The relationship of women to gambling is explored, placing it in its historical, legal and social context. An account of the gambler as a person is presented with reference to the various theories on why it is that people gamble at all and on occasions to their own destruction. An analysis of the existing sources of data draws attention to the invisibility of women when they move within a traditionally male domain and the prejudices they encounter when they try to join the male gambling group. Theories of gambling are then re-examined from a gender perspective, focusing on the way that women differ emotionally and economically from men and from each other. A series of assumptions is placed under scrutiny; i.e. that women take fewer risks in their lives and prefer harmony to competition; that women in general prefer less isolated experiences of gambling and shun the potential loss inevitable in this experience. The analysis embraces those women who gamble in supportive groups and those who become more isolated as their gambling develops a pathological tinge, together with women who manage to combine both forms of activity. Gambling activity is surveyed in the context of an established setting into which adult women must physically enter in order to play, that is; the dog or horse track; the casino; the bingo hall; the bookmakers. The high participation rate of women in bingo playing leads to a reassessment of women's propensity to gamble when social economic and psychological barriers are minimised. The thesis concludes with the view that it is the traditional “hidden from history" phenomena that operate to keep the participation of women in gambling activities a social secret and acknowledges the political and policy implications for women if attention is drawn to their involvement.

This thesis explores the relationship between contemporary theatre practices and conceptions of citizenship. It examines currently dominant notions of citizenship and their historical background. It then goes on to identify their implications for performance practices. In particular, it explores the implications for practice of ideas of citizenship which rely on the existing institutions of liberal democracies or universal human rights. The context of this investigation is provided by current scientific and technological developments, the phenomena of globalisation, international relations and emerging understanding of the changes in global environmental conditions. Throughout the work, I examine interactions between this context, theoretical ideas of citizenship and everyday practices. Set within this context, I develop a theory of citizenship of relevance to the practice of theatre in educational and community contexts. My theory is developed through an analysis of practice in its spatial and temporal dimensions via a series of contemporary and historical examples. I do not attempt a comprehensive survey but include a diverse range of performance forms. I juxtapose case studies of activity observed in the last decade, predominantly in the UK but with international connections, with relevant examples from twentieth century community, educational or politically engaged theatre. This approach which combines historical with geographical analysis is used to construct an argument that the aesthetics and politics of applied theatre must be grounded in time and place. I also argue that citizenship, in this context, can be best understood in terms of its practices rather than its institutions or universal rights. Through critical attention to the territorial, linguistic and institutional premises of my examples, I show that any conception of citizenship underpinning applied theatre practices should recognise the limitations of liberalism and the paradoxes inherent in ideas of democracy.

The embodiment of women with learning disabilities has been absent from mainstream psychology research on body image and feminist literature on women's experiences of their body. In addition, the learning disability field has historically viewed men and women as genderless 'people' and 'individuals', and only recently have their subjective and gendered experiences been sought and voiced. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to explore how nine women with learning disabilities experienced their body, and discourse analysis was used to explore the interpretative repertoires they drew on in relation to their bodies. The IPA suggested that participants experienced their body as functional and fallible, they were interested in beauty regimes and appearance, were concerned about fatness and weight loss, and experienced rules and regulations with regard to their sexuality. The discourse analysis focused on the involvement of staff and parents in relation to participants' bodies, where participants drew on guardianship, commentator/critic and facilitation repertoires. The analyses are discussed in relation to the literature and a number of implications for services and clinical practice suggested.

Global tourism is one of the world's largest industries, employing some 238 million people, generating over 10% of the world GDP, an annual growth rate of 4% and revenues expected to grow to $12 trillion by 2016. This important industry is an intensely competitive marketplace and, most importantly, characterised by an increasing difficulty in achieving differentiation. This, in turn, exacerbates the level of competition and limits viable response strategies. To cope with the increasing dynamism of the industry with particular reference to competitive intensity, fragmentation and differentiation, different augmentations of product/service bundles and strategies have been proffered. Prominently, the utilisation of co-marketing in parallel or in lieu of competition is increasingly prevalent, significant, and successful in product marketing. More recently, and to a lesser extent, it has been applied to domestic tourism marketing. Accordingly, this research is focused on pan country national level tourism collaborations and most specifically on developing a set of indicative selection criteria for country partners which reflect both marketing and organisational considerations and implications. Using a methods triangulation approach and building on theoretic corpus developed from marketing, organisational and behaviour literature, data collection involved the use of both questionnaire and in-depth interview methods. The questionnaire administration' was based on discretionary sample, selected from premier tourism events such as the international tourism trade exhibitions. Analyses of responses provided the basis for a series of subsequent personal interviews with strategic decision makers for national tourism such as tourism industry leaders and Ministers of Tourism of selected countries. On the basis of the intergrative findings from this research, a set of evaluative criteria for collaborative partner selection was developed. This set of criteria provides a template to evaluate potential collaborative partners reflecting both a spectrum of marketing considerations and organisational and behavioural perspectives . The criteria facilitates the design and selection of a co-marketing collaboration which provides a diverse, new and innovative basis for successful differentiation. The research reveals that arguments beyond purely rational decision making have a significant impact on collaborative decisions. Most specifically, political and vestiges of heritage based considerations were significant, prominent and prevalent. Similarly, the perception of which countries are competitors was often based on parochial perspectives. Thus, research substantiates the viability and efficacy of comarketing with the correct partner and its ability to create unique opportunities for marketing differentiations in an increasingly competitive and homogenious market place. However, there are some important caveats. While the benefits of collaboration are both established and significant, ambivalence and constraints based on subjective considerations are prevalent.

What determines technology capabilities and catch-up of countries? Why do the patterns, speed and performance of innovation differ across countries? This thesis seeks to address these questions by linking institutional, organisational and sectoral features of innovation in Korea and Japan which are regarded as the most successful cases of technology catchup. Despite the widespread recognition that innovators are susceptible to institutional conditions and contextual influences, previous empirical studies have not used contextual factors as determinants of innovation. On the other hand, institutional analysis of innovation has addressed national diversity and historical patterns of change based on thick description and qualitative evidence. This thesis provides a new way of explaining the underlying of dynamics of innovation by empirically examining direct correlations between country-specific institutional characteristics and technology capabilities and by testing causal relationships between technology input and output. This thesis employs the national innovation system (NIS) and the late industrialiser perspectives to perform three sets of empirical analyses. The first indentifies key institutional and policy determinants of national technology capabilities based on five sets of cross-sectional data, consisting of 37 high-income countries and 32 middle-income countries. The second examines specific institutional conditions for causal relationships between technology input and output based on time-series data of Korea and Japan. The third investigates technological catchup occurrence, speed and performance to indentify productivity and technology gaps as well as delaying and contributing factors. The findings of the thesis have significant relevance to innovation strategy and policy of other catching-up countries in the process of building indigenous technology capabilities.

This thesis uses specific crises and problems of radical institutional critique which have arisen over the last decade, as the starting point for an investigation of what is unconscious for academic labour. My central focus is on the failures of 'enculturalist' critiques of academic knowledge. These critiques advocate forms of epistemological progressivism, in which discrete disciplines are redefined as knowledge practices situated within social and cultural fields. In this regard, my central research question is 'why doesn't epistemological progressivism progress?' Enculturalism has proposed that the decentralisation of disciplinary knowledge will produce an interdisciplinary outcome which, in turn, will result in more culturally situated knowledge. It describes academic disciplines as regimes of knowledge, and itself as a form of resistance to these regimes. This resistance purportedly mediates between the university and the unconscious, elided subject of cultural practice. Against enculturalism, I claim that its failures and crises disclose what is unconscious for what Jacques Lacan has termed the 'discourse of the university'. This unconscious can be defined by the 'determinate absence' of the fallacious fantasy of plenitude intrinsic to academia, within the circulation of commodities. This absence is determinate insofar as the fantasy of plenitude is itself produced from the reduction of academic reason within commodity exchange. The fantasy of plenitude is, I claim, the site where the future of academia is currently being fought out. Enculturation itself then becomes the subject of critiques in which 'competing universalisms' struggle over the membra disjecta of the academic subject. My investigation of 'enculturation and its critiques' as a single problematic, has required the development of specific analytical techniques. My core methodology in this thesis employs a form of negation as just such an analytical tool. The 'specific impossibility' of knowledge as mastery and agency in psychoanalysis, is used as a means to identify those points of fracture at which an academic 'reflection on culture' fails to become an 'encultured' academic reflection. Psychoanalysis is not employed as one element of an interdisciplinary dialogue, but as a form of knowledge which is incommensurable with academic thought, and which can, for that very reason, be used to define criteria for what is unconscious for that form of thought, rather than what is unconscious 'within' it. The thesis begins with an investigation of how the notion of an 'epistemic unconscious' has been deployed by both enculturation and its critiques. It then goes on to investigate the struggles of competing universalisms in The Sokal Affair', in which an American scientist hoaxed the cultural studies journal Social Text in 1996. This account of the failures of enculturalist epistemology is followed by a more ambitious attempt, in Section Three, to model a work of institutional critique in which the institution appears as a point of incompletion or absence within the terms of its critique. In the light of my central research question as to why epistemological progressivism does not progress, I claim that a critique 'in the institution's absence' can not only answer this question for the self-reflexive subject of academic knowledge, but can also isolate the point at which enculturalist universalism will necessarily fail. This model is advanced with reference to work which I have done with an 'enculturalist' fraction of academic archaeology.

This thesis aims to reconstruct, through the analysis of the 1946 volume of the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, the influence exerted by the studies of Warburg tradition on Italian culture of the forties and fillies. The volume in fact, having been entirely written by Italian intellectuals, is not only a precious example of the revival of international collaboration immediately after the war, but also a significant cross-section of the Italian cultural life during the forties. The study of the essays collected in the volume along with extensive archival research on the relationship between the authors and the scholars of the Warburg Institute, led to an important conclusion. The Italian intellectuals who sought to oppose Benedetto Croce's dominant aesthetic theories, looked at the work of Aby Warburg and his circle with great interest, seeing in it an important example of a new historical and multidisciplinary method.

Zouglou is a popular music style of Cote d'Ivoire that is identified primarily through its outspoken lyrics of social comment and its dance with angular arm movements. It was born into a time of social upheaval in the country in the early 1990s, when students and professors were at the forefront of a movement demanding political pluralism: Today, Zouglou has also become Cote d'Ivoire's internationally most successful music. This thesis provides a detailed history of Zouglou's development from the university residence in Yopougon through the precarious neighbourhoods of Abidjan to its rise in international charts. It argues that the power of Zouglou music is located in a number of factors: as an urban music, Zouglou is not associated with any particular region or ethnic group; it is a supra-ethnic, national music which is of special significance at a time in Ivoirian history where political battles have divided the country into a northern and a southern half. As a new, urban musical form, Zouglou distinguishes itself through its use of Nouchi, the French street-slang spoken in Abidjan, and its use of very direct, outspoken texts, rather than of subtle, coded messages. It is well known that in many African cultures, musical performance is evaluated primarily through the song texts. Based on the idea that the strength of Zouglou music lies in its song texts, this thesis gives detailed analyses of their content. Zouglou's pervasive use of satirical humour has won it many listeners and great acclaim. Thus, Zouglou has in a real sense become street poetry, and its main themes criticise and comment on social problems. Zouglou is also known to criticise the behaviour of the political elite, and thus has gained a reputation as socially and political engaged music. Zouglou musicians have, through their songs, taken the initiative of public debate in the country, and have been considered as speaking in lieu of intellectuals, despite frequently being school drop-outs. In one of Zouglou's first recordings, its dance was described as a dancep hilosophique,a philosophical dance. Despite its intrinsically popular and mediated nature, Zouglou has, through its reflective song texts, remained true to this description, as this thesis demonstrates

Interactive technology has helped online gambling to become a more popular leisure time activity over the last decade. Alongside this development, new forms of Responsible Gaming tools such as voluntary limit setting and personalized feedback have been introduced. These interventions require a gambling environment with identified play such as online gambling and card-based land-based gambling. This thesis investigates the effects of personalized Responsible Gaming tools on subsequent gambling behaviour and also introduces a novel measure of monetary gambling involvement (i.e., 'theoretical loss'). Following reviews of the relevant literature and methodologies used, Studies 1 and 2 in Chapters 4 and 5 introduce the concept of theoretical loss, a monetary measure of gambling intensity. Study 1 utilised a simulation experiment and concluded that the theoretical loss is advantageous over bet-size with regard to measuring monetary involvement. Study 2 validated the results of Study 1 based on real-world gambling data from a large sample of 100,000 online players. Study 3 is also based on a sample of players from a real-world gambling environment and concluded that the setting of voluntary time and money limits lead to positive changes in gambling behaviour. It was also shown that the effect of time and money limits depended upon the types of games played. For instance, slot players benefited from money limits whereas poker players spent less money playing if they set time limits. Studies 4 and 5 investigated the effects of a pop-up message that appeared after 1,000 consecutive slot games. Both studies showed that only a minority of playing sessions lasted longer than 1,000 consecutive games. Study 4 compared the number of sessions that lasted 1,000 games before the pop-up was introduced with the number of sessions that lasted 1,000 games after the pop-up was introduced. Results demonstrated that the pop-up prompted a small minority of players to cease their playing session. Study 5 investigated a modified pop-up message that was formulated in a motivational way and contained normative information. Almost twice as many players ceased to play as a consequence of the enhanced pop-up message compared to the previous simple pop-up message. This led to the conclusion that the way a message is formulated is a crucial aspect of behavioural change. The hypothesis that self-appraisal messages and normative feedback have an effect on behavioural change was supported. In Study 6, players of an online gambling website who had voluntarily signed up to a behavioural feedback system (i.e., mentor) where subject to analysis. These players received elaborate visual and numerical information concerning the past six months of their gambling behaviour. The player front-end – which displayed various types of information (losses, types of games played, playing duration, etc.) – was in line with Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) principles. Results indicated that the personalized feedback system achieved the anticipated effect and that the time and money spent gambling was significantly reduced compared to that of the control group. The main results were also validated by additional analysis showing that the individual players reacted similarly with respect to time and money spent when provided with personalized feedback. The studies in this thesis demonstrate for the first time that voluntary limit setting, interactive pop-up messages, and personalized feedback can affect player behaviour positively in a real-world environment. The studies also demonstrate differences among subpopulations of players. It is almost impossible to uncover such insights in laboratory settings or with self-recollected information because a longer history of playing behaviour is necessary in order to extract player profiles. However, this thesis did not consider cognitive information as it was purely based on behavioural tracking data. Also, the data mostly came from one operator and players were not randomly assigned to experimental conditions. Consequently, future research should try to overcome these limitations and combine cognitive and behavioural data.

Since moving to Newcastle in 2009 to pursue our masters in music and art, Yilis del Carmen Suriel and myself noticed that there was a lack of cultural events designed and aimed to engage and highlight the diverse music and culture of the African and Caribbean Diaspora. We also noticed that there were a lot of local bands and musicians who performed and composed music from this community but did not share the same stage, perform together, or were even aware of each other’s existence. As musicians who love to collaborate and engage in musical activities we began creating concerts around our band, Hannabiell & Midnight Blue, and our duet, Ladies of Midnight Blue, aimed at bringing people from diverse backgrounds together. Our unique talent and skill is the ability to excite, enthuse, and create a collaborative force. We work in partnership with many other organizations and individuals, because we believe that partnerships result in stronger projects and direct action. All of our work is done through collaborative work, which is based around utilizing the resources, and strengths that already exist within the community and how we can identify them, honor them, and channel them to create new and innovative programing. The contents of this portfolio highlight and provide evidence of the longstanding rich program of events and activities that we have created and taken part of. It documents the process and ongoing development of my research in community building, audience development, networking and collaborating. It is organized chronologically from our most resent, Harambee Pasadia 2016, to some of our earliest, Roots Rhythms Double Bill in 2011.