Grounded in subaltern studies, a body of work that analyzes the viewpoints of those who are outside of the social, political and geographic power structure, this paper strives to illuminate the Nueva Canción, or “New Song” movement. Emerging in Latin America during the 1960s, Nueva Cancion celebrated the lives of indigenous and laboring class communities, but was largely made up of figures from positions of racial and economic privilege within the larger system. Investigating the seemingly contradictory politics of representation present, this paper discusses how the movement sought to champion disenfranchised figures, while simultaneously casting such figures as incapable of representing themselves; thus rendering them voiceless. At the center of my inquiry is Mercedes Sosa, a prominent Nueva Cancion figure of local and international recognition, who, as a woman of mixed European and indigenous ancestry, attempted to traverse the gap between the movement and its sentimentalized subject matter. By using Sosa as a focal point, this paper aims to illustrate the complex dynamics of the social and political climate in Latin America from 1960-1982, that enabled Sosa to function neither as producer or subject, but as what can be referred to as a “knowledge mover,” circulating the dominant ideology at the same time as effectively challenging it.

For the Mixtecos from Oaxaca, Mexico, their native language has functioned as an indicator of “inferiority” and “backwardness” due to prevalent stigmatization and stereotypes associated with indigeneity throughout Latin America. Now as the fastest growing indigenous population in the U.S., Mixtecos are challenged with the recent proliferation of the Mixteco/Spanish/English language divide that has emerged within Mexican-American communities throughout the U.S. west coast. In the face of the more dominant Spanish and English languages, the Mixteco language has seemingly been relegated to a “useless” language in the eyes of some Mixtecos. However, this view is not shared by all, and therefore the question arises as to how discourse regarding language is shaped for the transborder Mixteco communities in the United States. By using language as an indicator of the dynamics of power and cultural celebration within Mixteco satellite communities in the U.S., I address the paradox regarding the simultaneous decrease of Mixteco speakers and the increase of discourse via subaltern public spheres promoting the revitalization of the Mixteco language. By employing a comparative discourse analysis of the dialogue within their grassroots organizations and personal narratives, I examine the agency of the Mixtecos in forming their own suitable discourse to tackle the issues they face as transnational migrants. I suggest that via their grassroots organizations, the Mixtecos are creating a new hybrid language by incorporating Mixteco with other forms of discourse in order to advocate their indigenous consciousness and cultural celebration against constant discrimination and stigmatization of their language, culture, and voice. By addressing the agency of the Mixtecos, this research will contribute to the study of indigenous migration and social movements from Latin America.

This research analyzes interviews and census data to explore the varying ethical perceptions of water use in Oman. For many populations living in the hyper-arid Arabian Peninsula, cultural and religious values have always required that people strictly limit their water use. Today after one generation of intense urbanization, Omanis still maintain these values of conservation, however they have also come to glorify water-intensive, urban lifestyles. Given this apparent contradiction, why has “development” been able to frame urban water use so positively, while contradictory perceptions of ethical water use remain intact? I argue that people do not change their water usage based on actual scarcity or ability to consume, but rather based on the symbolism that their surrounding community attaches to their resource use. In urban and rural Oman competing symbols have been introduced that support two very different water ethics. To reduce cognitive dissonance, Omanis compartmentalize each ethic in relation to different community settings and go through a process of switching their ethical codes when traveling between the countryside and urban centers. For much of the Middle East and other regions around the world, water scarcity is increasing dramatically, while urbanization and population expansion has produced increasing demand. Understanding how peoples’ perceptions of water are formed will be essential for policymakers as many regions of the world are beginning to face extreme water shortages and related socio-economic crises.

Whether colonizers encouraged the growth of religion or attempted to stamp it out, they played a pivotal role in formation of religious movements within regions under their control. During the Russian colonial rule of Central Asia, a group of intellectuals began a modernist Islamist movement called Jadidism. This movement formed in response to the founders’ belief that Central Asian society was backward and primitive, as well as, in opposition of Russian colonial rule. Though Central Asia did not have a printing press prior to the Russian colonization, the printing press arrived with the Russians and enabled the Jadids to spread their ideas. Yet the low literacy rates within Central Asia caused the Jadids to push for educational reform. My research focuses on the influence of Russian and then Soviet rule on the Jadidist movement. Furthermore, it discusses the Jadids’ influence on education at the beginning of the twentieth century until today. I conducted my research by reading and analyzing texts on the issue and piecing together the information within a field which has been largely ignored by academia. My project attempts to draw attention to the gaps in the knowledge surrounding the Jadidist movement and its significance for the current education systems in Central Asia.

NSFW (“Not Safe For Work”) is an acronym used to indicate that a website, a picture, or a link contains inappropriate (usually pornographic) content. One could say that all of 4chan.org is NSFW. 4chan is an imageboard where communication takes place in the form of pictures and images posted by anonymous users and deleted minutes after they appear online. This anonymity and ephemerality of communication unleashes levels of racism, sexism, homophobia, and general malevolence unseen in Social Web communities like Facebook. However, 4chan operates with virtually no advertisement (or profit-motive) while Facebook is now a publicly traded corporation, with a mandate to generate revenue for its stockholders by monetizing its assets, which happen to be the words, pictures, jokes, and plans of its more than 1 billion users. Discourses surrounding the Social Web speak in terms of “openness,” “connectivity,” and “transparency,” promising a more civil online community. However, these trends make personal data and communication susceptible to appropriation by capital. How has 4chan remained a largely non-commodified space in the midst of the corporate colonization of the Social Web, and what do we make of its sociopathic ethos? I studied the community and signifying practices of 4chan's random board /b/, finding that although the fundamental anonymity and ephemerality of communication on the board free up participants to be racist, sexist, homophobic, and generally malevolent to degrees unseen in the Social web, these same conditions create a space for truly free speech (in both the monetary and behavioral sense), creating a novel mode of signification and a space for subversive political consciousness in the process.

Rio de Janeiro is infamous for violence. In the city’s large, informal shantytowns known as favelas, violent drug gangs rule with impunity while a corrupt and murderous police force contributes to distrust of formal government. With Rio scheduled to host the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016, pressure to tame the favelas and reduce violent crime is high. Facing the need to try something new, in 2008 Rio’s leadership introduced an innovative, community-oriented policing program known as UPP in an attempt to “pacify” the favelas. The program represents a paradigm shift in policing methods, focused on breaking down the adversarial relationships between favela residents and police and encouraging community involvement and integration. It has shown impressive progress: in favelas that have received UPPs, murder rates have fallen to nearly zero. However, much remains to be done--the UPPs are an expensive fraction of the police force, and skeptics worry that if the UPP’s leave, all progress will be lost. The challenge, then, and the focus of this Task Force, is to ensure that the favelas are integrated and supported in a way that preserves the progress that has been made and fosters permanent change. Each of the 11 chapters within this Task Force presents policy recommendations prepared for the Public Security Secretary of Rio de Janeiro José Beltrame, and as such, are tailored to his position and responsibilities. Subjects include reforms within the police force, such as improvements in police training, organization, and working conditions, as well as policies intended to promote integration of the favelas into the formal city, including methods to improve education and access to healthcare, implementing programs to target at-risk youth, and providing economic opportunities for favela residents.

The Arctic is receving global attention as climate change transforms the region. With increased interest in natural resources and sovereignty issues, the security discourse in the Arctic is also changing. This Taskforce report seeks to understand Arctic security as the capacity for communities and states to build sustainable and resilient systems and to assert a representative voice, in arenas of diplomacy and negotiating power. The Taskforce group spent one week in Quebec City and Ottawa, Canada gathering research with scholars, government officials, and Inuit leaders. This report combines relevant literature with these engagements to understand the evolution of Arctic security. Aspects of security discussed include: the Northwest Passage, devolution of resources, Quebec’s Arctic policy, tourism, food security, biodiversity, homelessness, education, the Arctic Council, and China’s role in the Arctic. Each chapter provides specific policy options that together form a model for building capacity for communities.

Evaluation of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict by analysis through a historical framework, centered on the events and ideologies of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa in the early 1990’s, provides a template for enhancing human rights efforts in the present-day Middle Eastern crisis. Comparison of this conflict against a successful internal political shift to promote peace presents the foundation for research in which the synergistic combination of knowledge gained through human rights coursework applies to a current humanitarian dilemma. The cooperative relationship between theories of international studies, historical analysis, and political structural components will help contribute to the ongoing dialogue about the paradigm shift in Israeli-Palestinian relations that is so urgently needed. Methodology for this research relies heavily on the historical framework of the grassroots movement to overthrow the apartheid system in South Africa. Theories of international and national conflicts from coursework in the Jackson School of International Studies, as well as firsthand accounts of the state of affairs in the Middle East gathered through field research in sociology, contextualize the problem within a larger historical and analytical picture. The implications of this research therefore centers on human rights promotion and enhancement with regards to a modern-day conflict. This critical investigation allows for active understanding rather than passive scholarly observance of a deadly and drawn-out battle for land, identity, freedom, and dignity.

Once subjected to an extractive history of British colonial and Indian national imperatives and ignored by development institutions, the mountainous region of Kumaon, Uttarakhand now thrives in its current development trends. Given that developers and donors disregarded the region while much of the rest of India prospered, it seems incongruous that the region should now be succeeding in its own development. This project asks why the isolated and “underdeveloped” region of Kumaon that was “left behind” by mainstream development and has only recently emerged is now able to succeed in its own grassroots development. My thesis posits an answer grounded in the notions of agency and identity politics in regional social movements and development vision. I examine the interdependency between the environment and social and historical processes, which informs my analysis of local development strategy regarding regional preferences for grass use in livelihood practices. The analysis employs data collected through qualitative, ethnographic interview processes and participant observation in the field. Supplementing the primary data with literature on identity assertion as a response to colonial and neocolonial processes, I argue that Kumaon has thrived and created significant agricultural development, notwithstanding the lack of outside aid, because development there is inextricably linked to regional movements for social change. These social movements have distinguished Kumaon from national trends of development and have led to the emergence of a conservationist and rights-oriented regional identity, which has helped form a particular vision for Kumaoni development focused on the environmental rights of the people.

This project strives to address the surprisingly high rates of eating disorders (ED) in southern Italy. Determinants for ED in southern Italy are characterized by perfectionist tendencies and parental criticism, rather than the low self-esteem and body image problems most often associated with ED. The high prevalence of ED and unique composition of symptoms and psychological determinants among southern Italian women point to a compelling paradox: Given the widely supported theory that the development of eating disorders in a population may be ascribed not only to media-stimulated body image concerns but also to processes of modernization and industrialization, why do women in southern Italy, which has not conformed to or successfully undergone these processes, exhibit relatively high rates of eating disorders? This thesis argues that ED in southern Italy is a symptom of transgenerational transmission of trauma related to collective regional fear of the end of WWII and loss of the precarious economic certainty of the Allied occupation. This fear and eventual loss could not be openly mourned because of its conflict with the Resistance and liberation myths that sustain WWII memory in the popular national narrative. To substantiate this claim, I will further propose that both culture-specific ED pathologies and acclaimed films represent ciphered articulations of the psychically “indigestible” nature of this conflict. I will analyze selected films of acclaimed southern Italian directors: Ettore Scola’s La famiglia, Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, Francesco Rosi’s Tre fratelli, and Mario Martone’s L’amore molesto. Each film is analyzed anasemically—that is, completely wthin the bounds of its auditory, visual, and cinematographic language—before connecting it to historical and social contexts.

The infamous dictator Augusto Pinochet came to power through a bloody coup on September 11, 1973 and drastically changed the face of the Chilean government. His regime instituted strict policies of neoliberalism that led to the privatization of the university system. Forty years after the coup, many of these policies remain in place, untouched and accepted as the reasons behind Chile as the ‘economic miracle’ of South America. However, tensions under these neoliberal policies, specifically in the university system, fomented a recent eruption of political activism in May of 2011. Why is it that Chile, one of the most economically ‘successful’ countries in South America and the ‘pride’ of the IMF and World Bank models, is seeing the rise of a powerful student movement against neoliberal legacies? My research juxtaposes the master narrative of Chile as a ‘model country’, in terms of hegemonic modernity, against the experiences of the Chilean university students who have fought to challenge it. I argue that the catalyst behind the student movement can be in part explained by the legacies of Pinochet’s repression and the political struggles of past generations. This contradictory temporal space forms a ‘generational borderland’. These generational ruptures combined with the legacies of repression, have led to the emergence of new forms of innovative and marketable protest, cultivated longevity for the movement through the mistrust of politicians, and inspired a reinvigoration of the Communist Party of Chile.

The levantamientos of 1990 and ’92 in Ecuador demonstrate the incredible ability of indigenous political organizations to present local concerns at the national level. After 500 years of resistance and oppression, the government was forced into serious political negotiations. I hope to add to an ongoing conversation regarding indigenous political organization in Latin America by studying the specific case of Ecuadorian indigenous peoples of the Oriente, and the construction of political voice in response to government policy, the actions of private companies, and the involvement of international lending organizations that led to years of unfettered, destructive practices of extraction and colonization in the last half of the 20th century. Through an analysis of documentary film, academic writing, and media coverage, this project looks to show that this struggle has been wrought with contradictions and unintended consequences and characterized by a high level of coordination at the local and national level. Emphasizing contradictions in the construction of political voice is appropriate in a discussion of political representation of historically marginalized or excluded peoples, who more than ever occupy an uncertain borderland space. I think it is crucial to understand that, in the construction of indigenous political voice, contradictions reinforce the borderlands they seek to escape, or the dominant power structures.

Burma is now undergoing an incredible transition toward peace, stability and democratic governance – a transition that we found requires a fundamental re-thinking of U.S. policy relations. While we discovered Burma’s commitment to reform to be genuine, its challenges are numerous. Instability and underdevelopment continue to dominate the Burmese landscape, defined by a weak constitutional government, repressed civil society, unreformed military, ethnic violence and an underdeveloped economy. This past year marked President Obama as the first American president to visit Burma, extending a hand of friendship, committed to strengthening political and economic ties between the United States and Burma. As well as a real commitment by the United States to reduce economic sanctions, aid in the democratization process, and lift the Burmese economy out of poverty -  elements we proved to be essential in ensuring a successful transition in Burma. Our task force recommends greater engagement, aid, and targeted policy consultation to help the country emerge from decades of military-junta rule and rejoin the international community. Ultimately, Burma offers a new roadmap in the United States in re-thinking the reform process of developing countries, one that now requires trading the tools of isolation and international pressure for those of integration and international cooperation. The world is now watching Burma as it prepares to chair the ASEAN council in 2014 and hold democratic elections in 2015. No one knows how long this moment for reform will last, but the time for action is now.

Does climate change affect food security and health in Indonesia? In this project I studied the history of food security and health in Indonesia and analyzed how climate change phenomena, such as floods, droughts, increase in temperature, and rising sea levels, affect food security and health in Indonesia. Furthermore, I applied theories of structural inequality, risk society, and globalization to analyzing the impact of climate change on food security and health in Indonesia. I investigated the hypothesis that climate change phenomena drastically reduce the Indonesian food production, ultimately having a negative effect on the Indonesian economy and the health of the Indonesian people. My method was to look at current research of climate change phenomena in Indonesia and speak with Indonesian institutions, such as the secretary of health and environment, to learn the situation of food security and health in Indonesia and the various impacts of climate change. The research that I have done so far on this project suggests that climate change is having a negative effect on availability of food, cost of food, and access to adequate nutrition.