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This thesis studies rapport: a harmonious relationship between people. More specifically, it focuses on the creation and maintenance of such a relationship through a process known as rapport management. My analysis looks at specific ways in which people use language to manage their relationships in ViMELF, the corpus of Video-Mediated English as a Lingua Franca Conversations. My research addresses various gaps in rapport research by analysing rapport management in a corpus as an applied example. There is a disconnect between the study of a macro-linguistic concept like rapport (social and interactional strategies) and the micro-linguistic features that help manage rapport. There is also a disconnect between qualitative and quantitative research on rapport. This thesis bridges these gaps by combining qualitative and quantitative approaches and focussing on three linguistic features that affect a specific rapport strategy, that of stance or conversational positioning. Rather than trying to capture rapport in its entirety, this thesis constitutes a new approach to the analysis of rapport strategies and features and their extraction from larger datasets. To achieve that, I ask three research questions: (1) Which linguistic strategies and features are used when managing rapport, (2) How is the rapport management strategy influenced by the medium, the speakers' backgrounds and idiosyncrasies, and (3) How can corpus linguistic methods be appropriated to analyse a rapport strategy and its realisations in the form of linguistic features? The knowledge generated with this research is theoretical as well as practical in nature. My thesis contributes to academic knowledge about how the three linguistic features-pronouns, pragmatic markers and laughter-influence how unacquainted speakers positions themselves in conversation and thereby effectively manage rapport. I explore the features' ambiguity, the different meanings that they take on depending on the context. Speakers either commit to a stance or, because of the ambiguity of the features, avoid doing so-depending on which function is necessary in a particular situation. This makes the features the perfect toolkit for navigating the fragile relationship speakers build with their conversation partner. My research also contributes practical knowledge about how corpus linguistic methods can be appropriated to advance rapport research, which results in a practical output in form of a software tool developed for this purpose. As an essential step in combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the thesis adopts the concept of co-occurrences and applies these to the linguistic features in the spoken corpus data, which has great potential for further research with other features, as it reveals their patterns of use in new ways.

Online discussions are affected by the design of digital technology, which can segment, polarise and divide discussion. The idea that digital technology presents a public sphere - a space where all can debate equally - is becoming increasingly challenged. Discussion is fragmented across digital spaces, each of which is subject to the constraints of the technology's design. As such their design, and how this affects online discussion is coming under increasing scrutiny from work within the HCI community, where this work is situated. Using critical technical practice, this thesis documents the design and deployment of a suite of agonistically informed technology prototypes, which I term agonistic interfaces. Leveraging adversarial design principles and the agonistic conception of democracy, these agonistic interfaces purposefully bring users into contact with socio-political issues, through reflection, discussion and criticality. This work examines three specific domains: i) socio-political social media ii) second screening of reality TV and iii) conversational interfaces. My results demonstrate the agonistic interfaces I designed were able create and sustain debate across a variety of contexts, and I describe a number of design techniques that can be used to engage criticality and reflection. The results highlight how the agonistic interfaces presented can provide a space for reflection on sociopolitical issues, how they can become a point for the concentration of various discourses, and they also raise questions about the moral acceptability of inclusive debate. I present two primary contributions of this thesis. First, I identify agonism as a means of addressing existing problems around online discussion, and describe how agonistic interfaces can address this. Second, I demonstrate specific ways that agonistic interfaces can be designed to reconfigure debate and engagement, which I illustrate through the design and deployment of four technology prototypes oriented around the three domains of inquiry.

This project investigates the art of listening in Japan through ethnographic observation of hostesses (escorts) and listening volunteers, and an analysis of self-help literature on listening. At night clubs in Tokyo, hostesses, who are famous for being good listeners, use listening as a streetwise skill. This enables them to stay in subordinate and supportive positions, and to help customers dominate a conversation. The customers can gain a sense of recognition, enhance intimate relationships with the hostesses or rebuild their masculinity. Hostesses’ listening is ‘an interactional weapon of the weak’, gaining money, business connections and prestige, but this, in turn, intensifies the gendered division of labour in interactions. By contrast, listening volunteers – who converse with elderly people using listening as a tool for reaching out – sometimes fall short in conversation, not realising that their listening functions as a gift. This forces clients to stay in helpee/subordinate positions and makes them feel obliged to reciprocate. Listening here can be ‘a mask for silent authority’. Superficially these two cases do not resemble each other; however, both deal with power dynamics. Their other common aspect is performing emotional labour. These listeners suppress or discard their feelings – such as disgust or boredom – and generate socially required emotions like respect or compassion, whilst displaying situationally expected listening behaviour. They hope to generate a certain state of mind in others to a greater or lesser extent, and so must perform emotional labour. Listening is therefore a subset of emotional labour. Self-help guides implicitly instruct emotional labour, and tacitly suggest dealing with power relations by introducing therapeutic listening for superiors and ‘zealous listening’ (my term) for subordinates. As my analyses show, listening is not simply a skill of hearing or understanding others, but also a way of associating with them. Therefore, listening is an ‘art’, which requires both fundamental skills, and a listener’s own personal way of relating to others.

In the context of online communication, the use of Arabish (an amalgam of the Latin script and numerals employed as a tool for communication in Arabic) by a young Saudi demographic has been steadily increasing in the context of informal instant messages supported by smartphones. Within the context of Saudi Arabia itself, however, there have been few studies of note. Therefore, this thesis aims to address that gap in the literature through examining Saudi Arabish as a social practice, particularly in Riyadh city, informed and invested by the concepts of class distinction and habitus. In keeping with Bourdieu’s concept of social distinction and power relation, the Arabish user is viewed as a social agent who employs the practice as a source of social distinction or social mobility that also represents the status of its users. This study considers Arabish within a broader vision, considering the macro conditions (society, discourses, institutions, family, social groups and ideologies) and linking them to the micro level of interactions (selfperception, position and habitus). The aim of this study is to narrow the gap between the macro and micro consideration that has been evident in the literature, particularly in the Saudi context. This study, therefore, employs a qualitative research methodology based on critical discourse analysis and content analysis, through utilising observations, semi-structured interviews and written Arabish examples as its main tools for the gathering of data. The examined subjects comprise nine Saudi members from Riyadh city, who come from three different social classes. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, the data show that social inequalities and class distinctions are factors influencing the perception and practice of Arabish, and the CS between Arabish and English. The data also suggest that the value vested in English as a language owes much to the confinement of Arabish usage in general to a constituency of younger Saudi users. However, class conflicts are evident, and therefore the study concludes that while Arabish is the signifier of the collective young group in Saudi Arabia, CS was found to be the new signifier of subgroups among Arabish users, while it is through social ties and the networking of high-capital users that sub-groups are established in order to preserve and sustain their social superiority.

This thesis aims to investigate the diverse roles information and communications technologies (ICT) play in shaping individuals’ mobility behaviour. In doing so, three strands of interrelated research questions are empirically analysed to better understand the use of ICT and its implications for travel among both working adults and millennials. A cross-sectional analysis is firstly performed to examine the variations in the relationships between Internet use and non-mandatory travel patterns according to household working status. By employing data from the 2005/06 Scottish Household Survey (SHS) and the two-part model, the ICT-travel relationships are found to be characterised by individual employment status and intra-household interactions, which impose different constraints on individuals’ non-mandatory mobility patterns. A repeated cross-sectional analysis using the difference-in-differences (DD) estimation and the pooling of cross sections from the 2005/06 SHS data and the 2015 Integrated Multimedia City Data (iMCD) subsequently examines the evolutions in the ICT-travel relationships over time, and how temporal changes differ between the general adult population and the millennial generation. Findings suggest that the changes over time are generally characterised by diminishing complementarity and increasing substitution. Moreover, while the temporal changes for the general population are mostly found among the medium-to-heavy Internet users, for millennials, it is the light or medium-to-light users who see significant temporal changes. Finally, using the longitudinal datasets from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the Understanding Society Survey, an exploration is undertaken of the direct and indirect effects of prior experience with using ICT (as children) on millennials’ current travel behaviour. The structural equation model is applied to examine the relationships between ICT use, travel choices, and environmental attitude. The longitudinal analysis finds that millennials’ long-term exposure to ICT (since adolescence) may shape their current travel patterns by influencing their environmental attitudes. The findings from these analyses highlight the importance of considering the effects of personal, household, and social characteristics on the ICT-travel interactions. In addition, the research focuses on dynamic interactions and on the indirect or higher-order roles of ICT in affecting travel behaviour as well as on the implications for transport planning practices and policy making.

This study explores the political communication strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood following Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi's dramatic removal from power in July 2013. Combining content and discourse analysis to comprehensively examine the Arabic communiqués issued by the Brotherhood from July 3, 2013, to March 22, 2016, the study seeks to provide a better understanding of the movement's identity, evolving ideology, communication practices and its politics amidst a heated debate amongst scholars about these topics. The thesis makes an important theoretical contribution to social movement theory, suggesting that propaganda techniques can be used to systematically codify precisely how the organisation has sought to frame itself and its opponents. It thus contributes valuable knowledge to existing literature about the Muslim Brotherhood itself and social movements in general. It argues that since 2013, the Brotherhood have followed a political communication strategy that seeks not only to resist regime representations of the movement as a terrorist organisation but frames itself to domestic, regional and international audiences as a moderate movement committed to democracy and progress. The thesis argues that the movement designed its political communication strategy to achieve three strategic goals: (1) discrediting and delegitimizing the military regime that ousted President Morsi (2) winning the hearts and minds of the public and constructing itself as a legitimate representative of the Egyptian people and the Islamic faith (3) establishing the group as a legitimate political actor by presenting itself as a moderate, non-violent movement that upholds and adheres to democracy and a civil state. Accordingly, this study shows that social movement theory's concept of legitimacy as a crucial moral resource has been central to the Brotherhood's communication strategy in the face of widespread demonization. The Brotherhood's communication thus suggests an ideology that has become more politically pragmatic and moderate in tone. Indeed, the content of what the Brotherhood say about themselves has arguably consolidated the movement's ideological evolution from hard-core Islamists to avid defenders of democracy and advocates of minority rights. In particular, the Muslim Sisters have served as crucial female human resources as the group faces unprecedented persecution by Egyptian regime. Paving the way for the emergence of female leadership, this suggests that negative political opportunity can lead to the empowerment of marginalized groups within a social movement. Contrary to much existing literature that suggests a repression-radicalisation nexus, I argue that moderation has been the movement's official response to the state's demonization of the Brotherhood. To reinforce its moderation, the movement has introduced a new term, not previously in the Brotherhood's dictionary: "the peaceful Jihad," thereby articulating an alternative conceptualisation of religious struggle. The ousting of Morsi afforded a political opportunity to deploy cultural and moral resources of legitimacy, moderation and democracy manifested through strategic self-framing. Finally, the thesis examines the discursive mechanisms the Brotherhood has used to communicate these messages. Using strategic framing as a theoretical framework and the seven devices developed by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) in the late 1930s as a deductive tool, the thesis demonstrates that the Brotherhood's communication strategy strongly aligned with the seven devices developed by the IPA: more than one technique was identified in 98% of the movement's communiqués. The thesis thereby advances scholarly understanding of "strategic framing" by suggesting that the IPA's persuasive techniques can be used to reveal the specific mechanisms through which the Brotherhood seek to achieve their communication goals. By raising awareness of these techniques as a critical means of setting the Brotherhood's agenda, the thesis also serves to empower audiences and policy makers consuming these messages.

Despite the high number of cases of overt political violence in the Mediterranean and the richness of media art in the region, there has been no comprehensive research about political violence and contemporary media art production in the region. Departing from the question of networks in media art from the Mediterranean, this research looks at the artists’ imagination of the region informed by practices of various forms of violence through critical outlook on the issues of visibility. In doing so, it inquires into treating the Mediterranean itself as a medium. It conducts four case studies whose common focus is on the networks of relations that reproduce, strengthen, and reinforce models of political violence at various levels, using anecdotal evidence and content analysis methods. The case studies give a a) microscopic view of a computer virus; b) life-size view of an individual human body; c) landscape view of urban transformation; and d) bird’s eye view of occupation, consumption and destruction. Taking Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics as its theoretical framework, the study analyses the contemporary blend of disciplinary, sovereign, biopolitical, and necropolitical practices within granular and grand levels across the region and claims that temporality is the key element in the transformation and survival of forms of violence.

In this research project, I address critical questions about Italian post-feminism, by exploring the way the peculiarities of Italian media and culture have contributed in producing a specifically Italian form of post-feminism. While a post-feminist subjectivity, in terms of neoliberal, individualist, narcissist standards among young women, has been observed and commented on by a few Italian authors, the important relation between post-feminist sexuality and subjectivity, Berlusconi’s political and cultural project, and the media has not yet been analysed in depth. To investigate this, I employ a feminist postructuralist approach to the study of media and society, and explore the way the media produces and reproduces discourses of gender and sexuality that have circulated in Berlusconism. The thesis highlights how young femininity has emerged in the national popular imagination as barometer of social change, at the same time becoming subjected to increased scrutiny and policing. In the first two chapters I discuss the theoretical framework and methodology of the thesis. I then explore Berlusconi’s influence on media and politics (Chapter 3). I define Berlusconi’s cultural and political hegemony in terms of a neoliberal authoritarian populism, in which the media played a fundamental role by articulating representations of femininity and female sexuality that work to secure the status quo and existing relations of power. Following this, is the analysis of the case studies, in which the connection between the legal system and the media provides a surface of emergence for the figuration of post-feminist femininity. This is articulated through cultural discourses about commercial sexuality (Chapter 4), phallicism (Chapter 5) and mental health (Chapter 6). Ultimately, this research project sheds light on the way media representations of femininity and female sexuality relate to Berlusconism, where longstanding sexist and misogynist discourses have been accompanied by new ones, integral to neoliberal governmentality.

This thesis inquires into the cultural-political constitution of what are commonly known as the Amateur and Amateurism, terms which need to be seen from a new perspective in the digital era. The discussion begins with whether amateur production of culture and media and the role of monetary compensation are changing upon the emergence of the Web and digital technologies. Amateur productions networked to online audience communities are here understood using Simondon’s concepts of individuation, recently re-interpreted by Stiegler and Virno, as transindividual activities that realise human potential in newly structured society and politics. At the same time, however, it is not overlooked that such transindividual activities are technologically mediated by cognitive capitalist digital platforms specialised in mediating and monetising user-created content. Thus, the formation of gift culture around production and circulation of amateur content is discussed with its relationship to the commodity economy on such platforms. In this context, live streaming videos from Afreeca TV and Web-cartoons (Webtoons) have been selected as case studies to investigate audiovisual content production of professional-like amateurs on South Korean-based digital platforms, specifically during the candlelight rallies of 2008 and the impeachment proceedings of 2017. Conducted over three years, a variety of empirical studies on the multimedia interaction between amateur producers and their audience community provides a critical analysis of how the amateur's individual, self-fulfilling activities are transformed into the gift culture-based transindividual and competitive commercial activities and are embedded in the logic of cognitive capitalism. The counter-commercial movement of the amateur self-publishers concerned with the transindividuality of the memory technics is also presented. Their dedication to materalise individual and collective memories through paper-book publishing evokes the original value and ethos of amateurism devoted to the diversity of culture and life.

This thesis provides a transdisciplinary investigation of ‘deviant’ media categories, specifically spam and noise, and the way they are constructed and used to (re)produce territories and people. Spam, I argue, is a media phenomenon that has always existed, and received different names in different times. The changing definitions of spam, the reasons and actors behind these changes are thus the focus of this research. It brings to the forefront a longer history of the politics of knowledge production with and in media, and its consequences. This thesis makes a contribution to the media and communication field by looking at neglected media phenomena through fields such as sound studies, software studies, law and history to have richer understanding that disciplinary boundaries fail to achieve. The thesis looks at three different case studies: the conceptualisation of noise in the early 20th century through Bell Telephone Company, web metric standardisation in the European Union 2000s legislation, and unwanted behaviours on Facebook. What these cases show is that media practitioners have been constructing ‘deviant’ categories in different media and periods by using seven sonic epistemological strategies: training of the (digital) body, restructuring of territories, new experts, standardising measurements (tools and units), filtering, de-politicising and licensing. Informed by my empirical work, I developed two concepts - processed listening and rhythmedia - offering a new theoretical framework to analyse how media practitioners construct power relations by knowing people in mediated territories and then spatially and temporally (re)ordering them. Shifting the attention from theories of vision allows media researchers to have a better understanding of practitioners who work in multi-layered digital/datafied spaces, tuning in and out to continuously measure and record people’s behaviours. Such knowledge is being fed back in a recursive feedback-loop conducted by a particular rhythmedia constantly processing, ordering, shaping and regulating people, objects and spaces. Such actions (re)configure the boundaries of what it means to be human, worker and medium.

This interdisciplinary project examines discourses of internet in Nunavut, a territory in Northern Canada. It has two main arguments: that internet in Nunavut is implicated in correlated discourses of frustration and potential, and that internet in the territory is articulated as having multiple faces and facets. Internet in Nunavut, this thesis argues, is experienced as a media technology, as a tool for communication, as political, as failing and frustrating, as online content, as physical infrastructure, and as potential. In making its arguments, the thesis engages with debates about internet governance, the cultural specificity of internet, and the definition of internet itself. Primary research methods for this thesis included: interviews conducted over the telephone or Skype in London (UK), face to face interviews in Ottawa, Toronto and Iqaluit, the analysis of archival materials (in particular, government reports), as well as a limited period of participant-observation at the Community Access Program site in Iqaluit (the capital of Nunavut). The first empirical chapter in the thesis (Chapter 4: “So frustrating”) examines narratives of Nunavummiut users concerning their experiences of internet; the second (Chapter 5: Fractious Collaborations) examines how some Northern internet activists have lobbied the federal government to alter its internet policy, as a means of tapping into Nunavummiut internet's potential; and the third (Chapter 6: A Local Connection) and final empirical chapter explores the Community Access Program (which provides internet access free of charge to the Nunavummiut public), as a means of linking macro-perspectives and discourses of internet.

This thesis evaluates the role of survivor speech in discussions of sexual violence taking place in the media. By undertaking a case study analysis of the media coverage of three cases of 'stranger rape', child sexual exploitation and historic child sexual abuse respectively, the discursive contexts within which victim/survivors are giving their account of the experience are examined. The study focused on a selected set of discursive parameters which establish the specific contexts in which the voices of victims/survivors are presented to media audiences. These parameters are collated as discursive frames, within which each victim's/survivor's experience is formulated by the voices partaking in the conversation on sexual violence in the media. The identification of the frames of sexual violence was preceded by an analysis of the naming processes employed by these voices. Analysis of the case studies was focused on multimodal texts from print and broadcast media which offered input in the form of the voices of victims/survivors. Texts were sampled mostly from genres of current affairs and news features. This thesis also reviews the suitability of existing epistemologies and research methodologies for the examination of media-based conversations of sexual violence, focusing on distinctly feminist approaches of discourse analysis. By uncovering the discursive contexts which victims/survivors have to negotiate each time they speak out about their experience in the media, the analysis in this thesis is able to contribute a media studies-based perspective to debates about the process of surviving sexual violence and the corresponding positionality of the terms 'victim' and 'survivor'.

This project examines the historical development of the ideology of mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture) in relation to the making of Mexico as a nation and the consolidation of the figure of the mestizo as the official national race. I am concerned with how mestizaje circulates and is (re-) produced across the public arena of politics, education and popular culture, and how it becomes part of everyday life. I also explore how mestizaje has been re-imagined with the concurrent rise of neoliberalism and multiculturalism from the 1990s onward. My ultimate goal with this dissertation is to show how race and racism remain implicated in Mexican nationalism as they serve to determine the terms of belonging to the nation.

This thesis draws on the conceptual tools of communication theory, and on studies of promotion and branding, to examine Hizbullah's communication strategy and the way the Party has promoted its identity, values and nationalist discourses in the period between 2006 and 2018. To do so, it examines five different sites including buildings and leisure sites in Dahiya, ʿAshura rituals and their mediation on al-Manar, ʿAshura posters, and children's magazines and television programming. By paying particular attention to Hizbullah's religious channels and activities such as ʿAshura rituals and posters, and treating them as part and parcel of the Party's political communication strategies, the thesis emphasises an aspect of the Party's communication practices that has so far remained largely overlooked. It understands the Party's communication channels as educational and socialising agencies that seek to create and maintain Hizbullah's religio-politico nation and to ensure the Party's survival within an increasingly tense regional political environment. The thesis's focus on the specific time period from the 2006 war with Israel until the present day shows that Hizbullah is expanding its resistance and nationalist discourses as it attempts to appeal to a wider local, Muslim, Arab and regional audience. The thesis argues that the Party does this as a tactical and pre-emptive calculation to gain support for a regional war yet to come with Israel. It draws on the modernist and ethno-symbolist schools of nationalism and argues that both are necessary in order to understand the Party's multiple nationalisms. However, the thesis argues that core to Hizbullah's nationalism is one centred around its religio-politico nation that adopts the Karbala battle for resistance activities against whatever Yazid that is declared. Hence, resistance and religion are intertwined within the Party's discourse.

The goal of this research is to investigate sports fan cheering as a collaborative undertaking. This is primarily done by examining video data of informal cheering groups called Student Sections at intercollegiate Ice Hockey contests. Additional video and anecdotal data of spectators at other sports and audiences at other types of performance are also used to illustrate and contrast various forms of en mass collaboration in spectators. The data is addressed from an ethnomethodological perspective, using conversation analysis to break down both the instances of cheering and the sport's play into sequences of turns to see how the turns at cheering orient to the turns at play. The analysis shows that Student Sections orient to a range of factors and interaction resources within the game and within the Section itself. This is done in order to collaborate on the performance of shared turns as a whole and to achieve proper meaning with those turns by managing their placement within the sequence of the game being watched. For the realm of interaction research this study hopes to expand the view of what can constitute a social actor beyond individuals. To this end a new form of social actor is proposed where individuals may mutually coordinate to not just talk amongst themselves but talk as one shared self, engaging as a recognizably unified actor in interactions with external actors. For sport itself a detailed understanding of cheering as a process of interaction offers a radically different approach to understanding fan participation and involvement than current studies focused on unilateral psychological factors like excitement and attachment. With new tools to investigate larger-scale interactions via EM/CA and a better understanding of the vital role interaction plays in cheering it is hoped that this research will promote greater investigation of sport as a research topic in interaction and greater use of interaction research in the management of sport.

This study explores how people understand and represent the economy in different spaces across society. It draws on over 120 semi-structured interviews as well as participant observation across four sites: the civil service, the financial sector, the financial press, and one of the UK’s largest housing estates. The multi-sited empirical study builds on and contributes to two bodies of literature. First, through looking at the representations and understandings of the economy across a number of sites it explores how the economy is anchored in different registers of meaning across society. This brings the notion of the economy into the same theoretical framework that has been used to theorise the fragmentation of the public sphere, which has mainly focussed on political, cultural and media fragmentation, but ignored the economy. The second intervention comes in the field of economic sociology. The multi-sited framework allows for an investigation into different forms of agency in socioeconomic praxis. The sites are explored as both internal localised networks of interaction and as spaces situated within broader societal relationships of power. The findings and the argument constructed emphasise the importance of broader structural relationships. In doing so they contribute towards undermining the influential recent trend inspired by Michel Callon's notion of economic performativity, and the localised networked conception of agency at its core. Beyond these theoretical contributions, the thesis also provides a snapshot of contemporary society in the UK. The elite institutional sites looked at are found to generate a self-serving abstract economic discourse grounded in the politics of knowledge representation. This elite economic discourse does not resonate at spaces on the periphery of the public sphere, and in the lack of rational pluralised discourse on the economy many people turn to explanatory frameworks that harness an anti-elite sentiment and appear to fit with their immediate lifeworlds. The result is a fragmented economic imaginary across society that holds little hope of bringing much needed positive economic change.

This thesis, based on a critical “militant ethnography” (Juris 2007) with an auto-ethnographic component, applies the Gramscian concepts of party, leadership and class (Gramsci 1971) to analyse the attempts of the small radical grassroots activist group Our London (OL) to mobilise a collective oppositional politics within a highly unequal city. The group - which was loosely structured, socially and politically heterogeneous and run on very few resources - aimed to mobilise around economic inequality in London through a campaign for the 2016 London elections. I was a founding member of the group and heavily involved in its activities for much of the research period; my account is therefore necessarily a partial one and involves critical reflection on my own practice as well as that of the group as a whole. Through analysis of data collected - including through interviews, observation, collation of internal documents, emails and Facebook posts - I outline how the dispositions and orientations of OL’s activists informed their praxis, developing in the process a novel account of activism as a located social practice. I also explore the collective political activities of the group, discussing the need to articulate identities to interests and the central role of what Dean (2016) calls “crowd events” (p8). I situate my analysis of grassroots organising within the context of what is often termed post-Fordism: a form of contemporary capitalism characterised by flexibility and decentralisation in workplace organisation and the rise of the informational economy (Harvey 1989; Lazzarrato 1996; Hall 1988). I argue that Gramsci’s (1971) emphasis on the “feeling-passion” (p418) that underpins political collectivity and the need for political action to “develop, solidify and universalise” (p227) incipient expression of class sentiment are more pertinent than ever in societies that operate, as Gilbert (2013) argues, upon neoliberal logics hostile to the very notion and practice and collectivity.

Interfaith initiatives have grown rapidly in the UK since the 1980s, but have been little researched. This thesis presents an organisational ethnography of London-based interfaith charity 3FF (Three Faiths Forum), with whom the author conducted two and half years of fieldwork as part of an ESRC collaborative studentship. Founded in 1997 to bring together Muslim, Christian and Jewish faith leaders, 3FF has since opened up its remit to those of ‘all faiths and nonreligious beliefs’, and primarily delivers education works to young people. The organisation is unusual within the interfaith sector, but expressive of broader shifts in religious and other forms of collective identities (Woodhead, 2012). Theoretically, this thesis attempts to adopt a non-modern (Latour, 1993) and non-secular approach to knowledge production, arguing that this is necessary to conceptualise processes of collective building that are inclusive of those of different faiths and beliefs, and which do not re-enact racialised hierarchies and coloniality. Chapters trace the mediation of different forms of knowledge, including the mediations of media technologies, from a number of angles. The empirical material covers the complexities of everyday coexistence between faiths; how the organisation navigated high profile ‘faith-inflected media events’ taking place during the fieldwork period; data practices within the internal workings of the organisation; and a theorisation of the organisation’s practice with participants as involving tacit and embodied knowledges, alongside a critique asking where accountability lies when central aspects of the work remain unspoken. The thesis conclusion outlines some of the lessons that can be drawn from this ethnographic case for constructing a ‘plural collective’ on a decolonial basis, which can challenge inequality despite fundamental disagreements about the nature of knowledge and the agencies at play in the world, and which is “open to contingency but still able to act” (Hall, 1987, p. 117).

The Sibe people in Northeast and Northwest China lived largely apart for over 250 years until information and communication technology (ICT) renewed regular contact. This thesis hypothesizes that the changes in Sibe interaction resulting from ICT use are redefining their ethnic identity – or minzu in Chinese. To investigate this hypothesis, data was gathered using a combination of interviews and ethnography of Sibe use of social media across platforms from Sina Weibo to QQ and WeChat. The findings contribute to research on both the concept and practice of minzu today and the role of ICT in the production of identity. They challenge essentialist explanations of the relation between ethnic minorities and the internet found in both cyber-utopian and cyber-realist literatures. First, they demonstrate that ethnicity – or minzu in Chinese – is a social construction and dynamic concept. Second, they show that ICT participates in identity construction in an interaction between users’ social and cultural needs and the characteristics of ICT itself. To support this understanding and show how different players shape ethnic identity in their use of ICT, the core chapters: trace the genealogy of minzu as a concept in relation to Sibe identity; analyze the representation of the Westward Migration of Sibe to Northwest China in official museums and unofficially online; and examine debates about how to transliterate Sibe language on the internet.

This study is an investigation into the operation on the ground of community radio (CR) in Bangladesh. The thesis argues, on the basis of fieldwork conducted at various CR sites, that the heavy involvement of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) poses a number of problems. Their domination of the sector, and their formative influence in the campaign for the introduction of CR in the first place, has tended to reduce the potential of the medium to generate democratization of communication. Simultaneously, the initiator-NGOs’ dominant role and protectionist approach to operations has generated a lack of active community participation and reduced community access to the medium. We have not, therefore, witnessed the emergence of an alternative public sphere in any meaningful way. Indeed, their efforts to institutionalize programing and broadcasting are indicative of a process moving towards the ‘NGO-ization’ of CR. This process is setting limits to the democratic potential of the medium. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in selected community radio station (CRS) areas, supplemented by qualitative research methods such as interview and focus group discussion (FGD). In practice, the NGO-guided CR only partially reflects the key values that constitute this participatory medium. The marginalised and excluded are yet to own and manage a CRS or have any decision-making authority. In the current status quo, local communities are unable to use the stations as a discursive arena in which to challenge dominant socio-political discourses. Nonetheless, initiator NGOs have trained local volunteers and the contributions of the CRSs during natural disasters is noteworthy. Furthermore, CR has demonstrated its utility as a means to support local development, i.e. as a form of local development radio. This, however, falls short of the true potential of CR. Thus, the thesis concludes with the overall observation that NGO involvement is failing to facilitate the proper democratic development of CR in Bangladesh.

Trust and speech are both essential aspects of human interaction. On the one hand, trust is necessary for vocal communication to be meaningful. On the other hand, humans have developed a way to infer someone’s trustworthiness from their voice, as well as to signal their own. Yet, research on trustworthiness attributions to speakers is scarce and contradictory, and very often uses explicit data, which do not predict actual trusting behaviour. However, measuring behaviour is very important to have an actual representation of trust. This thesis contains 5 experiments aimed at examining the influence of various voice characteristics — including accent, prosody, emotional expression and naturalness — on trusting behaviours towards virtual players and robots. The experiments have the "investment game"—a method derived from game theory, which allows to measure implicit trustworthiness attributions over time — as their main methodology. Results show that standard accents, high pitch, slow articulation rate and smiling voice generally increase trusting behaviours towards a virtual agent, and a synthetic voice generally elicits higher trustworthiness judgments towards a robot. The findings also suggest that different voice characteristics influence trusting behaviours with different temporal dynamics. Furthermore, the actual behaviour of the various speaking agents was modified to be more or less trustworthy, and results show that people’s trusting behaviours develop over time accordingly. Also, people reinforce their trust towards speakers that they deem particularly trustworthy when these speakers are indeed trustworthy, but punish them when they are not. This suggests that people’s trusting behaviours might also be influenced by the congruency of their first impressions with the actual experience of the speaker’s trustworthiness — a "congruency effect". This has important implications in the context of Human–Machine Interaction, for example for assessing users’ reactions to speaking machines which might not always function properly. Taken together, the results suggest that voice influences trusting behaviour, and that first impressions of a speaker’s trustworthiness based on vocal cues might not be indicative of future trusting behaviours, and that trust should be measured dynamically.

Every human being applies their acquired knowledge during the interpretation and application of information, but all the humanly acquired knowledge are shaped by the social information processing model as determined by the traditions and values embedded in their culture. Therefore, the transition from information seeking to the application within a person is not completely dependent on cognition but in the current socio-cultural interpretation of that information. The cultural background of every individual often determines the interpretation and the understanding derivable from any information. Human socio-cultural values are the intervening variables during information seeking, and they can be grouped into three, namely psychological, physiological and environmental, but none acts alone during information seeking and application. Hence, culture as a factor must be considered both psychologically and environmentally to understand its impact on IB because culture comprises of both the tangible and the intangible aspects of human life. The aim of this study is to investigate the main reason for the contrasting results of the polio campaign across the north and south of Nigeria. The study adopted a mixed method approach comprising of a semi-structured interview and focus groups for the collection of data that adequately describe cultural variables to determine the aspects of culture directly impacting on IB, such as language, customs, traditions, and religious values which cannot be quantified or counted. The research approach considered IB in its totality and viewed information not only as tools designed by human to enhance communication and conceptualization of realities but also as the means which enabled the achievement of the desired goal for both the providers and the users of information. Therefore, IB was not only viewed from the context or content of the information but from the way people search, receive and utilise information to meet their respective needs. The study considered the how ; the what ; the where and the whom people consult when in need of information or for the explanation about the information received but not understood, to determine the chosen culture group s IB By considering culture from a multi-disciplinary perspective and IB evolutionarily, the study investigates the impact of cultural orientation on IB through the way the people of Nigeria relates with the polio eradication campaign. The study links all the factors of culture, such as language, tradition, and religion to the ways people relate to information, and the findings revealed that culture plays a significant role in the IB of individuals right from the point of the perceived knowledge gap to the point of information application. The language associated with the people s religious belief was also found to be of significant influence on language preference during communication of information, as well as in the process of encoding and decoding of information. Thus, culture did not only impact on IB during information seeking and application but also the language for the communication of information. Cultural orientation significantly impacted on the way people relates to the polio campaign as a consequence of their IB, and this informed their interpretations of the polio campaign and the eventual outcome of the campaign within the north and south of Nigeria.

This study is set against the backdrop of equity in education agendas and government policy focused on improving essential skills. The purpose of this study is to give a voice to rural adults with the aim of understanding through interviews and storied memoirs, the experiences and difficulties they face with literacy in relation to inclusion, participation and success in education and also how literacy has influenced and shaped the quality of their lives. From the literature review three research questions were generated. What barriers do the research subjects perceive to have contributed to preventing them acquiring confidence in reading, writing and communicating orally in a range of everyday contexts and how has this influenced their social behaviour and subsequent attainment? What are the current perceived barriers impeding their progress as rural adults towards literacy achievement and what is their perception of how this has impacted on their social behaviour and the quality of their adult lives? Can the research subjects identify a pivotal moment in their lives as rural adults in regard to their issues with literacy and how has this impacted on its quality? Key findings demonstrate that rural positioning (through life stages), school positioning and work positioning impacts on the social learning of rural adults influencing what and how rural individuals think and this subsequently impacts on the current position in their adult life. The collection of influences impacting on the current positioning of rural adults has an impact on their decision to seek help with literacy. This research emphasises that the nature of educational contact and opportunity is particularly crucial for rural adults if their lives are to be transformed for the better development of their achievements and sense of fulfilment.

This thesis addresses a range of research questions regarding literacy in early modern Scotland. Using the early modern manuscripts and printed editions of Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie’s late sixteenth-century 'Cronicles of Scotland' as a case study on literacy history, this thesis poses the complementary questions of how and why early modern Scottish reading communities were encountering Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles', and how features of the material page can be interpreted as indicators of contemporary literacy practices. The answers to these questions then provide the basis for the thesis to ask broader socio-cultural and theoretical questions regarding the overall literacy environment in Scotland between 1575 and 1814, and how theorists conceptualise the history of literacy. Positioned within the theoretical groundings of historical pragmatics and ‘new philology’ – and the related approach of pragmaphilology – this thesis returns to the earlier philological practice of close textual analysis, and engages with the theoretical concept of mouvance, in order to analyse how the changing ‘form’ of Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles', as it was reproduced in manuscript and print throughout the early modern period, indicates its changing ‘function’. More specifically, it suggests that the punctuation practices and paratextual features of individual witnesses of the text function to aid the highly-nuanced reading practices and purposes of the discrete reading communities for which they were produced. This thesis includes extensive descriptive material which presents previously unrecorded data regarding twenty manuscripts and printed witnesses of Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles', contributing to a gap in Scotland’s literary/historiographical canon. It then analyses this material using a transferable methodological framework which combines the quantitative analysis of micro-data with qualitative analysis of this data within its socio-cultural context, in order to conduct diachronic comparative analysis of copy-specific information. The principal findings of this thesis suggest that Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles' were being read for a combination of devotional and didactic purposes, and that multiple reading communities, employing highly nuanced reading practices, were encountering the text near-contemporaneously. This thesis further suggests that early modern literacy practices, and the specific reading communities which employ them, should be described as existing within a spectrum of available practices (i.e. more or less oral/aural or silent, and intensive or extensive in practice) rather than as dichotomous entities. As such, this thesis argues for the rejection of evolutionary theories of the history of literacy, suggesting that rather than being described antithetically, historical reading practices and purposes must be recognised as complex, coexisting socio-cultural practices, and the multiplicity of reading communities within a single society must be acknowledged and analysed as such, as opposed to being interpreted as universal entities.

In recent years, unofficial and/or illegal forms of online file sharing have been increasingly used by audiences worldwide to consume foreign TV programmes which would not previously have been available to them at the time when such shows were first broadcast in their original regions. This form of consumption shortens the time-and-space gap between foreign broadcast and local consumption, highlighting audiences’ desires for borderless, transnational viewing. Taking Taiwanese audiences as an example, this research studies the implications which transnational foreign television consumption via online sharing may bring. Based on in-depth interviews with thirty-six audience members conducted from 2010 to 2011, I focus on two issues: 1. The meaning of television for its audiences: This research examines how and why audiences employ online sharing to bypass temporal, spatial and legal constraints on consuming foreign programmes, and elaborates the ways in which such consumption is becoming an emerging norm of television experience. It sheds light on how our existing understandings have changed, regarding what is meant by “watching TV”, and what television’s role is in providing a sense of liveness, shaping audiences’ sense of social togetherness and their cultural identity. 2. Transnational media flows and cultural power relationships: This research looks at the implications of this cross-border Taiwanese consumption of television for transnational media flows in the post-colonial East Asian contexts. It examines cultural power relationships between East Asian countries, as well as those between the East and the West. Furthermore, by elaborating how audiences’ sense of co-temporality with (and understanding of) other cultures develop via their consumption, this research analyses how such consumption shapes the direction of media flows and cultural power relationships of Taiwan with other countries and thus offers a contemporary understanding of what television means as a cultural form, and what features television audiences have, in the post-network era today.

This study analyses the ways in which artistic labour is racialised and made precarious. It examines the working and living conditions of Turkish German artists throughout the institutionalisation of postmigrant theatre and the implementation of cultural diversity in the arts policies in Berlin’s cultural landscape. It illuminates the dynamics that unfold with regards to cultural diversity in the arts and the labour involved in its practices. The main argument of the thesis is, that the emergence and development of postmigrant theatre needs to be understood as the successful establishment and institutionalisation of new aesthetic, narrative and political tools, which, on the one hand, signal the arrival of Turkish German and other artists of colour and of the language of cultural diversity in the field of the arts in the midst of a new globalised urban cosmopolitanism. On the other hand, however, this thesis also accounts for the still limited access of Turkish German and other artists of colour to institutions of high culture, for their precarious and racialised labour conditions and the lack of material resources available for the diversity work that the artists of the postmigrant theatre movement do. As a critical ethnography conducted over the span of seven years, this study maps out the field of opportunities and the restrictions that Turkish German artists working in postmigrant theatre experience in their everyday lives and in negotiating their position in institutional life. This includes their experience in arts school education, the artistic labour market, the sphere of cultural policy, existing funding structures and public discourses about migration, gentrification, cultural diversity and the arts in Germany. The study shows how postmigrant theatre artists’ representational practices produce new postmigrant ethnicities, and challenge narrow conceptions of ethnicity, German culture, national identity as well as power relations in Germany’s theatre landscape. Postmigrant theatre artists perform acts of memory by reaffirming intergenerationally transmitted cultural memories and lived experiences of migration. These become political through acts of remembrance that counteract the long neglect of Turkish German hi/stories. Ultimately, the artists of the postmigrant theatre movement determine the meaning of “diversity in the arts” by working collaboratively to establish sustainable funding and employment structures, networks of solidarity and by giving voice to an increasingly well-organised movement of artists who critique the racialised division of labour in the state-subsisided theatre and cultural landscape.

This thesis contributes to research by taking a social psychological perspective to managing privacy online. The thesis proposes to support the effort to form a mental model that is required to evaluate a context with regards to privacy attitudes or to ease the effort by biasing activation of privacy attitudes. Privacy being a behavioural concept, the human-computer interaction design plays a major role in supporting and contributing to end users’ ability to manage their privacy online. However, unless privacy attitudes are activated or made accessible, end users’ behaviour would not necessarily match their attitudes. This perspective contributes to explaining why online privacy mechanisms have long been found to be in-effective. Privacy academics and practitioners are queried for their opinions on aspects of usable privacy designs. Evaluation of existing privacy mechanisms (social network service, internet browsers privacy tabs and E-Commerce websites) for privacy experts’ requirements reveals that the privacy mechanisms do not provide for the social psychological processes of privacy management. This is determined through communication breakdowns within the interaction design and the lack of privacy disclosure dialectical tension, lack of disclosure context and visibility of privacy means. The thesis taps into established research in social psychology related to the attitude behaviour relationship. It proposes persuasive communication to support the privacy management process that is to enable end user control of their privacy while ensuring typical usability criteria such as minimum effort and ease of use. An experimental user study within an E-Commerce context provides evidence that in the presence of persuasive triggers that support the disclosure and privacy dialectic within a context of disclosure; end users can engage in privacy behaviour that match their privacy concerns. Reminders for privacy actions with a message that is personally relevant or has a privacy argument result in significantly more privacy behaviour than a simple reminder. However, reminders with an attractive source that is not linked with privacy can distract end users from privacy behaviour such that the observed response is similar to the simple reminder. This finding is significant for the research space since it supports the use of persuasive communication within human-computer interaction of privacy designs as a powerful tool in enabling attitude activation and accessibility such that cognitive evaluation of an attitude object can be unleashed and end users can have a higher likelihood of responding with privacy behaviour. It also supports the view that privacy designs that do not consider their interaction with privacy attitudes or their influence on behaviour can turn out to be in-effective although found to support the typical usability criteria. More research into the social-psychological aspects of online privacy management would be beneficial to the research space. Further research could determine the strength of activated or accessed privacy attitude caused by particular persuasive triggers and the extent of privacy behaviour. Longitudinal studies could also be useful to better understand online privacy behaviour and help designs of more effective and usable online privacy.

The first aim of this research is to better understand how the dominant and vernacular literacy practices of adult volunteers at an aviation-centred uniformed youth group in Hong Kong co-exist through a newly launched continuing education programme – a vocational qualification programme – and various types of texts in the volunteering context. Another aim is to explore how these volunteers’ self-generated literacy practices are shaped by new technologies, with a particular focus on a social networking site, Facebook. The study is grounded in the framework of literacy as a social practice (Barton and Hamilton, 2012) and the community of practice (CoP) learning theory (Wenger, 1998). Literacy as a social practice theory reveals that reading and writing practices are purposeful and embedded in broader social goals and cultural practices. Taking a CoP perspective, this thesis also views the uniformed group as a community sharing common knowledge, ideas and practices. The research was conducted using a linguistic ethnographic approach. Based on the analysis of written texts, including assignments and texts related to volunteering work and multimodal texts on Facebook, interviews and participant observation, this study first reveals how the social practices surrounding these digital and print-based texts constitute the professional practices of volunteers and bring formal education into a nonformal education context. Furthermore, this thesis contributes to the understanding of new practices in social media and other technologies, which will become more prevalent in volunteering and further education environments. The significance of literacy practices cannot be considered in isolation from their unique sociocultural context.

The submission, comprising nine outputs, ranges from journal articles and a book to a podcast and a radio programme. The accompanying commentary aims to contextualise the submitted work, demonstrate that it constitutes a coherent whole and that it makes a significant, original contribution to the field of cultural studies. The submission and commentary contest the idea that the voice has become less important than text and image in an era that has come to be known as one of 'secondary orality'. The outputs set out to demonstrate that, although metaphorical and narrative meanings of 'voice' have come to displace a sense of the audible voice in popular discourse as well as in many scholarly texts, it remains a prime and powerful modality in both human communication and new technologies. Applying the approach of psycho-social studies to the voice in a novel and original way, the outputs draw on semi-structured interviews, archive research and cultural analysis to argue that, despite the discursive absence of the audible voice, a study of vocality can enrich our understanding of both face-to-face and electronically-mediated communication. The commentary describes the phenomenological orientation of the outputs. Using the interdisciplinary approach of psycho-social studies to explore aspects of the cultural sphere, the submission is thus situated in the emerging strand of psycho-cultural studies: the commentary argues that, despite the methodological problems this throws up, it constitutes a valuable and apt addition to the study of voice. It suggests that gendered ideas of the voice may lead to an essentialism that can be countered by understanding the voice as a medium for the performativity of gender. Challenging the common polarisation of eye and ear and the idealisation of the voice, it traces some ways in which the voice is culturally-constituted, especially the radio and cinematic voice. The appendix documents not only the outputs' origins but also their wide impact.

The creative economy discourse now informs both cultural and development policies around the world. Virtually every country now uses the concept in politics, policy, advocacy, and practice. My aim is to show what this uptake means in conceptual and empirical terms. Through an ethnography of the music industries in Burkina Faso and Ghana I explore the changing meaning and position of ‘culture’ in cultural and development policies in both countries. How does the creative economy discourse help the pursuit human development, if at all? What does this discourse mean precisely? And, most importantly, what should it mean to develop cultural industries? Overall, my dissertation frames this issue broadly and narrowly. The narrow focus is on the situation in Ouagadougou and Accra, capital cities of respectively Burkina Faso and Ghana. The particularities of these countries serve as examples to simultaneously build and illustrate the argument. Yet, the scope extends well beyond this: the aim at large is to ask questions that can be asked beyond these countries. Even though they may yield different answers around the world, I hope they will help to critically understand and use the hegemonic creative economy discourse. The originality of my dissertation work is threefold. First, I link cultural policy studies with critical development studies. I do this by connecting cultural industries to the human development approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum by exploring the link with ‘capabilities.’ Second, I provide empirical insight in the particularities of the music industries in Burkina Faso and Ghana, as both countries are nearly ab-sent from the literature. Third, I provide a theoretical framework to rethink the way cultural and creative industries can be inscribed in cultural policies and development plans by including the cultural and historical palimpsest of existing practices that both enables and limits change.

Western media have come under intense scrutiny over the past 20 years for their propensity to marginalise Africa and to rely on colonial stereotypes, images and narratives. Both within and outside academia, commentators appeal to the concept of ‘Afro-pessimism’ to qualify and condemn this phenomenon. And yet, the notion is under-theorised and existing empirical studies insufficiently analyse and explain the phenomenon. Drawing on journalism, critical/cultural and postcolonial studies, this thesis seeks to answer the following questions: What is Afro-pessimism? Is it an adequate characterisation of media coverage, and if so, to what extent? Is media coverage moving beyond Afro-pessimism? In order to answer these theoretical and empirical questions, this thesis develops a conceptualisation of Afro-pessimism and provides a Critical Discourse Analysis of British and French print media. The analysis focuses on British and French broadsheet newspapers and news magazines. I critically analyse the visual and linguistic features of media texts against the background of their context of production and through interviews with foreign correspondents based in South Africa and Kenya. There are two sites of investigation: (1) the press coverage of the 50th anniversaries of independence (2007-2012); (2) the news magazines’ front covers dedicated to continental Africa (2011-2015). In site 1, I assess three recurring claims about Western media coverage of Africa, and investigate the discursive nature of the coverage in relation to Afro-pessimism and postcolonial memory. In site 2, I explore the emergence of an Afro-optimist discourse in media coverage of Africa. Finally, I offer a critical appraisal of the accounts of journalists at the heart of the production of Africa’s media image.

The veiled Muslimah or Muslim woman has figured as a threat in media during the past few years, especially with the increasing visibility of religious practices in both Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority contexts. Islamic dress has further become a means and technique of constructing ideas about the ‘other’. My study explores how the veil comes to embody this otherness in the contemporary print media and politics. It is an attempt to question constructions of the veil by showing how they repeat older colonial and Orientalist histories. I compare and contrast representations of the dress in Morocco and France. This research is about how Muslimat, and more particularly their Islamic attire, is portrayed in the contemporary print media and politics. My research aims to explore constructions of the dress in the contemporary Moroccan and French press and politics, and how the veil comes to acquire meanings, or veil associations, over time. I consider the veil in Orientalist, postcolonial, Muslim and Islamic feminist contexts, and constructions of the veil in Orientalist and Arab Nahda texts. I also examine Islamic dress in contemporary Moroccan and French print media and politics. While I focus on similarities and continuities, I also highlight differences in constructions of the veil. My study establishes the importance of merging and comparing histories, social contexts and geographies, and offers an opportunity to read the veil from a multivocal, multilingual, cross-historical perspective, in order to reconsider discourses of Islamic dress past and present in comparative perspective.

Mainstream news coverage of Africa relies increasingly on material provided by NGOs, who stand to gain in political influence as a result of becoming ever-more media savvy in a digital age. But at a time of widespread cost-cutting in mainstream journalism, is it appropriate for NGOs to ‘make news’ by providing audio, photographs and video to increasingly time and resource-poor journalists or does this diminish what news should be? Building a body of empirical evidence about why and how journalists use such multimedia and the consequences of this for journalism, NGO-work and those represented, is the central focus of this thesis. Unlike previous research on news coverage of Africa and journalists’ use of NGO-provided multimedia that tends to focus on the coverage of ‘disasters’ or ‘humanitarian emergencies’, this study analyses journalists’ use of NGO-provided multimedia about Africa during a very different news-making period – what journalists call a ‘quiet news week’. The research involved sixty semi-structured interviews with those whose decisions shaped the production of six media items, which were also subject to qualitative content analysis. These items were about a range of topics and African countries: all of which were published or broadcast in news readily available to British audiences. But why and how journalists used NGO-provided multimedia was shaped most powerfully by the ‘moral economies’ (Sayer 2007) structuring each news outlet. These moral economies were found to have brought about a ‘quiet revolution’: leading to the emergence of a number of heterogeneous, normatively-laden coalitions between NGOs and news outlets, often hidden from the view of audiences. Consequently, journalists’ use of NGO-provided multimedia was found to have limited progressive potential: for it inhibited collective reasoning by preventing critical scrutiny, as well as systematically excluding the political value of ‘voice’ in ways which further marginalised the disadvantaged and powerless (Sen 2010).

In this thesis I wish to analyse the complex relationship between actors’ media- related practices, legitimacy and long-term engagement. Based on a qualitative approach my research investigates two cases –Citizens for Europe, a civil society organisations involved in issues relating to European citizenship, and the Chaos Computer Club, one of the world’s oldest and largest hacker organisations. More concretely, through face-to-face interviews, participant observation and media analysis I analyse the role media practices play for the two organisations to establish legitimation and to sustain their political engagement over time. Accordingly, my thesis seeks to provide an empirically informed interpretive account of the meaning media-related practices have for actors’ political endeavours. From a more operationalised perspective, I am trying to make a convincing argument that practices circulating around and oriented towards media technologies and infrastructures play a configurative role for actors’ ability to co-determine democratic constellations. Instead of suggesting a straightforward causal chain my thesis conceptualises the entanglements between media practices, legitimation and long-term engagement as interlocking arrangements grounded in relational dynamics. Overall, my thesis aims to compliment existing research on the role media technologies and infrastructures play for the formation of political arrangements by looking at organisation-based engagement. In doing so, my research partially bridges a current research gap concerning the relationship between organisational actors’ media-related practices and their ability to establish legitimacy and to perpetuate political engagement over time.

Through the analysis of over 1,600 articles from four British news organisations, this thesis reveals distinct patterns in the political content of economic and business news in the first decade of the 21st century. In each of the three case studies – economic globalisation; private finance and public services; and Tesco - the Telegraph newspapers, The Times and the Sunday Times were overtly supportive of laissez faire, the primacy of profit, and reduced government regulation. The Guardian-Observer gave some exposure and credence to ideas from the left but tended to exclude the more radical thinking. Although the BBC is often accused of having a left-wing/anti-business bias, this thesis demonstrates that its reporting has far more in common with the right-wing newspapers than the generally progressive Guardian-Observer. Two further empirical chapters, based on interviews with 26 journalists and editors, explain these findings. The first describes the convergence of the mainstream news media around a shared set of deeply-entrenched assumptions and working practices that are hardwired to reproduce elite interpretations of the economic environment. The second explanatory chapter explores the concept of house tradition, and considers the extent of political divergence of the four mainstream news providers, and contrasts their positions with those of four ‘alternative’ news organisations, the New Statesman, the New Internationalist, Corporate Watch and Private Eye.

In this thesis we study epistemic protocols for gossip. Each agent in the gossip scenario knows a unique piece of information which is called a secret. Agents communicate with each other by means of pairwise telephone calls, and in each call the calling pair of agents exchange all the secrets they currently know. In an epistemic gossip protocol, an agent 'a' can call another agent 'b', not because it is so instructed, but because agent 'a' knows that it satisfies some knowledge-based condition defined by the protocol. The goal of gossiping is typically epistemic, for example, that after a sequence of calls, every agent knows the secret of every other agent. The question then arises as to which knowledge conditions bring about the goal of gossiping, and what properties the resulting protocols have. In this thesis we describe a theoretical framework for the study of epistemic gossip protocols based on dynamic epistemic logic. We describe a number of epistemic gossip protocols and formalise these protocols using our theoretical framework. We study and prove the dynamic properties of these protocols in various types of underlying network topologies such as the line topology network, circle topology network, tree topology network, and the complete topology network. Based on our theoretical framework, we implement a software framework for describing, modelling and checking the dynamic properties of epistemic gossip protocols. We call this software framework the Epistemic Gossip Protocol (EGP) tool. The EGP tool automates the checking of dynamic properties of a given epistemic gossip protocol, such as, whether the given protocol achieves the goal of gossiping for every execution sequence of the protocol, whether the given protocol can produce execution sequences that lead to a deadlock, or whether the given protocol can produce an infinite execution sequence due to a loop. We describe the details of the implementation of the EGP tool, and use the tool to model, and check the dynamic properties of our example protocols. We present and discuss the results obtained from our experiments with the EGP tool.

Universal and culture-specific properties of the vocal communication of human emotion are investigated in this balanced study focussing on encoding and decoding of Happy, Sad, Angry, Fearful and Calm by English and Japanese participants (eight female encoders for each culture, and eight female and eight male decoders for each culture). Previous methodologies and findings are compared. This investigation is novel in the design of symmetrical procedures to facilitate cross-cultural comparison of results of decoding tests and acoustic analysis; a simulation/self-induction method was used in which participants from both cultures produced, as far as possible, the same pseudo-utterances. All emotions were distinguished beyond chance irrespective of culture, except for Japanese participants’ decoding of English Fearful, which was decoded at a level borderline with chance. Angry and Sad were well-recognised, both in-group and cross-culturally and Happy was identified well in-group. Confusions between emotions tended to follow dimensional lines of arousal or valence. Acoustic analysis found significant distinctions between all emotions for each culture, except between the two low arousal emotions Sad and Calm. Evidence of ‘In-Group Advantage’ was found for English decoding of Happy, Fearful and Calm and for Japanese decoding of Happy; there is support for previous evidence of East/West cultural differences in display rules. A novel concept is suggested for the finding that Japanese decoders identified Happy, Sad and Angry more reliably from English than from Japanese expressions. Whilst duration, fundamental frequency and intensity all contributed to distinctions between emotions for English, only measures of fundamental frequency were found to significantly distinguish emotions in Japanese. Acoustic cues tended to be less salient in Japanese than in English when compared to expected cues for high and low arousal emotions. In addition, new evidence was found of cross-cultural influence of vowel quality upon emotion recognition.

Insects are common in our world, such as ants, spiders, cockroaches etc. Virtual representations of them have wide applications in Virtual Reality (VR), video games and films. Compared with the large volume of works in biped animation, the problem of insect animation was less explored. Their small body parts, complex structures and high-speed movements challenge the standard techniques of motion synthesis. This thesis addressed the aforementioned challenge by presenting a framework to efficiently automate the modelling and authoring of insect locomotion. This framework is inspired by two key observations of real insects: fixed gait pattern and distributed neural system. At the top level, a Triangle Placement Engine (TPE) is modelled based on the double-tripod gait pattern of insects, and determines the location and orientation of insect foot contacts, given various user inputs. At the low level, a Central Pattern Generator (CPG) controller actuates individual joints by mimicking the distributed neural system of insects. A Controller Look-Up Table (CLUT) translates the high-level commands from the TPE into the low-level control parameters of the CPG. In addition, a novel strategy is introduced to determine when legs start to swing. During high-speed movements, the swing mode is triggered when the Centre of Mass (COM) steps outside the Supporting Triangle. However, this simplified mechanism is not sufficient to produce the gait variations when insects are moving at slow speed. The proposed strategy handles the case of slow speed by considering four independent factors, including the relative distance to the extreme poses, the stance period, the relative distance to the neighbouring legs, the load information etc. This strategy is able to avoid the issues of collisions between legs or over stretching of leg joints, which are produced by conventional methods. The framework developed in this thesis allows sufficient control and seamlessly fits into the existing pipeline of animation production. With this framework, animators can model the motion of a single insect in an intuitive way by specifying the walking path, terrains, speed etc. The success of this framework proves that the introduction of biological components could synthesise the insect animation in a naturalness and interactive fashion.

This thesis comprises the first comprehensive narrative account of the history of classical music radio in the UK between 1945 and 1995, from before the launch of the Third Programme until after the launch of Classic FM. It describes and analyses the rich range of output across all relevant radio stations in this period, rebutting the conventional assumption that this aspect of British radio was simply about the Third Programme and Radio 3. At almost all times during the second half of the 20th Century, those stations were not the majority providers of classical music radio. Classical music radio over these years was marked by a series of high points, when the provision of elite and popular output combined to open the genre to a wide range of listeners; and then by a series of retreats from those summits. During three spells – the late Forties, the late Sixties and the early Nineties – a multi-channel offering of both highbrow and middlebrow music, linked and presented in an accessible way, achieved broad appeal and wide audiences, and realised the potential for this public good. The classical music programming of Independent Local Radio between 1973 and 1990 did the same in individual localities, to a previously unappreciated extent. This new narrative history of classical music radio in the UK highlights and is dominated by the dialectic between highbrow and popular culture, between elite and demotic taste, and between a class-based and a classless approach to radio broadcasting. Original audience data demonstrate a consistent potential audience for classical music radio of some five to six million throughout these years, provided listeners felt they were allowed to listen in. Original content analysis demonstrates a canonic repertoire of classical music radio, arrived at and maintained on a reflexive basis between the producers and the consumers of this genre, centred on the works of 19th Century European composers. That canon has remained largely unchallenged except at the popular margins, in contrast to modern approaches to the literary canon, and distinguishes classical music from other art forms. This account illustrates a particular aspect of listening, whereby classical music radio can validly be both foreground and background. The influence of individuals, and therefore the relevance of biography within this history, is shown to be significant, but overall less important than the social, political, cultural and economic context in which the radio services operated, and which shaped their output. Classical music radio is an archetypal element of public service radio broadcasting. This narrative shows that it has been provided during this period by stations outside the main cultural cohort, even from 1973 outside the BBC. As such, it challenges institutional definitions of public service broadcasting, and demonstrates how relationships between the producers of radio and its consumers can operate at many levels, testifying to the multi-threaded tapestry of UK cultural life as a whole in the second half of the 20th century.

In this dissertation I look at various ways in which the relation between gamers and games has been discussed in video game culture in recent years. Gamers and games are currently being positioned by many scholars and industry experts as experiencing a series of major changes. From one perspective, gamers are said to be getting more and more access to the means of production of video games. Video games, in turn, are frequently analysed in terms of the effects they can have on their users. I argue that the discourses surrounding these phenomena have the effect of reinforcing the separation between gamers and games, considering both terms as separate and distinct entities. Throughout this dissertation I offer a series of readings of the relationship between the two, of how this relationship is currently being discussed by various actors and of how it could be narrated otherwise. I look at the narratives about the historical origins of both gamers and games, the conflicts between consumers and publishers, the production of independent games and the use of games for doing things. Drawing on deconstruction (Derrida 1976, 1980, 1985, 1988) and cultural and media studies scholarship, I interrogate the mechanisms behind many of the stories surrounding the contaminated and parasitical relations (Serres 1982) between gamers and games, whereby both categories are seen as emerging from the process of boxing consumers and products into discrete entities. I offer a reading of contemporary video game culture through a study that aims to encourage all of us who study and play (with) games to raise ethical questions for our own role in shaping the objects of research and for our involvement in the discourses we produce, as both gamers and scholars. What is ultimately at stake in this project is the possibility of outlining an alternative mode of thinking about the medium of the video game, one that blurs the distinction between studying, playing, making and living with video games through the invention of narratives about the unresolved relations (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) between gamers and games.

This thesis analyzes the representation of and affects associated with the five class figures of worker, peasant, soldier, intellectual, and entrepreneur in the films of the Chinese director Jia Zhangke. They are the descendents of the five main Confucian class figures, and have also been socially, politically, and culturally significant throughout China’s modern history. The questions that guide this analysis include: How are these figures represented? How do their representations and cinematic tropes operate in the films? What feelings do they evoke? To answer these questions, I engage with scholarship in Chinese sociology and visual culture, Raymond Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling,” and theories on film phenomenology and affect. I examine Jia’s entire oeuvre (1994-2013), including his shorts, documentaries, narrative films, and advertisements. In the core chapters, I examine each figure’s socio-historical and cultural contexts, its representation in the films, and the cinematic tropes and feelings that are associated with it. I argue that the Maoist figures are in decline and will soon disappear, while the “new” class figures of intellectual and entrepreneur survive and thrive in the Reform era. Regarding cinematic tropes, I analyze the moving portraits, interviews, and constructions of memory for the figure of the worker; for the peasant, I focus on the POV shot, observation, and the gaze; for the soldier, I discuss the figure’s “absent presence” and its degraded appearance in simulacra; for the intellectual, I examine the voice, the pseudomonologue, and the observatory and exploratory lenses; and for the entrepreneur, I explore the close-up, speed, and film as advertisement. Finally, I examine how these figures produce what Raymond Williams describes as “structures of feeling,” and how these various feelings transition over time – from anxiety over the threat of Reform, to decrying its negative effects, to welcoming its opportunities, to finally demanding solutions to the problems it has caused.

Music and language are both deeply rooted in our biology, but scientists have given far more attention to the neurological, biological and evolutionary roots of language than those of music. Because of this, and probably partially due to this, the purpose of music, in evolutionary terms, remains a mystery. Our brain, physiology and psychology make us capable of producing and listening to music since early infancy; therefore, our biology and behaviour are carrying some of the clues that need to be revealed to understand what music is “for”. Furthermore, music and language have a deep relationship, particularly in terms of cognitive processing, that can provide clues about the origins of music. Non-verbal behaviours, including voice characteristics during speech, are an important form of communication that enables individual recognition and assessment of the speaker’s physical characteristics (including sex, femininity/masculinity, body size, physical strength, and attractiveness). Vocal parameters, however, can be intentionally varied, for example altering the intensity (loudness), rhythm and pitch during speech. This is classically demonstrated in infant directed speech (IDS), in which adults alter vocal characteristics such as pitch, cadence and intonation contours when speaking to infants. In this thesis, I analyse vocal modulation and its perception in human social interaction, in different social contexts such as courtship and authority ranking relationships. Results show that specific vocal modulations, akin to those of IDS, and perhaps music, play a role in communicating courtship intent. Based on these results, as well the body of current knowledge, I then propose a model for the evolution of musicality, the human capacity to process musical information, in relation to human vocal communication. I suggest that musicality may not be limited to specifically musical contexts, and can have a role in other domains such as language, which would provide further support for a common origin of language and music. This model supports the hypothesis of a stage in human evolution in which individuals communicated using a music-like protolanguage, a hypothesis first suggested by Darwin.

The changing media landscape in China has created a diverse society where young audiences often suffer from confusing and conflicting values. There is an increasing concern that young people‘s sense of citizenship is in decline, suggesting a lack of awareness that may be indicative of an alienation towards news. The purpose of this study is to enhance scholarly understanding of the relationship between Chinese young citizens and news. The research was conducted in Beijing, involving 12 focus groups and 40 semi-structured interviews with teenagers, and 10 in-depth interviews with their parents and teachers. Evidence obtained highlights that young citizens have a general negative view towards national news media regarding news objectivity, balance, and depth. Results also suggest that young citizens struggle to understand the top-down form of news in China. The gaps between young people and news raise questions about their relative grasp of news literacy, and their perspectives on what counts as good journalism. Briefly, the analysis reveals that: a) while news plays an important role in providing young citizens with information in their daily lives, consistent consumption of news does not necessarily result in enhancing their news literacy; and b) young citizens‘ perspectives on news are shaped by both foreign news concepts and domestic news stereotypes. The study reaffirms that multiple dimensions of citizenship and cultural traditions in different social contexts need to be integrated when examining the relationship between young citizens, news and news education. Looking to the future, the thesis presents a strong case for a new approach to help reduce the gap between young people and national news, offering specific recommendations for better developing news literacy education strategies best suited for China.

The brand relationship paradigm (Heding et al. 2009) has been applied extensively in the commercial consumer-brand context (Breazale and Fournier 2012) but there has been scant attention to the study of corporate brand relationships (Abratt and Kleyn 2010) and more specifically in the charity domain where there has been a growing interest in charity branding during recent years. Therefore, this study consisted of exploring brand relationships within a particular charity context in the UK whereby the host organisation was a national healthcare charity providing different types of services to people living with arthritis. The conceptual framework guiding this study was drawn from both corporate branding and brand relationship theory with a view to apply new approaches to the study of the charity brand. Due to the exploratory nature of this investigation, an inductive research methodology was adopted where data collection involved qualitative interviews with twenty-two participants including three extensive biographical interviews. Findings suggest the importance for charities to better understand the salient aspects of their corporate brand that effect brand-beneficiary relationships. Six aspects have been identified from the perspectives of beneficiaries and were labelled as follows: brand clarity, brand personality, brand communication, brand presence, brand experience, and brand ethics. Morever, brand relationship were investigated from an interpersonal relationship metaphor perspective (Hinde 1997, Fournier 1998, Saledin 2012) resulting in the identification of four brand relationship roles (Mentor, Befriender, Entertainer, Enabler) and one desired brand relationship role (Medical Expert) from the perspectives of beneficiaries. This study therefore contributes to academic knowledge by providing new insights and perspectives on brand relationships between a healthcare charity brand and its beneficiaries. In addition, practical managerial recommendations are suggested to assist the host charity in its branding efforts.

This thesis charts the historical evolution of the ‘personal’ radio interview, in order to understand its use as a speech device, a social relationship and a communicative genre. Four contrasting styles of interviewing have been chosen to illustrate key moments and to illuminate significant shifts in the history of UK broadcasting: Desert Island Discs (1942-1954), The Radio Ballads (1958-64 & 2006), the confessional style phone interview format on independent local radio (1975) and Prison Radio projects (1993-present). These cases draw together an assortment of live and pre-recorded material, across a variety of genres that encompass over seventy years of production output, granting an opportunity to demonstrate the specificities of each example, whilst also identifying any overarching themes or differences. Primary research has been carried out using an assortment of audio content and written archive, comprising of scripts, memos, letters, diaries, training documents, contracts, policies and guidelines, which give us a further sense of how this method of talk has developed over the decades. Power dynamics permeate all levels of broadcasting, so particular emphasis has been placed on how both ‘on air’ and ‘backstage’ interaction has been experienced by an institution, an interviewer and an interviewee. For instance, how might the interview have been used to serve, restrict or benefit the needs of a particular group, an individual or an institution? The different types of interaction that has taken place between participants before, during and after an interview exchange provide clues about the purpose, motivations and agendas of those who contribute towards on-air talk. So, while this thesis values the significance of broadcast audio and historical documentation, it also honours the experiences of individual figures, and seeks to highlight the relationship dynamics within production teams; all of which have an impact on the on-air interview exchange. As a result, research interviews have been conducted with industry practitioners, including editors, engineers, presenters, producers and phone operators. This study will not only start to develop our knowledge of the contextual history of interview production on commercial, public service and community radio in the UK, but also begin to lay the foundation for an expansion of our wider knowledge concerning the use of the mediated interview across other disciplines and throughout other countries. This thesis suggests that the on-air incarnation of interview talk, its ‘backstage’ production, and its principal position within speech radio genres all over the world, should be viewed as a powerful barometer of institutional, individual and national cultural hopes, desires and identities.

The hand is often considered as one of the most natural and intuitive interaction modalities for human-to-human interaction. In human-computer interaction (HCI), proper 3D hand tracking is the first step in developing a more intuitive HCI system which can be used in applications such as gesture recognition, virtual object manipulation and gaming. However, accurate 3D hand tracking, remains a challenging problem due to the hand’s deformation, appearance similarity, high inter-finger occlusion and complex articulated motion. Further, 3D hand tracking is also interesting from a theoretical point of view as it deals with three major areas of computer vision- segmentation (of hand), detection (of hand parts), and tracking (of hand). This thesis proposes a region-based skin color detection technique, a model-based and an appearance-based 3D hand tracking techniques to bring the human-computer interaction applications one step closer. All techniques are briefly described below. Skin color provides a powerful cue for complex computer vision applications. Although skin color detection has been an active research area for decades, the mainstream technology is based on individual pixels. This thesis presents a new region-based technique for skin color detection which outperforms the current state-of-the-art pixel-based skin color detection technique on the popular Compaq dataset (Jones & Rehg 2002). The proposed technique achieves 91.17% true positive rate with 13.12% false negative rate on the Compaq dataset tested over approximately 14,000 web images. Hand tracking is not a trivial task as it requires tracking of 27 degreesof- freedom of hand. Hand deformation, self occlusion, appearance similarity and irregular motion are major problems that make 3D hand tracking a very challenging task. This thesis proposes a model-based 3D hand tracking technique, which is improved by using proposed depth-foreground-background ii feature, palm deformation module and context cue. However, the major problem of model-based techniques is, they are computationally expensive. This can be overcome by discriminative techniques as described below. Discriminative techniques (for example random forest) are good for hand part detection, however they fail due to sensor noise and high interfinger occlusion. Additionally, these techniques have difficulties in modelling kinematic or temporal constraints. Although model-based descriptive (for example Markov Random Field) or generative (for example Hidden Markov Model) techniques utilize kinematic and temporal constraints well, they are computationally expensive and hardly recover from tracking failure. This thesis presents a unified framework for 3D hand tracking, using the best of both methodologies, which out performs the current state-of-the-art 3D hand tracking techniques. The proposed 3D hand tracking techniques in this thesis can be used to extract accurate hand movement features and enable complex human machine interaction such as gaming and virtual object manipulation.

Challenging established academic and techno-scientific enclosures of interdisciplinary or boundary research between art and other disciplines, the thesis provides an analysis of a series of critical research projects undertaken since 2004. The author argues that through critical forms of artistic research, new forms of knowledge production are possible that operate beyond current enclosures. Using Office of Experiments' (est. 2004) publicly exhibited works, research databases and publications, a body of evidence is described that represents a sustained contribution to artistic and academic discourse through collaborative and collective practice. This research and the formation of The Office of Experiments by White, provides the basis for the argument that artists are becoming engaged in ‘instituent’ forms of practice (Raunig) that are indirectly beginning to challenge the monopoly of established and hegemonic institutional spaces; the Museum and the University, gallery and the archive. In the context of interdisciplinary research, the concept of boundary objects (Gieryn and Borgdorff), an expanded field of art (Krauss), are discussed in relation to the author's concerns with critical and social practices. Using examples such as Artist Placement Group and The Center for Land Use Interpretation, it is argued that there needs to be a greater consideration and concern afforded to knowledge production developed in rigorous forms beyond the academic realm in order to fully interrogate emerging contexts of technology and science, new moral and ethical dimensions, new politics and antagonisms. It is argued that in essence, stemming from a frustration with limiting processes in academia, the published research of The Office of Experiments led by White provides examples of critical knowledge as developed by a new form of parallel institution. It is argued that such practices, when critically engaged with existing institutions of knowledge and culture, create new antagonistic spaces in which productive epistemic encounters can take place. In addition to the written thesis, the published research is presented through a browser to allow the reader to navigate documentation and traces of exhibitions, digital archives and artist publications, along with the full text of referenced citations of these works from major catalogues and published articles and journals. The database itself reflects a key dimension in the critical research practice that has attempted to present knowledge within an open model for dissemination purposes.