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This dissertation explores the political effects of the widespread diffusion of psychoanalysis outside the clinic in Argentina, specifically in Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires, a world capital of psychoanalysis, is especially noted for how the clinic has spread from the divan into popular culture. I examine the idea of a psychoanalytic culture critically and locate it within a range of discourses and practices, both historical and contemporary, that share a family resemblance. I argue that psychoanalysis is productively viewed as restaging problematics that predate it, reinterpreting them in a new vocabulary. My research points to the adaptability of the paradigm and its performative effects, decentering its self-representations as a stable and autonomous field. I also show, however, that beyond the use of psychoanalysis to reproduce the status quo—adaptive or complacent logics—it may be used to redescribe the terms of political debate in a way that opens a horizon of discourse. In this regard, I present a case study in which feminist activists use a psychoanalytic concept of desire to make a critical intervention in a fight over the legalization of abortion. This is not a spontaneous effect of widespread psychoanalytic knowledge, but the result of a strategic campaign intervention; its popular uptake nonetheless depends on the way that psychoanalysis is sedimented as common sense in a broad public. At the same time, its success also depends on a preexisting form that the psychoanalytic claim recapitulates, a form with a long trajectory in Argentina’s human rights tradition. Drawing on 19 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation contributes to a body of scholarship about the historical relationship of psychoanalysis and politics, of which there are few empirical studies in contemporary societies. In addition, this work presents a case study of what is often confined to theoretical speculation, the possibility of a politics of desire, following what happens whe

Summary: In the first essay, I examine how managerial opportunism affects corporate investment efficiency and, ultimately, firm performance. Prior research establishes corporate investment efficiency as a function of the firm’s information environment and internal governance. To measure managerial opportunism, I use an ex-ante firm level measure of managerial opportunism based on insider trading patterns and test its effects on investment efficiency and performance. Extant research associates opportunistic insider trading with opaque information environments about the firm and weak firm governance, making it an apropos proxy for opportunistic managerial behavior. Despite the clear establishment of opportunistic insider trading as an agency problem in the literature, it remains unanswered how the managerial insider trading decision’s economic irrationality might reflect a broader agency problem that affects firm investment policy and performance. I introduce competing hypotheses that managerial opportunism may positively associate with overinvestment through “empire building” and excessive risk taking at shareholders’ expense. On the contrary, manv agerial opportunism may lead to underinvestment through rent seeking behavior. My results show that managerial opportunism decreases firm investment efficiency and negatively affects accounting and stock performance. Further tests show that both the quality of the information environment and internal governance moderate the effects of managerial opportunism, providing a unique perspective on how insider trading policy and regulation can affect corporate investment policy., 2021, Includes bibliography., Degree granted: Dissertation (PhD)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021., Collection: FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Legalization of cannabis has accelerated over the past decade, with more than a dozen U.S. states legalizing adult-use or “recreational” cannabis, dozens more permitting medical use, and varieties low in THC (“hemp”) legal nation-wide. However, legalization does not mean the end of prohibition but the refashioning and renegotiatin of boundaries between legal and illegal versions of the plant, which circulates in a variety of markets with different rules and dynamics. For the “Emerald Triangle” region of northern California and southern Oregon that has been the epicenter of U.S. cannabis production for several decades, each successive moment of legalization – medical, recreational, and hemp – has been accompanied by new waves of “green rush,” cycles of boom and bust that have transformed the landscape.This dissertation focuses on southern Oregon’s Rogue River Valley, a long-standing cannabis producing region that has seen several successive shifts in the scale and geography of production with each phase of the roll-out of legalization. In this context, this dissertation asks, how is cannabis being re-defined, by whom, and to what ends? How do these new layers of meaning reshape the forms and practices of cannabis production? Based on interviews and site visits with growers across the spectrum of legal regimes, participant observation in cannabis industry events, and autoethnographic fieldwork as a worker in the harvest, this dissertation presents a portrait of the region’s cannabis landscapes in five movements. First, it considers the emergence of the recreational marijuana market and its booms and bust. Using the concepts of moral economy/economic morality, I examine how the ideal of the “free market” has influenced the development of Oregon’s legalized cannabis policy, and how ideas of what is fair and unfair shape the way growers perceive this market and their place in it. The next chapter looks at the emergence of legalized hemp, pointing out that “medicinal hemp

A Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a physical head injury that occurs in a singleevent. Over the last decade, the CDC has recorded well over 2 million TBI-related emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and deaths per year, making the injury one of the most prominent causes of death and disability in the country. In this dissertation, I trace how one class of TBIs, those diagnosed as moderate-severe, inaugurate a host of bodily and social consequences for survivors of the injury, those closest to them, and their wider communities. These consequences muddy and multiply the acronym’s meaning, even as it remains tethered to its construction as the product of a singular event. TBI in this sense, the TBI that exists outside the clinic, is what it means to those it impacts at specific times and in specific interactions. TBI is not only embodied and constructed differently from person to person and time and place to time and place, but it is different. TBI is thus multiple. I identify these social meanings of TBI ethnographically, drawing on over a year of interviews and participant-observation with survivors and those with whom they interact in one specific context, the rapidly developing and gentrifying city of Seattle, WA. I find that TBI’s full meaning in the city, the multiple meaning that it holds as a distinct social object outside the esoteric worlds of biomedicine and rehab wards, is determined by the contexts in which it is invoked. The acronym is brought into being as a complex, shifting, and ultimately fungible concept that tacks back and forth between each individual, social, and political bodies with life-altering effects on survivors and those closest to them. Through this process, TBI is phenomenological and performative,embodied and constructed, the product of narratives, relationships, policies, and social organizations. In the final analysis, what I identify in the Social Life of TBI is an amorphous social object that takes on unique meanings in di