<p> This study examined the lived college-to-career experiences of 23 Black and Hispanic first-generation bachelor&rsquo;s degree recipients who completed an 18-month career preparation program conducted by Management Leadership for Tomorrow, a non-profit organization dedicated to the career preparation and professional advancement of high-performing emerging leaders from underrepresented, diverse communities, including undergraduate students transitioning from college to career. </p><p> With record high costs of higher education, increased demand for bachelor&rsquo;s degree credentials in the labor force, and disproportionately higher rates of unemployment for Black and Hispanic first-generation college graduates, understanding the forces that influence the college-to-career transition of Black and Hispanic first-generation bachelor&rsquo;s degree recipients is critical. Using a qualitative research approach, the data gathered from semi-structured interviews were analyzed through the prisms of human capital theory and social cognitive career theory, a career-related construct for examining the personal, behavioral, and environmental forces influencing individual career choices, expectations, decisions, and outcomes. </p><p> The findings point to five forces influencing the college-to-career experiences of the 23 Black and Hispanic FGC graduates in this study: family, persistence, preparation, networking, and race.</p><p>

<p> This thesis analyzes the political genesis of Brazil&rsquo;s recent reform of its upper-secondary education system, the Novo Ensino M&eacute;dio Reform. This latest reform has been highly controversial and linked by many to the government of President Michel Temer. However, this argues that the reform is much larger than the Temer administration that produced it. This reform, that creates a seven-hour school day and allows upper-secondary students to choose an area of specialization, is a continuation of a history of incremental reform that has taken place against the backdrop of shifting educational priorities. This reform coincided with a shift towards a human capital centric ideology that is heavily influenced by international organizations, such as the World Bank. Furthermore, the reform is also largely the result of a bipartisan commission whose work preceded the Temer administration. The impeachment of Dilma Rousseff brought President Temer to power and allowed for the construction of a new majority. The new administration in turn adopted the already existing proposal for reform of upper-secondary education and modified it to fit their agenda of market friendliness and public burden reduction. The new majority was largely supportive of the reform but the reform also found support amongst the opposition who saw the reform as the logical next step in Brazil&rsquo;s long march towards universalization of upper-secondary education.</p><p>

<p> This qualitative testimonio study centered the voices of two Chicana graduate students and two doctoral students of an Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Program to examine how they interpret the positioning of their intersectionality as well as how these interpretations influenced their college trajectories and conceptualization of educational leadership. Chicana Feminist Epistemology grounded the investigation to claim research as a site of equality where collaborators participated fully in data collection and data analysis. Methods of pl&aacute;tica and reflexi&oacute;n were employed to engage collaborators in a critical reflection of their lived experiences relevant to their intersectionality with the aim of translating these reflections into individual testimonios. Specifically, a Mestiza Methodology Framework was introduced as a model in which collaborators integrated data collection and data analysis to yield a synthesis, analysis, and interpretation of their testimonios presented in the format of a collective testimonio. </p><p> Findings demonstrated by interrogating the imposition of dualities that split the intersections of their identity, collaborators located Nepantla, the space between these dualities to excavate knowledge from El Cenote, the intersection of dualities. From El Cenote findings revealed the family as an intersection of identity with the largest influence on initial educational trajectories defined at the undergraduate level. In addition, overall educational experiences fragmented Chicana intersectionality operating to threaten their academic survival. Lastly, the search for the healing and reconciliation of a fragmented identity reset educational trajectories towards advanced degrees in Educational Leadership framed by a praxis of social justice.</p><p>

<p> Afro-Brazilian guitarist-composer Baden Powell de Aquino (1937-2000), one of Brazil's earliest and most successful international musicians, is renowned for his inexplicable rhythmic style. This is especially true in the context of instrumental samba, or samba-jazz, which emerged in the late-night music clubs of 1950s-60s Rio de Janeiro. Samba-jazz engages a set of normative expectations: (1) a theme-and-variations performance involving a (2) cyclic scheme of regular and even chord changes comprising (3) a form of often 16 or 32 bars traditionally conceived of as being in duple meter (e.g. 2/4), where (4) improvised variations track the chord changes of the form. Against this recursively even, duple-meter background, Baden's chord-melodic improvisations frequently foreground dotted or asymmetrical rhythms that, in their interaction with the duple frame, suggest uneven periodicities. This study argues that such uneven regularities can, under certain conditions, be defined as metric and as such can be treated as participating in generalized hemiolas of the background form's meter. This two-fold expansion of meter and hemiola leads to the discovery of a much larger and more variegated abstract space constituted by the even and uneven metric possibilities for a given span of musical time. </p><p> This dissertation consists in two complementary projects. The theoretical project expands current theories of meter, hemiola, and metric space, as most recently defined by Richard Cohn (2018), to incorporate Justin London's (2012) theory of non-isochronous meters. The analytical project explores the richness of Baden's rhythmic art&ndash;it's metric implications and relationship to tropes of samba-jazz. </p><p> Through an exploratory analysis of "&Eacute; de lei," Chapter 1 shows why we should and how we can expand current meter theory, while introducing the reader to Baden Powell and his musical context of Brazilian samba and samba-jazz. Chapter 2 is a formal exposition of the expanded theory of meter, hemiola, and metric space. Using the language and representations of mathematical set and graph theories, it builds analogous (to Cohn 2001) analytical models of hemiola and metric space from the ground up upon an expanded and revised definition of meter that allows for both isochrony and well-formed non-isochrony. Through a series of shorter examples, including passages from "Tristeza," "A lenda do Abaet&eacute;," and "Canto de Xang&ocirc;," Chapter 3 defines, contextualizes, and analyzes four of the most prevalent rhythmic tropes of samba-jazz, while building some basic familiarity with the method of the analytical model. Chapter 4 considers larger examples organized around the idea of harmonic quantization, including extended improvisations from "Samba triste," "Conversa de poeta," and "O barquinho." It seeks to understand the metric implications of how Baden in theme-and-variations form can simultaneously support the 2/4 bar-to-bar chord changes required by the harmonic form of the theme while soloing with long extensions of dotted chord-melodies. Chapters 3 and 4 gradually increase the tempo and scope of analysis&ndash;from a few bars to entire form variations. Chapter 5 analyzes an entire recording, the afro-samba "Candombl&eacute;," principally asking how metric change and hemiola influence our perception of musical form, especially in the absence of more traditional form-defining parameters.</p><p>

This project engages with what various academics in the past twenty years have identified as a “discourse of invisibilization” that effectively erased indigenous presence from the Argentine national discourse. Following the Conquest of the Desert, a military campaign carried out between 1878 and 1879 that sought to eliminate indigenous presence in the Pampas and Patagonia, the common belief was that indigenous peoples no longer resided in Argentina. In reality thousands remained but indigenous identity and presence was effectively erased from the national discourse until the constitutional reform of 1994 which legally recognized indigenous pre-existence and articulated specific rights for the protection of indigenous communities for the first time in the country's history. This study engages with the manifestation of this discourse of invisibilization in Argentine literature, looking first at the representation of the indigenous figure by early political writers such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Juan Bautista Alberdi and Jose Hernandez as the barbaric savage, incompatible with modern civilization and Argentine values. Following the Campaign of Desert, the belief that indigenous peoples had been wiped out was reflected and informed in Argentine literature where the indigenous figure remained most commonly represented as an element of the past, remembered as the savage that attacked early Argentine settlements or as the last of an extinct culture that faded away with the advance of modern civilization. The recent work of Maria del Carmen Nicolás Alba argues that this invisibilization extends into literary criticism, where the participation of Argentine writers during the literary current of indigenismo has been ignored, silencing the few who denounced the treatment of indigenous people in Argentine society. In response to these tendencies, this project brings together an anthology of short stories by Argentine writers that challenged the dominant discourse. The story “Si haces mal no esperes bien” by Juana Manuela Gorriti is included to highlight her role in the development of indigenismo, as demonstrated in Alba’s work. The stories "El malón" by Manuel Ugarte and “La historia del guerrero y de la cautiva" by Jorge Luis Borges offer alternative representations of the indigenous literary figure in the historical narrative. The focus of others, however, such as "La sonrisa de Puca-Puca" y "Don Carlos y Chayle" by Fausto Burgos and "Allá en el Sur" by Pedro Inchauspe reveal and denounce the unjust social norms faced by indigenous people in the time in which they were written. The story “Una bofetada” by Horacio Quiroga employs the abused indigenous worker as the source of suspense that builds up to the horrific ending typical of his work, but the story also serves to highlight the social reality on which it was based. The last story in this anthology, “Caramelos para los mocovíes” by Fernando Rosemberg addresses the discourse of invisibilization and how it perpetuates the social and economic inequality of indigenous communities. The reading of Argentine voices from the late 19th century to the present day that have defied the oversimplified indigenous narrative provides a space for the revisibilization as well as the rehumanization of a segment of the population that has been silenced and ignored in Argentine society for more than a century.

<p> This study investigated the patterns of collaboration and communication related to maternal educational attainment and familiarity with Learning by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI) among Indigenous children whose mothers had 9 years or less of schooling, Indigenous children whose mothers had 12 years or more of schooling, and middle-class Mexican children. Study participants were 256 children who participated in groups of four. The children played a computer game called &ldquo;Marble Blast&rdquo; on two computers and were videotaped to see how they collaborated and communicated within their groups. Indigenous children whose mothers had 9 years or less of schooling were more likely to engage in collaborative behaviors in which the entire group worked as a unit to accomplish the objective of the game as opposed to the other groups. They were also more likely to engage in varied forms of communication as opposed to middle-class Mexican children who were more likely to both collaborate and communicate exclusively verbally. These findings are consistent with research showing that greater familiarity with Indigenous practices leads to more collaboration and varied forms of communication as opposed to more reliance on verbal communication which is seen in communities less familiar with Indigenous practices or non-Indigenous communities with an extensive history in Western schooling.</p><p>

<p> Leadership is a common and often generalized phenomenon. Traditionally, leadership denotes an individual, yet leadership is rarely the work of one. This study looked outside of Western ideologies to further examine leadership. The Zapatistas are a people in charge of autonomous territories in Chiapas, Mexico. This study focused on identifying how rotation in leadership among other Zapatista principles and practices can be implemented into secondary schools for more efficient and sustainable leadership. Through a constructivist grounded theory approach, the researcher interviewed two sets of participants Zapatista delegation and <i>encuentro</i> participants along with administrators to develop a Rotating Leadership Model for American high schools.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation studies how the melodramatic mode shapes the approach to political violence in six novels: <i>Libro de Manuel,</i> by Julio Cort&aacute;zar, <i>El beso de la mujer ara&ntilde;a,</i> by Manuel Puig; <i>Historia de Mayta,</i> by Mario Vargas Llosa; <i> Estrella distante,</i> by Roberto Bola&ntilde;o; La hora azul, by Alonso Cueto; and <i>La vida doble, </i>by Arturo Fontaine. Beyond the realm of sentimental formulaic melodrama, I define this term as the interpretation of events after subjective emotions. By studying these novels, I propose that the melodramatic imagination has become the most employed set of tropes for the interpretation of public and private interactions in contemporary fiction. My analysis exposes how literary writing addresses commercial, political, and artistic aspirations through a combined use of strategies such as moral polarization, pathos, emotional interpretation, scenic emplotment, and sensationalism. </p><p> Chapter One analyses the connections between political violence and melodrama in Latin American literatures and cultures. Chapter Two is a study of Cort&aacute;zar&rsquo;s <i> Libro de Manuel,</i> a novel which fictionalizes what I call melodrama of the revolutionary, an emotional, uncritical identification with leftist urban subcultures. Chapter Three studies Puig&rsquo;s <i>El beso de la mujer ara&ntilde;a</i> to illustrate the existence of reactionary practices in progressivist and queer sectors, limiting their capacity to generate political change. Chapter Four is an analysis of Vargas Llosa&rsquo;s Historia de Mayta, a dystopian diatribe against leftist politicians in which a melodramatic understanding of experience appears in both dominant and marginal sectors. Chapter Five studies Bola&ntilde;o&rsquo;s <i>Estrella distante,</i> a novel in which the search for a neo-avantgardist artist obsessed with the use of corpses as material allows the dramatization of melodrama in artistic sectors, leading to the normalization of totalitarianism. Chapter Six is a reading of Cueto&rsquo;s <i>La hora azul,</i> a novel in which national reconciliation becomes a middle-high class subjective conflict, interpreting historical experience in terms originated in audiovisual melodrama. Chapter Seven analyzes Fontaine&rsquo;s <i>La vida doble,</i> in which the voice of a former revolutionary and intelligence agent reinforces the idea that leftist convictions are futile, normalizing emotions that normalize material and symbolic inequity. Finally, the last section summarizes this work&rsquo;s contributions.</p><p>

<p> This research project focuses on estimating the effect of economic, demographic, and social factors in residential energy demand in Mexico from 2008 to 2014. Therefore, it estimates demand equations for electricity, natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), coal and natural gas using Mexican household data from 2008 to 2014. It also applies accessibility theory and it estimates energy access indicators using different specifications of demand for LPG in 2014. Sprawl measures, gravity model, and central place theory are the accessibility theory supporting the energy access indicators. Results suggest the greater the household income, the population size, the educational level of the householder, the energy access, and the lower the energy price and the household size, the greater the demand for energy in Mexico from 2008 to 2014. The greater the education, the lower the demand for firewood and coal. LPG and firewood have a monopolistically competitive market structure. Energy access indicators informed by accessibility theory are statistically significant and show the expected sign when applied to LPG in Mexican household in 2014.</p><p>

<p> Latinos represent one of the fastest growing populations in the United States, with distinct health behaviors and health outcomes compared to their non-Latino counterparts. This group also experiences more noted deteriorations in health as the time spent in the U.S. increases. In addition, Latino adults are diagnosed with chronic medical conditions such as diabetes at higher rates than any other ethnic group. Simultaneously, more Latino patients report symptoms of depression, however, they are less likely to receive any form of treatment despite studies indicating that pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy are effective in impacting the improvement of psychosocial outcomes and depressive symptoms. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of acculturation in the low rates of utilization of mental health services in Latinos with type 2 diabetes and depressive symptoms at federally qualified health centers in Southern California. Specific aims addressed in this investigation included determining whether acculturation level was associated with individual reports of depressive symptoms after controlling for potential confounding variables and assessing whether levels of acculturation were correlated with low rates of utilization of mental health services in Latinos with clinically meaningful levels of depressive symptoms. </p><p> This was a cross-sectional study using data from the Reducing Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Diabetes: The Coached Care (R2D2C2) Project. Participants were 749 individuals recruited from diverse outpatient clinics affiliated with an academic center in Southern California. Participants were Latino, mostly Mexican-American, adults with type 2 diabetes. A logistic regression analysis was used to examine the association between acculturation levels and reports of depressive symptomatology and mental health service utilization. Results demonstrated that, after controlling for socioeconomic status, individuals with lower acculturation were less likely to report depressive symptoms and, among those with depression, were less likely to report have seen a mental health provider. There was also no association, however, between acculturation and the documentation of diagnosis of depression/anxiety or the prescription of medications to treat those conditions. The effects of acculturation on reports of depressive symptoms and mental health utilization cannot be explained by socioeconomic factors alone. Therefore, the underlying causes for the lower level of depressive symptoms reported by less acculturated individuals with diabetes, and the discrepancy between provider recognition of depression and patient-reported mental health service utilization in these patients, warrants further investigation.</p><p>