Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Manufacturing Legitimacy: A Critical Theory Of Election News Coverage, Gabriel N. Elias

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

To what degree does instrumental reason influence election news coverage? Using Habermas's understanding of system/life-world as a heuristic, I map the rationalization process of political communication. This illuminates the institutional logics at play in the field of politics and the field of journalism, and the way the social dynamics between them enable the framing of political life as a strategic game. This understanding is then contextualized within an analysis of the media frames that informed the Canadian federal election of 2011. I find that news coverage does tend to focus on political strategy; but this is not wholly at the …

The Quest For Territorial Autonomy: Mapuche Political Identities Under Neoliberal Multiculturalism In Argentina, Lucas Savino

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In the context of neoliberal multiculturalism, indigenous activists face a fundamental dilemma. While they organize as indigenous peoples to negotiate and demand from states new terms of citizenship, activists recognize that new forms of accommodation for such demands exist within state institutions. However, indigenous organizations also discover that certain demands exceed these new spaces of participation. I argue that territorial autonomy is one such demand because it challenges the existing power imbalances between indigenous peoples and the state.

Not surprisingly, territorial autonomy is a common feature of many emerging forms of indigenous activism in contemporary Latin America. Based on new …

Fluid Identities: Toward A Critical Security Of Water, Cameron Harrington

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Water wars are coming! Water is the defining security threat of the 21st century! The future belongs to the water-rich! These types of warnings are frequently proclaimed, urging attention to looming water conflict, which will occur as stores of freshwater diminish in both quality and quantity. Yet the issue of water security is far more complex than as an inevitable source of future violent conflict. Water is a central component to all aspects of life and planetary health and thus it contains within it a multiplicity of social and political meanings, pivotal to our understandings of security. This dissertation begins …

Regional Organization And The Dynamics Of Inter-Municipal Cooperation, Zachary Spicer

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the institution of city-county separation in Ontario. City-county separation was the original form of municipal organization in the province, introduced as a method of distinguishing between urban and rural areas by politically separating one from the other. Over time, this practice lost ground to institutions such as regional government, which sought to connect urban and rural areas. Despite this institutional shift, 18 cities and towns in Ontario remain separated from their counties, establishing a situation where some of the province’s most populous communities lack institutional linkages to their surrounding rural municipalities.

Exploring four different thematic areas – …

Life Beyond Politics: Toward The Notion Of The Unpolitical, Inna Viriasova

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study presents a critique of post-foundational political thought, suggesting that it lacks a positive account of the unpolitical, of a radical outside of politics. I argue that political thought that oscillates around the distinction between “politics” and “the political” is correlationist and totalizing, resulting in the forgetting of its “Great Outdoors.” This critique is advanced through a close analysis of texts by Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. Against this background stand out Massimo Cacciari's and Roberto Esposito's categories of “the impolitical,” and Giorgio Agamben's notion of “bare life.” “The impolitical” is positively …