“On Globalization and Civil Society: Mediating Spatial Practice in Twenty-first-century Latin America” explores the tensions between globalization and civil society from a multi-geographical and multidisciplinary angle. The dissertation is informed by theories of space, power, identity, citizenship, and postmodernity, as well as mediatic and socio-political analyses of conditions that have consistently challenged democracy and the formation of a just civil society specifically in the Colombian and Mexican contexts but throughout Latin America as well.
I argue that national institutions fundamental to the formation of knowledge and the construction of identity--namely national citizenship, geopolitical and symbolic borders, and the national media--impose undue limits and power on globally affected individuals. After acknowledging and analyzing the dehumanizing way in which these national institutions limit individual freedoms and participation within local and global public spheres, I take a more hopeful stance as I explore humanizing instances that transcend victimization through the imagination and creation of alternative social orders that destabilize traditional apparatuses of authority through agency-enhancing initiatives.
Through close readings of contemporary Colombian and Mexican narrative by Héctor Abad Faciolince, Jorge Franco, Heriberto Yépez, and Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, and a case study of Un Pasquín, Vladimir Flórez’s independent alternative Bogotá media project, I call for a new understanding of the possibilities of the twenty-first-century public sphere in Latin America. I contend that by subverting dominant paradigms of power, these alternative spheres provide a new model from which to think and advance a just global order. In short, I argue that, despite globalization’s mostly deleterious consequences for the world’s most at risk local populations, the formation of a more humanizing spatial and mediatic practice that fosters alternative public spheres responsive to the human need for individual agency and subjectivity, though seemingly unattainable, is in fact possible.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/29677 |
| Date | 29 August 2011 |
| Creators | Cascante, Helena Isabel |
| Contributors | Davidson, Robert A. |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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