Hybrid Dialogues, Situation Strategies (hereafter referred to as HDSS) aims to explore the production of a postcolonial visual culture, through action research centered on producing and reflecting on collaborative visual artworks. The aim of the research is to use collaborative creative practice itself as the site of investigation into the way in which visual creative strategies can reflect and redefine the processes of constructing, inhabiting and exchanging complex definitions of postcolonial identities. It is suggested that the reflexive creative processes of art/design methods, can bring productive, transformative and complex re-visibilisations of accepted and contested postcolonial histories, through the application of the 'familiarity' of making clothes as a wider metaphor for exploring the construction of complex, postcolonial identities. In my thesis I set out my understanding of postcolonial visual culture and its histories and their relationship to my practice and the project presented. The research is implemented through Shade, a project situated within postcolonial visual culture and which interrogates the processes of producing that postcolonial culture. As the major practice project for HDSS, Shade is the key site of the generation of new knowledge. Through participation and reflection a new methodology of "fittings" has been developed, combining the principles of participatory action research and the craft process of tailoring, embroidering and fitting, so that the development and performance of the garments and accessories for Shade also become an important space for generation of new postcolonial cultural exchanges. Through this reflective practice, five principles of/for creative engagement with postcolonial cultures are identified. These five principles are; 'shared histories', 'radical familiarities', 'complicit spectacle', 'transgressive crafts', and 'democratic bespoke'. HDSS insists on becoming deeply implicated in acts of collaborative practice and on reflection on the construction of postcolonial identities. This has produced the key contribution to new knowledge, which can be summarised as the theory of 'shared cultural production', which suggests that no act of postcolonial cultural production can be theorised without genuine democratic participation in the conditions of its production.

This thesis presents a historicized account of the construction of identity within contemporary indie. Indie emerged as a music scene in the early 1980s, and existing scholarly accounts of it focus on practices of music production and consumption. Indie has expanded and diversified over the last 30 years, however. Crucially, in the UK it has become increasingly interconnected into popular fashion – a development that has transformed indie from being a space solely for the construction of masculine identities, as it was in the 1980s, into a space for the construction of both masculine and feminine identities. These transformations within indie have not been addressed, and one of the contributions of this research is to fill this gap. This thesis contributes to the field of youth cultural studies by providing new knowledge on the relationship between youth culture and popular fashion. Drawing on the Bourdieuian concept ‘field’, the thesis explores the relationship between the sub-field of indie music and the field of popular fashion in the UK, arguing that contemporary indie forms at the points of overlap between these two fields: where their value systems are mutually informative and where their value systems diverge. Drawing on Foucault’s concepts ‘discourse’ and ‘practices of the self’, this thesis explores the way in which this complex popular cultural formation creates a space for the construction of identities. Through an analysis of media representations, it considers the discursive constitution of indie, and through an analysis of participant observation and interviews, it explores the ways in which those people participating in this formation construct the self. The thesis contributes to the field of fashion studies in that it draws together these two methodologies into an examination of the construction of identity and, more specifically, gendered identities.