This thesis examines the everyday activities of Indian youth on the MTV India Facebook fan page. The two-phase research design included a period of participant observation, combined with conducting online interviews, and a visit to New Delhi, India to conduct offline interviews. The thesis analyzes several aspects of identity performance (e.g. online identity performance, relation between online and offline identity, ideal presentation of an online identity) in relation to Goffman’s (1959) presentation of self in everyday life, and argues that the MTV India Facebook fan page has become a site for identity performance. Since such identity performance is bounded by participants’ everyday activities, the fan page can also be identified as a particular ‘place’. I use Tuan’s (1977) idea of ‘place-making’ and illustrate how the MTV India Facebook fan page has become a meaningful and familiar ‘place’ overtime through performance of routine activities and everyday practices (Seamon, 1979). These activities can be identified as articulating ‘Youngistan’ (voice of Indian youth) and performing Indian-ness, suggesting that fans have appropriated the fan page for performing specific activities that are particular to them. In addition, the thesis takes the local-global character into consideration and argues that local-global combine together to form separate, unique cultures such as MTV India, which safeguard ‘locality’ within the global product and help in ‘place-making’ activities.

Traditions that shape our identity and beliefs are constantly undergoing transformation through our interactions with new cultures. At the same time, these interactions enhance our awareness of where we come from, and where we truly belong. In this thesis I investigate the history of jewellery in India through a contemporary perspective and interpretation. My project narrates my transformative journey from the rich tapestry of Indian traditions towards the contemporary western culture. The subject of Indian jewellery is vast and complex, the enquiry is just the beginning of the journey. Therefore, my goal is to discover linkages between the age-old traditions and the fast-changing world of today. I create a dialogue between traditional, ritualistic Indian jewellery and an irreverent choice of materials and methods that have been conceived from my experiences in the West. Through this dialog, I explore the push and pull between traditional ethos and modern sensibilities, and the transformation it engenders.

Det digitala krigsspelet Squad är mötesplats för flera olika föreställningar som rör manlighet och gemenskap. Föreställningar om maskulinitet kopplad till soldaten, spelaren och krig påverkar handlingsutrymmet för de som exkluderas av hegemoniska maskuliniteter som reproduceras utifrån den tänkta demografin: män. Gamer-identiteten har historiskt betraktats som en manlig arena och har således skapat en stereotyp som ihärdigt håller sig kvar. Soldaten inom spel och populärkulturen har primärt berättats ur mannens perspektiv och vidare bidragit till stereotypen av ett manligt ideal och ett maskulint förhållningssätt. Olika krigsspel väljer att använda sig av olika schabloner kring hur maskuliniteten kommer till uttryck. Squad värderar samarbete, grupptillhörighet och ledarskap högt vilket lämnar lite utrymme åt hypermaskuliniserade actionhjältar som återfinns i bland annat Call of Duty. De som hamnar i kläm och exkluderas är främst kvinnor, vilket har lett till att de som historiskt sett gjorts osynliga i termer av representation och strukturella limitationer ofta väljer att förbli dolda för att undvika bli den som sticker ut från normen. Squad och tillhörande gemenskaper speglar ett samhällspolitiskt klimat där konservativa och progressiva värderingarna står mot varandra. Dessa har lämnat ett starkt avtryck och påverkar synen på tillhörande genus- och speldiskurser.

The swedish state have as of late seemingly distanced themselves from the cultural politics regarding painting- and sculpture artists. Since the implementation of “samverkansmodellen”, a plan to regionalise the culture politics and the distribution of economic resources to the different countys of Sweden, the state has increasingly been hesitant to make any decisions regarding the painting- and sculpture artists. While the interest in art and culture has increased in Sweden the last couple of years, the welfare and social safety of artists has been on a decline.At the same time Sweden’s art worlds revolves around the big city regions of Stockholm county, Västra Götaland and Skåne. In the shadow of these counties I have met with artists from the northern part of Sweden known as “Norrland”, specifically in the county of Västernorrland. Through interviews I study how they both relate to being a working artist in the cultural periphery, and how they relate to the politics and economics that comes with the occupation, and what benefits and negatives they see in the locality of the region of Västernorrland. Keywords: Art worlds, culture politics, centre-periphery, place, working environment.

When performing music in front of a live audience place factors in greatly, both for musicians and audiences. It is often something most people don’t think of, but it’s essential for having a memorable and safe experience, according to your expectations as either musician or audience member. But what happens when there is a disconnection between place and musician/audience? In 2014 the city of Umeå was announced as that years European capital of culture. To get that title the municipality of Umeå had used the cities great number of active musicians to be rewarded with the title of capital of culture. However, these local musicians did not get to take part in this celebration and were unrepresented in the year long program. Also, in combination with the lack of representation, a couple of beloved  local venues used for live music where either moved away from central Umeå or closed down. This led to a period of musicians either having a hard time to play live shows, or playing liveshows on stages where they could perform their music as intended. The lack of an obvious scene for live music also led to difficulties of attracting audiences because of having shows in places around town where people never had experienced live music before.   Keywords: Local music, music scenes, place, representation, culture politics.

This is an ethnography of waste in the streets of urban Hong Kong and a curatorial inquiry into the significance of its visuality. Presented in the form of a triptych, the dissertation probes and portrays fragments of urban life in Hong Kong, consequently opening up a new vista for intellectual and social engagement at the juncture of aesthetics, lived experiences, and power. While urban density provides for its equivalent in trash, much of Hong Kong’s refuse first lands in the streets. It is thereupon regulated to be rendered invisible through government organisation which corresponds with what Gay Hawkins (2007) calls “the modern imaginary of the tidy city” where order and hygiene are brought together towards a ‘smooth running of things’ (Žižek 2006 in Moore 2012). Hawkins (2007) also states, however, that no city 'can hide the excesses of consumption'. Indeed, no matter the attempts at the ridding of rubbish in the modern city, trash keeps reappearing. Also Hong Kong has a waste problem that goes beyond its exhausting landfills. ‘It’s everywhere!’, as its collectors indicate. Both formal and informal collectors continuously pick up trash. This conflicting location between desired tidiness, persistent trash, and constant collection, it is argued here, is a political sphere that is largely negotiated visually. Taking on the collectors’ views of “trash in place” (in the streets; the city), I therefore rethink what is commonly understood as “matter out of place” (Douglas 2002) in the modern city. Emphasising the significance of the visuality of trash – understanding visuality as “an embodied process of situation, positioning, re-memory, encounter, cognition and interpretation” (Rose and Tolia Kelly 2012) – I advance the ethnographic project with curatorial practices, putting the collectors’ perspectives on trash and those of local artists in dialogue. From this dialogue, this thesis presents three “panels” on waste in urban Hong Kong. The “panels” engage in matters of order and duty, social networks and places, and the visuality and instantaneous of the everyday, to then reconsider the aesthetics of trash and the politics of urban life more generally. The thesis presents a range of different stories, therefore, about the instant undoing of disorder in the modern city, the (re)valuing of discards via social networks of excess, and the “unordering of the sensible” by means of a repositioning of trash. The triptych in its entirety, finally, manifests possibilities for methodological innovations on everyday matters of aesthetics and power.

As stated in the Urban Renewal Strategy (2011), “the problem of urban decay” has been identified as the major task of urban renewal in Hong Kong. Rows of densely packed, “dilapidated” tenement buildings constitute the imaginary of a declining urban landscape that, much like the squatter areas of the 1950s, are seen to pose threats to public health and to the “prestige” of Hong Kong. I propose the concept of the discourse of ruination as a way to interrogate and at the same time, de-naturalise the pervasive assumption of the problem of decay, which serves to rationalise and perpetuate the cycle of destruction and renewal. I argue that crucial to this process is how certain sites are identified and framed as “pockets of decay”, which simultaneously “brings ruin upon” these spaces by rendering them as useless. This research investigates (educational) exhibitions, operated by the key actors of urban renewal to observe how exhibitions, as discursive practice, construct and consolidate knowledges about urban decay, and how it configures and normalises the logic of urban renewal. In the second case study, I present a critical reflection of the ongoing preservation project of the Blue House Cluster in order to highlight how heritage preservation is incorporated into the larger framework of urban renewal, and the erasures entailed in ‘preservation’ in the process of transforming ‘ruins’ to ‘heritage’. By converging insights derived from ‘ruin studies’, and studies on urban space and its power relations, this thesis aims to illuminate how the ‘discourse of ruination’ operates in the logic of urban renewal in Hong Kong.

This study looks at representations of the bakla in Philippine cinema from 1954 to 2015. I argue that the bakla, a local gender category that incorporates ideas of male homosexuality, effeminacy, cross-dressing, and transgenderism, has become a central figure in Philippine cinema. I examine the films of Dolphy, the actor who was the first to popularize bakla roles in mainstream cinema, and I outline several tropes that create the bakla image in movies: “classical” kabaklaan (being bakla), which involves crossdressing, effeminacy, and being woman-hearted; the conversion trope, where the bakla stubbornly resists being forcibly masculinized by the men that surround him; and women’s enabling of the bakla to perform femininity despite his male body. The bakla also becomes trapped in the dialectic between the genres of comedy and melodrama – the bakla then becomes either a comic relief character or a tragic character, someone who should be both pitied and admired for enduring tragic circumstances. Since the word bakla colloquially means both the gay man and the transgender woman, I also look at the intersections between the bakla and global transgender rights discourse in Philippine cinema. I argue that the bakla’s male body and his female heart mirror contemporary thinking about transgenderism, where a person’s birth-assigned sex does not match their gender identity. I look at films in the science fiction/fantasy adventure genre and examine how the male body is transformed into a female body – whether through medical or magical means – but the bakla gender category remains pervasive. I next look at independent films and how the camera constructs bakla sexuality in cinema by framing the male body as an object of desire. I also examine how the bakla have shifted their sexuality from the desiring the otherness of the macho lalake (masculine man) to desiring sameness in the form of other bakla (masculine gay men). Incidentally, this shift in the object of sexuality coincides with the shift in gender performance from “traditional” kabaklaan, with its elements of effeminacy and crossdressing, to a more homonormative image, mirroring the “modern” discourse of gay globality. Finally, I examine the contemporary Philippine celebrity star system and the popularity of bakla films within the last decade. I argue that Vice Ganda becomes representative of the ideal bakla, one who is affluent but still ‘reachable’; opinionated and politically engaged with LGBT rights; and finally, funny and comic in a way that is empowering for himself, but also in manners that are abrasive and offensive.

Ever since the commencement of the new millennium, intangible cultural heritage, the cultural concept and campaign promoted by the UNESCO has rapidly spread the world. In China, thousands of traditional cultures and everyday practices have been absorbed into the intangible heritage system over the past decade, which is reshaping people's perception and engagement with everyday life and traditions. Intangible cultural heritage as an 'imported' concept has been highly localised and resituated in contemporary China. I seek to examine how intangible heritage as a prevalent cultural phenomenon incorporates everyday practices into regional and national narratives in China in light of the marketization of traditional culture and the political and cultural agenda of 'the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation'. Furthermore, I attempt to historicise the concept of heritage in China's history of modernisation especially since around the establishment of the PRC in 1949. Through the historicised approach, I aim to demystify the imaginary of heritage and interrogate how cultural heritage turns from something to be reformed in the revolutionary era to something to be 'protected' and 'preserved' in the consumer society. Under such scope, l examine in detail the changes of mwywge (木鱼歌),a former popular everyday practice in the Pearl River Delta area, as it successively becomes an intangible heritage ofthe provincial and national levels. Despite its prevalence, muyuge was peripheral, marginalised in the both the cultural and geographical senses. I contextualise muyuge in the economic restructuring of the Pearl River Delta area and analyse the process of an everyday practice being reconstructed as an intangible heritage. Based on fieldwork interviews, policy analysis and media analysis, I particularly examine the reconstruction of muyuge's performing practices, the reshaping of muyuge practitioners and its connection with the restructuring of an industrial town. I argue that intangible heritage is gradually replacing previous values and understanding of folk culture with ideas of capital, market and nationalistic identities, and that the autonomy of everyday life has been dissolved and re-incorporated into the dominant discourse.

本論文希望把中國鄉村建設運動放置在更為複雜與動態的脈絡下，嘗試以一種有別于“成王敗寇”邏輯的敍述與視野，通過參與者獨特的視角，結合起微觀與宏觀層面，將具體實踐扣聯（articulate）到近代中國轉型的“百年激進”、“百年鄉村破壞”、“百年鄉建”這一主線中。以理解鄉村建設的生命力、深層意義與內在困境，並在此基礎上對已有各種“類型化”評價認識、“刻板化”參照座標及背後的“意義系統”進行梳理與反思。 為更好實現以上目的，筆者借助卡爾•波蘭尼“雙向運動”視野，但努力避免因生搬硬套而“削足適履”式的尋找或對應本土及“三農”領域的“雙向運動”，而是更多借鑒其“視野”上的啟示。希望通過該“視野”的幫助，讓筆者可以更好的探討那些被遮蔽與忽略的面向，進而解決困擾筆者的理論思考與現實實踐問題。同時，本論文結合了歷史與當代鄉村建設的各組案例，實踐所蘊含的複雜性與豐富性也希望可以推進筆者對“雙向運動”發生及運作機制所展開的討論。 正如標題所示，本論文希望從“自我保護”和“另類實踐”結合起來的角度重新理解鄉村建設的定位與特點及其與“主流”社會的複雜關係及互動。它們既是鄉村建設的主要意義，同時也決定其將一直面對著各種困境與矛盾張力。 本論文借鑒文化研究的思想資源及其對脈絡與扣聯的強調，希望以此打破“研究者-行動者”、“理論-實踐”的習慣性分割。同時希望能跳出一般分析所隱含“樂觀-悲觀”、“積極-消極”的二元框架，也挑戰將鄉村建設納入“效果論”、“好人好事說”和“效果論”這三種常見的類型化處理。故本文儘量避免事實羅列、簡單代言與一般辯護，而是呼應以個人參與鄉村建設的生命史，反觀其中的興奮、困惑、不甘、無奈等複雜情感與認識，除以此帶出對所存在社會基礎與宏觀環境的討論外，希望再次說明鄉村建設的動力與張力。