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.

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.

Aerospace vehicles, such as reusable spacecraft and hypersonic flight vehicles, require materials that can both provide high thermal resistance and high mechanical strength. Thermal insulation is required to protect the vehicle interior including occupants from the high heat of reentry and mechanical strength is required to withstand the variety of loads including the forces experienced during launch. In general, it is difficult to meet both these requirements at a high level since the normal way to increase thermal resistance of porous ceramics is to increase the porosity but this reduces strength. We are currently developing and investigating anisotropic porous ceramics that have the potential to optimally meet both these requirements. We are making the anisotropic porous ceramics from through a route called polymer derived ceramics (PDCs). The class of PDC’s that is being investigated is siloxanes, which decompose at high temperatures (~800^oC) into a SiOC ceramic. These materials have excellent high temperature resistance including creep and low thermal conductivity. Polymethylphenylsilsesquioxane (Waker H44) is first cross-linked and milled into a fine powder. The powder is then pyrolyzed to a SiOC ceramic that is then milled into a fine ceramic powder. A water-based slurry is made and poured into a mold that sits on a cold copper rod that is cooled in a liquid nitrogen bath. This causes ice crystals to form in the slurry which grow perpendicular to the copper rod. The frozen component is then freeze dried, causing the ice to sublime leaving a highly anisotropic porous structure. The thermal and mechanical properties will be measured in the longitudinal and transverse directions and the properties of these anisotropic porous microstructures will be compared to those of isotropic porous ceramics of similar porosity.

Colonization in the 16th century permitted the creation of borderlands of indigenous groups in Mexico. As Mestizos became the majority in the country, indigenous groups rested in a borderland of injustice and inequality. To this day, indigenous groups still live in the struggle for justice. My aim is to research Los Triquis from San Juan Copala, Oaxaca and explore the realities surrounding the conflict that is taking place there; especially the implications in shaping Triqui identities around this conflict. Though various scholars have examined the paramilitary conflict in San Juan Copala, Triquis along with a study of their identify formation have been left out of the picture of the conflict. I intend to focus on the direct consequences on the individual rather than on the nature of the conflict itself through analyzing interviews with experts on the conflict and videos with first-hand accounts by Triquis who have escaped such violence. Since 1988, rising Triqui paramilitary groups allegedly helping Triqui people in San Juan Copala against injustices from the government, have created a paramilitary conflict. The resulting violence has led to the displacement of thousands of Triquis, who find it impossible to return home as they are attacked by their own people once they try. The particularity of this conflict is the government’s hidden involvement and it has affected every age and gender group in San Juan Copala thus changing the dynamics of interaction.

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.

How did the Indian English novel function within the Indian independence movement? Literature illuminates unique narratives not necessarily communicated by other forms of print media like newspapers and history books, and these stories exert a very different kind of influence. In the particular instance of Indian English novels around the time that India gained independence from Britain, literature established power through its inherent cultural capital, its role in imagining nations, and its critical abilities. These novels embodied traits of both the colonized and the colonizer, allowing them to occupy a position of notable political and cultural influence. Drawing on theories on literature and nationalism, this study employs close readings of novels by Rabindranath Tagore and Mulk Raj Anand within the context of historically evident politics and cultural phenomena of the time period to explain the role Indian English novels played in revolutionizing India. An understanding of the factors enabling the novel’s influence will illuminate how India’s independence was imagined and realized. Situating Indian English novels of the Indian independence movement in their historical and social context may yield further understanding to the way historical events played out and reveal more of literature’s effect on the societies in which it is produced.