本論文疏理台灣民主化過程中，訴諸「超越藍綠統獨」的「台灣」民主共同體形構及其「中國」想像。「超越藍綠」是分析對象，包括1980年代末以來國民黨與民進黨的「藍綠」政治論述，以及「超越藍綠」的社會運動論述，想像「中國」是分析當中台灣主體形構的「中國」想像，參照「香港」是以香港的「中國」想像為對照，並試圖回應「今日香港明日台灣」的說法。 本論文分為四章節：「中國統一」與「台灣獨立」、國民黨與民進黨的「藍綠統獨」、知識批判界與社會運動的「超越藍綠」，香港的「中國」想像。本論文指出，台灣國民黨的反共「中國統一」與反國民黨的「台灣獨立」意義，是訴諸他者「中國」的威脅，建構政治現代化的自我。在此論述下，國民黨與民進黨在國家認同與兩岸主張上，形成「藍綠統獨對立」的立場，但各自政治論述又共同召喚面對「中國」（中共）的政治與經濟危機想像，共構政治上捍衛台灣「主權－民主」完整與經濟上追求兩岸「經濟發展共榮」的共同體想像。社運與批判知識界的「超越藍綠」，雖然企圖超越藍綠民粹化的對立，並修補政黨輪替後民進黨執政的「民主創傷」，但隨著國民黨重新執政與強調兩岸共榮的中國政策/超越藍綠」接合「藍綠」的「中國」迫切焦慮，從解決內部「民主創傷」轉為「捍衛台灣民主」、對抗外部「中國因素」的政治修辭，藍綠政黨也挪用此修辭標榜自身優於對方政黨的正當性。「超越藍綠」成為消費性的符碼，陷入「藍綠統獨」的迴圈。香港的「中國」想像，則凸顯「中國」內在於香港人民基層歷史與日常生活中，有難以切割的距離，進而問題化「香港」與「中國」的對立指稱，是台灣重新想像「中國」的可能參照。 知識批判上，本論文疏理台灣「藍綠統獨對立」問題的「中國」論述，作為未來「中國」轉向的討論基礎。政治意義上，本論文反思政治「藍綠」到社會運動「超越藍綠」的民粹化困境。最後，本論文嘗試提出「人民」與「階級」的「第三方」，作為超克前述困境與「中國」想像侷限的未來方向。

这是一个关于人的成长和转变的叙事研究。本研究的问题意识是：一方面，1990 年代以来，伴随着中国社会的进一步市场化，青年文化呈现出去政治化、物质主义、“小时代”的窄化的走向。越来越多的青年人希望进入“体制”，以求得社会认可、物质有保障之生活。但另一方面，1990 年代以来亦是中国民间非政府组织（NGO）迅速发展的时期，一小部分青年人选择在NGO 工作。然而，NGO 长期以来面临着公众的不理解、政府一定程度的漠视甚至猜测以及物质上的低回报。本研究正是希望进入NGO 工作者的生命故事，理解他们为何逆社会窄化的价值之流、选择在NGO 工作，形成了怎样的文化以及如何形成这一文化。另一方面，本研究亦希望向组织内部回观以批判性地分析NGO 携带的意识形态、操演等如何对工作者的价值观和行为产生不经意的影响，以期改造其身处之社会脉络。 因此，本研究试图回答的研究问题是：在1980 年代以来的社会脉络之下，“80 后”NGO 工作者如何与发展主义和“小时代”的青年文化、以及NGO 内部的文化与操作进行协商？形成了怎样的价值观和行为方式？ 本研究通过叙事研究方法，深入理解10 位NGO 工作者的生命故事和日常实践。采取Dorothy Holland 等(1998)的形意世界(figured worlds)理论视角，本研究认为：一方面，NGO 工作者在参与NGO 的过程中增进了自我认识和成长，对社会发展有更深的理解和反思，并且形成一定的介入社会和公共生活的行动。另一方面，NGO 的操作中，可能带有缩窄批判思考和开放的学习多种思想资源的空间，缺乏对社会问题成因和解决方案的深入分析与公开论述，习惯性地以“主流”/“另类”二元简化的分析视角，这无益于NGO 工作者的成长，也可能阻碍NGO 对于社会和人的改造的工作。

This dissertation explores the universality of trauma-storing in the body and the need for contextualization when it comes to treatment. Of the two central themes addressed, the first is war-related trauma and the intersection of expressive arts therapy and South (East) Asia (Nepal and Hong Kong in particular) with its specific imagery, art, and culture, and to see how both feed into each another and can transform as a result. The question is how to locally sensitize expressive arts therapy, which has its roots in Europe and the United States, to the Hong Kong setting; more specifically, to working with Nepali women who try to make Hong Kong their new home. The dissertation suggests a holistic, locally, and culturally sensitive approach to expressive arts therapy. This means adjusting the expressive arts framework and practices to the local and cultural setting, as well as looking at the resources (myths, dance forms, breathing practices, rituals, etc.) present in the local culture and including them in the anthropological approach to trauma transformation. The second theme addressed is the importance of critically reflecting on power within therapeutic relationships, especially in trauma treatment, and recognizing the ontological underpinnings underlying therapy as well as our ‘human self-concept’, which leads to the acknowledgement of only a certain type of human experience, that of conscious, self-aware subjects in control of their acts. The latter leaves little room for understanding traumatic experiences, in which trauma victims seem to be unable to remember or shape the traumatic event. In Walter Benjamin’s dissertation, any kind of representation of our personal and collective identities is seen as a curation. When approaching history as a ‘collection’ of memories, it creates room for traumatic experiences to exist. Benjamin’s dissertation is applied to understanding trauma in such a way where it is precisely the discontinuity, the disparities, the ruptures of history and memory that make trauma visible; these are the gifts handed to the next generation. It is the piecing together of fragments and uncertainties that transforms trauma into a space of insight, creating meaning from what is known and unknown, bridging the stories and images of history present in our implicit and explicit memory. In the critical reflection on traumatology, a Foucauldian approach is taken regarding the therapist-client relationship. Foucault speaks of a top-down apparatus with policies that act under the guise of ‘protect and serve’, and language that frames the clients as a helpless victim in need of ‘betterment’ by the therapist. The only way for therapists to tackle the problem of trauma and psychotherapy, and to admit its social/cultural construction and the role of power, is to read themselves into the problem, to go beyond one-way mirroring, to analyze their pathology, and attempt to change patterns of communication that reproduce the psy-complex apparatus. In this thesis the latter is done by including the creative and analytic reflections of expressive arts therapists and of the author herself.

While the LGBT equal rights movements in Hong Kong have become increasingly visible and popular in recent years, and lesbians, when compared to homosexual male, seem to enjoy high visibility in the city’s public space and relevant safety from violent discrimination, their presence in the public sphere continue to be low. Writings by local queer activists and scholars such as Mary Kam Pui Wai (2001) and Denise Tang (2011) point out that instead of violent attacks, since the beginning of local LGBT activism, female have been facing systematic silencing and marginalizing within the community, their presence invisible, and their problems often ignored or trivialized. However, lesbians are not imagined to be, and do not perceive themselves as, the most oppressed and disadvantageous members within the larger LGBT community. This study proposes that this seeming apolitical attitude and lack of acknowledgement of their marginalized position are the results of the unique “lesbian learning” taken place in the Hong Kong context that render their positions invisible and their problems unspeakable. I want not only to explore what these young women conceptualize as lesbian identity and sexuality, but through proposing the notion “lesbian learning”, offer a new framework to articulate and examine the formation and construction of the “field of sensible” that conditions their learning about lesbian(ism) in terms of perceptual equipment, information flow, as well as strategies of management and application, to see the meanings attributed to this identity, and the nuanced struggle for and negotiation of their lesbian identity formation, as both gender and sexual identity. The findings of this study shows that their conceptualization of lesbian identity as gender and sexual identity is largely conditioned by how they have learned to be female, with normative gender social expectations having a huge influence on how they perceive their sexual identity and sexuality, and their priority. Through documenting and examining the process of their learning the lesbian identity and ways of managing it, I hope to shed light on the mechanisms behind the social construction of female subjectivity that conditioned the specific configuration of lesbian identity and sexuality in the Hong Kong context, and the close ties between the two. To this end, 26 women between the ages of 20 - 30 were interviewed, additionally I spent 2 years conducting in-depth follow-up interviews and participant observation. With the help of social constructionist accounts of contextualization, interactionist accounts of meaning-making, the theory of sexual scripts, and Foucauldian notions of discourse and discipline, I seek to analyze how the Hong Kong lesbian subject is created, maintained, and regulated, both within different institutions operating at specific sites, namely family, school, and pornography, and by the lesbians themselves. By proposing the notion of “lesbian learning”, this study seeks to offer a new methodological tool of intervention, to examine the network of conditions of intersectional positions, and the negotiated agency of their understanding and imagination of identity, gender, and sexuality in the context of Hong Kong.

Historically, traditional music in Africa was attributed to the collective society and not to individual musicians. Given the changing socioeconomic, cultural and political environments prevalent in most African societies, collective ethos are increasingly problematic to the very survival of expressive cultures like music. Individual musicians cannot effectively live off the traditional music they make without offending their traditional societies. Without meaningful incomes from traditional music, musicians cannot contribute to traditional music because it is difficult in a collectivist environment to exploit the opportunities of the global intellectual property regimes. This situation is likely to undermine the future of traditional expressive cultures. Given the problematic nature of the collective ownership of music, this study examined the perspectives of traditional musicians towards ownership of traditional music in Uganda in light of the changing socioeconomic, cultural and political environments. The study framed the collective approach to ownership of traditional music as problematic to musicians. Three central questions were examined: What are the traditional musician’s life experiences and work environments in Uganda’s current socioeconomic and cultural environment? What are the perceptions of Uganda’s traditional musicians towards ownership of creative works or expressions? How do musicians’ life experiences and work environments shape their perceptions and construction of ownership of creative expressions? The study employed a critical cultural analytical and theoretical framework to question the value of collectivism that requires musicians to live by an increasingly misplaced cultural practice. Qualitative data was collected using a phenomenological tools and procedures to capture musicians‘ life experiences and impact of those experiences on their views on ownership of traditional music. Nine individual and two group interviews were collected over a period of one month in two regions in Uganda, Busoga and Buganda. It was established that the current socioeconomic environment calls for a break from, or flexibility in, certain traditional views and approaches to traditional music. Specific legal remedies were recommended to enable musicians live off traditional music at the same time attempting to preserve the cultural elements in the music. That entails striking a balance between economic interests of individual musicians and the cultural values of their societies.

Scholars involved in gender research generally advocate the idea that gender subjectivities are based on active social construction and interaction and as such are amenable to change. Notions and values of masculinity therefore are cultural constructs that are reflected and articulated through symbolic systems such as spoken and written language. Fiction narratives in teens’ magazines are one form of textual media content in which these values can be expressed. The purpose of this study was to explore the textual representations of American values of masculinity in 56 contemporary fiction stories of Boys’ Life magazine by conducting a qualitative content analysis. The study used the values of the Scout Law as one definition of masculinity formulated by the Boy Scouts of America, one of the nation’s leading youth organizations and publisher of Boys’ Life magazine. Through close reading and thematic coding, this study revealed, on the one hand, that the values, with two exceptions, are well-reflected in different meanings and contexts and constructed through the use of different literary devices in the narratives. The study also indicated, on the other hand, that the portrayal of these values may lead to a rather narrow definition of a boy’s life and contribute to the limited construction of traditional masculinity. Further, it appeared that social recognition is represented as an important aspect in terms of performing in accordance with the values of the Scout Law. The study discusses implications of these and other findings as well as suggestions for further research.

The critical commentary presents and contextualizes a film and video making practice spanning three decades. It locates a contemporary visual music practice within current and emerging critical and theoretical contexts and tracks back the history of this practice to the artist’s initial screenings of work as part of the 1980’s British Scratch video art movement. At the heart of the body of work presented here is an exploration and examination of methods and working practices in the encounter of music, sound and moving image. Central to this is an examination of the affective levels that sound and image can operate on, in a transsensorial fusion, and political and cultural applications of such encounters, whilst examining the epistemological regimes such work operates in. A combination of factors has meant that work such as this, arising in the UK provinces, can fall below the historicizing and critical radar – these include the ephemeral and transitory nature of live performance work; the difficulties of documenting such work; the fragility and degeneration of emerging and quickly obsolescent formats; and a predominance of a London–centric focus on curating, screening and historicizing of experimental film and video art practices. My film and video practice has been screened nationally and internationally over three decades, and has been recognized as exemplary practice both in the early 1980s at the inception of the Scratch movement and in more recent retrospectives. The critical commentary argues that this work contributes new knowledge of the history, contexts and practices of film and video art and audiovisual and visual music practices.

Authenticity is a notion which carries considerable sociological weight in that it is used to determine cultural boundaries on one hand, and behavioural conduct in the individual on the other. Its idealization influences the formation of music cultures such as indie and punk, identifiable in the discourse of performers, cultural gatekeepers and music fans. This thesis follows the ways in which these actors pursue notions of authenticity by noting discursive constructions of culturally specific values, and the effects that this pursuit has upon music culture. Using social constructionist theory, I engage in discourse analysis of referents produced by three sets of actors: 1) musicians; 2) those who idealize notions of authenticity in various media, or gatekeepers; and 3) music fans. Arguably, through processes of claims-making, these actors discursively challenge or establish values relative to specific cultures and music, effectively defining social and aesthetic boundaries.

Authenticity is a notion which carries considerable sociological weight in that it is used to determine cultural boundaries on one hand, and behavioural conduct in the individual on the other. Its idealization influences the formation of music cultures such as indie and punk, identifiable in the discourse of performers, cultural gatekeepers and music fans. This thesis follows the ways in which these actors pursue notions of authenticity by noting discursive constructions of culturally specific values, and the effects that this pursuit has upon music culture. Using social constructionist theory, I engage in discourse analysis of referents produced by three sets of actors: 1) musicians; 2) those who idealize notions of authenticity in various media, or gatekeepers; and 3) music fans. Arguably, through processes of claims-making, these actors discursively challenge or establish values relative to specific cultures and music, effectively defining social and aesthetic boundaries.

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