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This thesis throws into relief the nomadic meshings of sexualities with post/apartheid cultural politics. It explores how, why and with what effects sexualities and post/apartheid nationhood have been imbricated in signal events and phenomena. Terms used to construct the thesis’ title each allude to significant events and processes through which assemblages of nationhood, sexualities, gender and race are worked on/with in particular ways. I propose that these events form a prism through which we are able to see refracted how a race-­‐gender-­‐sexuality complex becomes a pivotal mechanism through which post/apartheid subjectivities, embodiments, nationhood and sovereignty are being constructed and contested. I conclude that the events under discussion index how sexuality is both a site of political contestation; and, a central and crucial component of post/apartheid nationhood. That it is a ‘machinic assemblage’, which conditions and constitutes a particular field of the political including a popular consciousness of the post/apartheid body politic and sovereignty. Presenting qualitative analysis that reflects on the rhetorical structures evident within the nationscapes under discussion, I analyse and make reference to a substantial sample of media representations of, and discourses about, each of the scenes evaluated across the thesis. To this end, I focalise what Lauren Berlant has termed, the ‘National Symbolic’; an imaginary, chimerical and affect-­‐laden screen projection through which citizens venture to ‘grasp the nation in its totality’. This interdisciplinary project both draws on and expands the South African, Feminist and Queer Studies Fields and is influenced by what Judith Butler calls the ‘New Gender Politics’. I achieve this by bringing diverse critical perspectives into a discursive exchange with emerging bodies of scholarship concerned with questions of gender, sexualities, dis/ability and race in the South African context. I introduce novel, or previously untapped, theoretical repertoires to pursue unexplored interpretive horizons that generate new discourses about post/apartheid sexuality and politics. In doing so, I analyse a range of topics including: the state’s management of contemporary virginity practices and its abstinence messaging; popular anti-­‐polygamy discourse; and, critical intersex and dis/ability politics, which the available scholarship has not addressed. Although President Jacob Zuma is not the subject of this inquiry, each chapter examines events and developments that are both explicitly, and more implicitly, associated with his presidency. These events have unfolded during a later period of the post/apartheid dispensation; sometimes called the post post/apartheid period. I have written about a time that marked a conservative twist in the transition, which is not imagined as a teleological process. This is a perplexing time of uneven shifts where old things seem to be hardening even as they are simultaneously thinning or leaking away while new things are emerging in unpredictable rhythms and forms.

This research enquiry builds on and contributes to studies in the field of physical education, focusing specifically on pupils’ experiences of Year 12 physical education in a private secondary phase school in Turkey. Although there is scholarly work that examines the performance of gender in the physical education curriculum, there is little work attempting to interrogate the relationships between young people’s bodies, physicality, and the social landscape of a school. There has been even less work in the cultural context of Turkey that maps the various social forces which guide and determine the participants’ own physical education subjectivities. The research enquiry utilises physical cultural studies sensibilities that are based at the borders of inter-locking paradigmatic approaches. I am critically self-reflexive throughout the research enquiry as I represent, articulate, and rework the young people’s experiences gleaned from participant observations and interviews. An important finding to emerge from these narratives is the desire to reclaim the fun and play elements in physical education. However, the yearn to have fun in physical education becomes problematic when juxtaposed against the disempowering body practices surrounding engagement in the subject. In fact the workings of the body are afforded only a few positive comments from participants. The engagement of the participants in physical education thus contrasts with the performative and health discourses currently shaping Western physical education policies and curriculum practices. This research enquiry produces value-relevant knowledge to inform scholars and practitioners, aiming at a greater understanding of pupils’ experiences of the self, and opens future avenues for discussion when revising physical education policies, curricula, and practices. Furthermore, the research enquiry adds new insights into how the participants negotiate their own physicality and subjectivities in a physical education setting where Eastern and Western cultures meet, intersect, and collide.

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This thesis examines the struggles for moral, cultural and political control of the Scottish Highlands during the period, c.1918-1945. Using library and archival material it demonstrates how a range of contesting landscape narratives, each based on an amalgam of myth, ideal and reality, were constructed for a region holding a peculiarly intense significance in the Scottish and British consciousness. By dissecting four inter-related debates about where, and to whom, the Highlands belonged, the thesis considers several overarching themes; questions of nationhood, citizenship, tradition, modernity and the division of power in society are all addressed. Firstly, it examines the creation of a sophisticated landowning mythology to counter increasingly vociferous public opposition to the elite sporting industry. Secondly, it explores how this landowning hegemony was threatened by the rise of a populist outdoor movement, and asserts that only through steady institutionalisation and the discrete involvement of reactionary interests was the vibrant recreative community emasculated. Thirdly, it analyses conflicts over the conceptualisation of the Highlands as a location suitable for modern industry, infrastuctural improvement and economic development. Examples of proposed hydro-electric power schemes are used to frame key arguments of opposition and promotion. Fourthly, it investigates the campaign mounted to re-appropriate the Highland land resource as a means to inspire agrarian and cultural revival. The role of Scotland's nationalist literary community is determined as crucial to the creation of a sophisticated, if ultimately idealistic, ruralist mythology. Despite the emergence of these oppositional narratives the thesis contends that the persistence of a feudal, sporting tradition in the Highlands reflected both the immutability and ingenuity of the established landowning hegemony. Significantly, dominant cultural constructions of Highland landscape and identity originating during the inter-war period retain much of their power to the present day.

This thesis is a study of the cultural politics of environmentalism in an era of climate change and the public curriculum that it generates. Scientists and the policy elite alone are unlikely to solve the ‘wicked problem’ of climate change, even in the unlikely scenario that consensus was reached and concerted international action was forthcoming. Increasingly, it is recognised that institutional learning through technocratic refinements of the status quo are inadequate. Although there is widespread belief that anthropogenic global warming is an urgent problem, political action has not followed scientific knowledge, because we have been slow to recognise the problem’s cultural implications. A range of voices within the environmental movement (broadly conceived) have increasingly challenged technocratic policy framing, with new ways of thinking. By widening the debate these critical voices increase the possibility of learning to react in new ways, which increase the capacity for collective agency. Based on this assessment, the aim of this thesis is to explore the ways in which the cultural politics of particular activist milieus generate public curriculum, through catalyzing the relationship between the cultural politics of civil society and the political culture of the state. From the 1960s onwards, the environmental movement has undergone a process of differentiation and specialisation, such that distinct cultural formations – oriented around direct action, relocalisation, and professional campaigning – emerged. Different ideal typical modes of “climate change communication” – agonistic pluralism, public participation, and social marketing (Carvalho & Peterson, 2012) – can be mapped onto the public pedagogies of these activist cultures. Political theorist Chantal Mouffe (2005, p. 20) uses the term agonistic pluralism to describe a situation where the “adversary” is understood in a productive sense to be “a crucial category for democratic politics”: where this is denied, we/they relations are understood to be “antagonistic” in the sense that conflicting parties do not recognise the legitimacy of one another. This view recognises the power play and affective commitments that determine modes of political association. On the other hand, “public participation” views politics as constituted through non-partisan rational deliberation in legitimate public fora. Finally, “social marketing” approaches discard the notion of people as rational decision makers, but also discard the principle of public participation in favour of the notion that political communication can be improved through expert evidence-based interventions. Cultures of direct climate action tend towards agonistic communicative styles, characterised by contestatory moments and a public pedagogy of “defining the enemy” (Newman, 1994). On the other hand, this approach has been perceived as problematic by movement intellectuals in relocalisation movements, who have argued that the non-politicised experimental practices of local communities, which engage optimistically with a sense of the possible, may in the long run, be more productive of the kind of mass cultural value shift required in order to tackle climate change. More recently, reflecting their own situated organisational structures and actor-networks, knowledge workers in the professional campaigning sector have increasingly applied insights from social psychology, behavioural economics, and cognitive science in order to find ways that engage tacit cultural values and norms in their public pedagogical efforts. In seeking to ascertain the ideal conditions for communication, the ENGO sector aligns most closely with a ‘social marketing approach’ to public pedagogy. Working with the ‘agonistic’ discourse theory of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, I believe that all cultures of activism necessarily engage in a contingent politics of articulation, at the heart of which lies antagonism and hegemonic struggle. In this thesis, I construct an intertextual research model, capable of exploring the contingent processes of articulation within cultures of climate change activism, between them, and between the movement at large, and the wider public, as they engage (implicitly or explicitly) in hegemonic struggles that provide moments of educative potential to activists, bystanders and politicians. I argue that the public pedagogies of these cultures of activism cohere around the articulation of what Laclau (2005) would call “empty signifiers”, which link particular claims, interests, and identities through creating a frontier separating them from an outside, which partially constitutes the inside’s identity.

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archives@tulane.edu / Black women, amongst other marginalized groups across the Americas, have been placed as identity-making figures portrayed as folkloric emblems of an authentic past. In Salvador, Brazil, baianas de acarajé, popularly referred to as the “postcards of Bahia” as timeless, stewards of African heritage and regional Afro-Bahian identity, are predominantly older Afro-descendant women street vendors that sell acarajé—the West-African deriving black-eyed pea fritters. Drawing from ethnographic and archival research, this dissertation is the first English-written monograph-length study to investigate the discursive, symbolic, and aesthetic processes that portray baianas as cultural icons and elucidates the ways in which they are also political subjects. In 1992, baianas established a grassroots association, the National Association of Baianas (ABAM), to advocate on behalf of the baianas and facilitate their access to worker’s rights and benefits. In 2005, ABAM successfully lobbied for recognition of the craft as national cultural patrimony. They continue to use the title as leverage as the baianas strategically utilize state language and legislation to define safeguarding measures on their own terms to maximize their access to material and political benefits. The patrimonial title recognizes the importance of Candomblé-associated elements to the craft. At the same time, Candomblé-practicing and Evangelical Protestant baianas have created a baiana solidarity that is unique and important, considering the recent rise in religious intolerance and persecution against Candomblecistas. This solidarity has larger implications in conceptualizing and building a diverse, pluri-religious society living and working alongside others. The baianas also embody a Black feminist political praxis by renegotiating labor as not only a mode of survival but also their own personal and collective pleasure. This is most strongly conveyed through the very understudied—and misunderstood—livelihood and cultural figure of the baiana de receptivo: baianas who are generally hired as hosts for various events, including but not limited to street festivals that meld Luso-Catholic and Afro-diasporic traditions. Ultimately, this work expands discussions of political agency and cultural politics in ways that illuminate alternative modes of political engagement and that provide additional approaches to envision the ways power and pleasure circulate within and amongst baianas, the state, and beyond. / 1 / Vanessa Castaneda

British local government is placing a new emphasis on local action for the global environment. In the literature addressing these developments limited attention has been paid to the contested nature of sustainability, or to the local context in which initiatives arise. A cultural politics approach provides a means through which these shortcomings can be overcome (Hajer, 1996). Its discourse basis enables a local authority to be seen as a forum in which technocentric and ecocentric interpretations of sustainability compete with each other, as well as contesting established `non-sustainable¿ approaches. The Foucauldian view of power which underlies cultural politics requires that these contests are viewed in the context of an authority¿s history and traditions. As such, a cultural politics approach could form the basis of a new broader agenda for Local Agenda 21 research.

In the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, many indigenous communities further their struggles for greater political and cultural autonomy by working with transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Communication technology (what I call comtech) is increasingly vital to these intersecting socio-spatial relations of activism and advocacy. In this dissertation, I examine how comtech offer indigenous individuals and organizations with the means for visualizing their political-cultural agendas. Approaching the access and use of comtech, especially video technologies, as a partial and situated technoscience, I inquire into how and why these activities reconfigure the production and evaluation of authoritative knowledge about indigenous peoples, places, and practices. More specifically, I undertook an organizational ethnography of a small intermediary NGO comprised of individuals who self-identify as indigenous and others who do not, Ojo de Agua Comunicacin Indgena, which endeavors to place communication technologies (especially video equipment) at the disposal of indigenous communities. Through participation-observation and interviews, I explored this groups everyday strategies of networking in the name of assisting indigenous actors access and appropriation of visual technologies. I also pursued interpretive analyses of video-mediated articulations of indigenous knowledge and identity that were enabled by Ojo de Agua. My research indicates that Ojo de Agua has selectively built upon the ambitions and the socio-spatial connections of a government program that emerged from the initiatives of academic advocates, who sought to open new spaces of participation for indigenous peoples. Members of Ojo de Agua have, however, found their goal of service somewhat stymied by a situation that positions them within a flexible labor force of knowledge workers. Their livelihoods as media makers did not allow them (the time or money) to pursue as much altruism and advocacy as they would have liked. Nonetheless, Ojo de Aguas corpus of videos established the group as an alternative and yet authoritative source of visual knowledge of indigenous peoples, places, and practices. This relocation of advocacy is symptomatic of the creative destruction fueled by the neo-liberal economic policies that, for the last thirty years, have been reconfiguring spaces of cooperation and conflict in Latin America.