Dissertations / Theses on the topic '200299 Cultural Studies not elsewhere classified'

This thesis uses cultural studies approaches to ask in what ways can intersubjective art act on the disparities brought about by late capitalism through the auspices of cosmopolitanism? How do the same processes that oppress others allow the artist to be mobile and self-reflexive while accruing and deploying a broad range of knowledges and competencies? The answer is paradoxical: those oppressed by the processes of late capitalism become the focus, theme, and content of the intersubjective artwork while the artists benefit from a system they seek to problematise and critique. Three case study chapters highlight these complex and disconcerting politics.

Summary This thesis explores how massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), as an exemplary new media form, disrupt practices associated with more conventional media. These intensely social games exploit the interactivity and networks afforded by new media technologies in ways that generate new challenges for the organisation, control and regulation of media. The involvement of players in constituting these games – through their production of game-play, derivative works and strong social networks that drive the profitability of the games – disrupts some of the key foundations that underlie other publication media. MMOGs represent a new and hybrid form of media – part publication and part service. As such they sit within a number of sometimes contradictory organising and regulatory regimes. This thesis examines the negotiations and struggles for control between players, developers and publishers as issues of ownership, governance and access arise out of the new configurations. Using an ethnographic approach to gather information and insights into the practices of players, developers and publishers, this project identifies the characteristics of the distributed production network in this experiential medium. It explores structural components of successful interactive applications and analyses how the advent of player agency and the shift in authorship has meant a shift in control of the text and the relations that surround it. The integration of social networks into the textual environment, and into the business model of the media publishers has meant commerce has become entwined with affect in a new way in this medium. Publishers have moved into the role of both property managers, of the intellectual property associated with the game content, and community managers. Intellectual property management is usually associated with the reproduction and distribution of finished media products, and this sits uneasily with the performative and mutable form of this medium. Service provision consists of maintaining the game world environment, community management, providing access for players to other players and to the content generated both by the developers and the other players. Content in an MMOG is identified in this project as both the ‘tangible’ assets of code and artwork, rules and text, and the ‘intangible’ or immaterial assets of affective networks. Players are no longer just consumers of media, or even just active interpreters of media. They are co-producing the media as it is developed. This thesis frames that productiveness as unpaid labour, in an attempt to denaturalise the dominant discourse which casts players as consumers. The regulation of this medium is contentious. Conventional forms of media regulation – such as copyright, or content regulation regimes are inadequate for regulating the hybrid service/publication medium. This thesis explores how the use of contracts as the mechanism which constitutes the formal relations between players, publishers and developers creates challenges to some of the regimes of juridical and political rights held by citizens more generally. This thesis examines the productive practices of players and how the discourses of intellectual property and the discourses of the consumer are mobilised to erase the significance of those productive contributions. It also shows, using a Foucauldian analysis of the power negotiations, that players employ many counter-strategies to circumvent the more formal legal structures of the publishers. The dialogic relationship between players, developers and publishers is shown to mobilise various discursive constructions of the role of each. The outcome of these ongoing negotiations may well shape future interactive applications and the extent to which their innovative capacities will be available for all stakeholders to develop.

The Christian cultural heritage of north Africa is ancient and rich, but at risk after recent political events. Many Christian minority communities living in Islamic environments feel at risk of persecution. This is a topical and timely PhD. The Christian, Coptic heritage of Egypt remains poorly studied from the perspective of heritage management and is also at risk from a number of factors. Using first-hand study and analysis based upon original fieldwork, the thesis offers a state of the art assessment to risks facing Coptic monuments in Egypt today. It does this by situating Egyptian heritage policy within the English framework, and it establishes theoretical approaches to value, significance, meaning, and interpretation in Egyptian heritage within a wider global framework. It is based on the analysis of three markedly different Egyptian Christian Coptic sites, each with their own unique management issues and it offers a series of solutions and ideas to preserve, manage and interpret this unique material culture and to emphasise community solutions as being the most viable and sustainable approaches, whilst taking into account the varied levels of significance of these monuments.

This study contributes to the growing body of knowledge about the realities of women's lives in the seventeenth-century Iberian peninsula, through a socio-historical interpretation of the poetic production of five women. One is Portuguese, Violante del Cielo, and four are Spaniards: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, Marcia Belisarda and Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán. All are from the educated upper or noble classes and their lives span some one hundred and forty years, from 1566 to 1693. The thesis focuses particularly on their sonnets of love and friendship, both secular and religious. The sonnet was specifically chosen as the vehicle to study the ideas and concerns of literate, seventeenth-century women. As a difficult form of poetry requiring wit, artistry and education, sonnets enable a display of intellectual capabilities and offer opportunities for veiled criticism of contemporary systems of control. These women do not overtly rail against a system that offers them much in terms of social advancement and privilege. However, they do re-write our understanding of the Baroque by presenting their interests, pleasures and discontents from a feminine viewpoint. This detailed, contextual study of women's works, set against the philosophical, religious and moral treatises that governed their age, enables a wider interpretation of women's thought and intentions in the Iberian peninsula than may hitherto have been acknowledged, particularly in terms of relationships of affection within the family. Collectively, their individual works display a determination to demonstrate women's intelligence and moral strength. Furthermore, it becomes clear that women living within a system that utilised biological determinism as proof that they were incapable of reason, strive in their works to show that they are both capable of reason and determined to demonstrate it as undeniable fact.

In my exegesis, I will explore the different social, political, cultural and artistic themes, influences and methods that direct my art practice. I will dissect my current work, outlining these transformations and how they impact my work here at Massey, as well as how they will continue to inspire my art practice in the future.

This study investigates linguistic, perceptual, and pedagogical change (LPPC) in a short-term, study abroad English immersion program. It proposes the LPPC Interactive Model of second language acquisition based on Gardner's 1985 socioeducational model and Woods' 1996 beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge (BAK) structure. The framework is applied in a cross-cultural context, highlighting participants in the 1993 Camosun Osaka Aoyama English Language Institute involving Japanese English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students from Aoyama Junior College in Osaka, Japan, and non-Japanese ESL teachers at Camosun College and Canada's University of Victoria in British Columbia. The study examined the definition of teacher achievement; distinctions between language activation and language acquisition in the short-term, study abroad context; development of the constructs student BAK+, teacher BAK+, and class BAK+ to describe interactions in "class fit"; and the influence of temporal parameters on linguistic, perceptual, and pedagogical change. Data from teacher and student surveys and interviews suggest that change occurs in each of the linguistic, perceptual, and pedagogical dimensions and support constructs proposed for the model.

The health of the environment is integral to the health and wellbeing of the people. When the balance between Atua, whenua and tangata is disrupted, desecrated, disturbed or violated, it can have a detrimental impact on these relationships. This research study explored alternative indigenous paradigms for conceptualizing an environmental health framework that would improve the potency and health of all living things. A key question of the research study was to explore how Ngati Kuri sought to strengthen their relationship and connection with the natural world. The Hapu established Te Tai O Marokura health and social services as a vehicle to improve potency: healthy environments, healthy people. The specificity of Ngati Kuri experiences provided a broader context for researching and theorizing about restorative models that utilized traditional knowledge localized to a particular area. Another key question was to examine how Maori cultural values that were embedded within a worldview, could offer insights and constructs for new ways of being and thinking in the modern world. Kaupapa Maori philosophical positioning and theorizing informed the approaches and practices underpinning the study. The key aspects of the methodology were constructed around the tikanga principles of tinorangatiratanga, whakapapa and kaitiakitanga to provide a rationale for the collaboration formed with the Hapu. At the heart of the thesis is the validity given to the collective ownership of indigenous knowledge which challenges the fictional notion of a singular, temporally bound authorship. The thesis reflects the whakawhanaungatanga (reciprocal understanding) relationship between the Tuakana represented by Miriama Kahu and the Teina, Benita Wakefield working collaboratively with the Kaitiaki construct group formed to ensure that the use of indigenous knowledge and its transmission processes had honest transparency. The Tuakana was responsible for providing guidance, wisdom and mentoring to the Teina, the enrolled academic student responsible for producing the written thesis. These innovative collaborative Kaupapa Maori methods and practices in the study have tested the boundaries of conventional doctoral processes, breaking university academic regulations and challenging the western academy in the political nature of collective knowledge production and validity of indigenous knowledge. Qualitative and quantitative processes, approaches and methods were also utilized to inform the study and to ensure reflexivity of research practices. The key findings of the study were: • Improving potency requires a depth of intimacy and connection with all living things that involves a reciprocal understanding of the relationship between Atua, whenua and tangata. • Indigenous knowledge is localized to a spatial area and embedded within a worldview that validates and affirms cultural values and beliefs which continue to have relevance in more contemporary times. • The transformative nature of alternative indigenous paradigms must encompass the totality of creation, humanity and their genealogical and inter-generational linkages to all life. A major contribution of this PhD has been to create new knowledge, ways of thinking and meaning for restoring potency through the environmental health conceptual framework grounded in cultural and spiritual values. The specific focus on Ngati Kuri traditional knowledge authentic to the Hapu and their application, has significantly contributed towards constructing alternative indigenous approaches for meeting the challenges within the modern world.

This thesis examines the present status and enduring significance of the story “Scott of the Antarctic.” It critically reviews the story’s century-long history of interpretation and, via literary analysis, considers its meaning for a contemporary audience. It argues that while Captain Robert Scott’s historic hut is being conserved as an icon of the heroic era of Antarctic exploration, the story which gives that hut its meaning is in a less satisfactory condition and is also in need of conservation. In keeping with the twofold nature of its subject—a story which is based on fact—the thesis acknowledges both historiographical and literary critical perspectives. In addition, it draws on a wide range of data: manuscript letters and journals, newspaper and magazine commentary, historical monographs, biographies, literary works and film. The thesis reviews recent scholarly commentary on Scott’s story and identifies a variety of shortcomings. These include the polarized nature of the discussion, heavy uncritical use of a single influential debunking biography and a concomitant neglect of earlier sources. A detailed analytical survey of the story’s interpretation, from its genesis to the present, highlights principal themes and the influence of intellectual fashions. Veneration of the central character has always been accompanied by criticism. But judgements of Scott’s last expedition necessarily lack full knowledge of the circumstances, and many exhibit partisanship, faulty reasoning and the bias of hindsight. Two aspects of the story that have remained surprisingly unexamined are critiqued: the saintly reputation of Lawrence Oates, and the methods and accounts of the other contender for the South Pole, Roald Amundsen. Despite some recent favourable appraisals of Scott, evidence is presented that the character assassination that began in the late 1970s persists today. The final part of the thesis directs attention away from judicial and historical debates, and seeks the story’s deeper resonances through literary analysis. Although the quality of Scott’s writing and the tragic nature of his story are often mentioned, they have previously received scant critical attention. Aspects of the explorer’s literary skill are examined, and comparisons explored between his story and Greek tragedy as described in Aristotle’s Poetics. The discussion locates a large part of the transhistorical meaning of “Scott of the Antarctic” in its tragic qualities, and concludes by considering how the story’s potential has been exploited in imaginative renderings.

Black women are inventing new epistemologies to better fit their own experience, and they are putting these new ways of knowing into action within their communities to generate collective change through art. Black women’s theories of their own lived experience publicly have been consistently limited by narrow definitions of what it means to create a “Theory.” In this thesis, I will analyze the work of three contemporary Black woman performance artists, Ntozake Shange, Jamila Woods, and Nitty Scott, to identify the ways in which Black women do indeed theorize within these public spaces in ways that are innovative and complex. I focus on these artists insights on three critical sites: home, school, and community. I read Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, Woods’ Legacy!Legacy!, and Scott’s Creature! alongside Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought and bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress to explore the innovative theoretical spaces Black women have created in their art. Ultimately, I argue that acknowledging this process of using popular culture as a space for theoretical discourse can provide innovative tools for expression for Black women who do not, cannot, or do not wish to participate in academic discourses. Understanding these tools can empower Black women to explore their humanity and to understand the contexts, which Collins refers to as “domains,” in which Black women can claim and expand their power.

This investigation into the status of English in Iran and cultural presentations in Iranian English has two areas of emphasis. The first is a sociolinguistic profile of English in Iran in which the status, functions, uses and users of this language are described within in the country’s social and political contexts. In this part, contributing factors to the growth of English in three political periods, including the Qajar dynasty (1796 -1925), the Pahlavi era (1925-1979) and post-Revolutionary time (1979 – present), are elaborated upon to establish the historical and political bases for the second area of focus.

The second focus is the cultural content in the locally developed English textbooks used from 1939 to the present time (2020). Accordingly, the content of four generations (across five textbook series) of Iranian high school English textbooks are analyzed based on an evaluation scheme which the author has developed. This research finds answers to the questions on the status of culture in the Iranian English textbooks; distribution of Iranian and non-Iranian cultures; dominance of cultural elements (products, practices and perspectives) in each English textbooks series; and the political and ideological influence of each era on the content of English textbooks.

This investigation finds that the English textbooks which were developed before the Islamic Revolution (first and second generations) were highly cultural compared to the post-Revolution materials (third and fourth generations). Also, non-Iranian cultural components (particularly the American and British cultures) were more represented in the English textbooks of the Pahlavi period, whereas Western cultures were all eliminated in the post-Revolution textbooks, replaced by the Islamic/Revolutionary cultures. Additionally, cultural perspectives outnumbered cultural products and practices in the first and second generations of English textbooks (Pahlavi era) whereas cultural products dominated the post-Revolutionary English materials. This study finds that political and ideological hegemony of each era have directly influenced the textual and illustrative content of locally developed English textbooks in Iran.

Based on the lessons learned from the participating communities, the findings of this study confirm that the Tanzanian Government's aspirations for developing Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) policies and programmes that build on the strengths of indigenous child-rearing knowledge and practices are not only viable but achievable. What is required is a serious commitment from government to negotiated policy and programme development processes starting with families and communities. As indicated by the study community members, rural families and communities are eager to work together with government as equal partners in finding local solutions to improving the quality of care and early education of their young children in home and community settings as well as through the local services of clinics and schools.

The thesis is an examination of Aboriginal cultural tourism based on interviews with national and international tourists. The research found that the opportunity for tourists to share personal intimacy with Aboriginal people often outweighed the attraction to the cultural aspects of the tours and that this can contribute to the discourse of reconciliation.

This dissertation examines Charles Darwin’s major texts together with literary works by turn-of the-century American women writers—Nella Larsen, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin—in order to trace how evolutionary theory shaped transatlantic cultural ideas of race, particularly black identity, and gender. I focus on the concept of “descent” as the overarching theme organizing categories of the human in evolutionary terms. My perspective and methods—examining race and gender from a black feminist perspective that draws on biopolitics theory, as well as using close reading, affect theory, and attention to narrative in my textual analysis—comprise my argument’s framework. By bringing these perspectives and methods together in my attention to the interplay between Darwinian discourse and American literature, I shed new light on the turn-of-the-century transatlantic exchange between science and culture. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that descent constitutes a central concept and point of tension in evolutionary theory’s inscription of life’s development. I also show how themes of human-animal kinship, the Western binary of rationality and materiality, and reproduction and maternity circulated within this discourse. I contribute to scholarly work relating evolutionist discourse to literature by focusing on American literature: in the context of turn-of-the-century American anxieties about racial and gender hierarchies, the evolutionist paradigm’s configurations of human difference were especially consequential. Moreover, Larsen, Gilman, and Chopin offer responses that reveal this hierarchy’s varied effects on racialized and gendered bodies. I thus demonstrate the significance of examining Darwinian discourse alongside American literature by women writers, an association in need of deeper scholarly attention, especially from a feminist, theoretical perspective.

This dissertation begins with my application of literary analysis and close reading to Darwin’s major texts in order to uncover how they formed a suggestive foundation for late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century ideologies of race and gender. I use this analysis as the background for my investigation of Larsen’s, Gilman’s, and Chopin’s literary texts. In Chapter 1, I conduct a close reading of Darwin’s articulation of natural selection in The Origin of Speciesand focus on how Darwin’s syntactical and narrative structure imply evolution as an agential force aimed at linear progress. In Chapter 2, I analyze Darwin’s articulation of the development of race and gender differences in The Descent of Man, as well as Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, and argue that Darwin’s and Huxley’s accounts suggest how anxiety over animal-human kinship was alleviated through structuring nonwhite races and women as less developed and hence inferior. In Chapter 3, I argue that Larsen’s novel Quicksand interrogates and complicates aesthetic primitivism and biopolitical racism and sexism, both rooted in evolutionist discourses. Finally, in Chapter 4, I focus on Gilman’s utopian novel Herlandand select short stories by Chopin. While Gilman unambiguously advocates for a desexualized white matriarchy, Chopin’s stories waver between support for, and critique of, racial hierarchy. Reading these authors together against the backdrop of white masculine evolutionist theory reveals how this theory roots women as materially bound reproducers of racial hierarchy.

This study uses a sociocultural framework to trace the experiences of 24 Chinese international undergraduate students studying business and information sciences in a New Zealand university, using community of practice perspectives recognising the university as a site of complex discourses requiring negotiation of new identities and practices. The students’ expectations, the issues that emerged and the processes of change they went through to meet their goals were investigated from retrospective and longitudinal viewpoints, using semi-structured interviews supported by schematic representations developed by the researcher and photographic representations compiled by participants were. The findings suggest that preparation before departure focused largely on expected English demands, rather than wider matters of academic culture, and this was only partially rectified during prior study in New Zealand. Students thus entered the university unfamiliar with its specific discourses and found conditions for resolving difficulties more limited than previously experienced. The anonymity and extreme time pressure pertaining in large first-year classes led to bewilderment about requirements, threats to the sense of identity as competent students which they had arrived with, and often, failure of courses. Nevertheless, the investment, personal and monetary, which this journey represented provided the incentive to persevere. Most students were resourceful in negotiating a fit between their learning preferences and the affordances of the university, resulting in very different journeys for each of them. Measures adopted included those sanctioned by the university, such as developing skills to meet the demands of academic literacies, and others less valued, such as extreme dependence on teacher consultation. Success was gained through personal agency which proved more important than the university goal of student autonomy. Beyond the academic arena, other activities such as part-time jobs were significant in contributing to a sense of identity as competent and educated adults, and to new viewpoints which contrasted with original cultural norms. They continued to identify as Chinese, but in a “third space” owing something to New Zealand influences. The study concludes that entry criteria should include a component of university preparation. It also recommends measures by which the university might enhance the experiences of such students.

This thesis investigates factors which impact on Indigenous student learning and success in secondary schooling in South Australia. The research contributes to greater understandings of why Indigenous students make the decision to stay on at school, and highlights the importance of teachers and culturally responsive schooling for improved learning outcomes.

Suicide holds an ambivalent position in contemporary social and cultural contexts. It questions what it means to live and die, yet provides no clear-cut answers about death or dying, life or living. This thesis explores some of the ways suicide has been understood and represented, to demonstrate that knowing suicide is dependent not only on what suicide means, but also on how meanings of suicide become part of knowledge. Knowing suicide is not a matter of responding to it as self-evident, transparent, neutral and obvious, but rather is implicated in social processes and norms central to how knowledge gains intelligibility. Guided by poststructuralist, postmodernist, feminist and postfeminist philosophies, the thesis takes up gender and gendering as its central focus, to interrogate how knowledge about suicide becomes knowledge. Critically examining a wide variety of textual sources, it argues that suicide is principally rendered as a masculine, and even a masculinist, practice. Knowing suicide today is anchored in suicidology - the study of suicide - and maintained by institutional sites of practice including sociology, law, medicine, psy-knowledge and newsprint media, each of which is analysed here. Suicide as masculine and masculinist practice is invoked through multiple, often-contradictory and inextricably linked readings of gender, even while claiming homogeneity. Its gendered foundations can however be made to appear gender-neutral, even when actually gender-saturated. The twin gender movements of neutrality and repleteness are in fact crucial to the knowing of suicide. The thesis establishes that knowing suicide can never occur outside discourse. Even more importantly, how suicide enters discourse cannot be thought outside gender. The body matters to the production of deeply problematic understandings of agency, intent and violence, on which the production of suicide as masculine and masculinist depends. It becomes clear that such dependence rests not only on gender, but also on race and sexuality, as conditions of its knowing. The thesis suggests that further attention be given to the production and maintenance of highly reductive and limiting homogenous truth claims in suicide - truth claims that validate and privilege some interpretations of suicide, at the expense of rendering others less legitimate and serious. If the processes and practices of interpreting suicide become a site of permanent debate, they are more likely to challenge the ways in which masculinist ways of knowing render, and limit, the intelligibility of suicide.

Since the late 1970s, biomedical researchers have heavily invested in the development of portable insulin pumps that allow people with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) to carry several days-worth of insulin to be injected on an as-needed basis. That means fewer needles and syringes, making regular insulin injections less time consuming and troublesome. As insulin pump use has become more widespread over the past twenty years among people with T1D, the social and cultural effects of using these medical devices on their everyday experiences have become both increasingly apparent for individuals yet consistently absent from social and cultural studies of the disease.

In this dissertation, I explore the technological, medical, and cultural networks of insulin pump treatment to identify the role(s) these biomedicalized treatment acts play in the structuring of people, their bodies, and the cultural values constructed around various medical technologies. As I will show, insulin pump treatment alters people’s bodies and identities as devices become integrated as co-productive actors within patient-users’ biological and social systems. By analyzing personal interviews and digital media produced by people with T1D alongside archival materials, this study identifies compulsory patterns in the practices, structures, and narratives related to insulin pump use to center chapters around the productive (and sometimes stifling) relationship between people, bodies, technologies, and American culture.

By analyzing the layered and intersecting sites of insulin pump treatment together, this project reveals how medical technologies, health identities, bodies, and cultures are co-constructed and co-defined in ways that bind them together—mutually constitutive, medically compelled, cultural and social. New bodies and new systems, I argue, come with new (in)visibilities, and while this new technologically-produced legibility of the body provides unprecedented management of the symptoms and side-effects of the disease, it also brings with it unforeseen social consequences that require changes to people’s everyday lives and practices.