This study analyses the ways in which artistic labour is racialised and made precarious. It examines the working and living conditions of Turkish German artists throughout the institutionalisation of postmigrant theatre and the implementation of cultural diversity in the arts policies in Berlin’s cultural landscape. It illuminates the dynamics that unfold with regards to cultural diversity in the arts and the labour involved in its practices. The main argument of the thesis is, that the emergence and development of postmigrant theatre needs to be understood as the successful establishment and institutionalisation of new aesthetic, narrative and political tools, which, on the one hand, signal the arrival of Turkish German and other artists of colour and of the language of cultural diversity in the field of the arts in the midst of a new globalised urban cosmopolitanism. On the other hand, however, this thesis also accounts for the still limited access of Turkish German and other artists of colour to institutions of high culture, for their precarious and racialised labour conditions and the lack of material resources available for the diversity work that the artists of the postmigrant theatre movement do. As a critical ethnography conducted over the span of seven years, this study maps out the field of opportunities and the restrictions that Turkish German artists working in postmigrant theatre experience in their everyday lives and in negotiating their position in institutional life. This includes their experience in arts school education, the artistic labour market, the sphere of cultural policy, existing funding structures and public discourses about migration, gentrification, cultural diversity and the arts in Germany. The study shows how postmigrant theatre artists’ representational practices produce new postmigrant ethnicities, and challenge narrow conceptions of ethnicity, German culture, national identity as well as power relations in Germany’s theatre landscape. Postmigrant theatre artists perform acts of memory by reaffirming intergenerationally transmitted cultural memories and lived experiences of migration. These become political through acts of remembrance that counteract the long neglect of Turkish German hi/stories. Ultimately, the artists of the postmigrant theatre movement determine the meaning of “diversity in the arts” by working collaboratively to establish sustainable funding and employment structures, networks of solidarity and by giving voice to an increasingly well-organised movement of artists who critique the racialised division of labour in the state-subsisided theatre and cultural landscape.

In recent years, unofficial and/or illegal forms of online file sharing have been increasingly used by audiences worldwide to consume foreign TV programmes which would not previously have been available to them at the time when such shows were first broadcast in their original regions. This form of consumption shortens the time-and-space gap between foreign broadcast and local consumption, highlighting audiences’ desires for borderless, transnational viewing. Taking Taiwanese audiences as an example, this research studies the implications which transnational foreign television consumption via online sharing may bring. Based on in-depth interviews with thirty-six audience members conducted from 2010 to 2011, I focus on two issues: 1. The meaning of television for its audiences: This research examines how and why audiences employ online sharing to bypass temporal, spatial and legal constraints on consuming foreign programmes, and elaborates the ways in which such consumption is becoming an emerging norm of television experience. It sheds light on how our existing understandings have changed, regarding what is meant by “watching TV”, and what television’s role is in providing a sense of liveness, shaping audiences’ sense of social togetherness and their cultural identity. 2. Transnational media flows and cultural power relationships: This research looks at the implications of this cross-border Taiwanese consumption of television for transnational media flows in the post-colonial East Asian contexts. It examines cultural power relationships between East Asian countries, as well as those between the East and the West. Furthermore, by elaborating how audiences’ sense of co-temporality with (and understanding of) other cultures develop via their consumption, this research analyses how such consumption shapes the direction of media flows and cultural power relationships of Taiwan with other countries and thus offers a contemporary understanding of what television means as a cultural form, and what features television audiences have, in the post-network era today.

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This study critically investigates the concept of “digital Bangladesh” putting it in the wider debates surrounding ICT for Development (ICT4D). The original contribution of this thesis is that it problematizes empowerment in ICT4D approach within the human development paradigm in the context of Bangladesh. The main argument of the thesis is that digital Bangladesh as the local manifestation of ICT for Development is both outcome and facilitator of neoliberal globalization. Another argument is that digital Bangladesh promotes entrepreneurship-oriented personal empowerment which is consistent with the neoliberal ideologies. The thesis involves two types of empirical study: discursive and ethnographic. To be precise, it conducts a critical analysis of the National ICT Policy 2009 with the aim of investigating how digital Bangladesh is discursively constructed by it. The findings of the analysis show that the Policy constructs a positive discourse of digital Bangladesh. Most importantly, parroting ICT4D, the Policy propagates the idea that ICT can bring about progress in all areas of the lives of the citizenry, particularly social equity, education, healthcare and economic growth. The entire National ICT Policy is permeated by technological determinism. On the micro level, ethnographically designed fieldwork was conducted at three telecentres located at three districts. Findings show that the telecentres served predominantly the privileged sections of rural societies (i.e. literate, young men and women), by providing either services based on computer, the Internet and the Web, or computer-education. Peasants and other marginalized populations that form the majority of rural populations were invisible at the centres. Analysed from an empowerment approach based on social power, the findings suggest that the telecentres could hardly bring about empowerment and human development in the lives of the people involved with them in different ways. They at best contributed to the entrepreneurs’ achievement of self-reliance, which is consistent with neoliberalism.

Using post-2000 Taiwan queer romance films as a case study, this thesis examines the relationship between the film industry and its audience. It revisits scholarly distrust of the culture industry to address how, and to what extent, the power of capitalism has privileged the industry at the expense of the audience’s freedom or personality. Ethnographically informed, the thesis deems political economy and cultural studies approaches to the research question to be unsatisfactory. Both neglect the sensory aspects of cinematic communication. Drawing inspiration from actor-network theory and the analysis of late capitalism by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, it approaches the film industry-audience relation as a volatile, affective (dis)connection mediated by physical entities, including media technologies. This (dis)connection reflects an era in which the film industry invests in technoscience, tie-in products, ancillary markets and media convergence in order to seduce the senses of the audience. Core arguments are pursued along two lines. The first revolves around film text and cinematic apparatus, the second around film marketing and computationalnetworked communication. Looking at productive and consumptive activities, the main chapters reconsider issues of cinematic embodiment, genre filmmaking, film value production, and the (un)productivity of the human body. They locate cinematic embodiment in object-refracted bodily citation of film content, and define genre filmmaking as body-inflected reiteration of formulaic language. Due to the specificity of the Internet medium, which extracts valuegenerative labour from communicative actions by the audience and the industry, the thesis argues that Internet film marketing is a collaborative project of film value production. The productivity of such collaboration is, however, potentially hindered since bodily agency, manifested in the capability of action, retains an ultimate quality of unpredictability.

The sheer affective force of trauma from a 20th century Chinese history filled with the scars of war, chaos, poverty, famine, and disaster, transmits across ethnic Chinese Canadian diasporas through (un)conscious silences and remembrances. Diasporic visions of memory that embody these traumatic histories can become entangled through affective, discursive, and hegemonic forces that include: a) transgenerational hauntings through the transmission of affective intensities across social links, familial bodies and collective diasporas b) the tension of ‘blurring’ boundaries between history, testimony and fantasy c) official memory productions across media d) and the hegemony of nation-state power concerning which ‘historical ‘wounds’ are chosen or silenced for public consumption and transnational distribution. My research questions include: How does the transmission of trauma affectively pass from one generation to the next? What ‘methods of seeing’ can diasporic ethnic Chinese employ to crystallize invisible histories and lost traumas? How can Chinese Canadians engage problematic, mediated visions of the past and develop a reflexivity that both ‘sees’ haunted histories and critically defies the power problematics within memory production? For Chinese-Canadians, those compelled to seek out the histories of our migrant parents/grandparents are left with fragmented, silenced memories. Narratives of an era filled with trauma are expressed as ‘moral lessons’ and/or ‘Confucian’ virtues. Access to histories for postgeneration Chinese-Canadians, therefore, is dependent on a diasporic vision that assemblages multiple ways of ‘seeing’ the gaps in trauma through mediated memory, including: the memories of elder generations, memoirs, moving images, and artworks and multimedia installations. My research intentionally subverts traditional research methods that incorporate critical approaches that juxtapose mediations of memory, defying the problematics of power and memory production. Through a critically reflexive autoethnographic approach, I perform a ‘staging’ of the 2nd generation Canadian Chinese experience by composing a diasporic montage of data and im/material hauntings.

This thesis analyses film festivals as public spaces. It asks how publicness configures both contemporary film festivals and the activities of those who participate in them. In order to investigate this mix of theories and the concomitant practices are employed, all of which are intertwined with the notion of public or publicness as the overriding conceptual framework of this research. Jürgen Habermas’s universal and rational notion of public sphere has been subjected to criticisms that have called for an understanding of publicness as more fragmented and multiple, and hence experiential. Here, publicness is defined as performative: it is constituted experientially as the degree of physical, perceptual and sensorial connectedness between film festivals and those present at them. In other words, film festivals are experiential public spaces. On the basis of ethnographic analysis of the Busan and Berlin International Film Festivals (BIFF and the Berlinale) utilising in-depth interviews, participant observation and archival analysis, the thesis argues that film festivals are socioculturally bound and perceptually elastic public spaces that enable their audiences or publics to experience the ambient and environmental sense of public accessibility engendered jointly by film festivals and their surrounding milieus. Three aspects are analysed in more detail. First, public spaces are being used as festival venues within contemporary gentrified urban environments. The thesis argues that the physical and structural expansion and transformation of national and international film festivals affects the changing perceptions local residents have of everyday urban public spaces. Second, question and answer (Q&A) sessions between ordinary festival audiences and filmmakers are examined as communicatively performative activities. The thesis argues that the film festival Q&A format functions as a discursive means of facilitating the active participation of festival audiences in its verbally and emotionally-engaging public atmosphere. Third, the roles of film festival media, specifically online, are examined in order to argue that festivals use new media to facilitate ordinary festival audiences’ or their publics’ engagement with the film festival experience as a whole.

The veiled Muslimah or Muslim woman has figured as a threat in media during the past few years, especially with the increasing visibility of religious practices in both Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority contexts. Islamic dress has further become a means and technique of constructing ideas about the ‘other’. My study explores how the veil comes to embody this otherness in the contemporary print media and politics. It is an attempt to question constructions of the veil by showing how they repeat older colonial and Orientalist histories. I compare and contrast representations of the dress in Morocco and France. This research is about how Muslimat, and more particularly their Islamic attire, is portrayed in the contemporary print media and politics. My research aims to explore constructions of the dress in the contemporary Moroccan and French press and politics, and how the veil comes to acquire meanings, or veil associations, over time. I consider the veil in Orientalist, postcolonial, Muslim and Islamic feminist contexts, and constructions of the veil in Orientalist and Arab Nahda texts. I also examine Islamic dress in contemporary Moroccan and French print media and politics. While I focus on similarities and continuities, I also highlight differences in constructions of the veil. My study establishes the importance of merging and comparing histories, social contexts and geographies, and offers an opportunity to read the veil from a multivocal, multilingual, cross-historical perspective, in order to reconsider discourses of Islamic dress past and present in comparative perspective.

Through the analysis of over 1,600 articles from four British news organisations, this thesis reveals distinct patterns in the political content of economic and business news in the first decade of the 21st century. In each of the three case studies – economic globalisation; private finance and public services; and Tesco - the Telegraph newspapers, The Times and the Sunday Times were overtly supportive of laissez faire, the primacy of profit, and reduced government regulation. The Guardian-Observer gave some exposure and credence to ideas from the left but tended to exclude the more radical thinking. Although the BBC is often accused of having a left-wing/anti-business bias, this thesis demonstrates that its reporting has far more in common with the right-wing newspapers than the generally progressive Guardian-Observer. Two further empirical chapters, based on interviews with 26 journalists and editors, explain these findings. The first describes the convergence of the mainstream news media around a shared set of deeply-entrenched assumptions and working practices that are hardwired to reproduce elite interpretations of the economic environment. The second explanatory chapter explores the concept of house tradition, and considers the extent of political divergence of the four mainstream news providers, and contrasts their positions with those of four ‘alternative’ news organisations, the New Statesman, the New Internationalist, Corporate Watch and Private Eye.

This work begins with the idea that creativity is a problematic concept generally and in education particularly. I argue that it is necessary to shed a belief in an ʻessenceʼ of creativity in order to understand how knowledge about creativity is produced. In a review of different approaches to creativity I identify the ways in which ʻtruth effectsʼ are produced in scientific and popular texts. Of particular interest here are approaches and assumptions (expressed through language and operations) in the domains of psychology, education and the arts. A post structuralist analytical methodology, drawing particularly on Foucaultʼs work, is justified in relation to the significance of concepts such as discourse, ideology, rhetoric and myth which, I argue, are crucial in understanding how creativity is made meaningful. The primary analysis is of key documents from the last decade which have sought to inform education policy on creativity: All our futures (NACCCE 1999); Creativity: Find it, promote it (QCA 2004); Nurturing creativity in young people (Roberts 2006); Learning: Creative approaches that raise standards (Ofsted 2010a). Attention is given to the discursive processes of authorising particular models of creativity in these documents, the ways in which tensions and contradictions are dealt with and the implications for ʻcreativityʼ in education. An explicitly reflective mode is adopted where appropriate, in order to highlight my epistemological development during the course of the research. This takes the form of ʻinterruptionsʼ between chapters. I argue, ultimately, that there is a case for only operating with the term ʻcreativityʼ in a reflexive, meta-discursive way and that this is a particular necessity in education.