"Bodies as Location of the Greek 'Debt Crisis' (2000-2020)"
Mészáros Ortiz, 2023
This is my Master's thesis on History (GLOCAL - University of Glasgow, Universitat de Barcelona, Universidad de los Andes).
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12ZE_CshMrVxjLjM27JcUuxNAx5ctEYCB/view?usp=sharing
Abstract
Greece has become the embodiment of austerity since 2010 due to the measures that the Troika implemented in the country to control their ‘debt crisis’. Athens is considered to have been used as an urban laboratory for testing the auste-city model of governance in Europe as a way to normalise the state of economic crisis, and implement the European Union economic governance in the Eurozone during the coming years. Scholars have mainly focused on analysing the social movements, grassroots and solidarity initiatives that emerged out of the discomfort of the population, highlighting the conflict between ‘the system’ and ‘the people’, as a two-sided battle. This approach establishes a pre-existing position for the actors in the social script, limiting their possibility of action, and the understanding of how every person contributes and participates in ‘creating the system’.
Instead, this research proposes to locate the individual bodies within the collective body through a performativity approach. It will present qualitative research on footage captured during the first two decades of the 2000s in Greece, to identify how people use their bodies in a trespassing way to communicate their messages, and why they do so. The incorporation of this performative and metacognitive knowledge to analyse the case of Greece might facilitate the understanding on how macroeconomic decisions affect the livelihood of people directly in their bodies, and allow more awareness towards embodying new ways of being together in societal relationships. By localising the bodies, researchers can also allocate actions, responsibilities, and consequences to concrete bodies, which is particularly important when considering how globalised processes can dilute the proper signalisation of where decisions are being taken, by who, and how these might affect the life and death of millions of people.
Keywords: austerity, body discourses, Greece, Greek debt crisis, globalisation, governmentality, localisation, neoliberal capitalism, political performativity.
"Bodies that Produce Speech"
Mészáros Ortiz, 2015
Here you would find MariLu bachelor's thesis on Psychology (Universidad de Costa Rica).
http://repositorio.sibdi.ucr.ac.cr:8080/jspui/bitstream/123456789/2386/1/38225.pdf
Abstract
The Performance as an artistic expression has called attention since its beginning in the midst of the XX century, because its exponents force the glance of the audience to follow their moves. Parallel, the concept of performativity from Judith Butler‟s proposal (1990) has being developed to explain the naturalization of gender in the social context. However, both spheres stay isolated from each other, leaving the expression of the body either as an art design or a stereotypical ritual repetition. This research studied the speech of the performatic actions of two Centro Americans, Guillermo Habacuc Vargas and Regina José Galindo, using the grounded theory to go deeper into the discursive productions of politic resistance they do with their bodies in front of the public. The final objective was to examine the speeches produce by bodies not only when interpreting an artistic performance but also when understanding human production of daily life. The results of this research showed the following: the body does produce speeches that are read by other people; the body accomplishes specific dispositions for the use of the body itself, having a how and a what for those actions; regarding public figures there is a “virtual body” or a character that is known by the audience. Therefore, the performance art may be consider as an accepted methodology for personal and social research that makes easier the metacognitive understanding of the bio-psyco-social consciousness or awareness.
Key Words: performance art, performativity, performatic, analysis of speech, grounded theory, body, metacognition.
