Esta tese se baseia no estudo da materialidade de potes (vasilhas cerâmicas de armazenamento de água) no cotidiano doméstico de populações sertanejas atuais, de acordo com as perspectivas teóricas da arqueologia do presente, arqueologia do passado contemporâneo e etnografia arqueológica. Estruturei a tese a partir do questionamento das razões que levaram a permanência de potes no dia a dia de loiceiras no agreste central pernambucano, em detrimento do abandono paulatino do uso de panelas de barro, dentre outros itens da loiça de barro. Exploro a materialidade dos potes a partir de suas relações com o meio semiárido e com os sertanejos, representados pelas loiceiras do agreste, apresentando-a dentro do cotidiano doméstico sertanejo sincrônica e diacronicamente dos pontos de vista histórico e etnográfico. Apresento documentação histórica primária relacionada à produção, comercialização e uso de potes desde finais do século XIX até meados do século XX. Abordo a etnografia em três vertentes: registrando os processos de manufatura de potes por loiceiras de Belo Jardim, Altinho e Bezerros, em Pernambuco; realizando uma etnografia da mudança e da permanência de itens de barro da cultura material sertaneja; e refletindo sobre a necessidade de salvaguarda do conhecimento tradicional envolvido no saber fazer loiça de barro, como patrimônio cultural imaterial. A partir da análise destes aspectos argumento que a permanência de potes no cotidiano doméstico sertanejo é uma forma de resistência ao meio semiárido, à marginalização destas populações e ao colonialismo, que é acionada a partir de uma memória afetiva relacionado ao uso destes potes. O presente trabalho foi realizado com apoio da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior -Brasil (CAPES) - Código de Financiamento 001. / This thesis is based on the study of potes (emic category for storage water pottery) materiality in the domestic daily life context of contemporary rural populations, in accordance to the theoretical perspectives of present archeology, contemporary past archaeology and archaeological ethnography. I structured the thesis from questioning the reasons which led the potes to stay on the daily of loiceiras (woman potters) in the agreste central region of Pernambuco state - Brazil. At the same time, questioning the gradual abandonment of panelas de barro (emic category of pottery for cooking) use, among other items of loiça de barro (emic category for pottery in general). I explore the materiality of the potes from their relations with the semi-arid environment and with the sertanejos (peasants), represented by the loiceiras of the agreste, presenting it within the domestic daily life, synchronous and diachronically from the historical and ethnographic points of view. I present primary historical documentation related to the production, commercialization and use of potes from the end of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th century. I discuss the ethnography under three aspects. First recording the processes of potes production by loci of Belo Jardim, Altinho and Bezerros, in the state of Pernambuco. Second performing an ethnography of the change and the permanence of pottery items of the sertanejos material culture. Third place reflecting thinking about the traditional knowledge safeguard needs involved in knowhow of loiça de barro making as intangible cultural heritage. From the analysis of these aspects, I argue that the permanence of potes in sertanejos domestic daily life is a form of resistance to semi-arid environment, to marginalization of these populations and to colonialism, which is triggered from an affective memory related to the use of these potes. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001.

The purpose of this essay is to introduce readers to the music of living American composer Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972) through her chamber vocal works and to provide a resource to aid in the interpretation and performance of her music. Frank is an internationally recognized composer with a thriving career. However, she is not widely known among singers and teachers of singing and scholarship on her music is quite limited. This study seeks to fill that void by examining Frank’s published works as of January 2016 for solo voice and up to six instruments. These works are Cuatro Canciones Andinas (1999), for mezzo-soprano and piano; New Andean Songs (2008), for soprano, mezzo-soprano, two percussionists, and two pianos; Seven Armenian Songs (2013), for soprano, percussionist, and solo violin; and Honey (2013), for soprano, mezzo-soprano, and piano. Frank’s chamber vocal pieces are excellent additions to the repertoire and notable for Frank’s chamber music aesthetic, choice of diverse texts and languages (English, Spanish, and Armenian), dramatic storytelling, range of musical colors, and idiomatic writing for the performers. Frank’s ongoing exploration of her Peruvian heritage is reflected in two of these works, which draw inspiration from Andean folk music and poetry. This essay provides a brief biography of Frank; original poetic and musical analyses of the four works, exploring the areas of poetry, form, melody and motive, text painting, rhythm, harmony, folk influences, vocal writing, instrumental writing, timbre, range, and tessitura; and a summary of stylistic traits as seen across this sample. Poetic and word for word translations of foreign language texts, pronunciation guidelines for Latin American Spanish and International Phonetic Alphabet transliterations for the Armenian poems are included.

The significant cultural impact of HIV/AIDS has led to the production of an impressive amount of scholarship in the US and Northern Europe since the outbreak of the epidemic in 1980. In contrast, the study of the cultural representations of HIV/AIDS has been largely overlooked in the realm of Spanish literary criticism. The purpose of my dissertation is to address that void through the analysis of a representative corpus of texts and artistic works from different periods and genres that acknowledge the impact of the epidemic in Spain. More particularly, this dissertation analyzes Spanish literary and artistic representations of HIV/AIDS through a critical comparison with other written materials produced in the 16th and 17th centuries as a reaction to the syphilis epidemic that hit Europe at the time, also known as the Great Pox. The corpus of texts used in this dissertation includes Francisco Delicado’s La Lozana andaluza (1528); two short novels by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616); individual poems and collections of poetry by authors such as Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645), Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera (1600-1629), Aníbal Núñez (1944-1987), or Galician-language poet Lois Pereiro (1958-1996); as well as artistic works and performances by AIDS activist Pepe Espaliú (1955-1993). I explore this corpus through an interdisciplinary approach bringing into play, among others, historical and medical discourses, biopolitics, sociology of literature, semiology, as well as theories about violence and empathy. In my comparative examination of these authors’ representations of disease, I argue that contemporary writers approached HIV/AIDS using a framework inspired on the aesthetic and epistemic strategies developed in the 16th and 17th centuries in the context of the emergence of the Baroque. This framework allowed modern authors to confront the uncertainties caused by Post-Modernity and HIV/AIDS, and inspired them to depict the pandemic by means of metaphor and indirectness. The ultimate goal of my research is to uncover variables that will help to enlighten the well-documented historical trend to stigmatize sexual transmitted and infectious diseases. My work also sheds light on the reasons behind the slow emergence of epidemic diseases as objects of cultural debate in Spain, as well as on the social, political and ethical consequences of this slowness. Finally, I argue that there are some specifically artistic and literary responses to the Great Pox and HIV/AIDS that can help to understand the nature of these diseases and to distinguish discriminatory usages of these phenomena.

This dissertation examines a cycle of Hollywood films that spans over a decade, and which engages with and privileges a historical and geopolitical framework to address America's encounters and confrontations with the Middle East. At one level, these films map the 9/11 terrorist attacks onto various sites and histories that signify a contentious relationship between the Middle East and the United States (including Islamic fundamentalism, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Arab-Israeli conflict, or the struggle over oil). In doing so they incorporate and absorb elements from other media (the Internet, television, journalism) to augment and authorize film's signifying capacities. At another level, and in tension with this dispersal, these post-9/11 films regulate and manage these histories through the generic and narrative mechanisms of the action, conspiracy or combat film. If these films privilege a discourse of investigation and expertise that postulates scientific neutrality, and even a technologized view of the Middle East, they alternately mobilize trauma and victimization discourse to delineate, prioritize and redeem the American male body. In addition, the construction of the Middle East in post-9/11 Hollywood cinema in terms of space (vis-à-vis the emphasis on cartography, geography, and surveillance technologies) and time (real time, instantaneity, pastness), plays a central role in the strategies and practices that have contributed to the production of knowledge about the region since 9/11. Focusing primarily on post-9/11 American intelligence and military narratives, this study explores what is at stake in the cinematic struggle to accommodate, but ultimately, recast history in light of U.S.-Middle East relations.

Sola Fides Sufficit is a 20-minute concerto for solo violin and ensemble. The 16-member ensemble consists of flute (doubling piccolo), oboe, clarinet in Bb (doubling bass clarinet), bassoon, horn in F, trumpet in C, trombone, tuba, percussion I (bass drum, brake drum, chimes, glockenspiel, two woodblocks), percussion II (snare drum, suspended cymbal, two toms, triangle, vibraphone), piano, two violins, viola, cello, and contrabass. Sola Fides Sufficit is based on my previous solo violin composition Et si sensus deficit… written for violinist Emily Rolka in 2010. Sola Fides Sufficit is an expansion, orchestration, and ultimately a recomposition of Et si sensus deficit… The melodic, harmonic, and formal material in Sola Fides Sufficit is largely based on my detailed musical analysis of the Pange Lingua, an unaccompanied 13th century plainchant written by St. Thomas Aquinas. The six-phrase melody is well-known in the Roman Catholic tradition for its performance at the end of Holy Thursday Mass. My analysis drove my compositional choices regarding two distinct objectives: One, to reflect the chant material in overt ways (e.g., use of neighbor figures) and two, to intentionally diverge from the original chant material, at times exploiting or exaggerating elements purposefully avoided in the chant (e.g., the tritone). I utilized both ways of decision-making to create drama, contrast, tension, and resolution in the piece. My large-scale formal goal was to create a cohesive composition utilizing particular surface and structural aspects of the Pange Lingua melody, while withholding presentation of the melody in its entirety until the climax (conclusion) of the work. Fragments from the chant were selected and employed in varying contexts depending on the formal goals of each section. Some fragments were presented with few changes, while others were transformed and developed through tonality, registration, timbre, and rhythm. My structural design was shaped by four words of character the composer Witold Lutoslawski perceived as essential in the creation of his large-scale works: Introduction, Narrative, Transitional and Concluding. Influenced by Lutoslawski’s psychological approach to listener perception as a compositional and analytical tool, Sola Fides Sufficit unfolds in four unbroken parts, each portraying primarily one of these four formal characters. Within each movement, these formal characters also occur on a smaller scale and give shape to each section. Only during the Narrative portions is the content the most important aspect perceived. During the Introductory, Transitional, and Concluding music, however, the role of the given section in the form is more important than the content.

“Identity” constitutes one of the most debates theoretical concepts in the domain of postcolonial studies. Scholars often have a historical perspective for examining the question of identity in contemporary literary works. In fact, in the last three decades of the 20th century, we notice a significant increase in the number of literary works of an autobiographical and biographical nature. In the contemporary literature, the predominance of “personal narratives” in which reflect on identity, could be attributed to the heightened sense of individuality, which in turn results from the failure of Grand Ideologies, the mass migrations triggered by the processes of decolonization, the alienation of the consumerist society, and the fundamental redefinition of gender roles in the latter half of the 20th century. But during this period, there is also a parallel epistemological shift that takes place, and which is sometimes downplayed in the historical approach of the postcolonial studies. The episode in the history of ideas, known as “the death of the Subject,” is commonly associated with the structuralist movement in the 1950s and 60s. Structuralists argued that the human mind is traversed by omnipresent structures that play a much more significant role in the creative process than the conscious mind. In the case of language for example, it is not we who make use of the language, but rather, it is the language that evolves and produces itself through our mental structures. With language, human agency is also questioned in literary creation. As a result, literary critics take issue with such notions as “self,” and “self-writing,”-or autobiography. In France, the New Novel was the locus for the literary representation of structuralist theories, and played an important role in the formalist movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Using various techniques, the New Novelists sought to annihilate the anthropocentric narration or otherwise underscore the passive experience of reality by the Subject. The result was a highly formalist type of novels, predominant in the 50s and 60s, drawing mostly an elite intellectual readership. But May 1968 events marked a departure from the structuralist ideology in general, and the literary esthetics of the New Novel in particular. This political, social, and cultural upheaval in France was a ramification of the global student movement against institutional apparatuses and different forms of political establishment. In France, it was also a reaction to the elitist academism that denied the “human,” and to a literary expression that negated individuals and their personal stories. May 1968 protests objected to the monopoly of elite institutions on discourse and knowledge, and that they aspired to a “democratization” of discourse. The increase in the number of autobiographical and biographical works after 1970s, could therefore be viewed as a dialectical response to the formalism of the New Novel. This epistemological shift opened up the discursive space for narratives of “self” and “identity.” These narratives document a highly subjective experience of reality in a rapidly-changing world. Most importantly, they reflect the preoccupations of the contemporary individual as well as the transformations of the social life, and as such, narratives of family, exile, sexuality, and quotidian abound. The personalization of the experience goes so far as to call into question the very meaning of reality and History, and thus the “referential” genres autobiography and biography are new writing practices “autofiction” and “biofiction” which maintain an ambiguous rapport with the referential reality.

This thesis examines whether American civil religion, in its enactment in daily American life, is cosmological. That is, it questions whether the sacred behind American civil religion is present in the physical-material realm and not in a transcendental principle or being. It is interested in why, seemingly, what is sacred in American culture is always what is happening here and now. This is evidenced by and manifested in multiple vehicles of the sacred in American culture. These vehicles include a range of institutions from economics to politics to religion to education. They also include entities such as the mass media, the arts, and various elements of popular culture, of which one of (if not the very most) prominent, large-scale, and widely accepted forms are sports. As such, this paper maintains that sports, as a vehicle for the sacred in American culture, reveal a cosmological dimension of American civil religion. The thesis' primary investigation seeks comprehension of what is sacred in America and how the culture mediates it.

A dissertação procura compreender o fenômeno da financeirização no âmbito do capitalismo contemporâneo. Uma série de transformações iniciadas nos anos 1970 assinalou o declínio do regime de acumulação fordista e a provável emergência de uma nova fase do capitalismo. Sua característica fundamental consiste em um movimento de financeirização, decorrente em parte de mudanças desenvolvidas na esfera financeira. Seus traços mais destacados são o aumento exponencial das transações, tanto em termos absolutos como em relação às atividades produtivas; a liberalização e desregulamentação de mercados e das atividades financeiras em todo o mundo; o surgimento de novos agentes e instituições ligados às finanças. Processo este que desembocou no aumento da importância do capital financeiro nos circuitos de valorização. O caráter recente deste fenômeno ainda não permitiu que fossem estabelecidos consensos teóricos sobre a questão. Por conta disso, a dissertação debruça-se sobre as obras de dois pensadores marxistas, François Chesnais e David Harvey, buscando estabelecer semelhanças, diferenças e, sobretudo, as complementaridades de suas contribuições. A escolha de Chesnais se impõe pelo papel destacado que o assunto ocupa em sua obra. Harvey, por sua vez, concede primazia à discussão das relações das finanças com os demais aspectos que caracterizam o capitalismo na atualidade. / The dissertation seeks to understand the phenomenon of \"financialization\" under contemporary capitalism. A series of transformations started in the 1970s which began out the decline of the \"Fordist\" regime of accumulation and the possible emergence of a new phase of capitalism. Its key feature is a movement of \"financialization\", which results in part from changes in the financial sphere. Its distinctive aspects are the exponential increase in transactions, both in absolute terms and in comparison to productive activities; liberalization and deregulation of financial markets and activities around the world; the emergence of new actors and institutions related to finance. This process led to an increased importance of financial capital in the circuits of valorization. This new moment has not yet allowed to establish a theoretical consensus on the issue. For this reason, the dissertation focuses on the works of two Marxist thinkers, François Chesnais and David Harvey, seeking to establish similarities, differences and, above all, complementarities of their contributions. Choosing Chesnais is imposed due to the prominent role the subject occupies in his work. Harvey, in turn, prioritizes the discussion of relations between finance and other aspects of capitalism today.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) represents an emerging architectural approach that is able to tackle challenges in the contemporary service-based economy, in which the global market revenues are shifting from the manufacture of traditional off-the-shelf products to the provision of diversified services that suffice for customers’ needs. In such a service-based economy, one can envisage an entirely “service-oriented” world, where a massive number of distributed services with different natures and capabilities are provided by various professionals around the world. Problems arise when business applications demand desirable services through different sources and providers that are appropriate for their own benefits and preferences. Therefore, it can be very challenging to design an SOA infrastructure that enables users to exploit this great level of service heterogeneity and quantity. One of the key issues in service-oriented architecture is to achieve efficient service discovery and loosely-coupled service distribution while maintaining a satisfactory degree of scalability, usability, and Web consistency. This thesis deals with SOA infrastructure-level design and implementation issues. It approaches this SOA infrastructure within the scope of Web services, which capture an important, and perhaps the best, ‘realisation’ of SOA. It investigates and formulates how public Web services distributed across the World Wide Web can be augmented by a software platform that enables scalable, user-centred,semantic-enabled, and integration-oriented service retrieval, selection, and matching. The primary goal of this thesis is thus to propose a conceptual framework of an enhanced SOA infrastructure with regard to service distribution and discovery. / It also aims to design and implement a platform (PWSP), by means of which a large number of public Web services on the Web can be distributed based on service demands, retrieved based on service descriptions, selected based on service qualities, and matched based on service messages in a user-centred, scalable, and Web-consistent manner without augmenting existing Web services standards.

Using Foucault’s notion of a dispositif or social apparatus, this thesis charts the pedagogical relations established in contemporary literacy discourse in terms of a space of visibility and a form of sayability, and analyses them as operating within power-knowledge. It furthers this analysis by conceptualising the space of literacy as a normative heterotopia and as a recent mutation of bio-power, the government of the developing body. Such analysis problematises the discourse of literacy, from the term’s systematic indefiniteness to its real effectivity in producing subjects, spaces and disciplinary techniques. Literacy combines and interrelates a nineteenth-century establishment and a twentieth-century rearrangement of pedagogical space. The national language, the developing child, as well as the world of demands and national progress: all emerge as part of the nineteenth-century educational state, forming a set of disciplinary procedures, a structure of perception and a desire to recognise and utilise language development. Literacy discourse appropriates these knowledges and multiplies the sites in which they operate. It articulates the recognition and enablement of non-standard literacies with the governmental project of intensifying and directing the powers of a population. The pedagogical relations operationalised in literacy discourse project a continuous disciplinary power over a general social space. Thus, literacy has become both a common and much theorised social concern, and a term which structures lives, spaces, discourse and power. / Beginning with a close analysis of a recent education policy document, this thesis looks at the deployment of literacy as a way of organising experience through discourse and as a means of modulating the relations between three historically constituted terms: the student, the text, and the world. Schooling and literacy thus insert themselves into a machinery of social production and into the production of everyday concerns and processes. Consequently, literacy enters into our most material and non-linguistic moments through a teleological arrangement of time and space, a pedagogisation which is at the same time a textualisation of existence.