Browsing by Author "Ridge, Patrick Thomas"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    El hambre en el cine cubano del Período Especial
    Jaime Castillo, Joana (Virginia Tech, 2021-10-06)
    This thesis examines the trope of hunger in Cuban cinema produced during the socio-economic context known as the Special Period. Films selected for this discussion are Fresa y chocolate (1993) by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío, and El Rey de La Habana (2015) by Agustí Villaronga. Focused on the analysis of the trope of hunger, this study offers a summary of the Cuban cultural manifestations of the last decades that have addressed the issue of hunger as well as a brief historical context that allows us to understand the development of this trope from 1960 to the present. Focused on the aforementioned films, this study has observed the aesthetic and stylistic particularities used in filmic representations to convey the island's shortcomings. The thesis demonstrates the existence of two main famines within Cuban society: cultural hunger and physiological hunger. Cultural hunger is studied in Fresa y chocolate as a direct consequence of the cultural control of the repressive ideological apparatus implanted in the sixties. The analysis of El Rey de la Habana shows how physiological hunger builds a marginal and abject subject, unable to escape the vicious circle that society has imposed on him.
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    Fútbol, Politics, and Corruption
    Orjales, Andres Penovi (Virginia Tech, 2020-06-18)
    This thesis explores how football (soccer) is used as a tool to promote corruption within political and economic institutions in Latin America and Europe. By drawing on international political and economic policies and analyzing work that theorizes how neoliberalism is not only an outside force that highly influences the state, but also shapes power relationships in society that are procreated by every day economic actions of the working class, this research aims to provide a more theoretically informed perspective on global politics. This thesis also examines how entrepreneurial endeavors can lead to relations of exploitation, extraction and economic dispossession in broader political society. More specifically, it analyses neoliberalism in Argentina and Germany through the perspective of state power, informal economies, and international migration. Lastly, this research portrays the mindset of Argentine and German politicians over the last century by analyzing the actions of the elites within the football clubs and organizations under the guise of entrepreneurship.
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    Regional variation of mood use in Spanish: A comparison among three Spanish-speaking regions
    Tort-Ranson, Silvia Beatriz (Virginia Tech, 2024-09-24)
    The current investigation is framed within variationist sociolinguistics, an area of study that examines how language varies and is influenced by linguistic and extralinguistic factors. Variationist research has reported that the use of verbal moods (the subjunctive and indicative) in Spanish is variable. One of the reasons for this variation appears to be a centuries-long process of language change, during which the subjunctive mood seemed to show a decline in favor of the indicative mood. Considering this gradual process of change, various investigations have examined how sociolinguistic factors condition variability in Spanish, focusing their analyses on different Spanish-speaking regions. To contribute to the understanding of mood variation in Spanish, this study explored a range of sociolinguistic factors across three Spanish-speaking regions (Rosario, Argentina; Barcelona, Spain; and Seville, Spain) by means of a conceptual replication of Gudmestad (2021), which studied variable mood use in Spanish across three regions (Quito, Ecuador; Mérida, Mexico; and Seville, Spain). The current study's participant pool (N = 107) consisted of Spanish speakers—men and women over 18 years old—residing in the three aforementioned metropolitan areas, who had lived in the same location for at least 15 years at the moment of the data collection. The data were collected via a written clause-elicitation task, with the purpose of having enough verbal-mood contexts to analyze, and a background questionnaire with basic demographic information. The results suggested that there was geographical variation of mood use, which reinforced the original study's findings on regional variation of mood use. Like Gudmestad (2021), the patterns of verbal moods with individual governors (e.g., preferir que 'to prefer that'), semantic category, and time reference diverged across the regions. The examination of gender and individual participants also pointed to a possible connection between these factors and variable mood use across regions. These findings indicate that the envelopes of variation of mood use may be diverse across the regions under investigation, which suggests that different geographical regions may have slightly distinct grammars.