21st century

In an attempt to reduce runaway inflation, the Ecuadorian government froze citizens' checking and savings accounts for a year in March 1999. Nevertheless, Ecuador still experienced hyperinflation later that year. On January 9, 2000, Ecuador established dollarization as a desperate attempt to restore confidence in the economy. In order to test for dollarization's impact on economic growth, I employ an econometrics model with total factor productivity as the dependent variable. I then use dollarization as the independent variable of interest, and other control variables such as oil, and trade. The results reported in this paper suggest that dollarization has a significant positive impact on Ecuador's economic growth.

Limestone Creek is an unincorporated community existing within the planning and zoning boundary lines of Jupiter, Florida. Contrasting the economically flush and rapidly developing surrounding municipality of Jupiter, Limestone Creek is a predominantly African American community with an apparent economic gap that leaves the community untouched by development. This thesis project attempts to capture the voices of Limestone Creek and Jupiter residents pertaining to their accounts with an unincorporated area surrounded by a much wealthier municipality. Interviews were conducted with the residents of the community, Palm Beach County and the Town of Jupiter residents and officials, in an effort to explore the existence of an isolated African American community. The research resulted in varied responses to the idea of incorporation because of lack of funds. Conclusions to this research reveal that, to the members of the community, while race underlies all discussions of incorporation the more immediate issue is about securing basic services and infrastructure.

There are several competing theoretical explanations for why Pentecostal Protestantism is growing rapidly in Latin America including affinities with the indigenous religions of the region, a recent increase in the supply of Pentecostalism due to missionary movements, a reduction in government regulation of religion, social anomie theory, and the pull of economic upward mobility through conversion. This study analyses the growth of Pentecostal Protestantism in the case of Mexico, utilizing state by state comparative data measuring these variables. While higher percentages of indigenous residents are correlated significantly with Pentecostal growth, government regulation and supply are less so. Social anomie and economic upward mobility are not conducive to studying in minute detail but on a larger scale seem to serve as broad explanations for Pentecostal growth. Theories explaining Pentecostal growth should be revised to reflect these convergent factors and focus on the reasons for the divergent growth patterns.

This project examines politicization of the university. Critics have long charged that politics, and specifically identity politics, has infiltrated the classroom via radical professors. Scholars who lament the decline of the western canon claim that a massive wave of new untested works - largely written by women and people of color - have replaced the works of dead white men leaving our students ill-prepared. While most of the scholarship in this area has been written in the area of English literature departments, this project focuses on the field of Hispanic Literature. If identity politics has challenged the canon in the university, it is expected that within identity-based disciplines the infiltration of politics should be substantial. To test the politicization of the university, I examined 38 Hispanic Literature survey courses from a variety of American universities. I found a high degree of consistency among these syllabi and concluded that critics of the university have in many cases overstated their case. However, the results to suggest that changes are taking place in regards to the inclusion of more diverse authors in the curriculum, though not a complete take over as suggest numerous critics.

This project examines politicization of the university. Critics have long charged that politics, and specifically identity politics, has infiltrated the classroom via radical professors. Scholars who lament the decline of the western canon claim that a massive wave of new untested works - largely written by women and people of color - have replaced the works of dead white men leaving our students ill-prepared. While most of the scholarship in this area has been written in the area of English literature departments, this project focuses on the field of Hispanic Literature. If identity politics has challenged the canon in the university, it is expected that within identity-based disciplines the infiltration of politics should be substantial. To test the politicization of the university, I examined 38 Hispanic Literature survey courses from a variety of American universities. I found a high degree of consistency among these syllabi and concluded that critics of the university have at best overstated their case.

In the last 15 to 20 years, the failure of Communism as a viable revolutionary project has turned many on the Left to its historical rival: Anarchism. Merging with environmental discourses like deep ecology and the struggle for indigenous rights, Anarcho-Primitivism models its utopian discourse on ethnographic descriptions of hunter gatherer societies and mythologized notions of the "Noble Savage." Furthermore, its adherents retain high rates of visibility in the burgeoning antiglobalization movement, notorious for their black uniform and tactics of property destruction. My paper critically and pragmatically engages their attempts to invoke "the Primitive" as a metaphor for resisting the ascendance of global capitalism in the twenty-first century.