This research examines Vietnamese in London, focusing on identity formation and community networks through transnational activities. I argue that ‘the transnational’ is a ‘subset’ of migrant categories, and that Vietnamese transnational identities depend on the measurable activities in which they are involved. Important aspects of this research are: First, the Vietnamese are one of the first major non-British Commonwealth peoples to migrate into the United Kingdom in the modern era. This has had implications related to settlement into British society, overcome by the subsequent shift from refugee status to transnational activity and identities, resulting in widespread Vietnamese transnational networks. Second, the Vietnamese represent one of the first ‘quota’ refugee populations granted entry into the UK. Refugees were accepted prior to entering Britain, and upon arrival, government and private support structures were provided. Also, Vietnamese refugees underwent mandatory dispersal across the UK, a detrimental situation prompting a subsequent intra-Britain migration to urban centres, particularly London. Third, Vietnamese communities in Britain have distinctive characteristics, making a study of identities and networks an interesting and useful one, particularly in light of developing research in transnational studies. These characteristics include the Vietnamese North-South cultural and linguistic ‘divide’, the presence of Vietnamese and Chinese-background Vietnamese, and differences in the timing and reasons for migration. Key research questions relate to transnational activities, identities, and community networks played out in the role, reach and specific pathways of those activities across national borders. Key questions are: ‘What does it mean to be a transnationally active Vietnamese Londoner?’ and ‘How are Vietnamese Londoners engaged in community-based transnational networks?’ These questions are addressed using interviews, participant observation, participation in Vietnamese-related conferences, and in informal conversations on the street and in local Vietnamese shops. This research relates stories of contextualised transnational identities linking Vietnamese from London across the globe.

This thesis examines the mediation of the nation-state as a dimension of the diasporic experience of place. It focuses on the consumption of mass-media about Israel or originating from it by people residing outside of the country. I understand this mediation to take place continuously throughout the day, in multiple spaces, through different technologies. As such, it forms part of the experience of place in media- saturated (urban) environments, allowing for a distant nation-state to become embedded in daily routines. In order to theorise this experience, I draw on Merleau- Ponty’s phenomenology, which understands place through embodied perception and habit, and on studies of diaspora and media, which examine the social meanings and uses of media among specific transnational groups. This qualitative project is based on a researcher-absent exercise and extended interviews with British Jews and Israeli immigrants in London. Analysis reveals that orientation includes four areas of practice: investing and withdrawing emotions as part of managing ‘care’, searching for truth, distinguishing between ordinary and extraordinary time, and domesticating media. Some of these practices may be particular to the case of Israel, but some are shaped by discourses around insecurity, rather than Zionism itself. Others appear to be related to experiences of migration and diaspora in general. I argue that these practices are ‘orientational practices’ in which people endeavour to make sense of spatial positioning through negotiating distance and controlling media. I theorise media as ‘orientation devices’ in diasporic everyday life, but ones that are unstable, contested and reflected upon, and hence never fully habituated. The resulting experience is one of increased reflexivity about everyday place and, paradoxically, increased dependency on media for orientation. I conclude by suggesting that practices of orientation point to a mode of being in place in globalisation that is not sufficiently addressed by the dominant understanding of ‘belonging’.

The thesis hereby submitted, ‘How Does Technological Development And Adoption Occur In The Media? A Cultural Determinist Model’ was originally published in Media Technology and Society A History: from the telegraph to the Internet (London: Routledge 1998) and Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television (London: British Film Institute 1996). The argument outlined in those two books is further supported and updated by six other texts published between 1995 and 2005 on the same topic. Media Technology and Society A History: from the telegraph to the Internet deals with the development of electrical and electronic mass media proposing a model for the nature of such developments. It is a final iteration of an approach to this history which has its origins in work first begun in the 1970s. Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television applies the same model to photographic and cinematographic technologies. The thesis argues that all these media developments can only be understood in a social context; that they are to be understood as examples of what has become known as ‘socially shaped technology’ (or, in terms of the thesis, ‘cultural determinism’). This is contrary to the received dominant view that technology itself is the driver determining social formation – termed the ‘technological determinist’, ‘technicist’ or ‘diffusion theory’ approach. In rejecting technicism, ‘How Does Technological Development And Adoption Occur In The Media? A Cultural Determinist Model’ proposes instead an original, pioneering contribution to a revisionist cultural determinist/SST historiography as well as outlining a model to explicate at a theoretical level how such innovations and adoptions occur.

By examining viewer reception of female antagonists in traditionally feminine roles on television—particularly the role of wives and mothers who have husbands to answer to and children to look after and are thus expected, in some form, to act as a caretaker or guide for others—we can explore modern societal attitudes towards female agency and gender-based expectations of behavior.

The advancement of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), necessitate optimisation of their algorithms and their performance. More specifically, network coverage and preservation of nodes energy to increase the network's lifetime are among the core objectives of routing and clustering methods. This thesis constitutes of a literature review of WSNs' routing protocols in a categorised manner followed by proposing an energy efficient and QoS aware paradigm (PUSH) for flat network that outperform other similar paradigms in terms of collective delay and energy dissipation within the network. We have proposed a new clustering model, known as Energy Aware and Address Free Clustering (EAAFC) in which, no global addressing is required. In other words, nodes are assigned with an ID, based on local information. EAAFC clusters nodes with minimum number of cluster heads which in turn results in less in network energy consumption. Cluster heads are then re-elected frequently based on nodes' energy and distribution. EAAFC does not require geographical location of nodes nor time synchronisation. We compare performance results of our proposed clustering model, against two of well received algorithms, namely LEACH and EECF to demonstrate the advantages of EAAFC. In chapters 1 and 2, the major routing protocols have been studied over the years of research and strength and weaknesses of each protocol has been scrutinised. Further, objectives, motivation and methodology of the research are discussed. In chapter 3 and 4 the proposed routing paradigm for flat networks (PUSH) as well as the clustering protocol, EAAFC, and its advantages over other protocols is discussed in depth. Several scenarios based on similar well-known routing protocols have been implemented and tested to use as comparison and to evaluate the performance of paradigm and protocol presented in this thesis. These scenarios have been implemented in the simulator environment. The simulation results confirm the theoretic evaluation and support that PUSH and EAAFC outperforms the other protocols in compared criteria as they can achieve less latency, better coverage, preserve more energy and achieve more equally distributed energy dissipation across the network which result in longer network life time and full functionality.

This thesis project examines the way that cinematography can create an emotional connection between the film’s characters and the audience. The main component of the project is a film I wrote, directed, and shot, about a stool that falls in love with a pair of pants, titled “The Window Display.” While it is clear that the typical film relies on the emotional impact of the fictional story, this film attempts to create the same effect but with inanimate objects. Thus, “The Window Display” illustrates the ways in which different visual language, especially images from the silent film era, work together to help a human audience emotionally identify with an inanimate protagonist.

This thesis combines analysis of the production of EU news with analysis of EU news texts appearing in the UK national, daily press. It identifies key forces shaping EU news production and seeks to explain how and why they influence the content of EU press coverage. Forces shaping news production are explored through interviews with Brussels correspondents, UK based journalists and EU press officials. Findings emerging from these interviews are then examined, revised and further explored through a combination of the quantitative and qualitative analysis of newspaper texts. The resulting conclusions provide a number of original and substantial contributions to our understanding of the nature and causes of EU press coverage in the UK. First, the thesis provides the most comprehensive study to date of the roles of UK based journalists in the production of EU news. It identifies a number of ways in which these under-researched subjects are crucial in shaping the nature of EU reporting. Second, the thesis provides new findings about the role of the EU Commission in influencing the coverage of EU news, being the first major study to examine recent reforms of the European Commission's communication strategies and their impacts on the way the press service operates. Third, the study produces a new framework for analysing EU news texts in UK newspapers based on the empirical study of their production. In doing so, it is able to provide new findings about some of the causes of EU news in the UK press, about which previous textual studies have only been able to speculate. Finally, this thesis offers a new means of classifying EU press coverage. It will argue that existing means are inadequate, and develop an alternative which better accounts for the complexities and characteristics of EU news production.

This thesis examines whether and to what degree the UK media undermine the legitimacy of the European Parliament in Britain. It begins by arguing that in respect of the EP, the concept of legitimacy needs reappraisal. It then offers a definition of "meaningful legitimacy" for the EP and identifies those indicators, which will allow the presence or absence of meaningful legitimacy among the British public to be examined. On the basis of the definition offered and using the indicators identified the empirical evidence for the absence of legitimacy is reviewed. It is found that meaningful legitimacy for the EP is absent among the British public. Media discourse theory is then outlined and a particular application of media discourse theory is used to examine the British media. An empirical examination of the perception of the legitimacy of the European Parliament in the British Euro-sceptic and the British pro-European press respectively is offered. Problems related to bias in its various forms, how to identify it and its impact, are then outlined. The impact on legitimacy of the British broadcast media, especially the BBC, is evaluated through a detailed data analysis. Finally, the thesis concludes that meaningful legitimacy is absent and that the media, although not solely responsible for this, have played a major deliberative role in preventing meaningful legitimacy for the European Parliament being established. At the same time their coverage reflects this absence of legitimacy. Since the EP's meaningful legitimacy in its own right has not been subject to any substantial examination, this has left a growing gap in the literature. By offering a definition of legitimacy which can be operationalised and used in an empirical assessment of the impact of the UK media on the EP's legitimacy, this thesis makes a distinctive contribution to future research in this area.

This research explores the portrayals of perpetrators in television broadcast coverage of truth commissions within politically transitioning societies, particularly how these discourses may influence the perceptions and experience of transition out of conflict. It focuses on the narratives constructed around apartheid-era perpetrators who participated in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as shown by the South African Broadcasting Corporation's (SABC) weekly broadcast, Truth Commission Special Report. It also considers how this informs perpetrators in speaking about their own histories. The SABC broadcasts aired between the 21st of April 1996 and the 29th of March 1998. It acted as a key news source on the workings of the TRC for a large group of citizens. An average of 1.1 to 1.3 million people tuned in each week for the first year, and an average of 510,000 people tuning in during its second year on air.1 The TRC hearings were recorded and filmed, and parts of these recordings were included in the SABC programme, along with further research by Special Report journalists. This included stories from the apartheid era that were not told through the TRC, further interviews with perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and communities, as well as reference to news and legal documents. As SABC describes it, the Truth Commission Special Report series “contributed to the TRC's pursuit of revealing the truth about, and engendering a deeper engagement with, South Africa's past conflicts.”2 The series was hosted and produced by well-known anti-apartheid journalist and Afrikaner Max du Preez, whose own identity became central to the narrative put forth. His team of journalists and producers included other Afrikaners such as his long-time colleague Jacques Pauw, and the young Anneliese Burgess. Otherwise, “his team of journalists varied over the twenty-three months of the series, generally including five and seven people who were racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse.”3 As South Africa transitioned out of the apartheid state, transparency of the transitional mechanisms taking place was essential for the transformation of governance and the appearance of accountability.4 This demand acted as one of the driving forces for the intense media involvement in the country's chief transitional process, namely the TRC. This research hinges on the hypothesis that the media's involvement in the South African transitional process went beyond the provision of transparency and may have influenced people's perceptions and experience within the transition per assertions by scholars such as Parver and Wolf, Fischer, Kent, and Mihr, 5 among others. It uses this as a starting point to then investigate the series' narrative as a source of these perceptions and the subsequent experiences of the subjects. This points not only to outcomes, but also their influencing factors with the intent to suggest recommendations for more intentional media coverage of political transitions, with perpetrators being one facet of such.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / When discussing and addressing child soldiering in Africa, both in print or in film, there are a number of key factors that need to be considered. For example, taking into account the root causes for both recruitment and voluntary enlistment - which include the changed nature of weapons and warfare, the breakdown of law and order, and intolerable levels of poverty, unemployment and also the social pressures on children to engage in armed conflicts. By bearing these factors in mind when delving into this complex subject matter, helped in ascertaining the ways in which certain modalities of thinking about Africa, as well as her child soldiers, influence Western perspectives, convictions and beliefs via a variety of media. However, for this particular dissertation, the focus is turned entirely to the Afro-pessimistic / Afro-optimistic cinematic representations of African child soldiers in three case study films: Ezra (2007), The Silent Army (2008) and War Witch (2012). These films were closely analysed at the hand of certain research question which ultimately allowed for both researcher and reader to keep an open mind when being confronted with the different faces of Africa’s children on screen.