<p> In this dissertation, we propose an event detection approach to aid in real-time event detection. Social media generates information about news and events in real-time. Given the vast amount of data available and the rate of information propagation, reliably identifying events can be a challenge. Most state of the art techniques are post hoc techniques, which detect an event after it happened. Our goal is to detect the onset of an event as it is happening, using the user-generated information from Twitter streams. To achieve this goal, we use a discriminative model to identify a sudden change in the pattern of conversations over time. We also use a topic evolution model to identify credible events and propose an approach to eliminate random noise that is prevalent in many of the existing topic detection approaches. The simplicity of our proposed approach allows us to perform fast and efficient event detection, permitting discovery of events within minutes of the first conversation relating to an event started. We also show that this approach is applicable for other social media datasets to detect change over the longer periods of time. We extend the proposed event detection approach to incorporate information from multiple data sources with different velocity and volume. We study the event clusters generated from event detection approach for changes in events over time. We also propose and evaluate a location detection approach to identify the location of a user or an event based on tweets related to them.</p><p>

<p> In the last decade, theorists in anthropology and other disciplines have vigorously critiqued commonplace distinctions between secularism and religion. Highlighting how secularism is a form of Western epistemology, such theorists have argued this distinction is deeply problematic because it obscures secularism&rsquo;s historical, political, and cultural particularity. </p><p> My dissertation argues Iran is well situated to engage in this debate because its political terrain brings into relief how discussions of secularity and religiosity often fall back on an irresolvable dichotomy wherein secularism is defended without qualification or religious authoritarianism is ignored altogether. In an effort to move out of this impasse, my dissertation critiques the presumed neutrality of secularism without defending a thoroughly undemocratic Islamic Republic.</p><p> Through an examination of three sites within Iranian politics since 1979, I show how alternatives to both secularism and undemocratic forms of Islam are already present in Iran. The first site that I explore is the contemporary Iranian women&rsquo;s movement, specifically the One Million Signatures Campaign, which seeks full gender equality within the laws of the Islamic Republic. I argue that the internal logic of rights and a specific set of socio-political conditions that arose out of the revolution in 1979 made the newly fostered cooperation between Islamic and secular feminists within this campaign possible. Utilizing critiques of rights by poststructuralist and postcolonial feminists, I arrive at a critical endorsement of women&rsquo;s rights in Iran that calls for nurturing more radical political imaginaries by not treating rights jurisprudence as the apex of social justice struggles.</p><p> My second site focuses on the politics of time and its role in the 2009 post-election uprising as a further example of the porous boundary between secularism and religion in Iran. After surveying the history of Iran&rsquo;s three dominant calendars and the forty-day mourning cycle of Shi&rsquo;ite Islam in the last century, I argue the Islamic Republic is founded on temporal simultaneity, a non-secular organization of time wherein past, present, and future are enfolded into one dynamic moment. I conclude that during the 2009 uprising, protesters initiated a crisis of legitimacy for the regime by reconfiguring temporal markers that comprise this symbolic foundation of the contemporary Iranian state.</p><p> My final site is the visual culture in the Islamic Republic as well as Western understandings and depictions of it. I argue such analyses of artistic production in Iran by Western observers rely on a particular understanding of the state, religion, and art as discrete categories wholly separate from one another. This argument is twofold, the first part of which is a historical survey that shows how the relationship between art and the state in Iran over the last sixty years has been co-constitutive. On the basis of this history, I then explore contemporary Iranian street art, both sanctioned and illicit, to show how this convergence of art and the state has continued to unfold in the Islamic Republic. I show how the boundaries between culture and the state have not calcified under the current regime but remain dynamically in flux, albeit different ways than in the previous historical epoch.</p><p> Lastly, I trace how the politics of secularism and religion both consolidates and frays the public/private divide within these three sites. Given this fact, the question of what to do with secularism and religion in Iran is ultimately a question of what to do about the divide between the private and public spheres. Taking up the issue of the double-bind structuring the public/private divide, I conclude my dissertation by surveying the ethical-politico limitations and possibilities of these alternative political imaginaries in Iran.</p>

"The Magic of the Many Which Sets the World on Fire": Boston Elites and Urban Political Insurgents During the Early Nineteenth Century is a broad analysis on social class and political culture in Boston and Massachusetts between 1800 and 1830. I have consciously focused on the political odyssey of congressman, Massachusetts legislator, and Boston's second mayor, Josiah Quincy, to investigate the political and cultural evolution of Boston during these three crucial decades. Quincy's political career--though central to the story--is utilized as a narrative hook that helps unveil the dramatic changes in the political and social culture that Massachusetts faced in between the first and second party systems. During the first three decades of the nineteenth century, Massachusetts and Boston, in particular, faced a dramatic period of political, cultural, and economic transformation. At the beginning of the century, the politics, economy, and culture of the state were controlled almost exclusively by a close-knit elite which ran roughshod over the ordinary citizenry. By the mid-1820s this elite faced an onslaught of serious challenges to its hegemony in Massachusetts. By 1823 the political arm of the elite, the Federalist Party, was gutted by a united lower-to-middling class electorate led by ex-Federalist and Brahmin, Josiah Quincy. This newly charged electorate refused to abide by the political standards of the past, resulting in the passing of the first party system. This study investigates the emergence of a dramatically new sort of political culture while also providing an analysis of a highly popular caesarist who helped destroy the first party system in Massachusetts, but could not survive the advent of the second.

This dissertation examines the relationship between gender and political culture in the American radical pacifist movement during the World War II, postwar, and Vietnam War years. Between 1942 and 1972, male and female radicals in the American peace movement translated their beliefs into action as they protested against racial segregation, resisted conscription, and opposed U.S. foreign and nuclear weapons policies through direct action and civil disobedience. As they struggled to create a new paradigm of nonviolent protest, they discovered that political activism was as much about personal transformation as it was about dissent and social change. The history of this vanguard political movement belies accounts that relegate women to the margins of American radicalism and grassroots struggles for social justice and peace. Women played an integral role in the radical pacifist movement: they worked behind the scenes and on the streets, and made substantial contributions to its trajectory and growth. The motivations and experiences of female activists defy the standard equation between masculinity and militant action and refute essentialized associations between women's pacifism and maternal concern. Working alongside of men, these women transcended the distinctions between public and private and challenged the tendency to link female activism to separatist strategies for empowerment. The study's secondary focus on race complicates what traditionally is described as an organic alliance between white peace activists and the black freedom struggle. Radical pacifists were inspired by and hoped to contribute to the emerging civil rights movement. Nevertheless, the different priorities of these two movements created a tense and ambivalent relationship. By engaging in creative acts of nonviolent resistance, radical pacifists redefined dissent in terms of personal sacrifice and risk-taking, all within an egalitarian framework that sought to overcome gender and racial difference. They did not succeed in fostering a pacifist mass movement for social change, nor did they always act in concert with their egalitarian ideals. In spite of these limitations, these men and women modeled a militant style of activism that challenged the cultural and political norms of modern American society and helped to reformulate definitions of gender in the political realm.

American political thought is unusual in that the conception of “nature” is overtly important as well as silently embedded in the frame of reference of its practitioners. The conception of nature is evident in the national narrative around membership and property as well as in pastoral political resistance. It is my basic thesis that this attitude toward nature contributes not only to a specific kind of public policy decision concerning the allocation of natural resources, but also maintains a presupposition of the ideal American citizen as Anglo and male. I have ventured into the culture of the Southwestern Latinos, particularly but not exclusively the Hispanos of northern New Mexico and Chicano/Chicanas in order to find an alternative view of nature and an alternative perspective on the conception of nature in the United States. In the end I find the most problematic aspects of the conception of nature in traditional American political thought are (1) the reliance on ideological sameness in the that ignores real, material difference; (2) the commodification of nature and (3) the exclusion of human naturalness from the political debate.

At the current moment, with voter turnout low and mass popular uprisings refashioning the political map, questions of political participation and dissent are extremely pressing. In established democracies and newly democratized states alike, an active and potentially dissenting citizenry is often seen as the necessary balance to overreaching state power and unregulated market forces, but scholars struggle to keep abreast of a proliferation of new foci and forms of engagement. This dissertation focuses on the form of collective political engagement enacted at centri sociali occupati autogestiti (occupied, self-managed social centers) or CSOA in Bologna, Italy. As they enact political alternatives through everyday practices of self-management and cultural production, social center participants complicate conventional analytical distinctions between revolution and reform or between individual transformation and larger social change. Through participant observation at three specific centers, interviews with participants and visitors and discourse analysis of recent legislation and policy, the investigator explores the character of social center participants’ cultural and political practice, internal organization and decision-making processes, and the heated conflict surrounding social centers in order to discern the opportunities afforded and tensions generated by this form of political engagement. The author argues that CSOA participants experience a form of belonging constructed on the basis of participation rather than ascribed statuses or adherence to shared ideological positions. Furthermore, participants seek to establish an autonomous space wherein key obstacles to participation have been deliberately dismantled or drained of authority in order to render this form of belonging more inclusive. In the shadow of post-9/11 securitization processes at the supra-national, national and local levels aimed at governing migrant mobility and public expressions of dissent, CSOA participants seek to displace the ethnic, religious, linguistic, generational and class-specific norms that define the cultural dimensions of contemporary Italian citizenship. Drawing on the concept of cultural citizenship, the author therefore argues that the political imaginary proposed by CSOA participants represents a deliberate contestation of both the authority and function of state-based citizenship models and can be understood as new model of citizenship characterized by an alternative, less exclusive relationship between belonging and participation.

<p> The so called price control policies have traditionally been understood in terms of concerns about (a) the role and size of the bureaucracy implied (Taussig, 1919, Grayson and Neeb, 1974; Clinard, 1969; Rockoff, 1984; Galbraith, 1941 and 1946); (b) the (potential) short term effectiveness and medium/long term ineffectiveness of controls (Rockoff, 1984, Grayson and Neeb, 1974; Bienen and Gersovitz, 1986, FIEL, 1990); (c) the tax evasion and creation of black markets (Clinard, 1969); (d) the eventual emerging violence following the dismantling of controls or subsidies on consumer goods (Bienen and Gersovitz, 1986; van Wijnberger, 1992); (e) the potential impact on the government coalition (Ag&eacute;ndor and Asilis, 1997); (f) the levels of delivery, fill rates or even any breaks in supply chains (Grayson and Neeb, 1974; Clinard, 1969); (g) the incentives/distortions in the distribution of resources, as a result of the alteration of the price system (Galbraith, 1941, 1946, 1951, 2001; Friedman, 1990; Colander, 1984; Dunn and Pressman, 2005); (h) the search for focused or selftargeted alternatives in order to optimize the use of limited resources and prevent freeriding (Adams, s / f; Alderman, 2002; Gutner, 2002); and (k) its historical development as a political response to rising prices (Schuettinger and Butler, 1978). </p><p> However, little has been studied its contribution to the development of state capacities as well as the role of entrepreneurship in the acceptance of price controls. </p><p> In this sense, this thesis analyzes the first year of the "Precios Cuidados" program in force in Argentina since January 2014, in order to address two interrelated questions: (a) To what extent the &ldquo;Precios Cuidados&rdquo; Program, as a particular and specific form of joint coordination between public and private sector, favored the development and expansion of state capacities? (b) If it is true, as it will be argued, that this new form of joint articulation between the public and private sector contributes to expand state capacities, why did the retail community agree to take part of a voluntary agreement to freeze prices and markups that in the end would help to increase the relative powers of the agencies by which they are controlled without effective guarantees of limits to its exercise? A public policy, in a word, that will give us the unique opportunity to analyze the link between state, market and society and its effect on market regulation and the improvement of state capacities. </p>

This thesis considers the importance to democracy of online spaces where citizens can engage in dialogue on issues of public concern. Specifically, it evaluates the BBC's news and features provision on its website dedicated to the 2005 UK Parliamentary General Election, entitled Election 2005. Particular attention is given to sections such as the Election Monitor, the UK Voters' Panel and Have your say, to which people were encouraged to submit their views and comments for posting. Given the leading status of BBC News Online in the UK (the remit for which is defined, in part, by its Royal Charter obligation to provide a public service), it is vital to examine the Election 2005 website and its role in the democratic process. The principal aim of this thesis is to analyse the ways in which BBC News Online deployed its website to facilitate spaces for citizens to engage in dialogue during the 2005 UK General Election. To achieve this aim, the thesis makes use of web dialogue analysis, which is a method proposed and defined for the purpose of this project. The case study is divided into three chapters: the first dealing with online news in which citizen voices were found to be marginalised; the second concerning different genres of online feature articles, wherein citizen voices was the most prominent source; and the third focussing on sections where people were encouraged to submit comments. Through analysing the nature of source utterances (quotations and paraphrases), and comments submitted to debate sections, the thesis found little dialogue taking place in any of the sections on the BBC's Election 2005 website. It argues this was caused by a) the deliberate intention of BBC staff to discourage dialogue, and instead facilitate a 'global conversation', b) the manual process used to publish comments to the site, and c) people being at the time unaccustomed to participate in any meaningful debate using online forums. In this way, the thesis seeks to contribute to a developing area of scholarship concerned with news media representations of national elections, online journalism and citizenship.

<p> This dissertation analyses how a youth-led, technologically driven social movement led a collective political struggle for change in Egypt that revolved around the legitimacy of the existing system and demanded rights to expression and participation. It seeks to understand the political impact of new ICTs, namely blogs and networked social media, in authoritarian contexts through the use of Egypt as a case study and by employing new methods of ethnographic inquiry that link the online and the off-line in recognition that they are mutually constituted. </p><p> I propose that focusing on the micropolitics of practices and discourse, with due consideration of structural and institutional dynamics, reveals how epistemological and ontological changes take place when a distributional shift in the primary modes of communication occurs, and thus helps us better understand how ICTs are implicated in processes of political change. </p><p> I argue that Egypt's young cyberactivists, and particularly citizen journalists, radically shifted the informational status quo by witnessing, putting on record and imbuing political meaning to symbolic struggles to define quotidian struggles against social injustice, harassment and censorship as part of a broader movement for political reform. A central contention in this dissertation, therefore, is that blogging and social media reconfigure the potentiality for expression and participation, but that it is the particular concatenations of technologically-inflected repertoires of contention that transform potentiality into actuality. This analysis reveals the mechanisms by which the potentiality of the Internet and social media is transformed into concrete instantiations of political struggle through activism, news making practices, and collective action. Throughout the dissertation I analyze specific episodes of contention to explain how ICTs facilitated collective identity formation, organization, mobilization and advocacy, with far fewer organizational and logistical barriers, rendering the dynamics of contentious politics in this case distinctive from other revolutionary periods. This new youth movement created innovative repertoires of contention, which they developed and adapted very quickly, constrained less by structural factors such as economics and distance, which the properties of ICTs help overcome, than they would have been in the past. </p><p> I argue that it is not sufficient to explore only moments of collective action, because this does not explain how the "maker of claims" came to identify themselves as such, nor how they build consensus around their claims. This is of particular interest in the new communications environment of the post-millennial period, and therefore I also focus on the phenomenological lifeworlds of these cyberactivists to show how networked social media gave opposition and subaltern groups, such as liberal secularists or the Muslim Brotherhood, new tools for individual and collective identity creation and enabled freedom of expression and opinion. </p><p> The empirical focus of the article is Egypt but I argue that the mechanisms and dynamics identified have a much wider domain of application. I propose several new mechanisms including <i>asabiyah</i>, <i>ijma' </i>, and <i>isnad</i> to explain movement dynamics and to account for the technological aspect of cyberactivists' repertoires of contention, and propose revising the concept of amplification and certification to account for the fact that the algorithmic properties of ICTs now play a role in contentious repertoires.</p>

<p> The world is becoming more interdependent. Governments and diplomats negotiate across cultures every day. Some argue that negotiators are professionals and share the common diplomatic culture, therefore their cultural backgrounds are irrelevant to international negotiation and in result culture has no significant influence on the process. The author argues that culture does matter and it could influence the different negotiation elements: individuals, process, and outcome &mdash; the larger the cultural gap between the parties, the larger the cultural influence. To substantiate his argument, the author uses a case-study analysis of the Jordanian-Israeli peace negotiation that led to the 1994 peace treaty. The author conducted eight semi-structured interviews with negotiators from the two countries who actively participated in the negotiation &mdash; including the heads of the two delegations. From this work, the author concludes that culture in the Jordanian-Israeli negotiation was manifested, and influenced the negotiators, the process, and the outcome in six different ways &mdash; culture was an enabler.</p>