Between 1813 and 1825 the Boston Manufacturing Company built a textile factory in Waltham, Massachusetts. Their factory is known for many important firsts in American industry, including the first commercially viable power loom, one of the first vertically integrated factories, and one of the first join stock financed manufacturing concerns. This successful factory became the direct model for the large textile mills built along the Merrimack River and elsewhere, iconic locations of American post-colonial industrialization. This dissertation looks at the early development and success of the Boston Manufacturing Company from a geographical perspective. It argues that in order build a successful factory, the company, its managers, and its workers, had to transform their "place": a notion that I investigate from an economic-geographical and anthropological point of view, moving from site, to landscape, to geographic networks. On these grounds, I show how the logic of the factory's development was both embedded in and shaping the emerging structures surrounding it, and how, in turn, the company’s later move to Lowell as one of the iconic industrial sites depended on its having successfully learned the business of "place-making" in its foundational Waltham decade. / History of Science

This dissertation describes and analyzes the financial boom that made Russia the largest net international debtor in the world by 1914, as well as the Bolshevik default of 1918 -- one of the biggest in international financial history. For the Bolsheviks the default was a highly significant attack on "finance capital." Yet few historians have paid much attention to the financial history of the Russian Revolution. This study focuses in particular on the decision-making of the small but influential group of financiers and government officials who acted as the "gatekeepers" of international finance, channeling international capital to Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. / History

This thesis considers the transformation of Iranian-Israeli ties following the 1979 Iranian Revolution from a Western-allied relationship to a covert, scandalous relationship, specifically in the context of the Iran-Iraq War. I also look at the Iranian and Israeli narratives and compare the religious, historical, ideological and psycho-political underpinnings that reveal significant similarities between these two superficially diametrically opposed states, and ultimately shaped the complex and misunderstood relationship between the two countries. / text

This thesis is an ethnography and biographical study that examines the impact of the immense socioeconomic changes underway in Cuba at the turn of the 21st century and the flexible identity categories through which individuals navigate a social crisis. The biography and ethnography in this thesis are centered on the life of Violeta Aldama, an aging revolutionary and Afro-Cuban mother who struggles to make ends meet while fighting to steer her son, Brian, through a classical music education and into a music career. Amid growing racial inequalities when many Afro-Cubans are locked out of the most lucrative jobs in the new tourism sector and less likely to have family abroad sending remittances, the booming dance music industry offers the greatest promise for advancement and wealth than possibly any other profession. With the retraction of the state in a growing market economy, Violeta must scramble to build new networks of support while also coming to terms with the idea that the system she fought for all of her life will no longer be able to sustain her son. This study argues that individuals navigate through social crises through identity categories that are both socially constructed and subjectively fluid. In the process, they rely on these identity categories to build new contacts for support while also finding in them meaning and agency. I frame this thesis around three broad identity categories - race, class and national identity. The study also shows how Violeta in turn experienced these categories - as well as motherhood and her revolutionary roles - and the ways that she used them to build networks of support. The thesis is guided by the theory on lo informal developed by scholar Damián Fernández: the split in individuals between ideals and passionate beliefs versus life on the black market to help loved ones survive. The study's methodology draws from feminist ethnography, examining not only Violeta's position in society as an Afro-Cuban woman and aging revolutionary, but also my relationship with her and her son as a white, middle-class American researcher during a time when relationships with foreigners became a crucial means of social advancement. This research bridges academic areas of study regarding Cuba's growing racial inequalities and the rising economic power of the music industry. It also contributes to the academic canon on social movements by highlighting roles of individuals - not just the state or opposition alliances - as social actors.

The organization of work in the Western welfare states has made use of psychological know-how since the early twentieth century, for instance by making the practices of ‘psychotechnics’ and ‘human relations’ a part of the production apparatus. The last decades, however, have seen the development of a new economy based on information and communication technologies and with a related shift in organizational ideals from large hierarchical structures to networks of self-governing units – a change sometimes labelled the third industrial revolution. This development has meant new possibilities for the deployment of psychological knowledge in organizational management. The present study takes as its geographical starting point the greater Stockholm area in Sweden. Through a variant of multi-sited fieldwork it investigates the distribution of psychological know-how in and through different institutions – such as school, work life, health care – by which the average ‘worker-citizen’ is supposed to acquire a ‘psychological toolbox’, thus becoming a kind of amateur psychologist or therapist, ready and able to take responsibility for his or her own productivity, well-being and health. The study depicts this ideal of psychological self-regulation: its discourse and practices, and how it emerged as a part of the technological and organizational developments of the third industrial revolution.

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