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This dissertation presents an ethnographic analysis of tipping in the restaurant sector of The Hamptons of Long Island, New York. Taking the form of a full participant insider ethnography, the research is based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with co-workers and in-role observations. The research took place in a small restaurant (under fifty employees) that served casual and moderately priced food and drink. The ethnographic research offers access to the processes of subjectivity formation, as well as to the economic relations produced by tipping. Tipping is a technique of labour control particularly suited to the neoliberal political economy. In this study neoliberalism is understood as a series of political, economic, and ideological practices that centre around individual and entrepreneurial freedoms, pure market logic, and consumerism. Those economic relations produce governable subjectivities for capital by making workers complicit in their own domination. This is done through a process of mobilization at the site of the server, whereby servers: 1) internalize a neoliberal logic and self-commodify; 2) are incentivized by the potential of working for tips; and 3) are informalized and individualized within their work and wage relations. Tipped workers are subject to a sub-minimum wage, which at the federal level is as low as $2.13 per hour. Some workers benefit from the tipped-wage system more than others, and those nearer to the top maintain the inequality and exploitation of this system as a whole. Tipping is both a post-Fordist technology that relieves capitalist companies from paying wages in full, and a neo-feudal master/servant relation of unequal dignity. That contradiction forces workers into an asymmetric relation outside of market neutrality. Tipping reinforces the hierarchies of class, gender, and race, and constructs an embodied labour that requires a sexualised selling of the self.

In recent years, the rise of right-wing populism and post-truth politics has created a dangerous cocktail, enabling 'immigration' and 'anti-racism' to be framed within dominant political and media coverage in such a way that it stigmatises and marginalises foreign nationals migrating to the United Kingdom, replicating social injustice. Several activist groups within the broader anti-racist movement are engaging in contemporary forms of video activism alongside protest action to resist and challenge these frames and framing processes. This thesis makes the necessary four-way theoretical and methodological links between hegemony, qualitative frame analysis, video activism and knowledge production to explore the ways in which dominant framings of immigration are resisted by the broader anti-racist movement. Using a broad framework combining film theory/studies and cinematography, the analysis of the visual strategies employed by eight activist groups within this movement within video activist footage disseminated on YouTube and Facebook provides unique insights into the groups themselves, and the various stylistic, shot, angling, sound and editing strategies employed that open up opportunities for framing. A further qualitative, and discursive, frame analysis explores the various frames that are used by the groups through video activism itself; persecution, hardship, heroism, empowerment, incompetence and anti-racism; producing different new knowledges surrounding organisational knowledges of the movement (including collective identity), social injustice in general, dominant hegemonic narratives, and, most importantly, the struggles of migrants and refugees. In doing so, it makes significant contribution to knowledge by proposing three unique typologies to demonstrate how the contemporary hegemonic post-truth narratives surrounding immigration can be, and are being, resisted in order to reinforce social justice.

Now as in the past, White, middle-class men in Britain, despite their numerical minority status, are over-represented in positions of power. The normative discourses of Whiteness, masculinity, and middle-classness have provided them the freedom to perform their identities 'unremarked upon' and afforded them intersectional privilege. However, the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo campaigns have shone a critical light on the day-to-day cultural practices of White, middle-class men and cast them as unacceptable. Consequently, the invisibility of their intersectional privilege is being eroded and the hegemonic social conditions their normativity creates are being challenged. This thesis seeks to understand how White, middle-class men are responding to these challenges and their new-found visibility. The existing scholarship on privilege theorises that privilege is maintained through its invisibility and by hegemonic discourses' ability to adapt in changing social contexts. As such, existing accounts do not reveal how privilege responds when it is made visible. To resolve this problem, drawing on Foucault's and Butler's theories of subjectification, identity, and agency, whilst working with the literature on Whiteness, masculinity, class, and privilege, I develop a framework that identifies talk as the site of enquiry and provides for the examination of how White, middle-class masculine subjects agentively respond to this critical visibility. These processes are explored through qualitative sociological research involving 37 'conversations' with 19 respondents representing a range of ages, professions, and levels of income and education across 29 social settings over a 6-month period. The study reveals that in conversation with each other White, middle-class men agentively articulate 'strategies of signification' in their talk about race, gender, and class that work to reconstitute their normativity, despite their visibility, and reinforce existing social hierarchies. They do this in ways that re-establish the acceptability of their identities without necessitating any change in behaviour or relinquishing their privilege.

The purpose of this study is to enhance our understanding of Chinese moral education reforms under the scope of Xi Jinping's 'New Era' national reforms. It does this through examining the relationship between the prescribed expectations and lived realisations of moral education reform within the compulsory moral education class (deyu) in Mainland Chinese primary schools. This research adopts a constructivist and grounded theory epistemological perspective. Theoretically, it draws upon cross-cultural theories of moral education, socio-political philosophy, cultural hegemony, and moral philosophy. The research methodology utilises a mixed methods approach to critically analyse the current state of moral education and its socio-political implications. Methodologies used include autoethnography, critical discourse analysis, semi-structured qualitative interviews, and quantitative surveys. It was originally assumed that there would be a prominent disparity between the prescribed expectations and lived realisations of moral education reform due to vague official policies that included few details regarding implementation or assessment measures. This research found this to be true, but also found that the functional role of moral education reforms extends far beyond the classroom. The effect of this was that moral education not only passively facilitates social change, but actively produces social change. This thesis suggests that moral education is a driving force in an ideological policy feedback loop that reproduces cultural hegemony and ruling Party legitimacy. By highlighting the integral role of moral education within ongoing socio-political transformations in contemporary Chinese society, this thesis argues that moral education is a driving force for Chinese 21st century 'New Era' development.

This dissertation is focused on the praxis of a group of European left parties in the 1990s and 2000s. This study proposes an original contribution to the investigation of the role of the ideas of democracy and sovereignty in the praxis of communist parties from Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and the Euro-parliamentary group GUE/NGL. The PRC, the PCE/IU, and the PCP alongside the GUE/NGL and the PEL constitutes the subjects of the European left in this dissertation. Based on an exclusive documental collection, interviews, and literature, this dissertation adopts a multimethod approach to discuss theoretical perspectives on the concepts of sovereignty and democracy in the European relation of political forces. The contemporary history of the European left is analysed in order to observe how these political parties were able to develop a transnational cooperation around the GUE/NGL after a succession of defeats, which indicates that ideological transformations preceded the praxis in the 1990s. In relation to the development of the EU, subaltern and late integration marked the ways Italy, Spain, and Portugal composed the single market. As argued by the main literature in the field, the European left is understood as a synthesis of multiple forces and an instance of cooperation in the European Union, what is not an excess of pragmatism in opposition to their theory, but to their constitutive praxis. From a Gramscian perspective, it is suggested that the lack of a hegemonic project was substituted by a neo-Keynesian approach at the national and transnational levels, and therefore universal democracy became the central strategy of the radical and the European left as part of a limited notion of the sovereignty of the capitalist state. Some radicalism was present when the 2008 crisis erupted in Europe, however the analysis of the praxis of these left-wing forces in the 2000s suggests that the institutional approach and the lack of a consistent strategy prevented the emergence of radical democratic transformations.

This is a study of how the three powers which dominated Sicily in the period 410-70 BC - Carthage, the various rulers of Syracuse, and eventually, Rome - exercised political power over the weaker Sicilian polities and peoples. The aim is to understand whether any of these 'supremacies' qualified as 'empires', as defined by interference with local autonomy; when powers respected local autonomy, we use the term 'hegemony' instead. These categories frequently correspond to the Weberian ideal types of rational-legal and charismatic authority respectively, which are used as tools for explaining the basis of imperial and hegemonic power. Chapter 1 considers rational-legal authority, and demonstrates that while Carthage and Rome developed institutional frameworks to cement their positions over time, there is little evidence (with a few exceptions) that the Syracusan rulers did the same. The next three chapters turn to consider more hegemonic strategies. Chapter 2 looks at economic supremacy - the control or appropriation of material resources at the expense of other powers - which, it is argued, was primarily achieved through harbour dues and the issuing of coinage. Chapter 3 considers the charismatic authority of individual potentates: the Syracusan tyrants themselves, and the generals acting on behalf of Carthage and Rome. Chapter 4 looks at demographic strategies, including population movements and ideology. Chapter 5 takes a slightly different approach, using two Greek poleis, Akragas and Messana, as case studies to explore how hegemony and empire worked 'on the ground'. I conclude that while the rulers of Syracuse primarily used charismatic, hegemonic strategies, and the state powers of Carthage and Rome developed rational-legal frameworks over time, the latter two also used hegemonic methods alongside these imperial strategies. Informal, hegemonic strategies were thus fundamental to political supremacy in late Classical and Hellenistic Sicily.

This thesis examines the economic relationship between the United States and Latin America during the presidencies of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. It argues that U.S. trade and commercial policy sought to create a closer and more equal partnership with Latin American nations and throughout the Western Hemisphere. This thesis provides an original contribution to knowledge as it moves away from existing histories where the dominant consensus is that of imperialism and the desire to expand the American empire. Instead, it explores the potential for partnership and relations based on common interests. Latin America is a particularly significant region to consider as the relationship between the United States and Latin America was not always cordial and in some cases could be described as tempestuous. McKinley and Roosevelt advocated military intervention when U.S. interests were threatened, a foreign policy that enhanced U.S. power in the Western Hemisphere but alienated the U.S. from sister republics. As a consequence, the State Department sought to realign relations and build rapport with the people of Latin America. This thesis considers three key diplomatic conferences on inter-American trade, commerce, and infrastructure from the perspective of the United States in order to indicate the intentions of U.S. foreign policy in the region. The use of these conferences as a tool for determining intentions presents a unique aspect of study in the history of U.S.-Latin American relations. The content of these conferences allows for a further deliberation of methods of communication, tariffs, debts, and reciprocity, and how these were used as diplomatic tools in U.S. foreign policy. Investigating economic policy also facilitates new perspectives on American material interests and the idea of empire. This thesis explains how the United States could remain economically dominant in the Western Hemisphere and share political power.

While the English-language cultural response to the Troubles in Northern Ireland is well studied, French representations of the conflict have so far gone unobserved. This thesis aims to address this critical omission by examining examples of the most numerous and commercially successful of such responses while the conflict was ongoing: the Troubles thriller. Thrillers on Irish matters are part of the virtually inexhaustible output of thrillers and crime fiction published from the 1960s to 1990s by popular publishers in France. Thrillers on the Troubles featured in several of the genre's most popular series and are an ideal platform to observe French acculturation of the Troubles subject matter and Northern Irish setting during this period. These representations did not come into existence ex nihilo, but are a further iteration of a long-standing French interest in Ireland, Irish domestic affairs, and the "Irish Question". Their representations are therefore examined in light of prior cultural productions as well as contemporary news coverage of the conflict. To facilitate this study, a "French Troubles fiction corpus" was created. Many of these thrillers share features and representational commonalities with the larger English-language oeuvre, replicating common understandings (and misunderstandings) about the Troubles. Using a Marxian-Gramscian framework to explore the range of political discourses, both conservative and revolutionary, present in the corpus, this study charts how French thrillers deterritorialised the conflict and presented the Troubles through the lens of domestic French concerns. The theme of the Troubles thus becomes a lens through which diverse topics as Western and European sovereignty, French post-colonial identity, capitalism, socialism and revolution, nationalism and national identity are all explored. The corpus provides a cross-section of the spy thriller genre at large in France. Through it we can also witness attempts at renewal of the genre in light of political and social vicissitudes that threatened its already fragile standing. Conservative genre stalwarts are seen to give way over time to newer types of protagonists whose heroism is not through rank, standing, or genetics, but derived explicitly from a dialectical relationship with the state. These new post-ideological forms of heroism are examined here through the lens of a Hegelian dialectic of the Spirit. Later works also demonstrate further diversification of the Troubles theme. A reading of these novels informed by the Hegelian notion of Widerspruch reveals the use of the Northern Irish setting as one of acute crisis that makes possible interrogation of identity, freedom and reality. The French Troubles fiction corpus created for this study also reveals an evolution of the subject matter after the conflict's end, indicating an alteration in the French apprehension of the Troubles and contemporary Northern Ireland. This project prompts further study of a cultural phenomenon whose representational forms shift continually as new works are produced and whose story is not yet over.

This thesis analyses the process of construction of hegemony in the Spanish-language publishing world in the 1960s. It compares the book industries of Spain and Mexico to understand how the Spanish rather than the Mexican industry established itself as the main one of their shared language. The empirical research design consisted of interviews, historical sociology, bibliographical and archival research, and cultural, social, and political analysis. The context thus compared is one in which a group of outstanding authors and other actors, such as an editor and a literary agent, fully exercised their agency within their particular circumstances, often going against and beyond them. For the first time in history, Spain's publishing industry made it possible, mostly from Barcelona, for a small group of Latin American authors to become professional writers and for their work to reach international audiences and be translated into different languages. This set of events became known as the "Latin American Boom." This study's empirical findings include that the Boom authors opted to face censorship under the Franco regime in Spain, rather than aiming to develop their literary careers in the precarious, inefficient publishing systems in place in Latin America at the time. This work draws on Laclau and Mouffe's theory to build the argument that diverse factors - namely: Colonial history, cultural public policies and industrial models, networking among social actors, and authors' agency of professionalisation - articulated to establish the hegemony of Spain's book industry. In doing so, this dissertation engages with two theoretical debates: those of hegemony construction and that of whether hegemony belongs solely to the realm of national societies or whether it could be built globally. This dissertation, therefore, contributes to the sociology of culture and publishing by revealing how the construction of cultural hegemony worked in the Latin American Boom phenomenon.

This thesis investigates how networked hierarchies structure global and regional orders. This question unfolds in a twin research problem, which requires a combined solution. Firstly, it raises the question of how international hierarchies and international orders relate. Secondly, it inquires how global and regional orders connect and shape one another. Answering these questions, I contend, entails recasting both problems as part of the same relational ontology. I propose that both international orders and interstate hierarchies should be understood as social networks and that their formation and transformation is connected and shaped through a network of hierarchical relations among sovereign states. International hierarchies contain a vertical logic of mobilization that structures the production of international orders. Conceiving hierarchies as complex networks, it becomes possible to investigate how its structure connect multiple order building projects, tangling global and regional orders. This thesis thus advances the claim that global and regional orders are produced jointly by dynamics of network hierarchies. To investigate these dynamics, I proposed a revised multi-clustered structure of international hierarchies where peripheries are asymmetrically connected by local orchestrators that are simultaneously super- and subordinated. Seeing order as bounded by these multi-cluster network hierarchies allows one to unpack any international order as a bundle of nested and partially overlapping orders. In these global network hierarchies, regional hierarchies can be identified as clusters of hierarchical ties. I argue that the structural forms in which global and regional network hierarchies connect have implications for the construction of global and regional orders. To analyse those implications, I provide a typology of such forms and their structuring effects. I use quantitative network analysis to empirically map the network hierarchies evolving since the post-World War II period and investigate their role in structuring dynamics of global and regional order building.

This dissertation explores the contour and content of state-ordered destruction in the construction of state, territory, and subjects. To do so, it carries out a historical and ethnographic study of state violence, from the colonial era until today, in Pakistan's southern province of Balochistan. Through this study, the dissertation argues: Where the construction of state, territory, and subjects requires a rendering of society as legible in order to create it and make it manipulable for the purposes of rule, the destruction of politics, places and peoples requires a rendering of networks opposing the state as obscure in order to dismantle them and make them docile for the same purpose. These networks, or "counter-societies," are collective identities that transgress and resist the state's version of society proper, e.g. through the collective identities of the anti-colonial rebel, the revolutionary communist, or the separatist ethnonationalist. In turn, society proper is constituted by state-sanctioned identities considered necessary for rule, like the "tribal" colonial subject or the loyal and growth-minded Pakistani citizen. Through a close reading of three cases of state violence in the colonial, early post-colonial, and contemporary era-a 1918 colonial-era military expedition, a 1973-'77 counterinsurgency campaign, and post-9/11 displacements, disappearances, killings, and army raids-the dissertation argues that the state sought to contain the "infection" of "fanaticism" in the colonial era, censure alternative ideas of Pakistan as socialist and multi-national in the early post-colonial era, and confuse attempts to articulate a counter-hegemonic front against the violence of the state in the contemporary era.

Reviewing the second instalment of Amy Lowell's anthology series Some Imagist Poets in 1916, the Times Literary Supplement declared that 'Imagist poetry fills us with hope; even if it is not very good in itself, it seems to promise a form in which very good poetry could be written.' This study aims to dismantle this common assumption about Imagist verse. Although many commentaries have acknowledged Imagism's far-reaching impact upon American poetry, few have treated its theoretical premises with the scepticism it deserves, traced the movement's pedagogical legacy, or acknowledged the importance of contemporary poets who have challenged the pervasive influence of Pound's Imagist tenets. In Chapter One, I discuss the privileging of the image in modern poetry and criticism from the original Imagistes to Robert Bly's mid-century 'Deep Imagism'. Chapter Two explores the critical tendency to misread William Carlos Williams as a poet of the concrete image, before exposing the tangible effects of this skewed reading in the verse of his disciple Denise Levertov. Chapters Three to Six are made up of author studies, analysing the poetry of Charles Simic, C.K. Williams, Louise Glück, and Robert Hass, to illuminate the various aesthetic strategies by which they challenged Imagism's authoritarian precepts. In Chapter Seven, I discuss Rae Armantrout's Money Shot (2010) and Timothy Donnelly's The Cloud Corporation (2010) as critiques of the Imagist emphasis on 'the part rather than the whole,' while in the final chapter, I analyse Ocean Vuong's debut Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2016) as evidence of the survival of the Imagist hegemony into contemporary practice.

International monetary and financial crises have punctuated US hegemony since 1945. With US hegemony likely to endure and crises likely to recur, we need to understand how the US reacts to such events: benevolently or exploitatively? Using a case study of US behaviour during the 1969-76 international monetary crisis, this thesis challenges narratives that interpret events in terms of the concentration or deconcentration of power in the US hegemon, and favours an explanation of US behaviours based on the interplay of US domestic politics and international security imperatives. Using a Constructivist definition of hegemony and a neoclassical realist theoretical framework, I analyse the crisis from the perspectives of the international monetary order and system, respectively. I introduce a novel division of Strange’s concept of structural power into its negative and positive components (the power to disrupt or create international structures, respectively). Using these analytical tools, I analyse documents held in the UK and US National archives, President Nixon’s White House tapes and the Bank of England archive. Key and original findings include: - US tactics veered between hegemony by consent and, when that failed to yield the desired results, hegemony through domination; - domination tactics could be brutal, as when President Nixon and his National Security Advisor, Kissinger, tried to wreck European integration by destroying its first attempt at monetary union. Their intention was to advance the US’ security agenda by weakening EEC states; - Kissinger intervened in the Committee of Twenty’s negotiations to delay agreement on international monetary reform (despite the US being on the verge of achieving its objectives) until European states had acceded to what he wanted on security in the “Year of Europe” negotiations. Delay killed US plans to return to fixed exchange rates; - hegemonic stability theory-based explanations of events are challenged by the US terminating its Bretton Woods regime, persuading follower states to introduce generalised floating and blocking international monetary reform; - structural Realist and Marxist narratives of the crisis are challenged, inter alia, by President Ford abandoning Nixon’s attempts to strengthen US hegemony in favour of a laissez-faire solution to the international monetary crisis; - the decisions creating the basis of a neoliberal international monetary order (the introduction of floating exchange rates and free capital mobility) were taken for US international security or domestic political reasons, as neoclassical realism theory would predict. These decisions had profound economic consequences, but were not taken for economic reasons.

In 2009, the IASB published IFRS for SMEs, extending their work beyond standard setting for listed entities. This thesis investigates the IASB's political processes in the development of IFRS for SMEs. The board's discourse presents an image of technocratic expertise, which acts to obfuscate the ways in which the IASB controls the regulatory conversation to advance its role as an agent of financial capital. Previous research and regulatory theory are extended in this thesis through the use of Laclau and Mouffe's Discourse Theory and Glynos and Howarth's Logics of Critical Explanation. Whilst creating IFRS for SMEs, the IASB invoked democratic imageries, which has the effect of obscuring their financial capital agenda. This thesis demonstrates that the IASB constructs specific conceptions of SMEs as profit-maximising entities and emerging economies as in need of development along "Western" lines that reflect the ideology of advanced financial capital. Laclau and Mouffe's Logics of Equivalence and Difference are identified as being constantly in play in the development of IFRS for SMEs. This thesis shows that the development of IFRS for SMEs is an example of the "politics of condensation": by condensing the needs of all developing countries and all non-publicly accountable entities into one standard, the IASB claims that meeting the financial reporting needs of SMEs will automatically meet the needs of developing countries. Through the extension of international accounting standards to new entities in a "one size fits all" manner, the IASB constructs the "politics of the same" through a logic of equivalence. The thesis also identifies the influential role of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the development, promotion and adoption of IFRS for SMEs. The enforcement activities of these international financial institutions are shown to be crucial in allowing the IASB to act as a powerful agent of neo-liberal hegemony.

This study sets out to establish an hegemony of light and examine its relationship to the lens in photography. Through a series of sequenced photographs presented as an exhibition 'The Light Ages' in May 2017. The photographs were 841mm x 1189 mm Giclee prints mounted on aluminum which explore the way in which difference sources of light contribute to the identity of different spaces by fracturing and separating the light and duration of the image. The thesis explores how light permeates the English language and is inscribed in terms used to define photography. As a source of energy, light provides the very essence of visibility and defines the perception of objectivity and its limits. The geometric relationship between the light axes and the lens axis is what forms the basis of my development of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Since all photographs rely on some kind of light it was important to identify one that was developed specifically for photographic use and controlled almost exclusively by the agents of photographic representation. It also appears to mark the ontology of the image, however, as this study examines it is only one of the temporal registers. The practice seeks to tear apart these temporal registers to show the dualism and hegemony of light, how it attempts to pin down one interpretation at the expense of another. One of the greatest challenges for researchers, is to consider new photographic discourses that attempt to understand how advances in technology affect the relationship between the aesthetic and the signified. Through practice, the study tests and explores the relationship between flash light and the lens axis. It questions whether our perception of the centrality of photographic representation is the defining characteristic of photography as a stable form of representation in contemporary culture.

The aim of this research project is to investigate the hegemonic and posthegemonic arrangement regarding trust and power in order to establish whether the concept of 'trust' between banks, customers and the media is sustainable. This research challenges the notion that customers are losing 'trust' in banks by questioning the original existence of 'trust' and critically examining the components comprising what is seen as 'trust', as well as assessing the role played by the media in the process of building/destroying trust. What the literature shows is that despite there being a body of knowledge regarding trust in various fields within business, the issue of trust in the banking sector is becoming prominent. Although trust in banking has become a popular research topic (see, for example, Devlin et al 2015), few studies interrogate the concept of trust. This research was based on an inductive qualitative approach using critical discourse analysis to analyse data collection. The research found that there are four main components of trust that customers want in the banking sector and they are hope, expectation, belief and confidence. One can argue that trust is posthegemonic. The emotions produced from the articles are affective and it does not matter whether one has knowledge about the subject or not, affect can change opinions. The articles affected the four components of trust which led to a lack of trust from the customers towards the banks. Therefore, an argument can be made that the media influenced the public's perceptions of banks during the financial crisis and that many of these perceptions persist to the present day. There is scope for further research. One area of research could be to test the framework of trust developed in this research. Another area could be to measure the impact of the media during the financial crisis.

This dissertation argues that when leaders use ideological foreign policy rhetoric, it makes war more likely. The U.S. - led international order faces challenges from both Russia and China, and U.S. leaders are using ideological rhetoric to mobilize a response. I explain why such rhetoric is attractive to leaders and how it also makes the United States more likely to get pulled into wars it might otherwise avoid. Leaders use this kind of rhetoric because it allows them to explain to the public why they are being asked to endure the taxes, military service, casualties, and social disruption associated with efforts to shape the international order. Ideological appeals (e.g., “fighting for freedom and democracy”) tap into deeply held beliefs and identities, encouraging the public to bear the burdens of an active foreign policy. Unfortunately, this rhetoric also raises the stakes of international disputes, limits U.S. diplomatic flexibility, and creates a commitment to intervene in situations that implicate the country’s ideology more than its material interests. Using an original dataset of rhetoric by leading states (1816-2014), I show that justifying one’s international leadership in ideological terms is associated with fighting more wars. By contrast, a framing that emphasizes hegemonic goods provision has less mobilizational power but also produces less international conflict. This is the orderer’s dilemma. The policies that help a state motivate its domestic population exacerbate tensions and make war more likely.

Beginning around 2020, conservative politicians and media outlets have launched an aggressive campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives via the symbolic vilification of critical race theory. Several scholars have observed that this crusade has largely taken the form of a conservative media-driven disinformation campaign that seeks to obscure the true intent and scope of critical race theory’s influence on American society for political gains. Drawing upon critical race literature, framing theory, and various scholarship pertaining to the relationship between media and cultural hegemony, this project sought to qualitatively interrogate the frames used to discuss critical race theory within live Fox News broadcastings. Upon analysis of 50 randomly selected live Fox News transcripts, I found that Fox News commentators regularly invoked 6 common frames in discourses surrounding critical race theory. Therein, critical race theory was often projected to be: 1.) Divisive, 2.) Governmental Overreach, 3.) Indoctrination, 4.) a Marxist/Communist Agenda, and 5.) as Racist, with 6.) people of color (POC) often being used as legitimizers of these narratives. To conclude, I contemplated the implications of these frames, particularly in regard to what they unveil about mass media’s influence over knowledge production and dissemination processes, as well as what they project for future social and racial justice strategies in light of the impending direction of the conservative political agenda.

This research examines how the practice of curating has been used to further counter-hegemonic agendas in public art institutions since 1989. The central aim is to provide a fuller, contextualised, and medium specific understanding of the how the institutional exhibition might be used to challenge the hegemony of neoliberalism and the post-political consensus politics that sustains its dominance. It provides insights, through both historic case studies and reflective practice, that problematise the idea that the institutional art exhibition is a viable medium for counter-hegemonic critique, or represents the ideal space for the development of an agonistic public discourse. This thesis presents collaborative research undertaken with Tate Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University. The research presented both extrapolated from, and contributed to, the development of an exhibition, co-curated with Tate Liverpool, entitled Art Turning Left (8 November 2013 – 2 February 2014) and a supplementary publication of the same name. The first section investigates how the idea that curators can counter neoliberal dominance, through institutional exhibition-making, developed. It draws from analyses of previous exhibitions, and the theory of Chantal Mouffe, in order to critically evaluate the curatorial application of counter-hegemonic critique and agonistic practice. It also provides a review of how exhibitions (held in major art institutions since 1989) have articulated politics, in order to determine their relationship to neoliberal dominance, and to identify significant gaps in the dialogue facilitated by these institutions. These analyses provides the theoretical and contextual grounding for the final two chapters, which provide a rationale and critical evaluation of my own attempt to develop an alternative counter-hegemonic curatorial strategy for the exhibition at Tate Liverpool. They document, and analyse, the areas of dissensus, and the ideological and pragmatic limitations that emerged, in trying to realise these theoretical propositions (in practice) in a public art museum. The thesis therefore provides a critical framework for the development of an alternative practice that positions the exhibition as a form of post-political critique and specifically targets the hegemonic role that institutional exhibitions play in reinforcing class distinctions and devaluing nonprofessional creativity.

Between 1659 and 1689, northern Italy was generally at peace, having endured almost three decades of continuous war from the 1620s. The Peace of the Pyrenees of November 1659, between the French and Spanish crowns, seemed to offer the young Louis XIV an opportunity to gradually subvert Spanish influence over the small princely families of the Po valley. The Houses of Farnese, Este, and Gonzaga-Nevers, respective rulers of Parma, Modena, and Mantua-Monferrato, had all been allies of France at various points in the Franco-Spanish War (1635-1659), but had gained scant reward for their willingness to jeopardise their own relationships with the king of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor, despite the promises of material and diplomatic support which Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin had extended to them. As a consequence, they were reluctant to agree to again participate in alliances with France. This thesis examines how Louis XIV gradually came to lose the friendship of these three ruling families, through his arrogant disregard of their interests and their ambitions, and also by his contempt for their capabilities and usefulness. This disregard was frequently born out of the French monarch's unwillingness to jeopardise or to undermine his own interests in Italy – in particular, the permanent retention of the fortress of Pinerolo, in Piedmont, as a porte onto the Po plain. But although the principi padani comprehended the reasons for Louis's unwillingness to act as a benevolent patron, they resented his all-too-palpable distrust of them; his entrenched belief that they were unreliable; and his obvious love of war. The rulers and élites of the Italian states believed that Louis would undoubtedly seek, at some point in his reign, to attack Spain's possessions in Italy, and dwelt in perpetual dread of that day. This thesis provides the account of French policy towards the small Italian states after 1659 which is still absent from the historiography of Louis XIV's foreign policies.

This thesis is an examination of the influence and impact of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, post 1968, on the practice of Irish history, on southern Irish broadcast media and on the southern Irish modernisation process. I will examine the uneasy and contested transition in systems of hegemony in a society where the state is not coterminous with perceptions of nationhood, where society is anxiously suspended between conservation of its existence and popular nationalist aspirations, where southern economic dependency interacted uneasily with northern political instability and sectarianism. The thesis examines the ‘Ulsterisation’ of the War of Independence by some historians and its aftermath as an ideological project. It pays particular attention, using the case-study method, to the imposition of a sectarian character on republican forces during the war of independence by the highly influential Newfoundland historian Peter Hart, and will explain why this research is ideologically problematic within Irish historiography. I will link this to (in a second case-study) the project undertaken in the early 1970s by Irish government minister (also an academic historian and political scientist) Conor Cruise O’Brien to undermine and eradicate from popular awareness secular anti-imperialist aspects of Irish nationalist consciousness, primarily through, in case-study three, the imposition of broadcasting censorship and support for repression. I question O’Brien’s positing of a ‘Catholic nationalism’ as an overarching basis for Irish statehood by, in case-study four, an examination the largely unexplored socio-economic position of Protestants in southern Ireland and the forms of social control imposed on and within that community. The thesis examines how official reaction to the conflict combined repression and broadcasting censorship during the 1970s to revise popular perceptions of Irish history and Irish society. Control of understanding of the present was combined with attempts to take control of perceptions of the past, in order to circumscribe the parameters of what is feasible in the present, so as to preserve the socio-economic status quo. It specifically explores the impact of the post 1968 Northern Ireland conflict on: • The attempt by proponents of Irish revisionist historiography to portray Irish resistance to British rule as ‘Catholic nationalism’ and as a mirror image generally of Ulster unionist sectarianism; in the context of • The simultaneous transformational change of economic direction in the southern Irish economy and society, which imparted to this project increased impetus, opportunity and political scope.

This thesis specifically focuses on the professional practices and training of Western industrial designers using postcolonial theory to inform working practices in a complex global ecology. It investigates the culturally hegemonic construction of design solutions in man-made products. By adopting key ideas from postcolonial and cultural studies as a lens to evaluate fields of industrial design discourse, practice and pedagogy, the work proceeds from the premise that design is not intrinsic to a product but the result of a myriad different forces and factors acting on it externally including hegemonic potencies. By reinterpreting technological formations in light of research emerging from post-colonial studies, it attempts to broaden our intellectual understanding of how product design in theory, practice and education can often rely upon western [hegemonic] aesthetic and deep cultural archetypes. The purpose of this enquiry is to highlight the potentials that exist to explore a synergy between east and west in industrial design with a prospective vision for global, trans-cultural design. The research claims that current design practice often leads to culturally determined - rather than universal - conceptions in design and it attempts to re-conceptualise design as practice within a necessarily hegemonic culture. This hegemony needs to be acknowledged and redressed via increased awareness and changes to the intellectual heritage and autonomy of West European and American industrial design, in its dialogue, practice and education. As an epistemological project to identify knowledge within this discourse, it suggests new methodological and strategic approaches to engage with the crisis the discipline faces in light of globalisation so as to open up future discussions in design discourse and give a voice to the many silences that make up the noise of the world. It attempts to: • Further understand the trajectory of hegemony and globalisation in relation to design, technology and culture. • Critically engage with cross- and trans-cultural, global and social design implications. • Address the discrepancies between designers’ culture and users’ culture, to expose the necessity for more culturally-cognizant design practice and pedagogic provision. The research was initiated by identifying a number of questions that designers and users may consciously or subconsciously confront when faced with products that problematise the imagined universal values of designed products in terms of gender and culture. It explores how certain design solutions produced and developed in the west and their diffusion into global, international markets and foreign cultures could affect those cultures by asking in what ways the usability, aesthetic and symbolic characteristics of these artefacts often unwittingly contribute to the privilege or marginalisation of people from particular socio-cultural backgrounds. The thesis intervention is that product designers are neither explicitly trained to comprehend nor surmount their respective cultural constraints and design education both nationally and internationally is not sufficiently equipped with the tools to acknowledge and confront this. The key arguments presented in this thesis are: 1. Products can often be deconstructed to identify cultural connotations or omissions in their design. 2. Global, a-cultural design and universal usability are fallacies that frequently deny the existence of an underlying cultural hegemony at play. 3. Mass-produced products can gradually homogenise and eradicate cultural diversity contributing to the negative effects of colonialist attitudes and/or globalisation. 4. Academia and educational institutions have the potential to extend awareness in this field to inform and train future designers and graduates to better advance design obligations in global, trans-cultural, cross-cultural and multicultural contexts.

Originating from a disenfranchisement with the contemporary definition and realisation of Westernised architecture as a commodity and product, this thesis seeks to explore alternative examples of positive socio-spatial practice and agency. These alternative spatial practices and methodologies are drawn from participatory and grass-roots development agency in informal settlements and contexts of economic absence, most notably in the global South. This thesis explores whether such examples can be interpreted as practical realisations of key theoretical advocacies for positive social space that have emerged in the context of post-Second World-War capitalism. The principal methodological framework utilises two differing trajectories of spatial discourse. Firstly, Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey as formative protagonists of Western spatial critique, and secondly, John F. C. Turner and Nabeel Hamdi as key advocates of participatory development practice in informal settlements. These two research trajectories are notably separated by geographical, economic and political differentiations, as well as conventional disciplinary boundaries. However by undertaking a close textual reading of these discourses this thesis critically re-contextualises the socio-spatial methodologies of participatory development practice, observing multiple theoretical convergences and provocative commonalities. This research proposes that by critically comparing these previously unconnected disciplinary trajectories certain similarities, resonances and equivalences become apparent. These resonances reveal comparable critiques of choice, value, and identity which transcend the gap between such differing theoretical and practical engagements with space. Subsequently, these thematic resonances allow this research to critically engage with further appropriate surrounding discourses, including Marxist theory, orientalism, post- structural pluralism, development anthropology, post-colonial theory and subaltern theory. 5 In summary, this thesis explores aspects of Henri Lefebvre's and Doreen Massey's urban and spatial theory through a close textual reading of key texts from their respective discourses. This methodology provides a layered analysis of post-Marxist urban space, and an exploration of an explicit connection between Lefebvre and Massey in terms of the social production and multiplicity of space. Subsequently, this examination provides a theoretical framework from which to reinterpret and revalue the approaches to participatory development practice found in the writings and projects of John Turner and Nabeel Hamdi. The resulting comparative framework generates interconnected thematic trajectories of enquiry that facilitate the re-reading and critical reflection of Turner and Hamdi's development practices. Thus, selected Western spatial discourse acts as a critical lens through which to re-value the social, political and economical achievements of participatory development. Reciprocally, development practice methodologies are recognised as invaluable and provocative realisations of the socio-spatial qualities that Western spatial discourse has long advocated for, and yet have remained predominantly unrealised in the global North.

Employing Cornish Cultures for Community Resilience. Can cultural distinctiveness be used to strengthen community bonds, boost morale and equip and motivate people socially and economically? Using the witness of people in Cornwall and comparative experiences, this discussion combines a review of how cultures are commodified and portrayed with reflections on well-being and ‘emotional prosperity’. Cornwall is a relatively poor European region with a cultural identity that inspires an established ethno-cultural movement and is the symbolic basis of community awareness and aspiration, as well as the subject of contested identities and representations. At the heart of this is an array of cultures that is identified as Cornish, including a distinct post-industrial inheritance, the Cornish Language and Celtic Revivalism. Cultural difference has long been a resource for cultural industries and tourism and discussion of using culture for regeneration has accordingly concentrated almost exclusively on these sectors but an emergent ‘regional distinctiveness agenda’ is beginning to present Cornish cultures as an asset for use in branding and marketing other sectors. All of these uses ultimately involve commodification but culture potentially has a far wider role to play in fostering economic, social, cultural and environmental resilience. This research therefore uses multidisciplinary approaches to broaden the discussion to include culture’s primary emotional and social uses. It explores the possibility that enhancing these uses could help to tackle economic and social disadvantage and to build more cohesive communities. The discussion centres on four linked themes: multiple forms of capital; discourse, narrative and myth; human need, emotion and well-being; representation and intervention. Cultural, social, symbolic and human capital are related to collective status and well-being through consideration of cultural practices, repertoires and knowledge. These are explored with discussion of accompanying representations and discourses and their social, emotional and economic implications so as to allow tentative suggestions for intervention in policy and representation. A key conclusion is that culture may be used proactively to increase ‘emotional capital’.

As a result of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, a shortage of African American teachers has plagued American schools. A call for the integration of schools, while making great educational strides for Black students, caused a lack of representation from Black teachers and school leaders. Black educators were less likely to be hired in the schools that Black children were now free to attend. Participants are chosen to participate in this qualitative case study based on the criteria of being a Black/African American teacher in any stage of their teaching career. This study explores the experiences and perceptions of Black/African American educators in their predominantly white teacher education programs and what has encouraged them to teach in predominantly Black/African American schools. Ultimately, this study determined that there are connections between teacher preparation and where Teachers of Color teach, and there is a paradox of Black teachers for Black students.

The central purpose of this dissertation is to study the role and relevance of the balance of power factor within regimes for cooperative security with special reference to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). The balance of power concept is systematically applied to an examination of their history and modalities. This thesis addresses one core question: to what extent may the balance of power, defined in political terms, play a part in such associative security arrangements and in the calculations of the participants? Attention is therefore given to the balance of power factor and its co-existence with an associative dimension part of cooperative security regimes. The dissertation assesses the role of the balance of power as a disposition to promote countervailing arrangements to deny hegemony within and beyond cooperative security even if devoid of direct military content. The establishment of ASEAN and the ARF are analysed within a balance of power perspective. Both institutions were formed with the denial of hegemony in mind but not in a conventional sense. In addition, the balance of power remained a factor in their later developments. Its ongoing relevance is examined by discussing Brunei's motives to join the Association, ASEAN's response to the Third Indochina Conflict, the workings of the Forum, and the Association's involvement in the South China Sea dispute.

My thesis argues that the New Right (NR) sought to manipulate state education as a mechanism of both social transformation and social control in the UK between 1979 and 1992. This is investigated by employing a 'critical realist' perspective which is located within a wider 'neo-Marxist' conceptual frame. The links between the NR and the Radical Right (RR) Conservative governments during this period are investigated through an analysis of the origins, intentions and ascendancy of NR ideology. It is suggested that the NIRIRR's political intent was a 'hegemonic project' to shift underlying moral values from 'social democracy' to the 'social market'. This depended on the successful transmission, through education, of a definition of 'citizenship' grounded in competitive, 'selfish individualism', with the inequalities of the 'social market' accepted as 'common-sense'. My data reveal how the NRJRR conjoined symbolic and material rules and resources to draw power and authority to 'the centre' on the grounds that there was a crisis in national stability and security. Education is identified as a central mechanism in the NR!RR's 'hegemonic project'. It is shown how the RR gained control of the form, content and method of educational provision through a series of initiatives which gradually altered the structure of education and shifted provision progressively from the periphery to the centre, centralising control over curriculum and resources while devolving responsibility and accountability to schools. The argument central to my thesis is that the NR/RR sought to use physical education as a pivotal component of its 'hegemonic project'. This is revealed most clearly in the privileging of the definition of physical education as 'sport and games' in NRJRR discourse. This discourse sought to imbue pupils with values of competition, tradition, reward, meritocracy and individual responsibility: the moral values central to the 'social market'. My data outline how the NRLRR endeavoured to 'control' the 'form', 'structure', 'content' and 'methods' of physical education provision in state schools by delineating the discursive framework and text of the national curriculum physical education (NCPE), and raise critical issues relating to the relationship between policy, power and autonomy within the education system.

The problem of political and cultural under-representation of Australia’s vibrant and diverse Jewish constituencies by its governing Jewish organisations is a long-standing and vexing one. There appears to be a chasm between perceptions of how the established Jewish organisations represent their internal diversity and how minority Jewish communities wish to be represented. Formal under-representation of minorities and marginalised groups – of not having their interests statistically represented and included in these bodies regardless of the formal composition of the established bodies – is a critical issue. This thesis aims to establish how Jewish peak and roof bodies, media, and arts organisations currently represent their constituencies’ political and cultural diversity in Sydney and Melbourne. It seeks to explore how minority Jewish constituencies might be better represented within and by their community. The thesis has two research aims. The first is to understand whether diverse minority and marginalised Jewish communities are fairly represented on boards of governing Jewish institutions, and by arts and media organisations. The second aim is to establish how these diverse groups prefer to be represented and to suggest ways to achieve this.

Generations of women in the Evangelical Church have embodied narratives passed from mother to daughter, from church leadership, and through their religious communities. These narratives, including those of women’s subservience and deserving of suffering endured from spouses, church leaders, and others, have origins in the earliest days of church history. In this thesis I examine how such narratives are embedded in books on pubertal guidance targeted to mothers and daughters in Evangelical Christian communities. Building on Fish’s work on interpretive communities, Gramsci’s conceptualization of hegemony, Foucault theorizing on power, and an interdisciplinary literature on the interaction between religion, culture, and politics, I interrogate themes of puberty, sexual function, gender roles, consent, and gender-based violence addressed in books on pubertal guidance, and how these books contribute to or reinforce evangelical Christian doctrinal narratives on gender and sexuality. Through a methodological approach using grounded theory, narrative inquiry, autoethnography, and textual analysis, findings indicate Evangelical Christian culture creates an interpretive community which drives only acceptable interpretation of religious texts (primarily the Bible), gender norms, and patriarchal power dynamics. Themes emerging from the texts analyzed, including Complementarianism, submission, purity, modesty, inadequacy, and silencing, have deep consequences not only for women and girls in Evangelical Christian communities, but for society at large as the legislative push for adherence to Evangelical Christian doctrinal ideologies work to remove access to basic human rights for people who do not adhere them. Misinformation, incomplete information, and hegemonic narratives serve to perpetuate gender inequality and have broad effects on women’s and girls’ mental, emotional, and physical health. In light of the most recent intrusions by Christian Nationalists into the legislative fabric of U. S. federal, state, and local governments in an attempt to enforce religious practice and ideology in the legislative arena, this thesis provides important insight into the communication methods and the theoretical basis for women to accept the hegemonic concepts presented to them in their Evangelical Christian communities. The importance of this thesis becomes evident considering how Christian books contribute to this communication, especially considering its potential for affecting legislation and culture in the future.

The proliferation of educational technology currently marketed by textbook publishers reflects the neoliberal influence in higher education that emphasizes automated, standardized delivery and skills-based curriculum. Inclusive access programs are publisher developed digital packages that include access to digital course materials at a lower cost to the student, claiming to provide equitable access despite evidence that a digital divide still exists. This embedded single-case study is a critical analysis of the decision-making power of faculty and administrators as it relates to the adoption of inclusive access programs at a community college. The purpose is to explore if the adoption of inclusive access contributes to inequality in the form of digital structural violence. Hegemony is used as the theoretical framework. Data collection methods include student and faculty focus groups, faculty and administrator interviews, and faculty and student surveys. Findings indicate that while faculty members do hold some hegemonic power, the greater hegemonic force belongs to publishers and bookstores. Student data shows an appreciation for the lower cost and immediate access, but they prefer printed textbooks for academic reading. The data also suggests the possibility that inclusive access contributes to digital structural violence, but further research is needed.

The Frailty of Fruit is a young adult post-apocalyptic thriller, set in a far future subterranean farming community. The novel follows protagonist Qari Höfler, a reluctant tomato farmer, who must develop a hybrid tomato to earn her family’s stewardship or be banished to the Deep Dark. Her 33rd great-grandfather's tomato strain cured violence. But because their cultural understanding of violence didn’t include sexual violence, Qari develops an asexually reproductive strain with the naïve hope of curing gender. Little does she know, she’s not the only one with the seeds of that idea. Told in intertwining narratives, a second protagonist Iona also must race against time to beat Qari at her own hybrid game. But once the two of them find each other, with the help of a humanoid sexbot-turned-scientist named Misty, Qari and Iona realize that finding a place where they could grow together was the point all along. Told in the dystopian tradition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Frailty of Fruit draws upon themes of reproductive justice, hegemony, posthumanism, and the subaltern. Written in a traditional narrative structure, the novel invents an accessible story with textured social imaginings. It posits a poetic truth that utopias will always become dystopias, that will then become utopias, and so on. Like nature, human social conditions have birth and death cycles. In this way, the novel employs contemporary feminist methodologies which utilize post-structural theories to challenge the notions of stable concepts. The ground, literally and conceptually, is always shifting.

This dissertation offers a new perspective on Roman appropriations of ancient Greek culture for the construction of cultural hegemony in modern Italy, Britain, and the US. By reading a vast selection of canonical ancient Greek and Latin texts written between the fifth century B.C.E. and the second century C.E., I argue that Greece has consistently been imagined—and has imagined itself—as “mother and nurse” to Rome. As I will demonstrate, given the patriarchal nature of these societies, it is the gendering of Greece as female that allows Rome to get around the problem of priority, by positioning itself as the “rightful” (i.e., masculine) heir to Greek cultural hegemony. However, the discourse around Greece’s metaphorical mothering of Rome is not at all a unilateral Roman imposition, but a dialectical creation: originating in fifth-century B.C.E. Athenian autochthony myths, this discourse is also espoused by Greek authors under Roman rule, because it allows for Greek claims of cultural primacy to remain intact. While the role of “classical” culture in justifying modern Western claims to superiority has been studied extensively, the principal aim of this dissertation is to uncover the importance of gendered metaphors to this discourse. Taking Italy’s relationship with Britain and the US over the long nineteenth century as a case study, I contend that Italy is constructed as a maternal presence in British travel writing, as well as American literature on Italian migration. Taking the dialectic between ancient Greece and Rome as its model, an imagined relationship of filiation with Italy as a “classical” land frames its culture as part of the “rightful” inheritance of the British and American empires. This in turn facilitates the construction of British and American identities as masculine. However, an analysis of the recurring trope of Italy as a “mother and nurse” in Italian texts from Dante to turn of the twentieth century reveals Italy’s own investment in this discourse, since it allows for Italian claims of primacy to remain intact, as in the case of ancient Greece. By tracing this same trope through colonial and diasporic Italian literature and film, I argue that imagining Italy as a “mother-land” enables nationalist discourse to cast Italy is cast as a martyr to whom everything is owed. This trope is then used to justify Italian participation in settler-colonialism in the US and colonialism in Africa. By deconstructing the long history of mothering metaphors as a rhetorical stratagem in Western imperialism, this study makes an innovative contribution to the study of how gender, race and hegemony are constructed and performed within it.

This thesis analyses the ways in which the author of the book of Revelation used the apocalyptic genre to address the problems presented to the Christian community in Asia Minor by the Roman Empire. The thesis does this by first establishing the history and characteristics of apocalyptic literature, leading up to revelation. It then considers the ideological issues presented by the Roman hegemony to Christians of the age. The thesis identifies examples of anti-empire sentiments in the first five chapters before setting forth an exegesis of Revelation 6. The exegesis of argues that the images of the Four Horsemen and the other symbols of chapter six present the uselessness of the imperial lifestyle and expose the fraudulent claims of the Pax Romana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most International Relations literature suggests that when power becomes imbalanced, such a situation will be corrected – hegemony cannot persist over time. However, history offers us several examples of hegemonies lasting over a century, e.g., Ancient Rome, Ming China. So far scholars have offered four explanations for such enduring hegemony (Coercive Hegemony, Cooperative Hegemony, Cultural Hegemony, and Opportunist Hegemony), with a common mechanism: ineffective balancing. Namely, the hegemon has the capacity to put balancing at bay using different strategies flowing from the nature and fundamental principles of its hegemony. Hence, the hegemon uses coercion, institutional leverage, ideological indoctrination, or buyout, in order to assure its hegemony can endure. Yet, through time and through crisis the capacities of the hegemon to make the balancing ineffective diminishes. As such, these theories all share a similar assumption – imbalance is transitory and thus hegemony will breakdown. But what if that common assumption is incorrect. What if under certain conditions, imbalance is not resisted, but rather serves interests of non-hegemonic states as well as the hegemon? Twentieth and twenty-first century US hegemony suggests such conditions may exist. This American imbalance displays a different nature and fundamental mechanism behind its functioning. Although US relative power is declining, its global monetary network centrality is not. Moreover, even in times of severe crisis, such as the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, or the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, we have not witnessed US monetary centrality decline. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The dynamics associated with an imbalance of power in favor of the United States runs against the expectations of existing theories. Therefore, we need a different theory to make sense of these particularities and make better policy recommendations. Thus, I have developed a Pervasive Hegemony Theory, which is based on a ‘buy-in’ behavior, that better explains US hegemony compared to existing alternatives. The ‘buy-in’ behavior relates to non-hegemonic states as well as the hegemon, in which all countries continue to use hegemon’s monetary unit in their monetary relations, even in times of severe economic crisis. This reinforces the hegemony. Even though non-hegemonic states may not prefer the imbalance of power, they prefer conducting their economic relations within the hegemon’s monetary unit and thus perpetuate the imbalance. Subsequently, they can only maximize their selfish interests and autonomy by buying-in to the hegemony and reproducing the imbalance of power. Conversely, the hegemon may not like the current rules and norms of the international system, but it can change those and obtain the support of the non-hegemonic states if it accepts to provide its monetary unit as the central currency of the system. In pursuing this argument, I use both quantitative (Network Analysis and Time Series) and qualitative methods (Process Tracing). I use the former on available economic data to establish the claim of US economic centrality, and that it is something different than what we have seen in the past. Second, I process trace the mechanisms of hegemonic and non-hegemonic state behavior in two international monetary systems (Bretton Woods and post-Bretton Woods) in order to isolate and identify the buy-in mechanism and provide an explanation of enduring imbalance – ownership over the central monetary unit in global economy. The dissertation, thus, assesses existing theories and indicates their inadequacies in explaining an important international phenomenon and provides a more robust explanation of enduring hegemony with the economic centrality, namely the ownership of the central monetary unit.

The Lost Cause is an ideology that falsely portrays the antebellum South as an idyllic, agrarian society, the Confederacy’s cause as a just defense of states’ rights, and slavery as a benevolent institution. Historians of the U.S. South rightly attribute much of the Lost Cause’s creation to the South's prewar elite, particularly women from the planter class who led Confederate memorialization efforts. As the Lost Cause celebrates an antebellum slave society and Confederacy controlled by elites, it is clear the ideology also celebrated the South's prewar elite. However, previous studies of the Lost Cause fail to seriously question what benefit the Lost Cause brought the planter class, nor have scholars seriously examined how the ideology developed in states that experienced significant economic change after the Civil War. By examining the planters of Leon County, Florida, and one of the class’s descendants who later contributed to the Lost Cause in Florida, this thesis studies the structural reality of Middle Florida’s antebellum elite to understand what role postbellum Confederate memorialization played for that class. Chapter One calculates the persistence rate of Leon County's planter class using land and slaveholding figures from tax and census data to determine that the planters persisted at about the same rate after the Civil War as they did in the antebellum era. Chapter Two analyzes elites’ attempt to reassert social hegemony through the Florida Constitution of 1865 and the “Black Codes,” a campaign that failed when Congressional Reconstruction began. Chapter Three reviews the background and pro-Confederate narratives of Susan Bradford Eppes to explain how Confederate memorialization meant to reclaim the elites' social authority in a Florida economy that quickly evolved past cotton by the turn of the century.

This dissertation addresses shifts in global power structures resulting from long arcs of systemic processes. I employ mixed methods in order to interrogate the roles of policy and ideology in constructing these dynamics. Data was collected from a mixture of policy documents and communications, news articles, government publications, and economic databases. Documents were coded and analyzed in order to investigate the relevant case studies, with contextual information provided from quantitative data. I find that the United States implemented policies that resulted in the creation of a new archipelago of capital based in East Asia, particularly in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The US provision of economic, military, trade, and diplomatic support allowed the flourishing of banking, finance, and capital markets within these states and allowed them to rapidly advance their industrial output. This archipelago of capital ultimately became a massive pool from which China could draw once the United States began drawing down its involvement in the region. The United States became wary of Japan as a threat to its hegemony due to Japan’s rapid growth. As a result, the US implemented new trade policies and economic punishments. Chinese development policy was heavily oriented towards protectionist measures, under which it invested heavily in internal development. Following reforms, China opened itself up to rapid accelerations in trade and foreign investment, particularly from partner nations in the East Asian capital archipelago. As a result of its non- dependent development and its economic weight, China is much more robust to potential responses by the United States than previous hegemonic competitors. The Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) serves as a major step toward a more China-oriented world-system, and marks a shift away from neoliberally oriented forms of development finance toward one of nationalist developmentalism on the part of China. Marketing around the BRI has focused on cooperation, geography, and progressive environmental aspects, leveraging dissatisfaction with the US- backed neoliberal model of development finance to position itself as the lender of first choice. Policy choices made by the United States and China have made a direct impact on flows of capital and affect sites of hegemonic contest. This project demonstrates how the US constructed a world order, off the back of which China was then able to launch its own bid for prominent placement in the network of global power.

This dissertation analyzes politics of the Wage-Earner Funds (WEF) in Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s. Rudolf Meidner and Anna Hedborg, researchers for the powerful Social Democratic union confederation LO, first proposed the WEF plan in 1975, which would mandate an obligatory annual transfer of new corporate shares into union-owned funds. According to their plan, the Wage-Earner Funds would eventually gain majority ownership of firms constituting much of the Swedish economy within a few decades, radically transforming the capitalist relations of production. This plan, which I call the Meidner-Hedborg Plan (MHP), was among the most extensive program for a socialist transformation proposed in an advanced capitalist society in the 1970s, the last period in which legitimacy of capitalism was seriously challenged. Even though the Meidner-Hedborg Plan was adopted by the LO Congress in 1976, its radical aspects were soon attenuated and removed in the negotiations between the LO and the Social Democratic Party (SAP) leadership. The conventional narrative suggests that intense business mobilizations against the Wage-Earner Funds decisively undermined its transformative potential. However, a careful analysis of archival materials demonstrates that most of the capitalist anti-Fund campaigns occurred after the MHP had already been deprived of its transformative character and replaced by other moderate versions of the Wage-Earner Funds. I demonstrate that the cause of the Meidner-Hedborg Plan’s defeat was the Social Democratic Party leadership’s staunch refusal to support it, combined with the weakness of mobilizations for the plan. The structural root of these factors is the hierarchical and hegemonic character of Swedish Social Democracy. The party leaders rejected the MHP, since they embraced the capitalist “mixed economy” upon which they had built the welfare state. Social Democratic militants strongly supported the Meidner-Hedborg Plan, but could not organize for it in defiance of the leadership, because of the weakness of autonomous structure and culture to empower an organized internal dissent. Furthermore, certain institutional features of the plan, as well as the ambiguous, polysemic character of the discourse of “economic democracy”, made it challenging to concretely articulate how the society and workers’ lives would be transformed under labor control of firms.As the Meidner-Hedborg Plan was defeated internally, the Wage-Earner Funds were completely re-interpreted by the SAP leadership around Kjell-Olof Feldt, as a tool to secure increased capital formation while minimizing class conflicts. The new version of the Wage-Earner Funds, which I call the Feldt Plan, was congruent with the neoliberal turn of the SAP leadership in the early 1980s. The Swedish Parliament finally enacted the Wage-Earner Funds in 1983, based on the modified version of the Feldt Plan. But it had a very limited impact on the Swedish economy and society during their seven years of operation.The Meidner-Hedborg Plan was the most paradigmatic, ideal-typical example of the social democratic path to socialism. Based on an analysis of this critical case, I posit that contradictions of social democracy are rooted in containment of autonomous rank-and-file movements. The case of the Wage-Earner Funds in Sweden highlights the vital importance of internal democracy in struggles for an emancipatory society, not only as a matter of principle, but also as a question of strategy.

This thesis attempts to understand how American hegemony is reproduced. Despite heavily criticizing American military expansion, the foreign policy elite still abet the expansion of the American military apparatus. I argue that international liberalism is used to capture the hearts and minds of the professional-managerial class. Specifically, the framings of the democratic peace theory, multilateralism, and international law soften the violent and deleterious interventionist decisions made by the foreign policy elite. Furthermore, these framings are used to academically bolster liberalism and add to their cultural legitimacy and saliency in civil society. By interrogating a podcast made by foreign policy elites, I show how podcasts function as a key site of hegemonic reproduction.

With one of the largest and most dedicated fan bases, the Disney Company enjoys a strong following with adults. A portion of these fans purposefully and pointedly incorporate the Disney brand into their everyday lives making it their chosen lifestyle. Through social media, they have formed a tight knit community that, for many, has become the nexus of their social lives. Disney fandom, however, is not so straightforward and fans face conflicting pressures as Disney, their fellow fans, and their own personal desires attempt to influence their behaviors and fan practices. Disney pressures fans to unquestioningly promote it, consume as much of its products as possible, and to convince others to do the same. The fan community gatekeeps what it means to be a Disney fan and pressures fans to conform to social norms that can suppress individual expression. Fans themselves want to be completely dedicated to both Disney and their community but simultaneously independent and uninfluenced by both. Rather than choosing any one influence, they find a way to accommodate all parties by situating themselves in a paradox that enables them to continue being fans. They are both independent from and dependent upon Disney, they keep community unity through rejection and angst, and they are able to be better community members and Disney fans by pursuing their own self-interests. Using participant-observer ethnography, this dissertation explores the world of these fans to understand how they negotiate agency between the conflicting pressures. Each chapter highlights a paradox fans manage as they establish themselves in their identities as Disney fans. From these paradoxes, I demonstrate that media fandom, particularly with Disney, is not as simple as straightforward admiration and instead, is a complex process that requires careful navigation.

Women are oftentimes forgotten in history due to the pursuit of their male colleagues. Much is the case for Lady Colin Campbell, nee Gertrude Elizabeth Blood (b. 3 May 1857), as she was left behind in history. However, unlike other similar stories, Blood was subject to the thoughts and opinions of a nation when she and her husband went through the longest and nastiest - dismissed - divorce trial in UK history. After the trial, she engaged in journalistic writing, submitting over a period of time to the periodical The World which would eventually turn into her essays A Woman’s Walks. Despite her popularity at the time Blood and her writing faded out of the public sphere. What this project intends to accomplish is to reintroduce Gertrude Elizabeth Blood back into society not for her scandal, but for how her work can be considered part of the Flaneur genre. As a woman born to a family capable of social climbing and then eventually a shunned member of the upper class, Blood’s work can shed unique light on the machinations of the Flaneur and the effects of class and gender. This proposed project will perform an analysis to (a) engage in understanding of the flaneur, working the flaneuse into the definition of the flaneur using Blood’s writing and (b) a reintroduction of Blood as a woman worthy of analysis, and appreciation for her work as a woman who went against the grain of society.

This dissertation proposes an audience-centered political theory of rhetoric: speakers identify and appeal to the characteristics of their audiences in order to build unity behind achieving some collective project. When crafting rhetorical appeals, speakers must account for those processes that define audience members’ concerns, commitments, and conceptions of self-interest. I call these processes “political production”: a central, but underexamined element in how audiences respond to rhetorical appeals. Under some circumstances, as in the small and narrowly-defined political communities discussed by ancient Greek theorists of rhetoric, political production is consistent across the politically relevant audience. In plural societies, however, difference, subordination, and exclusion often cut across the politically relevant audience, rather than defining its boundaries. As a result, rhetoric can build new solidarities which, reinforced through organizing and material infrastructure, create transformative political projects. This project utilizes a wide variety of theoretical and historical methods. In the first three substantive chapters, I rely on a combination of close readings of Attic Greek texts, conceptual analysis, and intellectual history to identify a conception of regime (politeia) as productive of the “available means of persuasion” in the thought of Aristotle and Plato, and to uncover Hobbes’ attempt, in his translation of Thucydides, to protect political order against his original and polemical conception of subversive “rhetoric”. In the next two chapters, I draw on social theoretic analysis, contemporary social science, and the history of American political thought to examine the role of rhetoric in political contexts defined by plurality and hegemony. In the dissertation’s final substantive chapter, I use archive research, interviews, and my own participant observations to apply the dissertation’s treatment of rhetoric to contemporary labor organizing and movement building. Understanding rhetoric in terms of political production contributes both to the history of political thought and to theoretically-engaged political interventions. By placing worries about rhetoric’s manipulative potential in their proper early modern context, I open space for re-reading the history of political thought for other approaches to rhetoric, such as the ones that I find in ancient Athenian philosophy. Normatively-engaged accounts of rhetoric, particularly those that examine appeals to racial resentment and similar reactionary attitudes, may also benefit from a broader focus on the institutions, movements, and material conditions that enable such appeals. These aspects of political production contribute far more to the success and consequent harm of such appeals than any specific candidate or official. Finally, the project contributes to the theory and practice of contemporary politics, especially as understood through radical democratic and broadly leftist perspectives. I develop a distinction between populist strategies and other possibilities for counter-hegemonic projects, and identify ways to fit an organization’s rhetorical approach to its strategy for achieving change.

Today, a “High-carbon Energy compleX” (HEX) of fossil-fuel enterprises and their allies hold the future captive, attempting to indefinitely preserve global reliance on carbon- emitting energy. Emergent social forces offer alternative futures, from ‘climate capitalism’ to energy democracy and more. Public collective action in the United States of America represents a potential pivotal force in this world-historical crisis, capable of helping initiate a break from catastrophic futures and opening up more democratic and humane alternatives. Studies of public opinion in the United States, framed by a critical analysis of social power that foregrounds the contours of domination and possibilities of resistance, may therefore be essential. This study attempts this through a 2-phase method: Qualitative research on the beliefs of climate-focused scholars across the country (n=22) and quantitative research using a national survey of public perception (n=1065). I demonstrate that the US public is already highly concerned about climate change and supportive of strategically necessary democratizing and redistributive policy solutions. However, both the public and experts show only weak support for social movement action and repertoires of contention1 capable of delivering these solutions. I argue that the most pressing need for intervention by social scientists and activists today is not the production of concern or action divorced from power analysis, but instead the cultivation of power analysis, building public capacities for power-literate strategy to guide collective action toward democratic and ecologically vibrant futures.