The software engineering community is concerned with improvements in existing methods and development of new and better methods. The research approaches applied to take on this challenge have hitherto focused heavily on the formal and specifying aspect of the method. This has been done for good reasons, because formalizations are the means in software projects to predict, plan, and regulate the development efforts. As formalizations have been successfully developed new challenges have been recognized. The human and social role in software development has been identified as the next area that needs to be addressed. Organizational problems need to be solved if continued progress is to be made in the field. The social element is today a little explored area in software engineering. Following with the increased interest in the social element it has been identified a need of new research approaches suitable for the study of human behaviour. The one sided focus on formalizations has had the consequence that concepts and explanation models available in the community are one sided related in method discourses. Definition of method is little explored in the software engineering community. In relation to identified definitions of method the social appears to blurring. Today the software engineering community lacks powerful concepts and explanation models explaining the social element. This thesis approaches the understanding of the social element in software engineering by applying ethnomethodologically informed ethnography and ethnography. It is demonstrated how the ethnographic inquiry contributes to software engineering. Ethnography is also combined with an industrial cooperative method development approach. The results presented demonstrate how industrial external and internal socio political contingencies both hindered a method implementation, as well as solved what the method was targeted to do. It is also presented how project members’ method deployment - as a social achievement is played out in practice. In relation to this latter contribution it is provided a conceptual apparatus and explanation model borrowed from social science, The Documentary method of interpretation. This model addresses core features in the social element from a natural language point of view that is of importance in method engineering. This model provides a coherent complement to an existing method definition emphasizing formalizations. This explanation model has also constituted the underpinning in research methodology that made possible the concrete study results.

Thesis (MA (VA)(Visual Arts))--Stellenbosch University, 2008. / This thesis investigates social aspects of the production and distribution of artworks, approaching these from the context of the every-day life of the artist. Its main aim is to form a theoretical framework and personalised application of auto/ ethnography to enable the artist to study her own practice within a specific context. The thesis serves as a counterpart to the practical work that is expected of a Master of arts student at this particular university and in this department, the University of Stellenbosch, Department of Visual Arts. As such, it works in tandem with the practical component to posit an understanding of the artworks as they have been formed in a complex postmodern society. I, as the artist and writer, discuss my work by drawing from autobiographical experiences and theoretical frameworks as texts. Auto/ethnography, the chosen methodology, is informed by post-structuralism, Marxist and neo-Marxist theories and feminist discourses, among others. It calls for researchers to apply self-reflexivity in their practice and, hence, must include the situated position of the ‘I’ of the researcher, as this inevitably impacts on research findings. My writing on my art-making process becomes a form of ‘emergent’ research that studies the relationship between the self and the social. This takes place through the use of autobiographical texts and the above-mentioned theoretical frameworks, combined with relational and dialogical theories of art, and frameworks that study art production and distribution from sociological perspectives. I write myself as constituted within ideology and subject to societal structure, but also possessing agency. I write on my art as a product determined by my position in society; my intentions and aims for the artwork and considerations on how its distribution might affect me; and its function as a text that carries meanings that differ from those which I, at any given time, might ascribe to it. The framework in which I write on my art-making process also draws on complexity theory. Within this framework I approach the self as relational, society and the environment as a complex self-structuring process, and the meaning of text as created and re-created in a web of interactions, between the self (of the writer/artist and reader/viewer) and the society (as built up of different interrelating subsystems). Writing auto/ethnographically to produce an academic dissertation within this specific academic community can, I believe, serve as a means through which I can question my own objectivising claims, or claims that lie in theoretical and personal frameworks that I draw from. Implicit in this thesis is the question: how can an artist, working within the confines of an academic framework, ensure that an ethical component exists between the self and other in her working practice?

Recent scholarly writing has located performance analysis firmly within the coaching process. Although the what of performance analysis regarding system design and reliability has been well documented, the how and the why or use of video-based performance analysis within the coaching process remains less understood. Therefore, this thesis sought to develop an empirically-based understanding of some of the realities of the use of video based performance analysis feedback within the coaching process. Within a broad ethnographic framework, this thesis followed three key phases of data collection and analysis. Within phase one, a grounded theory methodology, was used to explore the what and why of the delivery of video-based performance analysis in elite youth soccer. Data were collected from interviews with 14 England youth soccer coaches. Through an iterative process of constant comparison, categories regarding Contextual Factors, Delivery Approach and Targeted Outcomes were highlighted. Within phase two, coach-athletes interactions were examined in situ over the course of a 10-month English Premier League Academy season to explore the how of the delivery of video-based feedback. Data were analysed using the techniques and procedures of conversation analysis combined with a social power analysis drawing upon the work of Bertram H. Raven. Analysis of the interactions revealed that the coach attempted to exercise control over the sequential organisation of the session, via asymmetrical turn-taking allocations, an unequal opportunity to talk, control over the topic of discussion within the interactions, and the use of questioning to select speakers to take turns to talk. Within phase three, a narrative ethnographic approach was utilised to examine the how and why of the in situ narrative construction of professional knowledge and coaching identity within video-based feedback sessions. Data were collected during the same 10 months of ethnographic filed work, as presented in phase two, with a Premier League Academy Head Coach. Additionally, in-depth interviews stimulated by video-based reflection were used to explore the participant coach s early interactional practices and subsequent changes in practice in the following four years. Data analysis was conducted using theoretical concepts of identity from the work of Anselm Strauss and revealed a number of features of the development and transformation of identity of the participant coach. Here, a reflective examination of authoritarian interactional practices and the consequences of those practices were critically considered against the creation of a positive self narrative in the development of the participant coach s professional knowledge. The empirical findings of the present thesis have highlighted some the what, why and how of the use of video-based performance analysis within the coaching process. This work has furthered understanding regarding the pedagogical practices which impact upon the delivery of video-based performance analysis feedback. In addition to broadening sports coaching s theoretical and methodological repertoire, the applied value of this work is grounded in the need for coaching practitioners to become more critically reflective about the use of video-based performance analysis within the coaching process, and the impact of their interactional practices upon the coach-athlete relationship.

Much of the extant higher education literature examining student activism and social movements in college is limited by both chronological time and physical space. In addition, very little is known about the ways in which technology generally and social media specifically are embraced in contemporary student organizing practices. Accordingly, my multi-sited ethnographic study focuses on the Dream Defenders, a Florida-based, racially and ethnically-diverse multi-campus social movement organization "developing the next generation of radical leaders to realize and exercise [their] independent, collective power; building alternative systems; and organizing to disrupt the structures that oppress [their]communities" (Dream Defenders, 2014). More specifically, my study is intended to contemporize research on student activism in college by using robust, real-time ethnographic data to examine off-campus organizing undertaken by Dream Defenders' organization and their use of new and social media technologies. Drawing from and modifying resource dependency/resource mobilization perspectives and new social movement theories, I conceptualize the interactive use of the aforementioned technologies as mobilizing structures and in the construction movement frames–parts of the social movement repertoire (Tilly, 2004) of contemporary student organizers. The findings from my study indicate the use of alternative and activist new media in contemporary student organizing is part of a larger, dynamic interactive process of traditional organizing practices to include four primary domains: occupation and agitation, power building, political participation, and civic demonstration. More specifically, findings further indicate the use of 1) mediated mobilization, and 2) culture jamming (Lievrouw, 2011) as alternative and activist new media practices within the Dream Defenders' social movement repertoire. The former harnesses the power of social media to leverage new and existing networks of college student organizers in on-the-ground mobilization. The latter, however, utilizes the production of digital art for purposes of social and political critique, which also serve as a diagnostic frame by which contemporary student organizers are able to identify problems/issues of concern and attribute of blame to key political targets. Overall, my study makes scholarly contributions to the empirical, theoretical/conceptual, and methodological domains of higher education research generally and student activism scholarship in particular. First, the findings from my study challenge higher education scholars to consider the importance of moving beyond campus contexts to investigate students' lives, which are increasingly occurring off- and away from campus. Second, my findings expand understandings of the ways in which contemporary college students relate to technology and social media beyond social uses, entertainment purposes, and utility for the delivery of instructional content to include harnessing alternative and activist new media for creating social change. Lastly, my findings strongly counter the prevailing narrative regarding millennials' lack of awareness of their history. Through drawing from communities of memory, invoking traditions of non-violent civil disobedience, and leveraging relationships with historical civil rights icons to increase legitimacy, contemporary student organizers draw upon history as a non-material resource as part of their social movement repertoire.

This thesis explores both what feminism looks like in a digital age, as well as how the Internet and technology inform the ways in which feminists interact, build communities, and form identities. I found that online feminist spaces are built as communities of validation and support, education and empowerment, as well as spaces of radicalization and contention. Ultimately my thesis leads toward a new understanding of feminist activism that incorporates the unique characteristics and abilities of online feminism.

This dissertation explores the phenomenon of ways of speaking in the Nanti speech community of Montetoni, in southeastern Peruvian Amazonia, between 1999 and 2009. In the context of this study, a 'way of speaking' is a socially meaningful, conventionalized sound pattern, manifest at the level of the utterance, that expresses the speaker's orientation toward some aspect of the interaction. This study closely examines both the sound patterns and patterns of use of three Nanti ways of speaking — matter-of-fact talk, scolding talk, and hunting talk — and describes each one in relation to a broader set of linguistic, social, and cultural practices characteristic of the speech community at the time. The data for this study is naturally-occurring discourse recorded during multi-party, face-to-face interactions in Montetoni. Bringing together methods developed by linguists, linguistic anthropologists, conversation analysts, and interactional sociologists, this study explores the communicative relations among participants, interactions, situations of interaction, and the utterances that link them all, attending to both the individual-level cognitive (subjective) facets of interpersonal communication and the necessarily intersubjective environment in which communication takes place. In order to disaggregate the multiple levels of signification evidenced in specific utterances, tokens are examined at four levels of organization: the sound form, the sentence, the turn, and the move. The data are presented via audio files; acoustic analyses; sequentially-organized and temporally-anchored interlinearized transcripts; and composite visual representations, all of which are framed by detailed ethnographic description. Nantis' ways of speaking are shown to consistently and systematically convey social aspects of 'meaning' that are crucial to utterance interpretation and, therefore, to successful interpersonal communication. Based on the robust correspondences between sound form and communicative function identified in the Nanti communicative system, this study proposes that ways of speaking are a cross-linguistically viable level of organization in language use that awaits discovery and description in other speech communities. The research project itself is framed in terms of the practical issues that emerged through the author's own experiences in learning to communicate appropriately in monolingual Nanti society, and the ethical issues that motivate community-oriented documentation of endangered language practices. / text

This dissertation examines representations of the Bulgarian peasant in order to explore how nationalist, agrarian and ultimately communist governments attempted to negotiate the meaning of "modernity" in predominantly rural Bulgaria. This work is not intended as a survey of displays of folk culture in the 20th century, but instead focuses each chapter on an important person, movement or organization which best seems to articulate Bulgaria's evolving sense of itself and its place on the edge of Europe. Beginning with a background chapter on the 1878-1917 period, I trace the foundation and development of ethnographic display, representations of peasants in the interwar educational press, campaigns to improve village hygiene and culture, alpine tourism, and the ever-changing image of peasants in propaganda from the years of agrarian rule in the 1920s through the early decades of communism. My dissertation explores the contested meanings of peasant images in Bulgaria's changing political and social milieu. Bulgaria's acceptance into first Europe and later the Soviet sphere of influence was for many nation-builders predicated upon her ability to attain European and later Soviet-style modernity. However, these modernities were based upon ideas of industrialization and urbanization. In the middle of the 20th century, however, Bulgaria's economy was still overwhelmingly agricultural. This represented a problem for Bulgaria's nation builders. Confronted with these seeming contradictions, different regimes attempted to incorporate the rural population into their visions of a modern Bulgaria. The changing nature of this imagined Bulgaria can be best elucidated through images of the Bulgarian peasantry. At one moment incorporated and at another excluded, modern and backward, embraced and reviled, the imagined peasantry reveals the anxieties and aspirations of Bulgarian state builders in the 20th century. / text

This paper addresses intertextual similarities of ethnographical and geographical details in Xenophon’s Anabasis and Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica and argues that these intertextualities establish a narrative timeline of Greek civilization on the Black Sea littoral. In both these works, a band of Greek travellers proceeds along the southern coast of the Black Sea, but in different directions and at vastly different narrative times. I argue that Apollonius’ text, written later than Xenophon’s, takes full advantage of these intertextualities in such a way as to retroject evidence about the landscape of the Black Sea littoral. This geographical and ethnographical information prefigures the arrival of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand in the region. By manipulating the differences in narrative time and time of composition, Apollonius sets his Argonauts up as precursors to the Ten Thousand as travellers in the Black Sea and spreaders of Greek civilization there. In Xenophon’s text, the whole Black Sea littoral becomes a liminal space of transition between non-Greek and Greek. As the Ten Thousand travel westward and get closer and closer to home and Greek civilization, they encounter pockets of Greek culture throughout the Black Sea, nestled in between swaths of land inhabited by native tribes of varying and unpredictable levels of civilization. On the other hand, in the Argonautica, Apollonius sets the Argonautic voyage along the southern coast of the Black Sea coast as a direct, linear progression from Greek to non-Greek. As the Argonauts move eastward, the peoples and places they encounter become stranger and less recognizably civilized. This progression of strangeness and foreignness works to build suspense and anticipation of the Argonauts’ arrival at Aietes’ kingdom in Colchis. However, some places have already been visited before by another Greek traveller, Heracles, who appears in both the Argonautica and the Anabasis to mark the primordial progression of Greek civilization in the Black Sea region. The landscape and the peoples who inhabit it have changed in the intervening millennium of narrative time between first Heracles’, then the Argonauts’, and finally the Ten Thousand’s journey, and they show the impact of the visits of all three. / text

Postcolonial critiques have emphasized the need for Western psychology to become more reflective of the histories, worldviews, and lived realities of historically marginalized communities across the globe (Comas-Díaz, 2000; Duran & Duran, 1995; Pickren, 2009). These works have included the contributions of liberation psychologists who advocate for the need to privilege the knowledge systems, concerns, and perspectives of local communities when proposing avenues for psychological research, intervention, and theoretical development (Watkins & Shulman, 2008). Recognizing the legacies of colonialism in North America, U.S. psychologists working with Indigenous communities have advocated for better collaboration with grassroots elders, teachers, and community groups, noting the importance of recognizing the validity of Indigenous epistemologies and the colonizing tensions that still exist between Indigenous healing systems and Western psychology (Duran, Firehammer & Gonzalez, 2008; Gone, 2007; Gone & Alcántara, 2007). Against this backdrop, the present research was carried out as an immersive, long-term ethnographic study in collaboration with Alma de Mujer (Alma), a community of Indigenous-identified women in central Texas, who are committed to creating accessible spaces for their communities to practice Indigenous lifeways and healing. Employing reciprocal ethnographic methods, the author spent two years participating in events and gatherings with the Alma community, as well as conducting in-depth interviews. Community members were consulted on an ongoing basis about the development of the research. The document centers on four objectives: First, the author traces the history of the Alma community as it emerged from social liberation and psychospiritual healing movements over the latter half of the 20th century. Second, based on the women's stories, the author presents community members' narratives about how healing is situated within the community's Indigenous knowledge systems. Specific attention is given to the holistic and reciprocal nature of healing in these stories. Third, the author includes contributions from Indigenous healers who remark on their experiences of the tensions between Indigenous healing systems and Western mental health institutions. Fourth, the author concludes with a personal critical reflection as a trainee in Western psychology and considers how dialogues between local Indigenous communities and Western psychology might be further explored. / text

This dissertation contributes to the educational literature by providing new research on the achievement gap in the Southwest. For this study, a sequential mixed-methods approach was employed. The quantitative research assessed which factors influenced academic achievement among a 2012 high school graduating class (N=2,238) through analyses using correlation, ANOVA and HLM. Additionally, qualitative themes from 15 in-depth ethnographic teacher interviews and 116 teacher surveys from low income schools were triangulated with the quantitative findings to describe the multiple, interconnected factors that affected student achievement from the teacher's viewpoint. The low income schools in this study were defined as `hardship schools' because they had a high percentage of free and reduced lunch participants, a high minority population, low academic achievement, and frequent turnover in the administrative staff. The findings indicated that a statistically significant academic gap existed between high and low income schools. However, the longitudinal student standardized scores from elementary (5th grade) to high school (10th grade) revealed that the gap did not widen over time between high and low income students. Although students from low income schools lacked social capital and other resources available to their wealthier peers, they were still able to make equivalent academic growth, albeit at a lower performance level. It was argued that a pivotal reason that the gap did not widen was due to a dedicated teacher cadre that chose to work in low income middle schools. These teachers expressed a high level of self efficacy and cultural competency and identified with the students and the surrounding community. Their sense of identification came from one of three sources: similar ethnic background, including Latino culture and language; similar socio-economic upbringing, including poverty and the hardships associated with being an economic underclass; and/or cultural competency, where curiosity and love of diversity is emphasized. This identification helped teachers level the playing field by relating to students and making learning relevant to their environment.