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In partial response to the inability of intellectual property laws to adapt to data-sharing over computer networks, several initiatives have proposed techno-legal alternatives to encourage the free circulation and transformation of digital works. These alternatives have shaped part of contemporary digital culture for more than three decades and are today often associated with the "free culture" movement. The different strands of this movement are essentially derived from a narrower concept of software freedom developed in the nineteen-eighties, and which is enforced within free and open source software communities. This principle was the first significant effort to articulate a reusable techno-legal template to work around the limitations of intellectual property laws. It also offered a vision of network culture where community participation and sharing was structural. From alternate tools and workflow systems, artist-run servers, network publishing experiments, open date and design lobbies. cooperative and collaborative frameworks, but also novel copyright licensing used by both non-profit organisations and for-profit corporations, the impact on cultural production of practices developed in relation to the ideas of free and open source software has been both influential and broadly applied. However, if it is true that free and open source software has indeed succeeded in becoming a theoretical and practical model for the transformation of art and culture, the question remains at which ways it has provided such a model, how it has been effectively appropriated across different groups and contexts and in what ways these overlap or differ. Using the image of the sandbox, where code becomes a constituent device for different communities to experience varying ideologies and practices, this dissertation aims to map the consequent levels of divergence in interpreting and appropriating the free and open source techno-legal template. This thesis identifies the paradoxes, conflicts, and contradictions within free culture discourse. It explores the tensions between the wish to provide a theoretical universal definition of cultural freedom, and the disorderly reality of its practice and diffusion, appropriation, misunderstanding and miscommunication that together form the fabric of free culture. This dissertation argues that, even though feared, fought, and criticized, these issues are not signs of dysfunctionality but are instead the evidence of cultural diversity within free culture. This dissertation will also demonstrate that conflicts between and within these sandboxes create a democratic process that permits the constant transformation of the free and open source discourse, and is therefore something that should be embraced and neither resisted for substituted for a universal approach to cultural production.

The subjective aspect of urban experience, and urban imaginaries in particular, have not been addressed sufficiently in studies of children in the city. This thesis will address these imaginative and subjective issues as they play significant roles in the construction of children’s urban lives. By referring to a set of short fictional stories that were produced by children as part of a series of workshops titled ‘The Great Book of the City’, the thesis approaches the city as a book made of interweaved stories, and thereby contests the idea that the city is mainly constituted by physical structures. I contend that children make sense of the urban environment through stories, and argue that their narratives are the place where they project their urban imaginaries. Narratives are also a tool for understanding the particular ways in which children perceive, experience and imagine the city. In particular, I explore three childhood everyday practices: moving, playing and dwelling. First, I argue that to study the child in the city we must consider the two factors of social space: the objective element (the spatial framework within which children live) and the subjective element (the space as perceived and imagined by children). Secondly, I claim that the way children make sense of the urban environment is both reliant on their encounter with the social city and on their internalisation of the cultural constructions of childhood. Finally, I maintain that children’s experience of the city is partial and personal, since urban space is fragmented and subject to change, and because it involves children’s own bodies at the levels of perception, memory and agency. I conclude that the short fictional stories not only allow children to project their urban experience, but also to (re)construct, imagine and contest their material realities.

Since the 1970s, revisionist art historians have elaborated how Abstract Expressionism was exhibited abroad by the post-war US establishment in order to characterise the movement, especially on Clement Greenberg’s account, as an artistic correlate to United States’ post-war dominance and worldwide imposition of capitalism. However, in this thesis, drawing on the theoretical resources of Theodor W. Adorno and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that Greenberg’s criticism in fact indicates how Abstract Expressionism stakes a claim against the rule of exchange-value. I interrogate the still prevalent notion that a development which Greenberg would retrospectively identify as a shift from Trotskyism to art-for-art’s-sake in the New York art scene of the ‘30s and ‘40s resulted in a movement, Abstract Expressionism, which lent itself to co-optation by US imperialism. I show that Abstract Expressionism’s deployment in efforts of cultural imperialism was certainly informed by Greenberg’s positioning of it as the pinnacle of the European modernist lineage due to its determinate negation of non-medium-specific elements. However, taking cues from philosopher J.M. Bernstein’s Adornian account of Abstract Expressionism, I then contend that this determinate negation is at the same time the affirmation of particularity delegitimated by capitalism. I then take recourse to both Greenberg’s and the artists’ accounts of their praxis, to show that it entailed a dialectic of construction and mimesis whereby the latter is guided by that which it forms. I then elaborate how, contrary to predominate accounts of Greenberg’s criticism, he in fact indicates the way in which the artworks invite mimetic comportment on the part of spectators, and engage cognition in a manner inextricable from corporeality. I contend that, thus, rather than buttressing the reified pluralism of capitalism, Abstract Expressionism both condemns capitalism’s disregard for corporeal subjects and prefigures the possibility of reconciliation which capitalism debars.

This investigation analyses the relations uniting the long endurance of the Salazarist dictatorship in Portugal and the political processes of its cryptic violence. Departing from the differentiation between different types of violence, this thesis shows that structural violence was used intentionally by the regime within the limits of a spectrum of visibility, in an effort to create its own normalisation. This research examines the mechanism and manifestation of both direct and structural violence through a study of different filmic data. Film served as key propaganda medium for the regime, holding together the concealment of direct violence and generating structural violence. Undermining this authoritarian gesture, this enquiry further explores the device of visibility, intrinsic to filmic material, which challenges the Portuguese regime's politics of self-censorship. By articulating recent political theories and image philosophy with two films O Alar da Rede by Michel Giacometti, (1962) and 48 by Susana de Sousa Dias, (2012), this thesis reflects on the moment when a process of rendering visible exposes a form of resistance to violent hidden policies. With elaborated methods, both films manage to reinsert in the present, a violence from the past. The filmic paradigm described in this paper exposes original tools to fight a violence that was previously concealed within normative conundrums.

China’s economy continues to fascinate. For some time now, it has been the focus of a discourse centred on the nature and implications of the phenomenon of Chinese state capitalism. Much of the research on this phenomenon has highlighted the country’s industrial sector. However, another distinctive yet comparatively under-researched characteristic of contemporary Chinese state capitalism is its financial system. Although the basics of this system are widely understood, the specifics remain very much a black box. In what follows, I position Beijing’s financial centre as a scholarship void that that will provide grounded insights into this lacuna in our understanding of a particular aspect of state capitalism in China. In particular, this study focuses on the Beijing ‘Financial Street’ (jinrong jie; 金融界). Drawing on a strand of economic sociology that focuses on institutions, networks, social capital and culture, the financial centre is seen here as a setting supporting a central component of China’s model of economic model. This setting is characterised by a networked hierarchy of firms constitutive of the commanding heights of the country’s financial system. In turn, this networked hierarchy is shown to be embedded and configured according to larger, more elaborate networks inclusive of the party-state. It is argued that the organisational structure of Chinese state capitalism in the Financial Street takes the form of a political financial industrial complex, which differs from the popular image of financial centres as spaces of globalised capital flow. Financial centres are phenomena of our time. They are the organisations according to which the economic landscapes of capitalism are configured. Whilst what is written here may be read as an attempt to bring the financial centre back down to earth, to ground it in a sustained scientific inquiry, this thesis is also meant to fit into the broader field of multiple capitalisms research. As a focal point for state capitalism, studying the Beijing Financial Street can tell us how China’s particular brand of capitalism is being constructed. It provides a window into some of the mechanics of Chinese economic development. This is important for deepening our knowledge and understanding of the nature of capitalism in general.

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Traditionally, studies of popular music have focused on young people and youth cultures. This thesis builds on previous sociological research by exploring the salience, meaning and long-term social uses of popular music for people aged over thirty. The study employs an ethnographic approach to investigate the experiences of 'older' fans in northern and rare soul, rock, and electronic dance music 'scenes'. Methodologically, the research draws on participant observation, face-to-face and electronic interviews with over seventy fans, Web 2.0 data, and secondary sources. The thesis shows that using the internet in qualitative research can produce in-depth and rich data. The study demonstrates that music tastes are typically formed during a person's youth and then remain relatively stable through the life course. A central argument of this thesis is that long-term popular music consumption, and participation in scenes, is best understood as a thread of involvement. The thread of music involvement stresses the fluidity of cultural participation since popular music weaves through the life course with shifting meaning, engagement and experience. Moreover, the research illustrates a number of socia-cultural experiences of older fans such as: the importance of belonging, community, and friendship networks; gaining status and distinction through long-term involvement in popular music scenes; the changing nature of recreational drug-use during adulthood; the role of nostalgia; intergenerational transference of taste in the family; and the gendered nature of popular music consumption, which age adds particular significance to, as older women are often marginalised in popular music scenes. This thesis contributes to previous research by highlighting the significance of popular music for people aged over thirty. Case-studies of older fans of northern and rare soul, rock, and EDM demonstrate that popular music does not necessarily wane in importance as people grow older and that long-term involvement in popular music scenes can be a highly meaningful and salient feature of adult lives. In contrast to existing work, this thesis argues that leisure practices and popular music tastes that began during youth can be extended and re-worked in adulthood.

Moral rules are an important aspect of culture. Yet, to date no published scale exists to measure the endorsement of different moral codes. This thesis report the development of the CADS (Community, Autonomy and Divinity Scale), based on Shweder's (2003a; Shweder et aI., 1987) anthropological theory of moral codes, as a means to measure cross-cultural, sub-cultural, and individual differences in the contents of morality. Scale development, confirmatory factor analysis, convergent and discriminant validity are reported in Studies 1, 2, and 3, as well as analysis for structural invariance and meaningful differences across British and Brazilian cultural contexts. Findings suggest the CADS to be a reliable and valid scale, thereby enabling the cross-cultural quantitative study of similarities and differences in endorsement of moral codes. Following CADS' development, this thesis presents one experiment (Study 4) investigating the relationship between moral judgement and emotional reactions, suggesting that emotions act as mediators of the relationship between perceptions of moral code violations and moral judgement. Finally, Study 5 studies the power of the moral codes to predict honour concerns, and Study 6 replicates these findings, and most importantly, tests the CADS in six different cultural communities (Brazil, Japan, New Zealand, Spain, the UK, and the US). The variation of the moral codes endorsement across cultures, here operationally defined as nations, genders, and religious groups, is also investigated. Limitations of this work, as well as its theoretical and empirical implications for research in social psychology are discussed.