11,851 research outputs found
Comedians without a Cause: The Politics and Aesthetics of Humour in Dutch Cabaret (1966-2020)
Comedians play an important role in society and public debate. While comedians have been considered important cultural critics for quite some time, comedy has acquired a new social and political significance in recent years, with humour taking centre stage in political and social debates around issues of identity, social justice, and freedom of speech. To understand the shifting meanings and political implications of humour within a Dutch context, this PhD thesis examines the political and aesthetic workings of humour in the highly popular Dutch cabaret genre, focusing on cabaret performances from the 1960s to the present. The central questions of the thesis are: how do comedians use humour to deliver social critique, and how does their humour resonate with political ideologies? These questions are answered by adopting a cultural studies approach to humour, which is used to analyse Dutch cabaret performances, and by studying related materials such as reviews and media interviews with comedians. This thesis shows that, from the 1960s onwards, Dutch comedians have been considered ‘progressive rebels’ – politically engaged, subversive, and carrying a left-wing political agenda – but that this image is in need of correction. While we tend to look for progressive political messages in the work of comedians who present themselves as being anti-establishment rebels – such as Youp van ‘t Hek, Hans Teeuwen, and Theo Maassen – this thesis demonstrates that their transgressive and provocative humour tends to protect social hierarchies and relationships of power. Moreover, it shows that, paradoxically, both the deliberately moderate and nuanced humour of Wim Kan and Claudia de Breij, and the seemingly past-oriented nostalgia of Alex Klaasen, are more radical and progressive than the transgressive humour of van ‘t Hek, Teeuwen and Maassen. Finally, comedians who present absurdist or deconstructionist forms of humour, such as the early student cabarets, Freek de Jonge, and Micha Wertheim, tend to disassociate themselves from an explicit political engagement. By challenging the dominant image of the Dutch comedian as a ‘progressive rebel,’ this thesis contributes to a better understanding of humour in the present cultural moment, in which humour is often either not taken seriously, or one-sidedly celebrated as being merely pleasurable, innocent, or progressively liberating. In so doing, this thesis concludes, the ‘dark’ and more conservative sides of humour tend to get obscured
Building body identities - exploring the world of female bodybuilders
This thesis explores how female bodybuilders seek to develop and maintain a viable sense of self despite being stigmatized by the gendered foundations of what Erving Goffman (1983) refers to as the 'interaction order'; the unavoidable presentational context in which identities are forged during the course of social life. Placed in the context of an overview of the historical treatment of women's bodies, and a concern with the development of bodybuilding as a specific form of body modification, the research draws upon a unique two year ethnographic study based in the South of England, complemented by interviews with twenty-six female bodybuilders, all of whom live in the U.K. By mapping these extraordinary women's lives, the research illuminates the pivotal spaces and essential lived experiences that make up the female bodybuilder. Whilst the women appear to be embarking on an 'empowering' radical body project for themselves, the consequences of their activity remains culturally ambivalent. This research exposes the 'Janus-faced' nature of female bodybuilding, exploring the ways in which the women negotiate, accommodate and resist pressures to engage in more orthodox and feminine activities and appearances
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Co-design As Healing: Exploring The Experiences Of Participants Facing Mental Health Problems
This thesis is an exploration of the healing role of co-design in mental health. Although co-design projects conducted within mental health settings are rising, existing literature tends to focus on the object of design and its outcomes while the experiences of participants per se remain largely unexplored. The guiding research question of this study is not how we design things that improve mental health, but how co-designing, as an act, might do so.
The thesis presents two projects that were organized in collaboration with the mental health charity Islington Mind and the Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP) in London.
The project at Islington Mind used a structured design process inviting participants to design for wellbeing. A case study analysis provides insights on how participants were impacted, summarizing key challenges and opportunities.
The design at PTP worked towards creating a collective brief in an emergent fashion, finally culminating in a board game. The experiences of participants were explored through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), using semi-structured interview data. The analysis served to identify key themes characterising the experience of co-design such as contributing, connecting, thinking and intentioning. In addition, a mixed-methods analysis of questionnaires and interview data exploring participants' wellbeing, showed that all participants who engaged fairly consistently in the project improved after the project ended, although some participants' scores returned to baseline six months later.
Reflecting on both projects, an approach to facilitation within mental health is outlined, detailing how the dimensions of weaving and layered participation, nurturing mattering and facilitating attitudes interlace. This contribution raises awareness of tacit dimensions in the practice of facilitation, articulating the nuances of how to encourage and sustain meaningful and ethical engagement and offering insights into a range of tools. It highlights the importance of remaining reflexive in relation to attitudes and emotions and discusses practical methodological and ethical challenges and ways to resolve them which can be of benefit to researchers embarking on a similar journey.
The thesis also offers detailed insights on how methodologies from different fields were integrated into a whole, arguing for transparency and reflexivity about epistemological assumptions, and how underlying paradigms shift in an interdisciplinary context.
Based on the overall findings, the thesis makes a case for considering design as healing (or a designerly way of healing), highlighting implications at a systems, social and individual level. It makes an original contribution to our understanding of design, highlighting its healing character, and proposes a new way to support mental health. The participants in this study not only had increased their own wellbeing through co-designing, but were also empowered and contributed towards healing the world. Hence, the thesis argues for a unique, holistic perspective of design and mental health, recognizing the interconnectedness of the individual, social and systemic dimensions of the healing processes that are ignited
From wallet to mobile: exploring how mobile payments create customer value in the service experience
This study explores how mobile proximity payments (MPP) (e.g., Apple Pay) create customer value in the service experience compared to traditional payment methods (e.g. cash and card). The main objectives were firstly to understand how customer value manifests as an outcome in the MPP service experience, and secondly to understand how the customer activities in the process of using MPP create customer value. To achieve these objectives a conceptual framework is built upon the Grönroos-Voima Value Model (Grönroos and Voima, 2013), and uses the Theory of Consumption Value (Sheth et al., 1991) to determine the customer value constructs for MPP, which is complimented with Script theory (Abelson, 1981) to determine the value creating activities the consumer does in the process of paying with MPP.
The study uses a sequential exploratory mixed methods design, wherein the first qualitative stage uses two methods, self-observations (n=200) and semi-structured interviews (n=18). The subsequent second quantitative stage uses an online survey (n=441) and Structural Equation Modelling analysis to further examine the relationships and effect between the value creating activities and customer value constructs identified in stage one. The academic contributions include the development of a model of mobile payment services value creation in the service experience, introducing the concept of in-use barriers which occur after adoption and constrains the consumers existing use of MPP, and revealing the importance of the mobile in-hand momentary condition as an antecedent state. Additionally, the customer value perspective of this thesis demonstrates an alternative to the dominant Information Technology approaches to researching mobile payments and broadens the view of technology from purely an object a user interacts with to an object that is immersed in consumers’ daily life
Conscience and Consciousness: British Theatre and Human Rights.
This research project investigates a paradigm of human rights theatre. Through the lens of performance and theatre-making, this thesis explores how we came to represent, speak about, discuss, and own human rights in Britain. My framework of ‘human rights theatre’ proposes three distinctive features: firstly, such works dramatise real-world issues and highlights the role of the state in endangering its citizens; secondly, ethical ruptures are encountered within and without the drama, and finally, these performances characteristically aspire to produce an activist effect on the collective behaviours of the audience.
This thesis interrogates the strategies theatre-makers use to articulate human rights concerns or to animate human rights intent. The selected case-studies for this investigation are ice&fire’s testimonial project, Actors for Human Rights; Badac Theatre; Jonathan Holmes’ work as director of Jericho House; Cardboard Citizens’ youth participation programme, ACT NOW; and Tony Cealy’s Black Men’s Consortium. Deliberately selecting companies and performance events that have received limited critical attention, my methodology constellates case-studies through original interviews, durational observation of creative working methods and proximate descriptions of practice.
The thesis is interested in the experience of coming to ‘consciousness’ through human rights theatre, an awakening to the impacts of rights infringements and rights claiming. I explore consciousness as a processual, procedural, and durational happening in these performance events. I explore the ‘æffect’ of activist art and examine the ways in which makers of human rights theatre aim to amplify both affective and effective qualities in their work. My thesis also considers the articulation of activist purpose and the campaigning intent of the selected theatre-makers and explores how their activism is animated in their productions. Through the rich seam of discussion generated by the identification and exploration of the traits of a distinctive human rights theatre, I affirm the generative value of this typological enquiry
Balancing the urban stomach: public health, food selling and consumption in London, c. 1558-1640
Until recently, public health histories have been predominantly shaped by medical and scientific perspectives, to the neglect of their wider social, economic and political contexts. These medically-minded studies have tended to present broad, sweeping narratives of health policy's explicit successes or failures, often focusing on extraordinary periods of epidemic disease viewed from a national context. This approach is problematic, particularly in studies of public health practice prior to 1800. Before the rise of modern scientific medicine, public health policies were more often influenced by shared social, cultural, economic and religious values which favoured maintaining hierarchy, stability and concern for 'the common good'. These values have frequently been overlooked by modern researchers. This has yielded pessimistic assessments of contemporary sanitation, implying that local authorities did not care about or prioritise the health of populations. Overly medicalised perspectives have further restricted historians' investigation and use of source material, their interpretation of multifaceted and sometimes contested cultural practices such as fasting, and their examination of habitual - and not just extraordinary - health actions. These perspectives have encouraged a focus on reactive - rather than preventative - measures.
This thesis contributes to a growing body of research that expands our restrictive understandings of pre-modern public health. It focuses on how public health practices were regulated, monitored and expanded in later Tudor and early Stuart London, with a particular focus on consumption and food-selling. Acknowledging the fundamental public health value of maintaining urban foodways, it investigates how contemporaries sought to manage consumption, food production waste, and vending practices in the early modern City's wards and parishes. It delineates the practical and political distinctions between food and medicine, broadly investigates the activities, reputations of and correlations between London's guild and itinerant food vendors and licensed and irregular medical practitioners, traces the directions in which different kinds of public health policy filtered up or down, and explores how policies were enacted at a national and local level. Finally, it compares and contrasts habitual and extraordinary public health regulations, with a particular focus on how perceptions of and actual food shortages, paired with the omnipresent threat of disease, impacted broader aspects of civic life
The geographies of care and training in the development of assistance dog partnerships
Human-assistance-dog partnerships form a significant phenomena that have been overlooked in both animal geographies and disability geographies. By focusing on one Assistance Dogs UK (ADUK) charity, ‘Dog A.I.D’., a charity that helps physically disabled and chronically ill people to train their own pets to be assistance dogs, I detail the intimate entangled lifeworlds that humans and dogs occupy. In doing so, I also dialogue between the sub-disciplinary fields of animal geographies and disability geographies, by exploring two broad thematic areas – embodiment and care. As such, this thesis examines the geographies of assistance dog partnership, the care and training practices involved, the benefits and challenges of sharing a lifeworld with a different species, and the changing relationship from a human-pet bond to a human-assistance-dog partnership.
Drawing on lived experience and representations of assistance dog partnerships gathered through qualitative (and quantitative) research methods, including a survey, semi-structured interviews (face-to-face, online, and telephone), video ethnography, and magazine analysis, I contribute to research on the assistance dog partnerships and growing debates around the more-than-human nature of care. The ethnomethodological approach to exploring how training occurs between disabled human and assistance dog is also noteworthy as it centres the lively experiences of practice at work between species.
The thesis is organised around interconnected themes: the intimate worlds of assistance dog partnerships, working bodies, and caring relations. These thematics allow for a geographical interpretation into the governance, spatial organisation, and representations of dog assistance partnerships. I also explore the training cultures of Dog A.I.D. whilst also spotlighting the lived experiences of training through the early stages of ‘socialisation’, ‘familiarisation’, ‘life skills training’, through to ‘task work’. Finally, the thesis focuses on the practices of care that characterise the assistance dog partnership, showing how care is provided and received by both human and nonhuman. I pay attention to the complex potentiality of the partnership, illustrating how dogs are trained to assist, but also how dogs appear to embody lively, agentic, moments of care. The thesis contributes original work which speaks to animal and disability geographies and attends to the multiple geographies of care-full cross-species lives
25 forms 25 years of Design thinking at University of Aveiro
As formas são ideias e as ideias constroem a realidade. Importa
a realidade herdada, mas importa mais a realidade imaginada
com que se concretizarão novos futuros. O 25.º aniversário da
fundação da área cientÃfica Design na Universidade de Aveiro é
celebrado pelo grupo MADE.PT, do ID+ Instituto de Investigação
em Design, Media e Cultura, com a publicação de 25 ensaios crÃticos
sobre 25 formas, exibidas na exposição From Spain With
Design recebida na Universidade de Aveiro.Forms are ideas and ideas build reality. Inherited reality
matters, but the imagined reality through which new
futures will be materialised matters the most. The 25th
anniversary of Design’s scientific field at University of
Aveiro is celebrated by the group MADE.PT, from ID+
Research Institute for Design, Media and Culture, with the
publication of 25 critical essays about 25 forms, shown
at the exhibition From Spain With Design hosted by
University of Aveiro.publishe
'Inventions and adventures': the work of the Stevenson engineering firm in Scotland, c. 1830 - c. 1890
This thesis examines the work of the nineteenth-century Stevenson civil engineering firm to argue
that civil engineering should be approached geographically both because it takes place in and is
shaped by particular spaces, but also because the result of such work reshapes space and the
relationship between places. Geographers have extensively analysed the ways in which humans
have worked to alter environments, but relatively little attention has been paid to engineering as a
socially and geographically transformative process, to the technical questions and to the engineering
professionals whose work brought about such change. This thesis analyses engineers as social and
technical agents of environmental change, rather than viewing their role as the simple
implementation of directives developed elsewhere and by others. It combines insights from the
history and historical geography of science, environmental history and the history of technology to
make a case for the relevance of an historical geography of engineering.
The thesis explores these issues through the work of the Stevenson family. The Stevensons
were an Edinburgh-based and internationally-renowned firm of engineers who specialised in the
construction of coastal infrastructure. The start and end dates of the thesis indicate, broadly, the
careers of David and Thomas Stevenson, who jointly managed the family firm under the name D. &
T. Stevenson between 1850 and 1886. The empirical basis for this thesis draws upon the detailed
analysis of the firm’s archival records: technical publications, project reports, diaries,
correspondence, maps, plans and diagrams.
The work of the Stevensons—their engineering epistemologies, practices, and professional
identities— are examined through four diverse projects undertaken by the firm in the nineteenth
century. These projects are: the training of new engineers; surveying and designing improvement
works for the rivers Tay and Clyde; the implementation of a coastal sound-based fog signal network;
and the failed attempt to expand Wick harbour through the construction of a breakwater. These
projects highlight the range of activities undertaken by nineteenth-century engineers and illustrate
the ‘making’ of engineers and the work they did by highlighting training and learning, surveying,
maintenance, testing, evaluation, repair and the explanation of failure. With reference to these
projects and by drawing upon relevant contextual material, the thesis examines the
conceptualisation of geographical space and natural forces in engineering, the relationship between
science and engineering, the nature of expertise and notions of engineering judgement, and the role
of family, legacy and reputation in securing professional credibility and status.
This approach challenges older historiographical traditions which portrayed engineers as
individual geniuses. The thesis instead understands engineering to be a combination of specialist
knowledge and tacit skill and situates engineers within their social and institutional networks of
power and authority. In pointing out that some engineering works failed, the thesis challenges the
tendency in histories of engineering works to focus on success. It makes the case for an historical
geography of engineering as a way of understanding engineering as an activity, a status and as
processes which changed human-environment relations
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