'Communicating adventure' : a semiotic investigation of the UK adventure subculture of motorcycling consumption

Changing cultural trends and increasing pressures and constraints on everyday life have led to a proliferation in the uptake of adventure pursuits in Western society. People are increasingly drawn to involvement in subcultures of high-risk extremity and adventure, and manufacturers, marketers and the media are commonly reflecting a discourse that ‘commodifies’ adventure experience in their wider cultural products and brands. This growth in the consumption of adventure has created an opportunity, and a necessity, for researchers, academics and practitioners alike to become involved in the development of adventure-leisure research and theory. This study takes the UK motorcycling subculture of adventure consumption as a unit of analysis, and employs a ‘holistic’ cultural approach to investigate meaningful consumption processes within, and relative to it. Specifically, it focuses on the role of consumers in contributing to the cultural world of motorcycling adventure consumption as well as the significance of manufacturers, service suppliers and marketers in producing and conveying it. This is achieved through employment of an ‘interpretive semiology’ research philosophy, in which a number of pioneering semiotic and narrative techniques are used and developed, to identify the key communication codes and myths that drive the construction and movement of meaning within, and relative to this consumption subculture. An ‘outside in’ approach is employed to understand the subculture from a wide crosssection of related discourse, and this is combined with an ‘inside-out’ approach, which focuses on the motorcyclist consumer psyche, on consumer involvement in motorcycling activity and use of signifying props, spaces and stories for the construction and signification of meaningful motorcyclist self-identity. Also this approach examines the role of manufacturers, service suppliers and marketers in constructing and signifying brands that purvey cultural messages and construct categories of motorcycling subculture. The results highlight that although UK motorcycling adventure subculture is enshrined with a very rich cultural heritage, it is dynamic in nature, and cultural changes can be identified by analysis of key cultural communication codes and myths. These codes and myths are influenced, and driven, by an interrelationship that exists between consumers, manufacturers, service suppliers, marketers and wider popular cultural discourse and media. They all exist in the same culturally constituted world and meaning is generated and signified through common market places and market stimuli. Overall, this study provides a contribution to adventure-leisure and interpretive, cultural consumer behaviour research and it employs and develops pioneering semiotic and narrative methodologies. It demonstrates how the field of semiotics, with rich theoretical and sometimes complicated underpinnings, can be applied in this context to achieve significant theoretical and practical implications.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Beginning with homelessness: a rhizoanalysis of neoliberalism, social justice, and community

Homelessness in the United States is identified as a social problem (Amster, 2008; Gowan, 2010; Marvasti, 2003; Stern, 1984). It receives attention from social service agencies, local and national government departments, faith-based institutions, advocacy groups, legal organizations, and grassroots coalitions. It has implications at both local and national levels. The people experiencing homelessness—their unique stories, perspectives, and ways of being—are overshadowed, even usurped, by constituted ideas about homelessness; as a result they themselves are surveilled, categorized, and pathologized. Additionally, the concept of homelessness is hegemonized, disciplined through a master narrative imbricated with crisis, pity, victim-blaming, medicalization, and criminalization. This rhizoanalysis considers how the current master narrative of homelessness as a social problem is a form of oppression and domination fed by neoliberalism and often evaluated by whether one is a “contributing member of society.” The intractability of this narrative makes it very difficult to radically imagine a construction of homelessness beyond that which is, yet, people are resisting this status quo and imagining a different future in which they hope to live. Informed by a postmodern, anarchist, feminist epistemology, I apply various methods in this dissertation, including critical storytelling, performance narrative, and qualitative inquiry with people experiencing homelessness, to (a) understand and expose the dominant narrative about homelessness, (b) identify ways that homelessness is used as a resistance tactic against oppression, and (c) imagine new ways of engaging with each other and the world around us

Fitting the bike to the chain: An analysis of transitions towards households integration of multi-modal cycling

This study explores the integration of cycling with public transport (Cycling-PT) from a household perspective. Varied household types were reflected in the individuals and families who participated in fourty-seven interviews and small group discussions in Nottingham and Leeds. Participants were recruited at railway stations, bike hubs and via activist and bicycle user groups and other gatekeeper organisations in the voluntary, local authority and education sectors between June 2016 and January 2017. Drawing on literature from the Activity Approach (AA), Mobility Biographies and structuration theory, an interview topic guide was used during individual interviews and small group discussions, supported by visual cue cards. Additional visual elicitation methods supported a second phase of discussions with individuals and families, the participants assembling 3D Styrofoam models of railway stations, using miniature Lego characters to recreate scenarios of journeys when they had combined Cycling-PT. Together, these methods provided insight into the variability of household travel behaviour over the life-course, mental models and reflexive processes. Interviews with eight family groups who took part with their children revealed how Cycling-PT had enabled the everyday activities of families through specialisation of roles for childcare and employment. Benefits to households included access to employment, particularly for people unable to drive. Time-savings over using buses to access rail journeys contrasted with more divided opinions on cost savings. Families integrated taking children to daycare, or school, with regular combined Cycling-PT commutes, carried by bicycle and train with their parents. Adolescent children travelling independently to visit relatives during school holidays. Childcare provision was influential in family travel decisions, collecting children at the end of the working day acting to constrain the combination of Cycling-PT. Parents valued secure storage for bicycles (and other mobility devices) at nurseries, schools, transport hubs and workplaces. Qualitative thematic analysis of interview transcripts using NVivo revealed beliefs and related to physical activity shared within households that had motivated the combination of cycling with PT. Participants associated improved mood with the integration of cycling with PT, the combined modes enabling the transition between work or study and household activities. Bicycle parking at PT hubs complemented carriage of bicycles on board trains to enable a full range of activities to be achieved. Workplace facilitation included flexible, or negotiated working arrangements, changing facilities, storage and showers for cyclists, salary-sacrifice bicycle purchase schemes and supportive colleagues. These findings have implications for policy, transport design, and offer directions for future research

Black students’ perceptions of the institutional context and associations with belonging and persistence at a southeastern MSI

Black students represent about 13% of the students who enroll in higher education and only 27% graduate within four years (NCES, 2021). Given national enrollment rates are declining, (NCES, 2022) higher education leaders face rising pressures to ensure the students who do enroll continue to matriculate toward graduation. Guided by a proposed integrative model of student experiences of embedded context in higher education, this study examined if there are distinct profiles of Black students’ perceptions of UNCG’s institutional context. Additionally, this study explored whether student characteristics were associated with emergent context profiles and how emergent context profiles were associated with students’ sense of belonging to UNCG and persistence toward graduation. Using a person-centered approach, this investigation revealed four distinct context profiles that were characterized by the extent to which students’ perceived UNCG’s institutional context as culturally engaging and welcoming versus culturally unengaging and discriminatory. Students’ college generation status, off-campus employment, living arrangements, and undergraduate year were all significantly associated with their likelihood of being classified in one context profile compared to another. additionally, context profiles were significantly associated with students’ sense of belonging but not their persistence toward graduation. Findings suggest Black students at UNCG are embedded in different types of interpersonal context within the institution, but the majority perceive a positive campus environment with respect to their cultural background. Findings also suggest that although UNCG successfully cultivated a culturally engaging and welcoming context for most Black students, there are specific groups within the Black student population in which additional institutional efforts are needed. The results provide support for the importance of several institutional factors that are linked to students’ sense of belonging

Exile on Main Street. The Desert as Internalising Territory

The desert has traditionally been considered as background. For the history of Modern architecture it forms a backdrop, a place in which to contemplate the metropolis from without. The architect withdraws to the desert escaping the metropolis. Moving away from the understanding of the desert as ‘exterior’, the thesis postulates the possibility of understanding it as ‘threshold’, a space that mediates the relationships of the metropolis with its exteriors. Revisiting the journeys of characters like Maxime du Camp, Gustave Flaubert, Le Corbusier, Raymond Roussel, Michel Leiris, Aldo van Eyck or Herman Haan, a different conception of the desert is generated: one in which the landscape is not relegated to the background but actively engages with the figure, highlighting moments of transition—of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. Questions that have become to the fore in contemporary post-colonial discussions. In that movement, a main historical process is focused: the desert has been utilised as mechanism of internalisation. With internalisation I point to the historical process through which the modern city appropriates or absorbs within it what was excluded or defined as its outside. I look at this process particularly in the case of the modern metropolis. In this case, three main steps describe the mechanism of internalisation. First, there’s a definition of the self over a background of the other. The modern metropolis is not that much defined by its own extremely heterogeneous identity. In a more legible way, the metropolis is defined by via negativa, by setting out what the metropolis is not. In a second step, the ‘exterior’ –‘that what the metropolis-is-not’ – starts to be defined as something specific. It is not, then, an ever-expanding backdrop; but rather a bounded area within the background. It is the moment highlighted by the travellers setting out from the metropolis. Their fascination is with something specific – the categories of the exotic, the irrational, the primitive, etc. A fascination that is a reaction to the situation back home. The trouble with these ‘findings’, these exteriors, is precisely in that; they are highly entangled with the condition they were fleeing from – even if it is in a reverse way. In the final step, that category is imported back into the metropolis. While originally intended as exteriors, spaces of critique vis-à-vis the metropolis, the categories paradoxically make their way back into the metropolis, into spaces that collect, contain and, overall, put a boundary around their experiences. In this paradoxical movement, the process of internalisation is a peculiar mechanism with which the metropolis moves forward: capturing exteriors, appropriating or absorbing within what was originally excluded. The thesis is organised as a journey, following the steps of specific travellers. Each chapter deals with one particular character travelling at one particular time. These are organised in three clusters each of which deals with one specific category that was crucial for Colonialism, and that has been highlighted by post-colonial critique—identity, vision and knowledge. For these categories, I would argue, the desert supposed bringing the colonial enterprise to its limits. The desert supposed a locus in which colonialism was not unfolding as power struggle; quite the opposite, it was precisely these ‘being-out- of-control’ that became a different form of colonial appropriation. A territory that absorbs ‘median categories’ – as Edward Said sees them – not completely familiar, not completely alien. In that sense, the desert poses a relevant question to the contemporary fascination with the exteriors of Modernity. The desert remits to Bhabha’s Third Space of enunciation, a crucial area for post-colonial studies as it is where that negotiation between cultures takes place. There, Bhabha sees the potential to overcome colonial cultural appropriations into a hybrid encounter. As Bhabha proposes, “(f)or a willingness to descend into that alien territory(...) may reveal that the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. (…) It makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti- nationalist histories of the ‘people’. And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.” (The Location of Culture, p. 38-39) While it is still a possible fruitful terrain for contemporary cultural encounters, and a crucial quest that should continue, revisiting the stories of these characters in the desert pose the risk of the Third Space of enunciation becoming a space for internalisation rather than Bhabha’s internationalisation

Four Festivals and a City: A critique of Actor-Network Theory as an approach to understanding the emergence and development of Flagship Festivals in Kilkenny from 1964 to 2004

This thesis is a critique of the suitability of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as an approach to understanding the emergence and development of four flagship festivals in Kilkenny from 1964 to 2004. The thesis compares Kilkenny’s four catalyst festivals (The Kilkenny Beer Festival, Kilkenny Arts Week, The Confederation of Kilkenny Festival and the Cat Laughs Comedy Festival) and assesses the ability of the ANT approach to analyse the festival product, organisation, and power flow of each. It examines the ability of ANT to understand the socio-cultural impacts of the festivals on the city of Kilkenny, its tourism infrastructure and built heritage. Utilising two subtly different interpretations (Fox, 2000 and Porsander 2005) of Michael Callon’s phases of emergence (1986, 1991), ANT is used to trace the differences in the origins of these festival committees, their emergence or translation from, and into, other networks and the actor-networks that reach beyond Kilkenny. It highlights the multiple organisational variations in the festival committees that become visible through the selected approach and its suitability for interrogating the varying contexts and topologies of these city-changing festivals