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This thesis examines the implementation of cultural diplomacy through the perspective of cultural policy in Taiwan (Republic of China). It elaborates how the policy-making and practice have progressed in response to the changes of Taiwan’s domestic cultural politics and foreign affairs, including its relations with China (People’s Republic of China). As an empirical study, the research focuses on Taiwan’s cultural policy in the timeframe of 1990-2014 and more specifically on the promotion of the performing arts. The research identifies three crucial elements of Taiwan’s cultural diplomacy. It complements traditional diplomacy, acts as an outlet in the process of cultural identity formation, and showcases cultural and creative industries. Each element is prioritised at different phases of policy practice. However, a long-term and continuous strategy is absent. The research reveals that Taiwan’s cultural diplomacy emphasises more on its self-presentation than creating mutuality. The unsettled issues of cultural identity have its profound influence on cultural diplomacy. Meanwhile, the projection of soft power is not necessarily reinforced by the market-driven policy orientation and the quantifiable policy objectives. The research also illustrates the interaction among the government, artists, and other actors from the private sector. The key finding indicates that the government is constrained by bureaucracy and its own contested political status. Civil society at the individual level participates in cultural diplomacy with a sense of enthusiasm, while corporations in general are less motivated. The research provides empirical evidence on communicating soft power through cultural diplomacy without much hard power. In this case, the promotion of soft power is limited and does not necessarily compensate for the deficiency of hard power.

This thesis is based on data collected during field research conducted in the Republic of Palau, western Micronesia, between March 2000 and July 2001. It is an ethnography of the Palauan people's interaction with the sea through fishing as well as that of their customary activities. The study considers cultural meanings observed in their fishing practices and its relation to the post-colonial Pacific sociality construed within the practice and discourse of 'custom', including the gift exchange and ritual gatherings. A unique aspect of contemporary Palauan fishing is that, although no longer their main source of subsistence, people continue to proclaim fishing's 'cultural' significance in mamtaining 'custom'. Taking this claim into consideration, the study examines closely fishermen' engagement with the marine environment as both an esoteric knowledge and a physical endeavour, in order to show how fishermen' individual experiences reproduce fishing's value as a traditional practice despite the modernisation of its techniques and equipment. Then it investigates fishermen' uses of fish as gifts and as food served at ritual gatherings in order to show how fishing practices and fish distribution present the 'unstructured structure' of custom. Overall, the thesis argues that the moral of fishing, concerning either ecological or social factors of the practice, is embodied through their practice of those customary activities, and so is the moral of their 'custom'. I conclude with a suggestion that both custom and fishing are reproduced with their social and cultural significance in contemporary Palau because together they present the reality of their moral and value of maintaining their kin- based sociality and create a meeting point between their nature and the culture.

Sport and its use to achieve social aims in programmatic interventions has gained increasing attention over the last ten years. My original contribution to knowledge is to demonstrate that the dynamics of power in sport for development and peace (SDP) are driven by a quest to record social reality. Critical accounts in SDP have only partially explained the dynamics of power at work in the sector. I use the perspective of Foucauldian governmentality, combined with an interpretative and qualitative methodology, to interrogate collected data through critical discourse analysis (CDA). This demonstrates, in a novel departure, that discursive alignments between corporate social responsibility initiatives and SDP non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are the constituents of the connections between macro and micro levels in the economy of SDP. These connections that change practice have been termed elsewhere a “technology of governmentality” (Hayhurst, 2011). I uniquely demonstrate that alignments are rationally justified on what I have termed here, a logical basis, which is in turn founded upon the results of microtechniques of monitoring & evaluation (M&E) of programme interventions in SDP. In a further unique contribution to knowledge I show that this requires the reconstruction of the meanings of time and space during the M&E process, temporally and spatially limiting wide arrays of human experience.

This thesis explores the interaction between domestic football and national politics during both the foundation and destruction of socialist Yugoslavia. It draws upon a wide variety of source material, including: a diverse sporting press; domestic histories and sociological investigations; photographs; monuments; and visits to important locations. Initially, it contends that the game was harnessed in the construction of a multi-ethnic socialist federation, based upon the all-encompassing ideology of 'brotherhood and unity' . The resultant integrative league structure, along with its ideologically acceptable participant clubs, was nevertheless exploited as a medium for the promotion of narrow ethnic identities by some of the game's suppliers. This phenomenon, which was present from the earliest days of socialist rule, arguably became acutely explosive and provocative during the 1980s as a result of two concurrent processes: Yugoslavia's deteriorating political and social situation, and the emergence of a distinct supporting subculture which borrowed heavily from analogous foreign trends. However, not all of the supporters' groups which emerged embraced chauvinist national politics, and the presence of significant counter-trends are also explored via the rich material of supplier dedicated sections of the sporting press. As a result of the direct military involvement of suppliers in the conflicts of the 1990s, certain pre-war incidents between rival groups have been mythologised as opening battles in Yugoslavia's demise; something which is explored and at least partially deconstructed. During the federation's dissolution, the game continued to be exploited in the construction of successor states based upon exclusive nationalisms. The political malleability of football, with clubs and their supporters embracing different conceptions of national and political ideologies during various historical periods, is illustrated by the evolving commemorative practices of the organisations in question. What is in many ways a preliminary investigation concludes by exploring the wide potential for future research in this field.

The following thesis represents research exploring the rhetoric of nationalism generated by the sporting arena in contemporary Spain and Catalonia. A sporting institution, FC Barcelona, is shown to have attained an almost mythical status as a symbol of regional identity where the stadium and club may be seen as a metaphor for the imagined nation. Support for the club is perceived as part of a broader movement of cultural resistance, maintained and re-invented through historical events, both real and imagined. The thesis represents an analysis, both empirical and theoretical, of the media through which football is disseminated, with a particular focus upon those narratives which serve to construct a sporting institution's elevated symbolic status in the nation's popular memory. Such an examination has enabled the extraction of themes that reflect regional and national identifies as well as national obsessions and invented traditions. Sport is understood as part of a broader cultural identity under transformation and the effects of post-modernism, post-nationalism and globalisation upon Catalanism as a whole. I shall focus upon three distinct periods since the Transition to Democracy that I feel illustrate perfectly these processes and effects. The three periods to be analysed in three different chapters are firstly; the early Transition to Democracy 1976; then 1992 when an increasingly autonomous Catalonia and successful FC Barcelona utilise sporting achievement and event hosting to locate the nation in a European and post-national context. And finally we consider the contemporary FC Barcelona and its context in a truly globalised setting. Each chapter begins with a degree of contextualisation and an explanation of the historical background to the period, followed by close readings of the text available in the newspaper at that time.

Unlike in previous phases of capitalism, the body now appears in every moment of the circuit of industrial capital. Developments within biotechnology are leading to the body becoming a core product of capitalism; it is at the frontier of commodification within consumer society. Existing accounts within bioethics are unable, or unwilling, fully to interrogate the implications of these developments. Thus, within a critical realist and Marxist framework and employing Marx, Baudrillard, Cohen and Polanyi among others, this thesis critiques biotechnological developments within late capitalism and the impact that these developments will have on embodied agency. It is argued that three producers operate on the body within consumer society: the producer proper, the society as producer and the individual as producer. The ultimate consequence of this is that, during moments of consumption proper of biotechnological commodities, individuals are simultaneously undertaking an act of production proper; they are producing a use-value, which blurs the boundaries between fictitious and real commodities and which, through a process of rationalisation, benefits society through enhancing the stock of human capital. Individuals materialise and internally consume aspects of capitalist human nature, which intensify and, potentially, petrify the processes of reification and alienation which occur in capitalist society.

Since its emergence in the early seventies, glam rock has been theoretically categorized as a moment in British popular culture in which essentialist ideas about male gendered identity in particular were rendered problematic for a popular music audience. In providing both a discursive reading of glam during the period 1971-1974 and new research on glam's influence on its male working-class fans, I argue that whilst this reading of glam is valid, insufficient attention has been given to an examination of the relevance of social mobility vis-ä-vis the construction of self-identity in relation to glam. My thesis is therefore concerned with raising questions about social class in addition to interrogating questions of gender. In undertaking a study of the ethno-biographies of a sample of glam's original working-class male fans, the thesis contends that glam's political significance is better understood as a moment in popular culture in which an educationally aspirant section of the male working class sought to express its difference by identifying with the self-conscious performance of a more feminized masculinity it located in glam. This rearticulation of masculinity, performed by an increasingly self reflexive subject, alive to the social and cultural upheavals of the period, was discursively represented as a modern development in contrast to the dominant representations of working-class masculinity - bound by tradition and community and thus essentialized as resolutely masculine - that had until that historical moment enjoyed hegemonic status. The thesis argues that the modem/unmodern dialectic at play here was replicated in glam's divergent artistic factions, which aligned themselves to competing aesthetic positions. In critiquing this process, the thesis engages with the work of Bourdieu (1993a, 2003,2007a) to raise questions about how this transition from unmodern to modern was affectively experienced by glam's male fans. The thesis concludes with an examination of glam rock's legacies in respect of more recent performances of masculinity by working-class young men seeking mobility. Finally, it draws on Skeggs' (2004) work to argue that class-based identities are always fixed by the more powerful other in order to be morally judged.

Language and the imagistic can be regarded as key figures of modern perception. The present thesis provides a comparative analysis of the role and development of both elements in 19th and early 20th-centljry German intellectual culture, focusing particularly on Walter Benjamin's philosophical reflections. The title of the thesis, 'Poetics of the Space Inbetween', recurs on Benjamin's physiognomic historiography and his simultaneous attempt of a culture critique. By using methods of modernity, the essential imagistic elements of the 17th to the 20th century are to be permeated in an intuitive way. The space in-between can be located between language and the imagistic. It can be regarded as offering a potential physiognomic knowledge of reality.' Here. one can detect the 'caesura', with the help of' which Benjamin intends to establish a historiography of modernity beyond a methodical integration of mythical elements. The starting point of the present doctorate is the assumption that in modernity one can perceive a turn from the linguistic as medium of knowledge and world experience towards the imagistic. The transition from rational knowledge of Enlightenment ideas through and within the medium of language towards an understanding of the world as imagistic phenomenon can be located in a space in-between. Within the analysed period, reason has lost its dominating significance. Instead, doubts occur regarding the project of Enlightenment. Consequently, new ways to grasp, represent and criticise reality have to be discovered. Central concepts in this context are, e.g., the modern experience, memory, individuation, secularisation and the role of concreteness. The topic to be considered is thus the form of process, 'Verlaufsformen', to use an expression of Benjamin, in which language crisis and the rise of imagery are expressed. Benjamin's work will be examined because his writings represent a conglomeration of fin-de-siecle's tendencies on the one hand and embody a very particular form of culture critique between strategy and immanence on the other. Regarding this, both his early works as well as his late works are of concern. Sources were, furthermore, found in the literary and theoretical works listed in Benjamin's record of his own reading as well as in his correspondences and references in his own texts. The process and development of the rising imagery and language crisis was followed by introducing first the philosophical and methodical background and approach. The second chapter explores the current phenomenon of 'Bildwissenschaft': Today, a growing scholarly body is concerned with visual studies, which is based on the so-called iconic turn that aims to describe the increasing use and perception' of images in modernity. The chapter gives a ' survey on the development, origins and problems of both a conceptualisation of images fr~m the 19th century up until today as well as of the newly founded discipline. Following thIS, the ~aradigmatic earlier writings of Erwin Panofsky and Aby Warburg are analysed in a narrative approach which focuses mainly on the history of the artistic idea and a critical Imagistic historiography. The question arising from this of an epistemological basis for the outlined inauguration of the imagistic into ways of grasping the world is then addressed through a reflection of the so-called 'Lebensphilosophie', philosophy of life. The analysis of the diverse approaches of Ludwig Klages, Henri Bergson and Walter Benjamin is follow~d by the introduction of Georg Simmel's concept of historical time which becomes relevant to Benjamin's idea of historiography. . The third chapter explores Benjamin's examination of New Kantianism through Hermann Cohen as well as the consequences resulting from this for Benjamin's own work. In this context, Cohen's posit of 'ethical aniconism' is regarded as central concept. Subsequently, the study follows Benjamin's methodical corollary of physiognomic critique within the area of language which acts according to the thesis that knowledge would, nevertheless, never be image-less. An essential way to understand Benjamin's methodical approach is the ensuing - closer analysis of quite d.iverse but influential concepts such as those formulated, e.g., by Immanuel Kant, early Romanticism,' Benjamin's correspondence with Florens Christian Rang, Jean Hering's concept of the idea, Leibniz's monade, H6lderlin, Carl Gustav Jochmann, Hermann Lotze, Heinz Werner's linguistic social physiognomy or Johann Wolfang Goethe's concept of truth. The fourth chapter is devoted to an application of Benjamin's methodology by means of considering 'apparent excesses', first in Baroque and later in the 19th and early 20th century. From Benjamin's treatment of the Baroque. mourning play up to his late writings, here, the history of human individuation can be retraced: In the course of secularisation, the manifestness of the world becomes substituted by imagistic elements. Relevant aspects of the changing perception of the world such as the contemporary phenomena of melancholy and later boredom - which are also based on imagistic elements - are thoroughly discussed from the point of view of cultural history. Apart from a close reading of Benjamins's conception, this includes reflections upon the writings of e.g. Baroque drama, Goethe, BaUdelaire, Hermann Bahr, Ernst Robert Curtius, the Historical Avantgarde, Karl L6with and the critique of Nietzsche, Franz Rosenzweig's concept of tragedy and Sigmund Freud. Modernity is not characterised by total secularisation, on the contrary: the element of myth comes to play an essential role. Therefore, the last. chapter of the thesis is devoted to this very phenomenon. The interpretation includes myth critique and theories of Benjamin's time as well as their relevance for Benjamin's last fragmentary works, in particular The Arcades Project. In this context, significant corresponding ideas like those of Erich Unger, Florens Christian Rang's critique of the modern dionysian, Freud's dream theory, .Surrealism, Benjamin's examination of Marxism, and ideas developed by Siegfried Giedeon and Valery are taken into account. Following from this, the chapter discusses Theodor W. Adorno's critique according to which Benjamin's late work has to be characterised as a 'mythologising of demythologising'; furthermore, Benjamin's introduction of such categories as the 'state of exc~ption' or the 'extreme' - among others according to Carl Schmitt - is c~allenged by the askIng the conclUding question, whether or notone could still establish a space in-between of knowledge in the face of imagistic tendencies in Benjamin's late work. Moreover, by fO~lowin.g Benjamin's late perspectives on concrete images, e.g. film, the crucial question is raIsed In which respect Benjamin's work might have distanced itself from an orientation ~owards Cohen's concept of ethical aniconism. The change from enigmatic images in anguage towards two-dimension, partly concrete images, the final chapter argues, corresponds not only with changing modalities of perception in modernity but with enJamln s present time by which he - as a matter of course - is not unaffected.

This study explores the locational choices and place meanings for birdwatching in an area of North West England using a qualitative methodology. Detailed, semi-structured interviews of 32 birdwatchers focus on-exploring individual points of view in order to secure rich descriptions of places and birdwatching. Participants were selected from direct appeal to members of three local birdwatching societies and using a 'snowball' technique using one contact to help recruit another contact. The study explores the variety of places that are used as locations for birdwatching. The study suggests there are complex motivations for birdwatching that are not related to birdwatcher type in the ways that existing published literature of recreation and place suggest. A complexity of meanings attributed to recreational locations is suggested by the data, with a spectrum of place use and place meaning including a variety of aesthetic, spiritual, intellectual and emotional motivations Many individuals attributed deep and significant meaning to the places they used whilst others saw places as simply locations where a particular bird was situated. From analysis ofthe data, a number of conclusions are drawn about birdwatching sites in terms of the importance of locations for birdwatching and how attitudes, feelings, meanings and attachment to places are related to the recreational activities associated with those places. These conclusions contribute to wider understandings of the links between places and recreational activity and will be of interest to those involved in recreation management and in the management of locations for recreation.