Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Who Governs Educational Change? The Paradoxes of State Power and the Pursuit of Educational Reform in Post-Neoliberal Ecuador (2007-2015)(2016) Baxter, Jorge Grant; Klees, Steven J.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study identifies and compares competing policy stories of key actors involved in the Ecuadorian education reform under President Rafael Correa from 2007-2015. By revealing these competing policy stories the study generates insights into the political and technical aspects of education reform in a context where state capacity has been eroded by decades of neoliberal policies. Since the elections in 2007, President Correa has focused much of his political effort and capital on reconstituting the state’s authority and capacity to not only formulate but also implement public policies. The concentration of power combined with a capacity building agenda allowed the Correa government to advance an ambitious comprehensive education reform with substantive results in equity and quality. At the same time the concentration of power has undermined a more inclusive and participatory approach which are essential for deepening and sustaining the reform. This study underscores both the limits and importance of state control over education; the inevitable conflicts and complexities associated with education reforms that focus on quality; and the limits and importance of participation in reform. Finally, it examines the analytical benefits of understanding governance, participation and quality as socially constructed concepts that are tied to normative and ideological interests.Item EN BUSCA DE UN PAÍS INTERIOR: LA NOVELA LÍRICA VANGUARDISTA EN GILBERTO OWEN, ROSAMEL DEL VALLE Y HUMBERTO SALVADOR(2015) Gonzalez, Norman Alberto; Aguilar Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Scholars have shown a tendency to analyze the so-called “historical avant-garde” from a perspective of "shock". This vanguardist gesture seeks to destabilize a mode of thinking and doing art in the early part of the twentieth century. If there is indeed an inevitable initial historical moment when the avant-garde becomes iconoclastic and distinguishes themselves in a patricidal gesture, there must exist another moment when the contributions of the avant-garde can be seen to challenge not only the formal aspects of the cultural tradition, but also its contents. Few authors have considered the avant-garde writings in dialogue with a tradition that began in the nineteenth century or with other contemporary aesthetics —often opposed in style and approach. One purpose of this work is to locate other aesthetic affinities with the avant-garde movement to better define how they differ and create their own genealogies as well as enter into dialogue with each other. In order to achieve this I propose a reading of the context in which one can see the necessity to seek a new expression for the spiritual demands of the time. One of these new spiritual demands is addressed by the so-called lyrical novel, which can be considered as a subgenre of the literary vanguards. Thus, by analyzing three Latin American writers: Gilberto Owen (Mexico, 1904-1952), Rosamel del Valle (Chile, 1901-1965) and Humberto Salvador (Ecuador, 1909-1982) and their avant-garde lyrical novels written between 1928 and 1931, I will identify what can be considered new, which elements characterize these novels, and how their content challenges the traditional narrative genre and creates new sensibilities. The avant-garde fundamentally breaks with the aesthetics of representation, leading to broader ontological, epistemological, and political ruptures. The aim of avant-garde literature is to regain the dynamic aspect of reality that was lost through the domination of rationalism. We are able to explore this re-appropriation through unique approaches to the elements of imagination, the occurrence (or not) of events, and experience and see how the authors were able to contribute to the radical critique of aesthetic beliefs and notions of reality at the beginning of the twentieth century.Item Gramática de un pensamiento solitario. Lenguaje y poesía en Alfredo Gangotena(2011) Burneo, Cristina; Aguilar Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The broadest sphere of bilingualism corresponds to the coexistence of two languages in a writer. This dissertation addresses less evident forms and realms of bilingualism in poetry. It is focused mainly on Alfredo Gangotena (Quito, 1904-1944), an Ecuadorian poet of French and Spanish expression. Through Gangotena's work, the author defines bilingualism as the individual code a bilingual writer forges through the writing process using two linguistic and cultural systems which, together, constitute the second element of his bilingual circumstance. This private language emerges as a universe with its own values and coherence as it creates its own constellation of influences and elective affinities, always within a split existential situation. Mother and second language, origin and destination, are categories subverted by the bilingual poet, whose literary and vital space becomes liminal and undetermined. Alfredo Gangotena's work is also shaped by illness. The body is the space of experience and confluence of physical suffering, anguish, inner exile and rootlessness, all expressed often through images of infirmity. Beyond a mere set of rhetoric strategies, writing is an aesthetic outlet for this circumstance. Although it cannot be confirmed if he suffered of hemophilia or any other blood disorder, Gangotena's poetic universe is built upon the image of a bleeding body. The Andes and France are not conceptually linked -at least, that is what the extant critical material would lead us to believe. The dissertation also focuses on the linkages that exist between Gangotena as an Andean poet, and the turn-of-the-century Parisian cultural environment that shaped his poetry in great measure. The author analyzes his work within a transatlantic experience of language and expatriation. Through the creation of his work, Gangotena questioned the intellectual tasks assigned to writers in Ecuador at the height of indigenism and the consolidation of the national project, being therefore perceived as a dissident, an afrancesado.Item Just a Click Away from Home: Ecuadorian Migration, Nostalgia and New Technologies in Transnational Times(2007-05-14) Mejia Estevez, Silvia; Harrison, Regina; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Focusing on three different narrations of migration from Ecuador to the United States, Spain and Italy, this documentary video and its study guide explore how new technologies such as the Internet, satellite communications, email, videoconferences, and cell phones have changed the experience of displacement. The two components of this dissertation propose that, due to the encounter with new technologies intent upon shrinking space and time, nostalgia is becoming digital -a quest for continuity of time and space through the simultaneity offered by digital media. Under these new circumstances, transnational businesses profit from nostalgic markets, whereas transnational families and organizations grapple with digital technologies to foment a "globalization of solidarity." As an aesthetic artefact, the project responds to the controversy within film theory regarding subjectivity and fiction storytelling procedures as defining features of documentary, a film genre traditionally marketed as objective and non-fictional. For this reason, the video is composed of what I call not three case studies but three stories of migration. The documentary starts out in Cuenca (Ecuador), where, speechless, Arturo and Mercedes see their children on the videoconferencing screen. It is their first "reunion" since the children left Ecuador and settled in New York City, eleven years ago. In another Ecuadorian city, Gloria -whose husband migrated from Quito to Madrid- promotes Internet access to rescue families torn apart by migration. Finally, we meet Carla, a journalist settled in Milan, who takes advantage of new technologies to report on the Ecuadorian community in Italy for readers far away. With a comparative and translocal approach -and theoretically based on Hall, Appadurai, Boym, Nichols and Portes among others-, this project explores multiple relationships with new technologies determined by gender, age, race, ethnicity, education, computer literacy, geographical situation, and socio-economic background. Through their differing and even contradictory discourses and practices, expressed and lived in geographical locations that coexist and overlap on the screen, the protagonists of this dissertation-documentary video show us to what extent they are inscribed in different places of enunciation that shape their experience of displacement and nostalgia in contrasting ways.