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In this dissertation, I address issues in relation to working with teachers on viewing video recordings of their own, or their colleagues' lessons and ask: how can I use video to support teacher learning? what patterns of interaction (in discussion of video clips) support teacher learning? what is the role of the discussion facilitator? I also address similar issues in relation to mathematics classrooms: how can I use video to study classroom discussion? what patterns of interaction get established and alter in a classroom over an academic year? what is the role of the teacher? I look at similarities and differences, across these two contexts. I bring an enactivist epistemological stance to this study, which took place in one secondary school in the UK. I draw out methodological implications from enactivism for the study of discussion and use the tools I develop to analyse data from year 1 of the project. In year 2, I developed alternative techniques to aid my analysis of micro-events in teacher discussions and mathematics classroom, drawing on ideas from linguistic ethnography. My first analysis of the data from teacher discussions of video, threw up five elements of the role of the discussion facilitator: setting up discussion norms; starting with reconstruction and moving to interpretation; re-watching the video; metacommenting; selecting a video clip. Bringing the more micro-techniques of analysis to the same data served to trouble the categorisation above, and I conclude that my description of practice cannot be separated from the particular context in which it took place. My analysis of data from mathematics classrooms suggests the teacher's use of explicit metacommunicative messages (metacomments) was significant in terms of establishing desired patterns of interaction. In one classroom I study, there is evidence of student metacommunication and metacognition in relation to work in mathematics lessons. I argue for a re-framing of metacognition to include the perspective of a process of becoming, as well as the development of skills. Looking across the data of teacher discussions and mathematics classrooms, I introduce the notion of a heightened listening as a description of a similarity in the roles of a discussion facilitator and teacher wanting to develop metacommunicative or metacognitive practices with others.

This practice-research thesis is a response to two related calls: the call of deceased figures from the archive to the living, and the call for the living to produce archives, to (never) become deceased. These calls are understood through, respectively, Avital Ronell’s conceptualization of haunted writing and Jacques Derrida’s notion of archive fever. Ronell’s concept, coined in Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1986), emerges in tracing the enduring posthumous power of Goethe who, after his death, continued to speak to and through other writers. In Archive Fever (1995) Derrida introduces the term via the relationship of the historian, Yerushalmi’s, relationship to Freud’s work, arguing that archive fever is a compulsion to return to the place of commencement; a homesickness that is constituted by a competing anarchivic destructive drive. The response draws on ethnography, post-structuralism, experimental literature and historiography in what can be termed a work of creative-critical writing or ficto-criticism. The three main archival collections that the thesis engages with are The Wistrand Collection at the Screen Archive South East, The Margaret Mead Collection and Pacific Ethnographic Archives at the Library of Congress, and the informal archives of the recently deceased mother and grandmother of the candidate (who writes about herself in the third person under the pseudonym ‘Scarlet’). The method is one of written assemblage akin to found-footage filmmaking. By creatively connecting these three archives, along with the personal lives of the theorists used to examine them, new perspectives and understandings are produced, in particular on ethnography and the avant-garde during the inter-war period, as well as previously unexplored literal and figurative links between Jacques Derrida, Kathy Acker, Maya Deren and Margaret Mead. More broadly, the thesis aims to build on Ronell and Derrida’s ideas by putting them in empirical motion, and to set out a new creative-critical model for approaching archival collections.

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In this thesis I wish to analyse the complex relationship between actors’ media- related practices, legitimacy and long-term engagement. Based on a qualitative approach my research investigates two cases –Citizens for Europe, a civil society organisations involved in issues relating to European citizenship, and the Chaos Computer Club, one of the world’s oldest and largest hacker organisations. More concretely, through face-to-face interviews, participant observation and media analysis I analyse the role media practices play for the two organisations to establish legitimation and to sustain their political engagement over time. Accordingly, my thesis seeks to provide an empirically informed interpretive account of the meaning media-related practices have for actors’ political endeavours. From a more operationalised perspective, I am trying to make a convincing argument that practices circulating around and oriented towards media technologies and infrastructures play a configurative role for actors’ ability to co-determine democratic constellations. Instead of suggesting a straightforward causal chain my thesis conceptualises the entanglements between media practices, legitimation and long-term engagement as interlocking arrangements grounded in relational dynamics. Overall, my thesis aims to compliment existing research on the role media technologies and infrastructures play for the formation of political arrangements by looking at organisation-based engagement. In doing so, my research partially bridges a current research gap concerning the relationship between organisational actors’ media-related practices and their ability to establish legitimacy and to perpetuate political engagement over time.

Technical communication is a relatively new occupational field in the Republic of Ireland, which has grown in response to the location of software and hardware companies in the country. Because it is also a new area of academic study, with just one academic programme in technical communication in Ireland, no research to date has examined the Irish technical communication context. This study seeks to begin addressing this research gap by examining practitioners' perspectives of technical communication in Ireland, specifically exploring four key themes which emerge from the literature on communities of practice and professionalisation theory: practice, education and training, status and value, and professional and community structures. The study also acknowledges the impact of technology, on technical communication specifically, and on professional work generally. The study uses a comparative case study approach to explore these themes. It compares the findings from an interpretative analysis of ten blogs maintained by technical communicators from other countries, with the findings from the Irish case, gathered from surveys, online focus groups and interviews. The study's findings indicate that Irish technical communicators exhibit traits of communities of practice (such as joint enterprise and shared repertoires). They also identify with their job title and practice. A key finding is that many Irish technical communicators, especially freelancers and lone writers, have a keen appetite for community involvement. This enthusiasm notwithstanding, many barriers impede professionalisation, not least the low visibility of the role in Ireland, limited evidence of professionalising activity, and the potential for career stagnation. Findings from the blog study support the findings from the Irish case in a number of areas, especially in respect of changing roles, the impact of technology, and some concern about the status and value of the role.

This study had two key aims: to understand the how the mediation of multiculturalism in Manila marginalised the city’s Indian and Korean diasporas and, more importantly, to “interrupt” (Pinchevsky, 2005) this problematic mediation by exploring whether and how a collaborative photography exhibition project might create a space that fosters the voices of these migrants. To address these two concerns, I did life story interviews of seventeen Indian and fifteen Korean diasporas from Manila, six focus group discussions with local Filipinos from Manila, an impressionistic analysis of contemporary Philippine mainstream media, and participant observation of Shutter Stories, which was a collaborative exhibition project that I worked on together with Manila’s Indians and Koreans and with two photography scholars from one of Manila’s top universities. By weaving together these rich and diverse data sets, this study provides a nuanced counterpoint to extant works that focus on understanding multiculturalism in the cities of the developed world. In particular, it reveals that although Manila’s Indians and Koreans tend to be economically superior to the city’s local Filipinos, they are nevertheless symbolically marginalised. This is most evident in the problematic mediation of multiculturalism in Manila, the dynamics of which are characterised by what I call the cycle of strangeness and estrangement. Together with this, one other key contribution of this study is that it maps out the complexities of how a collaborative photography exhibition project might create a space for marginalised voices that can challenge dominant social discourses, such as the mediation of multiculturalism in Manila. As regards the photographic mediation of voice, this study underscores the importance of considering both how the various properties of the photograph are activated in the context of production and of consumption, as well as how the various practices of photography might be harnessed in a way that balances the call for both ethics (that is, the desire for marginalised to have a voice) and aesthetics (that is, the desire to ensure that the voices of the marginalised will be engaging enough to be heard). And as regards the social mediation of voice, this study reveals that the already difficult task of helping marginalised groups, such as migrant cultural minorities, to articulate stories that are in line with their personal life projects is made complicated by the need to also think about the much more difficult task of helping establish a society that is willing to foster such voices.

This study takes a step towards answering two questions concerning L2 writing: 'Why do the Japanese write English expository essays differently in terms of discourse structure from their native English counterparts?' and 'What are the differences?' The study compares discourse structures of Japanese and English school texts from 30 Japanese junior high school pupils (14-15 years), who wrote school compositions on the occasion of their graduation, and 30 British secondary school pupils (14-16 years), who wrote GCSE coursework essays for Religious Education and English. Other written materials were collected from a Japanese school, and classrooms at a British school were observed. There are three research questions: whether the school texts are different in terms of topical progression (consisting of parallel, extended parallel, sequential and extended sequential progressions), what implications the results have in terms of genre and what implications the results have for Contrastive Rhetoric (CR) research. A review of CR literature suggests a need for further studies in this area, particularly for the exploration of the cultural and educational contexts, where preferred L1 discourse structures are likely to be taught and practised. It also raises an issue of genre, questioning whether expository writing, which has been the yardstick genre of CR research, is universally practised. Another issue is the search for a methodological framework for text analysis which can relate textual features to 'rhetorical organisation'. The apparently universal discourse structure of a meaningful utterance, topic - comment, and the central role of information structure in the construction of coherence, suggest Topical Structure Analysis (TSA) as the framework. The application of TSA to Japanese is discussed and found to be appropriate. The examination of the materials from the Japanese school and the observation of English and Religious Education classes in the British school reveal that expository writing is not practised in the Japanese school; instead, writing is used for self-reflection and self-growth. In the British school, expository writing is the major means of learning and assessment. The writing used in the Japanese school is characterised by parallel progression while English expository writing is likely to contain many topical progressions due to its clear focus on a limited number of topics and its logical nature. The TSA results show substantial differences of occurrence of topical progressions: the English texts contain more topical progressions, suggesting that they rely more than the Japanese texts on repetition of important items in conveying a sense of coherence. Parallel progression is the only type of progression that occurs more in the Japanese texts than the English texts. Examination of the results reveals the roles of topical progressions: parallel progressions for accumulation of information/descriptions, sequential progressions for development of argument, extended parallel and extended sequential progressions for repetition of important items throughout the text. The differences in the mean occurrences of topical progressions are found to be due to the difference of genre or function between the two data sets: the Japanese texts are expressive and the English texts transactional. The use of parallel progressions is associated with description within the expressive texts and the use of the other progression types is associated with the argumentative nature of English school essays. The potential of the topical marker was in Japanese for the construction of coherence is discussed. By providing a clearer coding scheme, this study contributes to TSA studies and CR research in general. The findings support a number of earlier CR findings. Although the limited sample size prevents generalisation, the findings hint at an association between lack of experience in argumentatiy writing among Japanese secondary pupils and the L2 writing performance of Japanese students at English speaking universities. Analysis based on TSA, while unable to detect every feature of coherence in text, has the potential to provide useful data for L2 writing classrooms and for future CR research relating textual features to coherence construction.

Most of the research exploring social communication has focused on the 'sender' perspective, examining how and why people choose to produce the cues they send to others. This thesis explores the experience of social interaction from the 'receiver' perspective. Broadly, this work examines how receivers perceive and interpret social cues and make social judgments, depending on senders' states and intentions. It relies on data from both laboratory-based experimentation and from naturalistic face-to-face interactions. The first section of the thesis examines how changing a receiver's internal social state, i.e., manipulating feelings of social 'need,' alters the utility or subjective desirability of a social reward, specifically, a genuine smile. My experimental findings show that high states of social need enhance the utility of genuine smiles and cause the devaluation of polite smiles - important social tokens in their own right. These findings extend to the face- to-face social environment, in which I show that this social state manipulation changes behaviour, including the use of smiles, and ultimately a dyad's shared experience. In the second part of this work, I explore how judgments receivers make about senders in one context influence their interpretation of the same senders in a new setting. I ask, for example, how the presence of different types of social cues shape receiver judgments and the extent to which these serve as useful and valid cues to future sender behaviour. Findings show that when receivers make judgments about senders in a naturalistic context, these judgments do not enhance their ability to decode senders' behaviour in a new setting. However, senders do signal some traits honestly, e.g., trustworthiness, and these traits induce biases in receiver interpretations. Specifically, senders' affective cues appear to bias receiver ratings such that expressions of positive affect induce more positive ratings for high trustworthy senders (although not for those merely rated as high trustworthy), and vice versa for low trustworthy senders. Finally, I ask whether a sender's prior beliefs about a receiver's behaviour can influence that receiver's behaviour in a specifically predictable way. I did this in the context of three "experimenter effects" studies. The results of this work show that experimenters unwittingly serve as stimuli in the experiments that they conduct, and can elicit specific behavioural patterns in their participants.

This research project began with the aim of assessing the impact of contemporary British feminist book publishing upon female readers. While it is important for women to have access to 'positive images' of themselves, readership is dependent upon factors beyond textual representation. The first part of this work challenges the text-bound assumptions about reading. The preoccupation with textual meaning which besets most forms of literary criticism, including the sociology of literature and feminist criticism, ignores the social construction of reading. The second part examines the way the book trade orders literary relations. Most of the material for this section comes from interviews with women working in various sectors of the feminist book world. While feminist publishing has managed to enter the mainstream to a degree and has attempted to redefine the relations between readers, writers and literary institutions, its future is uncertain in view of the increasing concentration of ownership in the book trade. The third part of this study draws on interviews with three groups of women discussing their reading. The group of schoolgirls were learning a literacy of differentiation which divided them along gender, class and ethnic lines. The group of women in Further Education were resisting a literacy of alienation which presented literacy as a series of discrete skills. Because the literacy that the group of feminist readers was developing empowers the individual to remake links between the personal and the political, I call this feminist literacy. To thrive, feminist literacy needs to go beyond personal identification and continue to participate in a larger feminist cultural and political project.