to illustrate how the group of humanitarian migrants is a very diverse group of people from different places with various skills and education-, social-, and economic backgrounds. Even though “asylum seekers” are often portrayed as a homogenous group of vulnerable people we cannot assume that these people understand themselves as vulnerable docile “asylum seekers”.

The name ‘Humboldt’ is associated with various ideals such as the unity of teaching and research, the freedom to teach and to learn and the community of teachers and students and used to stand for a unified idea of the university. Recent developments and changes like widening participation in and the marketisation of higher education related to the emergence of neoliberalism have challenged those old ideals. Through creating a Humboldt University model based on Humboldtian ideals and a Neoliberal University model reflecting neoliberal ideas the study seeks to illustrate the main changes that have happened. It then evaluates the developments by putting them against the German (the origin of Humboldt’s ideas) and English university (the first to marketise higher education). The ones to sense the developments and changes the most are the university academics. Therefore, it was chosen to review the former through the eyes of the latter. Thus, the study offers a glimpse of how university academics at the German and English institution/institute perceive the changes deriving from comparing the above-mentioned model. How do they relate to the Humboldtian ideals? How do they evaluate recent developments and related discourses in higher education? Are there connections between the countries’ university traditions and their perception? The main findings suggest that academics at the English institute believe more in the old ideals than the German academics who blame mainly massification for its infeasibility. It also shows that recent discourses and their termination are understood differently by the academics. For a new unifying idea of the university, opposing perceptions like the ones examined would need to be brought in line. Can there be one identity of the university?

Despite nearly twenty years of official peace in Guatemala since the signing of the 1996 Peace Accords, violence continues to remain a grave problem throughout the country. In particular, extreme forms of gender-based violence have been reportedly problematic over the past two decades, with a conversation on femicide, the targeted killing of women by men based on their gender, emerging in recent years between activists, politicians and practitioners alike. To respond to the crisis around femicide, in 2008, the Law on Femicide and Other Forms of Violence Against Women was passed by Guatemala’s congress, mandating the creation of a specialized justice system to criminalize such acts. Guatemala’s legal innovations around femicidal violence is widely believed by many observers as a victory for human and women’s rights defenders in the country. However, despite these legal interventions, femicidal violence has continued unabatedly in Guatemala. In this thesis, I present a two-pronged argument. First, I will argue that the tensions inherent to neoliberalism in Guatemala create a landscape in which women are vulnerable to experiencing femicidal violence, beyond the scope explored by both the mainstream and critical literature, and moreover, beyond the scope of the Law on Femicide. Second, I posit that the Law on Femicide, which is inserted as a neutral, technical fix to the ongoing and pervasive issue of femicide and violence against women, depoliticizes femicide in Guatemala, removing it from neoliberal capitalist context and individualizing the responsibility of the crime to perpetrators, rather than the neoliberal state. Simultaneously, the rule of law as expressed through the Law on Femicide must be understood in the context of the neoliberal landscape in Guatemala, in particular, in the context of neoliberalism’s “crisis of social reproduction” (LeBaron and Roberts 2012, 26). / Thesis (Master, Global Development Studies) -- Queen's University, 2014-06-18 10:26:03.879

In asking about the experiences of professors embodying and enacting tools of critical pedagogy, this thesis seeks to explore strategies of resistance to the hegemony of neoliberalism in the Academy. This research focuses on the Canadian university as characterized by neoliberal logic and the hierarchical practices of capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism. By exploring the themes of neoliberalism, violence, tension, critical pedagogy, and anti-oppression, that are in turn rooted in personal testimony and lived experience of educators, this study seeks to challenge normative systems of knowledge production to expand and explore subjugated knowledges. What is at stake is developing strategies that may be cultivated and documented as critical pedagogical tools that work toward collective imaginings of resistance.

The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) has had a political hegemony over Istanbul for more than a decade. Initiating rapid rates of development, the Turkish economy has nearly quadrupled under AKP leadership. The political party has also become notorious, though, for moving further away from a liberal democracy. Flirting with authoritarianism, recent governance trends include a weak rule of law, stringent social policies, extralegal policy execution, and substantial censorship. While Istanbul closely aligns with several emerging urban centers, the factors contributing to its patterns of growth are unique to both Turkish history and culture, and the city’s strategic regional position. Through a proposed self-sustaining cycle of neoliberal policy implementation, followed by institutional and political consolidation, the AKP has managed to maintain control of new engines for growth while facing increasing pushback from the residents of Istanbul. Though the past few years have been marked by unprecedented development, weaknesses in the AKP’s institutional structure are beginning to show. Istanbul is on the brink of an economic downfall. The government needs to take immediate action against a massive urban crisis if it wants to sustain legitimacy of authority. In leveraging the strategic location of the city, international institutions must partake in shifting Istanbul towards a more sustainable trajectory of urban growth.