Wally Olins (2008:6), points out that in contemporary culture “brands and branding are all-pervasive and ubiquitous”. As he says, one need only walk down the high street of any major foreign city in the world, be it San Francisco or Shanghai, to be embraced by so many familiar brands, including Coca-Cola, KFC, Apple MAC, Chanel and Toyota, that one could mistake it for home. In the last 15 years particularly, the ubiquitous influence of brands and branding has seen the field outgrow its commercial role and expand into more secular and political spheres. Thus, the focus of this study is the role and influence of brands and branding on modern nations and their reputations via intentionally constructed national identities, with specific reference to South Africa. According to the main objectives of this study, focus was placed on the critical examination of South Africa’s nation brand, It’s Possible, in the light of the theoretical ideals for an intentional constructed national identity as proposed by Bartholmé and Melewar, Anholt and Olins. The examination centred on the analysis and interpretation of the individual communiqués that constituted the South African pavilion at the world Expo 2010, as their content is the result of the implementation of the nation’s visual brand language. The analysis and interpretation sought to, firstly, investigate the constitution of the South African visual brand language used in the design and construction of the pavilion’s communiqués and, secondly, to broadly identify the core values of the intentionally constructed South Africa nation brand – It’s Possible, made manifest in the South African exhibit through the visual communiqués. / Dissertation (Master of Arts)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Visual Arts / unrestricted

This dissertation concerns the development and interaction of Kazakh and Russian identities in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. My research questions were: (1) what was the character of these identities in 2003/04 (the time of my research); (2) how have these identities interacted to form dominant and subordinate identities, and (3) how can the character of these identities and their interaction be explained? In order to research these questions I used a general questionnaire followed up by open ended interviews of a representative sample of Kazakhstani citizens. While my research findings show continued uncertainty and provisionality in both Kazakh and Russian identities, which confirms the broad trend of previous surveys, they also indicate signs of change in the emergence of more consolidated dominant and subordinate identities in the less Russianised areas like Chimkent and among the younger generation, while by contrast the older generations of Russians, particularly in the more Russianised areas, find it difficult to accept the delegitimation of their dominant status as reflected in the nationalizing policies pursued by the new state. In theoretical terms these findings confirm the importance of the study of ethnic stratification, which has not received sufficient attention in previous research in this area. In explaining these developments I found that the character of the transition and also of the ‘prior regime type’ in Kazakhstan has had a significant effect on ethnic relationships, but also that international factors, such as those presented in Brubaker’s triadic model, and internal factors, elaborated by Schermerhorn and Horowitz, were also important.

O trabalho ora apresentado tem como proposta a leitura, sob o pondo de vista comparatista das estórias presentes em Primeiras estórias, de João Guimarães Rosa, publicado pela primeira vez em 1962, e No antigamente, na vida, de José Luandino Vieira, de 1974. Parte-se do mapeamento do percurso da (re)invenção inscrita no tempo da infância, para posteriormente, sob o recorte da caracterização das personagens infantis, verificar a ficcionalização da violência através destas personagens, marcadas por dois movimentos distintos: através da compreensão da presença ou do passado colonial e das identificações nacionais, do intento harmonizador, em Guimarães Rosa, e da evidenciação da violência, temática e estruturalmente, em Luandino Viera. / The presented dissertation has as purpose a literary reading through a comparative point of view between the shorts stories from the books: Primeiras Estórias, written by João Guimarães Rosa, published for the first time in 1962 and No antigamente, na vida, by José Luandino Vieira, published in 1974. It is started with a map of the pathway of (re)invention, set in childhood time. After that, it is checked the fiction process of the violence made up through the infantile characters marked by for two distinguished movements: through the comprehension of the presence of the colonial past and national identification, through the harmonic intent present in Guimarães Rosa writings and also through the disclosure of violence, that is thematic and structural José Luandino Vieira short stories.

In the following study I explore the role of musical practices in the making of different sensibilities. Beginning with the founding of colonial musical institutions in the late nineteenth century in Canada and ending with a consideration of the ideals and subjectivities embodied in a 2008 concert at the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, I take up the education of feeling as it is rehearsed into being through various musical practices and juxtapose notions of identity with actual material and social relations. Anchored as it is in particular physical locations, my project draws on spatial analysis, discourse analysis and historical contextualization. The study is a genealogy of music education in Canada with music education referring to the institutional settings in which professional musicians and music educators are taught; public school music programs; and public celebrations of national identity in which music is employed with the goal of enjoining participants in particular historical/political narratives and emotional responses. My concern is to track the production of Imperial subjects and the normalization of hierarchies of the human, for example, rationalities of race, gender and class, as they become embodied and normalized in colonial institutional structures and discourses of national identity. I am particularly concerned with the ways that the displacement of Indigenous peoples, along with narratives of white entitlement, are rationalized and rehearsed into being in musical contexts. I also take up the question of how the discipline of musical training might lead to increased identification of classically- and university-trained musicians with the ruling order, and passivity in “political terms of obedience”—a subjectivity Foucault refers to as “docile bodies.” I identify this mode of being as “terminal naivety” in order to draw attention to personal and societal effects, and costs, that result from positioning ourselves and our artistic endeavours as politically disinterested.

In the following study I explore the role of musical practices in the making of different sensibilities. Beginning with the founding of colonial musical institutions in the late nineteenth century in Canada and ending with a consideration of the ideals and subjectivities embodied in a 2008 concert at the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, I take up the education of feeling as it is rehearsed into being through various musical practices and juxtapose notions of identity with actual material and social relations. Anchored as it is in particular physical locations, my project draws on spatial analysis, discourse analysis and historical contextualization. The study is a genealogy of music education in Canada with music education referring to the institutional settings in which professional musicians and music educators are taught; public school music programs; and public celebrations of national identity in which music is employed with the goal of enjoining participants in particular historical/political narratives and emotional responses. My concern is to track the production of Imperial subjects and the normalization of hierarchies of the human, for example, rationalities of race, gender and class, as they become embodied and normalized in colonial institutional structures and discourses of national identity. I am particularly concerned with the ways that the displacement of Indigenous peoples, along with narratives of white entitlement, are rationalized and rehearsed into being in musical contexts. I also take up the question of how the discipline of musical training might lead to increased identification of classically- and university-trained musicians with the ruling order, and passivity in “political terms of obedience”—a subjectivity Foucault refers to as “docile bodies.” I identify this mode of being as “terminal naivety” in order to draw attention to personal and societal effects, and costs, that result from positioning ourselves and our artistic endeavours as politically disinterested.

Borderlands are often peripheral geographically, administratively, and economically. A particularly illustrative case is the Szczecin area at the border between Poland and Germany, where a large city on one side neighbours to a sparsely populated hinterland on the other. There is a number of similar cases throughout Europe, but studies on them point to a mixed level of linkages following the opening and removal of the physical border. At the project’s start there were few if any studies on the Szczecin area per se, which was here studied through various methods. On the one hand, different pre-EU enlargement plans and visions for the area’s development were compared with practices and realities of recent years. This shows that earlier imaginations on the development potentials have not quite materialised, although some of them were probably too optimistic and ambitious from the beginning. Some of the area’s potentials following EU-enlargement have been more successfully exploited than others, and disproportionately by actors coming from outside. On the other hand, cross-border contacts were studied in the discourses on and attitudes towards the other side among local and regional elites, and among local residents more generally. This revealed a polarised attitudinal landscape, not least when compared to country-wide opinion surveys in both Germany and Poland. This is in line with other studies showing that identities are particularly accentuated in border situations, where the Other is more frequently encountered. These results support recent investigations pointing to a continued relevance of the border even after the physical barriers are removed. At the same time, another contribution of this work to border studies is that the time and contingency of the importance of identities and of the border needs more attention. In the Szczecin area, awareness of national identities and of the boundary appeared to be particularly high just after changes in the border’s status occurred – i.e. in 1989–1991, and then around the years 2007–2010. But while its importance may be fluctuating over time, given the opportunities and resources the boundary provides it will always be maintained in some forms. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Manuscript.</p>

This thesis examines how national identities are discursively constructed in online discussions around immigration in Finland. The discursive construction of Finnish national identities is analyzed both in the light of the construction of ‘sameness’ and of ‘otherness’, drawing upon critical discourse analysis and the notion of a nation as an imagined community. The analyzed data is from a Finnish discussion forum, Suomi24. The discussions analyzed generally construct an exclusionary identity: Finnishness is often represented as something inherent and impossible to combine with, for example, Islam or Russianness. Elite discourses as well as discourses previously identified in Hommaforum, a Finnish ‘immigration critical’ forum, were reproduced in the discussions, implying that online discussions, in addition to reproducing elite discourses, can also foster them. The prevalence of exclusionary discourses and stereotypical representations in a moderated discussion forum speaks for the normalization of such ways of talking about immigration, ‘us’ and ‘others’.

O trabalho ora apresentado tem como proposta a leitura, sob o pondo de vista comparatista das estórias presentes em Primeiras estórias, de João Guimarães Rosa, publicado pela primeira vez em 1962, e No antigamente, na vida, de José Luandino Vieira, de 1974. Parte-se do mapeamento do percurso da (re)invenção inscrita no tempo da infância, para posteriormente, sob o recorte da caracterização das personagens infantis, verificar a ficcionalização da violência através destas personagens, marcadas por dois movimentos distintos: através da compreensão da presença ou do passado colonial e das identificações nacionais, do intento harmonizador, em Guimarães Rosa, e da evidenciação da violência, temática e estruturalmente, em Luandino Viera. / The presented dissertation has as purpose a literary reading through a comparative point of view between the shorts stories from the books: Primeiras Estórias, written by João Guimarães Rosa, published for the first time in 1962 and No antigamente, na vida, by José Luandino Vieira, published in 1974. It is started with a map of the pathway of (re)invention, set in childhood time. After that, it is checked the fiction process of the violence made up through the infantile characters marked by for two distinguished movements: through the comprehension of the presence of the colonial past and national identification, through the harmonic intent present in Guimarães Rosa writings and also through the disclosure of violence, that is thematic and structural José Luandino Vieira short stories.

Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-10T19:07:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Texto completo ANA KAUST.pdf: 790486 bytes, checksum: b5cfea0fc2306345602f1a3f651ab4f0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-04-12 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Este trabalho visa apresentar as representações de identidade nacionais construídas pelos membros da comunidade árabe da região Oeste do Paraná, participantes desta pesquisa, e verificar como as questões multi e interculturais e multilinguísticas foram tratadas na formação dos professores que atuam em duas escolas - uma que se auto denomina árabe e a outra libanesa e como esta formação influencia na prática cotidiana destes profissionais, por se evidenciar a região Oeste do Paraná um complexo contexto de fronteira. A metodologia de pesquisa utilizada foi a qualitativa/etnográfic/interpretatisvista por ser a que melhor se adéqua à necessidade de utilização de uma forma de gerar dados que respeitem os participantes de modo que o conteúdo de suas narrativas não seja somente refletido em números em um gráfico. Para a realização de uma pesquisa que considere a cultura de um grupo, seu modo de agir, de pensar, de se interrelacionar e gerar dados que respondam às perguntas de pesquisa há necessidade de recorrer a várias áreas de conhecimento trabalhando juntas e interligadas, bem como com idéias que seinterconectem para que a análise desses dados possa ser feita. Sendo assim, este trabalho interdisciplinar envolveu, entre outros, os estudos culturais, a sociologia, a antropologia, a linguística aplicada, a geografia e a história. No primeiro capítulo apresento a metodologia de pesquisa bem como trago informações sobre os participantes da mesma. No segundo capítulo, para a análise dos registros gerados citei o conceito de representação de Hall (1997), quando diz que representação é o que utilizamos para nos referirmos ao mundo e como nos relacionamos neste mundo; citei Sarup (1996) para o conceito de identidade o qual afirma que identidade não é apreendida no abstrato, os discursos sociais que a formam são localizados no tempo e no espaço; citei Sarup (1996) também para a conceituação de identidades nacionais na qual este afirma que a identidade nacional é uma forma de expressar um modo de vida e isso tem um apelo poderoso porque é uma forma de auto-estima, de autodefinição de si mesmo, de realização pessoal; a língua híbrida de Santos (2004) que é o terceiro espaço ou espaço entre , que respeita as posições atingidas pelo indivíduo no seu deslocamento em direção à língua alvo, levando em conta os recuos que o aprendiz faz em direção à língua materna. No terceiro capítulo, trabalhei com o conceito de fronteira de Sarup (1996) quando afirma que todas as fronteiras, incluindo fronteiras das nações, são ao mesmo tempo barreiras e lugares de comunicação e troca; para cultura, o conceito que melhor se encaixa neste trabalho é o de transculturalidade de Cox e Assis-Peterson (2007) que afirmam não haver perda ou assimilação cultural, mas negociação e mudança cultural. No quarto capítulo, os professores brasileiros entrevistados para a realização deste trabalho, demonstraram ter claro os problemas que enfrentaram e ainda enfrentam em sala de aula destas duas escolas em questão, as quais possuem quase que totalmente alunos árabes ou com descendência árabe, e, ao longo das entrevistas, apresentaram suas experiências de forma organizada e significativa. Também demonstraram ter muita sensibilidade com relação ao que ensinam e à clientela envolvida neste processo de ensino/aprendizagem já que demonstraram mudança de atitude com relação à prática em sala de aula de acordo com a necessidade de seus alunos.

This thesis makes a contribution to the vast field of International Relations research conducted on Russia and its neighbors. Following constructivist scholarship focusing particularly on national interests, state identities, and the concept of ‘us and them’, the research shines light on how Russia has positioned itself in regards to the Europeanization process of neighboring Georgia. The thesis is additionally founded on understandings of European integration theories as well as information on the empirical case of complicated relationships Russia has with Georgia but also with the European Union. The steps of Georgia’s Europeanization process (2006-2014) are used as a pin point to define a time limit for the study and to analyze how shifts in a state’s surroundings can affect its identity presentation and national interests. The study is conducted as a qualitative content analysis utilizing public statements issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by the Russian Federation.