Central American leadership in the 1980s Philadelphia Sanctuary Movement was cultivated through long experiences with social injustice, along with deeply political religious sensibilities rooted in Latin American labor organizing and the base Christian community movement. While it is sometimes assumed that they carried with them only an undifferentiated past of victimization and violence, Central American sanctuary activists and collaborators brought refined community organizing skills, which they intentionally employed to expand solidarity and sanctuary coalitions across Northern America. This dissertation explores some of the ways in which displaced Central American human rights workers moved within this international, interreligious context to further their liberationist goals. In a religious environment steeped in long histories of racialized missionary intervention and human exploitation, Guatemalans and Salvadorans asserted a different vision of sanctuary not only concerned with personal safety, but also with the opportunity to educate the U.S. public while they transformed the practice of sanctuary from the inside out. Harnessing the resources of their own cultural and religious histories and experiences, Central American human rights workers gained access to certain critical segments of the human, social, and political capital of the Philadelphia region to advance the cause of their own survival and flourishing. / Religion

In the 1940s, Alicia Alonso became the first Latin American dancer to achieve prominence in the field of ballet, until then dominated by Europeans. Promoted by Alonso, ballet took firm roots in Cuba, particularly after the Cuban Revolution (1959). This dissertation integrates historical research, postcolonial critique and discourse analysis to explore the performative and discursive strategies through which Alonso defined the identity of the Cuban ballet. The study examines the historical context of the development of ballet in Cuba, Alonso's rationale for the practice of this dance form on the Island, and the relationship between the Cuban ballet and the European ballet. Alonso insisted that the cultivation of ballet in her country was not an act of cultural colonialism. For her, the development of the Cuban ballet amounted to an exploration of a distinctive Cuban voice within this dance form, a reformulation of a European legacy from a postcolonial perspective. Her rationale for the practice of ballet in Cuba captured the tension between cosmopolitan and nationalist forces that defined the country's artistic production throughout the twentieth century. Alonso defended the legitimacy of the Cuban dancers' performances of European classics such as Giselle and Swan Lake. She cast Cuban dancers as both heirs of the European nineteenth-century classics, but also proponents of a distinctive national aesthetics defined by the accents that they brought to the performance of this repertory and that, in her opinion, were expressive of the Cuban culture. Alonso proposed that, among other elements, a special sense of musicality distinguished Cuban dancers: she recycled the image of Cubans as a musical people, a trope that commonly informs representations of Cubans and their culture. The phenomenon of Alonso and the Cuban ballet helped to redraw the international boundaries of this dance form, disassociating the notion of ownership of ballet's legacy from its geographic and cultural origins in Europe. In today's dance world, increasingly marked by the international flow of dance genres, the study of Alonso's promotion of ballet in Cuba sheds light on the practices and discourses through which dancers assimilate and take ownership of foreign traditions. / Dance

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The political economic pressures of development contribute to unsustainable environmental practices in developing countries, and marginalize civil society participation. This dissertation looks at the following countries where policymakers are faced with strong incentives to foster rapid economic growth. In Jamaica, the bauxite industry demands mining rights in sensitive mountainous ecosystems. In Mexico, the tourist industry demands access to construct in vulnerable coastal environments in the southeast. In inland Mexico, unregulated agriculture threatens ecosystems in the Yucatán Peninsula. Finally, tourist and energy industries in Egypt demand access for infrastructure in sensitive ecosystems in the Red Sea region. In all of the cases, the preferences of these sectors threaten to displace local communities, while creating unsustainable pressures on the environment. At the same time, the projected revenues from these sectors justify continued environmental exploitation. In response, transnational networks of environmental advocates and epistemic communities mobilized throughout the 1990s, lobbying the Global Environment Facility for conservationist projects in each country, and then lobbying governments to effectively implement the projects. This research finds that three conditions were necessary for transnational networks to influence policies associated with project implementation. First, networks must generate an internal scientific agreement on the dimensions of the environmental problem. By doing so, they can delegitimate competing arguments, strengthening their own claims. Second, networks must build social ties with policymakers in powerful agencies. Social ties increase the likelihood that policymakers will adopt the norms of the network. Third, networks must reframe the discourse on environmental management. At present, policymakers and industry argue that environmental management should be assessed by its contribution to economic development, validating only those policies that lead to sustained revenue generation. By reframing environmental management as an issue impacting the wellbeing of domestic populations, networks can argue for the greater participation of actors marginalized by the dominance of privileged productive sectors in resource management. Moreover, by linking sustainable resource use to the interests of domestic populations, networks can generate political capital to oppose the most unsustainable environmental practices. This research thus builds on the epistemic communities approach by highlighting the importance of democracy in knowledge-building and environmental governance.