The aim of this thesis is to explore the concept of spolia and its analytical potential. The historical development of the concept from Roman antiquity to the present is examined, focusing on specific turning points, and two artefacts – a set of columns and a vase from the National Museum in Stockholm – are analysed. The different sections of the thesis are intertwined through methodological thematizations of power, violence and temporality. By activating older meanings of spolia, as well as introducing new ones, the concept is expanded through the study. It becomes a critical tool useful in understanding composite objects, which are analysed in terms of form, function and migratory paths. The study revolves around a contemporary museum setting but moves between several contexts and time periods. The expanded, critical concept that this thesis develops can therefore be used in other studies.

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Sit, Eat, Drink, Talk, Laugh – Dining and Mixed Media, is an exploratory study of qualities in everyday life and challenges people to enjoy the qualities of mundanity. Seeking inspiration in ethnographic studies, field work was conducted in domestic settings, returning an extensive body of material to work from. The study challenges people to absorb the moment, reflect and enjoy, rather than pacing through a lifetime, with a constant focus on the future instead of the present. This work takes a starting point in food and dining as a social activity, where interactive sound and a reference to online social media is explored through two interventions. The results of these are discussed with central findings around food and dining in the area of sociology, the use of sound in ambient computing and on a higher level around the topic of temporality.

People with disabilities will experience discrimination in many ways during their daily life; one way being the presence of physical barriers in the public built environment which prevent their full participation. Within the EU and in Germany, regulations and building standards are the primary tool used for ensuring accessibility within the built environment, however, full and equal access for people with disabilities has not been achieved. This discrepancy indicates the limitations of accessibility through standardization and regulation. Physical barriers, such as stairs, have long been identified and understood to prevent access for people with disabilities, however, there seems to be relatively little scientific literature discussing temporary forms of barriers which also prevent access in the built environment. This research project aims to identify and understand barriers which create temporary inaccessibility for people with disabilities. These barriers may reflect unregulated or unenforced situations within the public built environment, one example of this type of situation being construction sites. Of particular interest is the role temporality plays within the development of barriers and accessibility. The primary research takes the form of go-along case studies with three participants, each having a different disability or impairment. The setting for these case studies is Europaplatz, a plaza at Berlin’s central train station; this location can be considered as a critical case, findings here should be archetypal and can be expected to hold true in other similar situations. The research shows the existence of many temporary barriers which have long lasting inaccessible impacts for people with disabilities. These barriers primarily stem from the presence of nearby construction sites and activities. In most cases a small amount of initial consideration towards accessibility would have prevented these temporary inaccessibilities. Even after their creation, very minor changes could remove these barriers and create a more accessible environment. My research indicates that there are serious problems around construction related activities which create barriers for people with disabilities. A clear lack of consideration for accessibility during the planning, approval and oversight of construction activities is shown.

<p>This dissertation offers an in-depth exploration of how temporality—and the imperative to control the unfolding of time in particular—is embedded in the practices, processes, and dynamics of contemporary world politics. While most International Relations scholarship remains conspicuously uninterested in questions relating to time, this study sees such temporal blindness as inhibiting the development of adequately nuanced and critically oriented understandings of key theoretical and practical issues in the global political realm. It thus attempts to demonstrate how time can be “brought in” to the study of world politics, and to highlight the analytical utility and critical potential of doing so. In this respect, Part I considers the importance of temporality to perhaps the most fundamental global political concept—state sovereignty—and then moves on to discuss how shifts in the contemporary political imagination have (re-)inscribed temporal contingency as a pressing problem that requires a political response. Part II then attempts to critically think through what is at stake in the resulting proliferation of anticipatory governance strategies premised upon controlling the unfolding of the future through pre-emptive intervention in the present. It is argued that by prioritizing imagination and conjecture in the context of political decision-making, such temporally-inflected strategies serve to radically reconfigure the way political power is organized and exercised, such that a paradigm of political authority best described as "exceptionalism” is enacted. This line of argument is developed through a comprehensive conceptual engagement with one particularly prominent manifestation of this ongoing “temporalization” of the political—namely, the “pre-emptive security” strategies that have emerged as central to the conduct of the global War on Terror. It is concluded that the adoption of anticipatory political rationalities is particularly problematic for the liberal democratic states that have most enthusiastically done so—both in the security realm and beyond.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Lack of understanding regarding the role that temporality-pathos plays in Asian American literature leads scholars to misread many textual passages as deviations from the implied authors’ political critiques. This dissertation invites scholars to recognize temporality-focused passages in Younghill Kang’s East Goes West, Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, and John Okada’s No-No Boy, as part of a pathos formula developed by avant-garde Asian American writers to resist systemic alienations experienced by Asian Americans by diagnosing and treating America’s empathy gap. I find that each of pathae examined – the pathos of finitude, the pathos of idealism, and the pathos of confusion – appears in each of the major primary texts discussed, and that these pathae not only invite similitude-based empathy from a wide readership, but also prompt, via multiple methods, the expansion of empathy. First, the authors use these pathae diagnostically: the pathos of finitude makes visible American imperialism’s destruction of prior ways of life; the pathos of idealism exposes the falsity of the futures promised by liberalism; and the pathos of confusion counters the destructive nationalisms that fractured the era. Second, the authors use these temporality pathae to identify the instrumentalist reasoning underlying these capitalist ideologies and to show how they stunt American empathy. Third, the authors deploy formal and thematic complexities that cultivate empathy-generating faculties of mind and cultivate alternative forms of reasoning. / English

This thesis is about the scalar paradoxes of islands as seen through the cultural movement of a small island nation in the nineteenth century. As the divide between Celticism and Teutonism grew in Britain, the cultural movement of the Isle of Man created a hybrid heritage of both. Antiquarians, archaeologists, and cultural activists that were settled in the island organised themselves for the preservation and eventually revitalisation of a Manx past, in communication with scholars in the British Isles and the North. By investigating three major societies from this movement; the Manx Society (1858), the Isle of Man Natural History and Antiquarian Society (1879) and the Manx Language Society (1899); this thesis follows the development of a national exceptionalism through their selective identification with Nordic, Celtic, and British spaces, caught in between a Western large state ideal of progress and its antithesis: the imaginative geography of an isolated island. Lefebvrian theory shows that their navigation in a past of Celtic settlers and Viking invaders led to a multifunctional transnational history that could be transferred and repurposed for opposing social spaces. It is argued that this transnationalism functioned as cultural shelter, in accordance with how political and economic shelter from larger states has proven successful for small island nations. It shows that if Manx history was to be regarded as a legitimate and valuable addition to the history of nations in the late nineteenth century, it required manifold connections abroad that could be translated to different transnational agendas. And while this type of (trans-) national exceptionalism was adapted to their situation as a small island nation, its inherent co-dependency on transnational connections was only enforcing an inferiority complex within existing hierarchies in Northern European history.

This master’s thesis investigates normative lifelines, time and space in relation to a nonbinary gender identity. My research questions focused on nonbinary aging, orientation in regards to identity and spaces, and views on maturity. I wanted to know how temporality and spatiality can be used as a theoretic framework to better understand nonbinary people’s experiences. This was achieved by interviewing seven Swedish nonbinary subjects aged 30-41 about norms regarding time and place. The results show that the nonbinary informants use gender norms to orient themselves in relation to gender identity. Aging is shown to be a gendered practice and therefore nonbinary aging and what the future will hold is made unclear for the participants. Nonbinary people seek not to be a hindrance or annoyance to the outside world and are aware that their identity often is viewed as childish, made up and illegitimate. Despite fears that they take up too much space I have shown that there is not enough space for nonbinary subjects to comfortably find a place in most rooms.

Cette thèse a pour point de départ l’idée du jeune Heidegger selon laquelle le sens de l’être doit être recherché au moyen d’une phénoménologie ontologique, plus précisément par l’analytique existentiale du Dasein et la destruction de l’histoire de l’ontologie ; ou, comme nous l’interprétons, dans la transcendance du Dasein et la transcendance de l’être. L’étude du problème de la transcendance fait l’objet d’une approche phénoménologique, laquelle porte une attention particulière au vécu en tant que tel ainsi qu’aux conditions de possibilité de ce vécu, et repose sur une lecture attentive et critique des œuvres de Heidegger. C’est une telle approche phénoménologique qui nous permettra de mener à bien notre analyse du problème de la transcendance dans le corpus heideggérien. Nous serons par ailleurs en mesure d’aborder le débat opposant à ce sujet la tradition analytique (plus particulièrement l’approche pragmatiste) et la tradition continentale, notre étude s’inscrivant dans le cadre de cette dernière. Nous proposons ici une phénoménologie du problème de la transcendance qui fait également figure de phénoménologie du sens, de la possibilité et de la normativité. Prenant pour point de départ certaines contributions issues de la tradition continentale, nous soutenons que le sens de l’être peut être compris comme le problème de la transcendance. L’histoire de la philosophie doit être perturbée, déconstruite et repensée afin que le chemin de la philosophie, encore non pensé, puisse être mis au jour. L’accès à cet autre commencement doit être recherché dans la transcendance en tant que telle – de l’appel de la conscience fondé dans la nullité à l’encontre authentique avec la mort et l’ouverture de la temporalité ; de l’avènement historial de l’être jusqu’à, ultimement, le i! ! ! ! refus de l’être et le retrait du rien. L’événement (Ereignis) de l’être est donc compris comme processus de dépassement de soi à partir duquel la transcendance de l’être – ou, comme le formule Heidegger, la fin des questions – est possible. / This thesis takes its starting point from the early Heidegger’s insight that the meaning of being must be sought through an ontological phenomenology, and specifically, through the existential analytic of Dasein and the destruction of the history of ontology, or, as I broadly construe it, the transcendence of Dasein and the transcendence of being. The study of the problem of transcendence is approached phenomenologically, that is to say, with a concern for the lived experience as such and the conditions of possibility of this experience, as well as the close and critical reading of Heidegger’s works. I bring this approach to bear on my investigation of the problem of transcendence in Heidegger’s corpus and to the debate between analytic (especially pragmatist) and continental scholarship within which I situate my study of Heidegger. I present a phenomenology of the problem of transcendence that is also a phenomenology of meaning, possibility and normativity. Taking my lead from continental readers of Heidegger, I argue that the meaning of being can be understood as the problem of transcendence. The history of philosophy must be disrupted, deconstructed, and rethought such that the unthought path of philosophy is released. The way to the other beginning must be sought in transcendence as such – from the null- based call of conscience, to the authentic encounter with death and the disclosure of temporality, from the historical happening of being, and ultimately, to the refusal of being and the withdrawal of the nothing. The event of being is therefore a self-surpassing process from which the transcendence of being – indeed, the end of questions, as Heidegger puts it – is possible.