Anecdotal descriptions and small studies have reported decreasing reimbursements from Medicare Part D sponsors and commercial third-party payers, resulting in decreased gross margins for independent pharmacies; however, reports are inconclusive regarding which payer more greatly affects independent pharmacies’ financial viability. Using 2006-2009 prescription claims data collected by a pharmacy switching company, the purpose of this study was to calculate and describe estimated reimbursement formulas and mean gross margins to assess the relative impact of these two payer groups. The study evaluated a total of 2,929,696 prescription claims paid for by Medicare Part D sponsors (n = 1,830,896) and commercial third-party payers (n = 1,098,800). The prescriptions were dispensed by 418 Texas independent pharmacies to 192,968 patients aged 65 to 94. Between 2008 and 2009, the median ingredient reimbursement ranged from AWP-17% to AWP-15% for Part D sponsors and from AWP-17.44% to AWP-15% for commercial third-party payers. The median dispensing fee ranged from $1.50 to $2.00 for Part D sponsors and from $1.10 to $2.00 for commercial third-party payers. For all payers, the median dispensing fee and median ingredient reimbursement decreased or was stagnant. Similarly, aggregate percent gross margin (calculated using the payers’ estimates of acquisition cost) decreased for both payer types between 2007 and 2009, with the mean gross margin of 4.0 percent earned for Part D prescriptions being higher than the 3.7 percent earned for commercial third-party prescriptions. In the same timeframe, the mean aggregate percent gross margin ranged from 2.8 percent to 6.0 percent among the five most popular Part D sponsors in the sample, and from 2.4 percent to 5.1 percent among the five most popular commercial third-party payers. The generic dispensing ratio explained a portion of the variance between and among payers. This study shows that significant variation exists in reimbursement formulas and percent gross margin between and among several of the most popular Part D sponsors and commercial third-party payers and supports pharmacy assertions that reimbursements from both payer types are decreasing. Pharmacies can respond to these pressures by being more conscientious of their business’ margins when reviewing contracts and increasing the proportion of generic drugs dispensed. / text

With a subpoena in one hand and a donor agreement in the other, what choice should an ethical archivist make? Since the legal battle over the Belfast Project—a collection of oral histories from Northern Irish paramilitaries about their involvement in the Troubles—at Boston College erupted in 2011, such a scenario has become a reality. With U.S. attorneys demanding access in the name of truth and justice, and historians advocating denial for the sake of scholarship and honor, the archival profession is facing some troubling legal and ethical issues. Regardless of the ultimate fate of the Belfast Project, the archival field will have to adapt to a new reality. This reality will have to consider the effects of the law and oral history practices on archives. Should archives be granted privilege recognized within the legal system? Should there be oversight for oral histories? Should archives offer privacy protections for third parties? How can the archival community address these issues? This thesis will use the Belfast Project to analyze legal and ethical issues facing archivists and explore what this means for the future of the profession. / text

This project centers on an office environment and the physical and psychological well-being of the people who work within it. Located at 525 Beresford Avenue in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the Churchill Park United Church was converted to serve as an office space for a hypothetical publishing firm, Choice Publications. With recent knowledge concerning the health and well-being of employees, the design of workplaces has shifted to comprise a human-centered approach. The purpose of this practicum project was to investigate the evolving nature of the office and to determine its role regarding the identity, well-being, and behavior of individuals in order to better accommodate their needs. Central to the exploration is the study of environmental psychology theories and the introvert-extrovert dichotomy. Research into third place theory and the significance of home act as the primary lenses to evolve conventional office design into a hybrid of new typologies. / October 2015

Dominant approaches in film studies reflect the deeply-rooted assumption – inherited in large part from Marx and Foucault – that human nature and human history are inherently characterized by conflict and the struggle for power. However, this normative adversarialism prevents us from acknowledging the experiences and works of individuals who operate under a different set of foundational assumptions based instead on mutualism, cooperation, and forms of power that do not engage in zero-sum struggles. This dissertation will treat adversarialism not as an essential, inevitable, or preferable aspect of human nature, but rather as a culturally learned pattern of behavior that can be overcome, both individually and collectively. How would dominant theoretical frameworks in film studies be affected by a view of human nature that does not celebrate moments of conflict and adversarialism, but mutualistic tendencies instead? By mobilizing the definition provided by the Bahá’í discourse community (BDC) of “world citizenship” as a global ethic founded on the inherent oneness of humanity, this study will challenge three generally adversarial assumptions in the study of film: 1) That any filmmaker working within a non-democratic or “oppressive” state is politically worthy of celebration primarily when actively criticizing the politics of that state; 2) That any filmmaker with a complex multicultural background will have a psychologically difficult time reconciling their own cultural differences and reflect that internal struggle in their films; and 3) That conflict is an essential part of any popular cinematic narrative. Current approaches to filmmaking in an era of globalization, operating under normative adversarialism and often emphasizing the articulation of difference, are inadequate to explain the works of filmmakers living and working within a mutualistic ethic of world citizenship. By taking Dayyan Eng – a multicultural filmmaker based in Beijing, China – as the primary case study, I will develop a “world citizen” framework based on the articulation of the essential oneness of humanity and a filmmaker’s development of a “triple fluency” (cinematic, cultural, and industrial) to address limitations inherent in existing concepts in order to more appropriately illuminate the works of other media makers who work and live according to similar conceptual frameworks.

Beyond Charitable Imperialism investigates the role of film, digital media, and music in mediating social and political change in conflict regions with specific attention to the aesthetic choices, ethical implications, and lived consequences of audio-visual production in and about Congo. This study intervenes in the discourse on activist African cinema through a bi-directional investigation of (1) increasingly prominent instances of aesthetic and ideological practices in Congolese film that are emerging as central to larger projects of social transformation, and (2) the extent to which humanitarian narratives depicting present-day Congo obscure or expose the ongoing, neo-colonial power struggle between Congo and the West. My research includes critical analyses of temporality, memory, and language in audio-visual representations of Congo, as well as extensive field research investigating embodied instances of the 'film act.' In this context I advocate a historically informed reading of the correlation between current cinema practices and contemporary history based on the evolutionary relationship between audio-visual media, politics, and identity. Drawing on frameworks of militant Third Cinema this study interrogates the role of media in the creation and dissemination of 'Truth' and thereby draws pointed attention to global consequences that form the basis of what I call charitable imperialism. With methodological inspiration across disciplinary lines from scholars including Frantz Fanon, Teshome Gabriel, and Stuart Hall, I offer an anatomy of the particular ways in which film can emerge as a real means of social transformation in the face of conflict and mental colonization. Central to this inquiry is the history of resistance embedded in Congolese musical practices. I suggest that, fortified by intersections with visual technology, the elevated cultural capital of song as a vehicle of social mobilization is reconstituting both music and visual media and increasingly allowing Congolese voices to participate in global dialogues on their own terms. Ultimately I conclude that mediated agency effectively challenges charitable imperialism and repositions Congolese subjects as viable agents of sustainable social transformation. / African and African American Studies

Latin America has been envisioned, time and again, as home to the semi-civilized. Or so (post)colonial imaginaries continue to impress upon us in developmental renderings of a New World that has yet to take off. Neither backward (in the ways of a ‘dark continent’) or advanced (as guaranteed by the status of a ‘first world’), its giants are, at best, chronically emerging. This in-between position is acutely exemplified by the Brazilian dilemma of an interminable modernization, responsibilized for curing all of our ills. The most wide-ranging projects of development are mobilized within this context, but the closer that we get to their distinct materializations, the more that they appear to us as mirages of what ought to be rather than what is, measured against the incorruptible standards of a modernity realized somewhere ‘out there’. In this study, I look to everyday dynamics in Brazil’s aspiring world-city, Rio de Janeiro, that compose the fields and subjects on which development projects operate, in turn revealing and obscuring ‘successes’, ‘failures’, and ultimately, assorted desires and expectations that (mis)lead a politics of transformation in the peripheries of the modern world. In Part III, I elaborate this history of the present as a way to reorient such grand narratives of arrested development, corruption, and other ‘third world’ problems, by drawing on a range of sites of sociability that nurture particular kinds of relations between (dis)obedient subjects and their governing institutions. To this end, I reconceive the terms of debate for thinking about places of an allegedly incomplete or corrupted modernity, in Part II, where I largely reframe the problems that a developmental ethos appropriates for itself, which situates the third world as the constitutive outside of idealized ways of living. By investigating the predominant developmental archetypes of the last century of Brazil’s promised take-offs, in Part I, I set up the pathways to decondition and recondition how we think about the limits and possibilities of a peripheral politics of transformation. In these ways, I conclude that the standards of political judgement that follow from such idealized ways of living neutralize contentions and negotiations over how we want to live, here and now, making way for confused desires, expectations, and responsibilities more in line with (inter)nationalist paradigms and prescriptions than the politics of everyday life in out of the way places. / Graduate / 0615 / 0616 / 0700 / andrea.b.gill@gmail.com

Commitments to cosmopolitanism and indigenism complicate the Modernist literature of the Third World. This study investigates the rhetorical and aesthetic responses of Third World "little magazines"--short-running, self-financed cultural magazines--to these two notions. These little magazine evolved with the daily newspaper as a tool favored by avant-garde movements for critiquing the social structures that produced it and for codifying their aesthetic and political principles. Comparing the Stridentist little magazine Horizonte (1926-1927) to D. H. Lawrence's novel The Plumed Serpent (1925), I argue that the Mexican Revolution created a climate of nationalism that reoriented the Stridentist movement away from a version of cosmopolitanism influenced by European modernist movements and toward a deeper interest in the Mexican folk and indigenous culture. Following form there, I consider the concept of cosmopolitanism in the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier's El Reino de este mundo (1949) in comparison to two Haitian magazines: La Revue Indigène (1927-1928) and Les Griots (1938-1940). Here I find that, while Carpentier stages a relatively global critique of primitivism as a false cosmopolitanism, the magazines La Revue Indigène and Les Griots reflect a turn from such a cosmopolitanism that values the primitive for its own sake toward a cultural nationalism invested in the real and imagined recuperation of Haiti's African origins through the study of folklore, Vodou, the Kreyòl language and poetic images of Africa. Finally, I compare Futurist F. T. Marinetti's Mafarka le futuriste: roman africain (1909) to the Egyptian literary magazine Al-Kātib Al-Miṣrī (1945-1948) in order to demonstrate the distance between Egyptian modernity in the European imagination and the self-conceived notions of Egyptian modernity. In Al-Kātib Al-Miṣrī, I find that these writers value cosmopolitanism, arguing that it is in fact indigenous to Egyptian culture itself and constructing their notion of Egyptian modernity around the maintenance of continuity with this indigenous cosmopolitanism. My examinations of these magazines suggests that, though the European avant-gardes and Third World literary Modernists may wield the little magazine similarly against hegemonic cultures, their purposes are divided over the roles cosmopolitanism and indigeneity play in the formation of national culture. / text

In response to the highly exclusionary Guatemalan state and the genocide of Mayas during the 1980s, the paradigmatic currents of the Maya Movement have been engaging the state in their struggle for rights. Some have been negotiating from within the Guatemalan government by occupying bureaucratic positions within less powerful state ministries. Other Maya actors press for more favorable socioeconomic policies using social movement tactics. While most literature focuses on the above two currents as a dichotomy, I argue that a third current of Maya politics has the most political potential. One promising example emerged in the course of the land struggle of San Jorge La Laguna (1992-1999). A sector of rural Mayas (mostly poor farmers and teachers) began to look away from the state in their quest for empowerment. They became less concerned with rights granted from a distant state, and prioritized instead practices that reach towards community self-determination and ontological autonomy. This clearly represents a third current of Maya politics grounded in the social fabric of rural Maya communities and their values, social relations, and worldview. This current, which I call Tejido Social (social fabric), is also possibly present in other spaces in Guatemala and likely had existed in prior times but did not pronounce itself publicly until this period. I use Escobar’s theorization of postliberal, postcapitalist politics of relationality to analyze the significance of this third tendency of Maya politics. This study contributes to the theorization of emerging third current / Afro-indigenous movements in the Americas through an ethnographic approach which focuses on political interventions that are lived principles embedded in socio-political practice. / text

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.

This dissertation contributes to the discipline by demonstrating successful and productive incorporation of feminist research methods and methodologies in rhetorical studies and the application of the rhetorical arts to feminist projects. Specifically this dissertation examines the history of state-sanctioned marriage in the US and its contribution to normative discourses of family that problematically inform public policies and mainstream arguments directed at some working and parenting women struggling to care for their families and provide for them economically. Through feminist rhetorical analyses of congressional testimony on welfare; feminist rhetorics on women, work, family, and economics; and narratives of women's lived experiences derived from an interview-based study, this project renders visible and disrupts mechanizations of privilege and oppression deployed through hegemonic discourses on marriage and family. It concludes that feminist rhetorical scholars are uniquely trained and therefore called upon to address inequities promulgated through national attachment to state-sanctioned marriage and normative models of family.