What's in a colour? Studying and contrasting colours with COMPARA

This work was done in the scope of the Linguateca project, jointly funded by the Portuguese Government and the European Union (FEDER and FSE) under contract reference 339/1.3/C/NAC

Fashion forecasting and selection process of womenswear retailers: the co-production of fashion by producers and consumers

Looking at the working practices of designers, buyers and merchandisers this thesis attempts to explore the dynamics that govern high street womenswear retailers. By concentrating on the retailing rather than manufacturing of womenswear the thesis takes into account that the balance of power between clothing manufacturers and retailers has shifted - today the creative, i.e. design, capital within the fashion industry is in the hands of the retailers who dominate and direct fashion at the high street level.Broadly following production of culture and symbolic interactionist approaches to the culture industries, the thesis opens with an exploration of collective activity as an important dimension of the production of cultural artefacts. Attention is drawn to production of culture proponents' models of selection processes in culture industries, where cultural artefacts enter a set of gatekeeping or filtering stages that determine their acceptance or rejection. However, while these selection models provide significant insights into some of the dynamics that govern the production of culture, the non-conflictual, unidirectional portrayal of selection processes and the exclusion of consumption-related issues not only leaves important areas of investigation untouched, but distorts the actual working practices of culture industry practitioners. The aim of this thesis, therefore, is to open up the 'black box' of fashion production and provide an alternative model of selection processes through an empirical investigation of how fashion forecasting and garment selection are executed. Based on data from semi-structured interviews with designers, buyers and merchandisers it is suggested that selection processes in high street womenswear retailers can be divided into two distinct levels - forecasting and garment selection. Each level is characterised by (a) the occupational group that dominates it and (b) by a specific interplay between teamwork and conflict. It is proposed that the construction of a shared customer image among key players in the industry acts as an ordering principle which not only helps practitioners overcome differences in occupational outlooks, but which also directs their efforts towards the creation of garments that they feel will gratify their customers' taste. Practitioners' perceived customer image, therefore, plays a significant role in fashion industry forecasting and selection processes, because it influences the fashion production cycle at all levels.In addition, the thesis draws attention to variations in retailers' organisational set-up and shows how they influence the balance of power between key players and the competitive strategies companies adopt to survive in the market. These observations are grounded in a discussion of the transformation of Western economies from Fordism to post-Fordism, while also drawing on arguments regarding the co-existence and differential development of diverse fashion systems within the UK clothing industry since the mid-nineteenth century

Neolithic Diversities : Perspectives from a conference in Lund, Sweden

Papers from a conference in Lund, Sweden. The title of the conference was "What's new in the Neolithic". The book brings together the latest research on the Neolithic of northern Europe. In the study of the distant human past, certain events and periods have come to represent decisive passages from one human state to another. From a global perspective, the characteristic feature of the last ten thousand years is that people in different parts of the world, and at different points in time, started to grow plants and domesticate animals. The rise and dissemination of agriculture were crucial factors for the continued existence of humankind on earth. The incipient agriculture is often regarded as the very beginning of human culture, as it has traditionally been perceived in western historiography, that is, as control over nature and the “cultivation” of intellectual abilities. As a result of the increasing national and international interest in the northern European Neolithic (4000–2000 BC), combined with large-scale archaeological excavations which helped to nuance and modify the picture of the period, senior researchers and research students formed a Neolithic group in 2010. The Department of Archaeology and Ancient History at Lund University served as the base, but the group also included collaborators from Linnaeus University and Södertörn University, and from the Southern Contract Archaeology Division of the National Heritage Board in Lund and Sydsvensk Arkeologi in Malmö and Kristianstad. Meetings and excursions in the following two years resulted in the holding of an international conference in Lund in May 2013 entitled “What’s New in the Neolithic”. Invitations to this conference were sent to two dozen prominent Neolithic scholars from northern and central Europe. This publication gives aspects of innovative research on the European Neolithic

The Life of Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri (c1923-1998)

Biographies of Australian Indigenous artists are a recent phenomenon. This thesis responds to a growing national and international interest in Indigenous lives and art by focusing on Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, a Pintupi man whose life span coincided with the colonisation of the Western Desert region of Central Australia in the twentieth century. This thesis represents the first biography of Namarari and the first of a Pintupi individual. Importantly, it explores the long-term relationship between one of Papunya's founding artists and the Papunya Tula Artists organisation. The question of how an Indigenous artist's biography may be written for a contemporary audience has received scant scholarly attention, with no apparent model of best practice for the genre. This cross-cultural study draws on the fields of anthropology, social history and art history and the practices of life writing, oral history and formal analysis. A key concern is that of the visibility of the subject, given that he and the author never met. The biography was assembled from fragmentary data originating in existing oral history records and supplemented by interviews with relatives of Namarari and with art advisors who worked with him over three decades. The broad aim of the thesis is to respond to the questions: what can a study of Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri's life and art career tell us about him as a individual, and then, how does that illuminate our understanding of the Pintupi people and the development of Papunya Tula art? Namarari's life story is presented chronologically and takes into account his culture, family life and art practice. He survived the transition from a traditional lifestyle into and through the fraught cross-cultural milieu of European colonisation. Namarari's adaptive responses to changing government policies were counter-balanced by a quiet determination to honour his culture's primary values. The recognition he achieved as an artist overshadows his less visible role as an unassuming cross-cultural educator. Namarari's legacy is demonstrably significant and worthy of posthumous recognition