This dissertation explores the everyday practice of home and community vegetable gardening in a small southern Illinois city. The project engages with questions of how diverse elements of practice interact over time in the development of both gardens and gardeners, dwelling particularly on how the material agency of nonhumans contributes to what emerges. Combining a broad investigation of societal influences and constraints involved in gardening practices with a granular focus on material interactions in the garden, I consider the kinds of relationships individuals forge with the nonhuman environment in a modern, Western context and how they do so. Understanding such connections is essential in formulating responses to contemporary environmental crises. The study addresses multiple topics of interest in anthropology including skill and learning, sensory experience, time, care practices, ecological embeddedness, and community building in social movements.

In early criticism of Western Canadian literature, prairie spaces were constructed as predominantly rural in order to set the region and prairie writing apart from the rest of Canada and other Canadian literature. In time, prairie criticism’s focus on rural realist texts led to the marginalization of urban prairie writing and the construction of urban spaces as corrupt and artificial in comparison to the natural and virtuous rural environment. I work to remedy the absence of urban texts in the criticism of prairie literature, and I argue that prairie cities are dynamic and mobile worlds where prairie inhabitants exercise their agency through everyday practices. Utilizing the work of Raymond Williams, I show how urban and rural spaces are constructed in the canonical prairie texts of Grove, Ostenso, and Stead to serve various capitalist interests and colonial ideologies. I explore the depiction of Winnipeg in Durkin’s The Magpie as a dynamic, complex, and politically engaged space. Moreover, I use Michel de Certeau’s work to assert that the underprivileged and colonized individuals in the city subvert and utilize the systems and organizations of those in power. They develop an increased deviousness and take advantage of incidental and multifarious opportunities that come their way as they work, dwell, and move about in everyday life. Subsequently, I look at urban writing by women, Eastern-European immigrants, and Aboriginal writers and show that they use urban spaces, everyday practices, and writing to exercise their agency. To destabilize unitary forces in language, to depict their own experiences, and to convey their own meanings of home, labour, and community, marginalized writers employ wordplay, humour, historical and cultural references, and intertextuality. I also use Jane M. Jacobs’ work on postcolonial cities and Tim Cresswell’s theories of mobility. I read prairie cities as places of competing mobilities and networks of dominances and resistances, where colonized individuals negotiate complex, hybrid, and authentic identities. The urban prairie texts I explore demonstrate the possibility of political, social, and economic changes, and a beneficial relationship with the prairie environment.

The main purpose of the study is to investigate how children use picture books in the everyday practices in the Swedish pre-school. More specifically, I want to study the use of picture books based on the child's interaction with the book. How does the dialogic process between the child and the picture book proceed? How is the peer group used in book practices? What draws children to certain books - as favorites of the individual or of the group? How do they use the pictures in the books? What do they do when on their own with books and how does this usage differ from teacher-initiated activities with the books? By focusing on the 3- to 5-year-old children's book interactions, the study contributes to our understanding of how children use picture books for their identity work. A basic assumption is to see children as social agentswho influence and are influenced by the world they live in. The empirical data comprises over 35 hours video recorded interactions. Episodes of child initiated book practices were transcribed in detail, and the theory of subject positioning was applied for its analysis. The study shows that children in their picture book activities, in the every day peer-group interactions, use the books as a contact surface between them. In addition they use the book arenas for negotiations of subjectpositions, where they position themselves or are positioned as powerful or powerless persons. Children employ a rich repertoire of strategies (verbal and nonverbal) for excluding and including themselves and others in ongoing book activities. The empirical material show clearly that the pictures constitute an 'idea box' for children, from which they can take inspiration or use as tools in activities such as play, fantasy, and conversation. We can see that preschool children also produce and negotiate the meaning of the pictures. In some cases, the children use all of the pictures while in others they use only isolated pictures that are pulled out of their context and "take on a life of their own." The children use the pictures in several different ways: as a play arena for their games and activities; as props for play in progress; as markers of positions in their play; and as pictures for creating stories. Children actively use picture books in their day-to-day lives at the educational institution. Through this use, children create meaning for the cultural content of the books by testing subject positions that the pictures offer. In their use of picture books, it becomes apparent that children are competent to use and discover books on their own and sometimes need to share the experience with other children and with adults. Through the use of picture books, the children acquire experience of books and use them to create meaning; that is, they create a sort of children's cultural competence for themselves.

Whilst there are numerous studies on young people’s engagement in academic study, the internal relationship between young people and academic study is still unclear. This thesis seeks to explain the relation of young people to their academic study, in the context of Brunei Darussalam, through analysing young people’s motive hierarchy. The research is based on the understanding that young people are faced with multiple contradicting demands from the society, which evolve with their developmental age. The contradicting demands generate conflicts for young people as they participate across the different institutional practices in their everyday lives. The research entailed a semi-participatory research approach, which emphasised young people’s lived experiences, from a first-person perspective. Eight (8) young people aged 16-18 years who are studying for their GCE A Level examinations, played roles as both trained Student Researchers, as well as participants in this research. Data were collected from focus group discussions, annotated photo albums (MyAlbum) and a ‘participant self-generated’ questionnaire (MyQuestionnaire). The focus of the data collection was on the young people’s experiences of conflicts with respect to their academic study and the different agendas in their everyday lives. Intermediary tools were developed to focus the data analysis to identify motive-orientations and their relative importance in the construct of the motive hierarchy of a young person. An initial general model of motive hierarchy was developed from this study too. It is a societal demand for young people in late adolescence to be vocational and career oriented. However this study shows the eight (8) young people are also oriented towards other objects, apart from being future oriented. They can still have a dominant motive-orientation towards intimate personal relations, which usually prevails for early adolescence. Two other motive-orientations have also emerged from this study, i.e. the societal value system and self-comfort related. These different motive-orientations of the young people contradict the societal demands and create conflicts for the young people as they participate in and across the practices. These findings are important in informing intervention programmes to improve young people’s engagement in academic study.