Using a Head-Mounted Video Camera to Understand Social Worlds and Experiences

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Contemporary rural change and the enactment of common property rights : the case of crofting common grazings

Using the empirical example of crofting common grazings in Scotland, this study examines the way contemporary change – characterised in a European context by economic restructuring, socio-cultural recomposition and a changing policy framework – influences the ways in which historically enduring common property rights over land are asserted, contested, secured and undermined by various individuals and groups. Using a preliminary postal survey and in-depth case studies, it was found that rural change has profound implications for the ways in which common grazings rights are exercised and valued. The overall trend has been towards declining levels of use, involvement and regulation. The changing and predominantly diminishing opportunities to make a significant contribution to livelihoods, in either subsistence or monetary terms, has made common grazings less economically important to shareholders. Nevertheless, a minority of cases that have maintained levels of use and involvement demonstrate that common grazings rights can still be of importance to shareholders in securing a range of social, environmental and economic benefits. The reason this is not replicated more universally relates to the social, situated process of common property enactment which is caught up in a broader, morally charged struggle over the material and conceptual territory of ‘crofting’: what crafting ought to be, and; whom it should involve and benefit. By exploring the discursive means by which shareholders draw boundaries of inclusion and exclusion between people and practices, the study illustrates how shareholders negotiating and contesting who has the superior moral right to particular legal rights has important material consequences, both locally, in terms of realising livelihood and rural development opportunities, and more broadly, in terms of the provision of public goods. Since the common property literature focuses almost exclusively on tragedies of overexploitation, this thesis highlights the need for, and begins to develop, a theoretical basis from which more typically first-world common issues can be understood.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Ecosystem services as an integrative framework: what is the potential?

Ecosystems approaches, and among them the ecosystem services (ES) framework, are held as promising vehicles for holistic thinking which is usually taken to mean integration of society and nature. The notion of ES is also seen to aid us in saying something about how and what people value in nature. It is hence surprising that among a huge number of scientific works couched in terms in ES, still relatively few explore the explicit engagement of such concepts with stakeholders with respect to empirical issues, including integration. Motivated by a need to empirically test rather than assume the integrative work of ES, we ask: what ways of using the framework as a stakeholder tool are invited, and does integration unfold in practice? Our evidence comes from a study of a group of stakeholders’ perspectives on sustainable management of sheep grazing in low alpine landscapes in the south of Norway. According to the stakeholders, grazing intensity, type and spatiality cannot be understood and arrived at without accounting for how grazing pressure is the result of the co-production of nature and society. By way of four empirical examples, we demonstrate 1) the integrative agency ES can have, 2) how ES can work to integrate despite the framework, 3) how ES can work against integration, and 4) the implicit agency of ES for the co-production of sustainability and grazing pressures. The study demonstrates that there are particular weaknesses in the concept as an integrative device regarding the invisibility of human co-agency. Furthermore, the precise methodological framing of the research is found to be crucial for whether and how human co-agency is made visible through the framework, and thus how ES works as an integrative framework

Creating feelings of inclusion in adventure tourism: Lessons from the gendered sensory and affective politics of professional mountaineering

Gender is consequential in adventure tourism, where women are systemically underrepresented. Despite significant attention to the affective experiences of tourists, the gendered differences produced through affective experiences, and their implications for inclusivity in adventure activities and places, has been little explored. To address this, we examine the sensory and emotional politics of grading professional women mountaineers' bodies, and its relationality with managing social and physical risk, through mobile video, interview and reflexive ethnography. We highlight the affective intensities of maintaining professional status, as regulated through prevailing masculine ideals, requiring women to perform significant emotional labour when working in high-risk environments by developing extreme strategies to alleviate stress. This elucidates how power-laden affective relations create and deny inclusion in adventure spaces