O desenvolvemento das prácticas científicas de construción e uso de modelos e probas: un estudo lonxitudinal en educación infantil

A tese ten como obxectivo examinar a participación do alumnado de educación infantil nas prácticas científicas de uso de probas e o uso e construcción de modelos e explicacións e como esta participación evoluciona ao longo da etapa. Acompáñase a un grupo durante toda a etapa de educación infantil e a outro grupo no mesmo centro, durante o terceiro curso de educación infantil. Os resultados indican que nenas e nenos participan nas prácticas científicas con crecente autonomía e complexidade a medida que avanzan na etapa. Unha contribución orixinal da tese é a caracterización da observación cun propósito (Monteira & Jiménez-Aleixandre, 2016), que definimos como un tipo de observación prolongada no tempo, cun propósito determinado, andamiada, discutida e utilizada para apoiar conclusións e revisar teorías

We’ll have a gay ol’ time : transgressive sexuality and sexual taboo in adult television animation

Includes bibliographical references.This thesis develops an understanding of animation as transgression based on the work of Christopher Jenks. The research focuses on adult animation, specifically North American primetime television series, as manifestations of a social need to violate and thereby interrogate aspects of contemporary hetero-normative conformity in terms of identity and representation. A thematic analysis of four animated television series, namely Family Guy, Queer Duck, Drawn Together, and Rick & Steve, focuses on the texts themselves and various metatexts that surround these series. The analysis focuses specifically on expressions and manifestations of gay sexuality and sexual taboos and how these are articulated within the animated diegesis. The findings reveal the mutuality between the plasticity of animation, which lends itself to shaping physical representations of reality, and the complex social processes of non-violent cathartic ideological expressions that redefine sociopolitical boundaries. The argument contextualizes the changing face of sexuality and the limits of sexual taboo in terms of current contestations and acceptability and the relationship to animation. Contemporary animation both represents this social performance of transgression and is itself a transgressive product disrupting accepted conventions

Performing the township: pantsula for life

Pantsula dance is a performing art born from the townships of Johannesburg. It is a dance form performed across South Africa, in a variety of contexts; in theatres, music videos and competitions in community halls, on national and international stages and on television, and in the streets of townships, cities and suburbs across South Africa and abroad. Its performance is widespread, but it has its beginnings as a dance form born in areas created to marginalise and oppress. There is a scarcity of academic scholarship related to pantsula dance. This thesis aims to be a contribution to that pre-existing body of knowledge in the hope that there can be further engagement on this important, and increasingly mainstream, art form. I have focused my thesis on analysing pantsula dance as a performance of 'the township'. This has been attempted through an ethnographic engagement with pantsula dancers based in different township areas of Johannesburg and Graha mstown: various members of Impilo Mapantsula, Via Katlehong, Intellectuals Pantsula, Via Kasi Movers, Dlala Majimboz and the cast of Via Katlehong's Via Sophiatown. The research was conducted between 2013 and 2016 and serves to represent various moments within the ethnographic research process, while coming to understand various aspects of pantsula dance. An engagement with notions of 'the township', the clothing choices of the pantsula 'uniform', the core moves, inherent hybridity in the form itself, and the dedication to the dance form as a representation of the isipantsula 'way of life', are addressed throughout the thesis. As well as engaging with the memory and representation of Sophiatown as an important component to pantsula dance. Pantsula dance, an intrinsically South African dance form, provides a celebratory conception of 'the township' space and allows people from different backgrounds to engage in an important part of South Africa's past, present and future

A PACIFIC ISLAND DIASPORA: A CASE STUDY OF CHUUKESE WOMEN MIGRATION AND ADAPTATION STRATEGIES IN URBAN HONOLULU

Ph.D

Practices of Belonging: Identity Among Polish Tatars

The recent success of right-wing parties in countries around the world, including Hungary, the US and Poland, has brought renewed attempts to understand how forms of identity have been politicized as a way to navigate a world that is portrayed as increasingly variegated and uncertain. Through research among the historic Muslim Polish Tatar community in the politically conservative Podlasie region, I attempt to unpack how group identity and boundary formation occurs. My work focuses on how conceptions of (be)longing are reproduced and/or tactically contested in affective and bodily ways, such as through emotionally replete communal gatherings for Ramadan Bajram, food practices that both uphold and contest Islamic dietary prohibitions, and dance practices which fuse Polish, Turkish and Tatar traditions. In my research I attempt to unpack how narratives of origins, blood, and rooted-ness do not foreclose possibilities of movement, but rather connect peoples across paths which allow for multiple, conflicting lens of belonging. Building on existing literature on religious communities and group formation, I am interested in where tensions and slippages occur between idealized narratives of group membership based on religion and ethnicity, and how individual identities are actually practiced and performed. My research attempts to foreground the affective capabilities and motility of the body to understand how belonging differentially flows and sticks to individuals at the nexus of gender, community, and religious positionalities

‘Performing Diversity’: Everyday social interaction among migrants from the Great Lakes Region and South Africans in Cape Town

Philosophiae Doctor - PhDThis dissertation is an exploration of everyday social interactions among and between migrants from the Great Lakes Region and South Africans, who live together as neighbours in a post-apartheid South African community. It focuses on the ways through which migrants who are diverse among themselves forge social relations with one another and with the South Africans in an urban township of lower middle class setting. It is an ethnography that interrogates the understandings of belonging and difference in concrete arenas of interaction in these two groups, and how they both mediate their diversity encounters in everyday life

It’s Just a Kid’s Game: An Ethnographic Approach Examining the Intersection of Societal, Social, and Cultural Elements of The Midwestern Kickball League

For this dissertation, I conducted an interpretive ethnography of the Midwestern Kickball League (a pseudonym). The ethnography was grounded in a circuit of culture framework, and I immersed myself within the culture of the Midwestern Kickball League for the 2018 season where I attended practices, games, podcasts, charity events, social events, Game of the Weeks, and after parties. I became a participant (as) observer within the league and utilized ethnographic methods such as observations, informal and formal interviews, participant journals, a researcher diary, and material/digital products. I employed a circuit of culture model as a guide to understanding the fluid process of culture within the Midwestern Kickball League. Specifically, I analyzed culture through the production, representation, and consumption of cultural product throughout the league. I also implemented a multi-level (societal/community, organizational, and individual) examination of culture based in various academic research paradigms. A theoretical framework was formulated from literature on organizational culture, identity theory, social identity theory, sense of community, social capital, and sport participant motivation. The results are conveyed in the form of an interpretive ethnography, where I was able to provide personal accounts that contributed to the understanding of the Midwestern Kickball League context. In all, I used the six chapters that follow to provide an in-depth exploration of a captivating and complex cultural setting

Defying the law, negotiating change The Futanke’s opposition to the national ban on FGM in Senegal

This thesis is concerned with the politics of the preservation and ‘abandonment’ of female circumcision in Fouta Toro, Senegal. The focal point of analysis is the overt opposition to the law criminalising female genital cutting in 1999, and development projects raising awareness about excision in human rights and reproductive health education programmes. As an ethnography of the politics around bodily practices in the light of governmental and non-governmental intervention, the thesis looks at how different interest groups justify their position towards excision. This is a timely enquiry, given the Senegalese government’s ‘acceleration programme of the complete abandonment of excision by 2015’ and some Futanke leaders’ non-compliance with, and opposition to this intervention. After providing details about ‘the ban’ on ‘female genital mutilation’ in Senegal and a critical reflection on the events that are seen to have led to the call for this ban, I carefully disentangle what ‘the opposition to the law’ is and who disagrees with ‘the abandonment’ of the practice in Fouta Toro. The central part of the thesis is guided by an analysis of how excision is embedded in constructions of personhood, sociality and ethnic identity, and how the body is imagined and located in this process. I show how conceptions of ethnic purity and pride are formulated in terms of fear about a ‘loss of culture’ and ‘foreign invasion’ which nourishes discourses of opposition to the law and non-governmental intervention. Others use ‘human rights’ associated with non-governmental organisations and the state as a vehicle to express their views against excision and those who oppose its criminalisation. I examine how idioms like ‘the state’, ‘human rights’ and ‘Futanke way of life’ feature in discourses around the ban of excision in Fouta Toro, and how respectability and honour are maintained through competing representations of the female body as a site of morality. Some claim the female body – a reproducer of cultural identities – with reference to duties through kin obligations, others with reference to ‘human rights’ and ‘the state’. Based on 15 months’ ethnographic fieldwork in Fouta Toro and nine years working in and researching the impact of development in Senegal, this dissertation contributes to scholarship on Fouta Toro and indicates how governmental and non-governmental intervention stirs up the caste-related power structures of a society led by the Tooroɓɓe since the Islamic revolution in the 18th century. It shows how the female body is located as a site of morality, key to the reproduction of cultural identities

Doing Indefinite Time

This open access book provides insights into the everyday lives of long-term prisoners in Switzerland who are labelled as ‘dangerous’ and are preventatively held in indefinite, probably lifelong, incarceration. It explores prisoners’ manifold ways of inhabiting the prison which can be used to challenge well established notions about the experience of imprisonment, such as ‘adaptation’, ‘coping’, and ‘resistance’. Drawing on ethnographic data generated in two high-security prisons housing male offenders, this book explores how the various spaces of the prison affect prisoners’ sense of self and experience of time, and how, in particular, the indeterminate nature of their imprisonment affects their perceptions of place and space. It sheds light on prisoners’ subjective, emplaced and embodied perceptions of the prisons' various everyday time-spaces in the cell, at work, and during leisure time, and the forms of agency they express. It provides insight into prisoners’ everyday habits, practices, routines, and rhythms as well as the profoundly existential issues that are engendered, (re)arranged, and anchored in these everyday contexts. It also offers insights into the penal policies, norms, and practices developed and followed by prison authorities and staff

Multicultural country/side? Visible communities’ perceptions and use of English national parks

Despite the ever-growing debate regarding multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and hybrid and multiple ethnicities, this PhD contends that the Imaginary of England as a multi-ethnic nation is, explicitly and implicitly, tied to the urban sphere, while rural space and imagery are (re)iterated as a monocultural white. Moreover, the construction of a dominant national identity embedded in this rural 'idyll' space inherently racialises Englishness as white. These productions of rurality and nationality are then caught up in processes of social exclusion - physical and emotional - that impact non-white groups' access to the countryside. In order to unpack the issues related to ethnicity, national identity, rurality and social in/exclusion, this thesis examines people from Asian and African Caribbean backgrounds' use and perceptions of the English national parks. It incorporates a range of theoretical standpoints, and draws extensively from quantitative and qualitative research undertaken in the North York Moors and Peak District national parks, and proximate cities of Middlesbrough and Sheffield respectively. In particular, the fieldwork engaged with Asian and African Caribbean communities, and explored understandings of ethnicity, nationality, and 'belonging' in English rural space. Through the theoretical and empirical appraisals, I argue that there is a need to hold the structures of day-to-day life that affect 'visible communities', and the power differentials implicated in those structures, in tension with relativist understandings and performances of identity involved in people's everyday negotiations in society. I also call for a non-reductive gaze that does not routinely explain and expect visible communities to be marginalised 'rural others' (from a dominant white 'norm'). From such a perspective, I suggest an agonistic approach (after Mouffe) to policy-making, which recognises difference alongside similarity and acknowledges the ineradicabilityof adversarial belief systems. This approach demands adopting a 'radical openness' to social in/exclusion, enabling us to work towards a transformative 'sustainable multiculturalism'