The popularity of Craigslist has enabled users worldwide to find almost any product at prices significantly less than retail prices or market-prices. Craigslist has thus enabled lot of resellers to enter the market and has created a huge market for used/pre-owned products. The key to find products at prices less than their market-prices is to find the right classified and act immediately before other users. Craigslist search agents, with ability to search classifieds, that run on mobile/handheld devices are increasing in popularity with ubiquitous internet connectivity, convenience and speed. AnveShA is an automatic search and monitoring agent for craigslist that has been developed for Android platforms. AnveShA provides easy access and a rich feature-set that is not available in the state-of-the-art craigslist search applications available on the Android market. AnveShA has been developed to provide the user a rapid and intelligent search agent that can proactively search and monitor classifieds for desired products, contact sellers and increase the chances of obtaining the desired product at the best possible price. To achieve this, AnveShA has many unique features like the ability to schedule and execute automatic searches, search classifieds based on geographical location, automatically respond to classifieds, store price history for classifieds, get comparative prices from other retail/shopping websites, store favorite classifieds/reminder lists and predict the offer price based on a number of parameters. With such unique features, AnveSha assists users or resellers to find desired products at the best possible prices on Craigslist and hence have a significant advantage over the competition. / text

mother / me is a visual exploration and analysis of the biological and constructed maternal realms of artist Gray Swartzel’s life. Orienting and navigating childhood influences, Swartzel explains his desire to use Craigslist to seek out surrogates, or mother figures. Interrogating his queer body within the psychological space between himself and his biological and surrogate mothers, he challenges and interrogates conceptions of the nuclear family, critiquing heteronormative assumptions of family. Swartzel tasks himself as an agent to inspect family as a social construct within a larger Lacanian orientation, while seeking out the objet petit a, or cause of desire in such relationships. He details the influences of early twentieth century glamour photography and maternal theory and outlines how they manifest in performances of the self. mother / me is an experiment to investigate the queer relationship between camp and the twenty-first century dandy through the collaboration of a mother and a child to construct visual images.

No description available.

This thesis examines the desire and efforts to 'do something' about what is variously called 'modern slavery' or 'human trafficking'. Neoabolitionist efforts to fight such phenomena are typically wedded to a simplistic and essentialist ontology, unaware of or rejecting their own performativity. The thesis is not about slavery: it is about the ethico-political problem of responsibility and hospitality toward the other in the context of contemporary anti-slavery. What constitutes an ethical response to modern slavery? I explore the often violent effects of particular answers to this question but ultimately argue that the focus on doing something (and knowing it) threatens the very possibility of hospitality - of an ethical response. Through a conceptual vocabulary of 'scenes' I explore the performative interrelation of ontology and ethics. It is intended to help resist the metaphysical seductions of ontology and moral urgency. Scenes bundle specific ontologies, frames, conjured histories and futures, roles and narrative structures, distributions of concern, desire and enjoyment. Response begins with the discursive and affective co-constitution of the self, the one to whom we respond, and the scene in which it takes place. Scene-specific forms of responsibility can operate as a defence against the full force of responsibility to the other. Chapters 1 and 2 develop the notion of scenes and explore how neoabolitionism sets its scenes and locates favoured solutions. The remaining chapters explore those solution areas. Chapter 3 looks at how a US movement against 'sex trafficking' in internet advertising reproduces a Manichean world of simplicity by a game of Whac-A-Mole with websites, ritualistic repetition of baseless 'facts', silencing of sex workers, and aggressive demonization of those who disagree or argue for greater complexity; Chapters 4 and 5 draw on time I spent in San Francisco with two very different organisations. One, Not For Sale, makes a product of experiencing neoabolitionism, joining together charity, capitalism, consumer enjoyment, technology and the excitement of a movement of 'true believers', producing innovative approaches but in the process reinforcing problematic gendered and colonial stereotypes. The other, Anti-trafficking Collaborative of the Bay Area, works quietly and tactically in a messy immigration system, aware of the political and performative nature of their work. They actively take responsibility for their own preconceptions and desires to ground a profoundly hospitable client-centred approach avoiding many pitfalls identified in earlier chapters. The thesis has a performative element woven through it - the ethos of the work is one of unsettling both existing practices and literatures, and the writer and reader. The concluding chapter explores the impossibility of hospitality, its interrelation with juridical subjectivity and the ethics demanding and giving accounts in light of the preceding chapters, suggesting a performative approach toward the other is possible.