Ecofeminism has had a nonlinear developmental path. Although it was celebrated as a potentially revolutionary project in the 1970s, by the time climate change and environmental crises had worked their way into mainstream discourse ecofeminism had become practically unheard of. The purpose of this thesis is to reflect on the failure of early ecofeminism and to explore ecofeminism’s potential as a transformative project of the twenty-first century. This thesis is motivated by my own personal experience of ecofeminism as transformative and also by what I would call a recent resurgence of interest in ecofeminism by young students, budding feminists, and fledgling environmentalists that understand the climate and environmental crises as fundamentally linked to the oppressions of colonial capitalist-patriarchy. Recounting the origin, history, and marginalization of the project of ecofeminism, I explore the rift between materialist and spiritual/cultural approaches to argue that the effectiveness of ecofeminism is dependent upon a collaborative recovery from the damages done by extensive anti-essentialism critiques. The onto-epistemology of our current paradigm— defined by neoliberal capitalism and colonial patriarchy—limits response to the environmental crises of our times to that of incremental policy change that is more symbolic than substantive. I argue that, in order to escape the chains of the neoliberal/capitalist/patriarchal subject that are cast upon us by these predatory onto-epistemologies, we must envisage ways to be human otherwise; in reciprocal relationships with more-than-human nature. As a prefigurative project that centres the more-than-human yet maintains a comprehensive intersectional anti-oppressive framework, a contemporary ‘multispecies ecofeminism’ can endow us with this potentiality. In our times of immense ecological degradation and ‘point-of-no-return’ deadlines, ecofeminism is a needed ‘third story’ that resonates as revolutionary with young scholars of the twenty-first century. / Graduate

Since Kingston Penitentiary’s opening in 1835, prison labour has been an integral part of Canada’s penal history. With purported goals such as deterrence, rehabilitation, reintegration, and providing sustenance to the state, the practice of coercing or forcing a prisoner to work while serving a sentence of incarceration was further embedded in the penal landscape in 1980 with the inception of CORCAN, the Correctional Service of Canada’s prison labour program. Despite critiques of the prison as “a fiasco in terms of its own purposes” (Mathiesen, 2006, p. 141), prison labour continues as a mechanism of the state’s penal apparatus. Drawing on political economy of punishment and penal abolitionism literature, this study reveals and disrupts official discourses used to justify and perpetuate this modern form of slavery in Canada. Through a content analysis of 33 Solicitor General of Canada and CORCAN annual reports, I demonstrate how CORCAN’s prison labour program is legitimated as a “positive reform” (Mathiesen, 1974, p. 202) of Canada’s penal system, beneficial to the reintegration of prisoners into society, communities, and the needs of the Canadian state and economy. Underneath this benevolent mask such representations are found to reproduce neoliberal capitalism as the hegemonic form of economic organization, construing prisoners and prison labour as solutions to the gaps and shifts in the national economy and labour market. After outlining these contributions, I suggest ways that future research can reveal and discredit penal ‘solutions’ such as prison labour to eradicate the penal system as a means to address the harms inherent in our social and economic systems.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T13:30:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Paula Angela de Figueiredo e Paula.pdf: 1576351 bytes, checksum: 9795de74ce3027117b19a818d50d47d1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-06-09 / To defend the thesis that it is more appropriate to name the analyst s desire a love than social solidarity, it was first necessary to demonstrate that solidarity, as an ethical category of present times, arose specifically as a response to the social inequalities that are accentuated by capitalism. The theoretical basis for this study of love was consolidated on the three approaches in Lacan s teaching and that the solidarity is limited, being a type of love that has no virtue in itself as it is founded on the segregation of the different, so negating the otherness of the other. A distinction was made between joy and love, showing the analyst to be someone operating within the feminine logic of not-all as a means to escape the capitalist discourse. The thesis that analyst s desire is a more appropriate name of love than social solidarity was described by formulating a matheme. This should be sufficient to show analyst s desire to be the name of a new love . These two theses unite in my own desire to make psychoanalysis a political instrument for intervention in social contexts, overturning the currently hegemonic idea in our society that charitable solidarity should be the fundamental ethic capable of overcoming our social ills / Para defender a tese de que o desejo do analista é o nome de um amor mais digno que a solidariedade social foi preciso primeiro demonstrar que a solidariedade como categoria ética dos tempos modernos, surgiu justamente como resposta às desigualdades sociais acentuadas com o capitalismo. Consolidamos as bases teóricas de um estudo sobre o amor nos três registros do ensino de Lacan, mostrando os limites da solidariedade como um tipo de amor que não carrega nenhuma virtude em si, pois se funda na segregação do diferente, negando a alteridade do outro. Fizemos a distinção entre o gozo e o amor apresentando o analista como alguém que opera na lógica feminina do não-todo como forma de escapar do discurso capitalista. A tese foi escrita com a formalização de um matema que deve servir para mostrar o desejo do analista como o nome de um novo amor fora da dimensão de Eros de Philia e de Agape. Esta tese é fruto de meu desejo em fazer da psicanálise um instrumento político para a intervenção em contextos sociais, derrubando a idéia de que a solidariedade beneficente, hoje hegemônica em nossa sociedade, seja o fundamento ético capaz de superar nossas mazelas sociais

Anti-hegemonic social movements have historically had a complicated and conflicting relationship with mainstream media, as it consistently undermines the emancipatory potential of these grassroots revolutionary movements, hence serving the interests of the dominant social forces of the hegemonic order. This work develops a comprehensive and critical analysis of the agency of mainstream media throughout the coverage of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) to understand how and why it consciously and relentlessly worked to neutralize the true dimension of the movement and its occupations, and thus to preserve the neoliberal capitalist world order from the ideological threat and the revolutionary challenge that OWS posed to it. Employing a historical materialist approach based on Gramsci's theory of hegemony - and the emphasis in the consensual aspect of power in the production of the hegemony that it entails - and its use in the study of world orders grounded in social relations, this work aims to investigate the mainstream media's active role in the building of the current neoliberal capitalist historic bloc, and its subservience to the hegemonic social forces throughout every stage of the coverage of OWS and its occupations: from the deliberate lack of interest and the total indifference in the movement to the...