Global capital is transforming the spaces in which we live, thereby transforming culture: this thesis challenges a set of liberal assumptions about culture and cultural transformation by elaborating upon this very hypothesis. Specifically, it argues that cultural identities are being formed in global cities, where disjunctive global flows of cultural, financial, technological, ideological, and human capital intersect. These global flows are creating cultural contexts of choice that can be as central to individual and group identities as national institutions or inherited or native cultural norms. And as these modern contexts of choice emancipate the imagination from the influence of national institutions, they enable peculiar new forms of agency. I use Arjun Appadurai’s notion of imagination and his model of “scapes”—cultural landscapes formed by intersecting flows of capital—to explain how the global is becoming the decisive framework for social life. In contrast, I use Will Kymlicka’s model of multicultural citizenship and Jeremy Waldron’s model of cosmopolitanism primarily to demonstrate the limits of a class of liberal theories of cultural accommodation that oversimplify the relationship of the individual to culture, and of culture to modernity, and which ignore the role of “scapes” in constituting cultural identities. To conclude, I propose an alternative, three- dimensional and ultimately non-comparative treatment of culture inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city. / Graduate

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Canterbury, 2006. / Title taken from PDF title screen (viewed October 5, 2007). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-256).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Canterbury, 2006. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-256). Also available via the World Wide Web.

The thesis traces the evolving attitudes towards rhetoric in the highly-rhetorised English-language prose of the late sixteenth century by focusing on a term that was itself subject to significant change: 'wit'. To wit's pre-existing denotations of intellectual acumen, capacity for reason and good judgement was added a novel meaning, related to the capacity for producing lively speech. As a term encompassing widely divergent meanings, many Elizabethan and early Stuart works explored 'wit' as a central theme or treated the term as significant to explorations of the human mind, its capacity for rhetoric, and the social and moral dimensions of this relationship. The research centres on how 'wit' is seen and how it corresponds to rhetorical wittiness as produced in practice, and questions the implications of this for understanding the social and moral dimensions of the authorial wit. By focusing on the early vernacular manuals of rhetoric by author such as Thomas Wilson and Roger Ascham, on Lyly's and Greene's euphuist prose, and on Thomas Lodge's and Sir Philip Sidney's prose defences of poetry, the first half of the thesis explores the term's conceptual ambiguity. Potentially both reformative and deceptive, this ambiguity becomes a useful tool for the author looking to construct a profitable persona as a Wit, or a brilliant-yet-unruly master of rhetoric. The second half of the research notes how 'wit' tends to outlive its usefulness as a multivalent term in later writings when these seek to move away from the social commodification of an author's rhetoric. Examining Sidney's theological and political aims in The New Arcadia, Thomas Nashe's carnivalesque questioning of the idea of profit, and Francis Bacon's systematic interpretation of Nature, the research suggests that rhetoric and 'wit' maintain both their significance and their ambiguity into the seventeenth century. A meta-rhetorical signpost, 'wit' comes to reflect through its use and disuse both the issues at hand and the inherent self-reflexivity of any attempt to deal directly with rhetoric.

This thesis examines the practice of forensic medicine in Scotland in the period 1914 to 1939. This was a time of significant dynamism for the discipline, in which it enjoyed a high public profile and played an important role in the investigation of crime. The project focuses in particular on medico-legal practice at an elite level, based in specialist departments in the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. As well as producing a significant amount of research and textbook material, and thus constituting authorities within the discipline, representatives of these institutions gave expert evidence in a number of high-profile trials. Thus, an examination of their work can show how medico-legal knowledge was constructed, presented and challenged. To this end, four main areas of forensic medical practice are analysed, including the post-mortem examination, the laboratory analysis of trace evidence, the investigation of shootings and the use of photography. The development of the techniques contained within these categories is charted, as is the range of situations to which they were applied and the various ways in which their use was challenged in court by hostile legal counsel. Sources including textbooks and journal articles, medical case reports, photograph albums and trial transcripts are used. A fifth section explores an area of the public face of the discipline, specifically the popular output of two of its most famous practitioners, Sydney Smith and John Glaister Jr. Both produced memoirs and newspaper serials after retirement. These are used to explore the ways they reflected on their careers and spun their legacies, portraying themselves as impartial servants of science and justice. The thesis argues that the place of forensic medicine in wider institutional, investigative and geographical networks was central to its existence. The discipline collaborated extensively, both with representatives of other areas of the medical profession and with external authorities, professions and trades. Means of communication, such as written reports and samples taken at autopsy, allowed experts in the universities to lend their expertise to the non-specialists in peripheries by providing expert opinions based on materials sent to them. The scrutiny of post-mortem reports produced by peripheral generalists allowed medico-legists’ expertise to be spread over a wide geographical area. The thesis also reflects on the ways in which medico-legists guarded against error. Techniques derived from other areas of medicine and science were not adopted for use in court until their reliability could be demonstrated satisfactorily, and controls and standards were built in to procedures.

En érigeant un cadre théorique réunissant les concepts de fixation spatiale et d’état d’exception, la présente thèse vise à brosser un portrait des Zones franches d’exportation (ZF) à la lumière du cas salvadorien entre les années 1980 et 2000. L’objectif est de proposer des pistes de réflexion quant au caractère exceptionnel des ZF et leur insertion dans les cycles d’accumulation capitalistes. Sont ainsi abordés les discours légitimant la création des ZF et leur maintien, les moyens financiers, juridiques et logistiques déployés pour permettre leur construction, les relations de pouvoir exceptionnelles qui caractérisent les rapports intra et extra-ZF ainsi que les intérêts que les ZF servent. Cette thèse se veut donc une tentative de compréhension du processus général à l’oeuvre derrière les ZF, dans l’objectif de mieux cibler les possibilités de résistance. *** This thesis aims to analyse the emergence of export processing zones (EPZ) through a theoretical framework that combines the concepts of spatial fix and state of exception. Taking as an illustration the Salvadoran case in the 1980-2000 period, the objective is to suggest means for reflecting on the exceptional character of the EPZ and their insertion in cycles of capitalist accumulation. The thesis will also explore the discourses legitimizing the creation and the retention of EPZ, the logistical, juridical and financial means deployed to allow their construction, the exceptional power relations that characterize the intra and extra-EPZ relations and the interests served by EPZ. This thesis is thus an attempt to encompass the general process behind the EPZ, in order to identify the resistance possibilities.

It is widely accepted that description was used by eighteenth-century writers for the purposes of documentary or ornamentalization. That it was also used to manage the emotions of readers is less often discussed. “Dispassionate Descriptions” corrects this imbalance by attending to the ways in which descriptions in certain scientific and poetic works from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries were used to dampen the intense emotions that scenes of violence and death tend to inspire, be they sympathy, anger, or love. Writers ranging from William Harvey to James Thomson to John Gabriel Stedman, I argue, taught their readers how to remain dispassionate in the face of suffering and injustice by describing moving bodies and scenes in terms of their physical features alone. By presenting the blood spurting from the wounds of vivisected animals in relation to the regular beat of the heart, a drowning cat in terms of the movements of its head and paws, and the dance of enslaved persons in terms of its irregular beat, the writers I study demonstrated how the disorderly movements of pain or rebellion could be read as expressive of overarching classificatory schemes. Through cultivating dispassion for movements commonly thought to incite passionate responses, these writers worked to maintain the ethical and political status quo. By examining the emotional work descriptions of motion do, “Dispassionate Descriptions” traces an alternative history of how motion from the 1660s to the 1790s was understood outside of the predominant frameworks of mechanism and vitalism. While motion was regarded as inextricable from the literary and scientific discourses of this period, scenes of motion, as I demonstrate, were paradoxically also thought to facilitate emotional retreat. They were thus used by writers to advance a mode of ethics that prized non-interference and the disavowal of moral responsibility.

This paper focuses on the concept of right to the city and tries to link it to the topic of spatial planning in Prague. It introduces the view on the world of global neoliberalism, which comes from critical social geography and was elaborated especially by David Harvey, but originates from the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre. Through the optics of this approach the paper tries to grasp the complex problems of spatial planning on the example of Prague. Through a qualitative questioning of the representatives of CSO's, the paper attempts to show the relevance of the concept for public participation in decision making in urban development. The thesis presents a fundamental critical frame of theories, which evaluates the condition of society in the stage of late neoliberalism, and also the basic approaches to the city in social theory including the context of post-socialism. From these it continues to the analysis of urban space presenting a belief, which gives to the inhabitants of a city the right to make decisions about its shape instead of the capital. It puts emphasis on demarcation of the role of social movements and also the concept of place attachment, which becomes one of the key determinants for the involvement of inhabitants into the processes of urban development. The paper uses the...

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Thomas Hobbes est sans doute mieux connu comme philosophe politique que comme homme de science et ses longues querelles avec John Wallis en mathématiques et Robert Boyle en physique n’ont guère encouragé les historiens des sciences à prêter attention à son œuvre scientifique. Pourtant, Hobbes conçut la philosophie comme une science et se considérait comme le fondateur non seulement d’une science nouvelle : la philosophie civile, mais aussi de la science de l’optique - récemment renouvelée à la faveur de la découverte du télescope - et même des mathématiques. Mais à quoi Hobbes pense-t-il quand il parle de science ? Aux mathématiques qu’il admire tant ? A la philosophie naturelle de Galilée ? Ou à la médecine de Harvey ? En quel sens la philosophie civile est-elle une science et quel est le statut des mathématiques ? Telles sont les questions que nous abordons à partir d’une analyse du De Corpore et des dix premiers chapitres du De Homine traduits du latin. L’interprétation proposée ici consiste à réaffirmer l’unité du système des Éléments de la philosophie et à souligner la dimension matérialiste et réaliste de la science hobbesienne. Bien que Noel Malcolm ait définitivement établi que Hobbes n’est pas l’auteur du Short Tract on first principles, nous montrons que le tournant scientifique de Hobbes est profondément marqué par son intérêt pour l’optique qu’il renouvela sur la base d’une ontologie matérialiste et des principes du mécanisme hérités de Galilée. / Thomas Hobbes is perhaps best known as a political philosopher than as a scientist and his too long quarrels with John Wallis in mathematics and Robert Boyle in physics did little to encourage historians of science to pay attention to his scientific work. Yet Hobbes conceived of philosophy as a science and considered himself the founder not only of a new science: civil philosophy, but also the science of optics - recently renewed thanks to the discovery of the telescope - even mathematics. But what Hobbes has in mind when he talks about science? Mathematics he so admires? Galileo’s natural philosophy? Or Harvey’s medicine? In what sense civil philosophy is a science and what is the status of mathematics? These are the issues we discuss from an analysis of De Corpore and the first ten chapters of De Homine translated from Latin. The interpretation proposed here is to underline the unity of the system of the Elements of philosophy and emphasize the materialistic and realistic nature of Hobbesian science. Although Noel Malcolm has definitively established that Hobbes is not the author of Short Tract on First Principles, we show that Hobbes’s shift to science was deeply marked by his interest in the science of optics he renewed on the basis of a materialist ontology and principles inherited from Galilee mechanism.