The incarceration rate in the United States has increased dramatically in the period since 1945. How did the United States move from having stable incarceration rates in line with global norms to the largest system of incarceration in the world? This study examines the political and intellectual aspects of incarceration and theories of criminal justice by looking at the contributions of journalists, intellectuals and policy makers to the debate on whether the purpose of the justice system is rehabilitation, vengeance, deterrence or incapacitation. This thesis finds that justice and the institution of the prison itself are not immutable facts of modern civilization, but are human institutions vulnerable to the influence of politics, culture and current events.

This thesis is an attempt to analyse the narrative structure of the Turkish satiric comedies that were produced in the 1980s. It focuses on the relation between the narrative structure of the satiric comedies and the socio-political atmosphere of the period. It argues that the satiric comedies aimed to criticize the new right policies and the social transformation in the 1980s through the opposition between the &ldquo / honourable&rdquo / hero on the one hand, and the &ldquo / swindler&rdquo / figure(s) or the &ldquo / degenerated order&rdquo / on the other. The narrative tools and stereotypes were used to represent the decline of such social values as solidarity, collectivism and philanthropy and rise of new ones like individualism, competitiveness and self-reliance. The study also analyzes the transformation of satiric comedies themselves throughout the decade, focusing on the change in the construction of oppositions and conflicts, and the emergence of nostalgia and romanticism as part of their critical discourse.

The incarceration rate in the United States has increased dramatically in the period since 1945. How did the United States move from having stable incarceration rates in line with global norms to the largest system of incarceration in the world? This study examines the political and intellectual aspects of incarceration and theories of criminal justice by looking at the contributions of journalists, intellectuals and policy makers to the debate on whether the purpose of the justice system is rehabilitation, vengeance, deterrence or incapacitation. This thesis finds that justice and the institution of the prison itself are not immutable facts of modern civilization, but are human institutions vulnerable to the influence of politics, culture and current events.

The thesis analyses the thinking of Václav Klaus based on clashes with his rivals during his political career. The thesis works with hypothesis that Klaus is in this thinking connected with New Right, which was mainly present in world politics by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Values of Klaus are first analysed theoretically via analysis of conservatism, liberalism and finally their synthesis in so called New Right. Next part of the thesis provided evidence for hypothesis on national level, where Klaus was minister of finance and prime minister and third part on international level with Klaus as president of Czech republic. The hypothesis is confirmed at the end by summarizing evidence, which arose from particular chapters.

In this thesis, I investigate the German-speaking attachment-oriented parenting community on Instagram. Focusing on a debate about new-right activities in the community, I analyze how motherhood (self-)conceptions were discursively entangled with questions of resistance to and tolerance of the new right. Two questions guide my thesis: 1) How was attachment-oriented motherhood conceptualized in the debate? How were these con-ceptions classed and racialized? 2) How did the community produce openness for the appropriation by the new right? How did the community resist appropriation? To answer these questions, I conduct a critical discourse analysis of 45 Instagram posts and their comment sections. My thesis is grounded in motherhood theories, in particular Hays’s intensive mothering, and theories that take seriously the intersectionality of powerstructures. I also refer to Skeggs’s theory on gender, class, and respectability, and workon whiteness and femininity Ahmed and Shome. I find diverse conceptions of attachment-oriented motherhood that differed with regard to their resistance to and reinforcement of intensive motherhood and far-right ideologies. Resistant motherhood concepts sought collective action and mobilized mothers’responsibility for the opposition against the new right. Investment in the respectability of attachment-oriented motherhood on the other hand obstructed the discussion about new-right activities, diverting attention away from politics. Concepts of motherhood from New-Age community members not only tolerated far-right ideology, but at times even reproduced it, in particular in the concept of conspiritual motherhood.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

The presented thesis deals with the New Right in Germany and its current reception of the Conservative Revolution of the Weimar Republic. The thesis primarily focuses on the German New Right, which it aims to define by its references to ideological and political stances of the right-wing conservative and extremist movement of the Weimar Republic - the Conservative Revolution. Based on a detailed textual analysis of selected articles from the New Right's journal Sezession, the thesis presents the elementary worldviews of the New Right as well as its rhetoric and strategies. Furthermore, it is demonstrated how the New Right perceives the central ideas of the Conservative Revolution (anti- enlightenment, anti-liberalism, anti-democracy, anti-parliamentarism, advocacy of an authoritarian state concept and promotion of a homogenous society) and how it implicitly or explicitly employs these ideas for its argumentation. The thesis proved that the worldviews of the Conservative Revolution nowadays still function as an ideological reservoir of the New Right, meaning also that the New Right is theoretically little innovative and takes over and passes on a large part of the ideas of the intellectuals of the Conservative Revolution, which are currently one hundred years old.

An experimental survey (N = 415) is used to evaluate fascist qualifications within party preference groups, regarding susceptibility to a neofascist communication style and gravitation toward fascist ideas. Testing the notion by fascism expert Roger Griffin, that the influence of the neofascist intellectual movement the New Right (la Nouvelle Droite) is successfully shaping the 21st century wave of right-wing populism, it is hypothesized that sympathizers of the Swedish right-wing populism equivalent (the Sweden Democrats) are more susceptible to a neofascist communication style and more preconditioned to agree with covertly fascist ideas (as based on the writings of the Nouvelle Droite). The results strongly support this hypothesis, although the potential for generalizability beyond the collected sample is limited. Using a causal networks approach, the failure to falsify the hypothesis is however considered a small but valid observation that bolsters its probability. The study contributes to the current research by further strengthening the bridge between the fields of populism and fascism.

School safety is widely recognized as an ongoing problem in United States public schools. Guided by the New Right, the school safety problem has been framed as an issue of school crime, violence, and student misbehavior that is best mitigated by zero tolerance policies. This stance has emerged as an agenda that has proven disproportionately detrimental to poor urban students of color who have experienced unforeseen levels of punishment since the Gun Free Schools Act of 1994 endorsed zero tolerance. Despite mounting evidence that zero tolerance approaches to discipline do little to deter school crime and violence or make schools safe, little ground has been gained in interrupting the ideology, policies, practices, and discourses of the zero tolerance agenda. The dissertation study theorizes and explores how ideology, cultural-politics, and discourse foster the tendency for policy creation and codification to legitimize the New Right's official knowledge of zero tolerance ideology and policy as a panacea for the school safety problem. To accomplish this, I conducted an ethnographic content analysis of codes of student conduct to examine the imbued ideologies, discourses, and policy changes that emerge from the cultural politics of managing school discipline over the last 15 years. Through this process, I lend empirical credence to the concepts of net-widening and net-deepening. With these guiding concepts, I push the field beyond the zero tolerance discourse on school safety and discipline to establish a generative alternative to understanding school discipline policies called the school discipline net framework. The results of the study establish a precedent for thinking more deeply and creatively about the perils and possibilities of school discipline policies. Major findings include the identification of several school policy changes that make the discipline experience both increasingly likely and potentially more punitive for students. Finally, through substantiating the school discipline net as a framework for discoursing, researching, guiding policy creation, and recognizing and locating sites of agency, this work establishes that it is indeed possible to engage issues critical in the field in ways that can transfer into the highly politicized school policy context dominated by New Right ideologies and discourses. / Urban Education