In this research project, I address critical questions about Italian post-feminism, by exploring the way the peculiarities of Italian media and culture have contributed in producing a specifically Italian form of post-feminism. While a post-feminist subjectivity, in terms of neoliberal, individualist, narcissist standards among young women, has been observed and commented on by a few Italian authors, the important relation between post-feminist sexuality and subjectivity, Berlusconi’s political and cultural project, and the media has not yet been analysed in depth. To investigate this, I employ a feminist postructuralist approach to the study of media and society, and explore the way the media produces and reproduces discourses of gender and sexuality that have circulated in Berlusconism. The thesis highlights how young femininity has emerged in the national popular imagination as barometer of social change, at the same time becoming subjected to increased scrutiny and policing. In the first two chapters I discuss the theoretical framework and methodology of the thesis. I then explore Berlusconi’s influence on media and politics (Chapter 3). I define Berlusconi’s cultural and political hegemony in terms of a neoliberal authoritarian populism, in which the media played a fundamental role by articulating representations of femininity and female sexuality that work to secure the status quo and existing relations of power. Following this, is the analysis of the case studies, in which the connection between the legal system and the media provides a surface of emergence for the figuration of post-feminist femininity. This is articulated through cultural discourses about commercial sexuality (Chapter 4), phallicism (Chapter 5) and mental health (Chapter 6). Ultimately, this research project sheds light on the way media representations of femininity and female sexuality relate to Berlusconism, where longstanding sexist and misogynist discourses have been accompanied by new ones, integral to neoliberal governmentality.

This project examines the historical development of the ideology of mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture) in relation to the making of Mexico as a nation and the consolidation of the figure of the mestizo as the official national race. I am concerned with how mestizaje circulates and is (re-) produced across the public arena of politics, education and popular culture, and how it becomes part of everyday life. I also explore how mestizaje has been re-imagined with the concurrent rise of neoliberalism and multiculturalism from the 1990s onward. My ultimate goal with this dissertation is to show how race and racism remain implicated in Mexican nationalism as they serve to determine the terms of belonging to the nation.

This study explores how people understand and represent the economy in different spaces across society. It draws on over 120 semi-structured interviews as well as participant observation across four sites: the civil service, the financial sector, the financial press, and one of the UK’s largest housing estates. The multi-sited empirical study builds on and contributes to two bodies of literature. First, through looking at the representations and understandings of the economy across a number of sites it explores how the economy is anchored in different registers of meaning across society. This brings the notion of the economy into the same theoretical framework that has been used to theorise the fragmentation of the public sphere, which has mainly focussed on political, cultural and media fragmentation, but ignored the economy. The second intervention comes in the field of economic sociology. The multi-sited framework allows for an investigation into different forms of agency in socioeconomic praxis. The sites are explored as both internal localised networks of interaction and as spaces situated within broader societal relationships of power. The findings and the argument constructed emphasise the importance of broader structural relationships. In doing so they contribute towards undermining the influential recent trend inspired by Michel Callon's notion of economic performativity, and the localised networked conception of agency at its core. Beyond these theoretical contributions, the thesis also provides a snapshot of contemporary society in the UK. The elite institutional sites looked at are found to generate a self-serving abstract economic discourse grounded in the politics of knowledge representation. This elite economic discourse does not resonate at spaces on the periphery of the public sphere, and in the lack of rational pluralised discourse on the economy many people turn to explanatory frameworks that harness an anti-elite sentiment and appear to fit with their immediate lifeworlds. The result is a fragmented economic imaginary across society that holds little hope of bringing much needed positive economic change.

Interfaith initiatives have grown rapidly in the UK since the 1980s, but have been little researched. This thesis presents an organisational ethnography of London-based interfaith charity 3FF (Three Faiths Forum), with whom the author conducted two and half years of fieldwork as part of an ESRC collaborative studentship. Founded in 1997 to bring together Muslim, Christian and Jewish faith leaders, 3FF has since opened up its remit to those of ‘all faiths and nonreligious beliefs’, and primarily delivers education works to young people. The organisation is unusual within the interfaith sector, but expressive of broader shifts in religious and other forms of collective identities (Woodhead, 2012). Theoretically, this thesis attempts to adopt a non-modern (Latour, 1993) and non-secular approach to knowledge production, arguing that this is necessary to conceptualise processes of collective building that are inclusive of those of different faiths and beliefs, and which do not re-enact racialised hierarchies and coloniality. Chapters trace the mediation of different forms of knowledge, including the mediations of media technologies, from a number of angles. The empirical material covers the complexities of everyday coexistence between faiths; how the organisation navigated high profile ‘faith-inflected media events’ taking place during the fieldwork period; data practices within the internal workings of the organisation; and a theorisation of the organisation’s practice with participants as involving tacit and embodied knowledges, alongside a critique asking where accountability lies when central aspects of the work remain unspoken. The thesis conclusion outlines some of the lessons that can be drawn from this ethnographic case for constructing a ‘plural collective’ on a decolonial basis, which can challenge inequality despite fundamental disagreements about the nature of knowledge and the agencies at play in the world, and which is “open to contingency but still able to act” (Hall, 1987, p. 117).

The creative economy discourse now informs both cultural and development policies around the world. Virtually every country now uses the concept in politics, policy, advocacy, and practice. My aim is to show what this uptake means in conceptual and empirical terms. Through an ethnography of the music industries in Burkina Faso and Ghana I explore the changing meaning and position of ‘culture’ in cultural and development policies in both countries. How does the creative economy discourse help the pursuit human development, if at all? What does this discourse mean precisely? And, most importantly, what should it mean to develop cultural industries? Overall, my dissertation frames this issue broadly and narrowly. The narrow focus is on the situation in Ouagadougou and Accra, capital cities of respectively Burkina Faso and Ghana. The particularities of these countries serve as examples to simultaneously build and illustrate the argument. Yet, the scope extends well beyond this: the aim at large is to ask questions that can be asked beyond these countries. Even though they may yield different answers around the world, I hope they will help to critically understand and use the hegemonic creative economy discourse. The originality of my dissertation work is threefold. First, I link cultural policy studies with critical development studies. I do this by connecting cultural industries to the human development approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum by exploring the link with ‘capabilities.’ Second, I provide empirical insight in the particularities of the music industries in Burkina Faso and Ghana, as both countries are nearly ab-sent from the literature. Third, I provide a theoretical framework to rethink the way cultural and creative industries can be inscribed in cultural policies and development plans by including the cultural and historical palimpsest of existing practices that both enables and limits change.

This thesis analyses screenwriting as an exemplary and idiosyncratic form of creative labour in the ‘new cultural economy’ and specifically, in the contemporary UK screen production industry. Using a critical sociological framework combined with a neo-Foucauldian understanding of work and subjectivity, a series of explicit analytical connections are made in this project, between screenwriting, creative labour and the new cultural economy. I contend that screenwriting, as a form of creative labour which in many ways eschews the term ‘creative’, is an instructive, timely case study precisely because it agitates traditional dichotomies - between creativity and craft, art and commerce, individual and collaborative work - in pedagogy and practice. After tracing the dynamics of this form of creative work in theoretical, discursive and historical terms, I then analyse how screenwriting is constructed, taught and practiced as labour in three areas: ‘How-to’ screenwriting manuals, pedagogical locations for screenwriting in the UK and British screenwriters’ working lives. At each site, I focus on how craft and creativity are defined and experienced, how individual and collective forms of work are enacted at different locations and what implications these shifting designations have. Screenwriting within the mainstream Hollywood and British film industries in the contemporary moment demands particular and complex forms of worker subjectivity in order to distinguish it from other forms of filmmaking and writing, and to make the work knowable and do-able. I follow the voices of screenwriters and those who teach and instruct about screenwriting across the fieldwork sites and analyse the ways in which they calculate, navigate and make sense of the screen production labour market in which they are immersed. The theatrical, mythic and practical navigations of screenwriters in pedagogy and practice that are the centre of this thesis offer an antidote to impoverished, economistic readings of creativity, craft and creative labour in contemporary worlds of work.

Do digital screen media alter our sense of being in the world? Contained within this question are some fairly fundamental existential and metaphysical notions about what it is to be in the world, and what is it to have this sense altered? There is the complex notion of consciousness: what is it to be conscious of the world? What, indeed, is ‘the world’ – simply our phenomenal sensory awareness of reality, or some external transcendent actuality? To understand the effect of the digital on consciousness, one must consider investigating the dynamics of synaptic signals in the brain, to affection and cognition, to larger social, global and even metaphysical systems – whilst also maintaining an eye for the subtle metaphoric connections between them. In the work of new-media theorists such as Massumi, Shaviro, Pisters, Rodowick, Parisi, and Hansen, we see some of the above questions tackled through a triangulation of aesthetic theory, affect theory and philosophy of consciousness. It is amongst these theoretical perspectives that I position my research. I describe digital visual media as an extension and fruition of aesthetic impulses towards indeterminism and flux largely described by Deleuze in the Time-Image as ‘the indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary, or of the present and the past, of the actual and the virtual’, but further, through Bernard Stiegler, as a new mnemo-technical ‘grammatisation’ of vital metaphysical forces, or of existence as such. I then show by example how digitally created and inflected images, through their own vital automatism, give us new mimetic and metaphorical tools through which to affectively and conceptually think the real. I argue that the digital-image establishes itself in ways that Deleuze foreshadowed but could not quite foresee, becoming: ‘an as yet unknown aspect of the time-image’.

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Media and communications engage in social power relations. This thesis aims to investigate the “power value” of media and communications, focusing on the private communication practices of economic elites. The main argument is that, in the age of hyperglobalization, elite private communication plays no less important a part than mass forms of communication in shaping and maintaining economic elite power that operates in a far from transparent and accountable manner. This detachment of media and communications from the public is a symptom of the shrinking of democracy, which sanctions the massive transfer of resources to the organized interests. For the purpose of empirical study, his thesis investigates the sites or networks of the national and transnational market forces within the historical context of the neo-liberalization of the Korean economy and society since the 1990s. The research shows, via in-depth interviews and qualitative case studies, how increasingly broader areas of the economy are becoming discursively de-politicized and how the closed communicative processes of economic elites are replacing democratic structures. Think-tanks, epistemic communities and policy networks, with their practices of private communication, lobbying and “brain sharing”, often make policy decisions that have a significant impact on the masses. The discrete culture and exclusive elite communication networks which are prevalent in the global-national investment web of intermediaries allow the growth of “invisible power”, which almost completely blocks the vigilance of the public. In the financial market, the cohesive culture, combined with the reflexive and intensive communication environment, generates a system of preferences and evaluations as well as one-sided expectations that have a tremendous impact on corporate management and the whole of society. The study suggests that we should attend to the growing tendency of the mediation of power that is taking place with minimum reference to the public. This research contributes to the understanding of the “power value” of media and communications by providing an alternative or complementary explanation.

This thesis investigates how cinema’s specificities are defined in relation to technological developments. I propose that the most appropriate way to do this is by taking the whole cinematographic circuit into account – that is, the complete set of socio-technical operations that are involved in the medium, as remote as they might seem to be from actual cinematographic practices. I depart from the definition of circulation as a socio-technical continuum of the production, distribution, exhibition and evaluation of movies, explaining how these activities might be enacted in three different technological regimes: film, video and digital computation. Then, following an account of the early history of the pirate film society Cine Falcatrua (2003-2005), I show how the specificity of the medium is constituted and preserved throughout its technical progress. Acknowledging the limits of traditional film and screen studies to deal with these questions, I attempt to find an alternative research approach by engaging in practice-based investigation using curatorial strategies. By bringing together and analysing different film and art pieces in an exhibition entitled Denied Distances (2009), I propose a framework that allows an understanding of how media technology are defined in relation to one another, exposing how seemingly expanded practices such as installations and performances might be contained within conventional cinematographic apparatus. I conclude by suggesting that, in order to keep up with the ever-changing nature of the medium, the study of cinema would profit from engaging the extremes of scientific criticism and art practice.