People from Taiwan have been internationally marginalised and unrecognised for a long time, particularly by the cultural hegemony from the Western cultures and colonialism from Japanese imperialism and Chinese authoritarianism. These historical influences generate a hybrid culture in the Taiwanese society. Through the migratory experience of the Taiwanese people in Britain, their hybrid-cultural identity is caught between even unstable in between the host society and their homeland. As Stuart Hall states that identities, particularly in late modern times, are ‘multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions’ (Hall, 1996:04). It is intriguing to explore what is the identity of Taiwanese people in the UK, especially in the migratory situation. This practice-based research project, which combines a production of a documentary feature and a series of seven short documentaries made over the research period, and a written thesis. The research explores and examines the intricacies of the experience of a small group of Taiwanese migrants. living in the UK. It investigates Taiwanese identity in Britain using collaborative documentary filmmaking techniques as its central research methodology.

<p> This study examined the motivational factors that lead East Asian backpacker tourists to choose backpacking, and whether the destination choices of East Asian backpackers vary by nationality.</p><p> A sample of 100 East Asian backpacker tourists who travelled to Yunnan, China was surveyed. Both male and female was surveyed from a variety of age, vocation and nationalities.</p><p> The results may shed light on the reasons why East Asian backpacker tourists want to participating in backpacking. Information of the study showed that East Asian backpacker tourists found many motivational factors to be important when seeking backpacking and these factors varied based on demographic characteristics. </p><p> Understanding the importance of relative motivational factors studied may help tourism service providers better understand East Asian backpacker tourists' motivations so to customize the various types of services for different backpacker tourists. The associated tourism services, such as transportation, food service, accommodations, and recreational activities, may also benefit from the research findings.</p><p> <i>Keywords:</i> backpacker tourists, backpacking, motivation, destination choice.</p>

<p> My dissertation traces the genesis and growth of the Chinese emergency management organizational field over the ten-year period since the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak. I conducted my fieldwork in Beijing in 2012, using a multi-method approach that involved interviews, participant observation, and analysis of archival materials. </p><p> I found that governing elites and academic experts within the emerging field&mdash;what I call the "establishment"&mdash;relied upon insider cultural knowledge (e.g., myths) and party-state ideologies (e.g., communist folklore) to legitimize a new risk governance framework and create an emergency management policy domain separate from existing domains. The emergency management establishment enabled these legitimizing claims through its embedded position in government and academia. By using a strategy of <i>curation,</i> it carefully (re)assembled culturally-accepted accounts and ideas, both indigenous and adapted from afar, to create its claims. By becoming <i>institutional evangelists,</i> academic experts in particular entrenched the risk governance framework and propagated the ideas that helped form the field by advocating, advising, and training government officials through multiple field organizational entities. </p><p> By also incorporating Foucault's concept of governmentality, I found that the legitimacy project conducted by the establishment consisted of shaping the conduct of emergency management government officials according to its own risk governance framework. This expands current Foucauldian studies on governmentality by highlighting that not only the general population but also elites can be subjected to governmentalization. It also provides a more nuanced reading of the "hollowing of the state" thesis by highlighting how the Chinese party-state strengthened its role as the legitimate emergency manager by including the civil society and the private sector, albeit in lesser roles. </p><p> My findings draw attention to the foundational quality of cognitive legitimacy vis-&agrave;-vis pragmatic and moral legitimacy, an area which has received scant discussion in the neoinstitutional literature. It also informs the understudied topic of the interrelated influences of power relations, ideas, and experts on emerging organizational field formation within neoinstitutional theory, especially in a non-Western context. Finally, my research updates current understanding of national emergency management policies in the international arena, and especially in China.</p>

<p> This dissertation commences a critical examination of the issue of historical representation and draw on the fieldwork surrounding Bopiliao Historic District in Taipei to explore how the imagination and authentic sense of heritage influence the designation of historic sites and the way in which people use authenticity to negotiate their position in the progress of place making. The buildings cannot speak for themselves. Historical significance is not a given but something that needs to be interpreted and constantly reimagined. A sentimental yearning for a former time and place is not enough to explain the establishment of this historic district with twists and turns and the ambivalence over it expressed by the host community. </p><p> The first empirical chapter describes the historical background, preservation process, and the status quo of Bopiliao Old Street under the influence of the government-supported film <i>Monga</i>, which causes considerable controversy over heritage and culture representation and affects public image of the site and the host community. The second empirical chapter illustrates how an old urban neighborhood has been narrated, interpreted, and eventually certificated and accepted by the public as cultural heritage based on various social groups' heritage imagination and practice. The third empirical chapter examines how the stakeholders construct and employ the idea of authenticity to justify their viewpoint of cultural heritage and to strive for their position in the progress of place making. </p><p> My research seeks to contribute to the sociological literature on historic representation, heritage interpretation, and the construction of historical authenticity by exploring the increasingly central role played by media, activists and the locals. The tangible heritage is the production of the interaction between historic relics and the host community. Historical representation in the cinematographic media became a stimulus urging civil resistance to the existing official forms and strategy of historic preservation. Tourism continues to highlight the impact as well, for the opinions of the visiting tourists play an important role in reinforcing the image of destination. The contradiction in the sense of authenticity among social groups implies the existence of entirely different images of cultural heritage. The conflict represents the struggle of establishing local identity in contemporary Taiwan society. It is argued that the preserved heritage never denotes a successful end; rather, it is a start of the dialectical place-making process.</p>

<p> This thesis studies the potency of place in mobilizing social categories, and its implications for both social categories and places. I use the theory of distanciation to study associations between caste identity and place. I conducted an ethnographic study of a caste-based digital group, the <i>Cyber Thiyyars of Malabar,</i> to understand the connections and disconnections between the Thiyya caste and Malabar from the perspectives of different sets of actors involved in the identification of caste, namely the nation-state and members of this caste-based network. The nation-state knows the Thiyya caste in a manner that is disconnected from Malabar, while the <i>Cyber Thiyyars of Malabar</i> seek to re-emphasize the identification of this caste through the region. Participant observation and in-depth interviews indicate that through references to Malabar, the group seeks to establish a Thiyya caste identity that is distinct from the Ezhavas, a caste group within which the nation-state subsumes them. </p><p> I demonstrate that references to Malabar serve to counter the stigma that the <i>Cyber Thiyyars of Malabar</i> experience when the spatially abstract categorization of the Thiyyas interacts with notions of caste inferiority/superiority. Further, it serves as a mobilizational tool through which they hope to negotiate with the nation-state for greater access to affirmative action. I also demonstrate that caste identification continues to be relevant to the production of place. Place-based identification of the Thiyyas influences the manner in which the group envisions the physical boundaries of Malabar and how other social groups can belong to this region. Based on this analysis, I argue that framework of distanciation should incorporate not only the experience of place and social relations, but also how they are known and represented. </p><p> This dissertation establishes that even though social categories such as caste and place are not conventionally understood to be connected to each other, it is important to study the associations between them. Although the new media and globalization may prompt to us to think that place does not matter anymore, I establish that this caste group uses the language of place to organize and mobilize itself on a stronger basis in precisely this context. </p>