This is an ethnographic study of a television show titled Esra Erol’da Evlen Benimle (Marry Me on the Esra Erol Show), the most popular of the televised matchmaking formats in Turkey since it premiered in 2007. The marriage show is part of the daytime flow of television broadcasting in Turkey that, as an entertainment format, sets the everyday rhythms of life and provides content for debates/judgements on – as well as being an increasingly popular route to – marriage. I explore the marriage show as a reality show format, which is an outcome of the global flow of media images, narratives and genres. As such, it is a television show that translates the neoliberal imaginary of the self as an aspect of subjectivity in search of survival, security and happiness, into the Turkish context. What distinguishes the marriage show from other reality show formats is that it orients the self towards the desire and expectation to get married as a means of survival. To explore marriage as an orientation of the self through television, I contextualise the show within the contemporary practices, policies and debates of the family in Turkey. By deploying the concept of frame, I investigate how the format is produced by normatively framing the narratives of the participants as marriageable subjects, while also registering the show as a quality program which is seriously dedicated to marrying people within the norms and conventions of marriage in Turkey. Taking the production space of the marriage show as the field of research, and female subjectivity as the particular focus, this study is an endeavour to show how practices, tensions and sensibilities pertaining to marriage and family in Turkey produce female subjects, bodies, self-narratives and movements across the intense present of television production.

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The adverse and lasting effects traumatic experiences can have on individuals pose significant challenges to psychotherapeutic treatments. This is due to the profound impact trauma has on the body and mind of survivors which can result in a wide range of posttraumatic symptoms, The unique nature of traumatic memories, and the extent to which they can become engrained, can further complicate treatment considerations. Relevant literature suggests that Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP) can be useful for treating survivors of trauma, due to its emphasis on embodiment and creativity that this modality offers. However, research to support this notion is currently limited. Furthermore, not enough is known about how the therapeutic process with survivors of trauma unfolds in the context of DMP. This thesis, therefore, aimed to identify the components of the therapeutic processes used in trauma-informed DMP as a step towards improving understanding of therapeutic practice with this client group. This thesis used hermeneutic phenomenology as the underlying methodology and epistemological position from which all findings and understandings were derived. It encompassed the following two strands: the first involved semi-structured interviews with practitioners who were experienced in treating survivors of trauma. To ensure a sufficient amount of data were collected, and due to commonalities between the DMP and Body Psychotherapy (BP) modalities with regards to the role of the body in the therapeutic process, participants from both of these professions were interviewed for the first research component. The second strand comprised a heuristic inquiry that utilised embodied and creative practice to synthesise the findings from the first strand, and elucidate further the components of the therapeutic process. Findings suggest that the therapeutic process for treating trauma comprises of several identifiable therapeutic elements, some of which were grounded in embodiment and creativity and appeared to be specific to DMP. A relationship was found between the concepts of "narrative‟, "trauma-processing‟ and "ritual‟ while the notion of "joy‟ was identified as ii supporting and signifying positive change. Concepts of "witnessing‟ and "resourcing‟ were also identified. These were perceived by respondents to facilitate and support the therapeutic process with this client group. Applied embodiment and creativity were found to be empowering and seen to facilitate a manageable and paced access to traumatic material. The synthesised results of this thesis are presented as a map of the therapeutic process, and it is suggested that findings may potentially be transferable and useful for other treatment modalities. Overall, the results of this thesis enabled a fuller understanding of the role DMP can play in facilitating therapeutic processes with this client group. Furthermore, the current findings emphasise the contribution that DMP can make to the wider body of knowledge relating with psychotherapeutic treatment approaches to trauma.

This thesis examines the labour that is made visible by the individual on-screen performances of five distinct postfeminist identities from contemporary popular culture. Each chapter focuses on one of three texts: the English-language film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011); The Hunger Games film adaptations (2012-2015); and HBO’s cable-television series, Girls (2012-2017); as well as the girl figures at the centre of them: Lisbeth Salander; Katniss Everdeen/ Jennifer Lawrence; and Lena Dunham/Hannah Horvath. In these analyses I identify two marked strands of work acting as a conceptual thread that harnesses the potential of these gendered performances: firstly, the narrative, thematic, aesthetic, and representational work of the texts, which complicate current ideological and conceptual understandings of girlhood, feminism, and postfeminism; secondly, the cultural and ideological work of the magnetic identities of the girls at the centre of these texts, who help to bring these politics to the surface. The texts and the performances that inform my analyses are often associated with feminism, although the value of this work is often contradictory in nature, both questioned and reinforced by virtue of the performative, creative labour that underpins their authentic, yet commodified, representations. In the case of Lawrence and Dunham, this concerns their work as celebrities and how they mediate feminist ideas through their branded performance. The main objective of this thesis, then, is to demonstrate how each of the identities in this corpus effectively open out the tensions involved in performing feminism in twenty-first century culture, and thus to render the gendered labour attendant with this as politically imperative towards current understandings. This is an interdisciplinary study, drawing on scholarship from film, media, celebrity, gender, and cultural studies in order to grapple with the complexities and myriad meanings of contemporary feminism in the broader context of media culture.

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This project has visually explored the relationships between language, knowledge and subjectivity. Its conceptual foundations have been developed through an engagement with post-structural theory, literature and personal experience. Its visual language has been formed by adopting aspects of the theories of postproduction and relational aesthetics of Nicolas Bourriaud in tandem with early conceptual arts aesthetic of administration. The result of the project is a series of installations that focus on viewer experience and offer the possibility of developing new narratives about our relationship to language and knowledge. The installations incorporate already existing materials, cultural signs, objects and ideas associated with institutional practices of collecting, manipulating and disseminating information. The familiar language of bureaucracy has thus been used to create a network of seemingly interconnected scenarios that engage the viewer in the shifting roles of protagonist, subject, witness or voyeur. A sense of uncertainty and confusion is produced, evoking the idea of a fractured subjectivity in a state of limbo, a condition in which meaning is gained only through attempting to piece together the different narratives on offer. The nature of our relationship to language and knowledge is thus evoked through physical and psychological interaction as well as visual engagement with the work. The project's concern with language, knowledge and information systems harks back to the conceptual art movement of the1960s and to contemporary art's accompanying engagement with philosophy, in particular post-structuralism. Within this context, it has re-visited and re-assessed ideas about the role of language in defining contemporary subjectivity and has explored strategies for conveying those ideas through installation. From Kosuth to the Kabakovs, it references a broad spectrum of artists who have investigated related themes using an almost uncategorisable array of non-traditional materials, styles and strategies. The project has concluded that we are fragmented subjects in a state of limbo, our relationship to language and knowledge characterised by paradox, anxiety, complicity and challenge - and a continued search for meaning and wholeness despite their seeming absence. Ultimately, it has presented the viewer with an opening: a new network of possible narratives about language, knowledge and self. Although these narratives appear to be linked, they fail to come to a neat conclusion. Just as contemporary subjectivity is in a state of limbo, so too, are the scenarios depicted in the installations.

This research project investigates visual metaphors for aspects of the nature/ culture paradox. Modern human beings formalise nature, natural elements and natural processes by quantifying and qualifying the environment to better define themselves. A desire to comprehend and gain control over nature is expressed through the imposition of artificial systems and mathematical descriptions. However, the forces of entropy and decay are ever present. Despite attempts to suppress these physical processes, humans are necessarily bound to a common material existence. In response, attainment of a spiritual dimension is sought through cultural expression. The project explores how the nature/ culture paradox is manifested in the phenomenon of landscape design, especially formal gardens of 18th century Europe, including features such as Platonic forms, labyrinths, mazes and meanders. Particular attention is given to the work of Batty Langley. The investigation is located within an international field of artists concerned with the culture/ nature question. The enquiry considers artists who create visual representations of symbolic pathways, such as Jorgen Thordrup and Marianne Ewaldt. Land and environment art is examined with regard to concepts of order, disorder, entropy and stasis, emphasizing those artists such as Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt and Jurg Altherr, who contrast artificial constructions with natural settings. It also considers the appropriation of nature in a search for the sublime through the sculptural installations of Anja Gallaccio. Examination of formal garden features has informed new hybrid motifs which are developed in the work for this project. The application of these designs to the sculptural and installation mediums has involved innovative usage of materials and techniques. The development of a personal symbology to present metaphors for order and chaos/ entropy and stasis, has produced new juxtapositions of man made forms and natural elements. Exploration of the viewer's engagement with space and physical ambience, including smells, has also been an important element of the work. In addition, new methods have been developed to visualise concepts through computer generated virtual drawings and, to present the preparation and exhibition of sculptural installations through digital photography. Finally, the project considers the spiritual dimension within human culture, employing a number of universal symbols in new ways to create works, which echo both eastern and western sensibilities, for example, metaphorical methods for attainment and links between Buddhist and alchemical symbolism.

The project addresses issues of value and meaning in objects while at the same time considering more sustainable approaches to designing, making and consuming, through the reuse of already existing materials. By exploring concepts such as durability and ephemerality, the precious and the mundane, I have sought to show possibilities for reconciling the production of objects with reduced environmental effects of their production, use and disposal. This was an issue that tended to be neglected during the period of modernist design with its embracing of technology and the machine aesthetic. Since the 1960's with the emergence of designers and writers such as Victor Papanek and Buckminster Fuller there has been a growing concern to develop more sustainable approaches to design, and a broader consideration of meaning and engagement with objects. Some of the significant contemporary designers addressing these issues include Paolo Ulian, Hella Jongerius and Constantin and Laurene Boym. It is with reference to this field that I contextualise my practice. Through the research project I have recognised the importance of a local focus, in supporting more sustainable approaches and engagement with objects. In the process I have identified factors specific to designing with reuse materials, and have used them to guide the direction of the research. These include: material availability, perceived value of materials, time or cost required to achieve a high finish, design complexity and sophistication, and perceived value of the finished product. What has also emerged from the research is the importance of commercial considerations in designing for sustainability, as I believe economically viable objects contribute more than purely symbolic ones in influencing the perceptions and habits of designers and consumers. The project has shown that engagement with objects and sustainable approaches, when considered as integral to a design's development, can be mutually beneficial and lead to aesthetically sophisticated and highly valued objects.

This project investigates new ways to apprehend and visually reconfigure aspects of concealed or disputed pasts.' The intention of this work is to enable a viewer to experience obscured or nearly forgotten narrativesnarratives of memory, time, absence, location and representation. The works utilise found and constructed objects and techniques from the visual arts, the museum, the library, the shop, the garden. One common methodology is the arrangement of multiple objects to activate a surface optically, and encourage a viewer to read it as a means of temporarily holding the objects in place. In doing so they find themselves part of the work. These pieces are experiments in understanding how viewers can travel around an artwork and in this process move their position back and forth, flickering between past and present and personal and national memory. Most works incorporate ideas of movement or stasis either technically or in the story which they may be partially relating to the viewer. This suggestion of waiting or of motion summons a viewer to enter into the work as a timekeeper. This is an anxious position where many of the materials inviting curiosity, and initially implying the humorous, accrue a sinister edge as the viewer reaches a point of understanding his/her caged predicament within the work. For the first time all these works will be exhibited together. Showing them in different locations raised considerations of setting both spatial and conceptual - and recent works have developed that are about journeying across time and place. The investigation has emerged from very personal considerations of the place of memory, forgetting, loss, denial and the potency of the past within my own family. Artists who have explored similar terrain, visually reconfiguring the marginal or the textual, include Gordon Bennett, Fiona Foley, Tracey Moffatt, Christian Boltanski and Fred Wilson. This project has been a journey through many stories across time. These have inevitably been incorporated into my own memory, my own life, and my own increasingly open narrative of deciphering self in the process of relating the past. Each work has been built from the outcomes of the last, and represents a claiming within a larger consideration of ways to personally invoke and involve nation, viewer and self in acknowledging our entangled histories.

This thesis examines for the first time the role of Sir Frederic William Burton (1816-1900) as director of the National Gallery, London, during the period 1874 to 1894. I argue that his directorship is important because it was followed by the second major administrative re-organisation in the Gallery’s history, namely the Rosebery Minute of 1894, which significantly reduced the authority of the director in making acquisitions. This power had been bestowed upon the director in 1855 after an in-depth parliamentary Select Committee examining the running of the Gallery, which had established the post for the first time. My thesis seeks to determine to what extent and how Burton’s tenure prompted this major reassessment of the Gallery’s management structure. The enquiry addresses the question from a variety of perspectives including Burton’s acquisitions, the display of the collection, his attitude to the social function of the Gallery and the relationship of the Gallery authorities with government departments and individuals. These topics are informed by a methodological approach that takes as its starting point the large volume of archival material and correspondence both at the National Gallery and in other gallery archives and libraries relating mainly to Burton and his trustees, chiefly Sir Austen Henry Layard and Sir William Gregory. Using these sources my thesis examines the background, interests, motivations and personal relationships of key individuals, assessing the impact of personal biography upon institutional history. The thesis also sets these case studies within the broader cultural context of the development of the discipline of the history of art and the challenges this posed to the identity of the Gallery. The final chapter reassesses the Rosebery Minute of 1894 in the light of this research, highlighting the importance of both a detailed ‘micro-historical’ approach and a broad contextualisation of developments at the National Gallery at the turn of the twentieth century.