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Browsing by Author "Arnold, Linda J."

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Decolonizing Democratic Hegemony: The Indigenous Movement and Democratization in Ecuador
    Bowen, James David (Virginia Tech, 2002-04-29)
    This thesis examines the role of the indigenous movement in Ecuador on the ongoing process of democratization in that country. My study demonstrates that a comprehensive social movement such as Ecuador's indigenous movement has great potential for having a positive impact on democracy. However, these movements are not without their shortcomings which are clearly demonstrated by some of the actions of CONAIE. This study also points out several factors which are crucial in determining social movements' effect on democracy.
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    Environmetal Education in Mexico: A Content Analysis of Primary School Textbooks
    Razzino, Marianne Pauline (Virginia Tech, 2003-05-01)
    The focus of this study is change in environmental content in Mexican primary school textbooks before and after the decentralization of public education in 1993. The literature review in the opening chapter gives the background information on environmental education, internationally and in Mexico. The authors mention and discuss the major groups involved in the development and initiation of programs and curriculum such as the UNESCO, Man and the Biosphere (MAB), and the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD). The gradual Mexican ownership of the environmental cause and the promotion of awareness in Mexico lead to the main part of the study. This study employs both manifest and latent content analysis to find trends and themes in the textbooks. The primary focus of the manifest content analysis is individual words while the latent content analysis stresses excerpts and images from the textbooks. The use of an Excel database and PivotTables generated by Excel to correlate data indicates areas to examine for differences in content between the textbooks. In addition, the use of the two forms of analysis provides validation and significance when the data agree. The final portion of the study offers some general conclusions for the analysis and a summary of how the environmental content has increased in the primary school textbooks over the period studied. There are also suggestions for future research on the content of textbooks, surveys of environmental knowledge and attitudes, and alternatives to the formal education implied by the use of textbooks in the classroom.
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    Ethno-nationalism and the Spanish state: a comparison of three regions in Spain
    Albers, Andrew D. (Virginia Tech, 1992-12-05)
    Modernization theory hypothesizes that ethnicity and ethnic activism will diffuse and dissipate following industrialization because in industrial economies class will replace ethnicity as the basis for individual and group identity. However, the persistence of ethnic activism, including autonomist and separatist movements in Western European countries. challenges the validity of that hypothesis. Equally significant, many attempts, historical and contemporary, to suppress ethnicity and ethnic activism have failed. Neither class consciousness nor nationalist consciousness has transcended or displaced ethnic and regional identity. Such is the case for Spain. This study attempts to show that suppressive action by the state, not change in the economy, is the independent variable that explains contemporary ethnicity and ethnic activism. Suppressive action is defined as any policy, repression, or other activity by the state aimed at suppressing ethnic identity and autonomy.
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    Face Paint & Feathers: Ethnic Identity as Symbolic Resource in the Indigenous Movement of Ecuador
    McCloud, Jennifer Sink (Virginia Tech, 2005-12-02)
    The indigenous of the Amazon region of Ecuador unite against the petroleum industry and destructive resource extraction practices in order to preserve environment and indigenous cultures. Since the 1990s, the indigenous movement of Ecuador has played out in the international arena and become a transnational movement, which includes social actors from the international legal, human rights, and environmental communities. This transnational movement exemplifies identity politics through the projection of ethnicity and essentialized signifiers of indigenousness. Indigenous actors, Ecuadoran nongovernmental organizations, international filmmakers, and US nongovernmental organizations all use ethnic identity and signifiers via documentaries and cyberspace as symbolic resources to represent the movement. This thesis explores the intersection of external actors (international community of filmmakers and NGOs) and internal actors' (the indigenous themselves and Ecuadoran NGOs) projection of ethnicity as symbolic resource. Utilizing resource mobilization theory and new social movement theory as a syncretic to understand the movement and theoretical contributions of identity and representation to explore the process of mobilization, the study explores the question of ethnic identity as symbolic resource in four documentaries and on fifteen websites. The discourse analysis of the four documentaries and content analysis of the fifteen websites illustrate that there is consistency in the message within the transnational social movement community of actors who strive to work for and on behalf of the indigenous of the Ecuadoran Amazon.
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    Imagined Contested Spaces: The Imaging of the Patagonian Region (1840-1881)
    Magoia, Rosana Cecilia (Virginia Tech, 2006-09-22)
    This study underscores the importance of press discourse as means of production and circulation of representations regarding land and people. Considering the press has a strong influence on the construction of social imaginaries, this study explores how textual images in The (London) Times and The New York Times shaped public opinion about Patagonia and Patagonians and how those images relate to the United States and British national and international political agendas and to the historical/cultural context. In other words, this study proposes to analyze the relationship between media and agency. The time period under study is the second half of the nineteenth century the era during which Argentina focused on the need for exercising sovereignty over Patagonia as a way of expanding the state's frontier, incorporating new commercially productive lands to respond to the demands of the international market, contesting in this way the Chilean interests in the area, and responding to the demands of the aspirations of a ruling class "landed aristocrats" who wanted to attract Europeans. The analysis of this research draws on a total number of 669 articles which have been coded with the purpose of assessing the differences between the United States and British imaging of Patagonia and Patagonians, taking into consideration that England was directly linked through financial investment to Argentina while the United States had chosen a military policy to expand its control of western lands (1865-1890), similar to the Argentine policy for controlling northern and southern lands.
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    Search Tool Implementation for Historical Archive
    Scarborough, Mike; Fox, Edward A.; Arnold, Linda J. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2004)
    Dr. Linda Arnold's archival project "Mexican-American War and the Media" is an underutilized resource. Providing contrasting primary sources on the War, it is the only archive of its kind. In order to make the archive's massive amount of information more accessible to researchers and students, I added search functionality to the site. Several tools were implemented and tested. Perlfect, a Perl-based open-source approach, was determined to be the best option. This report includes an outline of the steps taken to implement the search tool, a user's manual, a developer's manual, and options for future work. The archive may be accessed at http://www.majbill.vt.edu/history/mxamwar/index.htm.
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    "We have everything and we have nothing": Empleados and Middle-Class Identities in Bogotá, Colombia: 1930-1955
    Lopez, Abel R. (Virginia Tech, 2001-04-27)
    No class has created more controversy than the middle class and nowhere has it produced more controversy than in Latin America. No class has been so poorly understood. No class has been so weakly analyzed in historical terms. Moreover, no class has had so many preconceptions and "myths" attached to it. I try to fill this historiographic gap by looking at the construction of empleado identities, as a part of the middle class, between the 1930s and the 1950s in Bogotá, Colombia. By using a diversity of primary sources - diaries, empleado handbooks, manuals, employment forms, historical statistics, government publications, personal archives, oral history and a set of novels - this thesis attempts to look at how empleado identities were "made" by means of the combination of the historical structures and the experiences lived at the very center of daily life.