This research enquiry critically examines correspondences between participation in sport with the enhancement of social inclusion for young people classified as, or 'at-risk' of becoming, 'NEET' (Not in Education, Employment or Training). Whilst policy interventions to develop social inclusion within such populations often accentuate the accumulation of three forms of capital - namely human, social and positive psychological - existing literature highlights a paradoxical relationship in respect of sport being utilised in this educational manner. Consequently, some scholars suggest that participation in sport can contribute to enhanced social inclusion, whilst other contend that such participation merely produces conforming citizens who reinforce the values of the dominant neoliberal discourse. As a context to explore this paradox, the enquiry examines Sport for Change, a Comic Relief initiative, implemented within five boroughs in East London. As an emblematic exemplar of programmes designed to utilise sport in an instrumental manner to enhance social inclusion, this case presents clear potential for exploratory insights which may offer the basis for correspondences to emerge pertaining to programmes containing similar ambitions. Framed by a realist evaluative philosophy, the research consisted of semi-structured interviews conducted with 22 individuals who were associated with this specific iteration of Sport for Change. The research engaged people at various junctures of the implementation chain, most pertinently ten young males who participated at two of the sports clubs who were recipients of the intervention. The findings of this enquiry gleaned insights into the disconnected 'life-world' of young males who reside on urban residential estates, highlighting how membership of a sports club enables acceptance by a recognisable and legitimate social institution to be obtained, to initiate the process of social inclusion, and forge the trusting inter-personal relationships upon which human, social, and positive psychological capital can be developed. Consequently, the research enquiry argues that rather than the act of sports participation itself, it is these relationships, formed with club personnel who possess a community consciousness, that are critical to the enhancement of social inclusion in young people.

Grime is a Black British music genre originating from London in the early 2000s. Linked to inner-city street/road culture, it is a subaltern subculture that initially experienced criminalisation, racialisation and marginalisation through the media and music industries, politicians, legislation, policing – mainstream British society. This ethnographic project reclaims power from the mainstream marginalising gaze by enabling the scene's predominantly Black and White working class members to elucidate and direct Grime's narrative from its inception. The project uses Foucault’s (1997) definition of genealogy to interrogate Grime's emergence musically and subculturally. It uses Lena’s AgSIT (2012) genre model to examine Grime's development teleologically. Hall's (1978) 'Internal Colonies' and Baker's Black Public Sphere (1996) are used in conjunction to examine the significance of local (tangible) and cultural (intangible) influences on Grime and how these connect to African diasporic cultural and spiritual practice (Mbiti 1991). Scene directed narrative highlights subcultural understandings of British society, the world, universe and sublime. It interrogates communal and personal identifications, subcultural fan practices and affective investments, to draw out subversive or normative meaning making with respect to politics, religion/spirituality, race, class, gender and technological democratisation. Ethnographic data was captured through in-depth semi-structured interviews, participant observation (events and Twitter) and Musicological Discourse Analysis (sonic and lyrics), to enable the exploration of 21st century inner-city subaltern youth experience; independent from, and, in dialogue with wider British society. Thematic analysis was applied across all data collection methods. This enabled the triangulation of Grime subcultural experience through various vantage points. This project makes a scholarly contribution by creating a new narrative for Grime, identifying the substantive issues of music, ‘race’, religion/spirituality, subalternity and technological democratisation, in addition to developing theories for musical analysis and affective investment through music, culture and spirituality for the social sciences.

The relationship between 'bushcraft' and 'indigenous knowledge' is investigated through a historical review, an examination of ethnographic literature, fieldwork amongst bushcraft practitioners, and through original case studies. Fieldwork was carried out in Sweden, the USA, and the UK. Case studies of the Saami 'kuksa', the 'figure 4' deadfall trap, and making fire by friction are used to explore a number of themes in the contemporary bushcraft world: the role of skilled-practice, ethical values, notions of an individually experienced connection with nature, practice as a personal transformative experience, and as an intersubjective relationship between practitioner and craft engagement with the material affordances in the landscape. It is argued that motivations for practice foreground a relationship with an environmental experience that counters 'alienation' through the development of techniques required to spend un-insulated time in nature which counter modern Western technocratic lifestyles. Bushcraft destabilises apparently similar categories of activity, particularly tourism, outdoor adventure recreation and education, historical re-enactment and survivalism.

This is a sociological study of gender and sexualities in the context of professional dance in Scotland. Since the 19th century, dance became associated with women, femininity, male effeminacy and male homosexuality. Considering the cultural attachments dance has acquired, this thesis sets to explore the conditions that influence men’s involvement in dance; the ways that different spaces, processes and relations within dance institutions in Scotland influence the negotiations of gender and sexuality; and the ways that male dancers negotiate their practice of dance and the gendered attachments this has. The discussions that unfold in this thesis rely on interview and observation data. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 28 men professionally involved in the performance and/or production of dance in Scotland. Further, observation was conducted in four dance institutions in Scotland: Scottish Ballet, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and two small-scale, project-based contemporary dance companies which are in this thesis named as Kinesis and Chorotheatro. This study’s findings suggest that men’s involvement in dance is mainly influenced by their social location, familial background and parents’ involvement in, and familiarity with, cultural practices. These conditions affect the time, as well as ways, they will become introduced to dance. Further, this study’s findings suggest that precisely because of the attachments dance has acquired through time, dance institutions are experienced as safe spaces where male dancers can problematise gender norms and challenge heterosexual hegemony. Yet, as this thesis demonstrates, there are tensions as we move between ballet and contemporary dance, and as we shift our attention from onstage performances to backstage practices. Lastly, this study’s findings suggest that male dancers are likely to ‘normalise’ their involvement in this practice by emphasising dance’s conventionally masculine qualities.

The objective of this thesis is to establish meme theory as an analytical paradigm within the fields of screen and fan studies. Meme theory is an emerging framework founded upon the broad concept of a “meme”, a unit of culture that, if successful, proliferates among a given group of people. Created as a cultural analogue to genetics, memetics has developed into a cultural theory and, as the concept of memes is increasingly applied to online behaviours and activities, its relevance to the area of media studies materialises. The landscapes of media production and spectatorship are in constant fluctuation in response to rapid technological progress. The internet provides global citizens with unprecedented access to media texts (and their producers), information, and other individuals and collectives who share similar knowledge and interests. The unprecedented speed with (and extent to) which information and media content spread among individuals and communities warrants the consideration of a modern analytical paradigm that can accommodate and keep up with developments. Meme theory fills this gap as it is compatible with existing frameworks and offers researchers a new perspective on the factors driving the popularity and spread (or lack of popular engagement with) a given media text and its audience. Following overviews of meme theory and fan studies, this thesis synthesises methods from both fields to analyse one of this generation’s most notable televisual fan-texts, The Simpsons, and its fandom. The memetic analysis thereof, integrated with the works of fan theorists including John Fiske and Henry Jenkins, reveals the implications of the fan-text’s memetic content in the economic, cultural and social capital interests of its creators, distributors, and fans. The revelations credited to the memetic aspect of the analysis support the conjecture that it is a suitable analytical framework for the fields of fan and screen studies.

No description available.

Studies focussing on Europeanisation and in particular on the return to Europe of postcommunist states have come to the fore in political science research since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. The way in which many states of the former Eastern Bloc have engaged with European geopolitical power structures such as the European Union and Council of Europe has been well-documented. Europe is a contested construct and its boundaries are still subject to redefinition. This study examines issues of Europeanisation, national identity and nation branding through the lens of popular culture. In particular the role that events such as the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) play in illuminating the more salient issues of European identity politics has until recently been an area which has lacked scholarly attention. Although the volume of literature on the event is steadily increasing, there has to date, been no in-depth study conducted on a Former Soviet Republic. This study aims to fill this gap. This thesis comprises a case study of the role of the Eurovision Song Contest in Estonia and Ukraine. The empirical findings highlight the contested nature of the construction of national identities in the post-Soviet region and in particular, this study has drawn out some of the more salient aspects of identity politics. By exploring these issues through the prism of the Eurovision Song Contest, I argue that the event is significant in terms of nation branding and image building, particularly in the context of the return to Europe of post-communist countries. The Eurovision Song Contest is often an event which is dismissed as musically and culturally inferior. However, this study shows that different nation states attribute different meanings to the ESC and as such there is a need to go beyond the dominant (western) view of the contest in order to explore the diversity of issues that this event illuminates in wider socio-political debates in Europe today.

In the context of Italian colonialism, relations between the colonisers and the colonised have often been constructed and conducted through materialities (objects, things and artefacts) as means for the transmission, exchange and exercise of power. Practices of architecture, infrastructure and spoliation have then created and intensified systems of circulation connecting the metropole to the periphery. Along this axis the movement of materialities justified the colonial order within a capitalist system of production, trade, migration, communication and conquest. This dissertation interrogates the relationship between ‘materiality’ and ‘circulation’ as central categories of analysis that allow the evaluation of Italian colonialism as a historical event and the deciphering of the complexities of Italy’s post-colonial present. It offers an in-depth analysis of specific materialities that from the earlier phases of Italian colonisation in the Horn of Africa and Libya up to the post-colonial present have circulated between Italy and its colonies, tying the centre to the periphery. This thesis reveals that as a parallel to the movement of humans between the metropole and the colonies, between the Global North and the Global South, an ensemble of materialities – road infrastructure, an obelisk, anthropometric artefacts and skeletal remains - seem to be epistemologically crucial in describing power relations between the colonisers and the colonised in both the colonial and post-colonial epochs. Formerly instrumental for civilisational claims of Italian superiority in relation to native populations, since decolonisation these materialities have turned into objects of dispute, emblems of postcolonial identities and bargaining chips for posthumous justice for colonial violence and pillage. Within such a context, the discourse on memory and the elaboration of the colonial past together with the definition of new power relations and techniques of government over ‘others’ – migration policies, development and humanitarianism – constantly develop while revolving around those same materialities that, in the first place, served the purposes of the colonial mission.

This research investigates the phenomenon of violence through the lens of legitimised violence in ice hockey. The study locates ice hockey violence among the boundaries of criminality, where it is managed, organised and regulated outside of the criminal justice system. Here, violence is organised through an accepted code of conduct, widely understood and acknowledged by players, spectators and regulators. Violence is organised through the culture of hockey, situated in the spectacle of entertainment, the audience often displaying a carnivalesque thirst for violence. In sport, the criminological boundaries of violence are not set and enforced by criminal justice agencies; rather they are constructed, managed and mediated through the culture of the sport and an accepted code of behaviour. Reflecting on an extended ethnography of the culture of professional hockey, this thesis considers the ever-changing cultural climate of sanctioned violence in the sport. Through ethnographic observation and extensive visually-elicited interviews; cultural and social identity, motives of violent behaviour, and situated meanings of hockey players are uncovered in a manner that has historically not been prioritised within criminological research of this area. The process of legitimisation of this physical violence is formed and shaped not only by players engaging in the sport, but by cultural factors that exist beyond the confines of the rink. Informed by broad structural themes such as power, masculinity and finance; shared interactions on the ice are a small part of the wider accepted justifications for otherwise illegal acts of violence.

Background: Cognitive perspectives suggest that gambling-related cognitive (GRC) biases contribute to the development and maintenance of gambling problems. Evidence has since accumulated to support these claims: GRCs tend to be stronger amongst problems (and pathological) gamblers, and can be effective therapeutic targets of talking treatments. However a richer account of how GRCs are conditioned by gamblers' game and group interactions might enhance their explanatory power and therapeutic value. Methods: Here, I present the results of an extended programme of research involving: (i) laboratory-based experiments on action-based expressions of illusions of control (IOC; Studies 1-4) and value learning when making decisions under uncertainty (Study 5); (ii) online surveys of Chinese gamblers' participation patterns and beliefs in luck (Study 6); and finally, (iii) qualitative interviews of treatment-seeking professional footballers in the United Kingdom (Study 7). Results: Studies 1-2 demonstrated that (non-problematic) gamblers displayed IOC biases by rolling a simulated die for longer when attempting to hit targets with larger prizes and numerical values. These action-based expressions of IOC were facilitated by congruent target numbers and prizes (Study 3), and heightened competition with gambling co-actors (Study 4). Additionally, computational models of gamblers' choices in Study 5 showed that self-report GRCs, and impulsivity, weaken gamblers' ability to learn the value of competing game options. Next, Study 6 reported that Chinese gamblers' GRCs were related to a broader range of gambling activities, and self-report IOCs mediated the association between beliefs in luck and the number of reported gambling problems. Finally, Study 7 found that social pressures, high income, and work-related frustrations precipitated problematic gambling involvement in treatment-seeking footballers. Discussion: Overall, the results suggest that a richer account of GRCs can be achieved by considering the sensorimotor and sociocultural contexts of gamblers. My thesis concludes with a discussion of GRCs within more recent theoretical developments of the embodied and social cognitions paradigms.