Grieving Online: Street-Involved Youths’ Use of Social Media After a Death conveys the context and lived experiences of 20 street-involved youth in Victoria BC, who live both on the streets and on line simultaneously (boyd, 2008a). Using a narrative methodology, including poetry, I explore how these realities affect the grief experiences after a death. Youth strategize to find access to computers and cell phones, using free wifi, sharing minutes, or buying or trading devices in the street economy in order to communicate through texting and viewing and posting to Facebook. Dire financial and unstable living situations, the complex and difficult relationships they have with both family and friends and the traumatic circumstances they have endured directly contributes to stress and anxiety and the ways they grieve the losses of people in their lives. This vulnerability, violence and instability is entangled both in their face to face interactions and in private and public communications online. It is also directly connected to the concept of precarity: “that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (Butler, 2009, p.ii). There are several key findings from youths’ narratives. First, although youth often see themselves as outsiders from “regular society”, they have taken up a normative discourse of a “grieving subject” in their language and stories. This is a discourse of progress that includes stages and tasks and the understanding that to grieve is to do work. I argue that for many youth, this discourse is heightened because the stakes are high: their lives are surveilled by police and child protective services. Sometimes shunned by family of the deceased, or without private spaces to mourn, their expressions of grief are exposed and sometimes criminalized. Second, I argue that throughout their narratives, youth position themselves as moral beings and actors talking about and making sense of death through hierarchies of values and decisions, and framing the death as an opportunity to explore how they want to be in the world or how the world should be. This vision of street-involved youth actively experimenting in the moral laboratory (Mattingly, 2013) of the street and the moral predicaments they faced when grieving challenges the social stereotypes of street-involved youth as delinquent, loners, dysfunctional, refusing to ‘grow up’ and ‘be responsible.’ Third, youth spoke about negotiating and managing relationships both in person and within the affordances of social networking sites (boyd 2009) such as the visibility and persistence of online discussions. My findings demonstrate that these affordances have implications after a death. For example, youth were wrestling with the performances of grief online, trying to make sense “to what extent these declarations of grief are public posturing and to what extent they are genuine, personal expressions of deep feeling” (Dobler, 2006, p.180). Youth caution about posting too quickly about the death online, so that family or close friends would not have to find out online. They value communication that is private, face-to-face, or by phone that is intentional and acknowledges the importance of relationship with the deceased. Their thoughtful expertise can help all of us as we try to navigate the experiences of grieving online. Although they shared a great deal of ambivalence for the place of social media in their lives, for many it is a powerful tool to tell themselves and others about who they are and how they want to be remembered. / Graduate

Having the Swedish northern village Vittangi as its field, this thesis asks what it is that makes Vittangi feel like home to its inhabitants and, further, how the sense of home motivate its inhabitants to participate in its place-making, i.e., in making it their home. Home is, in the thesis, understood as a subjective experience of rootedness. The ethnographic chapters therefore investigate, by focusing on the experience of everyday life in the village, how the sense of home is expressed through the inhabitants’ activities and movements in, to and through the village. Considering that the thesis’ focus is both on the sense of home and the making of home, its over-all aim is to examine the relationship between being and making home. Moreover, great attention is given to the values existing in the village, referring both to values created by global processes of economics, politics, and social activity, as well as values that are based in the experience of everyday life. In the end, the thesis argues that it is the experience-based values of Vittangi which makes it home to its inhabitants, and that it is these values which motivates inhabitants to partake in its place-making. Further, it is argued that the experience-based values cannot be separated from global processes of economics and politics, but that it is through the form they take in the locality which makes them valuable.

No description available.

The fairy tale of Cinderella is known for its romance, but she seeks independence while being confused by her identity in a new version by Marissa Meyer called Cinder. This essay will present how Meyer’s Cinderella, Cinder, confuses the gender roles by taking on both feminine and masculine ones. This blend makes Cinder not entirely compatible with the norms, and her identity confusion makes it even harder, which results in her losing her conception of self. While she is trying to conform to the gender norms and receive recognition from others (be accepted by society), she denies her heritage and cyborg self to the point of creating a false identity. However, her cybernetics and abuse prevent her from being recognized – she even loses her only source of recognition, which indicates that a norm breaker is not worthy of having it. Nevertheless, Cinder shows signs of what a queer cyborg would do if forced into an identity; as queer, Cinder is not meant to be embodied or forced into an identity and should also have the ability to be free and change her identity as she pleases. Regardless of being queer, the abuse and society’s views prevent her from escaping her identity confusion.

This paper analyzes how vulnerability is represented in the Jack Reacher series, by drawing onwork by Bryan Turner and Judith Butler. The purpose of the research is to investigate the reasonReacher’s acts of vigilantism are needed. I look at examples of vulnerability and precarity foundin the books Killing Floor and Die Trying, and argue that state neglect is the cause of economicand social vulnerability in the towns Margrave and Yorke, leading to precarity expressed ascriminal money and community subjugation controlling the towns. I conclude that the solutionpresented, through vigilantism, is reassuring but insufficient, but that the series, in representing acomplex display of vulnerability and acknowledging the insufficiency of the solution, stressesthe difficulty of presenting a simple solution to the multifaceted nature of the issue ofvulnerability.

[pt] A presente tese tem como objetivo identificar e entender as relações entre as transformações do trabalho e o recente ciclo global de lutas. A compreensão partilhada nessa investigação é de que a partir da década de 1980, o trabalho passa por uma transformação sem perder sua centralidade. Entretanto, vale destacar, sua centralidade será renovada pela transformação. Diferentemente da dinâmica fordista que tendia a excluir a subjetividade do trabalhador nos processos produtivos, o trabalho pós-fordista exige a participação subjetiva do trabalhador não apenas na produção. Ou seja, o trabalhador participa através da sua capacidade de criar, imaginar, intervir, mas, também, nas dinâmicas de circulação. A produção contemporânea se dá, portanto, extrapolando os espaços de confinamento fabris de outrora, difundindo-se por todo tecido social numa cooperação entre redes e ruas. Nesse contexto, a cidade converte-se em espaço de produção e valorização do trabalho. Diante das condições de vida e trabalho na cidade, cada vez mais precária, a metrópole constitui-se também como terreno das lutas por melhores condições de vida e gestão democrática da cidade. Articulado aos movimentos globais, o levante brasileiro de junho de 2013 constituiu-se como desvio da tese que nos impele à investigação das associações que os movimentos reivindicativos de direitos permitem estabelecer com as questões do trabalho metropolitano. Em termos metodológicos, acolher o desvio diz respeito à construção de um pensamento que se alimenta do encontro com o mundo e, nesse sentido, questiona continuísmos artificiais. Essa opção metodológica faz da pesquisa uma prática inventiva que exige o esforço de conceber outras maneiras de pensar os caminhos e modos de fazer da pesquisa. O método mais do que mero instrumento, é ele mesmo questão de pesquisa. Assim, enquanto teoricamente a investigação se articula em torno das problemáticas do trabalho, e dos direitos, estendendo-se para as questões da vida na metrópole, metodologicamente, a tese se ocupa com a própria forma de apresentar o conhecimento produzido, buscando um método que lhe faça justiça. / [en] This thesis aims to identify and understand the relations between the changes in labor and the recent global cycle of struggles. The shared understanding in the investigation is that from the 1980s, labor goes through a transformation without losing its centrality. However, it s worth mentioning, its centrality will be renewed by the transformation. Unlike the Fordist dynamics, which tended to exclude the worker s subjectivity in the production processes, the post-Fordist work requires the worker s subjective participation not only in the production. In other words, the worker participates through their capacity to create, imagine, intervene, but also in the circulation dynamics. Therefore, contemporary production happens, extrapolating the otherwise confined factory spaces, disseminating through the entire social fabric in a cooperation between networks and streets. In that context, the city turns into a space of production and valorization of labor. In face of life and work conditions in the city, increasingly precarious, the city is also territory for struggles to improve life conditions and the city s democratic administration. Hinged to global movements, the Brazilian uprising of June, 2013 established itself as a deviation from the thesis that impels us to investigate the association that the protests claiming for rights allow us to establish with the issues regarding metropolitan labor. Methodologically speaking, receiving the deviation refers to the construction of a thought that feeds from the encounter with the world and, in that sense, it questions artificial continuities. That methodological choice makes this research an inventive practice that requires an effort to conceive other forms to think the ways and means to research. More than a simple instrument, the method is a research matter. Therefore, while in theory the investigation revolves around labor and right issues, extending to the issues of city life, methodologically speaking, the thesis deals with the very way of presenting the knowledge produced, searching for a method that does justice to it.

No description available.

This Master Thesis focuses on the theoretical reconstruction of a positive feminist conceptualization of vulnerability via the thorough systematization and critical comparison of Martha Fineman’s socio-legal philosophy and Judith Butler’s poststructuralist ethico-political theory. In the introductory remarks, the reader becomes familiar with the turbulent receptions and numerous interdisciplinary re-artications of the term vulnerability within the realms of contemporary feminist theory. The second chapter mainly illustrates the core thematic axes of Fineman’s vulnerability approach. More specifically, the second chapter explores Fineman’s vulnerability perspective both in terms of an alternative ontological paradigm revolving around the recognition of our fundamentally vulnerable, shared, fragile and dependent universal condition, as well as in relation to its juridico-political normative implications apropos of the legitimate political organization of democratic societies and the just function of their central institutions. Furthermore, the third chapter systematizes the dual texture of the Butlerian radicalization of vulnerability in terms of both an existential condition of irreducible relationality, as well as in terms of a socio-politically contextualized and differentially allocated distribution of violence, deprivation, insecurity, injury and trauma to certain -gendered, racialized, sexualized and nationalized- social categories. To that end, the third chapter further elucidates the nuanced differentiations between the Butlerian conceptions of vulnerability, precariousness, precarity and dispossession, while further investigating Butler’s revolutionary constellation of vulnerability and resistance. Conclusively, this Master Thesis critically designates the similarities and divergences between the two above analysed feminist frameworks and supports that the twofold texture of the Butlerian vulnerability theory invests Butler’s ethico-political theory with more nuanced theoretical conceptions and more empowering political devices in comparison to Fineman’s universalistic postidentitarian vulnerability approach. In order to further enhance this core argument, I develop my own critical assessment of Fineman theory’s epistemological, political and conceptual limitations in regard of its self-declared ‘post-identitarian’ structure.

[pt] A tese explora analiticamente a arena pública formada ao redor da questão da precariedade habitacional nas cidades de Londres e Rio de Janeiro a partir do acompanhamento de quatro movimentos sociais formados nessas cidades, traçando relações entre direitos, cidadania e participação. A análise desenha um panorama da questão da moradia no Brasil e no Reino Unido, formado por distintas experiências sociais relativas ao tema. Com base em uma metodologia que propõe a distinção das dimensões referentes às experiências (integradora, estratégica e cultural), a tese explora os limites entre privatividade e publicidade de questões relacionadas à moradia e sugere categorias interpretativas para compreensão dos movimentos sociais de luta por moradia contemporâneos e de suas demandas, que envolvem o acesso individualizado a residências dignas e o direito à cidade. Alguns temas sobressaem no desenrolar da análise, dentre eles a individualização de políticas públicas de moradia, a precariedade que experimentam os indivíduos que passam por ameaças de remoção, a importância de analisar os movimentos sociais de moradia que se organizam nas periferias, e as demandas por reconhecimento espacial que operam. / [en] This thesis analytically explores the public arena shaped around the issue of precarious housing in the cities of London and Rio de Janeiro. The arguments are based on the investigation of four social movements formed in these cities, tracing relationships between rights, citizenship and participation. The research presents an overview of the housing issue in Brazil and United Kingdom, grounded on different social experiences related to the theme. Based on a methodology that proposes the distinction of dimensions related to experiences (integrative, strategic and cultural), the thesis explores the limits between the private and public on issues related to housing and suggests interpretative categories for understanding contemporary social movements struggling for housing as well as their demands, which involve individualized access to decent homes and the right to the city. Some themes stand out from the analysis, among them the individualization of public housing policies, the precariousness experienced by individuals who undergo threats of removal, the importance of analysing social housing movements that are organized in the peripheries, and the demands for spatial recognition in which they operate.

This thesis studies online video game live streamers. The study aims to explore the interrelationship of play and labor within streaming. Through this exploration, the study also enquires about the emerging platform economy. Streamers share their gameplay with viewers, interact through the accompanying live chat and subside mainly on donations from their audience. Streaming turns the leisure activity of gaming into a part-time or full-time subsistence pursuit. Twitch.tv, like other social media platforms, exists within the platform economy, inhabiting novel positions both in contexts of the global economy and in relations to laborers and consumers. Achieving the studies’ aim is done via methods of ethnographic interviewing, digital participant observation, and endeavoring into streaming. In fulfilling the thesis purpose, contemporary anthropological theories of play, labor, and the platform economy are utilized by the author in analyzing the ethnographic material. The main results of the study showcase the economic realities of streamers in Sweden. The conditions streamers exist within are characterized by spatiotemporal dislocation of labor, the commodification of play, mental struggles, and the platform economy's embedded precarity. The work contributes to the sub-fields of digital anthropology, new media studies, digital play & labor, and studies of the platform economy. Studying streamers aids the production of emic knowledge within these crucial disciplines of understanding.