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This practice-based project investigates modalities of performing eco-aesthetic assemblages across the modern nature―culture divide. Assemblages are here understood as non-hierarchical associations between bodies that are different amongst themselves. I argue that eco-aesthetic practices that work towards naturalcultural assemblages contribute to the wider field of ecological thought and cultural understanding of the nonhuman environment or nature. The research uses a transversal practico-theoretical approach that, following posthumanist and neomaterialist elaborations of ontology and epistemology, creates a ‘material-discursive entanglement’ (Barad, 2007) of bodies and concepts. In this posthuman continuum of practice, I argue that eco-aesthetics is an ethico-political disposition of fostering relations of accountability and responsibility with the bodies implicated in performance, especially the nonhumans understood to be minorities in the current politico-economic organisation. The research is situated within the landscape of modern biopolitics, which is understood as a set of conceptual and material strategies of appropriation of life through the ‘logic of colonisation’ (Plumwood, 1993). Situated naturalcultural performances enact a different modality of ‘intra-action’ (Barad, 2007) with the world, by creating and maintaining fields in which life is seen as a force of generative difference. The dissertation is divided in three parts which correspond to three entangled modes of performing research. The first part is a critical ontology which individuates operative modalities of modern boundary-making techniques. This part also outlines an alternative landscape of art and philosophy which go beyond binary thinking. The second part, through a posthumanist reconfiguration of the concept of assemblage from Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, and apparatus, in the work of Michel Foucault and Karen Barad, shapes an analytics for locating possibilities of material-discursive reconfiguration of the existing power relations. The third part follows the narrative of my artistic projects that sought to create naturalcultural performances with plants, trees, molecules of carbon-dioxide, sheep, and earth. This material-discursive entanglement of critique, analytics and performance as artistic practice together shapes a posthuman ecological praxis that is oriented towards naturalcultural justice.

Studies of identity constitute one of the most dynamic areas of sociological inquiry. In the light of global changes - economic, political and cultural - the overall structure of social and personal identifications is under a constant process of reconstruction. 'Becoming a Citizen of the World' is a research project designed to explore how identities change, especially in circumstances of transnational mobility, and to engage with theoretical discussions on cosmopolitanism. The inquiry is based on the analysis of 25 autobiographical narrative interviews with transnational individuals. The process of analysis employs three different analytical models - the formal structural analysis of Schutze, the narrative ethnography of Gubrium and Holstein, and the fuzzy set analysis of Ragin. The overall research process focuses on two main strands of the academic discussion: theoretical, dealing with transnationality and identity; and methodological, exploring innovative analytical approaches to biographical data. The investigation of cosmopolitan ism focuses on biographical dispositions, perceptions of mobility and identity adjustments. It considers biographical elements that constitute empirical indicators for cosmopolitan ism and the idea that cosmopolitan ism is an outcome of the reconstruction of overall identity configurations. The methodological discussion examines the differences between analytical models - allowing for a systematic exploration of the different levels of transnational biographical experience, including meaning-making, transnational practices and emotional attachments, which add up to the formation of identifications beyond the nation state. It engages with the issues of validity, generalisation and dissemination of biographical research, and contributes to the discussion concerning methodological cosmopolitanism. The multi-dimensional findings suggest that autobiographical narrative data offer fascinating insights into identity formation processes and that the data can be analysed most effectively through a combination of complementary analytical models, each of which provides a unique perspective on the subjective experiences of transnational individuals.

This thesis extrapolates from a six year area study of delinquency and victimisation among Pakistani, Bangladeshi and white young people in the North of England. In focusing on inter-ethnic violence between Asian and white adolescents and young adults in a specific locality, the study was struck by both the normality of violence in everyday life and its racialisation. Racial violence occurs when young people come into contact at the symbolic boundaries which surround 'colour coded' territories. These boundaries and territories shift and change as a result of attempts by different ethnic groups - white and Asian - to establish, defend and extend their neighbourhoods. As a result of these processes of attempting to create safe areas through the control of territory and public space, racial violence in the area declined, in the context of an unfolding story of Asian vigilante activity to defend Asian areas against incursions by white racists. The unintended consequence however, was that areas were further racialised, and social and racial segregation between ethnic groups was compounded. Young people, in achieving a modicum of community safety on the basis of an agreed racialisation of public space, reinforced and confirmed local forms of racism. Finally, because of Asian defence of their areas, racial violence became constructed as something which mainly happens to white young people. These and other findings, problematised accepted policy and academic understandings and definitions of racism and racial violence. An alternative theoretical framework for interpreting the empirical data offered ways of conceptualising racial violence that emphasised its specificity within and between different ways of conceptualising racial violence that emphasised its specificity within and between different British localities. Indeed, much of the empirical data points to the need to understand racisms in their specificity and locality rather than in terms of a monolithic understanding of 'racism' which reduces all different 'race' encounters to instances of a general and ubiquitous racism.

This is a claim, articulated by sections of the members of the Scottish press and the political elite, that racism does not exist in Scotland. The aim of this thesis is to draw on documentary evidence and secondary sources in order to demonstrate the myth of 'racial' tolerance in Scotland. Through developing a materialist and empirical method of investigation, which recognises how racialised discourses can articulate with discourses of the nation, a historical and comparative analysis was carried out. Secondary sources and existing research were used to examine the history of racialised discourses during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The examination of the substance of postwar racialised discourses involved the content analysis for Scottish newspapers and their coverage of several key events was examined (the 1958 'race riots', the 1968 Kenyan Asian crisis, and the 1980s 'race riots'). The results were compared with existing research on the English press. Overall, this demonstrated that there were continuities and discontinuities in the substance of racialised discourses. Continuities in the sense that the substance of racialised discourses in Scotland and England are very similar. This stems from the fact that both Scotland and England are bound together within the common space of the nation-state. By discontinuities, I refer to the fact that there are subtle differences in the expression of racialised discourses. In Scotland's case, the major discontinuity is the myth of 'racial' tolerance. This discontinuity stems from the fact that the British nation state still contains a distinct Scottish national identity as well as a broader English/British identity. Racialised discourses have articulated with different national identities, leading to subtle differences in the expression of racism. In the Scottish case, it includes the myth of 'racial' tolerance. However, through drawing on secondary sources, evidence will be provided that contradicts this myth.

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No description available.

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