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This study examines economic development in Third World countries and the use of portable video systems in development projects. The study, conducted in 1985, attempts to measure the level of effectiveness of videotape programs as a communication tool for training rural subsistence women in Honduras in technical aspects of pig-keeping. Classical communication and development models posit a downward, vertical process from small elite to mass of receivers. Participatory communication, however, suggests the involvement of marginal groups in their own social and economic futures. From the 1940s to the early 1970s, development theories shifted from emphasizing modernization toward more choice-based economic and public-policy approaches. Most modernization programs today continue to support a relationship in which one group is economically maintained at the expense of another. International development programs develop national modernization projects that often fail to incorporate effective input from local people. By entering the global market, developing nations often deny themselves opportunities for economic self-sufficiency. It may be possible to have successful small-scale development programs which help promote self-sufficiency among marginal groups without requiring the dramatic economic, political, and social changes necessary for modernization. Advanced video technology widens opportunities for improved participatory communication. The concluding chapter suggests that the Honduran women understood and used the videotaped pig-keeping information. It recommends changes in the videotape project, however, to make it more participatory and more responsive to local needs. A bibliography with over 80 items is followed by extensive appendixes which include a questionnaire given to the Small Scale Livestock Project population who went to the United States. (TES)

This dissertation examines three prominent educational reform movements in late nineteenth- and early- twentieth century Spain: the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institute of Teaching), the Escuela Moderna (Modern School), and the Escola Nova Catalana (New Catalan School). Studying these movements syncretically, analyzing both similarities and differences, the thesis contends that efforts at educational reform throughout Spain were vibrant, heterogeneous, and far-reaching. Although bound together by history, politics, culture, and more, the thesis studies how each movement conceived differently the relationship between the individual and the collective, or the particular and the universal: the Institución Libre de Enseñanza pursued a liberal Spanish "cultural nationalism," while the Escuela Moderna eschewed nationalist formulations in favor of international collectivism, and the Escola Nova Catalana sought to increase Catalonia's political and economic influence both domestically and internationally by championing study of Catalan history and language. By privileging child-centered pedagogical theories that focused on rationalism, autonomy, hygiene, and wellness, and by taking steps to widen educational access to girls and working-class children, the three movements contributed to the constellation of reform that advanced Spain's often fractured process of modernization. Spanish and Catalan educationalists were also active in global circuits of intellectual exchange. Accordingly, the thesis deploys a cultural and historical archive to illustrate the international characteristics and contributions of educational reform movements in modern Spain. In their attempts to "modernize" pedagogical methods and curricular offerings and to "emancipate" students from the strictures of State-sponsored Catholic hegemony, Spanish and Catalan educationalists occasionally employed rhetoric and embraced methods that mirrored the practices they critiqued. Thus, the dissertation considers the ties and tensions between tradition and transgression in an array of areas that range from religion, economics, and governance to gender, class, and national identity to the prospects and/or specters of revolution. Ultimately, the dissertation explores the interconnected relationships between pedagogy, politics, and power to offer fresh perspectives that will enrich the cultural and intellectual histories of modern Spain and its relations to the wider world.

This thesis questions a series of assumptions concerning the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century modernization of European spaces. Current scholarship tends to concur with essayistic texts and images by contemporary intellectuals that technological and organizational developments increased the freedom of movement of those living in western-European societies, while at the same time alienating them from each other and from their environment. I assess this claim with the help of Dutch travel egodocuments such as travel diaries and letters. After a prosopographical investigation of all available northern-Netherlandish travel egodocuments created between 1500 and 1915, a selection of these documents is examined in greater detail. In these documents, travellers regarded the possession of identity documents, a correct appearance, and a fitting social identity along with their personal contacts, physical capabilities, and the weather as the most important factors influencing whether they managed to gain access to places. A discussion of these factors demonstrates that no linear increase, nor a decrease, occurred in the spatial power felt by travellers. The exclusion many travellers continued to experience was often overdetermined. The largest groups affected by this were women and less educated families. Yet travellers could also play out different access factors against each other. By paying attention to how practices matched hopes and expectations, it is possible to discover how gravely social inequities were really felt by travellers. Perhaps surprisingly, all social groups desired to visit the same types of places. Their main difference concerned the atmosphere of the places where the different groups felt at home. To a large degree this matched travellers' unequal opportunities. Therefore, although opportunities remained strongly unequal throughout the period, this was not always experienced as a problem. Also, in cases where it was, many travellers knew strategies to work around the obstacles created for them.

This thesis deals with the determinants and mechanisms of individual secularisation processes in a cross-national perspective. In this ‘collected volume’ of six stand-alone articles, I examine religious beliefs and behaviours as well as attitudes towards religion and politics, whereby the validity of the main theories of religious change (classical secularisation theory, existential security hypothesis, supply-side explanations, historical/cultural approaches and conflict theories) are put to an empirical test. The main conclusion is that the fundamental mechanisms suggested by secularisation theories are valid and that we can identify main determinants of religiosity worldwide. However, only a combination of existing approaches is capable of explaining a broad range of the phenomena observed. Chapter 1 (co-authored with Nan Dirk de Graaf and Peter Schmidt) deals with the fundamental mechanisms that facilitate the socialisation of religious beliefs. Under conditions of high inequality, religion acts as a source of social capital that benefits the religious socialisation of individuals outside of the family context. If levels of inequality fall, this ‘social value of religion’ is diminished and religious socialisation depends more strongly on parental efforts, thereby gradually leading to intergenerational secularisation. In Chapter 2 (co-authored with Anja Neundorf) we show that the state in Eastern Europe played a crucial role in de-establishing as well as re-establishing religious plausibility structures, which explains lower levels of religious belief in Cold War cohorts as well as the religious revival after the end of the Cold War. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the topic of religion and politics and the mechanisms behind the support for the 9/11 attacks in the Muslim world. Levels of existential security and income inequality have a strong impact on the preferences for religious politicians in a cross-sectional as well as in a longitudinal perspective. Moreover, religiosity and altruistic behaviour run the risk of being converted into pro-terrorist support under conditions of high levels of inequality and low development levels. The final two chapters show that –in a world-wide comparison development levels, inequality and the Socialist history of countries explain 75% of the variation in religiosity between countries. Furthermore, future developments in religious change will also be subject to changes in fertility. The main drivers of secularisation processes can be identified, but for the majority of the world population these conditions are not met at present, nor will they be met in the near future.

Despite high poverty levels, and limited manufacturing and production activities, the morphology of the Sub-Saharan African cities is modernizing through the development of infrastructure including interchanges. The theoretical interpretations of the modernization of African cities have been couched within the frameworks of frontier urbanization and speculative urbanism. Using Accra-Tema City-Region (ATCR), Ghana as a case study, the primary purpose of the thesis is to map the geography of interchanges, examine the processes or reasons for the production of interchanges, and what they might mean for the urban development process of ATCR. I used Google Earth Satellite Imagery and Open Street Map (2000-2022) to locate the interchanges. I also employed archival research sources to obtain data on the sources of capital and builders for the interchanges. Open-ended interviews were conducted with the Department of Urban Roads and residents to ascertain the reasons for the development of interchanges and the implications for urban development. The findings show that ATCR has witnessed a concentration of 25 simple to tier-four complex interchanges under globalization. The production of interchanges has occurred because local forces have provided enabling circumstances for foreign direct investment. I provide three recommendations for the urban development process of ATCR.

A comparative study of German and Turkish literature and film, this dissertation analyzes the entanglement of processes of modernization and discourses of racialization. Drawing on Moishe Postone’s work, the first part examines the relationship between modernity and race in the context of the transition from pre-modern “anti-Judaism” to modern antisemitism. While this transition is often explained by means of a paradigm shift—race replaces religion as the dominant identity category—Postone identifies a connection between the social relations inscribed in the commodity form and the underlying ideological structures of antisemitism. Instead of limiting the ascription of the “abstract” to figurations of Jews in antisemitic imagery, however, my reading detaches Postone’s theory of racism from the idiosyncrasies of German-Jewish history, and, by linking the emergence of the modern notion of race to developments immanent to capitalist modernity as such, proposes to establish a theoretical basis capable of transcending Western metropolitan borders. The second part of this dissertation then illuminates how in the Levante as well the emergence of the modern concept of race was part and parcel of accelerated processes of nation-building and capitalist modernization. Finally, the third part examines representations of the Armenian genocide and the racialization of Armenians in the Weimar era and in contemporary German cultural discourse.

Located at the intersection of Global Studies, Gender Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies, this dissertation looks at Turkey's intellectual women in Kemalist and socialist movements in relation to Turkey’s gendered modernization process from 1935 to 1960. The research focuses on how women activists shaped their discourses on economic and moral frugality, nurturing the nation’s womanhood, and guarding the homeland. It further attends to the influence of their discourses and practices over Turkey’s modernization in these transformative years. This dissertation asks: how did intellectual women contest and negotiate their rights and duties in a nationalist modernization project during its implementation and transformation periods in the case study of Turkish Kemalist and socialist women? The research utilizes qualitative textual analysis, focusing on sources published by Kemalist and independent socialist intellectual women. The sources include newspaper and journal articles, memoirs, interviews, speeches, travelogues, biographies, and literary works such as short stories and novels. Many studies emphasize the gendered nature of modernization processes by emphasizing how nationalist movements situated the women in a ‘cultural’ or ‘spiritual’ realm. This dissertation argues that women intellectuals contested this positioning and sought to open new political fields of struggle to expand their influence even when they rallied behind nationalist projects. This dissertation makes two interventions in extant studies on modernization, gender, and nationalism. First, the dissertation challenges the most significant works on Turkish women’s movements that consider the 1935-1960 era as the ‘silent years of Turkish feminism.’ Challenging the ‘conservative consensus’ framework, this dissertation reads this period of women’s activism as ‘contested modernization.’ Second, the dissertation adds to studies that analyze anticolonial nationalist politics from a prism of material and spiritual realms by suggesting that the definitions of these two realms were in fact fields of political contestation.

This dissertation aims to reclaim the significance and innovations of female home scientists in India’s development from 1947 until 1972. Historiographies of India’s development in the post-independence period have largely overlooked how gendered projects, such as the establishment of home science programs in new Indian agricultural universities, were directed by professional women. To discover the ways and to what extent home scientists played an essential role in India’s modernization projects, this study investigates the transnational interactions of U.S. home economists and Indian women who earned advanced degrees in home economics subjects in the United States during the Cold War. Analyzing archival material, personal collections, oral history interviews, online subscription databases, and open-access repositories, this dissertation recovers the voices and lived experiences of these professional women. Additionally, this process uncovered a rich collection of first-person narratives. Over one hundred and twenty-five theses and dissertations written by Indian home scientists during the first three decades after Independence, collectively and individually, illustrate their pioneering leadership. The significance of this research is that it reveals home scientists’ personal and professional renegotiations, setbacks, triumphs, and transnational connections with philanthropic organizations, government officials, and U.S. home economists as they collaborated and led nation-building projects.

Two of the most compelling explanations for corruption and its mitigation include political institutions and economic development, but how each interacts with partisanship and the bureaucracy has received less scholarly attention. In this dissertation, I use new theory and objective, time-varying corruption data from audits to examine how copartisanship/party alignment between subnational and national governments affects patterns of corruption. On the one hand, the decentralization and clientelism literatures are clear that party alignment is an institutional configuration that facilitates resource-related bureaucratic advantages in both developed and developing countries. On the other hand, party alignment serves as an indicator of the larger phenomenon of clarity of responsibility for misgovernance. I propose a new theory to reconcile the contrasting predictions of current scholarship regarding alignment and corruption. In democracies with clientelistic citizen-politician linkages or lower levels of economic development, I argue that clarity of responsibility does not automatically yield less corruption. In such contexts, voters only seek to punish aligned politicians and, in turn, the latter will only reduce their corruption levels, after voters' basic needs are met. In most cases, basic needs refer to economic opportunities and poverty, but in other cases they can refer to freedom from violence. In any case, fulfillment of basic needs is so crucial for tipping the scale against aligned corrupt politicians, because I argue that corruption is fundamentally a demand problem. When citizens only receive low fulfillment of their basic needs, they tolerate--or tacitly demand--corrupt politicians in to receive something in return. In situations of economic need, voters tolerate corrupt aligned politicians to receive clientelistic handouts in return. In situations of high violence, voters tolerate corrupt aligned politicians in return for peace and stability. After meeting either set of basic needs, though, the clarity of responsibility from alignment becomes a liability for such politicians, and they reduce their corruption levels pursuant to voter demand pressures. That is especially the case after close elections. They motivate politicians to reduce corruption due to the reelection motive, and parties are more keen to sanction its politicians after close elections due to what they mean for party control of government. To support each empirical chapter, I employ close-election regression discontinuity designs to overcome endogeneity and code fine-grained, objective, subnational corruption data from individual audit reports. Given the centrality of the audit data for this dissertation, I dedicate all of Chapter 2 to the measurement of corruption using audit data. On that score, this dissertation introduces new subnational audit data from Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and India. In Chapter 3, I put the economics/poverty-oriented basic needs argument to the test using audit data from Guatemala. The latter is particularly useful case to test the economic/poverty basic needs argument, because the president picks all of the governors from his/her own party, so it allows me to directly test the effects of president-mayor party alignment on corruption without confounding from governor partisanship. Guatemala also has a poverty rate of circa 60%, thereby making the economic logic paramount. Consistent with my theory, I find strong support for the argument across the board. In Chapter 4, I test both the economics/poverty and violence basic needs arguments using audit data from Mexico. Unlike Guatemala, Mexico has political variation at the governor/state level, there was no reelection motive for mayors during the period of study, and there are available municipal-level data on homicides/violence. As with Guatemala, I find that clarity of responsibility, measured by different dosages of party alignment, is not sufficient to reduce corruption. With respect to the basic needs theory, I find less consistent support than I do with Guatemala.

This research analyzes progressive revolutionary thought and politics in Turkey in relation to comparable movements in Egypt and Iran from 1930 to 1960. In this context, progressive intellectualism is a socially and nationally oriented paradigm that strives for a secular and egalitarian democracy, and this study examines how these subjects have been at the vanguard of revolutionism in these countries, albeit in complex and sometimes highly problematic ways. My research is located at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory, and Middle Eastern studies. It further engages in studies of modernization, gender and sexuality, social movements, ethnicity and race, development, and securitization. Extant studies of Turkey’s political streams have made important contributions to Turkish intellectual history. However, most exhibit critical flaws: they employ a rise and fall paradigm, focus on narrow interpretations of ideologies, analyze male intellectuals exclusively, and remain within national borders. In contrast, this study tracks changes and continuities in Turkey’s revolutionary ideologies, strategies, and narratives in relation to its regional context to understand the influence of regional political-economic structures and institutions on various ideological formations. It takes progressive revolutionary political expressions as a holistic yet also heterogenous tradition of political thought. It analyzes domestic and regional interpretations of two global ideologies that had dominantly represented revolutionism (namely national-liberation and socialism) through a sexually, geographically, and generationally diverse group of intellectuals. This study draws from Antonio Gramsci’s theories on consensual hegemony, organic crises, intellectuals, and Caesarism; Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on the state and social status distinctions; and Şerif Mardin’s Center-Periphery paradigm. Political thought and experiences of Middle Eastern progressives pose challenges for these theoretical paradigms for their overreliance on static models on institutions, as in the case of Gramsci, and social blocs, as in the cases of Bourdieu and Mardin. The key research question asks: how did interactions and confrontations between revolutionary intellectuals and state actors influence the trajectories of Turkish republican revolution and other nationalist revolutions in the Middle East? Accordingly, my research is built around a two-pillar mixed methods approach. The first is qualitative, analyzing ten Turkish intellectuals. This includes three women and seven men. Five describe themselves as national-liberation revolutionaries, while the other five describe themselves as socialist revolutionaries. The second methodological feature is comparative and explores Iranian and Egyptian counterparts. The research is based on the varied nature of their intellectual production, which includes scholarly works, memoirs, autobiographies, letters, journal and newspaper articles, interviews, speeches, court defenses, and literary works such as novels, short stories, poems, and plays. This dissertation argues that state elites’ securitization of progressivism since the 1930s was linked to the undoing of Turkish republican project in the 1950s as this process saw the incorporation of fascist and Islamist intellectuals and movements into the state apparatus. Moreover, regardless of political distinctions within the revolutionary camp, which in Turkey had generally been between Kemalist national-liberation and Leninist socialism, the fates of all progressive streams remained interdependent. When one tradition failed, it discredited the other. The research further shows how hegemonic processes in the twentieth-century Middle East had functioned in three interrelated areas: 1) hegemony as regime legitimacy; 2) hegemony as controlling the codes of dominant political culture; and 3) hegemony as determining the limits of legitimate politics, in other words, establishing the boundaries between “politics as usual” and “politics of securitization.”

The Salvadoran Civil War of 1979-1992 transformed the nation’s government from a military dictatorship into a liberal democracy. The United States was involved from the beginning to the end of the war, yet the superpower’s role in the political outcome has been under-investigated. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to examine how the presence of the United States in the conflict shaped its eventual outcome. It argues that the United States’ main role was to serve as a bulwark for the formal institutions and processes of liberal democratic government against the furies unleashed by the civil war. Salvadoran politicians, activists, party members and voters worked within these institutions to reform the politics of the country. The U.S. policy that unfolded in El Salvador was itself a product of historical development. This dissertation therefore describes the historical antecedents of the policies of the three U.S. presidential administrations that engaged with the Salvadoran Civil War: those of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. These antecedents included the legacy of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean Basin, the Cold War, and the rise of the human rights movement in U.S. politics. Furthermore, the Reagan and Bush administrations’ El Salvador policy was the product of both administrations’ interaction with a human rights constituency in the U.S. Congress.

This thesis argues that what distinguishes all major, categorical types of human societal organization is the underlying logic operant in the unstated, dynamic ruleset that determines whether social entities and social actions at any given scale of analysis are accounted for as legitimate, or illegitimate. These are here termed “logics of legitimation,” and it is argued that all of the features said to distinguish modern society from the prior historical era by theorists such as Weber, Durkheim, Marx, and Foucault can be understood as expressions of a logic of legitimation centered on systematicness, which is the cumulative effect of the mutually-reinforcing, interacting operation of six quietly operating principles that every societal feature distinctive to the modern era exemplifies one or more of at a time. After a delineation of the areas of overlap and divergence between this central claim and core tenets of the neoinstitutionalist school, it is supported by using (a) the systems logic of legitimation, (b) it’s complex of underlying principles, and (c) it’s bright contrast with the preceding “sovereignty” logic of legitimation to analyze and make sense of historically recent macroinstitutional changes in Western society that have occurred in three major domains: economics, politics, and culture. Since the concept of “modernity” is both a theoretical abstraction and a historical time-marker, the task of this thesis is only completed with a final substantive section that attempts to mark the origins of the systems logic of legitimation’s emergence in the historical chronology of Western societal evolution. The account is suggestive of potential mechanisms for the shift from one logic to another, which warrant future research. The concluding sections suggest research designs for verifying the theory here espoused, and potential applications in the studies of international geopolitics, gender, and race.

We are currently seeing an unprecedented growth in the number of nonreligious people in the United States. However, our sociological understandings of this growing demographic have been limited by dominant cultural and social science narratives that presume the loss of religion comes with a detrimental loss of certainty, meaning, and community. Much of the social scientific theorizing about the consequences of modernization and secularization is based in a “subtraction story” – a story of moving away from stable social identities, communities, and religious beliefs, and moving toward a hollow and meaningless secular modernity that leaves individuals feeling uncertain, anomic, and socially isolated. In this dissertation, I draw on three years of ethnographic research with a network of atheist churches called The Sunday Assembly to disrupt this narrative of loss, revealing the meaningful cultures and communities that nonreligious people are constructing without religion. Rather than simply the absence of religious beliefs and practices, atheist churches signal the presence of substantive nonreligious beliefs and practices. And I show how practice-oriented investigations of these nonreligious cultures and communities can shed new light on core sociological questions about social change and meaning-making in contemporary social life. Instead of a demographic burdened by a detrimental loss of certainty, community, and meaning, I found a rich nonreligious field full of politicized certainty and meaningful uncertainty, contested conceptions and practices of community, and a meaning-filled discourse of “scientific spirituality” that combines the language of spirituality and transcendence with commitments to secular worldviews and scientific rationalism. I use the case of the Sunday Assembly to show how these nonreligious meaning systems are constructed, contextual, and contested.

Street vendors are a cultural icon and have a long history in the cities of Mainland China (abbreviated as China henceforth). However, with the development and modernization of Chinese cities, the relationship between street vendors and city managers has become increasingly tense and delicate, and conflicts between vendors and urban management are occurring at an increasing rate. This paper intends to illustrate the irreplaceability of the street markets and identify a solution for street vendors to thrive in tandem with modernization through research and design. In many large Chinese cities, the number of food vendors has been insufficient to support the increasing urbanization, and a large proportion of food consumption has shifted to supermarkets as traditional street markets have been banned. This article briefly introduces several major types of food consumption locations in Chinese cities and finds that the street market plays an important role in cities. However, street markets have their own problems, including polluting the environment and creating congestion. Also, as a semi-urbanized group, most street vendors rarely enjoy the same rights and interests as other people in the cities because of the ‘Hukou’ household registration system and other cultural differences. These vendors are marginalized in urban life and guaranteeing their rights and benefits is problematic. In contrast, although Hong Kong and Taiwan share many culture aspects with China, there exists a level of respect and tacit understanding that allows street vendors to thrive, and many prefer to purchase food at street markets instead of supermarkets because of the unique atmosphere that they provide. This paper also discusses the Chinese urban garbage disposal system and explores possible solutions to remedy the primary issues of pollution facing street markets in China. Through the investigation of Chinese consumers' perceptions of street markets, this paper concludes that people in fact enjoy street markets and believe that street markets can provide convenience and unique value. They welcome standardized street markets. Finally, this paper proposes the idea of standardizing the implementation of the street market; from rules, to promotion as a brand, to designing worktable for aquatic products vendors. The product can help aquatic product vendors maintain environmental sanitation and achieve harmonious coexistence within the city.

Informal, minimally-regulated minibus services dominate public transportation in Lagos. Local, state, and federal government entities in Nigeria have historically only been able to provide woefully inadequate formal transit systems. The informal transit sector has sprung up to fill this incredible demand. The cutthroat, individualistic grind of this system produces world-renowned problems of inefficiency, safety and, unreliability of urban transport in one of the world’s most populated cities. While build-out of more reliable, safer and more affordable public transit infrastructure in Lagos is imperative and ongoing, it is unclear whether past, current and future projects being carried out by the government are being or have been designed to incorporate informal services for a combined system that can better accommodate travel on a network scale throughout the city. Government agencies preach the need for modernist, top-down imposition of bold, physical infrastructure projects and the eradication of the disorder associated with the informal system. These plans boast a grand vision for the future of transport in Lagos, including the build out of numerous Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) routes, a 7-line commuter/light-rail network, and even a gondola system serving Lagos and Victoria islands. This research takes a critical, post-colonial lens to the complex relationships at play in what currently embodies a competing, dual transit system rooted in institutional corruption. Through this analysis, I distill a potential for a collaborative relationship to develop in this place, leveraging the benefits of both the formal, ordered system and the informal system’s adaptive nature and situated knowledges.

This dissertation examines the role of train development and construction in Bolivian state formation and social change at the start of the twentieth century during the twenty years of Liberal Party governments. The study analyzes national planning for liberal development and studies the impact of one particular railroad, the Arica – La Paz line, in the province of Pacajes. Though development planning throughout this period was exclusively the realm of politicians and businessmen, their plans often depended on the participation of the same people and relationships that Liberal Party leadership wanted to change. This study shows how a wide range of groups within the border province of Pacajes responded, reacted, and developed alternative agendas to the advance of trains and state reforms associated with them. Though Liberal Party leaders depicted the unimpeded advance of their plans to transform the nation into a liberal, modern, and centralized one, the details show a much more fragmented and varied result. That result often emerged from tensions and conflicts produced in those places and moments where the imagined project landed in a complex local reality, and came to reflect and produce many of the same contradictions that had been present for centuries. Because the Liberal Party’s approach to railroads understood modernization and development as a way to force other changes within the nation, including in social relations, power, and identity, this dissertation focuses on aspects of everyday life directly impacted by their development reforms: work, markets, food production and transport, taxes, and the financing of local governments. This study engages in a dialogue with research on the history of indigenous and worker movements, xv the development of liberalism, and citizenship in Bolivia, by examining the profound impact of expanding capitalism in the daily lives of residents of one region and its implications for belonging and exclusion in the nation. I suggest that the years of Liberal Party rule and their successful project to build trains and transform the economy shaped the emergence of new movements and politics that would dominate discussions of the nation’s future for many decades after.

When Reza Shah Pahlavi (1925-1941) came to power in Iran in 1925, he initiated a rapid and irreversible process of change that began in the public domain of the city and filtered into the private domain of the home. During this era of accelerated, westernized modernization, gender-segregated private housing, including courtyard houses, and gender-exclusive, masculine public spaces were repurposed relatively quickly and/or were replaced by modern villa-style houses/apartments and gender-inclusive public spaces. Over the years, as Reza Shah’s policies of western-style modern houses, urban spaces, fashion, and design grew, he intensified his support for gender desegregation, most notably through banning women’s use of the Chador (the traditional Iranian veil) in public spaces. In this sense, the first Pahlavi modernization project of the built environment was constructed through a gendered lens of progress, in which physical structures, public and private spaces, and women’s (and men’s) very senses of embodiment and identity – in their homes, in public spaces, in regard to their dress – became a contested battleground at the center of broader struggles concerning modernity and westernization in Iran. This dissertation utilizes an interdisciplinary transnational feminist approach, rooted in qualitative research methods including archival and primary sources such as floor plans, architectural drawings, historical photographs, newspaper publications and popular magazines. I analyze how modern architectural, spatial, and social reforms during this period created tensions amongst women and men, leading both some to embrace the reforms as emancipatory and others to resist them in defense of “Iranian” tradition. My conceptual framework draws from architecture history; comparative studies of modernization and nationalism; studies of gender, space and architecture; and transnational feminist theory. It develops a transnational feminist historiography of Reza Shah’s modernization of the built environment, focusing on four key aspects of this historical process: (1) The history of the modernization of architecture and urban space in Iran, also known as the “modern moment;” (2) modern urbanism and gender desegregation of the built environment; (3) the transition from courtyard to “modern” houses; and (4) the modernization of the ideal Iranian woman through Reza Shah’s laws and policies focused on domesticity, dress, and fashion. Ultimately this dissertation argues that Reza Shah’s project of modernization of the built environment is incomplete and contradictory at best: This process is best understood as a societal negotiation of modernization, westernization, secularization, traditionalism, and nationalization, including the proper “place” of women (and men) in public and private spaces in Iran.

Second Demographic Transition (SDT) theory argues very low fertility results from the simultaneous processes of modernization and secularization. However, this theory has primarily only been examined in the Christian countries of Northern and Western Europe. The assumption that modernization and secularization are co-occurring processes may not apply in other non-European, non-Christian contexts. Notably absent are studies of Muslim-majority nations, where modernization has occurred separate from secularization because the primary interpretation of Islam views the pursuit of secular knowledge is as important as the pursuit of religious knowledge. Therefore, there is a critical need to examine the applicability of the SDT theory to fertility in a Muslim-majority country. Using data from the 2008 and 2013 Demographic and Health Surveys of Turkey, and a series of regression models, I examine the independent and joint effects of modernization and secularization on married women’s parity, contraceptive use, and induced abortion receipt. Overall, I find mixed evidence concerning the effects of modernization and secularization on married women’s fertility behaviors. Modernization and secularization are independently associated with married women’s parity and abortion receipt. However, there modernization and secularization are jointly associated with married women’s contraceptive use and methods. I conclude that the specification of the SDT theory, that modernization co-occurs with secularization to allow more contraceptive use and more abortion, does not follow—and therefore does not—explain low fertility in the Muslim-majority country of Turkey. Advisors: David F. Warner and Philip Schwadel

This thesis explores the changing relationship between rural Iranians, the state, and the environment in the mid-20th century through a regional study of the province of Khuzestan, in southwestern Iran. This research differs from predominant histories of modernization in Iran by its use of an environmental historical framework and its focus on rural communities on the national periphery. Environmental history, as opposed to political, economic, intellectual, or feminist history, emphasizes the dynamic dialectical relationship between society and its environment, acknowledging the historical agency of the latter. Examining changes in the relationships between society, rivers, and disease (types of “socio-environmental” relationships) demonstrates how modernization projects affected social institutions and Iranian conceptions of nature. 20th century state initiatives degraded the existing relationship between society and environment in Khuzestan because of a modernist faith in humanity’s power over natural phenomena and a capitalist drive to replace traditional modes of labor with new jobs integrated into a global cash economy. Engineers designed plans for new canals and a massive modern dam that foremen and their professional crews built with over one million tons of concrete. Village health agents coerced residents into mass chemotherapy treatments while school officials experimented with the diets of schoolchildren to see what mixture of proteins might produce the healthiest citizens. These projects reveal a state faith in the ability of experts to control natural phenomena and successfully order society without input from local communities. Using corporate archival material, state reports, and anthropological studies, I tell the story of how the Development and Resources Corporation’s arrival in Khuzestan drastically altered socio-environmental dynamics, how the state enhanced its power and presence in villages, and the ambiguous response of villagers to these changes. The attractions of modern technologies and comfort commodities often came at the price of personal and communal autonomy. I argue that the DRC and the state altered traditional modes of incorporating nature into rural social structures. These organizations partially alienated Iranians from their natural environment by conceptualizing it as a resource to be completely controlled, for profit and national benefit, rather than accommodated for local needs and demands

El objetivo de este trabajo es efectuar un programa de análisis sobre la modernización española durante el tercer cuarto del siglo XX a través del papel desempeñado por el Estado. Para ello se articula en dos fases: la primera se dedicará a explorar si se produjo o no una modernización ―siquiera mínima― de las es-tructuras del Estado a partir de los años cincuenta; tras ello, abordaremos la cuestión de las relaciones centro-periferia (esto es poder del gobierno central y la administración en las provincias) a través de la figura de los gobernadores civiles y el papel llevado a cabo por los mismos durante el período del crecimiento económico.

According to Italian historiography, the term modernization refers to the transformation of Italian society between 1950 and the late 1960s. This study aims to analyse those years by adopting the specific framework defined by the action of State institutions, trying to clarify which contribution was given by the «State» to the modernization processes. The analysis starts from the period of political and institutional transition between Fascism and democracy, focusing the pivotal role played by Democrazia Cristiana (DC) to drive, and even delay, institutional and socio-economic transformations. It has been devoted some space to the «conquest of the State» by DC, enlighting the increasing connection between the DC political elites and State elites. During the Sixties, DC gained almost a complete control on the State apparatus, while the modernization was happening «out of the State». 1968 could be seen as a watershed in the history of the Italian Republic also by the State institutions’ point of view because of the regionalisation reform, but the regions would only be able to exercise their powers just from 1977, while the political system went on to be dominated by clientelism and restricted power-ful circles both on central and local level. Modernization would continue to be a deeply foreign enterprise for the Italian State. Only part of the private economy and some of the semi-public bodies would engage in it.

The Welfare State´s construction in capitalist of democratic countries the post-World War II European must be understood as part of a modernizing process of societies. The Welfare State created by European democracies is therefore distinguished from authoritarian, fascist, or communist state models. The corporatist Estado Novo, which was in force in Portugal between 1933 and 1974, assumed a kind of third way capable of overcoming the liberal and socialist models of social protection. Compared with those achieved by Welfare State countries, the Portuguese Corporatist Social Security model failed in all its dimensions (education, health, social security). Portugal in the post-World War II, was unable to disconnect itself from a conservative, authoritarian and retro-grade ideology and, despite having an economic growth never seen before, it remained deprived of two of the main engines of social modernization of the 'golden age of capitalism' : political democracy and the Welfare State model. This was only to take place on 25 April 1974. Very late, three decades late, and at a time when the Welfare State was beginning to fall victim to its own success.

El personaje de Circe en El mayor encanto, amor propone, más allá de los rasgos clásicos que lo caracterizan, una concepción singular del ejercicio de la violencia. El análisis de las etapas que marcan la progresión de la comedia revela el carácter funcional de la violencia ejercida por la maga. Esta condición estructural de la violencia bien podría resultar uno de los elementos más significativos de la reactualización del personaje femenino violento a la que procede Calderón.

Los estudios sobre la política norteamericana y la promoción de la democracia en España durante el franquismo, han sido relegados durante muchos años, al darse por sentada la naturaleza propagandística del discurso público estadounidense. Con el fin de aquilatar cuáles fueron los verdaderos móviles y condicionantes de Washington en sus relaciones con Franco y su régimen, en la primera parte de este artículo se examinan brevemente los cambios operados en las concepciones geoestratégicas norteamericanas a partir de los años 30 del siglo XX. La segunda parte, que constituye el núcleo del trabajo, se centra en el examen del caso español a partir de la documentación sobre España entre los años 1945-1973 conservada en los «National Archives and Records Administration» (NARA) en College Park, Md.

Contemporary professional violinists face constant exposure to multicultural compositions. For best results, they should be able to understand, capture, and express the subtleties of different styles. The violin and its repertoire spread to China through European missionaries during the late seventeenth century and continued to be developed by Chinese scientists and musicians who studied abroad. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Chinese composers wrote many violin pieces inspired by the unique sounds of Chinese instruments. Additionally, Chinese music scholars wrote numerous essays to discuss the new Chinese style. However, much of this research has been focused on the composers and the structures of the compositions rather than on the details of violin techniques necessary to play the repertoire. The techniques in Chinese violin compositions are unique and are influenced by the traditional instruments including string, wind, and percussion instruments. Furthermore, the style of such compositions is affected by the elements of Chinese culture, such as the language, the elite society and its poetic tradition, and historical legends and events. This dissertation provides examples of Chinese violin repertoire which demonstrate the principles of three main violin techniques in the Chinese style: slides, chords, and pizzicati. In order to help professional violinists better perform Chinese violin compositions, the dissertation also includes a number of exercises covering each technique above.

Abstract: This thesis considers translation practices, debates on language reform, and lexicography of the Meiji period (1868-1912). During this critical time in Japan’s modern history, Japan dealt with an enormous influx of Western culture and technology. Japanese scholars and intellectuals read and translated various works of Western scholarship in order to enlighten the people with brand new concepts from the West. The translation methods most frequently employed in the Meiji period were translation words, loanwords, and analogs. Translation words were wasei kango, which were generally coined by referring to classical Chinese literature. However, scholars and intellectuals also created neologisms, which did not have their origin in Chinese literature, as the concepts they imported did not have currency in Japan. Because these concepts had no currency in Japan, they experienced immense struggles, and reformers even had discussions to abolish parts or all of their native language to substitute European languages. Out of dissatisfaction with the unsuitability of translation words, some intellectuals even preferred the use of loanwords in the 1870s, claiming that loanwords most appropriately presented the original meanings of Western terms. However, the Japanese lexicon was modernized in the first twenty years of the Meiji period, and not only did the number of translation words increase, but many translation words that appeared in dictionaries of the 1880s also survive in the modern lexicon. Moreover, those intellectuals who employed loanwords due to their discontent with translation words in the 1870s switched back to the use of translation words in the second half of the Meiji period. Arguments by prominent reformers about abandoning the Japanese language also ceased in this period. Indeed, the mid-1880s and the 1890s, or the period of reversal culture, were the time in which Japan more selectively emulated the West and worked to revive or preserve its native traditions and Confucian ethics. Grounded in current scholarship, this thesis aims to identify a pattern in Meiji translation practice, lexicography, and language reform discussions that is parallel to patterns that intellectual and political historians have studied. This hypothesis-building study examines translation practices by Meiji intellectuals, language reform discussions among Meiji intellectuals, and Meiji English-Japanese dictionaries in order to document that Westernizing thinkers in the reversal period recognized that unselective borrowing from the West did not suit their country, with its different history and traditions, and that they partly retreated from their early project of forcing enlightenment on the people of Japan through European literature and languages.

“Late Persianate Literary Culture: Modernizing Conventions between Persian and Urdu” examines the modernization of Persianate literature and the emergence of modern literary historiography as a shared development between Iran and India in the 19th and 20th centuries. Focusing on the premodern tazkirah (literary anthology) genre as well as literary histories produced for new educational institutions, I examine how modernizing intellectuals and litterateurs appropriated the premodern literary tradition in developing the modern, nationalist genre of Persian literary history. By reading Persian and Urdu texts together, I trace intellectual and literary exchange between Iranians and Indians and contend that the Persianate literary tradition endures through the medium of Urdu. In this way, “Late Persianate Literary Culture” complicates and challenges nationalist assumptions about Persian literature and Iranian intellectual and literary history. I further argue that literary modernization was understood as a set of formal conventions, including standard typography and orthography, punctuation, and simplified prose, as well as thematic conventions, including Victorian-influenced sexual mores and a rise and fall model of history. These conventions were both products of modernizing technologies such as print, but also seen as productive technologies in and of themselves.

In the past quarter century, China has been developing at an explosive rate. However, social and economic inequity has become more and more severe issue, especially in the rural areas. Many villages and small townships are lacking the infrastructures, such as community center, educational and healthcare facilities, to support a healthy community. Even though the government has shifted a lot of their attentions towards these rural agriculture areas, these communities are still developing at much slower rate comparing to the urban eastern coastal regions.

My dissertation is a world history project that offers an historical perspective for understanding the existence and meaning of honor crimes. I focus on the history of honor-related violence in Turkey, which I contend can only be understood within the international context of twentieth-century modernization, state-formation, and nationalist projects. The Turkish nationalist state initiated an intensive process of modernization beginning in the late 1920s and lasting through the majority of the 20th century. My project examines the impact the nationalist modernization project had on the culture of honor and the existence of honor-related gendered violence, and argues against the ahistorical portrayal of Middle Eastern societies as “backward” bastions of patriarchy. Instead, I propose that honor-related violence has a very specific, yet complex recent history that has as much to do with “modernization” as it does with tradition. Although my project focuses on Turkey, I include a case study of honor crimes as discussed in Brazilian legal codes that were created or preserved by nationalist “modernizing” regimes. This study offers a nuanced historical explanation, on the one hand, of the ways in which the culture of honor and the nationalist state overlapped and often supported one another, and on the other hand, of how nationalist modernizing projects created the environments in which honor crimes tended to proliferate, such as during periods of civil war and in communities that are marginalized due to institutionalized racial, gendered, and ethno-nationalist discrimination.

Kuwait started the process of its nation building just few years prior to signing the independence agreement from the British mandate in 1961. Establishing Kuwait’s as modern, democratic, and independent nation, paradoxically, depended on a network of international organizations, foreign consultants, and world-renowned architects to build a series of architectural projects with a hybrid of local and foreign forms and functions to produce a convincing image of Kuwait national autonomy. Kuwait nationalism relied on architecture’s ability, as an art medium, to produce a seamless image of Kuwait as a modern country and led to citing it as one of the most democratic states in the Middle East.The construction of all major projects of Kuwait’s nation building followed a similar path; for example, all mashare’e kubra [major projects] of the state that started early 1960s included particular geometries, monumental forms, and symbolic elements inspired by the vernacular life of Kuwait to establish its legitimacy. The construction of specific building types with different functions such as museums, stadiums, and parliaments is significant to modern nation building and public assimilation. Those building types and/or institutions share the same origin, and all were (re)established during the early Western modern period and inspired by Ancient Greece as source of Western civilization. Such Western perspective of modernization as an evolutionary concept, dominated the view of international organization led by the new postwar powers. Kuwait was instructed by international consultants to follow a similar model of modernization to build its postcolonial nationalism. This dissertation critically analyzes the architecture of nation building in Kuwait City, with a focus on investigating key architectural projects such as Kuwait National Museum, Kuwait National Assembly, and Kuwait Sports Center in terms of their historical development, formal language, their impact on the socio-cultural milieu, and their roles in Kuwait’s nation building. This research utilize various methods of analysis to investigate architectural drawings, various Arabic and Western literature, local newspapers and other periodicals, over 10 archives around the world, a number of personal interviews with local and international experts in related areas to the architectural projects studied in this research.

This dissertation examines the powerful vortex of John Sung's revivals in China and Southeast Asia, which directly influenced ten percent of all Chinese Protestants by the end of the 1930s. It begins in 1926 with his decision to pursue theological education in the United States, and ends with his physical collapse in 1940. But the work is not focused on biographical details; it is primarily concerned with how Sung's ministry evolved. Contrary to the numerous biographies on Sung that circulate in multiple languages, he did not return to China as a newly born-again believer enthusiastic to call the nation to repentance. Instead, this work demonstrates that Sung first floundered in China, spending several years piecing together his conversion narrative, and he adopted the revivalism that made him famous only after joining the Shanghai Bethel Mission in 1931. Once those pieces fit together, however, Sung became the preeminent Chinese evangelist of the twentieth century. The dissertation uses archival material and unrestricted access to Sung's own diaries not only to reconstruct the transformations within Sung's ministry, but also to make new dimensions of his work accessible. Particular attention is given to class, women, and divine healing. Sung's revivals appealed to the xiaoshimin, or China's petty urbanites, who sought a modern spirituality that befit their urban lives, yet wanted a religious system that addressed their traditional concerns. Women appeared at Sung's revivals in disproportionate numbers, because in China and Southeast Asia revivalism and modernity fueled one another, and women could use that combustible mix to cast new places for themselves in local societies--even if it meant challenging Sung's own perception of women. Sung's practice of healing, derived from the holiness movement, temporarily challenged China's medical pluralism, before eventually becoming part of it. Analysis of Sung's ministry suggests that revivalism was a powerful tool for personal and social revitalization. Through it, Sung not only rebuilt his own life and ministry, but he also used revivalism to recreate a distinctively Chinese spirituality, though now Christianized and expressed in ways appropriate to China and Southeast Asia's modernizing cities.

The basis of this dissertation is a life history of Waldjinah, keroncong’s most renowned vocalist, whose career spans the era of Indonesian independence and modernization beginning in the mid-twentieth century. As a musician, the arc of her career places her at the forefront of larger developments in the keroncong genre—whose historical trajectory and popularization in the twentieth century paralleled Indonesia's emergence as a modern (and modernizing) independent nation. The dissertation interweaves four main threads: 1) a life history of Waldjinah, 2) a narrative of keroncong, 3) a narrative of postcolonial Indonesia as a modernizing nation, and 4) my own subjectivity as a researcher and keroncong musician. In a broad sense, this study examines how Waldjinah attained her stature as a national artist, the challenges she faced in doing so, and the mechanisms that enabled her to succeed. Drawing from research in ethnomusicology, anthropology, postcolonial studies and critical theory, I explore how processes of modernization in non-Western countries continue to complicate and disrupt previously held theoretical interpretations of modernity. By approaching “the modern” through cultural production rather than political economy, I examine how Waldjinah, as a keroncong musician, helped to bind and shape the modern nation by giving tangible form to the abstract idea of national culture.

This thesis examines the popular yé-yé phenomenon and its role in articulating a vision of modern France in the aftermath of decolonization. Yé-yé, a teen-oriented and music-based popular culture that flourished from roughly 1962-1966, was in a unique position to define what it meant to be young in 1960s France. I argue that the yé-yé popular culture, through its definition of youth, provided an important cultural channel through which to articulate a modern French identity after the Algerian War (1954-1962). Using a combination of advertisements, articles, and sanitized depictions of teenage pop singers, the yé-yé popular culture constructed an idealized vision of adolescence that coupled a technologically-savvy and consumer-oriented outlook with a distinctly conservative, apolitical, and inclusive social stance. It reflected France's reorientation toward a particular technological and consumer modernity while simultaneously serving to obscure France's recent colonial past and the dubious legacy of imperialism. To contextualize yé-yé, this thesis begins by examining the blousons noirs (black jackets) and the societal anxieties that surrounded them in the early Fifth Republic (1958-1962). By tracking the abrupt shift from the blousons noirs to yé-yé in predominant media representations of youth, this thesis provides a unique vantage point with which to interpret dominant discourses of the Gaullist Fifth Republic and its attempt to reinvent France into a modernized and decolonized consumer republic. As the work suggests, it was not a coincidence that the optimistic yé-yé youth, unburdened by the tribulations of France's recent past, appeared in full force within months following the recognition of Algerian independence in 1962.

The UNM shock tube in the Mechanical Engineering department has been in continuous operation since its creation in 2007. During this time, significant discoveries in the field of Richtmyer-Meshkov instabilities has been made with this shock tube. While conducting these experiments, limitations on the operational aspects and data quality aspects of this research tool have been found. To further advance the state of the art, it was necessary to address these limitations to allow the research to continue to push boundaries and discover new science.

Using critical racial theory, this paper examines the feeling of self-hatred, the anti-Manchu sentiment, white privilege and brown racism as three variations of popular racial discourse in the post-Mao China. The knowledge of global racial hierarchy was internalized in contemporary Chinese society through a discourse of modernization and people's anxiety of being backward. I also explore the resources for the operation of global racial hierarchy in contemporary China. The tradition of a hierarchical world order as well as the political and economic policy shift under the direction of developmentalism and liberalization since 1980s all contribute to the consolidation of Western hegemony. Intertwining with various popular political and historical, cultural discourses, racial discourse in China is molding the way through which people express their anxiety, frustration and hope in rapid social transformation, as well as their perspectives on the past and future.

This Thesis addresses the meaning, the origins, and the formation of preservation in Isfahan, Iran, in relation to the state’s modernization process. In the course of this narrative the internal and external forces stemming from the interaction and contradiction between local and global values, traditionalism and modernism, their advocates, and the changeful socio-political geography of place within a fast process of urban development will be discussed to answer the question. The findings show that in contrast to the formation of preservation within and through a course of modernism movement in West—although first opposed and then integral to modernism— in Iran, generally, and Isfahan, particularly, this is the preservation’s thought which develops modernism—first integral and then opposed to preservation. The findings suggest that preservation and modernization in Iran interact with each other through three main conduits. These include tomb architecture, industrialization of the city, and the imported modernism mainly through American urban plans. In the case of tomb architecture we observe an interaction between modernization and preservation, while as in the case of other two subjects the contradiction is more dominant. This contradiction, however, as we explore in Pahlavi II founded and developed the theory and practice of preservation in Iran. The focus of the current study is on Isfahan which distinguishes it from other similar studies on Iran.

A systematic legacy system modernizing approach represents a new approach for modernizing legacy systems. Systematic legacy system modernization has software reuse as an integral part of modernization. We have developed a modernization approach which uses software architecture reconstruction to find reusable components within the legacy system. The practice of software development and modernization continues to shift towards the reuse of components from legacy systems to handle the complexities of software development. Modernization of a legacy system requires reuse of software artefacts from legacy system to conserve the business rules and improve the system’s quality attributes. Software reuse is an integral part of our systematic legacy modernization approach. Software should be considered as an asset and reuse of these assets is essential to increase the return on the development costs. Software reuse ranges from reuse of ideas to algorithms to any documents that are created during the software development life cycle. Software reuse has many potential benefits which include increased software quality, and decreased software development cost and time. Demands for lower software production and maintenance costs, faster delivery of systems and increased quality can only be met by widespread and systematic software reuse. In spite of all these benefits software reuse adoption is not widespread in the software development communities. Software reuse cannot possibly become an engineering discipline so long as issues and concerns have not been clearly understood and dealt with. We have conducted two surveys to understand the issues and concerns of software reuse in the Conventional Software Engineering (CSE) Community and the Software Product Line (SPL) Community where reuse is an integral part of the product development. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of our surveys identified the critical factors which affect and inhibit software engineers and developers adopting software reuse. Software reuse has been talked about in generic terms in software product lines. Though software reuse is a core concept in SPL it has however failed to become a standardized practice. The survey conducted on the SPL Community investigates how software reuse is adopted in SPL so as to provide the necessary degree of support for engineering software product line applications and to identify some of the issues and concerns in software reuse. The identified issues and concerns have helped us to understand the difference between software reuse in the CSE and SPL Communities. It has also given us an indication of how both communities can learn good software reuse practices from each other in order to develop a common software reuse process. Based on the outcome of our surveys we have developed a systematic software reuse process, called the Knowledge Based Software Reuse (KBSR) Process, which incorporates a Repository of reusable software assets to build a systematic legacy system modernization approach. Being able to reuse software artefacts, be it software requirement specification, design, or code, would greatly enhance software productivity and reliability. All of these software artefacts can go in the Knowledge Based Software Reuse Repository and be candidates for reuse.

Scholars have tended to frame the rise of neoliberal governance in Guatemala as primarily shaped by the tangled, often contradictory relations between three main actors: multilateral organizations and international financial institutions, the state, and individual and collective subjects of rights. This thesis intends to contribute to the literature by focusing on a social actor that is seldom investigated academically—especially ethnographically—despite the determinant role that it has historically played in the destiny of Guatemala, namely, the oligarchy: an elite group of Guatemalans who by virtue of class position, family networks, and membership in business associations have “ruled since the conquest.” An ethnographic appraisal of elite discourses, attitudes, and practices, as well as an attunement to the affective dimension of elite subjectivities, can generate a better understanding of how historical relations of domination and exclusion in Guatemala are currently being reconfigured. Based on ethnographic research and a series of interviews with a dozen of its leading members in July and August of 2012, this thesis is an inquiry into the contemporary governance project of the Guatemalan oligarchy and the place that it allots to multiculturalism. In this sense, it has three main objectives: firstly, to characterize an increasingly coherent liberal discourse of national development, modernization, and corporate social responsibility emanating from the economic elite’s private foundations, think tanks and business associations. Secondly, it summarily compares this discourse to the general observable trends of capitalist accumulation around new dynamic “axes”: megaprojects (the construction of major infrastructure such as roads and highways, bridges, airports, seaports; as well as call centers, corporate tourism, malls, technological corridors, hydroelectric power plants); the agroindustrial production of mega-monocrops for agrofuels (sugarcane and African oil palm), and; extraction and commercialization of natural resources (minerals, oil, cement), as documented by other analysts. Finally, it examines the current status of multiculturalism and the ascendancy of whiteness within this emergent material and discursive landscape. I have termed this emergent model of neoliberal governance “technocratic philanthrocapitalism.”

Throughout the last century, sports have become more important than ever to individuals around the world. This project seeks to explore and help explain variation in attention to sport among 34 countries in 2007 using two theories about world development coupled with modernization- and globalization-related arguments. The aim is to show how the host of concepts contained within these theories can be used cohesively to help understand world regional and national differences in participation and viewing rates, as well as the motives which drive these forms of attention to sport. The project seeks to push predominant development theories to consider how current attitudes and behaviors in sport can be explained by both world-systems and world polity theories. I find that modernization and world polity processes bolster active participation while shifting and creating a multitude of attitudes about the meanings and functions of sport. World-systems processes constrain participation but contribute to higher visual attention through increased commercialization while simultaneously promoting a paradigm of competitive sport. The interaction between global forces and local settings helps create and maintain unique regional variation in attention to sport due to historical processes of diffusion and exploration. The findings suggest that processes deriving from the global spread of capitalism create opportunities to engage in sport in some regions at the expense of other regions. The analysis suggests a need for increased research and specification of the top-down mechanisms which either enable or restrict participation and visual attention, as well as the shift over time in attitudes towards sport in modern, as compared to modernizing, countries.

This dissertation, "Representing the Natural World: The Uruguayan Novel at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1888-1916)," studies the importance of the natural world in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Uruguayan novel. This study carries out the first critical analysis of the Uruguayan novel of this period using an ecocritical approach and emphasizes the importance of the natural environment with the purpose of caring for and preserving it. I argue that practices that began to be put into use during the time period that this study analyzes are anti-environmental and lead eventually to the full-fledged environmental crisis that we have been experiencing since the 1970s. This dissertation exposes how certain environmental conflicts arise in the various novelistic worlds studied. Each chapter embraces a different perspective in regard to these environmentally-based conflicts: struggle for independence, urban/rural conflicts, relationship between characters and the natural world, and how the natural world affects characters' psychological development. The pioneering work of Lawrence Buell in his The Environmental Imagination (1995) figures prominently as a theoretical basis for this study, but is complemented both by the environmentally-conscious work of Eduardo Galeano and by the work of various North American ecocritical theorists. This dissertation finds that the Uruguayan novel from the time period indicated is highly pertinent to the theme of the natural environment and that the natural world appears in a number of different forms in the four novels that this study explores. This study contributes to the already great body of ecocritical writing by exploring a specific facet of Latin American literature, the Uruguayan novel, in environmental terms.

China's post-1978 educational reform was born by and into an era of transformation. Given a historical background where modernization leads the principle of all kinds of reform, the Chinese educational system is found to be problematic in the country's struggle of a balance between economic growth and social equality. Upon using basic a historical methodology of Change over Time, the thesis examines the dilemma "between a socialist egalitarian model and a liberal competitive model" from a perspective that takes chronological and spatial transition into consideration. By placing the ongoing educational reform into two theoretical frameworks, namely isomorphism and modernization, the research tries to demonstrate the inevitability of a series of institutional changes that provide both opportunities and threats to the limited social mobility of the world's largest migrating population. The thesis concludes by assuming that although it undergoes many controversies and disputes, the educational reform is exploring a way to satisfy migrants in a particular Chinese manner.

This dissertation is based on 26 months, between 2007 and 2010, of official noncontinuous ethnographic fieldwork in real estate development in Kazakhstan. During this time, I investigated the institutionalization of new housing "dreamworlds" and new modes of being urban in relation to the practices of government bureaucracy, the practices of the construction industry, and the housing strategies of residents. Even before the commencement of my fieldwork, I had personally socialized with people who moved into and made their homes in the newly built housing complexes of Astana. Drawing on my participant observations, research, and personal engagements with policy-makers, businessmen, and residents, I have written what can be called an anthropology of the boom (an exploration into the socio-economic conditions and forces behind the recent housing boom in Kazakhstan) an anthropology of the emergence of a new material environment, as well as an anthropology of the new social configurations and normative framework arising from the new material conditions. I have also followed some of the institutional developments that took place during the period of my fieldwork and earlier - during the "boom" period of the first decade of the 21st century. These developments chiefly include the planning and building of the new capital, Astana, the housing boom and post-crisis management of the construction, the rise and fall of construction companies, and the trajectories of state housing policies of that period. After the financial crisis of 2008, much like the United States and countries in Europe, the state in Kazakhstan also had to deal with the excesses of the boom period having to play a particular role in mitigating the financial crisis - bailing out banks, companies, and individual home owners threatened by bankruptcy and foreclosure. The necessity to design effective yet socially acceptable anti-crisis policies opened up the political space in unexpected ways: during the recent crisis, questions of "moral economy," moral legitimation of wealth, social value and social needs have been creeping back into the public discourse. Put bluntly, in a time of crisis, somebody has to lose, and often it is up to politics to assign moral blame and decide who should lose.

Modern Persian literature has created a number of remarkable works that have had great influence on most middle class people in Iran. Further, it has had representation of individuals in a political context. Coming out of a political and discursive break in the late nineteenth century, modern literature began to adopt European genres, styles and techniques. Avoiding the traditional discourses, then, became one of the primary characteristics of modern Persian literature; as such, it became closely tied to political ideologies. Remarking itself by the political agendas, modern literature in Iran hence became less an artistic source of expression and more as an interpretation of political situations. Moreover, engaging with the political discourse caused the literature to disconnect itself from old discourses, namely Islamism and nationalism, and from people with dissimilar beliefs. Disconnectedness was already part of Iranian culture, politics, discourses and, therefore, literature. However, instead of helping society to create a meta-narrative that would embrace all discourses within one national image, modern literature produced more gaps. Historically, there had been three literary movements before the modernization process began in the late nineteenth century. Each of these movements had its own separate discourse and historiography, failing altogether to provide people with one single image of a nation. Throughout the centuries, people of this land have called themselves Iranian; however, the image that they conjured from this word has never been the same. The various images have had social aspects as well that all together have created several layers of disconnectedness.Modern literature, as the fourth movement, borrowed its discourse from Europeans. The historiography that it offered was also adopted from the European discourse of modernity. Unable to compromise with others, or to create an Iranian discourse of modernity, the modern movement eventually added yet another layer of disconnectedness.By contradicting other narratives, modern literature reflects a new narrative identity that, by distorting the historical knowledge, tries to refigure the history of Iran through a so called universal history borrowed from Europeans. This narrative in every respect is speculative and without inquiry into the conditions of possibility. What is important here is the paradigm of universal time under the European historiography that refers back to the universe of narrative structure, or rather part of the universe that depicts ‘us’ – Iranians- as a backward country or culture. The modern Persian narrative identity then is confused, because it denies the past and wants to refigure the future based on the European past. Narrative time, under this situation, could not match with historical time and old narrative identities, which were also broken in turn. With disconnectedness and the broken narrative identity, modern Persian literature has created novels that have been written in a political framework with particular motifs. Some writers and critics have mentioned these problems; however they have rarely attempted to examine the discourses in which these works are formed. This dissertation attempts to analyze the problematic aspects of the discourse of modern Persian literature, and the disconnectedness that was added to Iranian culture by its influence.

This thesis explores the relationship between the rhetoric of Southern reformers and the technology being adopted across South Carolina and Georgia at the end of the 19th century. The ideology of the New South, one that juxtaposed modern industry and old traditions, was fundamentally shortsighted in its failure to recognize how new technology would alter Southern institutions. Electric lights and power were widely viewed as neutral tools the South could employ to compete with Northern critics and achieve widespread hopes for modern prosperity. Because of this understanding of technology, one that is epitomized in the fanfare and optimism of the Chicago and Atlanta world's fairs, Southern reformers were sanguine about employing electricity in mills and towns throughout the South without consideration for the cultural costs. By examining the language of the participants (New South boosters and industrialists) we might understand how and why, in a region and period painted as being acutely concerned with preserving cultural institutions, the changes in Southern life that technology would bring went largely unanticipated. To accomplish this, this study focuses primarily on the technological developments associated with the textile industry in the South Carolina upstate.

Abstract: This research examines how religious and supernatural beliefs have changed with the rapid modernization and increased standard of modern, scientific education in Tainan, Taiwan. Participants in my project were between the ages of 20-40, had at least some post secondary education, and were from Tainan or had lived in Tainan for a significant amount of time. Tainan, a city of over 750,000 people, is one of Taiwan’s oldest cities and is a traditional cultural stronghold. Through a look at beliefs about and experiences with Taiwanese ghosts, gods and ancestors, I explore how modernization has affected beliefs about the supernatural for young adults in Taiwan who are struggling to balance their filial obligation to honor what has been passed down for generations and preserve what makes their culture unique with their desire to be seen as modern and progressive in the global arena of transnational cultural flows.

This dissertation undertakes an evaluation of electronic government in a developing country using a Stages Model approach. The intellectual traditions of communication for development and technological determinism perspectives are employed to assess the implementation of e-government, a transformational resource for the advancement of government-citizen relations made possible by advances in information and communication technologies that have gained prominence in the last two decades. Governments around the world have adopted the use of information and communication technologies as a means of transforming the delivery of services and access to information for citizens. Electronic government, the use by government agencies of information technologies that have the ability to transform relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government, has become a critical tool toward this end. However, the progress and outcomes of the implementation of e-government in developing countries has not been adequately studied. This study uses content analysis to examine websites established by Kenya government's 46 ministries in Kenya and evaluates their performance using a four-stage model framework. The framework builds on existing e-government literature and utilizes 35 different content measures to evaluate information content, transaction, horizontal integration and vertical integration attributes of government ministry websites. The research was conducted between June and July of 2009. The content coding instrument used in the study is the Web Attribute Evaluation System developed by the Cyberspace Policy Research Group. The study reviews relevant e-government literature for evaluating Web sites worldwide, discusses sample selection, methodology, theoretical framework, findings, and recommendations. The content and attributes of ministry websites are compared across different e-government stages and ministries grouped into functional categories. The central analysis of these data is to evaluate the claim that access to information and transaction attributes provided by e-government will improve the relations between government and citizens by enhancing the quality and convenience of services delivery. This dissertation puts forth two major findings: that government ministries have adopted online communication as one of the main resources for delivery of services, achieved by posting online some level of information, enabling communication and interaction online, and are at varying stages of e-government development. Secondly, the data set confirmed the Layne and Lee Stages model prediction that e-government tended to grow progressively from the information (Catalogue) Stage towards higher Stages. The study showed higher scores at the Catalogue stage for all ministries than at all the other stages.

In 2007 the World Bank released the World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development signifying a reinvigorated interest in sub-Saharan Africa‟s agricultural crisis (World Bank 2007). As part of the debate, frenzied calls were made for more fertilizer application, better technology and water irrigation in the agricultural sector. Within this debate, communal forms of land tenure were faulted for causing tenure insecurity, inhibiting land collateralization, and frustrating agricultural investment and ultimately agricultural productivity. Using data from Tanzania and Uganda this thesis critiques the terms of this debate and the premises upon which a link is made between communal forms of land tenure and agricultural failure. The major point of departure for this thesis arises from the ways in which historical and political dimensions of the agricultural crisis are absent within current efforts aimed at resolving the agricultural crisis, which have dissolution of communal land tenures at their center. I argue it is through the historical experience of Tanzania and Uganda that there has emerged a social and political institutional apparatus that has led to a pro-export and anti-food crop agricultural regime; an agricultural dualism that has favored export crops over food crops. This agricultural dualism, I show, is an outcome of transformation in social and political relations at national and local levels, themselves outcomes of how nation states are embedded within the larger global economy. In order to demonstrate the ways in which political and social transformation have contributed to this agricultural dualism, I will situate land use and agricultural production historically, making specific reference to how social relations and political power have shaped how land is owned and used in Tanzania and Uganda. In addition, by situating their land tenure and land use historically I will expose the institutional, political and social context that contributes to anti-domestic food crop on one hand and pro-agricultural exports on the other. Ultimately, I transcend the simple and quick technological solutions advocated by modernists and to privilege sociological tools in understanding and resolving the crisis in the agricultural and food systems of Tanzania and Uganda.

Since the 1980s, Brazil has had the highest rate of c-sections in the world. While existing research has provided a number of factors for contextualizing the phenomenon,this research argues that the high rates of c-sections could be due to connections between the history, geography, and culture of the Brazilian nation, especially in regards to notions of modernity, development, and what it means to be Brazilian. This research adheres to a critical theory approach to qualitative methodology, using interviews and ethnographic field notes to analyze the data within a context of larger economic, political, cultural, and ideological structures. Findings present implications for birth procedures in Brazil, and globally in the face of climbing c-section rates.

Albert Baldwin Wood and his screw pumps modernized New Orleans by bringing flood-free streets and cleaner water to the city while providing the potential for growth by pumping swamp lands dry. While Wood was never part of the local Progressive movement, his work with the pumps fit with Progressive initiatives for modernization. At first, the screw pumps removed rain water from the streets. Then New Orleans expanded the drainage to include sewerage removal and water purification. The pumps successfully drained thousands of acres of land once considered uninhabitable swamp land. This additional land extended New Orleans city limits but also aided in the acceleration of residential segregation. Cities from around the world used the designs for the screw pump and consulted Wood for advice on drainage systems.