This thesis examines the incorporation of human cremated remains into objects and tattoos in a range of contemporary practices in British society. Referred to collectively in this study as ‘ashes creations’, the practices explored in this research include human cremation ashes irreversibly incorporated or transformed into: jewellery, glassware, diamonds, paintings, tattoos, vinyl records, photograph frames, pottery, and mosaics. This research critically analyses the commissioning, production, and the lived experience of the incorporation of human cremation ashes into objects and tattoos from the perspective of two groups of people who participate in these practices: people who have commissioned an ashes creations incorporating the cremation ashes of a loved one and people who make or sell ashes creations. This qualitative study begins by exploring processes of commissioning; it argues that ashes creations are practices concerned with commissioners’ desires to maintain spatial proximities and an intimate relatedness with their deceased loved ones. The thesis moves on to explore the making of ashes creations, tracing how conceptual and physical boundaries are transcended as creative materials and cremation ashes irreversibly intermingle. The ashes creations that emerge from these processes perform as subjects and objects as they are experienced as loved ones and beloved things. Concluding with an exploration of how ashes creations are lived with in participants’ ongoing lives, this thesis considers the ways in which intimate relatedness is enacted through performances of presence. These performances are characterised by notions of loved ones returning as the deceased continues to participate in the lives of the living. What emerges, across the materially disparate practices of ashes creations, are recurring narratives of relationality, uniqueness, and presence. As cremation ashes are increasingly being located away from landscapes traditionally associated with death and towards the spatial domains of the living, this study contributes to our understanding of the personalised practices that people engage in with cremation ashes.

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Betting markets have been of great interest to researchers as they represent a simpler set-up of financial markets. With an estimated Gross Gambling Revenue of 45bn yearly on betting on outcomes alone (excluding other gambling markets such as Casino, Poker and Lottery), these markets deserve attention on their own merit. This thesis provides simple mathematical derivation of a number of key statements in setting odds. It estimates the expected bookmaker profit as a function of wagers placed and bookmaker margin. Moreover it shows that odds set by bookmakers should have implied probabilities that add up to at least one. Bookmakers do not require the exact probability of an outcome to have positive expected profits. They can increase profitability by having more accurate odds and offering more multiples/accumulators. Bookmakers can lower variation in payouts by maintaining the ratio of wagers and implied probability per outcome. While bookmakers face significant regulatory pressures as well as increased taxes and levies, there is no standard industry model that can be applied to evaluate the minimum reserves for a bookmaker. Hence a bookmaker may be under/over-reserving funds required to conduct business. A solvency regime for bookmakers is presented in this work. Furthermore a model is proposed to forecast soccer results – this focuses on goal differences in contrast to traditional models that predict outcome or goals scored per team. Significant investigations are made on the inefficiencies of betting markets. The likelihood of Brazil reaching different stages of the 2014 World Cup, as perceived by odds, is compared to events on and outside the pitch to imply bias. An analysis of over 136,000 odds for European soccer matches shows evidence of the longshot bias. Finally this work investigates how it is possible to profit from market inefficiencies on betting exchanges during short tournaments by using a Monte Carlo simulation method as a quasi-arbitrage model.

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This thesis is concerned with the prosocial effects and social psychological pleasures of computer game play. It argues that much of the research on this area has focused on the search for negative effects, ignoring possibilities of the positive. Based on both email and face to face interviews with players of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the thesis considers their testimony alongside Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to reveal numerous benefits that engagement with the computer game may bring. These benefits include not only the prosocial - the strengthening of relationships within families and between friends - but also the more deeply psychological, helping to satisfy needs for development and growth. The thesis argues that such findings not only reveal a great deal about those studied but are also suggestive in relation to the wider computer game audience. Furthermore, such findings draw attention to the fact that if the computer game - a cultural form becoming ever more ubiquitous - is to be understood in its entirety, then there is a need for further research on its prosocial and positive psychological effects. Finally, the thesis critically demonstrates the value of Maslow’s theory for Computer Game Studies and offers a methodology through which future research may be undertaken.

This thesis looks at the ways in which techno-scientific modes of seeing, classifying and meas-uring the earth are reformulating territorial disputes in areas of resource extraction. It will start by arguing that, due to the mobilisation of science by capital, the earth is being reduced to discrete components, converted into resources and potentials for extraction. The idea of the underground frontier will be presented as the extreme case of this condition: no longer simply the space where resources are located, the underground is itself being converted into a resource. Discussing a series of disputes over resource extraction, it will focus, in particular, on the spatial and political assemblages of which technoscience is a part: how it is mobilised, used, financed, and how it becomes part of wider political, cultural or legal claims. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in the Atacama Desert in Chile, this thesis will travel to the Niger Delta in Nigeria, home to the world’s most extensive case of oil contamination, and the Ori¬noco Oil Belt in Venezuela, an object of dispute between multiple global interests. Together with the Atacama, the study of these cases constitutes the three main chapters of the thesis, in each of which will be traced the expansion of the frontier deep into the underground, as I identify what political imaginations emerge from the frontier, and the ways in which these imaginations have been co-determined by technosciences. Finally, the argument developed here will be that technoscience has become a privileged field through which one interrogates and speaks about the earth, and, therefore, the field through which, or in alliance with which, every political claim in the underground frontier needs to constitute itself.

This thesis examines the politics of popular music and youth culture in two geographically close but socioculturally distinct Indian Ocean islands: Réunion (a French overseas département) and Mauritius (independent from Britain since 1968). Neither island has an indigenous, pre-colonial population: the respective societies have thus formed through successive waves of immigration, including the importation of slaves and indentured workers from Madagascar, Africa, and Asia, resulting in extremely ethnically diverse populations, on both a communal and individual level. The island societies both began the twentieth century as sugar-producing plantation colonies, but by the beginning of the twenty-first century, their socioeconomic landscapes had been dramatically transformed: independent Mauritius was proclaimed as an ‘African tiger’ thanks to astute state management of limited resources, and Réunion became a French département d’outre-mer, with living standards now similar to those of metropolitan France. Although both island societies experienced dramatic and rapid transformation, however, modern-day Réunion and Mauritius have come to represent opposing postcolonial experiences. This has resulted in the adoption of opposing approaches to the question of ethnic and racial difference: whereas the Mauritian Constitution officially acknowledges the existence of ethnoreligious ‘communities’, ethnic difference is not officially recognised in Réunion due to colour-blind French Republican policy. The following analysis seeks to show that the study of contemporary popular culture can provide particular insights into the workings of these two creolised, postcolonial societies. Considered here principally through the lens of popular music and youth culture, it will be argued that contemporary Réunionese and Mauritian popular music and youth cultures engage with political and social issues specific to each context. This is discussed in Part II in relation to Kreol language politics, which shows that popular music can be said to work towards changing mentalities still influenced by colonial language prejudices; and in Part III as concerns popular culture’s engagement with discourses of inclusion and exclusion within the national community.

This practice-based thesis explores the relationship between tourism, art and everyday life. Centred on the touristic spaces and settings of the British seaside town of Bournemouth the project explores how living in a tourist resort can facilitate transitory creativities, through which new modes of thinking and being can be developed. It also focuses on the blurring of tourism and everyday life, and more specifically, as the project develops, the conflation of work and leisure in neoliberal society. I argue that the blurring of work and leisure produces pseudo-individualised creativities that mask power and property relations to the extent that it becomes hard to negotiate ontological authenticity. In this direction, I suggest that it is not the closing of the gap between work and leisure that is the 'problem' with everyday life but our lack of capacity to govern how this pseudo-emancipatory relaxing of boundaries structures itself in the lifeworld. Though practice-based research methods, the project explores the notion of 'everyday tourism' as a methodology for developing a praxis of everyday production that attempts, not only to 'make visible' the ambiguities and paradoxes of leisure and tourism, but also, in bringing tourism and art to the centre of everyday life, works in opposition to neoliberal modes of work and leisure and their appropriation of creativity and other subjective and affective productive forces. This thesis asserts the notion and art practice of 'everyday tourism', which triangulates art, tourism and everyday life, not simply as the development of more tourist-like relations within life-world but also as new emergent field of practice involving strategies or tactics for defamiliarising the familiar, to disrupt dominant representations and habitual ways of being. In borrowing from the performances and performativities of art and tourism practices, I argue that we must develop an attentive ethics of practice if we are to reclaim everyday life from its occupation by the aggressive forces of neoliberalism. The thesis also suggests that the notion of 'everyday tourism', in its acknowledgement of emergence, contingency, transience, useless expenditure and our place in networks of affective forces and non-cognitive relations, becomes a means of liberating the self or moving beyond subjectivity and the habitual in order to go permanently 'on tour', in a world forever unfolding and never finished. 'Everyday tourism' thus becomes a means of envisioning alternative ways of being and seeing – of imagining possible futures and entertaining the idea of flux and change, of seeing difference in de-differentiation, of seeing through the eyes of the 'alien' other, in order to see beyond the alienating same. In this direction, 'everyday tourism' is intended as a strategy for moving beyond our current period of neoliberal, technocratic 'democracy' often referred to as 'the end of history'.

The purpose of this thesis is, firstly, to enquire into the functional aspect of the social dance in society, and, secondly, within this general framework, to explore the particular hypothesis that variations in the social dance are never fortuitous or random, but are always intimately related to the social structure of society. The study falls into two parts. Part I opens with a brief mention of what might be called the 'structural/functionalist' framework within which the enquiry is couched. This is followed by a background chapter on the nature and origin of dance, and its significance in primitive society. The major part of the study comprises a detailed historical analysis of the social dance in England from the 13th century to the present day, drawing, wherever possible, on contemporary literary and historical material. For each century, or in certain cases subdivisions thereof, the nature of social dancing has been looked at in the light of the dominant sociological and social features of society at that time. In this way it has been possible to show, firstly, that although dancing in peasant and modern society is of much less significance than in primitive society, it does nevertheless have a functional aspect over the period in question. Secondly, it has been possible to correlate changes in the nature of social dancing with changes, inter alia, in social stratification, in relationships between the sexes, in industrialisation and technology, in social attitudes, and with various kinds of culture diffusion. The major hypothesis on which the study is based has thus. been validated, theoretically, and a case made out that the 'social dance' should be regarded as a significant part of the total culture pattern of society. Part II consists of a sociological survey of young peoples? attitudes and habits with relation to dancing, in which particular emphasis is given to contemporary 'teenage' solo dancing to 'beat' music. The data thrown up by this piece of empirical research are used to substantiate where appropriate the theories and hypotheses set out in Part I. Specifically, some weight is lent to the theory that there is a basic similarity between 'modern beat1 dancing and primitive dance. Generally, in so far as the explanation of the teenage dance phenomenon is to be found along the lines of a 'youth cult' rebelling against adult values and attitudes, it can be said that the findings of the survey tend to corroborate the idea that the social dance is functional, and closely related to the other institutions of society.