My dissertation examines the putative success of Curitiba, the Brazilian capital of Paraná, and seeks to understand how it came to be touted as the model city of Brazil. The standard explication for Curitiba’s success credits the power of a single city agency, the Urban Planning and Research Institute of Curitiba (IPPUC), and the vision of its first president, Jaime Lerner. According to this narrative, in 1971 IPPUC formalized a broad urbanistic vision for the city’s growth and initiated projects aimed at improving traffic congestion, expanding green space, and increasing city and social services. I argue that the narrative of the institute’s contributions provide an incomplete genealogy of Curitiba’s success. It fails to examine the historical context of the city’s status and does not consider the significance of publicity campaigns in sustaining this image. Also, IPPUC’s story is not only tendentious but derivative. My historical research shows how IPPUC has rearticulated longstanding tropes that celebrate the region’s unique characteristics -such as Curitiba’s edenic cityscape and its European social composition- and has recycled deterministic arguments related to race, ethnicity, and geography. My dissertation demonstrates that exceptionalist discourses have circulated for more than a century. I trace these claims from the 1880s to the 1940s and investigate how and why they changed over time. I show that politicians first initiated efforts to promote the region at the turn of the twentieth century to attract European colonists. Over the next fifty years, politicians, elites, and intellectuals forwarded new claims that positioned Curitiba and Paraná as ideal locations for economic and social development. Planning specialists from around the world have closely studied Curitiba’s urban development, but in their analyses they have largely failed to consider the intellectual and social constructs that undergird this story of progress. My dissertation focuses on century-old celebratory claims about Curitiba and reveals the epistemological roots of the current explications of the city’s success. / text

This project engages theories of settler colonialism, biopower, and the state of exception to analyze the operations of rights-based narratives of citizenship in relation to political dissent in Canada. I argue that a normalized state of exception founds the white supremacist, settler colonial state, bringing Canadian citizenship into being as a (white) racialized, (cis)gendered, and (hetero)sexualized construct. By examining “resistance narratives” about the Toronto G20 that emerged in the post-G20 climate, my work argues that, in treating the policing practices employed during the G20 as exceptional and in (re)producing the exaltation of white heterosexual cis-masculine citizens, these narratives normalize and reinforce the daily operations of the exception, which targets Indigenous, racialized, and other “Others” in Canada. Finally, my work critically engages with the space of the Eastern Detention Centre (EDC) as a temporary camp set up to detain G20 arrestees, and with the narrative of “Torontonamo” that emerged to describe and explain the EDC. Reading the EDC in the context of other spatial organizations of the exception in Canada, I argue that the “Torontonamo” narrative reasserts race thinking in relation to the normalized operations of the exception. In so doing, it (re)produces white citizen-subjects as the proper recipients of national and international human rights, while abandoning racialized populations to the space of the camp. Ultimately, my work writes against the hegemonic view of the Toronto G20 as an exceptional event in Canadian history. I contend that G20 policing practices were only a hyper-visible example of the normalized operations of the exception within settler colonialism. / Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-29 21:16:51.694

<p>Drawing on broader discussions that attempt to envision new ways of negotiating identity, nationalism and race in a post-colonial, post-apartheid South Africa, this thesis examines how whiteness is constructed and negotiated within the framework of literary-journalistic narratives. It is significant that so many established journalists have chosen a literary format, in which they use the structure, conventions, form and style of the novel, while clearly foregrounding their journalistic priorities, to re-imagine possibilities for narratives of identity and belonging for white South Africans. I argue that by working at the interstice of literature and journalism, writers are able to open new rhetorical spaces in which white South African identity can be interrogated.</p> <p><br /> This thesis examines the literary narratives of Rian Malan (My Traitor&rsquo / s Heart, 1991), Antjie Krog (Country of My Skull, 1998, and Begging to be Black, 2009), Kevin Bloom (Ways of Staying, 2009) and Jonny Steinberg (Midlands, 2002). These writers all seem to grapple with the recurring themes of &lsquo / history&rsquo / , &lsquo / narrative&rsquo / and &lsquo / identity&rsquo / , and in exploring the narratives of their personal and national history, they attempt to make sense of their current situation. The texts that this thesis examines exhibit an acute awareness of the necessity of bringing whiteness into conversation with &lsquo / other&rsquo / identities, and thus I explore both the ways in which that is attempted and the degree to which the texts succeed, in their respective projects. I also examine what literary genres offer these journalists in their engagement with issues of whiteness and white identity that conventional forms of journalism do not. These writers are challenging the conventions of genre &ndash / both literary and journalistic &ndash / during a period of social and political flux, and I argue that in attempting to limn new narrative forms, they are in fact outlining new possibilities for white identities and ways of belonging and speaking. However, a close reading of these literary-journalistic narratives reveals whiteness in post-apartheid South African to be a multifaceted and often contradictory construct and position. Despite the lingering privilege and structural advantage associated with whiteness, South African whiteness appears strongly characterised by a deep-seated anxiety that stems from a perpetual sense of &lsquo / un-belonging&rsquo / . However, while white skin remains a significant marker of identity, there does appear to be the possibility of moving beyond whiteness into positions of hybridity which offer interesting potential for &lsquo / becoming-other&rsquo / .</p>

The aim of this thesis is to study how gender, race, and nation are represented in Miss Universe Japan 2015. I investigate how the top five participants are represented in relation to Japanese ideal femininity and what these representations contribute to. Furthermore, I examine how global ideals have impacted the outcome of the pageant. The material consists of recordings of the Miss Universe Japan 2015 pageant, which is available on YouTube. The material is analyzed using a context focused textual analysis. Stuart Hall’s theories of representation are used to understand how representations work. Judith Butler’s theory of performative gender and Floya Anthias’ and Nira Yuval-Davies’ theories of how gender relates to nation are used to understand how the construction of the nation intersects with the construction of gender. Michael Billig’s theory of banal nationalism is used to illustrate that beauty pageants are nationalistic practices. Lastly, theories of whiteness, both in the West and Japan, are applied to understand how race and national values interact. The top five participants in Miss Universe Japan 2015 are analyzed one by one and their representations are contrasted to the ideals of the Japanese woman. Moreover, the impact of global ideals on the pageant is discussed. I find that the representation of the top five participants both reproduces and challenges the ideal femininity in Japan, thus widening the limits for the Japanese womanhood. On the other hand, these challenges, and also the reproductions, largely follow global ideals, which leads to an essentialization of global beauty.

The purpose of this study is to create a broader understanding of the concept of afrophobia. The purpose of the study is also to investigate how the term ”afrophobia” is expressed in public documents. The research questions are: When did the concept of afrophobia begin to be used on an international level, but above all in Sweden? How is the term ”afrophobia” defined by different organizations and public bodies? What alternative terms are also used, and how does their meaning differ? What possible effects can different definitions contribute to? The method that will be applied by an idea analysis on my primary material. As an analysis tool, I will use five different dimensions that consist of the following: Historical perspective, Cultural identity, Intercultural perspective with a postcolonial point of departure, Strategic essentialism/cosmopolitism and critical whiteness perspective/color blindness. The result will show the different definitions of the primary material and is analyzed based on my chosen dimensions.

Com 8 décadas de existência, a Universidade de São Paulo tem se firmado como o grande modelo de universidade para o país. Seja pelos dados que apresenta, seja pela afirmação de sua história, tem marcado seu espaço na sociedade brasileira como referencial na formação científica, na produção cultural e na produção de elites que não raramente assumem postos de comando no país. Apesar dessas conquistas, a USP apresenta um quadro anacrônico em relação à diversidade étnico-racial, sobretudo, no seu corpo docente, que tem sido formado com um perfil étnico-racial extremamente homogêneo. A pesquisa ora apresentada objetivou entender a existência e a configuração de um possível nexo entre o debate racial das primeiras décadas do século XX no Brasil, com o processo histórico da fundação da Universidade de São Paulo. Na presente análise, três figuras ocupam papel de destaque: o eugenista Renato Ferraz Kehl e dois dos personagens centrais na configuração do Projeto USP, nomeadamente, Júlio de Mesquita Filho e Fernando de Azevedo. A partir da análise do corpus documental, formado por correspondências e textos dos intelectuais citados, foi possível identificar que muitos dos personagens ligados à história da criação da USP participaram ativamente do debate sobre raça e eugenia apresentado nas primeiras décadas do século XX. A despeito do relativo silêncio do envolvimento do tema raça com a história da USP, a presente pesquisa tem por objetivo trazer o tema à tona, por entender ser um dado relevante para a compreensão do papel da universidade e sua relação com a questão racial brasileira. Tendo estado presente na visão dos fundadores da instituição, bem como moldado o modo como estes compreendiam sua percepção da sociedade, a concepção racial vigente na elite pensante brasileira do início do século XX, manifestou-se na constituição da identidade (e identificação) entre a USP e São Paulo e está presente em seus símbolos. Tal dado fornece fortes evidências de que há, nesta instituição, uma cultura racial, isto é, uma tradição em lidar com a raça de modo implícito, por metáforas. Este fato também corrobora com a ideia de que a questão racial perpassa a USP da mesma forma como perpassa a sociedade brasileira como um todo. / The University of São Paulo (USP) with 8 decades of existence has made a model of University for yourself and for the roll country. This is shown in its numbers and the affirmation of its own historical contribution to the nation. In this process, the University marks an space inside the Brazilian society as a reference point in terms of scientific education, cultural production and in terms of elite formation, which, not rarely, it is the political elite of the country. Besides those achievements, the University of Sao Paulo has a quite anachronic context in term of ethical-racial diversity, especially within the university structure. We found out that the University its professors and researchers - is quite homogeneous in terms of ethnical racial matters. The main objective of this research was to understand the existence and how is configured the nexus between the racial debate of the early XX in Brasil and the historical founding process of the University of Sao Paulo. In this work, we discuss three major figures: Renato Ferraz Kehl, a eugenicist and other two majors figures of the Projeto USP, Júlio de Mesquita Filho and Fernando de Azevedo. From the analysis of the documental corpus, with is in part the mailing and the texts from those intellectuals, it was possible to identify that many of those that was part of the process of foundation of the USP was also part of the debate about race and eugenics from the early XX. There is a relative silence when the subject is the discussion of race inside and in the context of the foundation of USP; this research will bring up this discussion, understanding that this will be relevant to a comprehensive discussion of the roll of this University facing the racial debate in Brasil. Already present in the vision of the founders of the institution and shaping its social perception, the racial conception of the Brazilian elite from the early XX was heard and became part of the identity (and the identification) between USP and Sao Paulo and it is present in its symbols. With that in mind, we found strong evidence of a racial culture, which is a tradition to handle race in an implicit mode, working with metaphors. This fact also corroborate to the idea that the racial issue pervades the University as a corpus just like it pervades the society as a unity body.

The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to a deeper understanding of how the national community is reproduced and delineated in relation to class, gender and racialisation. It uses a qualitative methodology and interviews with people chosen to represent an economic margin, and is theoretically informed by Pierre Bourdieu, Beverly Skeggs and others. In interviewees’ accounts about work life and societal change, traces are found regarding how the national community is delineated, and how value for the community is claimed or denied. The main findings are that a national community is connected through the idea of value for the community, and that the dominating ideas concerning this value change over time in accordance with economic, political and discursive processes. Recognition is a condition for access to the labour market and for the right to contribute to the future of the community. The values and the community are not homogenous; there is room for competing values and thus competing ways of recognition. Those with less recognised resources get their value for the community questioned in relation to current hegemonic values. Adaptability to the needs of the labour market in terms of expectations of geographic flexibility and the right attitude are common demands that implicitly presumes economic and social resources. Misrecognition of resources and value also relate to the social process of racialisation. Whiteness can be regarded as the result of recognised national inclusion in a country such as Sweden where the ideal of light skin and blue eyes have gained hegemonic position through history. Class relations as well as male domination over women works through the same mechanisms of misrecognition and excluded experiences.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Drawing on broader discussions that attempt to envision new ways of negotiating identity, nationalism and race in a post-colonial, post-apartheid South Africa, this thesis examines how whiteness is constructed and negotiated within the framework of literary-journalistic narratives. It is significant that so many established journalists have chosen a literary format, in which they use the structure, conventions, form and style of the novel, while clearly foregrounding their journalistic priorities, to re-imagine possibilities for narratives of identity and belonging for white South Africans. I argue that by working at the interstice of literature and journalism, writers are able to open new rhetorical spaces in which white South African identity can be interrogated. This thesis examines the literary narratives of Rian Malan (My Traitor’s Heart, 1991), Antjie Krog (Country of My Skull, 1998, and Begging to be Black, 2009), Kevin Bloom (Ways of Staying, 2009) and Jonny Steinberg (Midlands, 2002). These writers all seem to grapple with the recurring themes of 'history', 'narrative', 'dentity' and in exploring the narratives of their personal and national history, they attempt to make sense of their current situation. The texts that this thesis examines exhibit an acute awareness of the necessity of bringing whiteness into conversation with 'other' identities, and thus I explore both the ways in which that is attempted and the degree to which the texts succeed, in their respective projects. I also examine what literary genres offer these journalists in their engagement with issues of whiteness and white identity that conventional forms of journalism do not. These writers are challenging the conventions of genre - both literary and journalistic - during a period of social and political flux, and I argue that in attempting to limn new narrative forms, they are in fact outlining new possibilities for white identities and ways of belonging and speaking. However, a close reading of these literary-journalistic narratives reveals whiteness in post-apartheid South African to be a multifaceted and often contradictory construct and position. Despite the lingering privilege and structural advantage associated with whiteness, South African whiteness appears strongly characterised by a deep-seated anxiety that stems from a perpetual sense of ‘un-belonging’. However, while white skin remains a significant marker of identity, there does appear to be the possibility of moving beyond whiteness into positions of hybridity which offer interesting potential for ‘becoming-other’ / South Africa

The purpose of my thesis seeks to uncover the constructed nature of the Anglo-Saxon ethnicity within two works of fiction. My thesis utilizes London’s The Valley of the Moon (1913) and Norris’s McTeague (1899) because they were published in a similar era. Both authors lived and wrote in the Bay Area during the Progressive Era of American politics. Therefore, there is political, stylistic, and regional proximity. Although Anglo-Saxonism has always been present in the United States, the construction of race was changing in the 1900s. The Valley of the Moon and McTeague both contain intriguing (and antiquated) notions of whiteness that further exacerbate the class struggle in California. This thesis describes the convergence of Progressive politics, eugenics, and Marxism within a unique chapter of American history. Through an exploration of Anglo-Saxonism, this examination of racial classifications is an attempt to reveal the inner workings of oppression in America.

This essay examines how trans people experience Swedish public libraries, as well as how the library can be an integral part of their trans identity work. The data sample was collected through semi-structured phenomenological interviews with five trans and non-binary library users. The analysis of the interview data was done using the method of thematic analysis (TA), following an inductive approach. The theoretical framework focuses on five different, but connecting, concepts. Mainly, theories about intersectionality; whiteness; the heterosexual matrix; orientation; and categorization. The results of this study show that trans people use and experience the library in a myriad of different ways. It is clear, however, that all the informants look to libraries to provide them with material that they can see themselves represented in, to get a sense of validation for their gender identity. Even though the library provides this in some ways, other aspects connected to libraries function to hinder trans people in their identity work. There are several ways that libraries can improve on their services toward trans patrons, and one of these are to better facilitate meetings between different trans people through more activities catering towards this group. In short, libraries need to be mindful about this specific group both when it comes to the services they offer, as well as the physical layout of the library space. These are all aspects which affect and influence trans people and their ability to construct and express their gender identity. / Den här uppsatsen undersöker hur transpersoner upplever Svenska folkbibliotek, och dessutom hur biblioteken kan fungera som en viktig faktor i deras identitetsarbete. Dataansatsen samlades in via semi-strukturerade fenomenologiska intervjuer med fem trans- och icke-binära biblioteksanvändare. Analysen denna intervjudata gjordes med hjälp av metoden tematisk analys (TA), utifrån en induktiv ansats. Det teoretiska ramverket fokuserar på fem olika, men integrerade, koncept. Detta baserat på teorier kring intersektionalitet; vithet; den heterosexuella matrisen; orientering; och kategorisering.  Resultatet av denna studie visar att transpersoner använder och upplever bibliotek på en rad olika sätt. Det framgår dock tydligt att informanterna alla ser till biblioteken för att erhålla material de kan se sig själva representerade i för att få en känsla av erkännande av deras genusidentitet. Även om biblioteken lyckas erbjuda detta i vissa fall lyckas andra apsekter av biblioteken fungera för att hindra dem i deras identitetsarbete som transpersoner. Det finns flera sätt som biblioteken kan förbättra deras tjänster gentemot sina användare som är trans, ett av sätten vilket relaterar till att arbeta mer mot att skapa mötesrum för transpersoner genom att erbjuda mer aktiviteter som riktar sig mot denna grupp. I korthet kan man säga att bibliotek måste vara medvetna kring hur de vänder sig mot den här användargruppen, både när det kommer till vilka tjänster de erbjuder samt hur biblioteket som fysisk plats utformas. Dessa är alla aspekter som påverkar och har en inverkan på transpersoners möjlighet att konstruera och uttrycka sin genusidentitet.