This study is a comprehensive attempt to grapple with diasporic Palestinianness in Santiago de Chile. Based on long-term fieldwork from 2013 to 2014 within Palestinian-Chilean networks, organizations, and places it explores how an inherently political Palestinianness is constituted, expressed and explored via memory on the one hand and processes related to space and place on the other. Palestinianness is employed here as a concept that captures all that goes into maintaining a Palestinian presence in Santiago. Rather than a fixed category, Palestinianness is something that works and is worked upon in ways that are inseparable from, in this case, the context of lived life in the Chilean capital. It is a host of experiences and practices that cannot be neatly separated, but that are constantly weaved together in steadily recurrent, but sometimes disruptive and surprising patterns. By interrogating Palestinianness within the distinct context of present-day Santiago, the thesis unsettles and reconfigures conceptualizations of the relationship between memory, space, and politics. It does so by delving into the ambiguities at play in Palestinian-Chilean relationships to the often uncomfortable memory politics of post-dictatorship and the ongoing Palestinian struggle respectively. To shed light on the dynamics at play, transmemory is introduced as a concept that seeks to capture the spatial and spatially mobile qualities of memory. The thesis argues that by engaging with traveling memories of life and conflict in the old land and simultaneously rejecting involvement with continuously troubling memories of the recent Chilean past, Palestinian-Chileans form a collective politics of Palestinianness that is nonetheless distinctly marked by an inescapable Chileanness.

Contemporary scholars of imperialism and colonialism studies have revealed how different imperial spaces were malleable, and they constantly shift through negotiations between diverse agencies. Whereas most existing studies investigate change of imperial space from the view of ‘metropolitan centre’, this thesis attempts to decentralise the dominant view of existing Japanese imperialism studies, and explores the Japanese imperial expansion with a particular focus on people’s subjectivities and agencies on the national border zone. The thesis particularly focuses on the border/boundary between the Yaeyama Archipelago of the Ryukyu Islands and colonial Taiwan. The first chapter explores the boundary between Yaeyama and Taiwan in representation and discourse after Yaeyama was annexed to Japan. I discuss how ‘Yaeyama’ came to appear as a historical subject in the Japanese colonial discourse, by distinguishing itself from the colonised subject as well as criticising the dominance of the main island of Okinawa. In critically examining the previous Yaeyama Studies, I suggest reconstructing Yaeyama’s history in the East Asian regional framework. The second chapter explores how civilians actively committed themselves to defining the national territory during the late nineteenth century. The chapter also aims to reconsider the dominant discourse of Okinawa’s modern history, which tends to focus on conflicts between the Japanese government and the former samurai class of Okinawa prefecture. Chapters 3 further discusses how people on the border zone constructed the boundary between Japan and Taiwan, but I argue that the border between Yaeyama and Taiwan did not only demarcate the ‘metropolitan nation’ and the ‘colony’, but also demarcated the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’ areas. In other words, the third chapter considers how the national border had different implications to people on the border zone. I explore how new settlers dominated the newly emerging economy of Yaeyama and developed trade links with colonial Taiwan. Furthermore, I discuss how while Yaeyama native farmers were marginalised from the local economy and industry, they also crossed the border in a form of rural-urban migration. Chapters 5 and 6 examine Yaeyama migrants’ experiences in Taiwan. Firstly, I explore in what social and cultural conditions Yaeyama migrants lived and worked during the 1920s to the 1940s. I argue that the distinction between ‘Japanese’ and ‘Taiwanese’ was not instantly determined by the colonial authority, but continuously constructed and negotiated by social agents. In Chapter 6, I examine how Yaeyama migrants shaped their Japanese identity by distinguishing themselves from the colonised subjects. The southern border between the Inner Territory and the Outer Territories were constituted through the interaction between ensembles of practices in the local ‘place’ and the wider imperial networks and ‘space’. Yaeyama people’s experiences of constructing and crossing the boundary effectively demonstrates how the determination of the Japanese national border was incorporated into colonialism, and how Japanese colonialism was associated with the emergence of modernity in East Asia. With a particular focus on the border islands of Yaeyama, this thesis presents an alternative view to Japanese colonial history, East Asian social history as well as Okinawa’s modern history.

The combination of poorly managed mass tourism, rapidly increasing international migration, and a declining economy facilitated a permanent exodus of natives out of the Venetian lagoon. This thesis examines how the community activism group and social network Venessia.com attempts to reclaim a place-­based and place-­manifested Venetian identity (venezianità) through theatrical public protests. While members are sensitive to an ethic of intercultural awareness, the discourse accompanying their concerns reveals nostalgia for the power and grandeur of Venice’s past that is threatened by a perceived invasion by suspicious outsiders. The theoretical framework I employ to illuminate Venessia.com's efforts includes the socio-­cultural and economic implications of mass tourism, theory of space and place, and critiques of modernity and postmodernity.

Thesis (M.Arch.)--University of Detroit Mercy, 2008. / "April 28, 2008". Includes bibliographical references (p. 122-123).

Thesis (M.Arch.)--University of Detroit Mercy, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 201-203).

The mid-nineteenth century has been presented in popular and academic narratives as a crucial period in the history of modern leisure in Britain, as urbanisation and changes to working hours provided new opportunities for recreation. These leisure practices shaped individual and collective identities. However, much of the scholarship in this area has focused on class, at times marginalising or overlooking themes such as gender, generation and sexuality. This thesis does not attempt to dismiss class as a useful tool for historical analysis, nor does it suggest that leisure did not feature at all in the formation and performance of class. Instead, it demonstrates that leisure played a powerful role in shaping masculinity. Men used specific leisure practices to construct, conceal and express different aspects of their male identity. The character, materiality and spatial dynamics of recreational sites helped men to move fluidly between different roles, in doing so asserting their own version of masculinity. Examining sites of leisure helps reveal these processes, as well as extending our knowledge and understanding of everyday life in the mid-nineteenth century. By doing this, the thesis argues that historical engagement with gender formation has to take place at the intersections of themes and methodologies, be it liminality and domesticity, emotion and space, or sound and space. This thesis presents a micro-history case study of leisure in Stalybridge, a textile town in the north west of England. Leisure practices in mid-nineteenth-century Stalybridge reflected the newness of both the town and the idea of leisure itself; as the town’s inhabitants sought to make sense of their newly urbanised and evolving environment, social and economic changes brought about an increasingly accessible and compartmentalised area of everyday life. Leisure thus shaped – and was shaped by – Stalybridge’s built-environment, place-identity and wider geography. Local writers drew on Stalybridge’s proximity to the countryside of the Peak District and southern Pennines in their depictions of the town, emphasising the opportunities for outdoor pursuits this presented. In calling attention to leisure, these authors attempted to shift focus away from industry as the central tenet of the town’s identity. Alongside its focus on gender and place-identity, the thesis makes two further key contributions to the study of identity and experience in the mid-nineteenth century. First, it engages with the recent ‘affective’ turn in history to uncover men’s emotional experiences. It reconstructs the walking practices of Stalybridge schoolmaster James Knight to show how he used this leisure practice to organise romantic encounters, form homosocial networks, and grieve in private. Secondly, a recurring theme is the unfixed nature of sites of leisure, from the liminality of the pub to the contested nature (or ‘in-between-ness’) of Stalybridge itself. This focus on liminality demonstrates that the past is not fixed, because people and places in the past were not fixed themselves. Recognising specificity and subjectivity in our research is thus vital to uncovering and understanding authentic experiences of the past. The thesis looks at three distinct leisure practices. Chapter One examines the liminality of the mid-nineteenth-century pub, arguing that, for young men in particular, these were sites of surrogate domesticity. It also challenges negative stereotypes of the Victorian pub, emphasising the diverse functions they fulfilled and the plurality of drinking cultures. Chapter Two discusses the prevalence of music in the mid-nineteenth-century urban environment, as well as its centrality to how Stalybridgeans viewed their town. It highlights the relationship between space, sound and local identity, as exemplified by the discourse surrounding the suitability of the town hall as a concert venue. Chapter Three argues that walking for leisure helped people both acquire and utilise knowledge of their surroundings, abetted by the inherent rhythmicity of that act. It also presents walking as an everyday act that played a crucial role in shaping and progressing key events and relationships in young men’s lives.

This dissertation examines the lives of Latin American immigrants in two enforcement landscapes of the US South, revealing the entanglement of religion with everyday social experiences and their geographies. It supposes that local places and their politics have the potential to structure action, but that these realities do not go uncontested by strategic actors. As federal-local enforcement agreements proliferate, local neighborhoods are increasingly perceived and mapped by immigrants in relation to insecurity and risks they pose. I find that Latinos strategically resist precarity and the local immigration conditions by engaging both communal and individual forms of religion in their neighborhood spaces. They make spaces safe through the enactment of religion where danger is perceived and redefine local geographies that threaten their existence through practical decisions with their religious networks. The research employs ethnographic, visual, and spatial methods, including in-depth interviews with 60 participants. Situated in a practice approach, the research follows these religious actors from their institutional spaces of religion into the multiple and varied locations of their lives. It interrogates the practices in institutions and spaces of the neighborhood, including the immigrant religious congregations that remain a focal point in Latino lives. By attending to the micro interactions and practices that occur in these geographies, the dissertation uncovers how spaces within places are battlegrounds of power where hiddenness and visibility are situationally and strategically employed. The research findings are developed in three empirical chapters, as I map the role of religion in these negative policy contexts. In the first, I consider the place of Latino congregations in relation to the US religious landscape and the logics of congregational geography. Then, I investigate the communal practices of religion at these Latino churches given the everyday experiences of immigrants, documenting the practical ways immigrant congregations assisted members with the local conditions of enforcement. Last, I turn to locate religion in the broader spaces of social life. Participants’ stories reveal that religion is transportable to all kinds of spaces, and they creatively invoke their traditions to claim space and redefine themselves around the neighborhood. Not every practice in everyday life should be counted as religious, but this dissertation reveals that religion remains entangled in the local immigration experience. / 2029-02-28T00:00:00Z

Mobile, digital technologies are thought to augment and transcend the limits of our places, yet they raise the issue of what our places are. PlaceMark is a simple, distributed collaborative authoring environment constructed in conjunction with a site-specific writing activity. This system is examined as a cultural probe, investigating how new media students engage in collaborative writing and how they construct place. Findings include that students engage in the activity as if in parallel play (influencing one another implicitly rather than explicitly), that approaching the notion of place through writing may require development (working through issues brought to the place and the exercise), and that students' relationship to place, at least when asked to write about places that may be considered natural, is not characterized by certainty in behavioral framing. / Master of Science

The focus of this two year master’s thesis in Library- and Information science is the study of two Swedish Public Library buildings with the examples Lomma and Halmstad. The main goal and purpose of the thesis is to try to uncover which views and values of the public library are expressed in the examined libraries; and to what extent these views manifests are shown in its architecture. The theoretical framework is based on Raymond Williams’s cultural concepts of effective, dominant culture and the two extremities of this culture, called residual and emergent cultures. A second aspect is Yi-Fu Tuans concepts of Space and Place. The study also uses a historical background of Swedish Public Library Buildings. By close reading and textual analyses, the empirical study focuses on the municipalities’ documents surrounding the building of the library buildings in Lomma and Halmstad. The architectural perspective is studied through the architects own documents and architectural journals discussing the built Library Buildings. Results show that the technological advances of the time these libraries were built has put them in a position of change, which also is visible in the architecture. The libraries in Lomma and Halmstad function as civic icons of the community and the architecture is very dependent of the places where they are situated. The expressions of the two libraries differ in details but the overall result show that the values exhibited behind the building of the examined libraries is a part of a historical residual culture, functioning as effective and dominant. The conclusion of the thesis is that the expression of the architecture is however a part of an emergent culture. The buildings aim to comprise the values and display the diverse causes in its architecture. The buildings seek to manifest the ideal activity and working of the modern Public Library.

Digital technologies have for many years been acclaimed as tools that hold the power to transform learning, yet educational research has so far failed to demonstrate the transformative effects of these digital technologies on learning outcomes (Cuban, 2001; Price and Kirkwood, 2011). Some research has even gone so far as to question this underlying assumption regarding digital technologies ability to transform education, suggesting that they do not in fact have any inherently positive benefits for learning, and that perceived benefits are actually artefacts produced by other factors (Means et al, 2009). Several potential causes have been proposed for the slow progress in educational technology, including lack of time for staff development, unsuitability of technologies, and cultural barriers within institutions (Laurillard, 2012a). A fourth potential cause may lie with the lack of theory to explain technologies themselves (Oliver, 2013). Different theoretical perspectives have been proposed as a way to enhance our understanding of technologies, with one potential candidate being the theory of affordances. The theory of affordances has been used extensively within many fields, including educational technology, but remains a divisive and often under-defined term (Hammond, 2010). This thesis argues that this may in part be due to its distortion through adoption in multiple disciplines, and its popular description as the ‘action possibilities’ presented by an object or scenario, something not present in the theory’s original conception. It is suggested that a return to the original theory of affordances as proposed by Gibson (1979), which attempted to explain how individuals derive meaning from the world around them, returns clarity to the theory. A particular focus on the underexplored aspects of intention and invariant, together with a re-appreciation of what it means to apply the theory of affordances to digital environments, to digital spaces and places, provides a way of thinking about affordance that arguably can be applied more constructively to the effective use of technology in education. A design-based research approach was taken in order to research the original concept of affordance, and its key components of intention and invariant, within learning scenarios supported by digital technologies. Design-based research is an evolving methodology, with no strict definition, but it has shown promise in both the design and the research of technology-enhanced learning environments (Wang and Hannafin, 2005). A pilot phase at secondary school level demonstrated the potential for the approach; multiple iterations at a higher education level developed and enriched these findings into a stable model for the alignment of digital technologies with a particular pedagogical scenario. Findings suggest that affordances can be used to ‘explain’ educational technology, if the concept is broadened to include the wider ecology of learning; digital technologies not only as tools, but also as places. Extending the notion of affordances from ‘action possibilities’ to ‘transaction possibilities’ gives agency to both learner and technology, and recognises the important contribution of the digital environment to the learner experience. A specific design framework is offered which uses this redefinition of affordances as a design tool to align an authentic learning scenario with the digital technologies that have the potential to support that learning scenario. A generic design methodology is proposed, based on this framework, which has the potential to align pedagogy and technology using this updated definition of affordance. To close, some thoughts on the value of the design-based research approach are discussed.