abstract: The advent of advanced reproductive technologies has sparked a number of ethical concerns regarding the practices of reproductive tourism and commercial gestational surrogacy. In the past few decades, reproductive tourism has become a global industry in which individuals or couples travel, usually across borders, to gain access to reproductive services. This marketable field has expanded commercial gestational surrogacy--defined by a contractual relationship between an intending couple and gestational surrogate in which the surrogate has no genetic tie to fetus--to take on transnational complexities. India has experienced extreme growth due to a preferable combination of western educated doctors and extremely low medical costs. However, a slew of ethical issues have been brought to the forefront: the big ones manifesting as concern for reduction of a woman's worth to her reproductive capabilities along with concern for exploitation of third world women. This project will be based exclusively on literature review and serves primarily as a call for cultural competency and understanding the circumstances that gestational surrogates are faced with before implementing policy regulating commercial gestational surrogacy. The paper argues that issues of exploitation and commodification hinge on constructions of motherhood. It is critical to define and understand definitions of motherhood and how these definitions affect a woman's approach to reproduction within the cultural context of a gestational surrogate. This paper follows the case study of the Akanksha Infertility Clinic in northern India, a surrogacy clinic housing around 50 Indian surrogates. The findings of the project invokes the critical significance of narrative ethics, which help Indian surrogates construct the practice of surrogacy so that it fits into cultural comprehensions of Indian motherhood--in which motherhood is selfless, significant, and shared. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Biology 2011

Over the past two decades, transnational private standards such as “dolphin-safe,” “fair-trade,” and “sustainably produced timber,” have become ubiquitous. The regulatory landscape of many issue areas includes a mix of these private standards and government regulation. This is puzzling as firms adopting these standards voluntarily commit to exceeding government regulation, yet may not recoup the additional costs related to production changes and certification of their processes. To understand why firms adopt transnational private standards and how these standards affect government policies, this dissertation examines how the adoption of sustainable forestry standards changed the regulatory dynamics between firms and governments between 1997 and 2016. The dissertation consists of three analyses of the interaction between standards’ adoption and government regulation. The first study quantitatively evaluates forest sector policies in 38 countries, and demonstrates that whether industries use their adoption of transnational private standards to gain competitive advantages over foreign rivals, or alternatively, to avert further government regulation depends on market conditions and the willingness of consumers to pay a premium for certification. The second study investigates the extent to which to which governments in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom have included transnational private standards in regulation to provide producers in import-competing industries competitive benefits over foreign producers. It establishes that in most cases, governments calibrated forest sector policies to increase trade benefits in response to the trade orientation of sectors and their level of transnational private standards adoption. The third study examines lobbying across industries and finds that industries adopted lobbying strategies on different forest sector policies based on whether those policies would improve their competitiveness and the extent to which to which they believed they could influence government policy. In aggregate, these studies demonstrate that governments of more-developed countries incorporated transnational private standards into their forest sector policies to the extent that doing so would provide economic benefits to their industries, and that they did so due to corporate lobbying. / 10000-01-01

This thesis examines the relationship between practices of internationalism, patterns of racialisation, and the politics of anti-racism and anti-imperialism in the revolutionary Marxist left in Britain between 1899 and 1933. I focus on two organisations, the Social Democratic Federation and the Communist Party of Great Britain, examining how different racialised subaltern populations were represented in their publications and how this affected the anti-imperial advocacy and activism of these political groups. I am interested in how the writings of colonial nationalists, as well as the intervention of transnational activists, helped to shape this political praxis. The thesis begins with a study of how positive racialisations, developed by colonial activists as a discursive means to argue for the inapplicability of the ‘civilising mission’ to their respective societies, were drawn on by SDF activists and figureheads such as HM Hyndman to bolster their increasingly oppositional stance towards the British Empire. Further chapters demonstrate how groups of border-crossing racialised outsiders, be they Russian-born Jews in the SDF or Indian activists in the CPGB, utilised a strategic universalism to overcome their marginalisation within the ranks of the revolutionary Marxist left, and to gain support for their respective communal concerns. During the course of the time period covered within the thesis, the October Revolution, the rise of the Bolsheviks, and the foundation of the Comintern helped to reshape analyses of imperialism as well as practices and theories of internationalism on the British far-left. Particular attention is given to how activists either attempted to utilise or bypass this ‘official internationalism’ to promote their own international anti-imperial networks and discourse, and the efficacy of their efforts. It is my hope that this study will be able to shed light on international influences on the British Marxist left beyond the Continental, provide a greater nuance to histories of Marxism and race in Britain, and demonstrate the variety of models and practices of internationalism available to these activists in the early years of the twentieth century.

In 2011, Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) was thrust into the Western media spotlight through the murder of LGBTIQ activist, David Kato Kasule, and the now-infamous “Kill the Gays Bill.” During the last six years, SMUG and its members have continued to fight oppressive Ugandan governmental systems and conservative leaders that have been instigated by U.S. evangelical fundamentalists, most notably Scott Lively. And while SMUG and its members have fallen out of the Western media spotlight since 2012, SMUG continues its social justice activism with and for LGBTIQ Ugandans on the ground, while also building transnational coalitions with other LGBTIQ organizations both within and beyond the borders of Uganda. In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which SMUG utilizes its website (sexualminoritiesuganda.com) as a site for transnational and translocal coalition-building for the sake of social justice activism. To understand the ways in which SMUG is engaging in LGBTIQ activism with nuance, I build a conceptual framework for my analysis through five constructs of critical intercultural communication: critical cosmopolitanism, transnational activism, the global-local dialectic, power, and identity. Critical cosmopolitanism, as conceptualized in Communication Studies by Miriam Sobré-Denton and Nilanjana Bardhan (2013), “is a world- and Other-oriented practice of engaging in deliberate, dialogic, critical, non-coercive and ethical communication. Through the play of context-specific dialectics, cosmopolitan communication works with and through cultural differences and historical and emerging power inequalities to achieve ongoing understanding, intercultural growth, mutuality, collaboration and social and global justice goals through critical self-transformation” (p. 50, emphasis in original). Through this definition, I also work with critical cosmopolitanism as conceptualized by Walter Mignolo (2000, 2010, 2012) and Gerard Delanty (2006, 2009). For Mignolo (2000), critical cosmopolitanism “comprises projects located in the exteriority and issuing forth from the colonial difference” (p. 724) as “an argument for globalization from below” (p. 745) that works to dislodge West-centric modes of thinking. Delanty (2006) extends this definition, as critical cosmopolitanism “seeks to discern or make sense of social transformation by identifying new or emergent social realities” (p. 25). In this, critical cosmopolitanism is a project that asks us to consider the ways in which “diversality,” or “diversity as a universal project” (Mignolo, 2000, p. 743), can dislodge Western modernity, colonialism, imperialism, and globalization from above. To understand the ways in which SMUG is engaging in a critical cosmopolitan vision through its website, I examine for clues of transnational activism as a way of performing and engaging in critical cosmopolitanism through Bardhan (2011), Burgmann (2013), and Gledhill (2010). To complicate our understanding of transnational activism, I turn to the global-local dialectic, as conceptualized by Stuart Hall (1997). The global-local dialectic helps me to observe the ways in which SMUG is dislodging all-encompassing narratives that center globalization as a top-down-only mechanism that ceases all local particularities of culture from existing. Kraidy (1999, 2005) also helps me to investigate the ways in which the global and the local are always already present and in a dialectical tension in our postmodern and postcolonial world. To understand more about how these tensions function, I investigate the construct of power through sociologist Jonathan Hearn’s (2012), Theorizing Power. In it, he seeks to shift theorizing of power away from questions regarding what “we mean by power” to questions of “what do we have to bear in mind when studying power?” (p. 4). Through theorizing five oppositions associated with power—“(1) physical versus social power, (2) power ‘to’ versus power ‘over’, (3) asymmetrical versus balanced power, (4) power as structures versus agents, and (5) actual versus potential power” (p. 4)—Hearn helps me to complicate the ways in which power is observed and discussed in relation to SMUG, LGBTIQ Ugandans, Ugandan leadership, U.S. evangelism, and Western political involvement. Finally, I offer a conceptual framework for identity in critical intercultural communication research, including questions on how we theorize difference differently through John T. Warren’s (2008), “Performing Difference,” as well as offering a framework to understand cosmopolitan identity as constructed by Sobré-Denton and Bardhan (2013) and a framing for African queer sexualities through the works of Ugandan feminist scholars, Sylvia Tamale (2003) and Stella Nyanzi (2013). To address my research questions, I engaged in an ideological criticism (Foss, 2003, Hart & Daughton, 2005, Wander, 1983) of SMUG’s website to more fully understand the ideologies driving SMUG’s rhetorical choices. I chose to use ideological criticism as a methodological framework as it allowed me, the critic, to construct a critical framework with which to analyze a text. Ideological criticism also offered me the opportunity to bring critical rhetorical methods into conversation with critical intercultural communication constructs. Through this conceptual and methodological framework, I analyzed 110 screen shots of their website and all 54 articles included as content on their page over the course of 13 months. Through this process, I argue that SMUG is showing signs of a critical cosmopolitan vision in their website through their participation in peripheral partnerships and activism that speaks back to oppressive systems in ways that highlight globalization-from-below, as conceptualized by Walter Mignolo (2000, 2010, 2012). I also trouble the ways in which SMUG represents LGBTIQ Ugandans on the ground as I call for more intersectional representation that speaks more broadly to LGBTIQ Ugandan experiences in the everyday than SMUG is currently offering visitors. This dissertation research also highlights the difficulties of reading critical cosmopolitanism in one online mediated space, and that centering people and the relationships among people is critical when engaging in critical cosmopolitan research. I end this project with a call to critical intercultural communication scholars to offer more nuance around the representations of LGBTIQ people around the world that takes us beyond sensationalized subjects while also not erasing the devastating impacts of LGBTIQ hatred locally and globally.

This study identifies the success and failure factors of foreign direct investment in transnational education. With western tertiary education markets becoming more saturated, it becomes essential for higher education institutions (HEI) to pursue new and lucrative opportunities internationally. One approach to internationalisation is the establishment of international branch campuses (IBC). This method provides the highest level of control but incurs the most risk, and failure can result in irrecoverable damage to reputation and substantial loss of resources. A review of the literature shows that numerous facets should be considered when establishing an IBC, but there are limited studies that holistically address what makes them successful or how success can be measured. Three research questions were devised to address the gaps in the extant literature. A three-stage exploratory mixed methodology is implemented consisting of expert surveys, case studies and a quantitative survey. The results show five factors that contribute to the success of an IBC. Additionally, eight classifications of success measures and a framework for establishing an IBC were identified. A key finding is the importance of the HEI factor; the remaining factors should be considered once it has been established that the HEI is able to open and operate an IBC efficiently. Furthermore, this study is one of few that presents a holistic view of how to operate an IBC successfully. The results of this thesis present HEI managers with the key considerations when developing an IBC and academicians with scope to further understand what makes IBCs successful.

This study explored the motivations, desired outcomes, and strategies used when developing and implementing international joint/dual degree programs in the US. Twenty-three administrators involved with the development international joint/dual degree programs, primarily at public doctoral-granting institutions of higher education in the US, were interviewed to learn more about current practices. Findings indicated that the primary motivations for developing international joint/dual degree programs include: recruitment, extending an existing partnership, and that it was part of an institutional strategic plan. The desired outcomes include: growth in both student participation and number of programs. To achieve these desired outcomes seven strategies being utilized by the institutions represented in this study are presented. The lack of formal assessment of programs and student experiences was a chronic challenge relayed by participants. By integrating these findings, this study introduces the notion of transnational partnerships as part of a network that enhances the ability for individual institutions to share resources and expertise in order to pursue new opportunities globally. In this way the tension between the traditional educational mission of the institutions and new entrepreneurial interests can be balanced.

This dissertation analyzes the political and expert discourses behind the legalization of abortion from the first attempt to decriminalize it in 1920 when democratic Czechoslovakia was established to 1986 when the institution of abortion commissions was banned during socialism. Drawing on biopolitical theories and critical feminist and disability studies that problematize the liberal understanding of rights, choice and autonomy, I shed a new light on reproduction policies by drawing parallels between the socialist and democratic regimes. Instead of assuming the mutual exclusiveness of the two systems, my inquiry starts from a different position and destabilizes the boundaries between East and West, active and passive, liberal and totalitarian. My main research question explores what sustains the continuity of the 1986 law, which allowed abortion on demand, in the new post-1989 capitalist and allegedly more democratic system. The aim is not to answer why the law was enacted, but rather what it unleashes in terms of citizenship practices. Through a geneaological intersectional lens, I go back in Czechoslovak history and follow the simultaneous paths of women’s liberation from a patriarchal order of things and their subjection to the ableist desire to achieve a nation full of strong and capable citizens. I deconstruct how the ideal female citizen-subject – the white, bourgeois, healthy, well-off modern woman of reason who individually plans her reproduction and has children only when and if she can – was constructed throughout the different historical discourses; and with what effects for the “other” categories of women – the poor, young, old, sick, the disabled, ethnically different. I argue that from their onset abortion rights were conceptualized as a regulatory strategy of power aimed at maintaining a certain population optimum by redefining women’s responsibilities as mothers who were to deliver a healthy child into a healthy environment. I am thus concerned with a certain type of biopolitical rationality, which defied tradition and religion and started to fear the degeneration of a collective more than its depopulation. Hence not every pregnancy was desirable, especially when seen as a threat to women’s or children’s health. I identify three stages of this epistemological shift when women’s health and sexuality collided into law and children’s health: its building efforts after WWI, developing spasms after WWII and functioning as a normalized structure of recognition from the 1960s onward. I demonstrate how eugenics trespassed into population politics and together with planned parenthood created a complex system of socio-biological classes of (un)desirability, determining who should belong to the nation, who should reproduce, whose life is worth living, loving and thus worth of protection. By elaborating on what I have termed female biological citizenship – that women function as civilizational identifiers and (self-)regulators of the quality and health of the nation, I suggest they are never free in regard to reproduction regardless of the political system. I conclude that this focus on the biological erases the distinction between socialism and capitalism, integrating women’s will as a governing tool to achieve societal progress.

This dissertation interrogates how diverse actors ascribe semantic, affective, and political meanings to instrumental music under changing historical circumstances and in different performance contexts. In what I call an “ethnographic reception study,” I employ historical and ethnographic methods to assess the ways in which the popular samulnori percussion genre from South Korea has been imbued with associations as divergent as a sonic symbol of Korea to narratives of resistance against the state. Through five chapters, I track some of the contested and multiple meanings as they interact, both in historical moments in South Korea and vis-à-vis transnational circulations that led to the genre’s transmission outside Korea. As a genre of percussion music that was first created in South Korea in 1978, samulnori has had a complex reception during three dramatic decades in modern Korean history—leading to life-changing encounters from its fans while also eliciting scorn from its detractors. As a dynamic musical genre that is now notated and largely nonverbal, samulnori has served as a user-friendly sonic canvas upon which identities and affinities have been easily grafted by non-Korean fans, leading to the development of amateur samulnori ensembles and musical communities around the world. By considering the ways in which the samulnori genre has been evaluated, interpreted, and practiced by different actors, I show how the genre’s complex reception exhibits a relational and imbricated set of meanings over time. Last, by considering the cultural politics of samulnori from diachronic and synchronic perspectives, I offer a working methodology for contemporary studies of music reception. / Music

This study consists of a qualitative analysis on the subject of human trafficking in Canada. It is intended to explore the steps that have been taken to address the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementary Legislation to the Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (2000c), also known as the Palermo Protocol, and examine Canada’s commitment to changing the international and domestic context in which human trafficking takes place. Through exploration of Canadian legislation, literature and prosecutions presented in Canadian courts between January 2005 and December 2011, this research aims to establish whether Canada has shown a commitment to ending and preventing the problem of human trafficking that is consistent with the Recommended Guidelines published by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights (2002). A nominal coding scheme was used to show in basic terms the level of commitment Canada is showing toward combating the issue of human trafficking, both internationally and domestically. Results indicate that while Canada has met minimum standards by implementing anti-trafficking legislation in 2005 which is consistent with the Palermo Protocol, the country is falling short of commitments to combat human trafficking due to inadequate victim protection measures, lack of standardized data collection procedures and insufficient efforts to combat and prevent the root causes of trafficking.

Dynamic networking is a key factor for successful transnational organizations. The transcultural shift is a critical process that can enable cultural hybridization so as to inspire consensual identity and learning aptitude amongst worldwide members. The Global Learning Organization (GLO) model is re-conceptualized to bring about this cultural shift. E-learning seems an appropriate tool to generate effective transcultural communication for both culture and learning perspectives under the GLO model. A qualitative case study using document analysis and interviews is conducted to understand how transcultural communication is generated via e-learning under the GLO model in two fields. Findings reveal that firstly, trust is a core element in generating transcultural communication and the combination of face to face and e-learning can enable trust to be activated and developed. Secondly, the way to build trust varies depending on task characteristics: the detail-oriented tasks require more intense face to face communication than the concept-focused tasks. This study illustrates that design of various mixed learning pattern with strategies to build trust through the affective dimension will be key for the successful GLO.