Thesis advisor: Gustavo Morello / In this thesis, I analyze the conditions brought about by neoliberal reforms that contributed to the emergence of youth gangs in Latin America in the 1980s and 90s. I draw upon economic determinism theory to help explain this phenomenon. I then assess the extent to which four factors—state-sponsored political violence, economic volatility, the rise of the drug trade, and migration (both external and internal)—contributed to higher youth gang participation rates by conducting a comparative case study analysis. This analysis examines the factors that led to the emergence of youth gangs in Guatemala and Brazil. I surmise that the findings of this study are transferable and applicable to the whole of Latin America. I argue that the latter three factors were primarily responsible for compelling individuals to join youth gangs. Finally, I recommend governmental policies that Latin American governments ought to adopt if they wish to eradicate youth gang violence. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Arts and Sciences Honors Program. / Discipline: Sociology.

In this dissertation, I trace the contours of state control and capital in India, starting from the 1970s and see how the state’s increasingly centralizing tendencies and authoritarianism, in the service of capital, creates cultures of violence, fatalism, desperation, and ultimately, even more desire for authoritarianism. I study male stardom in Bombay cinema, beginning withAmitabh Bachchan (who was the reigning star in the 1970s and 80s), and following up with Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan (who have been successful stars from the early 90s), to understand how changing subjectivities, responding to changing socio-economic reality, were formulated and expressed through these star texts by the film industry. Through the study of these stars, I try to understand how dominant ideas of masculinities were being formulated and how misogyny came to be a prominent aspect of those formulations, because of social structures of caste and patriarchy as well as neoliberal precarity. I also study the cultures of fascist violence that have emerged in India under the rightwing Hindu nationalist BJP government in the light of increased individualization and self-commodification under neoliberalism. I contend that the socio-political system that enhances individualization and self-commodification and thus, gives rise to a heightened celebrity culture, is also responsible for the limits on the agency of the stars and celebrities through the formation of a totalitarian state. I study Indian prime minister Narendra Modi as the ultimate celebrity commodity text to understand the future of stardom itself in India.

This thesis is presented in the partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts [International Relations] 02-06-2015 / Due to the need to gain global political legitimacy after the 1994 democratic dispensation, the South African government embarked on a neoliberal political trajectory. This became evident because of the ways in which the South African state was integrated back into the international economy through adopting neoliberal economic policies. This included a free-market economy with no state intervention, trade liberalisation through the lowering of barriers for foreign investment, and liberalisation of the media complex which was tightly controlled by the state. These were prescribed as an effective way of consolidating the new fragile democratic South Africa thereby seeing the new government accepting a neoliberal policy path. This was part of the embrace of the new won democracy and relationship with the international community after many years of economic sanctioning, political isolation and pariah status. The aim of this study is to examine the ways in which South African print media reproduce the dominance of neo-liberal discourses by globalising South Africa from outside and within. In addition, this study specifically seeks to look at how South Africa’s print media legitimises and authorises macro-economic policy. Thus, entrenching the ideas of a neo-liberal stance as well as analysing the perceptions of the print media’s class orientation in relation to the ruling historic bloc. The historic bloc is all levels of society [political, social, civil] coming together to form a dominant social class. This study will make use of interviews transcripts from 7 audio recorded and one email interview as well as the Business Day and Mail & Guardian’s reports on the Budget Speech from 2011-2014. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) Country Reports on South Africa were also used as data, and also analysed during the same period. These will be used to analyse how these newspapers report on macro-economic issues through the abovementioned case studies. This study employed the mixed research method which uses quantitative and qualitative tools to analyse the data which is a convergent design also known as triangulation. The quantitative tool used was content analysis for its numerical value and the qualitative tool used was the thematic analysis which is an inductive reading of the reports and transcripts. These tools exposed interesting results which echoed historical trends of ownership, values and norms illustrating an important but narrow function of the selected newspapers.

The study aims to analyze the City of Malmö's vision of a city of knowledge and the extent towhich neoliberalism is in the transformation, from a classic industrial city to an informationsociety. The Western Harbor and Hyllie projects seem to be potential areas to be developed inMalmö to achieve it so-called city of knowledge. This essay comes through a content analysisand idea analysis of the empirical material, analyzed based on four dimensions thatcharacterize the neoliberal ideology. The study's theoretical starting points are based on JanHylen's theory of "dimensions" and are useful for identifying and analyzing ideologies. Thechosen dimensions that are categorized are, the ideology's human view, social theory,economic ideals and view of morality. The results showed that there is a strong neoliberalinfluence in the planning of the city of knowledge Malmö. The dimensions are expressed inthe planning of both Västra hamnen and Hyllie.

This thesis explores, through a neo-Marxist/cultural materialist lens, how discourses of class conflict in three pieces of contemporary Canadian fiction — Megan Gail Coles’ Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club (2019), Tracey Lindberg’s Birdie (2015), and André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs (2015) — are suppressed in broader public discussions of the texts, particularly on the CBC Radio program Canada Reads. Through close-reading the texts and their respective Canada Reads seasons for how class is operating “equiprimordially” (Ashley Bohrer) — an intersectional conceptualization of class that views class and its relations to other systems of oppression such as race, gender, sexuality, and settler-colonialism as co-constitutive, not separate — I argue that Canada Reads serves as a cultural arm of the neoliberal Canadian state’s project of erasing the political saliency of class conflict so that it may continue to reproduce its conditions of existence. To demonstrate this, I first outline the history of Canadian state cultural policy in relation to class, as well my theoretical framework. I then close read the thesis’s three pieces of fiction to determine how they mobilize class in relation to Canadian state narratives of class. Following this, I close read each book’s respective Canada Reads broadcast to see if class is taken up at all in the discussions. I then examine Canada Reads as a “mass reading event” (MRE) [Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo] and explore alternative modes of shared reading that escape the nationalist logic of Canada Reads and thus have potential for bringing class discourses forward. Ultimately, the thesis demonstrates that Canada Reads as a model of shared reading is too deeply tied to the liberal humanist values of the Canadian state for any radical class discourse to emerge from it. Radical class discourses in literature that could spur collective, transformative action must come from elsewhere. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / This thesis examines how messages of class conflict in three pieces of Canadian fiction — Megan Gail Coles’ Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club, Tracey Lindberg’s Birdie, and André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs — are suppressed in broader public discussions of each piece, particularly on the CBC Radio program Canada Reads. Reading both the books and the Canada Reads seasons each book appeared on through a neo-Marxist lens that places class in relation to other systems of oppression, such as gender, race, sexuality, and settler-colonialism, I argue that Canada Reads serves as a cultural arm of the neoliberal Canadian state’s project of erasing the political saliency of class conflict — something that it requires in order to reproduce itself. Based on this finding, I turn at the end to alternative models of shared reading that could serve as spaces that recognize class messages in literature.

This study aims to understand the organization of Emergency Department (ED) nurses in Ontario after years of restructuring and cuts made to the healthcare system. The news is currently filled with ED closures across the country due to a shortage of nurses and high hospital occupancy. The recruitment and retention of nurses in the ED has proven extremely difficult due in part to the Ontario government's Bill 124 capping nurses' wage increases at 1%. This wage freeze is inscribed in a larger rationale present internationally advocating for efficiency and marketization of all spheres of life, healthcare included. Most of the literature published on the work of ED nurses refers to ideas of performance of flow. Using Institutional Ethnography (IE) as an approach and governmentality, more specifically neoliberalism, as a perspective, this study maps the ruling relations influencing the work of nurses in the ED. It also uncovers how the neoliberal discourse was not only internalized but applied by nurses in their work environment. The methodological approach and perspective used in this study highlight how a new rationale was implemented in the management and funding of healthcare, which then led to transforming the rationale of providing care in the ED. The ED now delivers care following a supply chain rationale employing technologies of governmentality such as Electronic Medical Records (EMR) to entice a specific conduct from nurses in order to meet the demands of the market. This new rationale, coupled with the implementation and sustaining of the technologies of governmentality, has come to completely transform what an ED nurse is nowadays. This new ED subject is responsible for most aspects of care, flow, and even her own training and security. The findings suggest that the use of algorithms based on best practices (such as medical directives) came to further erode the decisional power of nurses, resulting in "checkbox" practice.

On April 16, 2014, South Korea witnessed one of the worst tragedies in contemporary Korean history. A cruise boat named Sewol carrying 456 passengers—most of them teenage high school students on a field trip—sank into the sea, taking the lives of 304 persons. The nation saw aghast, on multiple media platforms, the abysmal failure of the authorities to rescue them. I analyze the movement that developed in its aftermath: how citizens started to claim their adulthood, united beyond exclusionary familism in sorrow over the failure to protect children who belonged to them all. I explain how they turned their personal grief into political solidarity and started to overcome the rugged individualism and self-reliance that had come to define citizenship in neoliberal Korea. Against the state’s injunction to forget and move on, citizens created memorials and refused to accept the dominant narrative that the authorities had done their best to rescue the children and meticulously started to examine televisual and other records of that day. By their very nature, as public and personal records, these artifacts of memory-keeping are across media and art forms. I do close readings of fiction and documentary films, explore the 24/7 nature of live broadcasts, and analyze artistic responses such as memorial sites, literature, paintings, and sculptures to find in all of them, a deeply felt crisis triggered by the death of children. I find in these collective efforts what I describe as “suspended mourning,” a resolve to suspend the emotional state of grief in search of answers to the reasons not just for the incident but the deep-seated propensity toward obedience ingrained in South Korean upbringing itself. I argue that the catastrophe finally severed the emotional bonds many had with President Park Geun-hye, the daughter of the military dictator Park Jung-hee, who is widely recognized as the father of Korean modernization. The “orphan of the nation,” as Park Geun-hye was referred to, lost the public leniency she had enjoyed until then. It eventually led to the Candlelight Revolution three years later, leading to her impeachment.

This dissertation responds to the notion that the economic success and social integration of one imaginary figure, the “model minority,” can explain the downward mobility of another, the “white working class” in post-Brexit Britain. Through intersectional readings of Black and Asian British fiction written during and after Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership, I examine the model minority myth as providing a racist explanation for rising inequality, but also as a burdensome imperative of neoliberal aspiration to which racialized British subjects are increasingly subject. I trace the origins of this exclusionary account of racialized belonging to the account in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses of the political possibilities resulting from the collapse of anti-racist solidarities under the sign of Black British identity in the 1980s. I show that the author’s non-fictional responses to the subsequent controversy known as the Rushdie Affair work to close off these possibilities, serving instead to justify Islamophobia one specific means by which racial neoliberalism functions as what David Theo Goldberg calls “racism without racism.” I develop this analysis of Islamophobia as form of racial neoliberalism by turning to two novels that depict coming of age for diasporic Muslim British women, contrasting Monica Ali’s Brick Lane as a normative narrative of feminist becoming through assimilation with Leila Aboulela’s Minaret, which complicates the agency assumed to be conferred on “Third World Women” who migrate to the Global North. In my third and final chapter, I trace the model minority trope across differences in Black and Asian British communities as evidence of the empty aspiration of “post-racial” Britain, contrasting the attempt in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani to posit the figure of the “rudeboy” as an alternative “outsider” figure of aspiration, with Zadie Smith’s “insider” depiction of the social alienation that results from approaching the embodiment of this racialized ideal in NW. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation discusses the influence of neoliberalism—the idea that capitalism represents the ideal model of organization for every aspect of human life—on Black and Asian British writing from the 1980s to the present. In the context of mainstream analysis of the June 2016 Brexit vote as an expression of “white working class” disaffection with rising inequality, I focus on how coming-of-age narratives by Black and Asian writers complicate an unspoken implication of this popular explanation: that neoliberal reforms have unduly advantaged so-called “model” racial minorities. Through readings that emphasize how the Muslim and/as racialized protagonists of these texts experience the recoding of racism either in the covert guise of Islamophobia or through the aspirational idea that Britain is “post-racial,” I demonstrate the highly tenuous nature of what social and political belonging racialized subjects can find amid the increasing individualism of contemporary British society.

Sexualized violence is a citizenly issue. It is a phenomenon that, in the Canadian context, is formed and informed by the settler-colonial nation-state. Yet, as the spike in attention to instances of sexualized violence in news media suggests, sexualized violence is also a sociopolitical ill, one that causes harms to persons who experience it and those who care for them. How, then, might we ensure that sexualized violence is no longer a possibility? Feminist anti-sexualized violence advocates have created or contributed to several identifiable approaches to sexualized violence prevention: education about consent, teaching self-defence, and implicating bystanders in the continuation of sexualized violence. In this dissertation, I focus on two of these approaches to sexualized violence prevention – consent discourse and fighting strategies – and consider how their amenability to a normative form of rationality that governs conceptions of citizenship – neoliberalism – might not only limit the preventative efficacy of such approaches, but also work to (re)produce the very conditions that allow sexualized violence to occur in the first place. Analyzing these prevention approaches through close readings of academic theories of prevention and practical mobilizations of these approaches (i.e. a poster campaign, a short independent film), I ultimately argue that while neoliberalism’s idea(l)s of individualism, personal responsibility, and normative interpretations of ‘equality’ function to potentially limit or contradict a feminist anti-sexualized violence goal of emphasizing the structural causes of sexualized violence, it is also the case that these theoretical and practical projects can produce alternative understandings of what it means to be ‘human’ and to ‘live together.’ / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Today, one can scarcely turn on a television, open a newspaper, or visit an online news source without some mention of a case of sexualized violence. What are we doing to prevent this social ill? In this dissertation, I analyze two approaches to sexualized violence prevention: strategies that encourage the import of communication during intimate encounters (consent discourse) and strategies that encourage persons most vulnerable to sexualized violence to engage in defensive measures (fighting strategies). Through an investigation of academic theories and practical mobilizations of these prevention approaches, I consider their connection to dominant conceptions of the human and what it means to ‘live together.’ From these analyses, this dissertation ultimately argues that we must be attentive to the ways we think about, talk of, and implement prevention strategies so that we do not inadvertently reproduce the very oppressive conditions that enable sexualized violence to occur in the first place.

No / The federal government under Cardoso was not ideologically committed to the adoption of specific "neoliberal" policies in the field of crime control and criminal justice through the reform of the courts, the police, and the prison system. Its failure to curtail institutionally driven human rights violations resulted from a more diffuse "environmental" effect of neoliberalism whereby fiscal management concerns monopolized the government's economic and political capital and from structural constraints on domestic political and governance configurations such as federalism and the character of the Ministry of Justice. Penal policy in Brazil, as elsewhere, was incoherent and volatile because of the confluence of two distinct political ideologies, economic neoliberalism and social neoconservatism, with the federal government pursuing strategies of delegation and denial. Policy transfer and norm convergence were affected positively by the international human rights regime and its domestic allies and negatively by local moral conservatives and producer groups acting as policy blockers rather than entrepreneurs.